#Tenet media

[tomorrowusa]

Yep, the GOP is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Putin, Inc..

If Trump loses, all those pee tapes will have been for nothing.

Jay Kuo blogged about the Republican Tenet Media payola scandal at his Substack.

A MAGA Meltdown The Russian influence peddling scandal begins to mount casualties.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

DOJ Indicts Russian Nationals in $10 Million Scheme to Spread Covert Propaganda to U.S. Audiences

Brett Meiselas at MeidasTouch:

The Department of Justice has unsealed an indictment charging two Russian nationals, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, with conspiring to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and money laundering in a scheme to covertly influence U.S. audiences. Both Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva remain at large, according to the DOJ’s announcement today. The indictment reveals that Kalashnikov, 31, and Afanasyeva, 27, who were employees of Russia's state-controlled media outlet RT, played pivotal roles in funneling nearly $10 million to a Tennessee-based online content creation company, referred to in court documents as U.S. Company-1. The content company, unbeknownst to its viewers, was funded and directed by RT to produce pro-Russian videos aimed at American social media users. This company is believed to be TENET Media, who touts right-wing hosts Lauren Southern, Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and others, as part of their roster.

[...] Since its launch in November 2023, U.S. Company-1, believed to be TENET Media, has posted nearly 2,000 videos across platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and X, garnering over 16 million views on YouTube alone. The DOJ notes that while the content appeared to offer commentary on domestic issues, it was aligned with the Russian government's goal of weakening U.S. opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The defendants are also accused of deceiving two U.S.-based online commentators with large followings into producing content for U.S. Company-1 without disclosing RT’s involvement. The DOJ alleges that RT used a fictional persona named “Eduard Grigoriann” to conceal its role as the company’s true financial backer. Within the indictment lies a troubling sequence involving directives from Elena Afanasyeva, alias "Helena Shudra," to manipulate content creation at U.S. Company-1, aiming to tailor videos to specific agendas. Notably, in early 2024, Afanasyeva orchestrated the creation of tailored content that included a video featuring a "well-known U.S. political commentator," who MeidasTouch can identify as Tucker Carlson, during an bizarre visit to a Russian grocery store in which Carlson said he was "radicalized" by how low the prices were in Moscow.

The DOJ handed down indictments to two Russian nationals Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva for violating FARA.

The two helped funnel nearly $10M into creating a right-wing pro-Russia propaganda outfit called TENET Media founded by Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan. TENET Media has right-wing pundits Lauren Southern, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Benny Johnson in their stable.

See Also:

The Guardian: Russia accused of trying to influence US voters through online campaign

Nashville Banner: Nashville Media Company Appears in U.S. Indictment of Russian Propaganda Efforts

Mother Jones: New Indictment Alleges Conservative Media Company Took Millions of Kremlin Cash

[gwydionmisha]

Be careful what you watch and read and believe.

[makingdonalddrumpfagain]

[epically-epic-epicosity]

DOJ link:

Edit - Follow up:

[corporationsarepeople]

The funniest part of the Tenet Media / Russian money / Disinformation indictment is the response from the show hosts.

“We never even spoke to them! They just funneled cash to us! We don’t know why!”

If someone is giving you a few million bucks, you talk to them. If they don’t tell you what to say, then you’re already saying what they want. If you’re already saying what Russia wants, then stop calling yourself an American “patriot.”

(Ultimately this story is about transparency imho. We need to know who is paying for what ads and what content. Who owns this media outlet, this publisher, that platform, and who is paying their speakers? Put it right up front where we can see it. Not on GitHub or in a report, but right there on YouTube or Facebook, or at the start of a podcast.)

[rednblacksalamander]

Pool's closed.

[mysharona1987]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 4, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Sep 05, 2024

Long tonight, folks, but it’s been quite a day. And even still, I did not mention the day’s horrific shooting at a Georgia school.

Today, Vice President Kamala Harris announced a series of proposals to help entrepreneurs create small businesses. Like President Joe Biden, she and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, argue that small businesses and entrepreneurs are the “engines of our economy.” In a statement today, they noted that “small businesses employ half of all private-sector workers in America—creating 70 percent of net new jobs since 2019—and do trillions of dollars of business every year.”

The Biden administration has boasted of the record number of new businesses created since Biden and Harris took office. There have been 19 million new business applications in that time. Harris said she and Walz are setting a goal of 25 million new business applications in their first term. Their plan, they say, is to “kickstart…more young, small, and innovative firms.”

To make this happen, they propose raising the deduction for startup expenses from its current level of $5,000 to $50,000, noting that the average amount a new business spends to get set up in its first year of operation is $40,000. They also propose funding a network of new and existing “federal, state, local, and private incubators and small business innovation hubs” that will make it easier for small business and local suppliers to get technical assistance, funding, customers, and so on. 

They also promised to make low-interest and no-interest loans available for small businesses, to protect and expand the support of the Affordable Care Act for small business owners, and to guarantee that one third of federal contract money will go to small businesses. They promise to make it easier for small businesses to file taxes, reduce excessive occupational licensing requirements, and urge state and local governments to cut the red tape of burdensome regulations by streamlining them across jurisdictions. 

Harris and Walz said they are committed to making the investments that will build the economy while also paying for them and reducing the deficit. “They also know,” their statement said, that “we need to support America as a locus of innovators, entrepreneurs, and workers coming together to create a better future.  

Harris calls this a New Way Forward, but it is curiously close to the old Republican reforms of the Progressive Era, when entrepreneurs joined forces with workers and farmers to demand access to capital and a fair economic playing field after decades in which a few wealthy industrialists stacked the system in their own favor. When we look at that era, as well as the New Deal reforms of the 1930s, we tend to emphasize reforms designed to benefit workers and farmers, but members of those groups always allied with entrepreneurs shut out of the system by wealthy industrialists. The demand for securities and exchange law in the 1930s, for example, did not come from western farmers, but from entrepreneurs who knew they could not break into the system if established businesses made up the rules amongst themselves.

Harris recalled that Republican reform impulse when she said we must make the tax system fairer. She called for rolling back Trump’s tax cuts and implementing common-sense tax reforms for corporations and the richest Americans. She calls for setting a minimum income tax for billionaires, the corporate tax rate to 28% (it was 35% before the Trump tax cuts), and quadrupling the tax on the stock buybacks that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest Americans.

She emphasized that no one earning less than $400,000 a year will pay more in taxes under her plans, and called for a tax rate of 28% on long-term capital gains for those who earn more than a million dollars a year. This is up from the current 20% rate, but less than the 39.6% rate Biden proposed in his 2025 budget. 

A Fox News Channel host applauded some of Harris’s ideas, saying, “When a political candidate comes up with what I think is a good idea, I have to call it a good idea. And a fifty thousand dollar…tax credit for startups or small businesses, coupled with less red tape, I’ve got to say, that is a good idea, regardless of her other tax ideas.” 

This was a nice endorsement of Harris’s policies, coming as it did after yesterday’s assessment by economists for the Goldman Sachs Group saying that the nation’s economic growth would take a hit if Trump wins, but will grow under a Harris presidency if she also has the support of a Democratic House and Senate.  

In her statement about economic policy, Harris called out Trump for supporting “himself and the biggest corporations” and noted that sixteen Nobel laureates have said that Trump’s policies would ignite inflation and trigger a recession by mid-2025. That recession, economists project, would cost more than 3 million jobs, explode the deficit, and raise costs. Harris pointed out that Project 2025 would cut funding for the Small Business Administration and make it harder for small businesses to get access to money. 

For his part, Trump has doubled down on the idea that the United States is a failing nation. For the past week he has been telling a story about a residential building in Colorado taken over by a gang from Venezuela. But it appears the story is entirely made up. Similarly, Trump on Friday said at a right-wing Moms for Liberty event that public schools in America kidnap children and operate on them to change their sex. This is bonkers, but it is bonkers in a way that deliberately demonizes Trump’s opponents.

Trump’s vision of the United States is one of darkness and carnage. As Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz said today, “It is a deliberate effort by some people to make them believe that our political system is broken. To make them believe that things are pessimistic. My God, every time I hear Donald Trump give a speech, it’s like the next screenplay for Mad Max or something. They are rooting against America.”

That bleak version of the United States, it turns out, echoes the talking points Russian handlers gave to their operatives working in the U.S. in an effort “to steer the U.S. public opinion in the right direction.” The Russians directed their U.S. employees to emphasize the following “campaign topics”: “Encroaching universal poverty. Record inflation. Halting of economic growth. Unaffordable prices for food and essential goods”; “Risk of job loss for white Americans”; “Privileges for people of color, perverts, and disabled”; “Constant lies of the [Democratic] administration about the real situation in the country”; “Threat of crime coming from people of color and immigrants”; “Overspending on foreign policy and at the interests of white US citizens”; “Constant lies to the voters by [Democrats] in power.” 

The target audience of the campaign was “[Republican] voters,” [Trump] supporters, “Supporters of traditional family values,” and “White Americans, representing the lower-middle and middle class.” The focus was in particular on “[r]esidents of "swing states whose voting results impact the outcomes of the elections more than other states. 

This information came out today when the Departments of Justice, State, and the Treasury announced sanctions against 10 individuals and 2 entities, and criminal charges against two employees of RT, a Russian state-controlled media outlet, who allegedly funded a company in the U.S. to hire right-wing social media influencers to push Russian propaganda before the 2024 election. 

While the indictment does not name the Tennessee-based company the Russians funded, it appears to be Tenet Media, a company registered by Liam Donovan and Lauren Tam, who is associated with The Blaze and Turning Point USA, as well as RT. The two appear to be married. The indictment alleges that the company’s two founders knew they were working for the Russians, but suggests the six commentators—Lauren Southern, Tim Pool, Tayler Hansen, Matt Christiansen, Dave Rubin, and Benny Johnson, all staunch Trump supporters—did not know where their massive paychecks originated. After the story broke, five of the commentators denied any knowledge of the source of the company’s funding; some insisted their words were entirely their own. 

One of the videos the company pushed at the request of the Russians was what appears to have been right-wing host Tucker Carlson’s visit to a grocery store in Russia where he praised the low prices (which even the company’s founders thought “just feels like overt shilling”).

Separately, the Department of Justice seized 32 internet domains that “the Russian government and Russian sponsored actors” have used to influence the 2024 election. In a malign influence campaign called “Doppelganger,” these domains produced fake articles that appeared to be from major U.S. news sites, to which influencers and fake social media profiles on Facebook, X, Truth Social, and YouTube then drove traffic. 

Russian operatives called in bold type for Russia “to put a maximum effort to ensure that the [Republican] point of view (first and foremost, the opinion of [Trump] supporters) wins over the US public opinion. This includes provisions on peace in Ukraine in exchange for territories, the need to focus on the problems of the US economy, returning troops home from all over the world, etc.”

One of the documents produced in the affidavit justifying the seizure of the internet domains called for trying to stir up a conflict between the U.S. and Mexico in order to distract from the fact that the U.S. economy is “very healthy” under Biden.

Tonight, in an interview with Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity, Trump appeared to think he is running against Joe Biden. An internal email leaked to the press from the Trump campaign showed managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles warning staff not to communicate with the press and suggested anyone doing so would be fired.

Today, Steph Curry of California’s Golden State Warriors basketball team and former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president. “Endorsing Kamala Harris is important for me and my family,” Curry said. “Knowing Kamala and having been around her, I understand she's qualified for this job."

“There was never a doubt that the courageous Liz Cheney would endorse Vice President Harris,” conservative judge J. Michael Luttig wrote, “because  Liz Cheney stands for America.  She is the very embodiment of country over party and country over self.  And she fears no one—least of all the former president.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[talkingpointsusa]

Let the Dave Rubin Taylor Swift meltdown begin

Dave Rubin didn't take the presidential debate very well. He really didn't take Taylor Swift endorsing Kamala Harris well. I can understand this to a certain degree, it's been a pretty rough couple of days for Dave what with that whole "Unwittingly taking money from Russia to spread propaganda" thing and that other "My candidate chocked on national TV in front of the entire free world" thing.

Keep in mind when Dave starts rambling about Taylor Swift that his shows motto is "Crazy world, sane views" and his shows new theme song (which I'm 99% sure is AI generated) is "It's a crazy world, somebodies gotta have the sane views".

Somebody does indeed but it sure as hell ain't this guy.

01:41, Dave Rubin: "It's not really about the policies, it's really just about the narrative and I think we really saw a very very sharp example last night, lets say a very obvious example last night, of how the narrative is shaped and shifted right in front of our eyes because that was a three on one, that was not a debate, we've seen it in the post coverage."

So, right-wing media has settled on calling the debate rigged. It's the "8 year old who's angry that they lost a game" approach to politics. "Oh no, the moderators moderated the debate. We shouldn't do that anymore." Naturally, they're all ignoring the points where Trump made an ass of himself like when he declared that migrants in detention centres are forcibly getting trans surgeries or when he amplified the debunked racist smear about Haitian immigrants eating dogs. None of that was caused by the moderators, that was all Trump.

Part of what makes this all so embarrassing is that guys like Dave Rubin are constantly going on about how Trump is this political genius playing 4-D chess against the Democrats and yet simultaneously he turns into a blustery mess against three "dumb libs". Even if we're accepting that the debate was rigged, which it wasn't, Trump still should have mopped the floor with everybody there. You can't have both!

So, Dave launches into a diatribe about 9/11 which is just him politicizing a tragedy so he can push a narrative about the debate, gross. We won't dwell too long on it but he does say some royally stupid things in this segment.

05:02, Dave Rubin: "I wanted to just sort of show you something there because that was only 23 years ago and think of how fundamentally different the world is from that morning to this morning, like wildly different. The fact that there was no questions even asked about it at the debate last night and the one time it was referenced, Kamala Harris completely dismissed -- well, it wasn't referenced actually. Kamala Harris said that January 6th was the worst moment in US history since the Civil War, completely dismissing 9/11. I mean, absolutely disgusting."

Why were there no 9/11 questions at the debate? I don't know Dave, could it be because it was 23 years ago?! 9/11, while tragic, isn't a current issue. There are no people basing their vote around 9/11 related policy. If you want to talk about questions about terrorism and the Department of Homeland Security, fine, but I don't think any sane person was expecting any 9/11 related questions during the debate.

So, Dave does an ad for mattresses and then reads a tweet from Ben Shapiro, also Dave's super objective. Just oh so objective.

08:47, Dave Rubin: "So, it seems to me, I'm gonna try to cover this as always as objectively as possible, you know my feelings about these two candidates, you know my feelings about the two parties, you know my feelings about the mainstream media but it seems to me that the main takeaway is not 'Oh my God, Kamala got Trump on this policy' or 'Trump really had that great line that exposed her for being a fraud' or any of that. It really is the narrative thing around the mainstream media because watching that debate last night, I don't know how you could be an even approximate objective person and think that it was not a three on one."

Yeah, the main takeway people seem to be having is "Holy shit, Trump's nuts!" Also, Harris absolutely won the debate. She swept the post debate polling with a 23 point margin with 57% of respondents saying that she won the debate. Turns out that racist diatribes about migrants don't pull in the moderates, shocker.

Also, Dave sounds very objective just parroting dumb right-wing media talking points.

09:22, Dave Rubin: "They repeatedly, dishonestly, fact-checked Donald Trump instead of just letting Kamala retort and they did not do it to her once. She went on lie after lie after lie including very fine people which, as I said last night, it is the most debunked lie of all time."

Yeah, like the time where she fell for a Facebook hoax about migrants eating pets....oh wait, that's your guy.

Very fine people isn't debunked. There is a Snopes article saying that the claim that he called Neo-Nazi's very fine people is false but if these guys read past that appealing big red X they'd find this paragraph. Quote:

Editors' Note: Some readers have raised the objection that this fact check appears to assume Trump was correct in stating that there were "very fine people on both sides" of the Charlottesville incident. That is not the case. This fact check aimed to confirm what Trump actually said, not whether what he said was true or false. For the record, virtually every source that covered the Unite the Right debacle concluded that it was conceived of, led by and attended by white supremacists, and that therefore Trump's characterization was wrong. 

So, he didn't specifically call Neo-Nazi's at Charlottesville very fine people, he just both sidesed it. This is just a dumb semantics game. Trump absolutely should be criticized for that.

Dave then plays a clip of RFK Jr and then a clip of Trump with Hannity. Dave then plays a clip of Trump being fact-checked on crime being down (which it is). Naturally, the Dave Rubin Clip Show hasn't really changed much since the news about Russia broke out.

Anyway, here's Dave lying about the crime rate.

14:39, Dave Rubin: "You can argue actually, I think you can make an honest argument that it is a moderators job to fact-check, we all wish there would be a little more fact-checking right? So, when she lies about very fine people on both sides I would like a fact-check there. So I am not throwing David Muir under the bus as if he shouldn't fact-check but he only did it one way and actually Trump was right about that, we've got this from Washington Examiner. In fact, violent crime is up substantially from 2019 levels and last years 2023 apparent drop is less significant than it appears. Part of the problem is how police departments report offences to the FBI, that's exactly what Trump was referencing. The FBI asked, then demanded, that law enforcement agencies transfer away from the system that they used for decades to a new more detailed but onerous one"

Well, Dave finally gave me a specific, I love when they give me specifics.

So, the Examiner article that Dave's referring to is a Washington Examiner article called "Bad Data From The FBI Mislead About Crime". Since the Washington Examiner is journalistic garbage, I looked into this myself and found that they're being intellectually dishonest as hell.

First of all, the Examiner is looking at 2019-2023 whereas people saying that crime is down are looking 2022-2023. There was indeed a brief spike in crime during 2022 but that doesn't change the fact that crime is down now in 2024. The Examiner itself concurs that crime continued to drop from 2023 to 2024 meaning that Dave's own dumb source was forced to admit that crime is indeed down. Unfortunately, guys like Dave need crime to be up because that helps them panic their audiences into buying their junk.

16:21, Dave Rubin: "Go to New York City, see whats going on. See what happens the second the sun goes down, the types of people that are out on the street. They're out during the day too but then suddenly it's like a zombie movie, they all start coming out."

Yes, at night they DOUBLE come out! They're out during the day but during the night it suddenly becomes like a zombie movie and then they....come out again I guess? What an absolutely moronic statement.

Also, as somebody who's been to New York City and walked around there at night, no it's not like a zombie movie.

So, Dave complains about MSNBC which is just stupid. I'm not going to deal with it. MSNBC is a network I have lukewarm feelings about as it is (their website is better than their cable coverage) and Dave Rubin just sloppily rambling about clips from them that he's clearly taken out of context isn't interesting. What is interesting is Dave whinging about Taylor Swift. Dave reads her endorsement and then gets really mopey and stupid.

27:00, Dave Rubin: "It's all confusions that she said there, I don't know what the issues are she cares about so Taylor Swift, do you want 15 million illegals here bringing in fentanyl and taking out our cities? Is that what you want?"

I've discussed this on the blog before but migrants aren't bringing in most of the fentanyl, it mainly comes in on trucks and tractor trailers. So yeah, pretty bold of Dave to try and accuse somebody else of having "confusions".

Dave then has some high-level political analysis. All I can say is just...just look at this absolute moron.

27:45, Dave Rubin: "There's something -- I would say there's something even more nefarious. She obviously didn't write that statement, probably didn't even look at that statement but they put that out immediately after the debate because what they want to happen there -- what they want to happen there is that they want young girls to be angry at their parents. That's another piece of this, they're using her as a tool so that when a father comes home from work, and generally conservatives have jobs and he's worked hard all day to put food on the table for his family and he comes home from work, that the daughter will start screaming at him for supporting Donald Trump and then the wife will probably start screaming at him too because the wife doesn't want the daughter to be upset because they are trying to hatchet away at everything."

Ah yes, conservative dads. If there's one group of people famous for changing their worldview when their family challenges them on it, it's conservative dads. That's why every thanksgiving since, oh I don't know, the concept of presidential elections was established has been peaceful whenever politics comes up.

The pandering in that clip is also just painful. "Hello audience of mostly conservatives who hate me for my marriage, just wanted to let you know that you are all HARD WORKERS and that's why you shouldn't take what your family says seriously."

He goes on too and it just gets dumber from here.

29:44, Dave Rubin: "So think about it, that statement was planned, obviously. She didn't write the statement, somebody -- they pay somebody, a PR person or whoever it might be, to write that statement. The picture with the cat -- like, this was a plan right? She didn't just take a selfie with her cat and then write that thing up, obviously. They put that out immediately after the debate and then moments after that, Tim Walz is on television talking about how excited he is about the Taylor Swift endorsement. Really think how fucking pathetic, I think it's my first one since I came back, that this is."

Getting this riled up over a celebrity endorsement is pretty pathetic Dave. He does realize that she's wealthy enough to have a photo taken of her after the debate right? Or more importantly, that this endorsement doesn't really mean that much in the grand scheme of the election. I'm convinced that the only people who really gave it a lot of attention are Taylor Swifts fans and guys like Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin who've been blowing a gasket about it since it dropped on Instagram.

31:07, Dave Rubin: "Ivy (?) just mentioned to me that Taylor Swifts tour that she's on was supposed to wrap up but they've now extended it to go through the election, do you think that's a coincidence right? Probably not."

So, Taylor Swifts master plan to steal the election is as follows:

Step One: Become famous over the course of decades by producing music.

Step Two: Go on tour during the election and endorse Harris after the debate

Step Three: Extend that tour through the rest of the election because...if you aren't on tour you'll just suddenly stop being famous I guess?

The Russians really go their moneys worth with this Dave Rubin guy. I wonder what the refund policy on grifters is. So, the rest of the show is pretty boring stuff. He plays a clip from the View at some point which is further proof for my theory that conservatives are the only people watching the View in 2024. Then he remembers that Taylor Swift is a person who exists and decides to get gross as hell.

58:30, Dave Rubin: "Taylor Swift endorses Kamala Harris on Instagram, after the debate on ABC, proudly calls herself a childless cat lady. Elon Musk, who they hate, he saw that and he wrote this; 'Fine Taylor, you win. I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.' So, he's mocking. He's exposing the ridiculousness. Right, it's like Taylor Swift, you are a young pretty girl. Do you know what the gang members from Venezuela do to young pretty girls? It ain't pretty."

God, both Dave Rubin and Elon Musk are gross as all hell. Gotta hit that "fair white women will get raped by those scary brown people" button whenever you can I guess. Again, gross. Also, she's a 34 year old woman you misogynistic creep.

On the bright side, it certainly helps cement the fact that these guys are indeed weird as all hell despite their protestations.

Conclusion:

Well, that was a grown man having a conniption fit about a pop star endorsing a political candidate. The yearlong conservative meltdown over Taylor Swift is hilarious and I figured we could all use something on the lighter side after all the Matt Walsh we've been seeing on the blog lately. I'm sure we'll go back to naked racism and bigotry in the next post and all our souls will be destroyed oncemore but for now lets just take a moment to laugh at this absolute moron prattling on about Taylor Swifts supposed evil plans to throw the election.

Sources Cited:

Archacki, Liam. “Kamala Harris Sweeps First Batch of Post-Debate Polls by 23-Point Margin.” The Daily Beast, The Daily Beast, 11 Sept. 2024.

Bump, Philip. “Analysis | Fox News Twists Data on Economy and Crime to Attack Biden.” Washington Post, 9 Apr. 2024.

Sganga, Nicole, and Camilo Montoya-Galvez. “Fentanyl Seizures Rise at U.S.-Mexico Border — Here’s Why.” CBS News, 3 Feb. 2023.

[tomorrowusa]

It's clear that America's autocratic enemies desperately want to elect Trump. It's the cheapest way for kleptocrats in Russia, North Korea, Iran, and North Korea to weaken the United States.

Foreign dictators manipulating US media is not new. But now we see Putin making direct monetary investments in platforms which promote stooges for the Kremlin.

The indictment unsealed in New York’s Southern District accused two employees of RT, the Kremlin’s media arm, of funneling nearly $10 million to an unidentified company, described only as “Company 1” in court documents. CNN has independently confirmed that “Company 1” is Tenet Media, which is a platform for independent content creators. It is self-described as a “network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues,” according to its website, which matches language contained in the newly unsealed indictment. The alleged Russian operation tapped two people to set up the company in their names to add to its legitimacy and the two founders were aware Russian money backed the operation, according to the indictment. The goal of the operation, according to prosecutors, was to fuel pro-Russian narratives, in part, by pushing content and news articles favoring Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and others who the Kremlin deemed to be friendlier to its interests. Among the commentators listed on Tenet Media’s website are right-wing personalities Benny Johnson, Tim Pool and Dave Rubin. All have released statements saying they were victims of the alleged Russian scheme and they maintained editorial control of the content they created. Each has a loyal fanbase online, with a combined roughly 6 million followers on YouTube alone. Pool interviewed Trump on his podcast in May.

Tenet Media was just one of Putin's tentacles in US media.

The DOJ’s revealing of the alleged Russian plot was part of a wider set of actions the Biden administration announced Wednesday it was taking to tackle a major Russian government-backed effort to influence the 2024 US presidential election including sanctions on 10 individuals and entities, and the seizure of 32 internet domains. At Russian President Vladimir Putin’s direction, three Russian companies used fake profiles to promote false narratives on social media, US Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a statement. Internal documents produced by one of those Russian companies show one of the goals of the propaganda effort was to boost the candidacy of Trump or whoever emerged as the Republican nominee for president, according to an FBI affidavit.

Putin tried to deflect the negative publicity by claiming he liked Kamala Harris's laugh. Of course his puppet Weird Donald doesn't have a laugh – just a malicious sneer.

Putin will continue to try to interfere in elections until it becomes too costly for him to do so.

RELATED: The Kremlin has Putin-friendly influencers sowing pro-Trump propaganda.

Unsealed FBI Doc Exposes Terrifying Depth of Russian Disinfo Scheme

Of particular note, the documents released Wednesday included an affidavit that noted a Russian company is keeping a list of more than 2,800 influencers world wide, about one-fifth of whom are based in the United States, to monitor and potentially groom to spread Russian propaganda. The affidavit does not mention the full list of influencers, but is still a terrifying indicator of how deep the Russian plot to interfere in U.S. politics really goes. The Doppelganger program and its “Good Old USA Project” aimed to mimic mainstream media outlets to push pro-Russian policies through fake social media accounts. Documents show that the Kremlin specifically targeted Trump supporters, minorities, gamers, and swing-state voters by spreading far-right conspiracies and capitalizing on existing divisions in U.S. politics. ”They are afraid of losing the American way of life and the ‘American dream,’” Ilya Gambashidze, an architect of the project, wrote, outlining his scheme. “It is these sentiments that should be exploited in the course of an information campaign in/for the United States.” To do so, the Russian government would emphasize that Republicans are “victims of discrimination of people of color” and promote conspiracies that white middle-class people are being discriminated against. The “guerrilla media” plan needed to not only plant falsehoods, but also spread them far and wide. They targeted gamers and chatroom users, who they described as the “backbone of the right-wing trends in the US segment of the Internet,” and monitored social media influencers.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

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 company’s description matches that of Tenet Media, a Tennessee-based firm co-founded by Lauren Chen, a creator for Glenn Beck’s 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.” [...] 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. [...] 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. [...] 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..

MMFA's Matt Gertz for MSNBC.com on MAGA media pundits being on the Kremlin payroll via TENET Media (09.06.2024).

Matt Gertz wrote in MSNBC’s opinion section that MAGA influencers such as Tim Pool and Benny Johnson have only themselves to blame for the TENET Media debacle in which they pumped out pro-Russia propaganda.

See Also:

MMFA: How MAGA pundits who mocked the Russia “hoax” ended up the Kremlin’s payroll

Public Notice: Russia's useful idiots

[davidaugust]

Being too foolish to realize you are sharing propaganda for the Russians doesn’t make you better than someone who willfully spreads propaganda for the Russians.

Betraying your country is betraying your country, whether or not you were a fool too.

[makingdonalddrumpfagain]

[sewersoul]

bro if someone is paying you $100k PER EPISODE of a YOUTUBE PODCAST like you def either knew where it was coming from or you are even dumber than everyone thought. like in no regular world does that kind of money for that kind of content make sense