Kremlin Cash

A federal indictment unsealed on Wednesday as part of a larger investigation into pre-election Russian malfeasance in the United States tells a juicy tale of dirty money, deception, journalism, and propaganda. A US-based start-up, Tenet Media, launched last November as a self-described “network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues,” illegally received about $10 million in Russian money for production of English-language videos. The six commentators, who received as much as $400,000 a month or $100,000 per video—which is well above market value—include several stars of the online right: Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Lauren Southern (as well as more obscure podcasters Tayler Hansen and Matt Christiansen). The money was funnelled by two employees of the Kremlin propaganda network RT, formerly Russia Today, using the fake personas of European financiers. Tenet’s founders, right-wing pundit Lauren Chen and her husband Liam Donovan, allegedly knew that it was Russian money and deceived their contributors.

Rubin, Pool and Johnson have all made statements depicting themselves as victims of this scheme—which may well be true, though at the very least they were startlingly incurious about the source of the funding. The two Laurens—Chen and Southern—have kept quiet since the news of the indictment broke.

The story has a lot of material that sounds like something straight of a quirky dark comedy: for instance, the time a Russian operative posed as a Paris-based businessman for a call with a pundit who was being recruited for the venture, and got the time zones mixed up. Also, one of the two Russians has the last name Kalashnikov. (Seriously, screenwriters? You’re getting a bit too obvious.) But real-life farce aside, this story tells us something not-so-funny about the current intellectual ecosystem that bills itself as “conservative” and “heterodox,” though “intellectual” is a bit too grand a word for the likes of Johnson, Rubin and Pool.

Some people reacting to this story have suggested that the Russian cash explains why the American and Canadian pundits involved embraced views closely aligned with Kremlin propaganda. On the other hand, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) downplayed the impact of Russian interference in a Fox News interview, saying that “we’re talking about preexisting political opinions in the United States” and that Tenet Media’s influencers “legitimately believe in the views they’re espousing.”

For the record, I think Rubio is mostly right. Rubin, for instance, was snarking about too much aid for Ukraine on Twitter in May 2022, before Tenet Media was even a concept. (Back in 2020, Rubin gushed over a machismo-infused Russian army ad and contrasted it to an American ad showing a female soldier with two lesbian mothers.) Lauren Southern travelled to Russia in 2018 with another far-right “influencer,” Brittany Pettibone, to interview ultranationalist guru—and rabid Ukraine war hawk since 2014—Alexander Dugin, by whom she claimed to be “enthralled.” At the time, she also quipped, “Unfortunately, we are not funded by the Russian government, although if you guys are interested... just kidding.”

Looks like someone heard her, eventually.

As for Lauren Chen, she was an RT contributor from March 2021 until February 2022, before Tenet Media existed. In August 2021, she could be seen on Twitter singing the praises of Vladimir Putin for upholding “medical freedoms” by supposedly banning vaccine mandates. (In fact, while the video clip she tweeted showed Putin saying that vaccination should be based on “persuasion” and not coercion, vaccine mandates imposed by local governments and employers did exist in Russia; but that aside, Chen was entirely cavalier about Putin stamping out civil and political liberties.) It seems likely that the RT operatives turned to her because they believed her “preexisting political opinions” were congenial to the goal of running a Russian propaganda site. When Chen repeatedly and openly articulated her view that Russia’s position in the war in Ukraine was “pretty reasonable” and based on legitimate grievances, or that Ukraine’s 2014 revolution was a CIA-funded coup, it’s very likely that those were “preexisting opinions” as well. 

Nonetheless, from expressing Kremlin-friendly views to knowingly running a site funded by Kremlin operatives—as Chen allegedly did—is quite a leap. It’s an especially ironic one since, only recently, Chen had repeatedly attacked pro-Israel activists in the US for loyalty to a “foreign nation.”

The hypocrisy is evident. But there is also a certain amount of consistency in Chen’s position, since she has also been quite candid about her belief that the “tyranny” of the US government, not Putin’s expansionist and subversive autocracy, is the real enemy of Americans. 

It’s the same view expressed by then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson—who, as far as we know, is not on Russia’s payroll and would be an extremely expensive acquisition for the Kremlin—on 23 February 2022, as Putin ordered Russian troops into Eastern Ukraine in the prelude to the full-scale invasion. Arguing that the Democratic establishment had conned Americans into regarding Putin as their enemy, Carlson invited his viewers to ask:

Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? … Is he trying to snuff out Christianity?

We don’t know to what extent Russian money influenced the influencers. Did it make Chen’s pro-Putin views more strident? Did it fuel Pool’s deranged rant, posted a couple of weeks before the rubles-for-propaganda racket was exposed, calling Ukraine “the enemy of this country” and “the greatest threat to this nation and to the world,” accusing it of “triggering this conflict” by blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline (which was blown up seven months after the Russian invasion), and saying that “we should apologise to Russia”?

Or was he simply dipping into the same toxic swamp as, say, venture capitalist and fervid Kremlin apologist David Sacks? Short of living inside the heads of Tenet Media’s stable of talent, it’s impossible to tell. But maybe the real problem here is the convergence between the Kremlin propaganda machine and a large segment of the conservative and “heterodox” punditocracy.

In March 2022, less than a month after Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I wrote about the curious phenomenon of the pro-Putin right.

Ukraine and the Pro-Putin Right

Reactions to Russia’s war in Ukraine have become a perfect demonstration of the “horseshoe theory,” according to which the extremes of Left and Right must converge. Amid overwhelming international condemnation of Russia and sympathy for the Ukrainians’ courageous resistance, Putin-friendly voices blaming the West, NATO, and particularly the United

QuilletteCathy Young

That trend, I argued, was driven by several factors: the perception that post-2014, westward-looking Ukraine was a project of the Democrat-dominated “Deep State”; the belief that anti-Putin animus was linked to the Russiagate scandal surrounding Russian interference in the 2016 US election, seen by many if not most conservatives as a witch-hunt against Donald Trump; a romanticised view of Russia as a bastion of social, cultural, and sexual traditionalism, religion and national sovereignty pitted against the depraved, godless, “woke,” and globalist West; and, finally, a reflexive distrust of the “mainstream media” and of narratives associated with the “establishment.” (In many cases, all four of those beliefs overlap.)

Those views are still driving pro-Russian sentiment on the right. They are also being quite consciously exploited by the Kremlin and its propaganda machine. The horrors of Western decadence and “wokeness”—usually presented in dramatically hyperbolic form—are endlessly discussed on political talk shows on Kremlin-controlled Russian television. In early August, on the nightly show Evening with Vladimir Solovyov on Russia’s Channel One, Solovyov and frequent guest Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of RT, asserted that it was now “fashionable” in the United States for people to identify as “doggies” and get walked in doggy costumes; later, Simonyan suggested that Russia could become a haven for the “crème de la crème of normal people” from all over the world. (This comment may have been the inspiration for Putin’s 19 August decree streamlining the asylum process for Western refugees fleeing “destructive neoliberal ideological attitudes”.) On another Channel One show, a panelist recently told the shocking tale of a Boston man who wanted to open a business with his son but had received notice from city hall that he was required to hire “two homosexuals, two lesbians, and one transgender person.” Needless to say, this is pure fiction, whatever real problems there may be with “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies; it’s also exactly the kind of DEI porn one finds in right-wing media.

The convergence between American right-wing punditry and Russian propaganda with regard to American “wokeness” was on especially stark display in late 2022 in the reactions to the swap of US basketball player Brittney Griner, detained in Russia several months earlier for marijuana possession, for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout. A number of commentators on the right, including Carlson and Daily Wire podcaster Matt Walsh, charged that the Biden Administration was being “woke” or in thrall to “DEI” in trading Bout for Griner but not for Paul Whelan, a former Marine held in Russia on espionage charges. Whelan, they claimed, was hung out to dry because he was a white male—while Griner took precedence as a black woman, and a lesbian at that. Benny Johnson (presumably not yet on the payroll of Tenet Media, which was launched in November 2023) delivered a particularly virulent tirade on his Newsmax show: 

They calculated this. … They knew they had to appeal to the left-wing, woke-wing of their party. They wouldn’t allow a Black woman, lesbian woman, drug addict, America-hating woke to be kept in prison in Russia. One of ours. Not the Marine. Not the person who served this country. No, no. One of ours. Somebody on the identity politics spectrum who’s notched every single kind of victory you can possibly hope for inside of the vector of woke politics. 

Compare this to Simonyan’s remarks on Solovyov’s show:

I found it very amusing, though not surprising, that Bout was finally traded for Griner, not Whelan. ... [Whelan] is a hero, a decorated Marine covered in medals. He only has one, no, two, no, three problems. First problem: He’s white. Second problem: He’s a man. Third problem: It seems he’s hetero. This is something that just can’t be forgiven these days. ... American voters were given a choice: A hero who suffered in the service of his country ... or a black lesbian hooked on drugs who suffered for a vape with hash. 

This narrative, by the way, was almost certainly bogus. It appears that Russia refused to trade Whelan (who was finally freed in the multi-person prisoner exchange last August). And several months before the Griner trade, Trevor Reed, another former US Marine who had been detained on probably trumped-up charges of assault on two police officers, was freed in a swap for a Russian drug trafficker despite being white, male, and apparently straight. But such inconvenient facts are never allowed to interfere with culture-war narratives, whether “woke” or “anti-woke.” 

It is also worth noting that, while the Russian operatives at least sometimes expected Tenet Media to channel pro-Russia and/or anti-Ukraine propaganda—such as spreading the claim, duly reported by Johnson, that Ukraine, not ISIS, was responsible for the attack on a Moscow concert hall in March—most of Tenet’s videos focused on culture-war topics: transgender people, free speech, DEI, illegal immigration, racial conflict, and in particular discrimination against whites. 

One could argue that the progressive left bears plenty of responsibility for promoting toxic and divisive ideas and policies and undermining trust in the media and the “establishment.” But plenty of people manage to criticise the left without stumbling into the Putinist camp. If your “heterodox” opinions happen to regularly coincide with Kremlin talking points, maybe that should make you think twice, or think, period—even if cash from mysterious foreign backers who can’t get their time zones straight does not set off alarm bells.

Yet this scandal has sparked remarkably little soul-searching on the right. Breitbart, for instance, seemed most concerned with undercutting the claim that Russian interference was meant to help Trump, depicting Chen—who has been fired from The Blaze and disappeared from TPUSA’s website—as an “anti-Trump conservative.” (As a look at Chen’s Twitter timeline shows, she briefly became critical of Trump in August when she thought Trump was pivoting too far to the centre.) 

No doubt, more revelations in this story are coming; among other things, there are more “influencers” on the FBI’s radar. For now, however, it brings to mind nothing so much as the 1930 verse by British writer Humbert Wolfe:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist,
thank God! The British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
unbribed, there’s no occasion to.