The Interference Is Ongoing
Russian paid propagandist Lauren Chen is back in US; Jack Smith proves Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election. Who will you believe in 2026? Russian paid propagandists or war criminal prosecutors?
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Addicted to Benny Johnson
My heart sunk when one of the sweetest, least judgy people I know started in on immigrants. This was in 2023, and during Covid lockdown, he began watching a lot of YouTube. I asked him where he was getting his information from, and he told me ‘Benny Johnson.’
I hadn’t heard of Benny Johnson, but it took me about five seconds to determine he was a Russian propagandist under the guise of conservatism. A quick scroll of his YouTube channel, and I could see he hit on all the same Russian talking points you’d find in a Solovyov feed. I called my friend and told him my findings — based on four decades of being an investigative reporter, and the last decade dedicated to investigating Russian active measures — but when I delivered the news, it was met with the usual cognitive dissonance. He was already addicted to Johnson’s slop.
A year later, when it was revealed that Johnson was on the payroll of Russian military intelligence, receiving millions of dollars to push Russian propaganda under the guise of conservatism, I called my friend to ask if he’d heard the news. He told me he had and had stopped watching Johnson as soon as he learned he took money from Russian cutouts.
September 4, 2024
It was September 4, 2024, weeks before the presidential election. But it was too late, he’d gone from being an anti-Trump California liberal to anti-democratic. His brain had been soaked in Putin’s agenda, and he was now anti-Biden, Harris, Newsom, science, etc. He referred to vaccines as ‘the jab,’ he’d watched Plandemic and 2000 Mules. I’d lost him to the information war.
Nevertheless, I persisted. As the stories broke in a flurry that September about Russian interference, I wrote through the night, reading every release from the DOJ, the FBI, every indictment, affidavit, US Treasury Department, and US State Department sanctions reports to inform my readers that Russia was engaged in massive multi-layered operations to steal reality from Western nations and replace it with anti-democratic distortion. We had so little time, so I wrote, and wrote, and wrote.
Russian military intelligence, as directed by Vladimir Putin, was aiming for total control of our information environment, in order to get Westerners to vote and act against their own interests. They used propaganda, cyber attacks, and domestic traitors within their target countries. According to an FBI affidavit, Elon Musk was coordinating with the Russians in charge of the operations that mirrored .
JD Vance and Peter Thiel’s Rumble gave the Russians and their useful idiots a platform, with Vance crying ‘free speech’ each time it was revealed.
Covert Influence Activities Are Not Journalism
The US State Department said pointedly that it was not about free speech — that covert influence activities are not journalism.
I thought, surely now that people know influencers like Johnson and Tim Pool are paid millions by Russia they’ll understand they’ve been manipulated. I demanded the DOJ release the names of the other 600 Americans who were doing Russian propaganda. Justin Trudeau told us two of them — Jordan Peterson and Tucker Carlson.
But we needed all the names. We were now days away from the election, and we needed the names. Someone in Biden’s camp decided it would be a distraction to turn the spotlight on Russia, and again, the doomsday clock ticked louder.
So I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote. I wrote about Tenet Media, and the doppelganger affadavit, all the while, truth and reality getting buried under a sea of Trump’s latest clickbait fascism — an M.O. that continues today.
On December 30, we learned that Trump’s goons just helped Lauren Chen return to the US from her native Canada. Chen was exposed on September 4, 2024, as a propagandist for Russia. She founded Tennessee-based Tenet Media, the YouTube network bankrolled through cutouts connected to RT, Kremlin-funded state TV connected to Russian military intelligence, according to the US State Department.
Tenet Media was paying the likes of Johnson and Pool — now part of the White House press pool.
Chen had been forced to leave the US after the 2024 federal indictment alleging in granular detail how Tenet was paid by Russia.
On Christmas Day, she announced she was back in the US, thanking the new leadership at the FBI, among others, as “we celebrate the birth of Christ.”
She. Was. Paid. By. The. Russians.
She. Then. Paid. Influencers. With. Russian. Money.
This is a very important indicator that the Russian mind control operations, which have been so effective on bringing their own people in line, will be the fight of 2026.
In 2024, they were able to erase people’s awareness of President Biden’s successes — that he had brought America’s economy back to the strongest in the world. In 2026, we see the same tactics being deployed in Europe and the EU — a targeted erasure of people’s awareness that they are living in countries where human rights, dignity, health care, education, and rule of law still persist. Using AI, Polish people are being targeted on TikTok with pretty-girl fakes telling them to leave the EU.
Whataboutism Writ Large
When I wrote in my most recent Hot Type column in Byline about the very name of the Soviet Union being a lie, I was attacked by anonymous accounts trying to discredit my work by saying the United Kingdom was the greatest lie.
Classic whataboutism, a Russian propaganda technique. I wasn’t writing about the history of the UK, I was writing about the biggest story of 2025 — that America is under Russian occupation, and too few are grasping that reality because as long as Red Sparrow Beard Melania looks pretty in a silver dress, who cares…
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
I stick with reality, staying very close to those who bring it.
On New Year’s Eve, I read the 255-page transcript of testimony by former Special Counsel Jack Smith, where he defended the prosecution of Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election and for illegally hoarding classified documents after leaving office.
The election investigation, he explained, “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power.”
Fact.
Smith said he understood that Trump wants to seek retribution against him.
Smith understands criminals. He was a chief prosecuter at international tribunals in The Hague, investigating war crimes, including for the Kosovo Specialist Chambers and the International Criminal Court (ICC), before being appointed US Special Counsel in 2022 to oversee investigations into Trump. Smith's background includes leading the DOJ's Public Integrity Section, as well as working on genocide and war crimes cases internationally.
Public Integrity
So as we begin the new year, I ask you: where are you going to get your information from? The Jack Smiths? Or the Lauren Chens?
Will you believe a man who prosecuted war criminals at The Hague?
Or a Russian paid spokesmodel hired to distort reality?
Have a look at Tenet Media’s twitter feed, frozen in time, to the date — September 4, 2024, when the federal indictment dropped. YouTube took down their feed. Musk promoted it. Music added by me:
Where we get our information from has never mattered more.
To the Hague
As I try to devise a way out of the troubles in the collective West, I do believe it starts with getting Trump and Putin to The Hague for crimes against humanity. There are others, deserving, but start with the head of the hydra and work your way down.
And also, do let’s think about prosecuting the propagandists, too, and what that would look like. Multiple Nazi propagandists were prosecuted at the Nuremberg Trials for crimes arising from hate speech and the incitement of mass murder. Trump and Putin are propagandists, as well as mass murderers.
It matters what you know.
Right now in America, Musk and Trump want you to think immigrants are the enemy. That’s an old playbook, used to distract and control.
Maybe spend a few hours re-reading my reports from 2024 about how Russia used the firehose approach to deny us reality.
Here are some key ones:
‘DESTABILIZING DEMOCRACIES’: Canadian PM Names Tucker Carlson and Jordan Peterson as Paid By Russia
It might also be worthwhile to re-read my 2016 election attack series:
As I wrote in Part One:
The Crime Scene
Twitter 2016 is a crime scene. The chalk outline around the decaying corpse is an ominous warning — metaphorical yellow tape serves as an attempt to keep people out. But I go in — probing the bombed out traces of memetic warfare. And navigating my way between the mounds of deleted tweets and suspended accounts, I forensically piece together the carcass of 2016 — an election stolen by Kremlin-sponsored attacks facilitated by misogynistic white nationalists — superspreaders of GRU lies.
I start pulling at threads, one at a time, because criminal propagandists reveal their crimes through projection. Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones’ InfoWars, Dinesh D’Souza, Don Jr. and Glenn Greenwald are each defending Douglass Mackey, a convicted felon just sentenced to seven-months in prison for his role in a conspiracy to interfere with the 2016 election. He targeted people of color to vote for Hillary Clinton with ‘vote by text’ memes — and thousands of people contacted the line.
Voting by text isn’t a thing, but election interference is.
According to the FBI, Douglass Mackey, who went by the pseudonym “Ricky Vaughn” in multiple accounts, was previously convicted of the charge of Conspiracy Against Rights at trial by a federal jury in Brooklyn.
I had reported on Douglass Mackey, superspreader of Russian-intelligence lies during the run up to the 2016 election and beyond. In threads and investigations, I noted how he was a prolific tweeter of GRU propaganda from Prigozhin’s troll farm, and he wasn’t alone — Mike Flynn and Don Jr. also tweeted Russian state-sponsored lies from the St. Petersburg operation — Ten_GOP.
But the cabal of Russian fanboys simping for Mackey is a loud confession. They are trying to make the MAGA cult members believe that Mackey is going to prison for making Hillary memes.
Number one, that shows an overt downplaying of memetic warfare — trolling is a cheap way to destroy people and countries.
It’s guerrilla warfare in cyberspace and memes are the weapons.
Number two, why are they so worried? What are they trying to hide?
We know now much more than we did a decade ago.
I’ve been at this work for ten years, and I’m just getting started.
Don’t be pressured to normalize any of this. We know beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump is a criminal, who tried to overturn the 2020 election, and that Russia interfered on his behalf to get him elected multiple times.
As that great patriotic American Jimmy Carter told us:
“I think a full investigation would show that Trump didn't actually win the election in 2016. He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.”—Fmr President Jimmy Carter, June 28, 2019
The interference is ongoing.
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I like that phrase “stealing reality.” It compresses the motive, the sinister character of the memetic piracy, and the epistemic effect, all into two words. This was an interesting post, to say the least
So much “there” there 😭🤬