Foreign Influence in the Influencer Economy

On the TENET indictment

Three things happened yesterday. The indictment concerning TENET Media was unsealed, alleging former employees of Russia Today were using Lauren Chen and her partner as a pass-through to pay the notable conservative influencers pictured above.

The second was the Treasury Department’s broader sanctioning of former RT employees.

The third was the DOJ takedown of the Doppelgänger group of sites, some of which were basically mirrors of Western media like Bild or the Guardian.

It is somewhat awkward for Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and the rest, who have been pooh-poohing the problem of Russian influence. All of them are pleading ignorance, which may well be true, but that’s not really the point.

Jeff Giesea, a spotter for Peter Thiel who ran the influencer summit shortly after Trump was elected, has now endorsed Harris, cutting one of those links between the influencers and Silicon Valley.

That whole “meme magic” thing is coming to an end, guys.

Influencer marketing on the whole is very Israeli, for several reasons. One is Unit 8200 and the voluminous hasbara operations on social media platforms. Much of this is illegal in the U.S. because it is coordinated with the Israeli government, but in general the U.S. does not apply the rule of law where Israel is concerned. Influencers know that if they cross certain lines, the ADL might come for them via the platform, or other accounts may come for them as well. It’s very much in the interest of the whole racket for your Dan Bilzerians or what have you to indulge in their kind of gutter anti-semitism.

So when the Russians want to get involved, they find themselves paying into an Israeli network. Benny Johnson came from Buzzfeed, Dave Rubin is a big Israel guy, and Lauren Southern worked for Ezra Levant and her book was ghostwritten by a David Frum protege—a lot of these Russian-Israeli ops come from Canada. I’ve been texting Southern to get her to talk to me about this stuff, but she hasn’t replied. She’s smart, I suspect she knows it’s true.

The big question, which isn’t spoken to by the indictment, is whether these influencers are favored by Elon Musk’s algorithm, which could indicate his Russia problem has extended beyond his investors and other business activities, and into the operations of the platform formerly known as Twitter.

There are some indications that the Claremont-aligned influencer marketing network is connected to genuine violent crime:

Another interesting detail is that Dave Rubin appears to have been doing stuff with NatCon while it was backed by the PiS in Poland, before taking the Russian Tenet money. No doubt the Poles have some thoughts about that.

As for Lauren Chen, she’s not a very smart person. A lot of people don’t like her because she’s said unpleasant things about the Israel lobby. What the Israeli influencers will say is Pool, Johnson, Rubin et al are blameless, and they ought to turn on her. This is them trying to preserve a network that, God willing, is all going to fall apart.