Maaaybe….
The indictment of Russian agents bankrolling a bunch of very heavy hitting right wing “influencers” says those influencer had no idea what was going on and they all insist they were “victims” (who were being paid as much as 400k a month to make some videos.)
The Daily Beast story summarizes it as well as anyone:
Several right-wing American influencers described themselves as “victims” after the Justice Department accused a company they worked with of being a front for a covert Russian influence campaign.
Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Dave Rubin all released statements Wednesday after prosecutors claimed a Tennessee-based firm—identified in multiple media reports as Tenet Media—was secretly funded and directed by Russian state media employees.
The company, which lists Pool, Johnson, Rubin, and others as its “talent,” published English-language videos online with content that is “often consistent” with the Kremlin’s aim of “amplifying U.S. domestic divisions” to undermine American opposition to Russian interests like its war in Ukraine, prosecutors say.
An indictment alleges that two employees of RT—the Russian state-controlled broadcaster formerly known as Russia Today—funneled almost $10 million to the content creation company, which in turn pumped out content sympathetic to Moscow’s viewpoints. The influencers aren’t accused of wrongdoing and didn’t realize they were working for the covert operation, prosecutors say, with the indictment claiming that some were misled about how the company was funded.
That’s a point several of Tenet’s influencers were eager to underscore as they came under scrutiny for their association with the company, which was allegedly paying huge sums to some of the media personalities on its books. One unidentified person was getting $400,000 a month—plus a $100,000 signing bonus—to make “four weekly videos” for the business, the indictment says, while another was contracted to get “a fee of $100,000 per video.”
“Should these allegations prove true, I as well as the other personalities and commentators were deceived and are victims,” Pool said in an X statement responding to the indictment. “I cannot speak for anyone else at the company as to what they do or to what they are instructed.”
Pool said his deal with the company meant the live broadcast of his Culture War Podcast went out on Tenet’s YouTube channel, but he alone had editorial control of the show. “That being said, we still do not know what is true as these are only allegations,” he added. “Putin is a scumbag, Russia sucks donkey balls.”
His statement came as a clip from one of his videos in August went viral on Reddit. “Ukraine is the enemy of this country!” Pool fumes in the footage, later adding that the U.S. should drop all of its military support to Kyiv and “apologize to Russia.”
Another clip shared by several users on X showed Pool talking about how it’s possible for a “foreign agent” to fund channels of influencers they want to boost. “‘This guy talks about things that we really like,’” Pool says in the video, speaking from the perspective of the hypothetical agent. “Dump ad money into his channel through Google AdSense and they’ll never know we were the ones funding him, and you can’t prove it.’”
Yeah, they had no idea. None at all.
They all deny knowing anything about this. They are just so special that they believed it was perfectly plausible that some obscure company in Tennessee would come offering them this vast sum of money. The fact that they consistently delivered pro-Russia, pro-Trump material that perfectly matches what the company was tasked with pushing into the ether is pure coincidence.
Maybe so. But I doubt it.
