As I write this video, it's the 5th of September, 2024. Yesterday, on the 4th of September, a sealed indictment pertaining to a case against two individuals, Konstantin Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, in New York's Southern District Court was released by the U.S. Department of Justice. The indictment alleges these individuals were the middlemen between RT, that is, Russia's state-funded news organization, formerly Russia Today, and a company employing right-wing content creators in the U.S. and that through them, through this company, nearly $10 million of Kremlin funds were spent to pay these figures, some of whom you likely know, for the creation and licensing of videos. The contents of that indictment are being covered by a variety of major news outlets, and have far-reaching implications for the online culture war.
implications which ripple down through anti-fan digital spaces and through the reactionary, fandom-adjacent content creation economy we've discussed before on this channel, right down to me and you. In one sense, nothing at all has changed, but in another, everything has. Bear with me, I promise it's worth it.
Let's start by taking a look at the DOJ indictment. It's linked below, so feel free to read along, but I'll give you a quick rundown of the story it gives us and how involved parties have responded so far. The document opens with some relevant context, which is probably worth including here. I quote, After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, RT was sanctioned, dropped by distributors, and ultimately forced to cease formal operations in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. In response, RT created, in the words of its editor-in-chief, an entire empire of covert projects, designed to shape public opinion in Western audiences.
As we'll go on to see, that shaping of public opinion is sometimes specific and targeted, but RT's broad goals in the West are perhaps best summed up by the words of an RT journalist to an academic researcher the indictment quotes a few pages later. I asked my editor what is RT's line for this, and he said, anything that causes chaos is RT's line. That context aside, the body of this indictment is the story of one of those covert projects, a Tennessee-based online content creation company it refers to as US Company One, but which we can identify by matching up some website copy the document provides later as Tenet Media.
At the end of 2022, following a period of direct work for RT, Tenet's two founders were approached to work with a fictitious Paris-based investor by the name of Edouard Gregorian, a figure whose name was repeatedly misspelled by his would-be representatives, and whose name Google search returns no results for. Hold on to that fact for later, by the way. It's clear from private communications, though, that the company's two founders knew Gregorian wasn't the real deal.
Between themselves, they referred to their backers as quote, the Russians, the same term they'd used in prior correspondence to refer to RT. There's also the fact that one founder, while awaiting a response for an invoice sent to the ostensibly Paris-based Gregorian, Google searched, time in Moscow. Despite this, Tenet never disclosed to its viewers that the content was sponsored by RT, and Tenet's founders never registered with the Attorney General as agents of a foreign principle, which is, you know, illegal.
But who are those founders? Well, since US Company 1 is Tenet Media, we can fairly easily find out that Founder 1 and Founder 2 are Lauren Chen, the Turning Point USA, PragerU, and BlazeTV affiliate we've discussed previously on this channel, and her husband, Liam Donovan. And while it's not straightforwardly apparent who everyone mentioned in the document is, it is clear that the collaborators Chen and Donovan eventually hired and paid with that Russian money, and that's not to say that included Tim Pool, Lauren Southern, her Blaze TV co-star Dave Rubin, and her old Turning Point buddy Benny Johnson, among others. The indictment reveals that Chen was making tens of thousands of dollars per month coordinating Tenet, and that some of these contributors were getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars per video.
All in all, the indictment states nearly $10 million trickled from the Russian state into RT, through shell corporations, and into the hands of Tenet and their contributors. Tenet's YouTube channel officially launched in the autumn of 2023, and in the year since, has amassed over 300,000 subscribers and over 16 million views. I would be showing you footage of all this by the way, but the channel's been deleted by the time I'm editing this.
Over that period, the influence RT held over Tenet's output reportedly grew more direct. The initial contacts who had set up the deal with Chen and Donovan, who by the way, They all shared an IP address, as did the so-called Gregorian, suggesting that all these personas were in fact the same handler or handlers, directed Tenet to work with Kalashnikov and Afanasieva, the RT employees being charged, under the guise of hiring them as an editing firm. But before long, the pair were corresponding with commentators directly, and by June 2024, had even started posting their own content directly to Tenet's sites. Allegedly, they also successfully persuaded Chen to have commentators cover directly supplied talking points.
And all this was ticking along nicely. At time of writing, their last published video was released just yesterday, until that indictment was released, and Tenet's viewers, Tenet's collaborators, the internet at large, and the mainstream media discovered the business was funded by the Russian state. Predictably, media responses to this news varied. And I do want to take a look at some of them, but sifting through all the bias and conflicting interests in the media space can be a time consuming process.
Luckily though, this is exactly why I'm partnering with Ground News for this video. They're an app and website that gathers the world's news in one place, then pools data from multiple independent news monitoring organisations to tell you which sources are actually credible, and which are literally owned by the Russian government. I'll show you what I mean.
Ground News has pooled reporting on the Tenet situation with the other Russian disinfo stories that broke at the same time, so for this story, US seizes over 30 websites used in massive Russian disinformation plan, I can see we're looking at 387 total sources, 38% of which tend to lean left, 43 centre, and 19 right, with 65% of all these rated as high factuality. So everyone agrees this is a big story, but the right sides don't tend to be placing as much importance on it. Wonder why. We can also get more granular with the analysis, see how the story's being framed differently by those more partisan players.
Newser, for instance, identified as left-leaning with a mixed factuality, frames the story as a transfer directly from the Russians to these multiple influencers, whereas American Wire News, right-leaning but also with a mixed factuality, has these influencers accidentally caught up in the story implies they're barely involved at all. Quite the difference. There's also the Blindspot feed, which shows stories that are disproportionately covered by media sources on one side of the political spectrum. For example, if you lean right, you probably missed this story, that the Harris campaign raised $47 million in the 24 hours after the debates.
It's a great tool to help eliminate, you know, blindspots. I used Ground News while working on this video, and I'm certainly going to use it in my research process going forward. Oh, and this map's a feature on their app, by the way. So why not go to ground.news.pog and subscribe through my link, or scan my QR code for 40% off the unlimited access vantage plan.
Back to the Tenet story, though. We'll get into the fallout and what this all means shortly, but just before we do, it's probably worth addressing the elephant inside the elephant inside the elephant in the room. Russia bad?
The less politically engaged among you might wonder why the Russian connection here even matters. Why is this being treated as a smoking gun? Some of the more politically engaged among you might wonder why I'm going with the Russia bad framing here. Isn't that just some jingoistic Cold War relic?
Aren't we past that? If America bad, wouldn't that make Russia good? Well, in a nutshell, no. The flaws a lot of folks, particularly on the left, find in the US and the West, warmongering, imperialism, corruption, worker exploitation, inequality, restrictions on civil liberties, all that, are just as present, if not far more so, in Putin's Russia.
You guys, it's still colonialism even if they didn't use boats. Anyway, what you need to know here, and I'm obviously simplifying things, is pretty much that the jabronis in charge of today's Russia have a bit of a nostalgia fixation, and think it'd just be swell if things went back to the good old days. Not to the USSR and whichever genuine leftist sentiments may or may not have kicked off that period of history, but to Russia's imperial period. The only problem there is all the Eastern European, Caucasian, and Central Asian countries and citizens that kind of like not being under the Russian yoke, some of whom have made allies in the West for precisely that reason. Naturally then, the weaker the US, NATO, and the EU are, the more feasible Russia's clawing back of influence or land becomes.
The more successful the jabronis themselves look, and the less likely it is they end up falling out the window. Remotely weakening foreign countries without launching any missiles is pretty tough though, or it was, before we decided to collectively hook ourselves up to the brain rot matrix that is social media, and before the people developing that matrix figured out that throwing in a bunch of black box recommendations algorithms would make them more money by doing so. dialing up the brain rot.
Or in more scientific terms, there's a functional misalignment between human psychology, which evolved to learn and adopt beliefs based on a host of social factors, and these algorithms, which are designed simply to maximize engagement. The result of this is the tendency for algorithmic media to amplify our own biases and create false polarization. So, and again, this is something of a streamlined history.
In the time since social media became an everyday part of Western life, the Russian governments put more and more resources into waging an information war on this front, through tactics like bot farms, paid trolls, and, of course... Content. What's that, Tenet? The shooting in Moscow that ISIS already claimed responsibility for was really the US and Ukraine's fault? What's that, Tim Pool?
Ukraine is the US's greatest enemy? Hmm, maybe I will vote for a candidate who wants to sever ties to the US allied country Russia's currently war-criming after all. Research has shown that the Russian government has used these tactics to covertly interfere with countless elections and referenda in the West, with the headline examples, at least in the Anglophone world, probably being just, you know, all of the recent US presidential elections.
The motivations here being that an isolationist demagogue like Trump would be more inclined to stay out of Russia's way in the short term. and weaken America irreparably on a longer timescale. When you hear that RT's line is causing chaos, then, this is why. That's the basic version of the reason covert Russian funding behind divisive online media raises eyebrows. So what's come of all this so far?
At time of recording, Chen and Donovan, again the company's founders, the active Russian collaborators per the DOJ, haven't made any public statements. Their channels have, in fact, been scrubbed from YouTube. That's the reason I've been reusing old clips of Chen I already had.
I literally can't get new ones, but some of the channel's presenters have broken their silences. As I write this, Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, and Tim Pool have given statements reiterating their ignorance to the source of Tenet's funding, and there's some interesting stuff here. Rubin evidences his claim to cluelessness by highlighting a passage from the indictment.
which includes the following information. Commentator 1, i.e. Ruben himself, requested that Founder 1 provide a profile or article on Edward Gregorian. In response, Founder 1 sent Commentator 1 a one-page profile provided by the handlers.
Now this does tell us that Ruben was given false information, was misled by Chen, but that's not all it tells us, is it? We see here that Ruben was sufficiently suspicious of Tenet to seek information about its backing, but... either didn't google the guy's name afterward, or plowed ahead despite seeing Gregorian did not exist online. Anecdotally, if I even get a sponsorship offer, I'm setting a chunk of time aside to make sure the sponsor's on the up and up.
I have turned down many sponsors who have not cleared that bar. And if I, a relative nobody, am doing that for a one-off and a few hundred bucks, surely it's safe to at least say the passage Ruben quotes, Isn't the clear exoneration he's framing it as? Ignorance can be excused, but willful ignorance is perhaps a stickier thing.
Stepping back from Rubin specifically though, one idea found in both Johnson's and Poole's statements is, um, not true. They refer to the indictment as leaked, when it was, in fact, released by the DOJ intentionally. That's not a big thing, it's just a little sympathy-inducing rhetorical twist that it feels worthwhile to point out. Perhaps more significant is the idea of victimhood.
This is the most prevalent theme across the statements, the idea that they, the hired commentators, are the victims here. Again, that's how a lot of the media is reporting it too. And I won't argue that here, far be it from me to incur the wrath of Benny Johnson's crack legal squad, but I will observe that there is a tension between this line and another the statements are pushing. Poole states that his content in question, the Culture War podcast, was only licensed by Tenet Media and existed well before any license agreement with Tenet.
He points out that the only change with the agreement was that the location of the live broadcast moved to Tenet's YouTube channel. Johnson himself observes that he was an independent contractor for Tenet, and that the deal he signed was standard for him. Clarifying this does make sense.
It's doubtless important to these figures to clarify that, unlike some of the commentators mentioned in the indictment, they didn't make videos to Arty's specification. But if they did maintain creative and editorial control, if all that changed was where the content was hosted, and if they were paid tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for that transfer, well, what does victimhood mean here exactly? And if they are the victims, where exactly does that put the viewers?
The millions who consumed their content on Tenet without being informed of its backing. The countless others who saw Tenet content via the commentator's own channels. I think those are questions worth considering.
But I'm also aware that It's not the most important part of this. The most important thing here isn't who the victims are, or even what they're victims of. The thing the press should be reporting on, the key to all of this, isn't what RT did, it's what they didn't have to do. Tenet started up in 2023. Contact was made with Chen in 2022, i.e. well after any of these figures had come up. None of these commentators are Russian plants, not even Chen herself.
Working with her wasn't an enticing prospect for RT because of what she could be moulded into, it was because of the content she'd already made, the brand she'd already built, the alt-right audience she'd collated over the 2010s. The takeaway here isn't that this guy or that guy is a Russian stooge, knowingly or otherwise, that some of them might have shared the odd bit of content explicitly put together by Kalashnikov or Afanasyeva, the takeaway is precisely the opposite, that the vast majority of Tenet's resources went to supporting and platforming these creators'standard content. It's like Poole said, all that the Russian money changed was where his podcast was hosted.
These are not people RT groomed as assets, they're people RT recognized as assets. The takeaway isn't that we've just uncovered an unprecedented injecting in of Russian propagandistic values and talking points. It's that the values and talking points already being produced from this corner of the content ecosystem fit Russia's chaos and division agenda so well that they don't need to change. To be sure, as we've discussed before on this channel, those values haven't necessarily been developed and spread naturally. Many of these creators and channels have been given significant leg ups from existing media institutions.
But these institutions are domestic, they belong to the American right wing. In the grand scheme of things, RT being involved here isn't really that noteworthy. Russia gonna Russia.
What is noteworthy, surely, is that the networks and voices people like myself have been raising as potential threats to the fabric of Western democracy are seen in the same terms by the people actively seeking to do that damage, and that they see the best route to take here as simply letting them cook. RT didn't need to push in any substantial way for editorial powers with Tenet's content, because their interests? were already aligned with those of Tenet's creators, and of many of those creators'viewers, friends, and colleagues. Alt-righters want Trump in office, Russia wants Trump in office, Christian nationalists want the US to have a race kerfuffle, Russia wants the US to have a race kerfuffle.
And even aside from that admitted agenda of chaos and social sabotage, there is just a broad ideological overlap here. So much modern Russian propaganda focuses on the danger Western elites and their gender ideologies pose to traditional values, claims moral high ground by virtue of their resistance to this subversion. And doesn't that remind you of anyone else?
As I write this video, it's the 5th of September 2024. The other relevant thing that happened yesterday, on the 4th of September, was a Twitter campaign, spearheaded by figures in or around the Star Wars fandom. including Kyle Katarn and the Rewriting Ripley podcast, aiming to demonetize hate from YouTube. Rewriting Ripley's initial tweet included an example montage, which I'll play you a snippet from here.
This is what the Acolyte exists for. It's not here for story, it's not here to build the lore. For crying out loud, look at the cast right here.
This cast was made for having as little white males as possible in this cast. You know, Lucasfilm, you know, the retarded Avengers assemble over there, backing each other up. Racists do stick together.
Central here are channels like RK Outpost, Geeks and Gamers, and NerdRotic. and we of course see more than a few shots from the latter's podcast, Friday Night Tights, on which the montage's other stars frequently guest. The montage's more peripheral stars, like Shadiversity, Little Platoon, and Star Wars Theory, are largely FNT guests themselves, or else stream with members of the FNT extended family on other platforms.
The montage focuses on creators who have a history of breaking terms of service and getting away with it, hence the call for demonetization, but you may have heard other criticism of them in the past. You definitely have if you're a long-time pillar of garbage watcher. Creators like myself have criticized these channels in the past for lying about or generally misrepresenting media, as well as stoking bigotry through targeted, minority-centered dogpiles in order to outrage farm to the tune of millions of monetized views and to fuel politically motivated moral panics.
It is a spectrum, not every creator in this general circle has an openly far-right second channel and outright admits the inauthenticity of their work. But even the would-be centrists in these circles are only too happy to cover the same talking points and to enjoy the benefits of the integrated, radicalizing audience that repeated collaboration and platforming creates. Had this call for demonetization been made a day or so later though, I imagine whoever put it together might have included some other footage.
Perhaps NerdRotic's appearance on Tim Pool's podcast. Perhaps the big, high-budget discussion Benny Johnson had with NerdRotic and Critical Drinker about Wook Modern Hollywood and the culture war. or any of the many times Johnson joined FNT to commentate on the same topics, or perhaps Lauren Chen's multiple appearances on the same podcast. The video you're watching now is my third installment in a loose series I've put together this year aiming to properly contextualize the alt-right and alt-right adjacent voices in this corner of the online content ecosystem. To situate both the grifters who knowingly create in bad faith and the usefully myopic accomplices who allow these fringe ideas to be laundered and disseminated on a wider scale within a network encompassing both grassroots forms of collaboration and the role played by media companies and moneyed backers.
A few months ago in Across the Grifftiverse, I placed Chen in that web, highlighting her prior industry connections and her platforming of white nationalists, but the reason she was on my radar to begin with wasn't to do with Richard Spencer or Charlie Kirk. It was to do with the X-Men. The commentary she'd given about modern LGBT nonsense taking over the definitely not progressive X-Men franchise ahead of the release of Marvel's X-Men 97 had been picked up by The Blaze, for whom she was a contributor at the time, and had added a not insignificant amount of fuel to the, they're making the X-Men woke, panic that swept nerd spaces over February and March.
The evidence for that by the way is already being swept under the rug, Blaze have wasted no time at all in scrubbing their archives clean of the numerous pieces she contributed to on their site. Feels like something we probably shouldn't let them get away with minimising right? But let's not miss the forest for the trees. Lauren Chen, while in direct Russian employ, was appearing on Friday Night Tights, and contributing to the fandom wokeness panics that creators in this space spin into content. The point of the video you're watching now is to show you that those two stories from the 4th of September, the fandom call for YouTube to take responsibility and address the bigoted, bullying, radicalizing TOS-breaking grifter networks and negativity mills on the media discussion side of the internet.
and the DOJ released information pointing to Kremlin campaigns hiring American commentators to sow social discord, are the same story. The point is that the importance of the work I and others have done to expose poor YouTube practice, the twisting of media, and the continuity between the tactics in this space, and those previously used by movements like Gamergate and entities like Breitbart, all this goes far, far beyond the griftiverse. beyond a few YouTube channels, podcasts, partisan media companies, and it always has. It's about elections.
It's about democracy. It's about disinformation and division, far more than it is about woke X-Men, or The Last Jedi, or Peach's Trousers, or objective film criticism. Many of them know this.
Doubtless, some don't. But at least now you do, too. The latest on all this is that Tenet may very well be the tip of a larger iceberg, but I don't want to end this video by casting aspersions. Granted, it's certainly possible that some of the other names that have come up in this video are among these remaining little green podcasters, but this surely isn't the case for all of them.
Some, most, probably all, are simply still at this because the architecture of the modern internet incentivises and monetises these practices. generates the potential for lasting social and civic harm all by itself. Bringing a case against two Russians who will likely never again step foot on US soil, even playing whack-a-mole with collaborators like Chen, Donovan, and whoever comes next, isn't going to stop the damage content like Tenet does.
If the powers that be are serious about shoring up the social weak spots RT is so gleefully targeted, sooner or later, they'll have to look a little closer to home. But again, as I record this conclusion, the story is still very much developing. I fully expect we'll learn more about the Tenet situation as time passes. Perhaps by the time you're watching this, this video's already aged surprisingly poorly. Maybe it's already aged surprisingly well.
Either way, one question remains. What can we do against all this? Well, there are a few things.
We can engage with online content actively. We can check sources, we can try to spot when someone's making an emotional argument rather than a logical or analytical one, and we can respond accordingly. You can check for bias in written sources and reporting with tools like this video's sponsor Ground News, or through other methods. If your company advertises on YouTube, let YouTube know you'll consider pulling out if those ads continue to run on content spreading hate, breaking terms of service.
Yeah, like, we didn't need that quote to know that that freak we had on screen for way too long is fucking mentally ill. Like, we didn't need-You can challenge friends and family who you see echoing unsubstantiated talking points or opinions that don't seem like their own. And if you live in the US, you can put all this into practice now, because this is maybe the best time to make sure you're thinking critically about the ideas, moral panics, and hot-button talking points the Kremlin views as damaging enough to your country's future.
to merit millions of dollars of backing. And hey, if you think videos like this are worth making, why not help support them by joining up on YouTube or Patreon, and throwing me enough money to get my windows bolted shut. Yes, I know I already made a window joke this video, but you know, it's fertile ground. Yes, operation was success.
Comrade, I believe he was recording video. Thank you for watching Pillar of Garbage episode. Spasibo in particular to Hanan, Daniel Goldhorn, Magath, Something Something Capitalism Bad, Thomas R and Weirdy Beardy. Do svidaniya!