Daniel and Jack chat about Tenet Media, Lauren Chen, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Lauren Southern, the Russians, and that whole hilarious schemozzle. Also discussed: Tucker Carlson interviews Daryl Cooper; Daniel has read the diary of the so-called 'Trans Shooter' from the 2023 Nashville school shooting. Show Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
So what happens with social media, particularly YouTube, where it's really easy, you can have a foreign agent or even the government or some corporation or whatever say, this guy talks about things that we really like.
Dump ad money into his channel through Google AdSense, and they'll never know we were the ones funding them.
And you can't prove it.
No, because what you say here is more attractive to investors and advertisers.
I mean, we're basically only members.
This is I Don't Speak German.
Here we talk about the Far Right, their fellow travellers, and what they say to each other when they think we're not listening.
The show is hosted by Daniel Harper and me, Jack Graham.
We're both he-him.
Be aware, we cover difficult, sometimes nasty subject matter, so content warnings always apply.
And welcome back to yet another episode of I Don't Speak German.
It's another news brief, but I don't know why I said that in an apologetic manner.
These news brief episodes are bloody brilliant, and you should be grateful that you're getting them at all, don't you think, Daniel?
I think since Jack is the one who does most of the work for these, then these are definitely better to produce than the more mainland ones.
Yeah, I believe I said in the last episode that I'm going through some personal stuff right now.
And hypothetically, here in the next few weeks, couple months, I will be in a better place to be able to do some stuff on my own and get my head right back into this and produce content again.
But for right now, This is what we get.
But I think it's important to, I mean, honestly, doing the numbered episodes, doing the mainline episodes, it tells you why so many podcasts of this type are just news posts, because you just react to what's in the news, you know?
Like, if you ask me to produce, like, 90 minutes of content a week, I mean, you know, this is the way you do it.
Yeah, absolutely.
Because you only have to do basically what I've done, which is listen to a couple of podcasts and read some Daily Beast articles, and then talk with somebody that you like and who thinks similarly to you about them and laugh at them.
And that's basically what this is going to be.
As you may have gathered from the cold open – Daniel doesn't know this yet, but I've already picked a cold open – this is going to be about the Tenet Media thing.
I feel like we couldn't possibly have not talked about this, really, given the fact Some of the people involved, as Dave Gerrard pointed out on Blue Sky.
But before we get into that fun stuff, we're going to talk a little bit about some older news.
So, Daniel, over to you on that one.
I know there is a mass shooting in this country just about every day, and at a school, you know, several times a year.
But I'm not talking about the most recent school shooting in Atlanta, I'm talking about one from 2023.
This is the Nashville school shooting, and it's widely mocked on the right, and widely used as a bludgeoning tool against trans people, because the perpetrator of this particular, of thousands of shootings, who killed three small children, I believe all below the age of nine, and then three adults, a custodian and I think a couple of teachers, because this particular piece of extra, extra rent, happened to be trans.
And so, therefore, it means all trans people are just walking trigger fingers away from killing people because they're ultimately mentally unhealthy, etc., etc., etc.
But of course, we can't generalize from the loads of school shooters that were straight cis males.
We can't make any generalization.
Right-wing, gun-toting nincompoops.
No, those are just bad apples.
But when a trans person does something bad, it reflects on all trans people, of course.
And again, I mean, the some of the commentary around this has just been like disgusting and I haven't really wanted to cover it.
I mean, I wasn't going to.
I don't plan on doing a full episode on this because it would just be like packaging all the worst things of like every bad person that we've ever talked about is said on against a trans person.
And I just don't know that there's a lot of value in that except for just like documenting it.
But what is interesting and what I did want to cover for just a moment is that The whole unredacted diary of the shooter, Aiden Hale, was his chosen name.
He was killed by police on the day.
Aiden Hale was his name, but almost every article in every mainstream source you read on this uses the name Audrey Hale, which is his dead name.
And despite the fact that he is a despicable piece of shit who murdered children, that still doesn't mean you should deadname him.
Anyway, through a long, complicated legal process, the Tennessee Star managed to get access to the diary, and they published it on their website.
You had to, like, put in your email address in order to, like, get the link, download it, but it is apparently taken from crime scene photos, and it is a handwritten notebook.
It's funny because in some of the reporting, it's mostly that there is a manifesto that included plans for other places that this guy decided to go shoot.
But that, if it does exist, if it wasn't just misreporting at the time, that appears to, at least it hasn't been made public.
So if that does become public, I will certainly talk a bit more about that.
I think the one thing that I wanted to put out there is, You know, this, from the beginning, was seen as, like, oh, this is, you know, he shot up a Christian school, a Catholic school, where he had previously attended.
The guy was 27.
Aiden Hill was 27 when he committed this horrible crime.
The notebook, at first it read like, I thought it was a teenager, I was like, I forgot his age, so I was like, oh, was he like 19, 18, 19 at the time?
It's filled with crushes, it's filled with remembrance of what we now know to be, or what was subsequently reported as a former classmate of someone he knew.
The young woman of his age had died in a car accident recently.
And so he has, like, long remembrances of her and, you know, kind of heart of her and, like, the date of her death and et cetera, et cetera.
There's a lot of that stuff in it.
And his often sometimes graphic sexual fantasies that are not, like, no more than probably what I was into when I was that age.
But, you know.
He talked about being trans, the difficulties of being trans, the difficulties of being... He didn't like his dad, you know?
His dad was apparently neglectful.
I didn't get the sense that there was an actual abuse situation there, but I think neglectful parenting is probably in the cards.
Ultimately, it's hard to know.
Stephen Crowder released portions of this notebook about a year ago, I forget the exact date, and focused on this anti-Christian, anti-white kind of thing that's going on by taking tiny little snippets out of context.
So who knows how Crowder got them?
I can only imagine he had sources within the Nashville Police Department who were just feeding him a bunch of bullshit.
And that's just... I'm glad that the full thing is out there now so that at least people can read it and put all that stuff back into proper context.
The diary reads, I mean, it reads young to me, but it doesn't read inopportune.
It doesn't read as something that any person in their mid twenties might not be feeling and producing feelings this way.
Um, except of course he references, you know, wanting to, wanting to go and do his massacre.
And it's just, it's like in between all the little love notes and all that stuff is like, well, I'm going to be within heaven soon because I'm going to commit this thing.
And he picked an exact date and then did it on that date.
It's all, it's all there in the notebook.
So that's really what I had to say to me if you know without having any more information and never having met this person or anything from the notebook it seems like he was intending to commit suicide by cop and decided this was the best way to do that.
I don't see in this document like a hatred of that particular institution I don't see any real hatred for anything at all except for himself in the body that he was born into.
And, you know, on that level, it sounds like, you know, better access to hormone replacement therapy, earlier access to it, might have prevented this, you know?
It's entirely possible.
But honestly, you know, we can't do armchair diagnosis, and I'm not being trans, I'm not going to speak on the mental state of trans people before and after they take hormones, so.
But I read it, it affected me, it reminded me a little bit of the Buffalo Shooters manifesto, which was 600 and something pages.
This was much, it was like 20 or 30 pages or something.
So this was, you can get through this in, you know, 20 minutes, if you can decipher the handwriting.
And so I just wanted to mention up top, just to kind of make that a, just a little bit of commentary on that event, because I think most people are not going to read this diary.
Most people have never read even a single school shooter's diary, and I have now read two.
So, great job I got here.
So, what is the right-wing narrative about this shooter, then?
Does it focus... It focuses on the transness.
It focuses on... Right.
It depends on which part of the... on the right you're talking about.
Like, the kind of more, like, thoroughbred Nazis kind of refer to it as an anti-white crime, that a trans... I mean, the shooter was white, but it's ultimately because they were trans that They're automatically like a lefty antifa type, which there's no evidence of that in the slightest, but that the crime is ultimately is against like traditional like Christian structures, against a Christian school.
And so of course the Christian school must be, you know, the target.
And so it is anti-Catholic, anti-Christian, anti-white, anti, et cetera.
And then you just get sort of versions of that.
And it's always about, it comes down to, well, he was trans and therefore dot, dot, dot.
And never, sometimes trans people are just bad people.
Yeah, or they could have, you know, mental health issues.
They can have all kinds of, you know, all the reasons that a cis straight person might commit a school shooting are also reasons that a trans person can.
I don't know.
The more I looked at the more like normal, it seemed like the more like, Oh, this is just kind of an ordinary young kid trying to figure out his life.
And ultimately it's very fragmentary.
You don't, I mean, you're not getting a full picture.
It's just very sad.
And, uh, you know, I can obviously morally condemn the action he took and not think all trans people are going to act this way.
And that's just, you know, it's just not, there's nothing in the, in the text that indicates anything like what the right wing narrative is.
If the manifesto is released, I will definitely read that, because that would be very, very helpful, I think, in terms of actually kind of like figuring out what the motive is.
Because the police are saying, like, we know the motive, and they just haven't released the... there was a motive, but dot dot dot.
The point being, I take it, that people like Crowder, I mean Crowder specifically, taking extracts out of context to construct a narrative about this being a politically motivated crime from the left, essentially, from what they take to be a left position, which is sort of hating Christians.
Rating whiteness etc and the glue that holds all that together did the fact about this person that makes that seem.
Like it all makes sense in the mind of people like crowder and his audience is that this was a trans person so it all links up perfectly.
And you've had the you've had access to the the entire document the diary not the manifesto and.
The entire document shows that to be horseshit, essentially.
Or at least completely sourceless.
I mean, he may have hated white people and Christians, but it's not in any of the documentation I've seen.
So Crowder has no way of knowing that?
Yeah, he has no way of knowing that.
It's just smearing trans people with, a trans person did a bad thing and we're going to impute motives because we know what those people are like.
That's all it is.
That's all it ever was.
Yeah.
Okay.
I think that was worth remarking on.
Thank you for that.
So, as we were saying before the episode started, we are possibly, in the podcast world, we are the kings of the awkward transition from the darkest possible material to something a little bit funny.
And the way we do it, as you will have noticed that I'm doing it now, listeners, is I just comment on it.
And that, of course, in a post-modern sort of recursive way, it makes you feel okay about the fact that we're transitioning away from very, very dark, horrifying, tragic material to something that we're going to laugh at, essentially.
Yes, definitely.
I feel like my way into this is to start by... I don't want to talk about this at great length, but I want to at least reference... an awful lot of news stories come up my... well, not my Twitter feed, because I'm not on Twitter anymore.
I like deadnaming Twitter, by the way.
You're allowed to deadname.
You can only deadname Twitter.
That's the only thing you can deadname.
It's Twitter.
Exactly, yeah.
And it's right and proper that you should do so.
Not my Twitter feed, because I'm not on Twitter, except when I'm sort of lurking on the I Don't Speak German account.
Not my Twitter feed.
They come up my Blue Sky account, news stories.
And I see them and I think, This is the sort of thing we could talk about on the podcast, except that is there really enough there for us to talk about?
Which is one of the virtues of these Newsbrief episodes, which of course is that we can talk about them without really adding any content at all, and just completely get away with it, because these are throwaway rubbish episodes.
LIAM These are the bad ones.
ALICE He said, completely disrespecting the audience.
One of those sorts of events was Tucker Carlson's, formerly America's foremost public white nationalist, his recent interview with Daryl Cooper, who he introduced as, I think, America's foremost unorthodox or dissident or independent historian.
The most important popular historian working in the United States today.
There you go.
Okay, well, he was slightly more subtle about it than I just was.
So I didn't know this story until Jack mentioned it to me now, so I'm definitely going to go look into this when we're done recording.
Daryl Cooper is the Twitter handle MartyrMade, which I've been following.
I found him on Twitter.
He has something like 260,000 followers or something like that, so it's a large account as these things go.
And I follow quite a few Nazis on Twitter because they don't know who I am, and so it's just fine.
I can just follow Nazis on Twitter.
The ones who know who I am will almost always block me, but Murder Man, I'm beneath his contempt.
So yeah, no, I've been following him for a while, and I believe I have his podcast on my archive list, even though I think I've never listened to a single one.
I mean, the guy's a Holocaust denier, essentially.
He's the soft Holocaust denier.
I have a lot of stuff I don't watch or listen to.
I'm familiar with him through the handle, but I didn't know he had appeared on Tucker Carlson.
I didn't know his revealed his identity.
So tell me about this Tucker interview.
I mean, the guy's a Holocaust denier, essentially.
He's a soft Holocaust denier.
We've talked about Holocaust denial on this program before.
And a lot of the Holocaust deniers that go around denying the Holocaust They don't deny the Holocaust in the sense of saying, none of it ever happened, or nobody died.
The worst ones will say things like, well, there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz, and there were no death camps, and a much smaller number of people died.
And then you've got a spectrum of them, and you get down to people who acknowledge that the Holocaust happened, or at least publicly they acknowledge that the Holocaust happened.
And they acknowledge that there were gas chambers, and they acknowledge that Treblinka and Sobibor were death camps, etc.
But they will go very much down the Richard Irving sort of route of constantly making completely unwarranted moral and political equivocations and equivalences.
and stuff like that, to try to obfuscate and muddy the waters about why it happened and who was really responsible and so on and so forth.
Daryl Coop, I don't actually know very much about him.
I didn't even know that he was this presence on Twitter until this Tucker interview, and I started looking into him slightly.
But he strikes me as one of those.
And his interview with Tucker, the big theme that got picked out by people who reported on this, because it was reported to an extent, was that he said, That the real villain of World War II wasn't Adolf Hitler.
It was Winston Churchill.
I despise Winston Churchill.
I think Winston Churchill was a racist, imperialist, mass murderer.
He wasn't the main villain of World War II.
That was Adolf Hitler, definitely.
Definitely Adolf Hitler.
That was, you know, when you've got Stalin, Churchill, you know, Hitler.
There's no shits there!
Hitler was the king's shit.
Churchill is third, but Churchill's still really, really bad!
But Cooper, of course, is engaged.
What he's actually engaged in is a project of trying to stealthily whitewash the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler and Nazism through issuing bullshit talking points like, well, you know, it was Churchill who actually caused it to become the war that it became.
Hitler didn't want to fight Britain, which is true.
He didn't want to be in a war with Britain.
That's true.
But he's twisting stuff like that.
You know, Hitler was making peace envoys to the British well into the hostilities and stuff like that.
And they were completely insincere, and they were based upon the British basically abandoning their allies and stuff like that.
So saying, well, Hitler was trying to make peace, and nasty old Winston Churchill was saying, no, we're going to have a war instead.
And Hitler was like, oh, no, not a war.
I don't want a war.
You know, that's bullshit.
And you're twisting the historical record to absolve Hitler and make him look better than he was.
I mean, this is straight out of the Pat Buchanan playbook.
I forget which book it was.
It's not Death of a Superpower.
I'd have to look it up.
But one of his very prominent books is effectively Churchill was the real villain of World War II, and that Hitler... So Cooper's just copying Pat Buchanan.
Yeah, no, no.
This is... I don't want to say tame.
It's not tame.
It's despicable.
It's funny that Pat Buchanan, like, wrote those books, like, he wrote several books on this topic, and yet never, never managed to, like, leave the cocktail party set.
I mean, he was just, like, he was still on TV, he was still giving speeches, he was still, you know, Hitler wasn't the villain of World War II.
And everybody knew it.
This is not quiet.
It was just like, well, old Pat, he's got his ways, I guess.
It's one of those things, when the political establishment decides that you're in it, that that's just it.
You're in it.
You can stand there saying, Hitler was right!
And people are like, oh, there's Pat off again.
Silly old Pat.
It's like with Trump now.
Trump does press conferences, and he sort of shambles up to the podium and stands there going, And the New York Times reports it as former President Trump gave an unconventional presentation today.
But you know, once they've decided you're in, there's nothing you can do that won't make them throw you out.
Apart from go left, of course.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Express a single iota of support for Palestine and suddenly, like, oh no, now you're with the terrorists.
That's, you know... That's right.
As far as Cooper being on Tucker, I mean, this does not strike me in the slightest.
Except, I guess the sense is that because Vance has appeared, J.D.
Vance has appeared on Tucker's show, then Vance is being asked if he would distance himself from... Well, Vance follows... This is the thing.
This was the story that I was going to link up with the last episode.
This is kind of like a little addendum to our last episode, because we're talking about J.D.
Vance and his connections with people that we've talked about on this program.
J.D.
Vance follows Daryl Cooper on Twitter, and Daryl Cooper follows Vance on Twitter.
And asked about this, Vance equivocated and said, basically, that he wouldn't condemn Tucker for having Cooper on, and he did the usual dance about, well, we should hear all viewpoints and shouldn't censor freedom of speech and all that crap.
It's just JD Vance being JD Vance, basically.
Well, and it's just, it's just like, this is, this is the way you can just act on, on media now.
Like, this is just the nature of the beast.
It's like, you know, it's not completely normalized.
And this is the thing.
This is the thing that like, in 2019, when we first started talking about these, you know, these assholes, it's like, we understand that like the Daily Show has a small audience relative to Tucker Carlson.
We understand that Christopher Cantwell has a small audience.
But they are pushing narratives.
They are creating the conditions for this kind of far-right ideology to be factored into the mainstream.
And the more popular and the further out they are, and the more you can make direct connections between someone like Martyr Maid and make Enoch, and say they're kind of saying the same thing.
Now, Enoch is far beyond this level of Holocaust denial.
I wouldn't want to pretend otherwise, but Cantwell's probably about where that is.
Cantwell's probably right there.
Cantwell's arguably like, no, the Holocaust happened because it was good.
Yeah, but Churchill was still the real villain because et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
I don't think he's ever talked to that issue to too great a degree, but he doesn't focus on things like Holocaust denial at all.
I mean, it's just not in his interest to even care whether the Holocaust happened.
It's not He believes in the power of, you know, a powerful state to just, you know, crush its enemies.
And if it means, you know, a few gas ovens in it, that's what it means.
That's kind of where I believe Campbell will stand on the matter, you know?
All in the name of libertarianism, of course.
The whole name of libertarianism.
Yeah.
What you've just said is a really great link into the main topic of the episode, because you're talking about people with comparatively small audiences, and actually the kind of people we're going to be talking about a little bit in this episode, they have much, much larger audiences than Mike Enoch and Chris Cantwell.
But we're talking about people with, sort of in relative terms, very small audiences, who nonetheless, the danger certainly is, and it seems to be happening at least to an extent, that their narratives because of their ability to propagate them as influencers from the sidelines, will infiltrate the mainstream.
And of course, I'm talking about people like Tim Pool and Dave Rubin, who are two of the people who have... Well, they weren't... I was going to say they were named.
They weren't named.
Nobody is named in the indictment.
Let me step back a little bit.
You, listener, probably know the rudiments of this anyway, but I think I'll go through it anyway.
The DOJ unsealed an indictment It wasn't leaked.
Benny Johnson said it was leaked.
It wasn't leaked.
It was unsealed.
It was an indictment.
Grand jury voted to indict two Russians.
One of them is actually called Kalashnikov.
His name is Kalashnikov, believe it or not.
Two Russians, I believe formerly employees of Russia Today, possibly still employees in some way of Russia Today.
You know how these things work.
I think Russia Today is probably like the mafia, you never really leave Russia Today.
That's right, nobody ever leaves Russia Today!
They set up a media firm, which came to be known, it wasn't originally known as, but it came to be known as Tenet Media.
It was set up in Tennessee, and they employed Lauren Chen, who I believe her name has come up on this show before.
She used to be Roman Millennial.
She was Roman Millennial back in 2016, 2017.
The alt-right era, what we could kind of call that.
She was definitely affiliated in those circles, but always in that more sort of the Lauren Southern kind of angle of it, of not the explicitly racist, at least not the explicitly really racist stuff.
She referred to herself as the Asian.
So I think that tells you kind of where she is.
My understanding is that the company was founded by Chen and her husband.
So Chen and her husband found the company with the money from the two Russians.
Or own the company or however, however, the corporation worked.
I'm not, I'm not sure exactly, you know, kind of whether Chen personally funded it from her, like other corporate things, or if it was just, this was always just a wing of, of these two Russian guys.
I'm not, I'm not sure kind of what the answer is that I don't know if anybody has that answer yet, but.
Well, that's certainly what it looks like.
Russia today, which of course was banned in America and the EU and Britain after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, is not shy, really, about saying exactly what they're about.
They basically said, okay then, we're going to create a covert network of influencers.
If we can't just broadcast our obviously incredibly successful and influential propaganda to the American people.
We'll do it covertly with influences.
So they, as I understand it, according to the indictment anyway, they employed, they paid very well, Lauren Chen and her husband to recruit these influences.
And Lauren Chen, she, until very recently, she worked for The Blaze.
In fact, I think she stopped working for The Blaze almost immediately after this story broke.
Going back to another former subject of our episodes, Elijah Schafer.
It's funny how often The Blaze has to keep Firing people for things that come out.
It's amazing!
It's such a wonderful, wonderful company headed by Glenn Beck.
It's kind of remarkable how many quiet Nazis are just, like, hiding in the bushels there.
Tenet Media would then effectively fund a whole bunch of our right-wing grifter types into pushing a particular message, especially on the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
They're given tasks seems to have been to set out and recruit influencers to the exact relationship sort of varies between different people.
It's a, it's almost like a kind of licensing deal.
It seems to me, but yeah, she, because Chen was also worked for or with daily caller, I think, and also turning point USA.
She like picks people up like Benny Johnson.
Benny Johnson is not somebody real I'd ever looked at before, but looking down his resume, he seems to have done the tour.
He sort of started with Breitbart, he went to The Blaze, he worked at National Review, he worked at TPUSA, he worked at The Daily Caller, so you know, she's gonna know him, so she sort of brings him in.
And Lauren Southern, I believe, is another influencer who's referred... Because again, in the indictment, it's all like, Founder 1 and Founder 2, and Commentator 1, Commentator 2, and stuff like that.
But people can tell who's who, because of the details that are in the indictment.
And I mean, we've talked about Lauren Chen before.
We've talked about Lauren Southern before, obviously.
We've talked about her palling around with Destiny, for instance.
And also Tim Pool and Dave Rubin, as I say.
Tim Pool seems to have had the best deal because this company apparently has paid out something like $10 million in these payments to influencers.
And the vast majority of it seems to have gone to Rubin and Pool.
They're definitely the biggest names on the list.
I mean, you know, not that Lauren Southard and, you know, some of the other ones don't, you know, don't have followings.
But, Tim Pool, I have no idea why anybody watches Dave Rubin.
He's just such an obvious clown.
I can understand why people like Tim Pool.
I can understand people finding Tim Pool entertaining.
But, like, since, like, 2016, I've always thought that Dave Rubin is, like, the most talentless hack who ever, like, who just managed to drift his way into this stuff.
He's just boring.
I have no idea why he's as popular as he is, but, I mean, he is, and so he gets the views, and, you know, once you feed the algorithm, the algorithm is just gonna keep feeding itself, right?
You know, as long as you keep producing the content, it's just gonna keep going.
I have thoughts on that, but I want to kind of finish the description, which is...
Tim Pool arranged a deal where he was being paid.
Was it $100,000?
It's like $100,000 a week.
It's $100,000 a week.
Yeah.
For four videos a week.
He seems to have, I think as Matt Binder said, he seems to have gotten the best deal because he just got paid for doing what he was doing anyway.
His culture videos.
And he kept ownership of them completely for his own channel.
Rubin, I think, got more money.
Rubin actually seems to have sort of driven a hard bargain in the negotiations, if you look at the indictment.
And I want to be clear, by the way, the indictment describes them as unwitting.
It says that they didn't know that they were taking money from Russians.
They have not been indicted for anything.
Lauren Chen and her husband have not been indicted for anything.
It's these two Russian people who've been indicted.
As I understand it, even if they knew about it, they haven't committed.
They're just producing content.
They're Americans producing content.
It's the influence from an outside nation.
It's the fact that they are Russians quietly funding this and not abiding by certain reporting rules where they have to register as foreign agents in terms of that.
I don't want to be flippant about that.
This is a paperwork crime.
If these were American citizens doing the exact same thing, pushing the exact same message, There's no crime here.
This is just... That's right.
Yeah, Tim Paul is not going to be indicted for anything.
You know, Dave Rubin's not going to be indicted for anything.
And to my knowledge, Chen and her husband have not been... Yeah, no, they haven't.
Apart from the Russians, nobody's been indicted.
There's just danger of being indicted, as far as I can tell.
There may be legal consequences for Chen.
If they knew what they were doing, there may be consequences for them.
And from the indictment, it certainly looks like Chen and her husband did know, because, I mean, they're actually referring to the Russians in sort of private messages back and forth and stuff like that.
Yeah, no, they knew.
They knew, they knew.
I would not be surprised if they turned state's evidence on this, if they were like, you know, look, we'll give you these two Russian guys, you can get a big headline out of this, you get a big arrest.
So it wouldn't surprise me, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest that that's kind of what happened.
And Ruben is being paid to, you know, he, he keeps ownership of these videos, but they go onto Tenet media.
I think Tenet media shows them or Tenet media has the rights.
Tenet media kind of, I, I've actually archived.
I'm glad I, I'm glad I had it on my archive.
I archived it because Tim Pool was associated with it and I just grab everything Tim Pool does.
So I've, I, it's now, it's now taken down.
I have, I have everything except for, I, I archive each channel about once a week.
That's kind of how my, my process goes.
So in anything that was in the last, you know, like few days, I might have lost, but you know, and I was just, it was just cause it was 10 pools on.
So then it was like, Oh yeah.
So I just need to, I have a 10 pool like main directory and then all his channels are in their own like sub directories.
Like antenna media is one of those channels.
It's just one of those in there.
Yeah.
And also, Tenet Media have these other people like Tyler Hansen and Matt Christensen and Benny Johnson, who seem less important, to be honest, from the wider point of view.
It's kind of hit that ecosystem, the right-wing online influencer ecosystem, simultaneously with a bombshell and a damp squib.
Because it's like, you know, obviously it's hugely embarrassing, but at the same time, these people don't have shame, so they're not embarrassed.
And there aren't going to be any consequences, and we kind of already knew this anyway, didn't we, frankly?
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like, oh, you mean like right-wing influencers are taking money from Russia to say really positive things about Russia?
Wow, I am shocked.
Like, dark money on the right?
No!
This isn't a surprise, but it is nice to have actual documentation of it, of course.
It is a big story, in the sense of... it's a very funny story, is what it is, because I was watching the Even More News video on this topic, and it's like, we make a podcast, people we don't know who all our Patreon, all our patrons are.
If somebody came to me and was like, hey, $100,000 an episode, I'd have some interest in and trying to figure out who that person was.
At least vet that and go like, that seems like a lot.
Thank you.
But They made a fake, like, Belgian billionaire.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
They just created this person out of thin air, and just went, oh, it's so-and-so.
Edouard Grigorian.
The thing I love most about this is that for a very, very long time, the most famous Belgian has been fictional, Jules Poirot, and now the two most famous Belgians are fictional.
Yes, yes.
With no disrespect to the wonderful people of Belgium, whose beer I have enjoyed for many, many years.
And also, Edward Gregorian, I don't know.
There's lots of very funny stuff in the indictment.
To be honest, I think this whole sort of spy world stuff is just inherently funny, because in the movies it's always so serious and grim and, oh, spies and espionage, and it's all Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and all that sort of stuff, and I love that shit, but in the real world this stuff is always so fucking dumb.
It's always so fucking gonzo, this sort of spy shit.
And the stuff in the indictment is hilarious.
They've created this fake persona, Edward Gregorian, because... Supposedly because some of the influencers, particularly Poole and Rubin, were kind of doing what you were just saying.
Kind of saying, well, who is giving us this money?
Where is this money gonna be coming from?
Before we agree, we kind of wanna know.
So they fake up this person, Edward Gregorian, and they give him Like, the world's most generic writer.
Edward Gregorian is into business and philanthropy, and he has skills, and is interested in spreading awareness, and stuff like this.
And one of Rubin's sticking points, actually, it goes to show that Rubin is actually a man of principle.
You know, this is not just a grifter.
This is not a man who's just out for money.
One of Rubin's big sticking points, before he started taking money from this Edouard Gregorian, was that in this fake write-up the Russians had created of this fake persona, they put that he was concerned with social justice.
And Rubin, Dave Rubin, was like, whoa, well I don't like the sound of that, what does that mean?
And they had to reassure him, oh no, it doesn't mean he's on the left or anything.
But, they kind of fake Zoom conversations and stuff like that, and they get the time zones wrong, so they say, the guy pretending to be Gregorian is saying, oh, I'm speaking to you from Paris, and it's the Moscow time zone.
It's very, very funny.
ALICE That's a one hour time difference, how do you not, like, you know, account for that?
Yeah, I know.
It's very deeply silly.
On one level, just completely mundane, and on another level, absolutely hilarious.
One thing that apparently, in some of the reporting I read on this, that Tim Pool, he's compounded West Virginia.
There's a skate park.
As we know, Tim Pool is a skateboard enthusiast.
He's been a skater since Tim Pool, literal 80s teen movie villain.
Buys the kids skatepark.
He was trying to, like, I think he was going to sponsor some event at the skatepark, and they didn't want anything to do with him because he's fucking Tim Pool, and he buys the skatepark out from under them.
And so, like, no, the kids don't get to have their skatepark anymore.
That money came from Tenet Media.
That was straight up Tenet money.
That's right.
I don't know what to say to that.
It's just too perfect.
It might as well... ALICE It is an 80s movie, y'know?
The stuck-up rich guy, the uncool rich guy ruins the fun of the kids in the local area with their skatepark, or breakdancing studio, or whatever it is, and the bad guys are the Russians.
It's an 80s fucking film.
It's the old man who's trying to stick it to the kids, because he's trying to put toxic waste in their skate park, or he's trying to brand it.
But he's an old skater himself, and so he thinks he's still with it.
And then it turns out that behind him the whole time, it's just the Russian government.
Yeah, you're right!
Now I really want someone to write this screenplay.
I want to see this movie.
It's just too perfect.
This is the revenge of the nerds.
This is what it actually looks like.
Yeah, well, better than the actual plot of Revenge of the Nerds, which includes a whole lot of sexual assaults.
Yeah, absolutely.
Although, no, not going there.
I mean, yeah, you talked about the effect.
For me, one of the biggest effects that this stuff has had... I mean, I know he's not actually involved in this, but Jimmy Dore is another... I mean, we talked in the Jimmy Dore episodes about the fact that this guy has taken money from the Syrian government.
I'm not saying he suggested he's connected with this story.
He's not as far as I know.
But he's the same sort of person who poses as being in some sense sort of either on the left or being a sort of unorthodox thinker or an independent thinker or a heterodox thinker or whatever shit you want to say.
Whose main effect as far as I can see, and I think this might be true sort of somewhere down the line for Paul and Ruben as well, has been to disorient the left to an extent.
Right.
Because they muddy the water particularly on issues like Syria and Russia and Ukraine and stuff like that.
And it can have the effect and I think has had the effect downstream, quite a long way downstream sometimes.
But it can and has had the effect of disorienting people on the left, or even just the liberal or progressive side, or whatever you want to say, who would otherwise have something approaching the right stance on stuff like this, who are nonetheless weighed by some of these arguments about, isn't the West just as bad?
And a hell of a lot of this.
I mean, Tim Pool has been producing outright, sort of thumping the table with fury.
Ukraine is our enemy because of the Nazis there and the Nord Stream pipeline, and we should apologize to Russia and stuff like this.
They're the enemies of America, and we've been funding... I mean, the right are kind of already there.
I feel like the effect is more sort of to at least disorient.
To not necessarily persuade, but to disorient other people.
I see the connection you're drawing there, is that ultimately the point of this influence campaign, I mean, I think in Tim Pool's case, he probably did actually.
I mean, there's that one video of him that everybody's sharing around, where he's reading notes from his desk as he's doing that, and he's pounding the table with his shoe, practically, talking about how terrible America is for supporting Ukraine, and Ukraine is the ultimate enemy of America.
I think that was, they're literally putting words in his mouth, but ultimately the way these influence campaigns work, like 99% of the time, is you just find somebody who's already saying what you want them to say, and you just give them money for it, you know?
Well, that's what they did here.
And that's, I mean, you know, I don't think, I mean, Dave Rubin seems to not have an actual belief in his body, I think.
I think he just goes where the money is.
Tim Pool, I think, does actually believe most of this stuff, but, like, you know, he's just dumb.
What I always say is, people have an amazing ability to sincerely and passionately believe things that it's in their material interest to believe, right?
And I think, like, Dave Rubin is kind of like the paradigm of that.
And I actually, that kind of became clear to me watching a José video about Dave Rubin.
José, friend of the show, former guest.
makes great videos.
He did a video about Dave Rubin years back now, where he charts in kind of detail Dave Rubin's journey from the just post the Young Turks progressive, you know, he identified as a progressive liberal at one point, and he charts the journey right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right.
And he, you know, he shows how it's directly a result of like audience feedback.
Rubin is directly chasing the audience, tell him what they like, and he moves right in obedience to their approval or disapproval.
And I mean, I think I've always found that incredibly, that really stands as a paradigm for me for how, how, how so much of this works.
Tim Poole, I think, I think he's slightly more actually I mean, I would call the guy a fascist, personally, or a crypto-fascist of some kind.
I think he sincerely believes that stuff, in a way that... I'm not sure Dave Rubin has actual enough intellectual power to believe things.
He's working with a 30 watt bulb, you know?
It's only gonna get so illuminated in there.
But nonetheless, I would say Tim Paul is another example of a guy who has very cynically become what he is now, which is a pro-Putin, pro-Trump, anti-immigrant, anti-left, really very, very, very far-right voice, because that's where the money is.
And it's not just money from the audience as a crowd of people.
It's obviously this kind of money as well.
These people are not for the most part being paid to, you know, here's your script, here's your money, read the script or you don't get paid.
That's not how it works.
As you say, what they're doing is they're recruiting people and rewarding them for saying the stuff that they're saying anyway.
They're going to the voices that are saying, But that's kind of, that's always how it works.
Yeah, no, that's just how it works.
Yeah.
MSNBC hired Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes because they are in alliance with the worldview that that corporation wants to, you know, that's just how it works.
And Tenet Media's aim, I think, was probably to draw audiences in to Tenet and Tenet's other material.
via these very popular influencers and their connection with Tenet, rather than to use Tim Pool and Dave Rubin specifically to persuade people, if you know what I mean.
It's a web strategy.
Well, and like a lot of these, you know, so this is a true for, for Ruben and pool, but a lot of the like other tenant media stuff, the stuff that was actually published to that channel, some of this stuff only had like a thousand views or something like that.
These weren't going mega viral.
These are, it's just, it just becomes part of the wallpaper.
There's just that voice sitting there and you know, ultimately, you know, some of this is also like we're funding kind of the next generation.
You're, you're giving people the money to.
So they will grow and so they will have the the resources to to become bigger stars and bigger influencers on this stuff and I mean a lot of that's that's that seems to be a lot of how like tenant media just seemed to go like it just sort of appeared one day.
They kind of released like I think it was like a trailer or a, you know, like a Twitter ad or something like that, which is like a poster.
And then it's like, you know, on certain date, Tenet Media launches, and it was, you know, Tim Pool and Lawrence of course, I just went, well, I'm just going to grab that.
I headed it to my feed before they'd even put out content.
And, you know, so also like part of that is like, it's not just like a weekly show or a, you know, a daily show.
It's like multiple people also like pooling resources and going into this thing.
And so there's, A variety of voices as well we're even though dave rubin does not agree on one hundred percent of the things the temple says they do have you know differing different styles and different opinions on certain types of things you know.
They're both your fashion on the right but they do you know there are disagreements between them and they use their independent free thinker disagree and bounce ideas back and forth you know we just we just can't do that on the left.
LIAM And temporary speech censorious people.
We don't know what it's like to be marginalized.
JUSTIN To be marginalized, really.
I mean, to be marginalized.
This is a joke, I'm stealing this from some more news or even more news, but, man.
To be victimized to the point of $400,000 a month salary.
That's gotta be the worst fate imaginable.
LIAM Anybody wants to victimize me on Patreon.
JUSTIN I certainly wouldn't want to be victimized like that, y'know?
Patreon and bio.
Absolutely.
Victimise me, folks, I love it.
I've talked about having some personal issues in my life right now.
If I got $400,000, just one payment of $400,000, every problem in my life would immediately disappear.
Yes, me too.
Everything that I've spent years struggling with, everything that I'm dealing with, just goes away if I have that amount of money just sitting in my mind pocket.
It's done.
$100,000, one Tim Pool video would solve every problem I have, basically.
Exactly.
You're just trying to undercut me now.
That's what.
It's a bidding war.
It's a bidding war, folks.
I'm a bigger whore than Daniel.
We're going to end up splitting 20 bucks is what's going to happen.
As usual.
This is one part of a much wider operation, isn't it?
Let's be honest, like $10 million is not really that much money.
Yeah.
I mean, not on the scale of like the government of Russia can produce.
I mean, it's literally the largest country on earth.
It doesn't have the largest economy on Earth, of course, but they've got money.
It's not like these two guys are the only ones.
And honestly, Link, I believe you can fill out certain kinds of paperwork and make certain kinds of disclosures, and you can do this legally.
They just don't, because then it just becomes this obvious Russian state media.
Yeah, that's right.
The deniability is part of the ideological message.
I've seen some people on the right kind of defend this as, well, it's a free speech issue.
Like, shouldn't they be allowed to say what they want?
Shouldn't they be allowed?
And you know what?
That's a legitimate free speech argument is, you know, hey, why can't we just let Russian media just buy television stations and just run influence campaigns among the people of the United States?
That's a perfectly reasonable free speech position to have, I think.
And I'm not even necessarily wholly opposed to that idea, but that's not the way the laws work.
It's just not the case.
I mean, without wanting to sound like I'm making any apologia for these people, because I'm very, very definitely not, there is a hefty dose of hypocrisy here.
Firstly, because I'd be very interested to know how much Saudi money, for instance, or Israeli money is floating around the United States influencer online media ecosystem and political ecosystem generally.
And the other thing, of course, is the United States does this sort of shit in foreign countries.
And when foreign countries shut down front organisations in their countries, set up or co-opted by the United States, to do very much this same sort of thing, the United States is, of course, outraged about these attacks on free speech.
So, there is a lot of hypocrisy here.
Yeah, I mean, I didn't want to get into the weeds on that, but everything you say is correct.
This isn't about, like, Russia bad, because this is about, like, there is just a kind of fundamental geopolitical thing happening here.
Well, I think the thing that makes it different for me is that Russia is currently the global wellspring of neofascism.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, we don't, we don't disagree.
We don't disagree with the, like the principle that people should be allowed to buy media or to, to pay money for, for things like that.
It's the particular message they're sending is the, it's kind of the issue here, you know?
And yeah, no, I, I absolutely agree with that.
No, it's Keats, I'm afraid.
tweeted and then what are they called toots it's toots on blue sky are they still doing that no i'm just gonna call him post keats oh god no we're i'm calling him post he posted his blue sky post sorry i i like blue sky sex positive you know his post you know it's like hey you guys should do an episode and it's like yeah no i mean i woke up this morning to to you tweeting it or to dm me about that and i was like well okay yeah no i think you're right i think we should do a we So, we decided to do an episode.
But yeah, I don't know that... ALICE We've done an episode!
So I hope you're happy!
Honestly, David, he is probably, at this point, obviously not the largest financial provider of this program, but certainly the biggest booster that I know of, of I Don't Speak German, who isn't on the microphone every episode.
David has always been really, really great to me personally.
He's always there, if I have a question for him about Bitcoin or crypto or whatever's going on, AI, he always gets back to me.
I mean, he's just a really, really lovely guy, and especially when he called us, it's like, okay, well, we gotta... it's David, you know?
Like, you gotta... LIAM It's David, we gotta heed David's call.
He even listens to my other podcasts about horror movies, you know, those guys are a glutton for punishment.
OK, so I feel like we've done the Tenet Media episode, and I think, apart from the bit at the start, obviously, about a mass shooting and the right-wing's co-optation of that, I think that was a lot of fun.
So thank you, Daniel, for joining me for that, and thank you, listeners, for joining us for this.
And again, any left-wing billionaires out there that want to victimize me to the tune of huge amounts of money to make these, feel free, please.
I have no integrity at all.
I will take your money.
I won't ask any questions.
I won't even... You don't even have to go through a Belgian financier, a fake Belgian financier.
We will just take it.
Yep, absolutely.
Please, Mark Cuban, you know where my DMs are, you know?
George Soros, man, can you imagine if we were actually Soros-funded?
That would be the funniest thing imaginable.
What if George Soros is, like, quietly giving us, like, 20 bucks a month?
Like, you know, in the Patreon, like he's under a new pseudonym?
And George Soros is personally like, ah, yeah, we'll throw 20 bucks or something.
And we're technically Soros-funded media.
Yeah, those hedge fund and financier and those billionaire guys, they just love my stuff about how we should overthrow capitalism.
