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 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.