Tom Nichols writes:

When people think of the world of espionage, they probably imagine glamorous foreign capitals, suave undercover operators, and cool gadgets. The reality is far more pedestrian: Yesterday, the Justice Department revealed an alleged Russian scheme to pay laundered money to American right-wing social-media trolls that seems more like a bad sitcom pitch than a top-notch intelligence operation.

According to a federal indictment unsealed yesterday [9/4], two Russian citizens, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, worked with a Tennessee company not named in the indictment but identified in the press as likely to be Tenet Media, owned by the conservative entrepreneurs Lauren Chen and her husband, Liam Donovan. The Russians work for RT, a Kremlin-controlled propaganda outlet; they are accused of laundering nearly $10 million and directing the money to the company.

Chen and Donovan then allegedly used most of that money to pay for content from right-wing social-media influencers including Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Lauren Southern, and Benny Johnson. Unless you’ve spent time sloshing around in some of the dumber wading pools of the internet, you may not have heard of these people, but they have several million followers among them.

So far, Pool, Rubin, and Johnson claim that they had no idea what was going on, and have even asserted that they’re the real victims here. On one level, it’s not hard to believe that someone like Pool was clueless about who he was working for, especially if you’ve seen any of his content; these people are not exactly brimming with nuanced insights. (As the legal commentator Ken White dryly observed in a post on Bluesky: “Saying Tim Pool did something unwittingly is a tautology.”) And even without this money, some of them were likely to make the same divisive, pro-Russian bilge that they would have made anyway—as long as they could find someone to pay for their microphones and cameras.

On the other hand, you might think a person at all concerned about due diligence would ask a few questions about the amount of cash being dumped on their head. An op-ed in a newspaper or a magazine usually nets the writer a few hundred bucks. Well-known podcasters and the biggest writers on Substack—and there are only a few—can make $1 million or more a year, but most people on those platforms never get near that kind of income. According to the indictment, however, the unnamed company agreed to pay one contributor $400,000 each month for hosting four weekly videos, and offered another a contract to make occasional videos at $100,000 a pop.

Now, maybe I’m not well versed in the high-flying world of Tennessee media companies, but that seems like an awful lot of cabbage.

What’s really going on here is that the Russians have identified two major weaknesses in their American adversaries. The first is that a big slice of the American public, especially since the ascent of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, has an almost limitless appetite for stories that jack up their adrenaline: They will embrace wild conspiracies and “news” meant to generate social conflict so long as the stories are exciting, validate their preexisting worldviews, and give them some escape from life’s daily doldrums.

The other is that more than a few Americans have the combination of immense greed and ego-driven grievances that make them easy targets either for recruitment or to be used as clueless dupes. [Continue reading…]