Earlier this month, the Department of Justice charged two employees of the Russian state TV channel RT with illegally pouring nearly $10 million into a Tennessee company, Tenet Media. The company, founded by now-former Blaze TV personality Lauren Chen and her husband, had six right-wing YouTubers on its payroll. Among them were personalities like Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, and Lauren Southern, who—in exchange for large sums of money—unwittingly agreed to spout propaganda from Russian state-controlled media to their more than 6 million YouTube subscribers.

The two RT employees—who claimed that the endeavor was being funded by a fictitious European banker who mysteriously had no internet footprint to speak of —delivered these influencers content designed to paint Russia in a positive light and make Ukraine look villainous in the eyes of their American audiences. For example, although ISIS took credit for a terrorist attack at a Moscow concert hall, the Russians requested that their influencers blame Ukraine for the attack instead, to which “Commentator 3” said he would be “ happy to cover it.” At another point, a Tenet producer was sent a video produced by Tucker Carlson in which he marvels at the abundance of food within a Russian supermarket and says “It will radicalize you against our leaders.” Even though a Tenet producer described the video as “overt shilling,” they posted it anyway, and Johnson boosted it on his social media feed.

On one hand, it’s quite unnerving that a revanchist, imperialist regime like Vladimir Putin’s has the ability to so effortlessly con U.S. media figures with millions of followers. But there is a delicious irony to learning that a bunch of people who rail against “elites” and the “establishment” and claim to be “a network of heterodox commentators” as Tenet’s website still reads, turned out to be serving the “establishment” of another country. In addition to revealing these YouTubers as incredibly gullible, this scandal also reveals them to be quite craven and willing to spout any nonsense their handlers asked of them. For instance, last month, while still in the employ of Tenet, Pool published a video in which he pounded the table and shouted that “Ukraine is the enemy of this country” and that “Ukraine is now accused, a German warrant issued for blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline [stammers] triggering this conflict.” (The Nord Stream II bombing, in fact, happened seven months after Russia invaded Ukraine, so it could not have “triggered this conflict.”) Pool then said that the United States “should rescind all funding and financing [for Ukraine], pull out all military support, and we should apologize to Russia.” After it was revealed that he’d been duped by Russian propagandists, Pool hastily put a Ukrainian flag—the flag of the enemy!—in his Twitter screen name and wrote, “Putin is a scumbag, Russia sucks donkey balls.” 

Pool, Rubin, and Johnson have all claimed to be “victims” in this fiasco. This is how the Department of Justice described it and it may be true in the legal sense—they appear to have been deceived by malicious actors who took advantage of their naivety. But typically, being a “victim” implies that one has experienced some sort of loss. Usually, victims do not walk away from their victimization with giant sacks of cash. Per the Washington Post’s reporting on the indictment:

Rubin received $400,000 a month for 16 videos, plus a performance bonus and a $100,000 signing bonus — all for a series in which Rubin commented on dumb internet clips that often received just roughly 1,000 views per episode. Tenet also proved lucrative for Pool, who made $100,000 per episode for a weekly show he hosted, according to prosecutors. The same month that Tenet launched, Pool purchased a skate park in Martinsburg, W. Va., as well as other significant real estate purchases in the same area.

Pool, Rubin, and Johnson, all acted scandalized to learn that they’d been receiving money from a foreign power. But according to a CNN report earlier this week, none of them have offered to give any of that money back, even though they are all quite wealthy. The obvious conclusion to draw is that no matter what they say, these people simply have no principles and are willing to say whatever they think will get them paid. 

Some independent media hosts have pointed to these hefty chunks of change to suggest that these YouTubers should have been able to sniff out the con and willfully deluded themselves for the paycheck. For the Some More News podcast, Katy Stoll expressed incredulity, pointing out that the view counts on the videos put out by Tenet were very low—“too low,” she said, “to warrant anything near that amount of money.” She continued: “You're not asking yourself who could this mystery person possibly be, but just blindly accepting $400,000 a month and then very clearly parroting Russian talking points?” On Breaking Points, the conservative co-host Saagar Enjeti suggested something similar, saying “We work in this business. Sorry, those sums are insane.”

But I actually think it’s entirely plausible that the conservative commentators who slurped up this Russian cash simply thought that receiving that amount of money was normal. As Enjeti’s Breaking Points co-host Krystal Ball pointed out in that same podcast segment, “There is a lot of ideological money floating around in right-wing circles. […] There’s all these billionaires who want to have their taxes cut, [...] and $10 million is nothing to them.” 

This is evident if you look at the kind of money that right-wing hosts routinely rake in. We got an inside look into how lucrative a career in right-wing media can be from last year’s very public falling-out between Steven Crowder and the Daily Wire. While in the process of leaving the Blaze, Crowder entered negotiations with the Daily Wire. (Presumably, they figured that Crowder’s climate change denial and belief that women shouldn’t be allowed to divorce their husbands would make him a perfect fit.) But negotiations broke down and Crowder went on a tirade on his YouTube channel in which, without naming the Daily Wire specifically, he accused them of offering him a “slave contract.” According to files released publicly by Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boreing, Crowder was offered $50 million over his first four years, including an additional $25 million upon renewal. Crowder claimed that his outrage was due to what he argued were censorious requirements that he avoid getting himself demonetized by saying offensive things… in other words, avoid costing their business money. (For the record, Crowder had recently gotten himself into hot water for suggesting that Kanye West, known for his antisemitic remarks, had made some salient points about Jewish people.) But as Boreing revealed, Crowder “wanted at least $100 million.”

For a sense of proportion, recall that one of the left’s biggest influencers, Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, was labeled as inauthentic, a “champagne socialist,” when it was revealed that he bought a  $2.7 million home. It’s arguably fair to wonder whether people who’ve made careers lamenting wealth inequality should be buying multi-million dollar mansions in West Hollywood. But Steven Crowder was offered more than ten times Hasan’s reported yearly earnings and dismissed it as the equivalent of slavery.

The Russians funding Tenet seemed keenly aware of the kinds of expectations right-wing media personalities have, expressing their willingness to shell out more than $2 million a year per contract to “get the right person on board.” While pondering which talking heads to bring on, they were counseled by Chen (who was allegedly aware that she was dealing with Russians), that in order to get Dave Rubin on board, “it would need to be closer to 5 million [dollars] yearly for him to be interested.” Pool, meanwhile, said on a stream that receiving $100,000 per video is “around market value for offers we had already received,” and that the money has been “inconsequential” to his lifestyle. These are your crusaders against the “elite,” folks!

 The right is swimming in a Scrooge McDuck money pit that is simply inconceivable to those of us on the left. Current Affairs got off the launchpad from a Kickstarter campaign that brought in a little under $17,000. The Daily Wire got off the ground when a fossil fuel billionaire, Farris Wilks—who remains a part owner of the company—dropped $4.7 million on top of Ben Shapiro. Wilks and his brother, Dan, also gave $8 million to PragerU as of last year. (Other top PragerU donors have included Donors Trust—the “dark-money ATM” of the right—the late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, and the charitable trust for Fidelity Bank In 2024, PragerU operated with a budget of more than $75 million.) Both of those propaganda mills are able to spend millions of dollars a year to plaster high-traffic sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Google with ads. Until recently, if you searched the term “climate change” on Google, one of the first links you’d be shown is a piece of “sponsored” content from PragerU titled “The Truth About Climate Change | Fake Climate Catastrophe.” YouTube users have been served spots for “anti-woke razors” before videos. And when Shapiro’s colleague Matt Walsh was taking heat over nauseating comments he’d made about how teen pregnancy is normal because 16- and 17-year-old girls are the “most fertile,” the Daily Wire dropped nearly $100,000 to run a Facebook ad campaign in which Walsh’s colleagues called him a victim of “cancel culture” who is “doing God’s work.” 

Then there’s former American Conservative writer Rod Dreher, who was able to make a six-figure salary maintaining one of the most thoroughly deranged blogs online—in which he gave harried soliloquies about everything from the dangers of “sissy hypnosis” porn to how Blue’s Clues has gone woke to the demonic “possession” and exorcism of his friend’s wife—because his entire career was “bankrolled by a single donor,” Howard Ahmanson Jr. (And as the rich giveth, so too can they take away, as Rod’s sugar daddy did when he saw a post calling a Black child’s uncircumcised penis a “primitive root wiener” and realized Rod’s blog was “too weird” to keep funding.)

Lots of right-wing media outlets would not exist if they did not provide value for the billionaires that fund them. The New York Post is Exhibit A: It is a catastrophic money pit that has been estimated to lose Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp anywhere from $50 to 110 million per year. But as Michael Tomasky wrote earlier this year for the New Republic, “It’s worth every penny. It gives him power. The Post’s editors know how to use its front page and its news pages to shape discourse.” Ditto for the dozens of other failing papers and TV stations being gobbled up by fellow billionaire David Smith, who owns Sinclair Broadcasting and has turned once-proud papers like the Baltimore Sun into ones that scaremonger about immigrants and call the “transgender movement” a “cancer.”

The left is at an inherent structural disadvantage, for obvious reasons. When a fundamental part of your philosophy is that billionaires shouldn’t exist, billionaires are not going to be eager to give you money. And even if an eager billionaire donor did hope to push their agenda by funding a left-wing venture, any left-winger who actually believed in their stated ideals of equality and justice should be willing to dismiss the offer out of hand. Meanwhile, billionaires are busy tossing big burlap sacks with “$$$” on the side to the right. There are things that could be done about this: Short of just taxing them out of existence (our preferred solution), there could be limits on how much money ultrarich individuals are allowed to spend on political messaging. Or at the very least, we could require that media organizations disclose their donors, so viewers could decide for themselves whether they want to get climate change news paid for by a fracking company.

In the meantime, though, keeping a robust left media ecosystem alive will be a challenge.  As I wrote last year, the profit motive has hollowed out journalism, and what we need to do is bring journalism and media back into the realm of public service without relying on shadowy donors, ads, or paywalls. It can be done. Current Affairs has sustained itself and produced an acclaimed body of work (largely without paywalls!) for close to a decade now on nothing but support from our readers and podcast listeners. There are lots of other independent publications trying to do the same, and they’re worthy of your support.