Prominent right-wing influencers Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson and Tim Pool have huge followings on YouTube and a fondness for the Trumpist talking point that allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election on the former president’s behalf are a “hoax.” That’s not all they have in common: They also reportedly enjoyed lucrative deals with a content creation company that was a front for Russian propagandists.
The Justice Department indicted two employees of the Russian propaganda outlet RT on Wednesday, charging them with laundering almost $10 million through foreign shell companies and violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The DOJ alleges this was done “to covertly fund and direct” a media company that produced videos whose content and subject matter were “often consistent with the Government of Russia’s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition to core Government of Russia interests.”
The Tenet Media saga demonstrates once again that Russian election interference is not, as these commentators and their allies have insisted, a “hoax.”
The company’s description matches that of Tenet Media, a Tennessee-based firm co-founded by Lauren Chen, a creator for Blaze TV (which fired Chen on Thursday) and a contributor to Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA. Tenet Media publishes content by Rubin, Johnson, Pool and other less-prominent influencers. According to the indictment, the production companies of three unnamed commentators were paid $8.7 million through the scheme.
The indictment states two of the commentators were deceived about the source of the funding; the trio all described themselves as unwitting “victims” of the operation in separate statements on social media. But the Tenet Media saga demonstrates once again that Russian election interference is not, as these commentators and their allies have insisted, a “hoax.” It is a fact, a deliberate and ongoing operation by the Kremlin to sway U.S. politics. And the Trumpist right’s yearslong quest to rebut that reality have ended up ensuring that their entire information ecosystem is honeycombed with Russian propaganda.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 final report conclusively documented the Russian government’s systematic effort to influence the 2016 presidential election in order to help Trump and the many ways Trump’s associates participated in that endeavor. This was an inconvenient finding for Trump and his political and media allies, who had spent years fabricating a complex alternate reality in which claims of Russian election interference or corrupt ties between Russia and Trump and his associates were “deep state” lies. They responded by falsely claiming Mueller’s report had found “no collusion” between Trump and Russia, and used that lie to brand the entirety of the probe as a “hoax.”
That inability to forthrightly reject Russian efforts to aid their party’s standard bearer set the stage for Russian propaganda efforts receiving saturation coverage in the right-wing ecosystem.
No one on the right has done more to push pro-Russia talking points than former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, a longtime defender of Russian president Vladimir Putin and opponent of U.S. support for Ukraine. Russian propaganda channels sought to gin up Western support for its 2022 invasion by highlighting Carlson’s nightly screeds against U.S. aid to Ukraine, and in turn served as a source for Carlson’s program. A Russian state TV host even suggested on-air that Carlson take a job at his network after Fox dropped him the following year.
Carlson didn’t go that far — but he did take a jaunt to Moscow the following year for a largely friendly interview with Putin. Carlson’s visit received fawning coverage from Russian propaganda channels; the host in turn produced a pathetic video in which he claimed his visit to a local grocery store had “radicalize[d]” him against America’s political leaders. (Carlson’s Moscow market video was so unsubtle that when one of the indicted RT employees suggested posting it on Tenet’s Instagram channel, a Tenet producer initially recoiled, fearing that the video “feels like overt shilling.”)
The revelation that some of their own got pulled into a Russian intelligence operation isn’t leading to self-reflection on the MAGA right.
But Russia-friendly narratives about the country’s invasion of Ukraine ultimately spread far beyond Carlson. It became widely accepted orthodoxy on the MAGA right that sending military aid to Ukraine is a waste of money, that the United States is responsible for Russia’s invasion, and that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is the real villain of the conflict. As Pool put it, “Ukraine is the enemy of this country!” All of this brings Putin closer to one of his top objectives, the end of U.S. support for Ukraine.
Russian interests and Kremlin-connected sources also fueled the right’s obsession with Hunter Biden’s business interests and the absurd related allegation that Joe Biden accepted a bribe from a Ukrainian oligarch — both of which right-wing media and politicians treated as major stories, with House Republicans making it the heart of their impeachment case against the president..
While the U.S. right has been peddling Russian talking points for years, commentators unwittingly receiving payments from that country does seem to be a new development. But the revelation that some of their own got pulled into a Russian intelligence operation isn’t leading to self-reflection on the MAGA right. There’s a palpable lack of concern about the notion that Russian propagandists want to encourage the divisive rhetoric prevalent on the pro-Trump right because they feel it weakens the United States and bolsters Russian interests.
Instead, as they did with revelations of Russian interference in 2016 and the dissolution of their impeachment case earlier this year, they’ve moved directly to grievance and conspiracy theories.
In the hours after the indictment dropped Wednesday, Fox hosts and chyrons claimed that the Justice Department is engaged in “dirty tricks” intended to help Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign, and may be “laying the ground for more censorship.” Other right-wing commentators suggested that the indictment may be “a “psyop within a psyop” or perhaps linked to “Trump say[ing] he is going to declass the Epstein client list.”
For Charlie Kirk, the close Trump associate and streamer who had Tenet Media co-founder Lauren Chen as a TPUSA contributor, the big takeaway was that “the regime is ramping up its fear campaign ahead of November.”
All of this ensures that the right-wing information space will remain a rich breeding ground for Russian propaganda as Moscow tries to return Trump to the White House.
CORRECTION (Sept. 11, 2024, 9:30 a.m. ET): A previous version of this article mischaracterized Glenn Beck’s relationship with Blaze TV. He founded TheBlaze, which merged with CRTV to form Blaze TV, but is he not an owner of the new entity.