You probably remember Lauren Chen. She’s an attractive hapa from YouTube who made videos against feminism or whatever. I don’t watch videos made by women, but I was aware of her. She’s popular.
She may be getting indicted by the Department of Justice for being a Russian spy.
An unsealed indictment the DoJ released this week claimed that RT was funding her company, Tenet Media. Allegedly, they gave her $10 million, and the company never registered under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA), which made this an illegal spying operation, according to the feds.
Tenet was not named in the indictment, but it was easy to figure out who they were talking about.
Thus far, only people from RT have been indicted – or rather, only their indictments have been unsealed – but it seems obvious that Chen and her husband are going to also be indicted as Russian spies.
WIRED has an article going through the details that the government is giving.
Here is Jewish Attorney General Merrick “Garland” Garfinkel laying out his case:
AG Merrick Garland unveils a series of targeted actions against Russia’s election interference efforts, saying Putin’s “inner circle” directed companies to “promote disinformation … as part of a program to influence the 2024 U.S. presidential election.” https://t.co/PzYR4zN3vI pic.twitter.com/KTfDB21om8
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) September 4, 2024
Tenet hired Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, Dave Rubin, and others. Allegedly, 90% of their income was coming from the Russians, and the DoJ has evidence that they knew where the money was coming from, even though there were some attempts to disguise it.
At one point, they were waiting on their money, and they googled “time in Russia,” apparently to see if the Russians were awake yet. That’s a weird piece of proof, but I guess it is proof.
YouTube has now removed the channels of the company. They also deleted Chen’s personal channel, which has videos going back to long before she is accused of being involved with Russia. Mind you, she has yet to be charged, let alone convicted of anything.
Tim Pool is denouncing the whole thing, trying to keep from getting thrown under the bus.
Pool has made tens of millions of dollars, mostly completely unrelated to Chen’s Russian shill operation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the DoJ freezes all his accounts and moves to shut him down.
Frankly, the stated allegations appear to be true. It’s unlikely that it was all made up whole-cloth. I don’t know that I believe it’s Russians, but someone gave Chen a bunch of money.
If it was actually Russians, I will defend this Russian shilling. There is a really easy basis on which to defend these Russian shills: “But what about Israel??”
Ben Shapiro, Dennis Prager, and virtually the entire US Congress are paid agents of Israel, working on Israel’s behalf, and none of them are registered as foreign agents because there is a narrative that whatever is good for Israel is good for the United States. There is no basis for that narrative, and I could just as easily claim that whatever is good for Russia is good for the United States. In fact, I do claim that, constantly, basically every day.
What’s more, the US is super hypocritical for whining about Russia paying Americans to influence American policy, given that the US does this literally everywhere in the world. They don’t even have to pay people, because they’ve devised a system where their own social media companies – pretending to be “private companies” – go all over the world and influence politics. Further, the US was funding a gay-anal-vaginism website called “Meduza” in Russia, which was very popular, and Russia didn’t shut it down until the war started. They labeled it a “foreign agent” and then let it continue to operate.
You cannot totally stop foreign countries from using the internet. FARA is a law that existed before the internet – it was passed in 1938 – and was not really in use until they started charging people from the Trump Administration with it. Remember that the US has started riots in Georgia against that country’s attempt to pass a FARA of their own.
Here’s an article from the Council on Foreign Relations claiming that forcing foreign agents to register is a Russian conspiracy, and that requiring foreign agents to register destroys democracy.
Furthermore: Tenet Media was founded nearly three years ago, in January of 2022. From the way the reporting on this story sounds, the company was started with Russian money, and that would mean that the DoJ knew about it from the start. You can’t really keep this sort of thing secret. Maybe you could keep the communications sort of secret (though probably not), but you definitely can’t keep ten million dollars going into a US bank account secret. So they knew about this, and are just now announcing it before the election. Apparently, they want to prove, yet again, that Russia supports Donald Trump.
We’re all the way back to 2016, and the “Russian interference” gibberish.
Hilariously – I think this is hilarious – Putin has endorsed Kamala Harris, citing her “infectious laughter.”
Putin never says anything that isn’t sarcastic. That’s his style and certainly, aside from his competence, one of the main reasons he’s so popular in Russia. Russians would rather hear things from the government stated in the form of hardened sarcasm, rather than earnestly.
In reality, even though Donald Trump is more or less useless, Russia probably would prefer him, as there is at least a chance he will end the Ukraine war. There is a chance Kamala would as well, because this has all gotten extremely expensive, and there is no stated goal of the operation. But, all things considered, Trump is more likely to slow or stop the flow of armaments to the Ukraine, if for no other reason than that he wants to send everything to Israel (and maybe the Philippines, we don’t really know what his thinking is on that, because this current election doesn’t have anything to do with issues).
That said, Chen was telling people not to vote for Trump. This is from just a couple weeks ago:
Furthermore, Tenet was not making a lot of videos supporting Russia. Most of these videos were the same slop about “culture war” and “politics” that we are all too familiar with. And they were not even getting significant views.
Most right-wingers are already against the Ukraine war, so there wasn’t really any reason for Russia to pay them to do that.
There is a possibility that this is all some kind of hoax – that feds went to Chen and paid her $10 million while pretending to be Russians.
I can tell you as a matter of fact that I’ve never gotten any money from Russia or (which would probably be more likely) China. It seems like if they were going to offer anyone money, it would be me. I’m the top shill, and I’m also the most influential. That’s a fact. I might only get 25 million views a month, but everyone copies my material. That’s very well-established. All popular right-wing content producers who are not total Israel shills copy my stuff, so I am the prime candidate for an influence operation. I’m also very good with secure communications, and I don’t even live in the United States. And yet, I’ve never once been approached.
This is anecdotal – sort of – but the fact no one has ever asked me to shill for them makes me wonder if this is even a real thing. Russia already has RT, which is very popular globally (even after it was kicked off of YouTube), and again, the fact of the matter is, most right-wingers naturally support the Russian position. Hiring people through some shady scheme in order to promote the idea that the Ukraine war is bad or that Trump is better than Kamala is sort of a ridiculous plot.
So, while the current evidence presented by the DoJ does seem to indicate there was a bunch of money coming from somewhere – which sort of has to be true, given the amounts they were paying people (they paid Dave Rubin $400,000 per month) for content that was not hardly getting any views, it might make more sense that this is some kind of false flag operation.
It ultimately can’t be proven either way. However, media is suggesting that Chen might not actually be charged. If that is the case, I think it’s safe to say the whole thing was completely fake. Right now, they’ve only indicted Russians who are outside of their jurisdiction and who they know they will never arrest, so they can just accuse them of anything. But if they were to take Chen to court, she would have a bunch of lawyers, and they would be able to do discovery and figure out more details about where exactly the money was coming from.
If Chen really was knowingly taking money from Russians in order to “undermine our sacred democracy,” then there is no reason not to charge her, unless the whole thing is fake. Frankly, the fact that they didn’t announce charges against her at the same time they announced the charges against the Russians says a lot.
The feds pretending to be Russians and giving a bunch of money to random YouTubers and then coming out two months before the election and saying there’s a big Russian scam against our democracy, in my opinion, makes more sense than an actual Russian plot to tell YouTubers to talk about things they were already talking about.
