It Could Happen Here - Inside the Russian Government's Big YouTube Scam

Episode Date: September 11, 2024

Robert, James, and Gare discuss Russia's secret payment to Tenet Media and conservative content creators as a part covert operations to influence US politics.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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New episodes every Thursday. Cool Zone Media. Oh! what's getting indicted by the FBI? My several people I don't like. It could happen here. A podcast about things falling apart. And today, this week, well, for the last couple of weeks, the thing that's fallen apart is Tenet Media. This is not related to Christopher Nolan that we can prove at this exact moment. It is instead a media venture starring a bunch of assholes that turned out to all be an op by the Russian government. And none of said assholes claim they knew anything, even though they got paid $100,000 a video. Anyway, we're going to talk about all that and more today, but I'm going to bring onto the program now my co-hosts, Garrison Davis and James Stout.

Thank you. I'm not getting 100K per episode here, but if I was, I certainly wouldn't tell the government that it was actually a foreign government that's paying me. I would keep tweeting about it. Fun fact about both of you guys before we get into this if you reverse your last names you sound like confederate era generals garrison stout james davis i can see davis garrison stout yeah no yeah all right yeah yeah that's uh that is our secret backstory we had to actually switch them when we joined cool zone media due to our confederate ties yeah and the fact that you're 190 years old

so kirsten you want to take us off here yeah so tenant media was this kind of small right-wing startup that hired a whole bunch of more well-known content creators on the right-wing sphere from like tim pool dave rubin benny john Johnson, Lauren Southern. People who are either just like conservative commentators or someone like Lauren Southern's case has been like an alt-right kind of white supremacist media figure for quite a while. And they put together this little collection of people to make like content

for tenants on YouTube channel as well as licensing some of their regular content. And this company was ostensibly started by another right-wing YouTuber named Lauren Chen and her husband, Liam Donovan. Now, Chen's been on Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire, and was employed at The Blaze, where she's no longer employed based on the allegations inside this DOJ indictment. So yeah, it was a small collection. Not super kind of noteworthy, honestly,

in a lot of cases. Lots of people weren't super familiar with Tenet Media. I know they also hired Taylor Hansen, who was kind of one of the first guys to report on grooming, LGBTQ stuff like a few years ago. That's kind of what was immediately weird

about them to everyone who pays attention to this stuff is that their videos did not get a crazy amount of engagement. They were clearly not an established, like they came out of nowhere, but they had the money to pay for people who aren't cheap. Tim Pool, if you don't know Tim, is one of the most profitable influencers on the right wing chunks of the internet. He's a guy who kind of got his start as a citizen journalist during Occupy. Really, he's one of these guys, all he does is he gets on, he reads news articles, he reads the headlines of news articles. He talks about how we're all doomed to left-wing terrorism or whatever. And then he makes millions of dollars. He's a frustrating individual to say

the least, but he doesn't come cheap. And Hansen also doesn't come cheap. Dave Rubin is not an inexpensive person to bring onto your team. So it was kind of clear from the beginning, there's a lot of money behind this thing that seems to have come out of nowhere. Whose money is it? And that is what the federal government's been trying to figure out.

And we have now a better indication on where all of these kind of right-wing content firms, or at least this one who is employing some very influential people, where they are getting some of their money from. Because there's a lot of money flying around this space. Lots of these guys are obviously filled by fossil fuel

billionaires, right? You can look at the early funding for the Daily Wire. That has a lot of money. But for this smaller, kind of lesser-known company company how are they paying a hundred thousand dollars per episode to these guys and it's also the daily wire definitely started inorganically by getting a lot of fossil fuel money pumped into it but one thing you have to hand it to them is they built a business that is a functional business right they are now

profitable in their own regard or at least were there's some evidence their traffic collapsed recently but you saw you saw them have a growth curve that looked pretty organic for a media organization which you didn't see with tenant no no and it uh it seems the only way to actually pay these millions and millions of dollars to all these people is if you are actually the government of russia um who is starting covert operations that's their words not mine to influence the u.s election by uh like i was talking about like ukraine using these mouthpieces but also just kind of so general division which seems to be kind of the main tactic and robert elected to actually go through some of this,

geez, 23 page indictment and kind of, uh, hopefully we can find some of some of the, some of the better, funnier little tidbits here. Cause there's a lot of interesting information about kind of the inter workings of some of these like, uh,

like media groups and how exactly Tim pool was convinced by a Russian agent. Yeah. A Russian agent pretending to be three different people. Pretending to be some mysterious European billionaire. Yeah, so the document starts with some stuff that I had been unaware, which is that, you know, because Russia Today is kind of the first large Russian government affiliated media organization that has been putting out propaganda in the United States. And the FBI has been watching them like a hawk.

And so they quote here from the editor-in-chief of RT after the expanded Russian invasion in February 2022, when he describes Russia Today, which has always argued that it's a legitimate news organization, as an entire empire of covert projects designed to shape public opinion in Western audiences. And one of these covert projects it described as the funding of what we now know as Tenet Media, right? It's described in these documents because they're indictments as a Tennessee-based online creation company, but it can only be referring to Tenant Media. As employees have since admitted that, yes, it is for sure to Tenant Media. Yes, yes. There's no doubt about this. We're not reading into what the Fed said here at all.

So they spent over the course of about a year, $10 million. I think it actually was more like $9.6 million, but $10 million basically just buying these influencers. Oh my God. First off, things we could do with 10 million dollars yeah oh oh james we'd be sailing to myanmar and a rocket launchers the things that their military could do with 10 million dollars like that's sending dudes to the front with air soft plates yeah it's anyway whatever so the the kind airsoft plates. Yeah, it's anyway, whatever. So the kind of key detail there is how much they were making per one of these dog shit videos, which is about $100,000 per YouTube video.

That's what Tim was getting. I think Dave Rubin was getting close to just half a million a month to do like a weekly video. So when that is the kind of money we're talking about and tim was also being paid a hundred thousand dollars per weekly video as well he was making one video a week that was what they decided on in his contract so he was ranking in at least four hundred thousand if not five hundred thousand dollars a month yeah and then they had signing and download bonuses on top of that which is like even for them is more than you could get on youtube for the kind of traffic that they get that is that is like the top one percent of the top one percent

of youtube creators are making money like that and and certainly no one with the kind of views these 10 videos we're getting so anyway garrison you've got a clip to play yeah here's here's a here's a clip that's definitely a totally genuine opinion, not impacted by those $100,000, of Tim Pool talking about Ukraine. Trigger warning, most annoying man on earth. This is psychotic. Ukraine is the enemy of this country. Ukraine is our enemy, being funded by the Democrats. I will stress this again. One of the greatest enemies of our nation right now is Ukraine. They are expanding this war. Now, don't get me wrong, I know. You've got criminal elements of the U.S. government pushing them and guiding them and telling them what to do. Ukraine is now

accused, a German warrant issued for blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline, triggering this conflict. pipeline, triggering this conflict. Ukraine is the greatest threat to this nation and to the world. We should rescind all funding and financing, pull out all military support, and we should apologize to Russia. Interesting. I wonder what would compel a man to say that. Huh? Very curious. There's no way to know, Garrison. So since they publicly launched in November of last year, Tenant Media posted almost 2,000 videos that got about 16 million views. And 16 million views is a lot for a YouTube channel, but not if you've put out 2,000 videos. So again, that's what I mean when I say this is not the kind of audience that you would get this kind of money organically for, right? Like this is, was obviously, and I mentioned this because this is obviously suspicious to the creators.

You cannot be, Tim Pool is not a smart man, but you cannot work for YouTube the way that he has and not know that something is fucked up with the money. Yeah, just if you're not a mental arithmetician like myself, that is 8,000 views video. I made a video once about how to use hiking poles which has around that many views i have a video that i fucked up when filming another video while i was reviewing products 15 years ago before anyone knew who i

was that has more than 8 000 yes like where is our money vladimir yeah yeah come on vladimir like i'll there's a lot i'll do for half a million dollars well and i think part of this as well is not just trying to prop up tenants own views itself it's making these specific content creators lives more comfortable because the better that these guys do that's that's all that russia is like interested in as alleged in in this document right it's that they they just want to make sure that these guys can still talk about Ukraine certainly as this evil and how Russia is the traditionalist

Christian empire and right-wing resistance to globalist domination. But in terms of just wanting to amplify U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition to core government of Russia's interests in the ongoing war in Ukraine, as said in the document

all they need to do is just make sure these guys are having a lot of money so like they're comfortable tenant doesn't need to be like a successful media operation where like they're making more money on youtube than they're paying their influences that's that's that's not the point the point is just to give these guys a lot of money to keep talking the way they're talking yeah what was also interesting to me and and this comes from a Wired article, Wired downloaded as many of these videos as they could and then ran them through, this is actually one of the journalistic uses for these large language models. They ran them through like one of those like machine learning algorithms to just kind of look at how often different subjects are mentioned because no human being could analyze that many videos with any kind of like speed

right yeah and one thing they found is that ukraine which you would imagine being the focus of a horrific war that is bleeding russia's military uh was mentioned about like a third as often as transgender people the vast majority of the content was U.S. culture war stuff, right? Like woke is much more of a focus than anything to do directly with Russian military operations or Russian like government, like what you would imagine, right? And the reason for that is that they see it as number one, building a sense of solidarity between American conservatives and Russia, which is largely imaginary. I'll be talking about this in an episode later, but like Russia is not the country a lot of conservatives in the U.S. think it is. But more to the point, it's just sort of stoking division, right? Rather than actually needing to

change American minds on Ukraine in much of a concerted way. Like if you kind of keep them ginned up and angry about everything the quotequote left is doing, they will be against supporting Ukrainian resistance anyway, right? And that's the bet the Russians made very, very astutely, and it seems to be paying off for them. One of the more interesting facts here is that one of the primary contacts, this is one of the people who has been indicted, who was working with Poole and these other creators, is an employee of Russia Today with the perfect spy name, Konstantin Kalashnikov. Just amazing stuff.

How is that literally their name? Yeah. How do they not just change it? We call it a Kalashnikov because the guy's name was Kalashnikov. It's just lovely. It's just lovely. Yeah, it's beautiful. It's breathtaking.

Because if you put a character with that name in a Bond film, everyone would be like, come on, man, it's not 1965 anymore. What are we doing here? But that's just the person's actual name. It's beautiful. So they had a couple of fake personas within the company, but this was a person who directly talked to the employees of People Like Pool, the editors and whatnot, without disclosing that he worked at Russia Today. Now, there's evidence that people who worked for some of these creators in their discords, like editors and whatnot, saw this as deeply suspicious.

Probably the most interesting came from when we now know it was Tucker Carlson postedson posted a video during his trip in moscow like where he was going to a russian grocery store to be like look russia has grocery stores everything's fine here his editor in the discord was like this seems like a little much what are we doing here basically and the statement made was along the lines of like you know this is what the people paying us want us to get out right like it which is clear evidence that people were aware of what they were doing to some extent. At least among like the tenant media producers, there was a growing awareness of what was actually going on. Obviously, all of the on-air talent still maintains that they are the victims

of an international conspiracy. Being a victim pays, I guess. Oh my God. of an international conspiracy. Being a victim pays, I guess. Oh my god. And no, I think one of the funniest parts is definitely this fake European businessman. I believe he's referred to as Edouard Gringorian. Yeah, this is very funny.

We'll talk about Edouard. Let's throw to ads first and then we'll get back to this. Let's throw to ads first, and then we'll get back to this. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over

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Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. And we're back. Garrison, let's talk about Edouard. Yeah, so, in the document they talk about how Kalashnikov, this other RT person, as well as Tenant's founders, worked together to deceive commentators one and two,

who we believe are Tim Pool and Dave Rubin. The point was to leverage their existing audiences and license their videos they were already making. So together, the RT people and the Tenant founders tried to trick Pool and who we believe is Rubin into thinking that the person providing these $100,000 per episodes was a European businessman and private investor named Edward Gregorian, which is a wonderful fake name. And this was a not real person. This was a completely fake person. At some point, I believe Dave Rubin or commentator number one requested that the founder provide like a profile or an article yeah yeah it was commentator two that wanted to know more about quote would like to know more about the company and who he will be working with

yeah so they asked for like this like one page profile on like who this guy was and this was provided and he was described as an accomplished finance professional who had various positions in brussels and france at a multinational bank including the director of private banking division and wealth management the the one page on this guy who is supposedly their investor shows an obvious stock photo of a man on a private jet with his face blurred out his face blurred is the best yeah that. That's what, that looks real. Yeah, not sketchy at all. This is an actual guy.

Quote, Founder One transmitted the Edward Gregorian profile to Commentator One, who is either Pool or Ruben. We believe it's Ruben. Yeah, I think that one's Ruben. Because Tim wouldn't have asked for more details. On or about May 12th, 2023, Founder One reported to Persona One that Commentator One had a problem

with the profile we sent over, specifically the reference to social justice. I think it may be because that's usually a term used by liberals, but we're trying to create a conservative network. Founder One suggested that Commentator One and Edward could simply speak together to clarify the profile.

Yes, and I know there was a secure call between a russian agent pretending to be mr gregorian to tim pool and allegedly this this this other call with commentator one who we think is ruben so there was like conversations between like ruben and pool with people like further involved in the actual like espionage parts of this. And the actual, like you're talking to people affiliated with like Russian spies in order to like sell this lie. I did find it very funny where,

did you read the section where they sort of did a forensic analysis of the three personas email accounts? Yeah, no, I'm not far enough into it yet. So they had three different personas. So we're all accessed from the same IP address and were presenting as three different individuals

with three different email accounts. Obviously, the DOJ has been able to get access to those email accounts. And they found that the people using those email accounts made mistakes in signing them. So one was supposed to come from Persona 3, but they mistakenly signed it Edward Gregorian. And another time, Persona 1 sent a draft of an email to persona 2 which persona 2 then copied and pasted into an

email like their their opsec was extremely poor yeah it would seem and it didn't set anyone off to kind of make that point in terms of like what's happening to these guys right now what they've been indicted for is violations of the Foreign Agent Registration Act. If you are acting as the agent of a foreign government, you have to register in the United States. You have a freedom of speech, but you don't have freedom to create propaganda for another government and pretend that you're not, right? Yeah. And so, obviously, one of the things the feds needed to indict them is evidence that they knew specifically they were being employed by the Russian government, that the Russians hadn't somehow snuck money to the people who founded Tenant Media. And so, at one point, Founder 2 gets on the investor Discord channel to submit one of the influencers, I think it's Rubin's, invoices to Persona 1 and press for payment of those invoices.

On September 11th, 2023, never forget, at approximately 8.07 p.m. Central Time, Founder 2 wrote in that Discord channel, Today marks two weeks since I submitted the invoice for August. Any idea for the delay? We are signing the large contract, so we need to be certain we will get the funding to pay these people. While waiting for a response, they searched for the current time in Moscow. So just unbelievable OPSEC, like giving the government absolute knowledge of intent.

I mean, similarly, earlier on in the document, quote, in their private correspondence while working directly for RT, pursuant to Founder One's written contract, Founder One and Founder two regularly referred to their sponsor as the russians for example on or about may 12 2021 founder two message founder one on discord quote so we're billing the russians from the corporation right on or about may 22nd founder one message founder two on discord also the russians paid so we're good to bill them for the second month, I guess.

Nailed it. On our vote. June 2nd, Founder1, MessageFounder2 on Discord. Also, I say we bill the Russians for the last month once we're done the extra op-eds. I wonder if they knew they were working for the Russian government. There's a lot more that's just like this. They constantly referred to the source of their income at least to each other as quote unquote the russians and and then uh in like

outreach to like talent which is you know a generous word to refer to tim pool and others they were a little bit more vague but they certainly made kind of coy references to it in their producer discord beautiful well yeah so i, the big question here with all of this is like, did any of these major right wing media figures who have like they got hired in part because they were already doing the job the Russians wanted them doing, you know, building up this kind of hatred that exists on the right over the idea of funding Ukraine and Ukrainian and ukrainian resistance to the russian war machine like all of that kind of stuff is like why these people got brought on anyway tim pool has just kind of been one of the most reflexively anti-ukraine voices in conservative media um and ruben is very effective at getting americans to hate other americans like he's one of the big kind of anti-trans culture warriors out there ditto hansen it's like that's why they wanted these guys like they wanted to encourage He's one of the big anti-trans culture warriors out there. Ditto Hanson. That's why they wanted these guys.

They wanted to encourage them basically to keep it up. And the question then is, what did these guys know and when did they know it? And the bigger question, because I have my suspicions, and my suspicions are a lot and immediately. But none of that is in this indictment, obviously. And the big question then is, is the federal government going to attempt to prove anything? Do they want to actually go after these guys? And I don't know. My guess is not because there very rarely are consequences for these people, but I'm curious as to what y'all think. No, it seems not. Both Poo pool and i think three others have made statements saying that they've been contacted by the fbi as a potential victim of a crime yeah and that they

will be happy to assist the fbi investigating this matter now that doesn't mean the fbi isn't necessarily looking into them because that is also the language the fbi would use if they suspected them but yeah my guess is that they lawyered up absolutely it was funny both in there in in benny johnson's and tim pool's immediate immediate statements they called this a leak doj indictment which is not true it was not leaked it was just unsealed yeah they just arrested people yeah i'm fairly sure there's a press release like also one of the final posts from tenant media was talking about how this woman named Lauren Sun was charged with acting as an agent of the Chinese Communist Party.

Quote, here she is talking about DEI. Why would the Chinese government want to push DEI in America? Oh, yeah, I remember this. This is, I think, one of their final Twitter posts before their account got taken down. Yeah, beautiful. Their Rumble account is still alive and kicking yeah oh thank goodness that out also can we talk about their graphic design just for a

moment because it is dog shit yeah tenant medias tenants yeah like have you i don't know if you uh have you been on their rumble account garrison you know i can't i can't say i have been on their rumble account as of as of recent the last time i at Rumble, it was their booth at the RNC. Well, let me tell you, they're back. Genuinely, some of the most deranged... It's extremely busy. It's very 90s. It's a lot of bright colors.

I mean, the clearest indication to me that this was absolutely a Russian op is that the company described itself as, quote, a network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues. Definitely Russians. Definitely Russians. You're like, oh, I wonder who wrote that. Who would ever describe themselves? Tim Pool had never even seen the word heterodox before. It's crazy. It's crazy. It's wild. Yeah, they put multipolar into a thesaurus and that's what they came up with. It's crazy.

It is interesting. One of the things in this indictment that I did find kind of worth talking about is that it specifically notes that folks at Russia Today, when they were, because they were largely deplatformed after the expanded Russian invasion in 2022, early 2022. And the indictment quotes the editor in chief of Russia Today being like, but it's fine because we were able to rebuild our following on Twitter. So I don't know if you just in case you had any questions about like what Elon Musk's reforms at Twitter have accomplished. One of them is that we should probably roll to ads again. And then, Garrison, you had a very fun document you wanted to take us through. Yes, to kind of talk about why they might be doing some of this. There was one other document that was unsealed that kind of sheds a

light on Russia's exact focus on influencing U.S. politics. Well, that's great. Speaking of influencing U.S. politics, our advertisers probably don't. of influencing U.S. politics, our advertisers probably don't. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and

learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts

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Exhibit 9A, which is originally in Russian, and a translated copy is provided in this PDF. And this appears to be some kind of instructional manual for why exactly people are going about this. Why exactly is Tim Pool and all these others getting paid

to talk about what they talk about? And then it also kind of explains tactics and how to actually go about it. So the first bit of this of this document, they just are talking about, like the US two party system, which is really funny. And they primarily explain the two party systems differences as being like the way that they affect race, that the US political party B or Democratic Party includes people of color and quote unquote, supporters of affirmative action and reverse discrimination,.e infringement on the rights of the white population of the united states

and then meanwhile the republican party are victims of discrimination by people of color unquote so that's that's how they kind of frame the u.s two-party system is that there's these poor white people being oppressed by wokeism they end this little introduction on the two-party system by saying quote a key characteristic of the american media is it skewed towards the democratic party's influence while society is split between supporters of the new globalist socialism and traditional values the media is democrat by over 75 situation for the republicans is made complicated by the censorship on social media and democrats oriented new media so some kind of weird phrasing there because it is being translated from russia but they're they're talking about how liberalism isn't is inherently uh biased in media and that's

something that's promoted while being like racist and being a republican is something that is harder to get paid for by big media to talk about and that's why they have this campaign which they title guerrilla media campaign in the united states they justify this by saying that there is no pro-russian and or pro-putin mainstream politicians or succinctly large numbers of influencers and voters and this is one of the things they're trying to do. Another quote is that Americans are, quote, dissatisfied by the dramatic decline in standard of living

and large expenditures of offensive policy in the United States, in Europe and Ukraine. They are afraid of losing the American way of life and the American dream. It is these sentiments

that should be exploited in the course of an information campaign in the United States. Smart. The campaign topics used in their guerrilla media campaign are included here. The first one's encroaching universal poverty. Number two is the risk of job loss for white Americans, privileges for people of color, perverts, and disabled, constant lies of the Democratic Party administration, the threat of crime coming from people of color and immigrants, including new immigrants from Ukraine, overspending on foreign policy

at the expense of interests of white U.S. citizens, constant lies to the voters by the Democrats in power. Last but not least, America is suffering a defeat despite liberals' efforts. We are being drawn into the water. Our guys will die in Ukraine. The target audience of their campaign is listed as Republican voters, Donald Trump supporters, supporters of, quote, traditional family values, white Americans representing the lower and middle class. Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things. It's frustrating that it is working. Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things.

It's frustrating that it is working. Yeah. To be quite frank, it's exactly what the Russiagate conspiracy theorists have been saying for years. Unfortunately. Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately. And like a shitload of people on the left have just been mocking them endlessly, in part because they bought a lot of this propaganda. And this is certainly different from the way they were going about it in 2016, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, like this isn't the same like Facebook stuff they're doing, although Tenant did have Facebook accounts. These are like weaponizing these people that have gotten big on YouTube and other platforms for talking about the same type of things that Russia kind of wants them to talk about. And it's just making sure that they have the ability to do so. Kind of lastly in this information doc, they talk about kind of like where you can spread this disinformation. It says here, quote, on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, we need to create multiple perishable accounts primarily for the work with comments. Websites should serve as the sources of information for dissemination and for video content. YouTube accounts with a relatively small number of subscribers and commentators, unquote. The list of information products can

be disseminated includes texts of posts, comments on social media, memes, including characters and collages, and video content, including news stories in the Fox News style. They then propose creating a quote-unquote project office to run this style of media campaign. This consists of three segments, monitoring US media and social media accounts of Republican politicians, a text factory with a minimum of five to four main topic-based recommendations, including about 10 basic posts on social media

and 40 to 60 comments, and then managing an editorial office with a daily output of three to four pictures and memes and a video editorial office with a daily output of three to four videos per day quote in order for this work to be effective you need to use a minimum of fake news and a maximum of realistic information at the same time you should continuously repeat that this is what's really happening but the official media will never tell you about it or show it to you unquote so i mean like part of what's frustrating to the about this number one is just like they clearly

have watched alex jones and like i've learned a great deal from how he's done this which unfortunately something alex used to claim about put that, fuck, maybe he was right. But the bigger, more frustrating point to me is that like, oh, they didn't need to do any of this at all. Like this was all working just fine without them directly getting involved this way. I kind of am interested. I think it's probably just a reaction to the fact that they had a lot of their more traditional stuff get deplatformed after February, 2022.

Yeah. But like, this was all stuff the right was doing organically in their media without russian money they didn't need this they certainly are trying to kind of rebuild some of their like direct ability to influence after like rt got de-platformed the other part that's interesting to me is because like this indictment focuses on like tenant media as being kind of one of these video editorial offices with a daily output of three to four videos a day like that that's what this that's what this kind of guide it describes that's what tenant is this evidence talk also talks about how like they're also just like faking engagement getting like 60 comments uh per day on

various social media posts on political topics so that also like points towards like a lot of people like driving like discussions and trying to like increase the actual like visibility and on political topics. So that also points towards a lot of people driving discussions and trying to increase the actual visibility and engagement is being boosted by this non-authentic interference. A lot of videos will go viral, not just because they had a lot of people

watch them initially, it's because they have a lot of engagement in the comments. And that's what's going to push something to actually show up on more people's feeds. That is how Twitter currently works. There's a degree to which that's what's going to push something to actually show up on more people's feeds like that is how twitter currently works there's a degree to which that's how things work on youtube so it's also just trying to try to like engineer virality by faking a certain amount of engagement yeah there's also like that that degree of like interference

beyond just actually you know paying for tim pool uh to talk about ukraine and talk about how gay people are evil once a week yeah i don't know i think that's probably all we've got to say about this for right now this is not the most surprising news in the world it is good that it's embarrassing to some of these guys i don't know that i think it's actually going to hurt their listenership at all the people who listen to them don't really care yeah they'll lie out of it yeah they'll find some way to make themselves the victim out of it yeah they will not have any reflection that there was a whole russian operation to identify like like influencers to scout for that would serve russia's purposes that they will never reflect on why they specifically were scouted for no yeah they

will never reflect that the only bit of like the only bit of hesitation that they had to take to take this money was that the profile for the fake business man mentioned social justice that was the only thing that they like protested uh that's the only thing that he actually wanted to look further into was the fact that he listed social justice as something he cares about and not the fact that uh he just doesn't exist at all this is a completely fake person they were able to flag social justice but not flag that he just doesn't exist at all. This is a completely fake person. They were able to flag social justice, but not flag that he just did not exist.

None of this will cause any kind of recollection because these guys don't care. The reason why they say what they say is because they can make $500,000 a month extra saying it. So imagine how much money they're already making. That explains why they're doing what they're doing. They don't care what they say anymore. They make such a ridiculous amount of money that it doesn't matter. Yeah, and that's what it's always been about.

They have never believed in anything. They don't need to reflect on any of this because they're still making tons of money. They're making slightly less than they used to now that Russia's not paying them. But they are still making tons, especially if this is what they thought the going price was like they suggested these amounts like they this is like the regular price for them and that kind of points towards how much money is flying around

this right-wing media ecosystem yep great good stuff yeah the last couple of videos were focusing on this ridiculous lie that migrants have taken over an apartment complex in uh in colorado like all this shit that just isn't true that they've been able to make true i don't know it's so frustrating i find it so frustrating also how like pool has been able to run this line of like the media won't tell you this because there are things that legitimately are neoliberal establishment media completely ignores and like that leaves the door open for this kind of shit and as a result people can fill that space with lies as we're seeing here yeah well so the next time you get contacted by a shady man on whatsapp to pay you five hundred thousand dollars a month talking about how gay people are evil you might want to check to see if he's

actually a russian agent first you just you might want to do a little a little bit of work yeah they have to tell you it's like cops you just ask them they have to tell you you know what just send them my way got some exciting new content news for you guys i will not get paid by russia to lie i might get paid by like sweden you know to like advance swedish interests maybe there's a there's a number of most countries i would lie for beside that aren't russia i would i would lie for like uh japan probably no that could get dark actually no that could never yeah yeah leave that one out bro sweden sweden's perfect no just garrison i think you're underestimating the kind of shit sweden gets up to oh no they're certainly evil they're certainly evil but in terms of like a very like milquetoast country to get paid to

increase their foreign interest in i think sweden's about about as good as you're gonna get like come on like hungary come on come on switzerland you know although switzerland oh boy you would you would quickly get implicated but but they could pay all the financial all the financial price yeah ro, Robert and I received material benefits from the Burmese PDF. We both had a nice lunch from them and that has been why we've done all our coverage. It's time for us to come clean

now. We did, although you did get very sick afterwards. Unbelievably sick and you locked me out of the toilet. So, yeah. Putting that out there. That was pretty funny. Oh oh what a time anyway rip tenant media you were a fake one we'll be back tomorrow it could happen here as a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemededia.com or check us out on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you

listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzone media.com sources thanks for listening hey i'm jack lease thomas the host of a brand new black effect original series black lit the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture.

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