In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce a Dutch right-wing activist, conspiracy theorist & social media personality, Eva Vlaardingerbroek (@evavlaar). She's best-known for her promotion of the "decline of the Decadent West" trope, and for promotion of pro-Kremlin narratives.
1/19
Eva's main audience is conservative traditionalists, and basically everything she does revolves around this theme. She also promotes various conspiracy theories about the "global elites", COVID-19 and vaccines, World Economic Forum and digitalisation of society.
2/19
She's also a raging populist, and is not afraid to take current events and rally around them to get more attention to her conspiratorial ramblings. Recently, she's been involved with the protests by European farmers against increasing costs and tiny margins.
3/19
In 2016, she joined the far-right political party, Forum voor Democratie (FvD). Some years later she became an intern at the FvD faction in the European Parliament, and soon left her position at the university in order to fully focus on her political career with the FvD.
4/19
FvD leader Thierry Baudet soon announced that Eva would fill the 5th spot on FvD's candidate list for the House of Representatives.Few months later FvD faced a huge crisis when its youth wing had made some extreme remarks, including praise of Anders Breivik & Brenton Tarrant.5/19
Soon after this, many members resigned from the party. Eva was one of them - she joined a morning talk show in which she announced that she had chosen sides against the FvP leader and her former boyfriend (or "fling", as Eva called it), Thierry Baudet.
6/19
For the time being, she left politics and focused more on political commentary and promoting herself on podcasts, talk shows and right-wing political events. She promotes various conspiracy theories, and often talks about the "The Great Reset" and its dangers.
7/19
In 2021, she appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight, stating that Europe is becoming "a tyrannical regime, of mass surveillance and control". In the same year, she also worked as presenter of her own YouTube talk show "Let's Talk About It".
8/19
The show was part of Swedish media outlet Riks, which is affiliated with the far-right party Sverigedemokraterna. It seems that the show ran for only 10 episodes. She was also working as a legal advisor at a law firm, but her employment was terminated just after 4 months.
9/19
Eva then continued her career as a political commentator and speaker, calling for people to "reject Globalism and embrace God" at events like the Brussels National Conservatism Conference. She also became a regular commentator on European matters at Carlson's show on Fox.
10/19
She's also appeared as a regular commentator on Mark Steyn's YouTube show, on which she's commented - among other things - about how "young girls are being sacrificed on the altar of mass migration," and how the governments are trying to control us with digital currencies.
11/19
Like most conspiracy theorists, Eva often creates doomsday scenarios around topics she has no clue about, like for example cybersecurity and the threat of "cyber pandemics", which according to her would lead to martial law and the adoption of Europe-wide mass surveillance.
12/19
Eva doesn't speak a lot about Ukraine, but when she does, she condemns it as a pointless money sink. She's also claimed that the whole thing is just another scheme to make weapon manufacturers and companies like BlackRock even wealthier.
13/19
After the Carlson interview with Putin, she praised the dictator's 30 minute revisionist history rant, stating that it has "current political relevance", and that no other leader could give such a detailed (biased and made-up) "historical account" as Putin did.
14/19
She also commented on the Tucker video about the "low prices" in Russian supermarkets, stating that the Western standard of living is low "by design" and that it was "made by people who hate us." Almost half of Russians state that their salary doesn't cover basic spending.
15/19
It doesn't take a genius to see the conclusion here - Putin as a traditionalist is in the right by "defending Russia" and the "decadent West" in the wrong by giving up all power to "global elites" and by sending military and monetary aid to Ukraine. The whole narrative...
16/19
... is based on a silly conspiracy theory there is some kind of clandestine power that is trying to enslave the whole of humanity through degradation of "conservative values", lockdowns, vaccines, mass surveillance, and depopulation.
As is tradition.
17/19
As a traditionalist, Eva's been desperately looking for that far-right love of her life - between 2012 and 2014 she dated far-right fascist Julien Rochedy, after which she had a "fling" with Baudet. In 2022 she got engaged with Will Witt, but I don't think that worked out.
18/19
Oh, and Eva: if you're reading this, here are some of the lies Putin told to Carlson:
And below is Tucker making excuses why he didn't ask Putin any tough questions and basically calling him a killer.
In today’s Vatnik Soup, I’ll discuss the Ukrainian SBU’s “Spiderweb” operation and the main disinformation narrative vatniks have been spreading during the afterfall. While domestic Russian media stays silent, the vatniks and Russian milbloggers have been extremely loud.
1/20
This operation was probably the most impactful strike since the drowning of the Moskva, massively reducing Russia’s capability to bomb Ukrainian cities (or anyone else’s). It involved smuggling 117 FPV drones hidden in trucks into Russia. Once near airbases,…
2/20
…the roofs opened remotely, launching drones in synchronized waves to strike targets up to 4,000 km away. The mission took 18 months to plan. The unsuspecting Russian truck drivers who transported them had no idea they were delivering weapons deep behind their own lines.
In today’s Vatnik Soup, I’ll introduce a Russian movie director, propagandist, and former priest: Ivan Okhlobystin. He’s best known for his strong support for the war on Ukraine and for his radical views, which are often used as a testbed for the domestic Russian audience.
1/20
Ivan was born in 1966 from a short-lived marriage between a 62-year-old chief physician and a 19-year-old engineering student. She later remarried, and the family moved from Kaluga province to Moscow. Ivan kept the surname Okhlobystin from his biological father.
2/20
After moving to Moscow, Ivan began studying at VGIK film school. He soon became a playwright for theatre productions and also wrote for Stolitsa magazine, which he later left because, as he put it, “it had become a brothel.”
In today’s Vatnik Soup, I’ll introduce a Ukrainian-born former State Duma deputy, Vladimir Medinsky. He is best known as one of the ideologues of the “Russkiy Mir”, for his close ties to Vladimir Putin, and for leading the “peace talks” in Turkey in 2022 and 2025.
1/20
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Medinsky interned as a correspondent on the international desk of the TASS news agency, learning the ways of propaganda at an early age. Some time later, he earned two PhDs – one in political science and the other in history.
2/20
As is tradition in Russia, Medinsky’s academic work was largely pseudo-scientific and plagiarized. Dissernet found that 87 of 120 pages in his dissertation were copied from his supervisor’s thesis. His second dissertation was also heavily plagiarized.
In today’s Vatnik Soup, I’ll introduce an American social media influencer, Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson). He’s best known for his plagiarism while working as a clickbait “journalist”, and for being paid by the Kremlin to spread anti-Ukraine and anti-Democratic narratives.
1/23
Benny graduated from the University of Iowa in 2009 with a degree in developmental psychology. His former high school buddy described him as the “smartest, most articulate kid in school,” and was disappointed to see him turn into a “cheating, low standard hack.”
2/23
After graduating, Benny dived directly into the world of outrage media. Benny’s first job was writing op-eds for far-right website Breitbart, from where he moved on to TheBlaze, a conservative media owned by Glenn Beck, and a spring board for many conservative influencers.
In today’s Vatnik Soup, I’ll introduce a Cypriot politician and social media personality, Fidias Panayiotou (@Fidias0). He’s best known for his clickbait YouTube stunts and for voting against aid to Ukraine and the return of abducted Ukrainian children from Russia.
1/20
Fidias hails from Meniko, Cyprus. In 2019, he began posting videos on YouTube. After a slow start, he found his niche with clickbaity, MrBeast-style content featuring silly stunts, catchy titles and scripted dialogue. Today, Fidias has 2,7 million subscribers on YouTube.
2/20
Fidias’s channel started with trend-riding, but he found his niche in traveling without money — aka freeloading. In one video, he fare-dodged on the Bengaluru Metro. The train authority responded by saying they would file a criminal case against him.
In today’s May 9th Vatnik Soup, we discuss the ambiguous relationship of the Kremlin with Nazism and explain why so many vatniks can be outright Nazis, and promote or excuse them while at the same time being so hysterical about alleged “Nazis in Ukraine”.
1/23
Of course, Kremlin propaganda employs the Firehose of Falsehood and often lacks any consistent ideology other than spreading chaos and seeking power, so such contradictions can be commonplace. However in this case there is a certain cynical consistency there.
2/23
To understand modern Russia, we need to go back a hundred years to the beginnings of Soviet Russia/Soviet Union — a genocidal terror regime under dictators Lenin and Stalin, whose totalitarian and imperialist legacy Putin’s Russia fully embraces.