In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce a Malaysian conspiracy theorist, journalist and social media addict, Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray). He’s best-known for his online attention-seeking activities, for his anti-Ukraine stance, and for simping @elonmusk and other techbros.

1/24

Ian’s online history goes way back. During the early 2010s, he was a moderator on Reddit, moderating some of its biggest subreddits. He was eventually banned for paid promotions he hadn’t disclosed to the site. He was also working as a games journalist, working for sites...

2/24

...like Gameranx, The Guardian and Ars Technica. When some of his older chat logs were leaked, they showed his edgelord-y behavior where he praised one Adolf Hitler. He apologized but blamed everything on the “toxic gaming community.”

He also SWATted a fellow YouTuber.

3/24

Some time later, he attacked this “toxic community” again in the for of GamerGate, a cultural online debate revolving around games journalism. It seems that around 2015-2016 Ian made a shift from someone who strongly supports LGBT+ rights and condemns totalitarian regimes, ..
4/24

...to someone who doesn’t. He also started supporting Trump and his rather strong right-wing views.

On thing you should know, is that Mr. Cheong spends most of his time online & especially on Twitter. All this time spent online has made him an expert on military strategy...
5/24

..., US foreign policy, geopolitics, and basically every other topic out there.

He also has a knack of figuring out the REAL truth on every topic, and based on Ian “telling the truth matters.” Because Cheong cares about the truth, we can trust everything he’s tweeted.

6/24

But Ian wasn’t always like this. Before 2018, he was quite anti-Russia and anti-Putin. He was calling Russia homophobic, blamed the Russians for killing his countrymen in the down shooting of MH17, doubting each and every election Russia held, and quite strongly condemned...
7/24

..the Russian invasion of Crimea. I mean, he even called Putin “an asshole”. But no one cared. He got barely any likes or retweets, nobody gave a shit about his meaningless opinion. Only after he became a Trump-supporting edgelord who suddenly loves Russia, his engagement...
8/24

...began to increase. It must’ve felt good to be at the top of the social media food chain again, being NOTICED, like he was previously as a Reddit moderator. So he kept drifting towards the extreme, perhaps for that extra attention.

9/24

Naturally, he did the exact same thing with Syria: 2012 he strongly condemned al-Assad’s plans to attack with chemical weapons, ten years later the whole thing was a false flag planned by the US and the humanitarian aid group White Helmets.

10/24

When it comes to cheering for Russia and parroting their narratives, Cheong got them covered. In February 2022, he denied the chance of invasion, and on the first day of fighting he stated that he “wouldn’t be surprised if there’s going to be a coup in Ukraine, ” because, ...

11/24

...according to Ian, “their main forces don’t appear to be fighting back.” “Ukrainian Nazis”, bioweapons labs in Ukraine, “Crimea is Russia”, “NATO proxy war”, Nord Stream, Ukraine banning churches, Bucha massacre was staged, Zelenskyy being a cokehead... they’re all there.

12/24

But he’s also come up with some new stuff, like for example the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, being dead.

13/24

By Cheong’s account, the counteroffensive that re-captured Kherson was a failure, and Bakhmut was a Russian master plan to put Ukrainians into a meat grinder. He’s also called Russia the underdog in the war.

14/24

He’s claimed that NATO is escalating the war, apparently by shooting Russian rockets into Ukrainian cities, and that EU and NATO should be dismantled as “fascistic organizations”. In the case of Nord Stream, he believes Sy Hersh and @KimDotcom’s “whistleblower thread”, ...

15/24

...declaring that the sabotage was done by the US. He’s criticized EU and NATO officials (without naming any) for calling Russians “subhuman” and “orcs”, suggesting that they’re resorting to racism.

16/24

By Ian’s words, Ukraine is not a democracy and it relentlessly attacks its churches, political parties and imprisons journalists. There might be some kind of confusion here, and maybe he was actually talking about Russia instead of Ukraine.

17/24

In March 2023, Ian was a guest at the Donbass Devushka podcast, spouting about American fascism, Zelensky’s cocaine addition, and praising the brave Soviet efforts during WW2. He hasn’t commented on the exposé of her actually being a Jersey girl with a fake accent.

18/24

But I guess if Jersey girl can support the Russian war effort and claim to be a “poor girl from Lugansk”, Malaysian can claim to be an expert on US politics and act like they have a big impact on his day-to-day life in Kuala Lumpur.

19/24

These days he’s a staunch supporter of “traditional values”, and the days when he was defending LGBT+ rights are long gone. Every event that seems to challenge Ian’s worldview, including QAnon, Allen shooting, Nick Fuentes, Kanye West, are a “psyop”.

20/24

Mr. Cheong’s a big fan of billionaire techbros, and he’s often praising them for basically anything they tweet about. His big favorite is naturally Twitter owner Elon Musk, whose boots he has cleaned on many occassions. And it’s not just one-way “notice me senpai”...

21/24

...asskissing from Ian (although there’s a lot of that) - Elon seems to actually listen what Cheong has to say. On 9 Oct 2022, Ian tweeted to @elonmusk that it “might be a good idea to take Starlink offline for the terminals used on the front lines, ”since it could lead to..
22/24

...further escalation in the war. And this is exactly what Elon did in Feb 2023, in order to “avoid escalation.”

Now that Musk seems to be endorsing DeSantis by offering him a platform on Twitter, Ian has suddenly forgotten about Trump and started endorsing Ronnie.

23/24

Ian seemed to be excited about the Twitter Spaces chat that was held, even claiming that it was unscripted.

To conclude, to me it seems that Ian Miles Cheong is an attention whore with broken morale compass. Also, he lies a LOT.

24/24

Thanks for all the coffee, it seems that people REALLY dislike Ian.

CORRECTION TO TWEET 3/24:

I couldn’t find any articles written by Ian for Ars Technica, and a person who has worked for the site for 20 years didn’t have any recollection of this, either. So, apparently Cheong never wrote for them.