Inside Tenet Media, the pro-Trump ‘supergroup’ allegedly funded by Russia
Even by the standards of right-wing social media, last year’s rollout for Tenet Media was strange. Videos of the event featured influencers such as Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin talking portentously about freedom and censorship while bathed in a nightclub-style purple light.
Tim Pool, a much-followed right-wing commentator, proclaimed that Tenet would be a kind of YouTube “supergroup” that would compete with the untrustworthy mainstream media.
“I worked for several massive corporate news organizations,” Pool, a former Vice News staffer, said in his own purple-toned promotional video. “And what did I learn? They lie.”
From its first days, though, the online stars Tenet called its “talent” seemed to question why this collective existed at all. They all still posted on their own channels, and Tenet’s view counts were noticeably low.
In his own promotional video for Tenet, YouTuber Matt Christiansen even conceded that the company he had joined could well be a house of cards.
“What if I’ve been duped, what if this is all a ruse?” Christiansen said. Still he maintained that he trusted the site’s founders, conservative social media commentator Lauren Chen and her husband, Liam Donovan.
Christiansen got his answer about Tenet on Wednesday, when the Justice Department indicted two employees of Russian government-funded RT for illegally operating Tenet behind the scenes. Rather than being a domestic network of social media accounts, prosecutors allege that Tenet was a foreign influence operation funded with roughly $10 million in Russian money.
The indictment outlines how prosecutors say this money was sent overseas and shared among the conservative YouTubers through whom Russia sought to promote its agenda.
Most of the six members of Tenet’s “talent” team claim they did not know the money was coming from Russia. (Canadian activist Lauren Southern has not issued a statement as of this writing.) The indictment alleges that Tenet’s founders and Russian backers misled at least two of them, Pool and Rubin, about the source of Tenet’s funding by inventing a fictitious Belgian investor named Eduard Grigoriann.
“I knew absolutely nothing about any of this fraudulent activity,” Rubin, who rose to prominence by fashioning himself as a “centrist” critic of liberalism, said in a statement.
The news that some of the right’s biggest online stars had, apparently unwittingly, taken millions from the Kremlin provoked a wave of schadenfreude from their critics. On X, never-Trump conservative writer Christian Vanderbrouk, quipped that Tenet’s stars managed to see conspiracy theories everywhere — yet never questioned why a mysterious Belgian was paying them to prop up a little-watched YouTube channel. [Continue reading…]
A contributor for Tenet Media announced on Twitter Thursday night that the company has abruptly shuttered, one day after the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment that accused it of being covertly funded by employees of a Russian state-controlled media outlet. Tayler Hansen, a self-described “field reporter” for the outlet, wrote that Tenet “has ended after the DOJ indictment.” [Continue reading…]