In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce an American investor and social media commentator, Malachy J. (@The_Real_Fly). He's best-known for his extensive history as an investor blogger, for his extreme xenophobia and for spreading pro-Kremlin narratives on social media.
1/18
Mal has been involved in the investment world for a long time & for example @TheStalwart published a story on Business Insider about his massive losses in the market already back in 2014. In the article, he was described as "a well-liked member of the community for years".
2/18
His blog, "Trading with the Fly", has been active since 2007, and since then he's posted around 4 blog posts a day, and he's even published two books, "Journey into Fear: when the dot com bubble burst" and "In a Car Made of Dynamite, Racing Towards the Sun".
3/18
Mal has gone the distance trying to erase the traces of his real identity online, using a fake name in the blogosphere ("George Hamilton"), that was even picked up by @rcarrick for The Globe and Mail article published in 2008.
4/18
His blog, iBankCoin, was very popular among investors back in 2008, and it was even voted as the most popular investing blog back in the day. Malachy aka The Fly was described as a "source of reliably rude but smart investing commentary and musings".
5/18
Malachy's worldview seems to be coming almost completely from various pro-Kremlin narratives & conspiracy theories. He's not the most influential account on X,but he's a perfect example on how tendency to believe in conspiracy theories leads to believing in the Kremlin's BS.
6/18
Already back in 2016, he was promoting Pizzagate, a conspiracy theory suggesting that a pizzeria in DC was a meeting place for Satanic ritual abuse. Incidentally, the theory involved Hillary Clinton & spread online like wildfire just days before the US presidential election.
7/18
He also seems to believe in The Great Reset and The Great Replacement conspiracy theories. The latter is very popular among the far-right and is of course supported by X's owner, @elonmusk. Malachy also thinks that the moon landing was a hoax.
8/18
As is tradition, Malachy's also keen on conspiracy theories related to COVID-19 vaccines. He also promotes the idea that "Liberal Jews" are pushing "anti white [sic] agenda", and that George Soros is some kind of mastermind trying to ruin America.
9/18
He's also extremely hostile towards any sort of "wokeness" in the US, suggesting that the US military is weak and the Western societies are collapsing because of it. Malachy's own son appears to be some sort of "pro Halo gamer", so I don't know if that's somehow better.
10/18
Next, let's look at some of Fly's posts related to the Russo-Ukrainian War: he's claimed that Navalny was "100% a CIA asset", that Ukrainian drones have dropped chemical weapons on a Russian soldier, that Ukraine is "full of Nazis" & that Zelenskyy is a drug addict.
11/18
But that's not all! There's of course the classics like "Finland joining NATO is escalation", "secret US-funded biolabs in Ukraine", "2014 Revolution of Dignity was a coup", and that the war in Ukraine is actually a civil war.
12/18
Apparently he considers Putin to be some kind of crusader that's fighting against the "decadent West" & that all the beforementioned phenomena are the consequences of this "decadence". Mal may know something about the market, but it seems that he has no clue about Russia.
13/18
In addition to being pro-Kremlin, Malachy is also extremely xenophobic, especially towards the African-Americans and Mexicans. Which is weird, considering that his wife and her mother are allegedly Latinas and that they mostly speak to each other in Spanish.
14/18
Malachy belongs to the pro-Kremlin, conspiratorial, disinformation-ridden circle-jerk that includes accounts like @geromanAT, @endwokeness, @dom_lucre and @CensoredMen. He personally appealed to Elon after the Serbian-Austrian communist Roman G aka @geromanAT was suspended.
15/18
Based on his online activity, Mal is chronically online. On average, he tweets 37 posts daily, and still has time to write for his investing blog on an almost daily basis. That's quite a lot of Internet time for an almost 50-year-old family man.
16/18
And since he's American, there needs to be some kind of grift or business involved in all this craziness. Malachy is aggressively promoting Stocklabs, some sort of investment platform that has "AI Based [sic] Market Timing Algorithms" and other completely made up shit.
17/18
Because who wouldn't want to take financial advice from someone who believes that the moon landing was a hoax, that the "Satanic elites" are having sexual rituals in a pizza place, and who thinks that Putin will save the West from its "decadence"?
18/18
This investigation was done in collaboration with @UnintelAgency.
In this 5th Debunk of the Day, we’ll discuss something that sounds great in theory, but was completely turned upside-down by the tankie kind of vatnik: anti-imperialism. More consistent anti-imperialists call this the “anti-imperialism of idiots”. 1/5
“Anti-imperialism” was popularized by Lenin, who saw imperialism as the ultimate stage of capitalism. Ironically, the largest empire is now… Putin’s Russia, proud heir to both Lenin’s Soviet Union and to the Tsarist Empire. 2/5
Indeed, Russia is an empire that is still ruled by a de facto all-powerful Tsar, that still proudly flies its imperial flag, that still dreams of expanding its already huge territory through brutal conquest and colonization. 3/5
In this 4th Debunk of the Day, we’ll refute an absolute classic of vatnik BS, the crown jewel of peak dishonesty: whataboutism.
Now, not everything that looks like whataboutism is wrong. Seeking consistency or comparing actions or responses is normal. 1/5
But when someone pulls some completely unrelated event, that happened to completely different people, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, you know what you’re dealing with: a crass denial of the problem at hand, a bad-faith attempt to derail the topic. 2/5
Logic or chronology plays no role here, nor your opinion on these other topics. You could be the staunchest critic or supporter of these other actions thrown into the discussion, it doesn’t matter. It is irrelevant whether these other things are true or not, or bad or not. 3/5
In this 3rd Debunk of the Day, we’ll talk about… “ending” the war by surrendering or ceding territory.
Nearing four years of the 2-day “special military operation”, Russia is desperate to obtain through other means what they failed to conquer on the battlefield. 1/5
An endless army of vatniks therefore tries to demoralize both Ukrainians and supporters.
They sound noble: “anti-war” or concerned about the fate of Ukraine’s civilians, soldiers and cities. They claim that if we just stop fighting or helping, this horror would magically end. 2/5
What they never mention is… WHO started the war, WHO murders Ukrainians, WHO destroys Ukrainian cities: the same monsters they suggest Ukrainians be at the mercy of. Surrendering wouldn’t end the atrocities of the occupation, it would enable them. Surrendering wouldn’t even…3/5
In today’s Debunk of the Day (2), we’ll look at… nuclear blackmail. Vatniks love using Russia’s nuclear threats as a reason for surrendering or for not lifting a finger to help Ukraine: “see, they have nukes, we have to give them whatever they want”.
The argument is absurd: 1/5
Nuclear deterrence has been a reality for decades. Both the US and Russia have lost wars without resorting to nukes. We are not submitting to the whims of Pakistan or North Korea either. For vatniks, it’s just an insidious way of siding with Putin. 2/5
We can’t just give in to the Kremlin’s nuclear blackmail, to the threats their officials and propagandists make five times a day to scare us into letting them have something they know perfectly well is not theirs, with no limit to their appetite. 3/5 vatniksoup.com/en/nuclear-thr…
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we introduce a Ukrainian “scholar” and social media activist, Marta Havryshko (@HavryshkoMarta). She’s best known for spreading anti-Ukraine and pro-Kremlin narratives online, along with a habit of spotting neo-Nazis everywhere in Ukraine.
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Marta hails from Ukraine, where she studied history at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. She received her PhD in history in 2010. Her academic work focused on gender-based violence and wartime atrocities, including publications on sexual crimes in occupied Ukraine.
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She is currently working as a visiting Assistant Professor at the Strassler Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies at Clark University in the US. According to the center’s website, Marta teaches courses on antisemitism, racism, and gender-based violence in armed conflicts.
In today’s (first) Debunk of the Day, we’ll talk about… “realistic expectations”.
Russia has the GDP of Italy. NATO — which Russia claims to be fighting — has 20 times their GDP, and a much stronger and more modern military. 1/5
Russia’s full scale invasion was supposed to take 2 days, but we’re nearing 4 years. They’ve lost a million men. Their economy is in shambles.
And yet we're letting them set their red lines instead of massive sanctions, strong support for Ukraine, and an immediate sky shield. 2/5
Russia thought their war was “realistic” because we’d let them get away with it. It wouldn’t be “realistic” to invade a European nation and redraw borders by force if the West had a strong and united response.
What’s “realistic” is what public opinion tolerates and accepts. 3/5