There was a report a few years ago that the CCP funded the people going after the Confederate flags and the people fighting to keep them.

I remember when the official position of the US was the destruction of the North Stream Pipeline was an act of Russian Sabotage

There is plausible deniability when fucking over an opponent - and make no mistake Putin is an opponent. NordStream was an asset to Putin leverage over Western Europe. Now the Russians can't threaten to make Germany freeze in the winter for sending weapons to the Ukrainians as we send LNG.

Posting Alex Jones level stuff like the US will destroy the critical subsea cables destroying global internet across multiple continents ... Just to prevent Tim whatz his name from having a podcast is ...

Bigger_Hammer

I'm beginning to doubt MB's motives.  This gal hates him with white hot passion.

https://x.com/sparklingruby/status/1831934074245787696?s=61&t=kxZ0lCHT5PtfVXRtpASqnQ

Smooth brained morons believe DOJ Propaganda:

Chen and Donovan knew they were dealing with Russians and Russian state money.  Explicitly stating such in text/email communications.

Nobody has interfered in US elections as much as US government officials in the CIA, the FBI, the DOJ and they've been doing this shit since Trump came down that golden escalator and we all see it.

Take your latest Russia  Russia Russia Hoax and jam it sideways up your ass.

— Brian Cates - Political Columnist & Pundit (@drawandstrike) September 6, 2024

It's not like you give a shit about ongoing genocides around the world.

Your moral crusading is meaningless.

The Dumbocrats have sold their soul to the CCP, I think everyone here agrees about that.

The Republitards, or at least the idiots calling themselfs principled conservatives ( guess what, your're not )  otoh have sold their soul to the GRU, there is NO FUCKING WAY TO SUGARCOAT IT

There, I said it. And we, as a nation, are boned.

I dunno about totally selling their soul, but there’s definitely a reflexive rejection of any suggestions that hating Ukraine becoming a right wing purity test might not be entirely organic.

The internal polling for Heel's Up must really be bad.  By the end of the day they'll have listed everyone except those who are actually manipulating the election.

BREAKING - Russia, China, Iran trying to influence US election, intelligence official says - Reuters pic.twitter.com/weL7kw2EcU

Insider Paper  (@TheInsiderPaper) September 6, 2024

Today's official government statement is tomorrow's lie not yet exposed.

It is entirely possible to not support the Ukrainian effort without any foreign input

TPUSA influencer Lauren Chen fired by BlazeTV after US Justice Department claims Chen received over $10 million payout from Kremlin.

Follow: @AFpost pic.twitter.com/MjRIYvnRkP

AF Post  (@AFpost) September 5, 2024

Why can politicians accept money from Israel but a journalist can’t accept money from Russia? https://t.co/hjA67w4Ygq

Jake Shields  (@jakeshieldsajj) September 5, 2024

Meanwhile there is a US ally threatening to extradite US citizens for political comments online (in an election year), and sending their foreign secretary over here in April, to have private meetings at Mar a Lago in an attempt to sway the Trump Campaign's policies on sending money overseas.

And now Preston Stewart is piling on Tim Pool

If he is one of the people in the report (and it sure sounds like it) and if he knew (and it sounds like a reasonable person would have), then yeah, fuck him.

Doesn't sound like he broke any laws himself but it's still incredibly scummy.

Wait wait wait... the real story is not that the Russian government clandestinely paid western alternative media to put out Russian state narratives...but that the Feds took so long to expose it?

lol, ok.

Agree

China loaned fox a billion.

You just reposted an image of someone calling it a hoax.

Which is it?  Real but totally OK or a hoax.  It can't be both.

Send more money to Ukraine to fight against Russian interference in our elections

Okay, so even more of a nothing burger than what I thought it was.

Jake shields is a faggot that's probably on the take himself, so I'm going with real.

Stop being obtuse.  You know exactly what the point of the Shields post is.

I do.  Jake Shields being a faggot has the ring of truth to it.

My statement wasn’t in conflict with that position.

Damn, Tim Poole was getting paid $100,000 per Youtube video. They were making $5M a year.

Tim pool's been rich. He was the most superchatted person on the entire site for a while, until Vtubers came out. That actually makes him seethe so much that he won't have vtubers on his show.

from today's WSJ -- some details.

-----------------------------------------


$10 Million and a Fake Investor: How the Kremlin Allegedly Built a Conservative U.S. Media Startup

Tenet Media posted hundreds of videos, as it was secretly bankrolled by Russia, the Justice Department says

By Dustin Volz and C. Ryan Barber     Sept. 6, 2024 11:06 am ET

WASHINGTON—In January 2023, a representative claiming to work with a European finance professional named Eduard Grigoriann shared instructions with a popular U.S. conservative media influencer to start a new YouTube channel.

“Find a personality that could serve as the face of the channel,” Grigoriann’s representative said. “For the right candidate we’re willing to pay around $1-2 million per year.”

The representative was a fictitious persona, as was Grigoriann, U.S. prosecutors said this week. They were fake identities being secretly operated by two Russian nationals seeking to advance Moscow’s desires to interfere in the 2024 presidential election.

Grigoriann’s offer allegedly laid the groundwork for what would later that year become Tenet Media, a seemingly successful startup incorporated in Tennessee. Prosecutors said since launching in late 2023, the company has posted nearly 2,000 videos that have received more than 16 million views on YouTube alone.  

Unlike Russian efforts to seed social media with low-quality bots and trolls that earn little, if any engagement, the alleged scheme helped to launch Tenet as a serious player in conservative media, fueled by content from Trump-supporting personalities who questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election, had well-known views hostile to U.S. support for Ukraine in its war against Russia and advanced narratives that at times aligned with Russian talking points.

Their work for Tenet, which included interviews with members of Donald Trump’s family, repeatedly attracted the attention of prominent Americans, including billionaire Elon Musk, who on his platform, X, interacted with several of the influencers more than 100 times, a Wall Street Journal analysis found.

“If the American people knew that these views were being directed and paid for by the Russian government, they wouldn’t have 16 million views,” said Brandon Van Grack, a former top official in the Justice Department’s national security division who oversaw efforts to police covert foreign influence. “And the Russian government knew that, which is why the Russian government went to such lengths to hide their direction and funding.”

‘Heterodox commentators’

The case has raised questions about what Tenet’s founders knew about the $10 million they allegedly received from the two Russian nationals, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, who were indicted Wednesday on charges of conspiring to launder money and operate as unregistered foreign agents. Both defendants, who remain overseas, worked at Russian state-media outlet RT, which has long been accused of being an organ of Kremlin propaganda. The charges also have spurred complaints from Tenet’s online personalities who say they were as duped as anyone and would have produced the same content anyway.

Tenet wasn’t identified by name in the indictment of the Russians, identified only as “U.S. Company-1,” but a person familiar with the matter confirmed the company is Tenet. The court filing said the outlet described itself as a “network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues.” That language matches the description used by Tenet. Its founders, Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan, also aren’t identified by name in the document. Tenet didn’t respond to a request for comment sent via its website.

Chen—an influencer in her own right, with 572,000 subscribers on YouTube and 157,000 followers on Instagram—describes herself as the host of two shows on Blaze TV and conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA. She also previously wrote for RT. She didn’t respond to requests for comment via email or various social-media accounts. Donovan couldn’t be reached for comment.

“Lauren Chen was an independent contractor, whose contract has been terminated,” Blaze Media CEO Tyler Cardon said. Turning Point USA didn’t respond to a request for comment. YouTube on Thursday took down the Tenet Media page. The platform said it was “terminating the Tenet Media channel and four channels operated by its owner Lauren Chen as part of our ongoing efforts to combat coordinated influence operations.”

Duped influencers

Tenet hired a small collection of popular firebrand conservatives, paid them handsomely, and instructed them to churn out viral political content. Within months of its November 2023 launch, Tenet was attracting influential audiences and scored interviews with top Republicans, including former President Donald Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr., and daughter-in-law, Lara, after she took over as chair of the Republican National Committee.

The indictment doesn’t identify the influencers who were recruited beyond referring to them as unnamed commentators. Several who were allegedly paid with Russian funds issued statements denying any knowledge or involvement with foreign election interference.

Tim Pool, a conservative voice who has repeatedly referred to Ukraine as “the enemy” and urged the U.S. to stop supporting Kyiv since Russia invaded the country two years ago, said on X that his YouTube videos were merely licensed by Tenet, and that “never at any point” did the company have editorial control over the content. “Putin is a scumbag, Russia sucks,” he added.

“Myself and other influencers were victims in this alleged scheme,” Benny Johnson, a popular conservative broadcaster who also contracted with Tenet, wrote on X. “My lawyers will handle anyone who states or suggests otherwise.”

In a press briefing Wednesday, Attorney General Merrick Garland indicated Johnson, Pool and other hired talent were unaware of the Russian plot. “The company never disclosed to the influencers or to their millions of followers its ties to RT and the Russian government,” Garland said.

Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Anatoly Antonov, in comments posted to the Telegram messaging app, denied the accusations. “We categorically reject the false accusations against Russian information structures and demand the lifting of the administrative restrictions imposed on the work of our journalists in America,” he said.
‘Happy to work with the Russian firm’

The 32-page indictment of Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva, issued in Manhattan, repeatedly suggests that Tenet’s founders knew that Grigoriann was fake and not the real source of Tenet’s funding.

There were ample alleged clues.

Prosecutors said one of Grigoriann’s fictitious associates misspelled Grigoriann’s name in at least four different emails to Tenet founder Chen, who is referred to in the indictment as Founder-1.

In one instance, the indictment said, one of Grigoriann’s associates emailed a potential Tenet hire and signed the message as Grigoriann, rather than as the associate, confusing the influencer who received the email.

In another, prosecutors said, Chen was informed by her funders that management and marketing of the new company they were funding would “be done by the Russian firm we agreed to hire,” but added that Chen would remain chief executive. Chen replied she was “happy to work with the Russian firm.” Prosecutors said she also acknowledged in private correspondence that Tenet’s investors were Russians.

Under the veil of Grigoriann and three fake personas of associates who worked for him, the Russians started paying Chen $8,000 a month, prosecutors alleged, using a shell entity in the Czech Republic to make payments to a Canadian company that Chen, herself a Canadian citizen, owned.

In February of last year, according to the indictment, they suggested a “specific shortlist of candidates” to try to recruit for the new media venture. Chen replied that one of the influencers they wanted to hire would cost “well over 2 million a year,” but the Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva made clear that wouldn’t be a problem.

Grigoriann was “OK with over $2m as long as we get the right person on board, under the right conditions,” the Russians replied, prosecutors said.

Even when Chen cautioned that the influencer would demand closer to $5 million a year—a sum she said would threaten profitability of the startup—the funders didn’t balk. “We would love to move forward,” they replied, according to the indictment.

At times, the talent recruited for Tenet appeared somewhat dubious of Grigoriann. Chen relayed to her funders that some of the influencers wanted more information about Grigoriann before moving forward. In April 2023, Chen herself did Google searches for “Eduard Grigoriann” and his bank account, and turned up nothing. A couple of weeks later, the Russians sent Chen a visual résumé of Grigoriann that included an image of a man on a private jet peering wistfully out a window.

The résumé said Grigoriann was born in Brussels, held a master’s in “Accounting, Finance and Political Science” and had worked as a financial analyst and consultant around Europe and in Singapore before starting his own private equity and wealth management company.

“Mr. Grigoriann intends to establish a conservative news outlet that offers expertise and experience for a wide audience in the Western world and beyond,” the résumé concluded.

In the end, one influencer agreed to work with Tenet Media for $400,000 a month plus a $100,000 signing bonus, while another received $100,000 per video.

On Thursday, Tayler Hansen, one of Tenet’s star talents, said on X that the company had “ended” following the Justice Department indictment.

“I will now be pursuing other job opportunities so I may continue to report on vital news stories this election season,” Hansen said, adding he was looking for independent funding for his work.

Andrea Fuller and Jeff Horwitz contributed to this article.

Write to Dustin Volz at [email protected] and C. Ryan Barber at [email protected]

-----------------------------------

Do yourself a favor and READ the indictment!

Much more than Ukraine.

Remember how the DOJ spent years and millions of dollars in a fraudulent investigation to frame Trump as a Russian agent?

They would surely never do that again, seeing as nobody went to prison for it.

Several days ago, Tim's company states that they will be filing a defamation lawsuit against the Kamala Harris campaign in response to a claim by the campaign that he and/or guests on his show advocated the execution of leftists.

Literally the next day, these allegations against him are launched and the FBI gets involved.

Simple math.

I'd be more inclined to believe at this point that the FBI provided the Russian funding sources so that they could have them in their back pocket.

Despite the "Who is Tim Pool" responses by GD to the Kamala lawsuit thread the other day, his show is hugelt influential and popular with many younger right wing voters in the 25-45 age bracket.

He's a very influential social media target for them, and many on the left want him gone.

I visited the TimPool subreddit today and every single post there is being brigaded by "Russian bots" concern trolls which violates Reddit's own TOS, and some subreddits are already auto banning users who have posted there

Yeah I know a lot of you don't do social media... everyone younger than you does and it matters

It appears the Preston Stewart Youtube video I posted earlier has been pulled.   Now WTF???

This guy offers some perspective.  Essentially we have seen this before.

This thread is like so many others where the usual Care Bears get all excited; like moths to a flame.  

Meanwhile...
Attached File

I watched part of the unsubscribed podcast with him in it.  The boys hot him hammered, it was pretty funny, and also terrifying. Scariest fedora ever.

My impression due to some passing comments was that he is currently working in the osint field (at the least) for people with deep pockets.  He dropped $13k on cell phone advert/location data to prove that some doctor in the DC area was full of shit when he claimed he witnessed the IDF head shooting children in Gaza.  Pulled tower data in Israel as well...Dr's cell phone never traveled to Gaza. Dude is a true believer that would fit in around here.  Brandon Herrera had to work hard to not lose his shit.

The unsubscribed podcast is usually pretty funny, they got this guy schnockered, 500ml of bourbon schnockered.  Do you want to know more? Worth a watch.

The government that lies to you about absolutely everything is telling the truth about political enemies?  Seems legit.

Rubin, Pool and Benny didn't know Russians were involved, there was a middle man between them,  even according to Garlands DOJ.  They just got paid a lot to make some videos that nobody saw.  Honestly they were so unviewed the most effective thing we could have done was to just keep taking their money, and let those Podcasters keep pointing out the insanity of the left.  That might be the real reason DOJ got involved.

Weird huh?

(3:00) Kamala wants come after podcasters.

Always follow the \uD83D\uDCB5\uD83D\uDCB5\uD83D\uDCB5.

In February 2023 @TheLaurenChen approached me to be a face for the new media outlet #TenetMedia.

The money looked great. But I wanted to know where it was coming from.

Simple question, you would think.

After pushing repeatedly she gave me names…

Sebastian Gorka DrG  (@SebGorka) September 5, 2024

It’s only used when there is a financial transaction involved.

I laughed my ass off when he said if I came out as gay HLC would have to stop teasing me about being nearly 50 and not having a girlfriend, and tease me for being nearly 50 and not having a boyfriend.

I remember when the US had freedom of speech, fair elections - and we'd knock the commie fucktards for not having them.
"Can you believe that? the soviet mindset is so broken, the FSB just rounds up and charges political opponents
They spy on their people for disagreeing with the government - they have a shitty economy, they're a 2nd world country with a good military.
They have rich oligarchs ruling over a populace that's getting poorer every day. The art is ugly, the place is crumbling, they've got problems with alcohol and drugs - God what a sad place to live."

That fuckin sounds too familiar.
Sounds uncomfortably familiar.

But hey, at some point buttsex became the only checkbox for if you're a "good guy" country or not.
We can slide right down the totalitarian toilet, shred free speech, but as long as the right flag goes up during rainbow ramadan, good guy country.  

And there was no debate over this ^
No discussion either.
This happened fast, in my adult lifetime.
The media isn't clutching pearls or saying "whoa wtf, we need to ask Kamala like 15 debate questions just on freedom of speech and the press that she has to answer in public, and alllll the downballot dems have to publicly disavow, and fast."
They're hiding it.


This is the China-fication of the US.
And this has nothing to do with that dope in Russia - the US is poorly run, period.
We're allowed to critique elected officials and unelected bureaucrats, who did a trash fucking job, period.
That's been a norm since my memory started. Hell, SNL used to make fun of Presidents once upon a time.
Remember that?

In a republic like ours, we can vote out the head coaches who give us 7-9 seasons and swear it cannot be done differently.
They don't get infinite rule and LESS accountability for sucking worse as time goes on.
That's just insane

Hey, I remember that country.

Megyn Kelly Breaks Down Legal Case Involving Conservative Media Personalities and Covert Russian Op