Russian Interference Is Back

Screen grab of Tenet Media’s homepage

You could be forgiven for thinking that it was still 2016. Donald Trump is campaigning against a female Democratic candidate and now comes the news that Russia is once again interfering in the presidential election.

A lot of people think Russian election interference was disproven. Not so. A Justice Department investigation found that there was no evidence the 2016 Trump campaign successfully colluded with Vladimir Putin’s Russian government, but it also found that Trump aides were open to such collusion and went so far as to meet with Russian representatives. Paul Manafort admitted to passing polling data to Russia, and a report by the Republican-led Senate found that Russia intervened in the election on Trump’s behalf. The infamous Russian hack of the DNC came immediately on the heels of Donald Trump’s open request for Russian help in finding Hillary’s lost emails. There are more examples, but Trump partisans derided and diminished the evidence of Russian interference for years until last month when news broke that the Trump campaign itself had been the target of hacking by Iran.

This week, the focus shifted back to Russia with the announcement of an indictment of two Russian nationals with “conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and conspiracy to commit money laundering” by using a US media company to distribute Russian propaganda. The ironically named Kostiantyn Kalashnikov, 31, and Elena Afanasyeva, 27, were employees of RT, a Russian government-funded company formerly known as Russia Today. RT isn’t as common today as it once was, but I wrote about the channel back in 2011 when I discovered it on hotel cable.

Per the indictment, the Russians paid a total of nearly $10 million to the founders of a US media company to place op-ed material in videos that they posted to sites such as TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Rumble. The Americans also wrote op-eds for RT’s website. The money received by the Americans far exceeds the ad revenues generated by the social media channels.

The indictment does not identify the Americans or their company, but other outlets have concluded that they are Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan, the conservative couple who founded Tenet Media, a company that employs such pundits as Benny Johnson, Dave Rubin, and Tim Pool. Chen has contributed to The Blaze and Turning Point USA. Email and Discord intercepts presented in the indictment indicate that Chen and Donovan knew they were working with Russians even though the pair also utilized fake online personas.

At first, the Russians gave ideas and instructions to Tenet’s media creators. For example, in March 2024, Afanasyeva told Tenet to create pieces regarding a terrorist attack in Moscow that blamed the US and Ukraine even though ISIS had claimed responsibility. Later, Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva posted their own content directly to Tenet’s channels.

Tenet’s media personalities deny that they were aware of Tenet’s Russian connections and that they were given instructions on what to say or write, but Chen and Donovan definitely knew. They failed to disclose RT’s role in their programming to audiences but so far have not been charged, although Chen has apparently been fired by both The Blaze and TPUSA.

Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva have not yet been arrested. RT ceased operations in the US after cable networks dropped the channel in the wake of the Ukraine invasion, and it is likely that they are in Moscow beyond the reach of US law enforcement.

The big question on my mind is not whether the indictment is legitimate but how widespread Russian influence is within the Republican media industry. It may be true that Tenet’s commentators were not spoonfed words by the Russians or Chen and Donovan, but it’s probably also true that they knew what they had to say to get paid.

I’ve written for a variety of small conservative outlets over the years and the way the sites are run would probably surprise a lot of their followers. For most of the sites that I was part of, there were no editorial checks or supervision to speak of. Writers would write their own stuff, edit their own stuff, fact-check their own stuff, and publish their own stuff. Across a handful of sites, about the only editorial advice I ever got was to lay off Donald Trump. Pretty much anything else was fair game.

And that, in a nutshell, is why you don’t see criticism of Trump in conservative media: They know which side their bread is buttered on.

A lot of the Republican pundits don’t believe what they are telling you. We learned that during the Fox News defamation trial a few years ago. Internal Fox News communications obtained during discovery showed that stars such as Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity didn’t really believe the stolen election claims and didn’t even care that much for Mr. Trump, yet they went on the air night after night spreading the lies that were lapped up by their viewers.

If I was still a part of the Republican media complex, I’d be feeling pretty uneasy in the wake of the Tenet indictments. I’d be asking myself who I was working for and who was funding my paycheck.

But that’s the real problem. Most of the partisan writers and pundits don’t want to endanger their paychecks by having an attack of principles.

That can be a real problem in the midst of political realignment and the establishment of a personality cult. You may have gone into the position as an authentic conservative idealist, but once you start taking the money, you have to keep making a living. There is not a big market for conservative Never Trump journalism despite what you may have been told. (Full disclosure: I do not receive any money for my writing. My opinion is hopefully worth at least what you pay for it.)

If you’re a consumer of Republican media outlets, you should at least go to them knowing that at best they are telling you what you want to hear and they might not believe what they are saying. At worst, they may be receiving their marching orders from Vladimir Putin’s minions in or near the Kremlin.

Before this week, I was blissfully unaware of Lauren Chen, but one of the first things that I noticed when I started looking into her online is that she posts quite a bit of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic stuff. I have to wonder if that is authentic Chen or if it’s a point of view that was fostered by her Russian friends. Those who have followed recent Middle East history know that the Arab nations have long been aligned with the Soviet Union and Russia. Today, Iran remains a key Russian ally and a supplier of weapons for Putin’s war on Ukraine.

There’s a term in psychology called “projection.” This means that someone is placing their own feelings or actions onto someone else, often as a defense mechanism. When Chen accused others of being disloyal to America while at the same time taking Vladimir Putin’s money to spread Russian propaganda, that sounds like a textbook case of projection to me.

What is Russia’s goal with all this? I think it’s pretty obvious. They want to sow dissent and mistrust among Americans. They want to polarize us and make us weaker. They want to destroy support for Ukraine and other countries that are on Putin’s hit list.

So when people like Tucker Carlson, who was last seen featuring a Nazi apologist who claims that Winston Churchill was the real bad guy in World War II and whose show is often featured on Russian television, tell us that America is the root of all the world’s problems, we might want to question their motives. Rush Limbaugh used to call the left the “Blame America First crowd.” These days, it is often the MAGA right that is always blaming America and if the Russians are whispering the scripts into their ears, it would explain a lot.

Tucker denies any relationship with Russian media, but he has been a Putin fan, a nut, and something of a leftist from way back. I remember a fun Resurgent piece from 2019 in which I had readers guess whether quotes were from Carlson or leftists like Elizabeth Warren, AOC, and Bernie Sanders. He was always an odd choice for a supposedly conservative broadcaster.

At this point, we have had several big warning signs that Republican media is not all that it is cracked up to be, but it is still protected by the First Amendment. Republican pundits have a right to be mouthpieces for Russian propaganda if that is what they desire, but they should probably be glad that Joe Biden is president and not Woodrow Wilson.

Pundits can choose to be shills for Vladimir Putin, either for money or for free, but Americans can choose to be more discerning about the content that we view, read, and share. Don’t hit the “like” and “share” buttons just because something outrages you or tickles your itching ears. A major problem of the internet age is people uncritically believing anything and everything they read or hear on a screen just because it fits their confirmation bias. Think about whether it is true and whether it is beneficial before you reward these posts with your engagement.

We aren’t making America great if we are pushing Russian propaganda that contributes to our national division. Don’t let Vladimir Putin make you his dupe.