The Influence Wars Have Begun... Or Have They Already Ended?

A recent indictment reveals a lot about how public opinion is formed by foreign governments. Or does it?

Some years ago a former CIA agent and I were having dinner and he told me how he had put multiple anti-American Iranian agents on the U.S. payroll.

“We use the money to establish a relationship,” my dinner guest told me. “If I need to burn them or discredit them, this is what I’ll do.”

I assume other countries also do this sort of thing, too, and I’ve never been more of this view than I am in reading yesterday’s indictment of Russia Today.

The Russians are willing to sacrifice players all the time.

I think the firm’s name — Tenet — might have been a clue.

So, too, the name of the fictitious private investor — “Eduard Grigoriann” (literally: Wealthy Guard of Pope Gregory) — who ponied up the $10M.

Pope Gregory, I’ll remind you, is known for instituting the first recorded large-scale mission from Rome to convert the Pagan Anglo-Saxons.

Miniature of Gregory the Great writing, in a 12th-century copy of his Dialogues

Pope Gregory’s Dialogues and other writings were pretty influential in my own spiritual journal though that’s perhaps something for another time.

Tenet is a Tennessee corporation founded by Canadian conservative commentator Lauren Chen, who goes by Roaming Millennial online and her husband, Liam Donovan. Chen works for Glenn Beck’s BlazeTV online video company and contributes to Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA.

For what it’s worth I had a great time hanging out with the Tenet’s Tayler Hansen and Turning Point USA’s Savanah Hernandez at the Democratic Convention whilst they were filming protests at the Israeli consulate.

I learned that Savanah was paid about $1000 bonus — “up to three” — if her tweets got more than a million impressions. I wondered how safe that made her. At a nearby table there was a pro-Palestinian protestor who had coincidentally lived in Russia “as a boy” before settling in the Chicago area. “Are the Russians funding both sides of this effort?” I thought.

There are just kids, I thought, but then again aren’t wars always fought by kids?

*****

I have less patience for Tim Pool (age 38), Benny Johnson (37), David Rubin (48), all of whom I have met and all of whom should know better.

Tim Pool came to visit me before the 2018 election and asked me for money to “cover Standing Rock the way I wanted it covered.” We met in a restaurant in Pasadena, California, and I decided thereafter that I wanted absolutely nothing to do with Pool thereafter.

Benny Johnson I first met when he was working for BuzzFeed. He got fired from there for plagiarism. He wanted me to join him in opening a “viral marketing firm” for “high net worth individuals.” I declined and I’d see him over the years, usually working with Charlie Kirk.

David Rubin asked me to invest in a money transmitting business called Locals he had started with an IDF officer. I got the pitch in October 2020 over Zoom. Rubin had got millions from David Sacks’s Craft Ventures. He later sold the company to Rumble after J.D. Vance invested. We’ve been over this already but it’s still pretty weird and worth repeating.

The funniest part?

“They want me to post this, but it feels just like overt shilling” Founder-2 replied that Founder-1 “thinks we should put it out there” Producer-1 acquiesced, responding “alright, I’ll put it out tomorrow.”

For what it’s worth I caught that Putin was humiliating Tucker Carlson when they met back in February.

Tucker, Putin, and Russian Ethnology

That was when I knew that the Democrats would win the election. Putin did not respect Tucker Carlson — or J.D. Vance. Putin, in making Tucker wait and in humiliating him, was disposing of the asset and signaling that he would be open to a prisoner exchange.

And so began the thawing of negative U.S.-Russian relations. On Ukraine there could be no agreement. But everywhere else? Well that gets interesting…

Historically the way mob-intel relationships work is that the U.S. government would cultivate ties with the organized crime of other countries while those other countries — namely Russia, Israel and China — would build alliances with our own domestic mafias.

But that’s changing now.

My sense is that ever since the prisoner exchange and the detention of Pavel Durov there’s been a kind of alliance between various deep states to racket down the state to state conflict and deal with the domestic mafias. This is why Dan Bilzerian, Candace Owens, Andrew Tate, and many of the conservative influencers are seemingly desperate.

It’s also why money launderers like many of the tech “investors” are also sweating.

I read the Department of Justice indictment as a warning to the influencers who are carrying the message of hostile foreign governments. “Knock it off,” says FBI Director Christopher Wray as if the influencers were just badly behaved school kids.

Sure enough, the Treasury Department sanctioned a number of RT players.

Russian state-sponsored actors have long used a variety of tools, such as generative artificial intelligence (AI) deep fakes and disinformation, in an attempt to undermine confidence in the United States’ election processes and institutions. Beginning in early 2024, executives at RT—Russia’s state-funded news media outlet—began an even more nefarious effort to covertly recruit unwitting American influencers in support of their malign influence campaign. RT used a front company to disguise its own involvement or the involvement of the Russian government in content meant to influence U.S. audiences. 

The American and Canadian players — David Rubin, Tim Pool, Lauren Southern, and Benny Johnson — were recruited by Canadian Lauren Chen and then given millions of dollars to post. Who doesn’t love globalism bringing people together?

Of course sometimes it doesn’t work out. Never you mind that the RT cofounder Mikhail Lesin died in Washington D.C. under very suspicious circumstances. Was he murdered? I’m not sure. But Christopher Steele said he was.

Mikhail Lessin, cofounder of RT, with Vladimir Putin in 2002

Were the influencers paying the taxes on all that money? Of course not. And those 86,000 IRS agents will come in handy as all these influencers are asked to account for the money they were paid out. Maybe they’ll self report and work out a payment plan? Who knows!

Here are the “victims,” David Rubin & Benny Johnson, directly behind DeSantis early on.

Say isn’t that right around the time that they started getting paid by the fake Russian investor?

And while we’re talking about fake Russian investors how many real Russian investors are there? How many Russian-Israeli investors are there?

Did you know, by the way, that Netanyahu’s niece, Galia Benartzi, was a partner at Founders Fund from 2012-2013?

How many Israeli assets still work there?

Polymarket was backed by Founders Fund, which I called for the FBI to investigate, and employs Nate Silver who is telling everyone Trump is winning.

Benny Johnson works for Tenet Media, a company funded by Russia Today, according to a DOJ indictment announced today.

The question that’s unanswered about the indictment is whether and how the Russian-backed influencers are favored by Elon Musk’s X algorithm.

Is Musk himself being turned?

We shall see…