The most striking thing about Lauren Chen, in hindsight, is how she managed to be everywhere. Until earlier this month, when the Department of Justice alleged that Chen, a Canadian influencer and self-described “Christian nationalist” with ties to the far right, had been secretly funded by Russia, she wasn’t much of a mainstream figure. But, through a remarkable number of platforms, podcasts, spinoffs, guest appearances, and side hustles, she was undoubtably prolific in conservative spaces.

Chen, now 30 years old, began her public career around 2016 and had since managed to build remarkably diverse ties across the right-wing spectrum, courting conservative media, white nationalists like Richard Spencer, likeminded podcasters, “paleo conservatives,” comedians turned aggrieved libertarians, and many others. She even dipped her toe into lifestyle influencing, peddling both ivermectin and a chintzy soap line she co-owned with her mother. She appeared as a commentator on The Blaze’s TV channel, as a “contributor” for conservative activist group Turning Point USA, and made appearances on Fox News, One America News, Newsmax, and in videos from The Daily Wire, Rebel Media, and PragerU. With a young daughter and a home in Nashville that she shared with husband Liam Donovan, who served as president of their video-making company, Tenet Media, it appeared to be paying off. 

Chen’s career raises questions about mercenary personalities willing to amplify any message. 

All of that came to an abrupt end earlier this month, when the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment alleging that Tenet was secretly funded by RT, the Russian state media company that functions as a Kremlin propaganda arm. The department said Chen had received money from RT’s parent company since 2021, billing them for videos that she posted without any kind of disclosure of that financial relationship on her personal YouTube channel. (Chen has not been personally indicted or accused of criminal wrongdoing; the filing only charges Konstantin Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, two RT employees, for their alleged role in the scheme.) A “reporter” for Tenet announced the following day that the company was shutting down.

The well-known conservative and far-right commentators who worked for Tenet—including Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Lauren Southern—have all described themselves as unwitting victims in a scheme the DOJ alleges was meant to promote pro-Putin talking points and deepen partisan divisions within American society. But the indictment explains that at least one of them had suspicions. When one (who appears to be Rubin or Pool) began asking questions about the supposed French funder of the company, a French banker and philanthropist named “Eduard Grigoriann,” Chen sent that commentator a fake resume, which the indictment alleges was provided to her “by another fictional persona.” The resume claimed that Grigoriann had “held various positions in Brussels and France at a multinational bank,” and featured a stock photo of a model peering out a private jet’s window. That, apparently, was enough to quell concerns.

But while Chen and Donovan allegedly worked hard to conceal the source of the funding for Tenet from the commentators they were paying, they also continued building her brand outside of the company. She appeared at a Young Women’s Leadership Summit hosted by Turning Point USA earlier this year, on a borderline-ludicrous number of podcasts, and made a constant string of videos on YouTube and elsewhere, mocking feminism, gender non-conforming people, migrants and anyone who might need welfare—standard conservative targets. In the course of doing so, she barely mentioned Tenet at all, focusing much more on her roles at The Blaze and Turning Point USA. 

But Chen’s motivations for allegedly partnering with Russia, if they go beyond simply making a buck, are still hazy. The indictment depicts her and Donovan as mainly preoccupied with money—how quickly “the Russians,” as they called their funders, would pay their invoices. Chen’s career seems to show someone of ideological flexibility, willing to promote a range of ideas across the conservative spectrum—if it comes with time in the spotlight: anti-feminism, fearmongering about migrants, barely-concealed racism. If the allegations are proven true, Chen’s career could be read as a cautionary tale not just about the dangers of foreign influence peddling, but about the kinds of mercenary domestic personalities who—out of self-interest, a lack of curiosity about how their actions might affect the world, or simple greed—are all too willing to help amplify any message. 

Chen was born Lauren Yu Sum Tam in Hong Kong in 1994, but was raised in Canada and came to the US for college, eventually graduating from Brigham Young University. (Unlike most of BYU, Chen is not Mormon and said in 2018 that she “wouldn’t recommend” the school to other Christians.) Beginning in 2016, Chen (a stage name she adopted at the start of her career) began making YouTube videos, calling herself Roaming Millennial. It was a time, as NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny points out, that YouTube was incentivizing engagement above all else: “Political and algorithmic incentives amplified the most extreme and entertaining voices and reactionary takes, making stars of creators on the ideological fringe.” 

In her videos, Chen was all too willing to platform people even more radical than herself, earning her first taste of true notoriety in May 2017 with a jaunty three-part interview featuring white supremacist and alt-right figurehead Richard Spencer. She seemed thrilled when the series earned a response video from YouTuber Natalie Wynn, who makes intelligent cultural commentary under the name ContraPoints; Chen joked on Twitter that she was releasing the next installment of the series early, just for Wynn. 

“No one (Richard Spencer included) is advocating people be killed,” she told one person on Twitter who objected to the series. “Calm down.” (Spencer would participate in the violent Unite the Right rally three months later, in which counter-protestor Heather Heyer was murdered by white nationalist James Alex Fields.) 

Chen hawked ivermectin, urging Americans to seek “healthcare without the propaganda.” 

A quest for attention, whether positive or negative, seemed to drive many of Chen’s next moves, as did branding herself as a young woman in opposition to mainstream feminism. She began writing for the anti-feminist women’s site Evie Magazine in late 2018, contributing pieces deriding hookup culture, careerism in women, and, in early 2020, a column that argued it wasn’t racist to call Covid-19 “the Chinese virus” and derided Chinese state media’s “propaganda” covering the disease. Later in the pandemic, Chen hawked ivermectin as a cure for Covid, entering into a partnership with an anti-vaccine, Florida-based company called The Wellness Company, whose “medical board” includes Dr. Peter McCullough, a cardiologist famous for promoting bad information about Covid. Chen’s page on the retailer’s site is still live, urging Americans to seek “healthcare without the propaganda.” (TWC did not respond to a request for comment about whether their partnership with Chen is ongoing.)

As the indictment lays out and her internet footprint makes clear, Chen worked directly for RT prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. By 2021, Chen was writing op-eds for RT serving the same fare she produced everywhere else, although with more overt pro-Russian messaging. In February 2022, for instance, argued that Americans who opposed “mounting calls for war”—she named Tulsi Gabbard, Jill Stein, and Tucker Carlson—“can expect to be smeared as unpatriotic.” 

While that was the last of dozens of pieces she wrote for RT, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Chen tweeted and posted to Telegram in opposition to US funding for the Ukrainian military. The Canadian citizen positioned her stance as an America-first approach, writing in February, “Neither Ukraine nor Israel should be allowed to loot the coffers of the American taxpayers. Especially when America’s borders are in such neglected disarray.” 

Donovan kept far less of a public presence than his wife. When Donovan did tweet about foreign policy, he presented himself as simply too naive to have an opinion about Russia. “I approach Russia (and some other topics) with complete agnosticism,” he posted in June 2023. “It would take far too much effort to gain reliable knowledge about something I can have very little to no impact on. I just hope for the best and leave it at that.”    

But according to the indictment, about two years before that tweet, Donovan and Chen had exchanged messages on Discord in May 2021 discussing payments from “the Russians” for her RT op-eds. “Also, the Russians paid,” she wrote. “So we’re good to bill them for the second month I guess.”

That money was only a prelude to the sums that the indictment pictured at play since August 2023, when Chen and Donovan began sending bimonthly invoices to a UK shell entity that would eventually total more than $10 million, including both payments to commenters and Chen and Donovan’s own “fees and commissions.” 

RT did not respond to a request for comment; the closest they’ve come to issuing a statement is an unbylined, English-language story about the indictments, which states that “Producing videos that highlight social and political divisions in the US is not a crime.”

Chen’s overt Putin boosterism attracted little attention or outrage among her conservative peers, where it stood out little from what others were also saying. In November 2023, more than a year into the invasion, she called him “pretty reasonable in regard to Ukraine.” In praising a rambling interview he did with Carlson, she called his performance “a two-hour dissertation on Russia’s history and its place on the world stage,” comparing him to President Biden, who she said, “could not finish a cohesive sentence in a five-minute carefully choreographed setting.” On Ukraine, her politics resemble not only those of people like Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who’s made attacks on Ukrainian military aid a cornerstone of her public policy, but those of JD Vance, the GOP’s vice presidential nominee.

Nor did anyone who appeared with Chen at public events seem to notice anything amiss. “I knew nothing about Lauren’s business endeavors,” says Erin Elmore, a Trump surrogate who featured alongside Chen earlier this year at the Turning Point women’s summit. “We only spoke briefly and this topic never came up. She was always cordial and we kept things very surface.” 

The end, when it did come, was exceedingly swift. After the DOJ indictment was unsealed, Pool, Rubin and Southern all quickly declared themselves to have been unaware of the ultimate source of their paychecks, with Pool announcing he would be “offering [his] assistance” to the FBI. Chen’s YouTube account and TikTok were both deleted within a week, while her Instagram, Twitter, Rumble, GETTR and Telegram accounts remain online, but silent. 

The reaction from the conservative galaxy, whose every planet Chen worked so hard to visit, has been muted. One of the only visible defenses came from far-right personality Candace Owens, who appeared many times with Chen on one another’s podcasts, and whose work was reshared multiple times by Tenet Media.

“Just pathetic to see what the conservative movement has become,” Owens tweeted. “Lauren Chen was always nice to everybody. At the first hint of trouble, everyone is throwing her under the bus and believing the DOJ.”

Through a spokesperson, Owens elaborated to Mother Jones: “In the limited capacity that I knew Lauren Chen, she was always very kind to me. While I have nothing to do with the case at hand, as someone who believes in due process, I will never enjoin myself to the media culture of ‘guilty until proven innocent.'”

Tayler Hansen, a self-described “field reporter” for Tenet, said on Twitter that the allegations against the company came as “a complete shock,” and that he has always been free to report whatever he wanted. Before his association with Tenet, Hansen was best known for filming drag performances and posting them online as part of a purported crusade for child safety, telling the Texas Tribune, “Drag queens do not belong around children. Neither does gender ideology.” Hansen has claimed that YouTube shut down his personal channel following the indictment; the Daily Dot reported that YouTube says Hansen shut it down himself, a version of events he denied. 

Hansen told Mother Jones in an email that he had not been contacted by the FBI, and that he learned that Tenet was no more in a message from Tenet’s ownership: “Hosts received a message from the owner explaining that due to the ongoing investigation we would not be able to continue with TENET Media.” He didn’t respond to questions about how he’d met Chen, and why the arrangement with Tenet didn’t strike him as suspicious. 

In contrast to Chen’s well-lit trail of podcasts and public appearances, the paths of the two RT employees accused of secretly funding Tenet are murky. One of the few English-language traces of either is a Twitter profile appearing to belong to Astafaneya, which she used to ask people posting on the platform about hot-button issues to come on TV. (When pursing such guests—someone who blamed a loved one’s Covid death on Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, say, or Afghans seeking to flee after the US withdrawal—she identified herself only as a “producer,” not identifying the outlet.)

While Chen has nuked any chances of a career with a more credible outlet, the people paying her did a far better job covering their trail. And it seems exceedingly likely that, should someone in the Russian government want to further shape US conservative opinion to their benefit, there are more influencers who, for the right price, will be willing to act as eager salespeople for whatever they’re trying to peddle.

In the week following the presidential debate, Elon Musk, Bill Ackman, and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene have all tweeted in support of a thinly sourced rumor claiming that a “whistleblower” at ABC News came forward to reveal that the event was rigged in favor of Kamala Harris.

The notion has taken on increasingly farcical dimensions, with some sources claiming that the whistleblower died in a car accident soon after revealing his secrets, and others, including Ackman and Musk, circulating a typo-riddled “affidavit” from said whistleblower that is obviously not real.

Fake news peddlers claimed Harris was given debate questions in advance.

Now, thanks to a curious bit of unwitting help from Google News, the name of a real person who recently died—a Virginia plumber and pipefitter who has no connection to ABC—is being tied to the story.

Following Donald Trump’s uninspired performance last Tuesday against Kamala Harris, prominent Trump supporters and fake news peddlers alike began claiming without evidence that the ABC News-hosted debate had somehow been rigged in Harris’ favor or that she’d been given the debate questions in advance. This isn’t new: Trump spent much of 2016 arguing the presidential debates would be rigged against him, claims he repeated in 2020 in regards to his first debate with Joe Biden. 

This time, however, the idea has taken on new contours, spread by Twitter users who claim to be independent journalists and researchers. One central player has been a person calling himself Black Insurrectionist, a Trump partisan who specifically says he’s not a journalist, but who claims to get inside information from figures in conservative politics. He’s also paid for his account, @DocNetyoutube, to be verified, meaning his replies and visibility are boosted on the site.

Two days after the debate, Black Insurrectionist claimed to have access to an affidavit from an ABC News whistleblower, outlining the ways in which Harris was given an upper hand. 

“I have just signed a non-disclosure agreement with the attorney of the whistleblower,” he wrote. “The affidavit states how the Harris campaign was given sample question [sic] which were essentially the same questions that were given during the debate and separate assurances of fact checking Donald Trump and that she would NOT be fact checked.” He added that he would release the affidavit after the attorney redacted the whistleblower’s name.

A few days later, he did so, producing a clumsily redacted, typo-filled, strangely-formatted document, dated September 9. The affidavit claimed that Harris was promised she wouldn’t be questioned about the health of Joe Biden or her tenure as “Attorney General in San Francisco”—a position that doesn’t exist.

When people pointed out a range of such shortcomings, Black Insurrectionist took to feuding with those arguing the document appears to be obviously fake. After claiming that the document was sent to Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson in unredacted form, he signaled a retreat. “I have gone as far with it as I can,” he tweeted on Monday morning. “The rest is up to the whistleblower and Congress.” 

None of this makes a lot of sense, and as ABC News told Mother Jones in a statement, “ABC News followed the debate rules that both campaigns agreed on and which clearly state: No topics or questions will be shared in advance with campaigns or candidates.”

Nonetheless, the affidavit story was quickly picked up by a variety of sources, including, as the Daily Beast first pointed out, a fake news site called Leading Report, whose tweet about the affidavit has been viewed nearly two million times. Other people who shared the affidavit include former Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos, who did a brief prison stint in 2018 for lying to the FBI, and Republican commentator and plagiarist Benny Johnson, who worked as a commentator for Tenet Media, the company that the DOJ alleges was secretly funded by employees of the state-backed Russian media company RT. (Johnson and other commentators have said they didn’t know about RT’s role.)

Another person promoting the affidavit is hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who tweeted it at Disney CEO Bob Iger on Sunday evening. (Disney is ABC News’ parent company.) “I find the allegations credible as written,” Ackman wrote, adding that he “strongly encourage[s]” Iger to investigate them. “Our democracy depends on transparency, particularly with regard to events which can impact the outcome of the presidential election. I ask on behalf of all voters that you treat these allegations with the seriousness they deserve.” Elon Musk was among those who retweeted Ackman’s post, which has now been viewed 5 million times. Musk also commented “Woah!” to another person sharing images from the supposed affidavit. (By Tuesday, Ackman had declared he planned to alert the SEC about ABC’s supposed debate misconduct.) 

As word of the supposed affidavit picked up steam, so too did a tale about the untimely death of the person purportedly behind it. On Sunday, Rep. Taylor Greene tweeted, “The ABC whistleblower who claimed Kamala Harris was given debate questions ahead of the debate has died in a car crash according to news reports.”

Those “reports” appeared to be a WordPress blog whose URL is “County Local News,” but whose homepage title reads “Bgrnd Search.” The site, which seems to be running malware, ran a gobbledygook story claiming that the unnamed whistleblower died in a car accident on September 13 outside Bethesda, Maryland.

Because of an unfortunate twist of Google News’ algorithms, the car-crash story is being given an unwitting boost. Searches for the words “ABC whistleblower” bring up an article about an unrelated 64-year-old person who died in a car accident on September 11 in Virginia. That story appears to be coming up because it links to another story about whistleblower lawsuits filed against the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) authority.

There’s no indication whatsoever that any ABC News “whistleblower” even exists, and even less that this Virginia man was him. But Google’s algorithm has helped create a link where none exists—at least one fake news site has named the deceased 64-year old as the whistleblower, although most others haven’t followed suit.

A Google spokesperson confirmed that the article on the car crash was likely appearing in unrelated news results because it contained similar keywords. The spokesperson said that in such situations, the company will typically look for ways to improve their algorithm to prevent future occurrences, rather than take immediate action.

While Greene, on the other hand, has since tweeted that the car crash story “appears to be false,” she still doubled down on repeating the earlier unproven claim that gave rise to it: “We need a serious investigation into the whistleblower’s report that Kamala Harris was given debate questions ahead of time from ABC!” 

A few months ago, a man crawling along a rooftop in Pennsylvania tried to murder Donald Trump at a campaign rally. Hours later, press releases started to circulate, from analysts, think tanks, politicians, and pundits, all offering to cut through the swell of confusion and misinformation. 

One of the people who washed up in my inbox was Ben Swann, whom a New York–based PR team presented as a journalist, and a source “to separate the conspiracy theories from the facts behind Trump’s assassination attempt.” 

This was curious for several reasons, the main being that Swann is himself an energetic conspiracy theorist, who first attracted notice in 2017 by touting Pizza­gate, a lurid conspiracy about child trafficking, while working for Atlanta’s CBS affiliate. Swann was ultimately fired, but quickly launched a new career as a star of the most conspiracy-addled corner of the online universe, posting to his website Truth in Media. He also began accepting millions of dollars in funding from a Kremlin-backed broadcaster to produce pro-Russian propaganda, according to disclosure forms he filed with the federal government when registering as a foreign agent. 

While Swann has prospered by confidently and cynically presenting himself as a force for truth, legitimate researchers of disinformation—the kind he’s spread for much of his professional life—are struggling. Over the last several years, the field has undergone a broadscale attack from politicians, right-wing media, and tech industry giants. As a result, research has been curtailed, people have been laid off, and academics working in the space even fear talking to one another, lest it leave them open to charges of “conspiring” by their adversaries.

Who is trying to kill their industry and why are their attacks working so well?

The timing of the crisis could hardly be worse. In January, the World Economic Forum highlighted dis- and misinformation as a top global threat over the next few years, citing concerns about increasingly sophisticated AI and the ways that disinformation could be used to destabilize consequential elections—including here in the United States, but also in the UK, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Mexico, and India. With our campaign season in full swing, the political implications of the battle over disinformation are obvious: Identifying fake news and misleading narratives is both a core part of the researchers’ work and routinely attacked as a political project.

The question that has begun to bedevil these disinformation researchers—used to recognizing patterns and ferreting out the source of influence operations—is, who is trying to kill their industry and why are their attacks working so well? Some see strong similarities to corporate-backed assaults on climate scientists in the 1990s, where oil and gas groups teamed up with conservative politicians to push back against the scientific consensus that human beings were causing climate change. Others see echoes of Cold War paranoia.

“The Red Scare came for academia also,” one researcher said recently, with exasperation. “How do we not see the historical parallels?”

There are, to be clear, still some cops on the beat. At the University of Washington, for instance, the Center for an Informed Public does rapid response on electoral rumors. Other academic institutions like Clemson University and the Shorenstein Center at Harvard continue to publish peer-reviewed research, like Shorenstein’s Misinformation Review, which looks at global misinformation. But no one disputes that the environment for doing this work has gotten much, much worse.

Led by Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, the Trump loyalist who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, Republicans in Congress have mounted an onslaught of harassing investigations and legislative attacks, accusing the field of colluding with the Biden administration to silence conservatives. Jordan and his committee investigators have grilled disinformation researchers from both Clemson and the University of Washington, where Dr. Kate Starbird, co-founder of the Center for an Informed Public, has been under sustained attack. The Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), which spent the last five years studying misinformation and misuse of social media platforms, has been gravely weakened after lawsuits brought by conservative pundits and anti-vaccine activists alleging it was promoting censorship. One was filed by America First Legal, the organization run by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who bragged it was “striking at the heart of the censorship-­industrial complex.” 

Stanford has denied that SIO is ending its work, saying it is simply facing “funding challenges.” But its founder, former Facebook executive Alex Stamos, has left, as has its star researcher Renée DiResta, who warned in a June New York Times op-ed that her field was “being dismantled.” Disinformation scholar Joan Donovan recently filed a whistleblower complaint against Harvard, alleging the university dismissed her to “protect the interests of high-value donors with obvious and direct ties to Meta.” (Harvard said her departure was due to her research lacking a faculty sponsor, and insisted “donors have no influence” over its work.)

The conservative legislative onslaught against disinformation shows very little sign of slowing. In May, Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky introduced a bill that would ban federal funding for “disinformation research grants, and for other purposes.” The right-wing Cato Institute applauded and praised Massie for fighting back against “censorship.”

Arguments over truth, and the role of the government and academia in safeguarding it, aren’t new.

Some blows have been self-inflicted. The industry had become, as researchers Chico Q. Camargo and Felix M. Simon put it in a 2022 paper, “too big to fail” without reckoning with its rapid growth or establishing enough “methodological rigor.” In a passage that inadvertently echoes conservative attacks, the paper, sponsored by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, cautions against the field’s “unique position,” given that whatever it determines “counts as mis-/disinformation will likely be regulated as such.”

Arguments over the nature of truth, and the role of the government and academia in safeguarding it, aren’t new. Before misinformation, disinformation, and fake news became phrases in America’s political lexicon, a similar storm wracked climate science. Beginning in the 1990s, climate researchers faced attacks from politicians and private groups alike, who contested their widely accepted finding that human activity was causing climate change. Fossil fuel–funded organizations like the Heartland Institute began loudly promoting scientists willing to attack the consensus while hosting a series of lavish conferences devoted to promoting alternative climate facts. In 2009, a hacker stole emails between climate researchers, helping launch a scandal, known as Climategate, sustained by false claims that the messages documented scientific misconduct.

One target of the hack, and of climate change deniers throughout this period, was Dr. Michael Mann, a University of Pennsylvania climatologist best known for his 1998 “hockey stick” graph, which showed sharply rising temperatures over the past century. Mann told me he sees “parallels between the politically and ideologically motivated attacks on climate scientists, public health scientists, and now disinformation researchers…including common actors (e.g. plutocrats and Republican politicians).” Mann ultimately sued some of his most strident critics for defamation, two conservative authors who published pieces for National Review and the libertarian think tank the Competitive Enterprise Institute; one called Mann’s research “fraudulent,” while the other wrote that he “could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except for instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data.” After more than a decade of delay, this winter a jury awarded Mann a $1 million judgment. 

“The only solution to the larger problem of ideologically motivated antiscience is to go after the bad actors behind it,” Mann says, not just through such lawsuits, but by voting out Republican politicians involved in the attacks. In 2022, GOP state officials filed a suit against the Biden administration that alleged the government’s requests that social platforms take down Covid misinformation were unconstitutional. The case, thanks to the arch-conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, made it to the Supreme Court, where it was dismissed for a lack of standing, but not before contributing to the chill cast over the broader anti-disinformation field.

At the same time fighting disinformation has become a political battleground, it has also shown to be a problem on which Big Tech has been all too eager to throw in the towel. After Elon Musk bought Twitter, it stopped policing Covid misinformation in November 2022. Since then the site and Musk in particular have energetically amplified disinformation; one calculation found that his posts sharing election and immigration disinformation have been seen more than 1 billion times. Mass layoffs at companies like Meta have made it harder to set and establish standards around misinformation, including election fraud or dangerous pseudomedical advice. On the whole, the platforms have prioritized gathering eyeballs and profit over safeguarding an informed public.

So, for industrious conspiracy peddlers, conditions are a dream: confused, acrid, and with the powers that be seemingly convinced that combating disinformation is more expensive or more trouble than it’s worth. From now on, if you need help, you might be on your own.

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.”

YouTube says it deleted Tenet Media’s account to fight “coordinated influence operations.”

Tenet Media’s founders, Canadian conservative YouTuber Lauren Chen and her husband Liam Donovan, have not publicly commented on the allegations against Tenet. Nor has Canadian far-right activist Lauren Southern, a Tenet contributor who appeared in many of their videos. Other prominent contributors to the site, including far-right commentator Tim Pool, described themselves as “victims” in the Tenet scandal, who were unaware that employees of RT, the Russian state media entity, were secretly funding the company. Pool announced on Thursday that he has been contacted by federal investigators, writing, “The FBI believes I have information relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation and have requested a voluntary interview. I will be offering my assistance in this matter.” 

The Daily Beast reported that Chen’s contract with Blaze TV, where she also made regular appearances, has been terminated. The company has also deleted her page on their website and wiped episodes of her podcast, “Pseudo-Intellectual,” from Spotify.

YouTube told NBC News’ Brandy Zadrozny that it had deleted Tenet Media’s channel and four others operated by Chen in light of the indictment and “after careful review,” writing the steps were part of “ongoing efforts to combat coordinated influence operations.”

For now, Tenet Media’s Twitter profile, Instagram page, TikTok, and Rumble pages all remain online—though none have been updated since the indictment was announced. 

A federal indictment unsealed on Wednesday alleges that a Tennessee-based media company which played home to several prominent right-leaning online commentators was secretly a Russian government-backed influence operation. The company is accused of receiving nearly $10 million from employees of Russia Today (RT), a Russian state-backed media company, as part of “a scheme to create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging,” according to Attorney General Merrick Garland.

The allegations were part of a broader effort against Russian influence sites seeking to subvert the elections.

Tenet Media worked with American conservative or heterodox media figures, including Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, and Lauren Southern, who variously present themselves as independent journalists, documentarians, and political commentators. Not all of them immediately commented on having been publicly linked to a foreign propaganda site, but Johnson soon tweeted that he and other influencers had been “victims in this alleged scheme.” In his own tweet, Pool echoed that line, writing, in part, “Should these allegations prove true, I as well as the other personalities and commentators were deceived and are victims.” Rubin, too, described himself as a victim, adding, “I knew absolutely nothing about any of this fraudulent activity. Period.”

The indictment, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleges that RT and two specific employees, Kostiantyn “Kostya” Kalashnikov and Elena “Lena” Afanasyeva, worked to funnel money to Tenet Media as part of a series of “covert projects” to shape the opinions of Western audiences. RT has faced cancellations and sanctions in the United States, Europe, Canada, and the UK after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; federal authorities allege those travails led the company to instead create more covert means of influencing public perception.

While Tenet is only referred to in the indictment as “U.S. Company 1,” details made it readily identifiable. The indictment alleges that Tenet’s coverage “contain[ed] commentary on events and issues in the United States, such as immigration, inflation, and other topics…consistent with the Government of Russia’s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions.”  

The indictment also alleges that not everyone affiliated with Tenet was unaware of the scheme, stating that “Founders 1 and 2” of the company knew the source of their funding. The founders of Tenet Media are Lauren Chen and her husband; Chen is a conservative influencer and YouTuber who’s hosted a show on Blaze TV and who’s affiliated with Turning Point USA. Her husband, Liam Donovan, identifies himself on Twitter as the president of Tenet Media. 

The indictment alleges that the RT officials and Founders 1 and 2 “also worked together to deceive two U.S. online commentators (“Commentator-I” and “Commentator-2″), who respectively have over 2.4 million and 1.3 million YouTube subscribers.” Dave Rubin has 2.4 million YouTube subscribers, while Tim Pool has 1.37 million.

The indictment indicates that even some of the people working at Tenet found their content heavy-handed. On February 15 of this year, Afanasyeva, using the name Helena Shudra, shared a video in a company Discord channel of what the indictment calls “a well-known U.S. political commentator visiting a grocery store in Russia.” While he’s not named in the indictment, it clearly matches Tucker Carlson, who toured such a grocery store, declaring himself slackjawed in wonder at how nice it was.

“Later that day,” the indictment adds, “Producer-I privately messaged Founder-2 on Discord: ‘They want me to post this’—referencing the video that Afanasyeva posted—but ‘it just feels like overt shilling.’ Founder-2 replied that Founder-I ‘thinks we should put it out there.’ Producer-I acquiesced, responding, ‘alright I’ll put it out tomorrow.'”

Tenet’s recent content on sites like YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok has been heavily larded with critical commentary about Kamala Harris. Conservative political commentator and documented plagiarist Benny Johnson, for instance, recently starred in a video about her “empty words.”

The allegations against Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva, who are charged with conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and conspiracy to commit money laundering, were part of a broader effort against what US authorities allege were Russian influence sites seeking to subvert the elections. Earlier on Wednesday, the Justice Department announced it had seized 32 internet domains used in what they called “Russian government-directed foreign malign influence campaigns.” 

At an Aspen Institute event on Wednesday afternoon, a DOJ official, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, said the Russians charged in the case “used American-based individuals and entities to exploit, frankly, our free society to try to undermine our election,” including by deploying “unwitting influencers to push Russian propaganda and pro-Russian messaging.” 

One of the last things Tenet posted on their social media sites before the indictment was unsealed concerned—ironically enough—a government employee accused of secretly acting as a foreign agent. Tenet posted a video of Linda Sun, a former aide to New York governors Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul who has been charged with using her position to benefit the Chinese government. Tenet seemed to suggest that a few words Sun offered on a video call endorsing diversity, equity, and inclusion measures were part of an alleged foreign-backed messaging plot.

“Why would the Chinese government want to push DEI in America?” a tweet from Tenet read.

Abby Vesoulis contributed reporting.

Update, September 4: This story has been updated to include Johnson, Rubin and Pool’s comments.

A federal indictment unsealed on Wednesday alleges that a Tennessee-based media company which played home to several prominent right-leaning online commentators was secretly a Russian government-backed influence operation. The company is accused of receiving nearly $10 million from employees of Russia Today (RT), a Russian state-backed media company, as part of “a scheme to create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging,” according to Attorney General Merrick Garland.

The allegations were part of a broader effort against Russian influence sites seeking to subvert the elections.

Tenet Media worked with American conservative or heterodox media figures, including Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, and Lauren Southern, who variously present themselves as independent journalists, documentarians, and political commentators. Not all of them immediately commented on having been publicly linked to a foreign propaganda site, but Johnson soon tweeted that he and other influencers had been “victims in this alleged scheme.” In his own tweet, Pool echoed that line, writing, in part, “Should these allegations prove true, I as well as the other personalities and commentators were deceived and are victims.” Rubin, too, described himself as a victim, adding, “I knew absolutely nothing about any of this fraudulent activity. Period.”

The indictment, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleges that RT and two specific employees, Kostiantyn “Kostya” Kalashnikov and Elena “Lena” Afanasyeva, worked to funnel money to Tenet Media as part of a series of “covert projects” to shape the opinions of Western audiences. RT has faced cancellations and sanctions in the United States, Europe, Canada, and the UK after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; federal authorities allege those travails led the company to instead create more covert means of influencing public perception.

While Tenet is only referred to in the indictment as “U.S. Company 1,” details made it readily identifiable. The indictment alleges that Tenet’s coverage “contain[ed] commentary on events and issues in the United States, such as immigration, inflation, and other topics…consistent with the Government of Russia’s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions.”  

The indictment also alleges that not everyone affiliated with Tenet was unaware of the scheme, stating that “Founders 1 and 2” of the company knew the source of their funding. The founders of Tenet Media are Lauren Chen and her husband; Chen is a conservative influencer and YouTuber who’s hosted a show on Blaze TV and who’s affiliated with Turning Point USA. Her husband, Liam Donovan, identifies himself on Twitter as the president of Tenet Media. 

The indictment alleges that the RT officials and Founders 1 and 2 “also worked together to deceive two U.S. online commentators (“Commentator-I” and “Commentator-2″), who respectively have over 2.4 million and 1.3 million YouTube subscribers.” Dave Rubin has 2.4 million YouTube subscribers, while Tim Pool has 1.37 million.

The indictment indicates that even some of the people working at Tenet found their content heavy-handed. On February 15 of this year, Afanasyeva, using the name Helena Shudra, shared a video in a company Discord channel of what the indictment calls “a well-known U.S. political commentator visiting a grocery store in Russia.” While he’s not named in the indictment, it clearly matches Tucker Carlson, who toured such a grocery store, declaring himself slackjawed in wonder at how nice it was.

“Later that day,” the indictment adds, “Producer-I privately messaged Founder-2 on Discord: ‘They want me to post this’—referencing the video that Afanasyeva posted—but ‘it just feels like overt shilling.’ Founder-2 replied that Founder-I ‘thinks we should put it out there.’ Producer-I acquiesced, responding, ‘alright I’ll put it out tomorrow.'”

Tenet’s recent content on sites like YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok has been heavily larded with critical commentary about Kamala Harris. Conservative political commentator and documented plagiarist Benny Johnson, for instance, recently starred in a video about her “empty words.”

The allegations against Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva, who are charged with conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and conspiracy to commit money laundering, were part of a broader effort against what US authorities allege were Russian influence sites seeking to subvert the elections. Earlier on Wednesday, the Justice Department announced it had seized 32 internet domains used in what they called “Russian government-directed foreign malign influence campaigns.” 

At an Aspen Institute event on Wednesday afternoon, a DOJ official, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, said the Russians charged in the case “used American-based individuals and entities to exploit, frankly, our free society to try to undermine our election,” including by deploying “unwitting influencers to push Russian propaganda and pro-Russian messaging.” 

One of the last things Tenet posted on their social media sites before the indictment was unsealed concerned—ironically enough—a government employee accused of secretly acting as a foreign agent. Tenet posted a video of Linda Sun, a former aide to New York governors Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul who has been charged with using her position to benefit the Chinese government. Tenet seemed to suggest that a few words Sun offered on a video call endorsing diversity, equity, and inclusion measures were part of an alleged foreign-backed messaging plot.

“Why would the Chinese government want to push DEI in America?” a tweet from Tenet read.

Abby Vesoulis contributed reporting.

Update, September 4: This story has been updated to include Johnson, Rubin and Pool’s comments.

In an alternate universe where you had no access to any source of information beyond Elon Musk’s tweets, it might appear that the owner of Twitter/X is currently fighting a pitched and heroic free speech battle with the Brazilian government. In reality, an extremely petty spat—Musk’s refusal to name a local legal representative in Brazil, per its laws—has spiraled wildly, leading Justice Alexandre de Moraes to suspend X from the country last week.

Now Musk is interweaving his feud with Brazil with his ever-growing boosterism of Donald Trump, warning that if the former president isn’t reelected, America will become just like Brazil.

Musk has directly linked his Brazilian feud with the need to defeat Kamala Harris.

In recent days, Musk’s Trump-backing has taken a more frenzied turn, with constant tweets about the need to reelect Trump, and warning of dire and increasingly farfetched consequences if he doesn’t retake office. He’s shared a lengthy series of stories about crimes supposedly committed by undocumented people, writing in one instance, “So many lives have been lost, because Democrat policies pander to the criminal clients. Criminals vote overwhelmingly Democrat, so they don’t want to lose their votes.” In a continued fixation on migrants and crime, he’s also reshared posts from Chaya Raichik of the far-right Twitter account Libs of TikTok, in which she claims that “migrant gangs” took over an apartment building in Colorado. (Aurora’s interim chief of police has denied that, telling a local ABC affiliate that “gang members have not taken over this complex.”)  

Musk has also directly linked his Brazilian feud with the need to defeat Kamala Harris, retweeting and agreeing with the account End Wokeness, who wrote, “Kamala supports what Brazil just did to X. How do I know? She wants to do it here.” The clip the account linked to is an interview Harris did with CNN’s Jake Tapper in 2019, where she said that Donald Trump has “lost his privileges” in his use of Twitter and his account “should be taken down” by the company. These remarks were made during a period when Trump was heavily using the platform during his impeachment proceedings to engage in what Democrats called witness intimidation. Some Twitter users resharing the clip in 2024, like presidential-dropout-turned-Trump-booster Robert F. Kennedy Jr, have falsely implied that the conversation happened more recently and that Harris was referring to Elon Musk. 

Musk also reshared and agreed with a post from contrarian pundit and Musk-booster Michael Shellenberger, who wrote, “People think Brazil-style censorship couldn’t happen here, but it could. Indeed, Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and Barack Obama have all called for heavy-handed government censorship like that of Brazil and Europe, complete with banning disfavored individuals across platforms.” 

Musk also continues to platform far-right ideas and Twitter users; early Tuesday, he shared an episode of Tucker Carlson’s Twitter-only talk show, deeming it “very interesting.” The episode was an interview Carlson did with a self-styled historian and Substack user named Darryl Cooper, who declared that his latest project is investigating World War II, which he describes as a historical event about which there are “taboos” in how it is discussed. Both men agreed that people in Germany and Austria have been jailed for “looking into the wrong corners” when researching World War II, as Cooper put it. In response, a Twitter account representing British Holocaust denier David Irving thanked the two men for their conversation, writing, “Glad we are in the mainstream conversation, but it would be nice to get a credit.” (The account’s bio says that it is run by a bookstore continuing Irving’s work, while he himself “steps back for health reasons.”)

Twitter remains suspended in Brazil, with, on Monday, a Supreme Court panel ruling that it will stay so until the company names a legal representative and pays fines currently exceeding $3 million. Brazilian Twitter users who access the site with a VPN can also face a daily fine of 50,000 reais, or about $8,900, the Associated Press reported. The Brazilian bar association has objected to this move, saying in a note to the Supreme Court that the daily fine “to individuals and legal entities in a broad and generalised manner represents a serious affront to the fundamental rights enshrined in the constitution.” On Monday, Musk reshared a tweet that falsely reported that VPN use won’t be fined in Brazil, hailing it as “a step in the right direction!” (It was not, because it wasn’t true and didn’t happen.) 

Pundit Glenn Greenwald, who is based in Brazil and is a prolific Twitter user, has posted intermittently, but has not said if he’s in the country or using a VPN. Marcel Van Hattem, a conservative political scientist who serves in the country’s Chamber of Deputies, tweeted on August 30 that he’s accessing the site using a VPN, adding, “Thank you @elonmusk for standing with us. Your attitudes against censorship and authoritarianism are giving us hope and strengthening our cause for freedom in Brazil!” 

A number of prominent figures on the right and far right are once again engaged in energetic antisemitism; this time, Instagram personality Dan Bilzerian, a poker player and lifestyle influencer previously famous for posing with women on large boats, has climbed aboard. Bilzerian and two other masculinity influencers—accused human traffickers Andrew and Tristan Tate—have increasingly pivoted to criticisms of Israel that promptly segue into antisemitic claims clearly rooted in the blood libel, a medieval conspiracy theory about Jews murdering Christians.

Bilzerian is grandiosely known as the “King of Instagram,” where he displays scenes of a lifestyle involving yachts, crowds of bikini-clad hangers-on, and exotic locales to 32 million followers. In the past few weeks, however, Bilzerian has been spouting wild conspiracies about the Israeli government, telling a podcaster that he believes it “knew about 9/11” (presumably in advance) and “had JFK assassinated.”

Last week Bilzerian was among those who shared a viral meme on Twitter/X claiming to show English translations of the Talmud, a foundational Jewish religious text, “proving” that it exists to justify the mistreatment and murder of non-Jews. These claims, which have been debunked many times over the last several centuries, seem to be largely sourced from antiquated antisemitic texts, like 1892’s The Talmud Unmasked. Besides being composed of outrageous lies—claiming, for instance, that Judaism permits the rape and murder of non-Jews—the meme cites a purported book of the Talmud that the American Jewish Committee identified as “altogether fictitious” in 1939.

“Antisemites trying to focus on the Talmud is almost as old as antisemitism gets,” explains Rabbi Mordechai Lightstone, the social media editor of Chabad.org, the Judaism website run by the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, a branch of Orthodox Judaism. “You have places on the dark corners of the internet where people have compiled bits and pieces that are totally made up, or taken out of context. They have the same spelling mistakes and use made-up terms in Hebrew.”

The meme vastly oversimplifies what the Talmud is: an intricate text, composed of thousands of pages of summation of oral tradition, opinions from rabbis and sages, teachings, conversations and debates. While some observant Jews devote years to understanding its mysteries, antisemitic memes presume it is a literal rulebook by which modern-day Jews live, instead of a compilation of religious and ethical arguments written between the third and sixth centuries.  

The Talmud is, Lightstone adds, written “in a language that isn’t accessible to the common person today.” Even at the time it was written, in a blend of Aramaic and Hebrew, it was “incomprehensible to the non-Jewish world,” making it even more attractive for antisemites looking to imbue it with meanings that would demonize Jews, and frame it, as Lightstone puts it, as “the things Jews don’t want you to see.”

Bilzerian isn’t alone among far-right influencers, where antisemitic rhetoric is on the rise as prominent conservatives like Candace Owens and Stew Peters make increasingly overt claims about Jewish people. While they are often cloaked in supposed critiques of the Israeli government’s invasion of Gaza, that isn’t always the case. Last week, for instance, Owens shared posts about Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was murdered in Georgia in 1915 by a lynch mob that claimed he was guilty of rape, a claim most historians dispute. She stated without evidence that Frank was related to the founder of a cult “which practiced ritualistic incest and pedophilia.” (Owens has previously displayed an obsession with Frankism, a long-dead Jewish heretical sect from the 1700s that practiced sexual rituals, but had nothing whatsoever to do with Leo Frank.)

Owens has been joined by the Tate brothers, who she interviewed in Romania last year about the trafficking allegations against them, and who recently sat down with her for interviews again. This week, the Tates were raided at their Romanian compound for the second time, this time reportedly over allegations of sex with a minor. Upon his release, Tate retweeted a post from white nationalist Nick Fuentes, which read, “Just 2 days after Andrew Tate said that ‘the Matrix’ is really just the Jewish mafia—his house was raided and he was arrested again.”

Other masculinity influencers, like Rumble personality Sneako, celebrated their release. “Welcome home,” he tweeted, tagging the Tates. “Tell the truth, whatever the cost.” Later the same day he added in another tweet that “The Matrix is Israel.” 

Posting any one thing for too long—whether it’s misogynist screeds, pictures of women in swimwear, or Andrew Tate’s omnipresent photos of himself smoking cigars—can leave an audience feeling bored and prone to drifting away. For Andrew Tate and Bilzerian, focusing on Israel’s assaults on Gaza brings not only novelty, but an appearance of moral high ground that such influencers don’t typically get to assume; their antisemitism also provides a new enemy that could be, for instance, useful as the human trafficking case against the Tates moves forward. 

Chabad, the movement that Lightstone is part of, encourages less-observant Jews to learn more about their religious traditions. And while he’s disgusted by the meme, he hopes it, and the people like Bilzerian spreading it, might push someone to take time to look into the actual text.

“The Torah and the Talmud is here to bring truth and light to the world,” he says. “All of this hate is darkness and distraction from that purpose.”

Lawyers representing Elon Musk and X, previously known as Twitter, have quietly begun sending subpoenas to a host of public interest groups, Mother Jones has learned. Most of the targeted organizations have signed open letters to X’s advertisers expressing concerns about the platform’s direction under Musk’s leadership.

The groups include the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the digital rights organization Access Now, and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). The subpoenas represent a new chapter in the legal war Musk launched after advertisers fled X, and are part of a lawsuit Musk and X first filed about a year ago against Media Matters over a report it published documenting that ads appeared alongside extremist content. The subpoenas demand any correspondence the organizations have had with that progressive media watchdog group. Several targets told Mother Jones they’ve had no or limited interaction with Media Matters, and that the subpoenas feel, in the words of more than one person, like “a fishing expedition.”

“It’s really cynical, actually: Mr. Free Speech going after anyone who’s criticized him.”

“We were sent a subpoena,” confirms Jim Naureckas, the editor of FAIR, which has been documenting corporate media bias since 1986. In his 34 years there, Naureckas adds, this is their first subpoena.

While “it was very exciting,” he jokes, he says it is not something for which they can provide any responsive materials. “It’s a long convoluted subpoena looking for a bunch of stuff we don’t have. If we were enthusiastic Elon Musk fans who wanted to help him with his lawsuit against Media Matters, I don’t know what we’d give him.”

Representatives for the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Center for Countering Digital Hate also confirmed they had received subpoenas; other signatories on the open letters did not respond to requests for comment.

One of the letters was sent in May 2022 to express concern about Musk’s plan to take over Twitter, and was spearheaded by Media Matters alongside the big tech watchdog group Accountable Tech and the women’s rights nonprofit Ultraviolet. The other, from a coalition calling itself Stop Toxic Twitter, was sent to the platform’s top ad-buyers in November 2022; Media Matters was one of its lead signatories. Media Matters and their legal counsel declined to comment. Twitter, which no longer responds to requests for comment, could not be reached.

FAIR, for the record, had not signed either letter, but had written about X’s lawsuit targeting Media Matters, calling it an attack on free speech. “If a blog post is evidence of collaboration, that’s a stance that’s somewhat hostile to the First Amendment,” Naureckas dryly says.

With advertisers marching away from his site, Musk, a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist,” launched what he called a “thermonuclear” lawsuit against Media Matters in November 2023 over its report warning that paid content from major companies like Apple and Oracle was being placed along bigoted material on X. Musk and X contend that Media Matters “manipulated” the algorithm to make the ads appear alongside such content.

The company filed in the Northern District of Texas, where it will appear before Judge Reed O’Connor, who holds $15,000 of stock in Tesla, Musk’s other company. (Earlier this week, Media Matters lost its bid to have O’Connor recuse himself.) Media Matters has also filed to dismiss the case, which O’Connor has not yet ruled on; in the meantime, he has ordered that Media Matters must comply with an expansive discovery request from X’s lawyers. Musk is also taking legal action against ad industry trade groups, accusing the organizations of engaging in an illegal group boycott against X. Seemingly in response to the suit, one of the groups, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, said it would discontinue its work. 

Similarly, the new subpoenas from X’s lawyers will have “a chilling effect on advocacy and on freedom of expression,” says Jessica González, a co-CEO of the media policy organization Free Press. “It’s really cynical, actually: Mr. Free Speech going after anyone who’s criticized him.”

While Free Press, despite being an original convenor of Stop Toxic Twitter, has not received a subpoena, González worries about the effects on organizations that have. Advocacy groups coming together to speak up for the rights of their communities, she says, “are what free speech is all about.”

“By going on a lawsuit spree and issuing subpoenas to a number of organizations who signed a letter,” she explains, “folks have to think twice about whether they’re going to speak up on behalf of their communities. It’s threatening to smaller organizations with smaller budgets.”

“There’s a grim rationality to his legal activities,” says Imran Ahmed, the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s founder and CEO, of Musk. “They’re the desperate actions of a man trying to avoid accountability for what he knows is atrocious behavior.” Ahmed believes Musk knows the behavior is bad, he added, because he himself said in 2022 that Twitter could not be allowed to become “a free-for-all hellscape,” which critics argue it has.

In February, Musk lost a lawsuit that targeted the Center for Countering Digital Hate, when a federal judge in California ruled that the suit represented a clear effort to “punish” the group for criticizing Twitter. “He’s officially someone who’s tried to use strategic litigation to silence an organization, for all his First Amendment purity,” explains Ahmed.

Ahmed says his group’s lawyers have already raised that loss in pushing back against X’s latest subpoena, objecting that it is not only “vague, ambiguous and unintelligible,” but that it “clearly seeks information that X had sought to obtain in another, completely separate case that X brought against CCDH that has been dismissed with prejudice.”

“He’s revealing the extent to which this has never been about free speech,” says Ahmed. “It’s always been about protecting revenue.”

Anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign hosted an online panel Wednesday on the future of AI moderated, for some reason, by Ian Carroll, a self-styled journalist with a history of antisemitic statements.

In the course of the conversation, Kennedy admitted that he “gets manipulated by AI all the time.”

“Somebody will send me something and I’ll go ‘Holy cow, did you see this?’,” he said, describing how he credulously forwards fake content to his children, only for them to have to correct him. (Kennedy said that, unlike him, his children can identify fake images “immediately.”)  

RFK Jr. said he regularly “gets manipulated by AI.”

While Carroll has no particular public profile on AI, his persona tracks with the campaign’s focus on tech figures and influencers as it courts a young, male, and extremely online audience. When opening the panel on the “perils and promise of AI,” Carroll introduced himself as “just a regular guy who likes to ask questions.” Indeed, the conspiracy-minded podcaster and videomaker didn’t say much aside from asking questions of the panelists: Kennedy, his running mate Nicole Shanahan, Gmail-creator Paul Buchheit, and Creon Levit, a former NASA scientist who has appeared on the heterodox podcast circuit.

The discussion broke little ground. The group agreed that AI represented an exciting and complex new frontier. Kennedy, despite having admitted his own personal AI-enabled disinformation crisis, downplayed concerns that AI technology would be broadly used to misinform.

Yet Shanahan speculated about how AI could be used for “mind control” and “manipulate us in very powerful ways,” and Kennedy worried that AI could, in the end, serve “the ultimate ambition of every totalitarian regime through all of humankind.”

Unsurprisingly, Kennedy mused about the technology’s potential for his core issue, saying that he “looks forward to using AI to do real studies on vaccines,” speculating that the algorithms, given access to databases “that CDC has kept closed” would produce valuable insights. In a similar bit of techy-wishcasting, Shanahan said she had “run some models” about Kennedy’s candidacy, which she said demonstrated that if their campaign “didn’t have as much interference as we’ve had, we would win this election.”

Neither Kennedy’s campaign nor Carroll responded to requests for comment about why Carroll was chosen to helm the panel or his prolific and bigoted internet history. As the publication Jewish Insider pointed out on Wednesday, just a few weeks ago he proclaimed on X that the US is “controlled by an international criminal organization that grew out of the Jewish mob and now hides in modern Zionism behind cries of ‘antisemitism.’”

Carroll has also tweeted that popular understanding of the Holocaust is characterized by “lots of bad numbers and misreporting,” and suggested in March that there’s something suspicious about the three marriages Shanahan has shared with Jewish men, while promising he would dig into the matter. (It’s not clear he did, and, even before Wednesday’s panel, Shanahan had since appeared on his podcast.)

Carroll’s videos share his musings about the CIA, COINTELPRO, and the complex webs between various corporations that control the world. In recent weeks, he’s speculated that there may have been a second shooter involved in Trump’s assassination attempt.

Since Israel’s invasion of Gaza, more fringe media figures have begun making antisemitic statements while claiming they are objecting specifically to Zionism. While Carroll sometimes claims to draw a distinction between “Zionists” and other, blameless Jews—he once wrote he believes “Jewish people are wonderful”—he has traded in overt conspiracies about them. In April, Carroll shared a video that he described as featuring an escapee from a “Satanic ritual abuse compound” where “they were breeding Jewish bloodlines and he was selected for his more than 99% pure Ashkenazi Jewish heritage and apparent decendancy [sic] directly from King Solomon.”  

In contrast to Carroll’s many concerns about Jewish cabals and Zionist control, Kennedy has largely avoided discussing Gaza or Israel since March. That’s when, in an interview with Reuters, he was asked about its assault following Hamas’ October 7 massacre and declared himself to be a staunch supporter of Israel, calling it a “moral nation.” Kennedy has since reiterated that he does not support a ceasefire.

A heavily publicized Twitter conversation between Elon Musk and Donald Trump on Monday night began with an immediate bed-shitting technical crash. When things finally kicked off 42 minutes later with a much smaller audience, Musk blamed a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, which did not appear to be true, as the rest of his site continued to function as normal. In the time the platform struggled to serve video of the event, however, a deepfake on YouTube purporting to show a livestream of a gray-looking Musk addressing a factory audience attracted 200,000 viewers to a channel running a crypto scam. 

Trump was slurring his words and seemingly lisping.

Trump and Musk’s conversation on Spaces, X’s live broadcast service, had been promoted for weeks, both by the two men themselves and by secondary characters looking to glom onto the massive audience it promised to attract. As the stream froze and repeatedly crashed, some of those characters expressed profound disappointment. 

“Not available?????” tweeted conservative personality Glenn Beck. “I planned my whole day around this.   I don’t want to miss a word.” (Meanwhile, the leftist Twitch celebrity Hasan Piker, who had successfully logged into the Space early, carried audio of it live on his stream, offering color commentary and occasional hoots of boredom; at least 200,000 people watched part of his presentation.) 

Although two sources inside Twitter came forward to tell the tech site the Verge that there was no DDoS attack and that Musk appeared to be lying, conspiracist Alex Jones, who had promised live coverage on Infowars, concluded Musk was likely telling the truth. “When you’ve got a really big guest, you might not want to announce it,” he said solemnly, “because that’s when they attack.” Jones pinned responsibility for the claimed attack on the government, saying that it was “Cyber Command doing this,” possibly at the behest of the EU and the UK. (There is no evidence Cyber Command, a division of the Department of Defense, was involved.)

Amid the technical difficulties, the fake YouTube livestream purporting to carry the conversation (but instead showing an AI-generated Musk pontificating about Trump’s qualifications and the national debt) easily nabbed an audience of at least 200,000. Shayan Sardarizadeh, a BBC journalist, was one of the first to note the imposter feed; sometime after he tweeted about the video, it and the channel promoting it were taken down by YouTube.

When Musk and Trump finally began their conversation, about 1.3 million people appeared to be turning in—far short of the 8 million concurrent users Musk boasted had successfully listened to a test conversation earlier on Monday. The two men’s exchange trod fairly familiar ground. Musk told Trump his actions after the assassination attempt were “inspiring.” Trump, in a lengthy reminiscence, said that being shot at was “not pleasant” and that the ear, where he was shot, is, as doctors told him, “a very bloody place.” 

The men agreed that illegal immigration is bad and that “really bad people” within the government are, as Trump put it “more dangerous than Russia and China.” They also agreed that World War III could be imminent—not a reassuring sentiment coming from two people who could be involved in starting it. And Trump reiterated his plan to “close the Department of Education” during his second term, a proposal also supported by Project 2025.

Other lowlights included Trump’s accusation that the Harris campaign is carrying out a “disinformation campaign” about her record on the border, a claim for which he provided no evidence. Trump also contended that migrant caravans of “nonproductive people” were being sent to the US by foreign heads of state, telling Musk that “you would do it, and so would I.”

“They’re also getting rid of murderers and drug dealers and the people who are really brutal people,” he expounded, as he promised to bring about “the largest deportation in the history of this country.” 

Trump was slurring his words and seemingly lisping throughout the conversation. After S.V. Date, a Huffington Post reporter, asked the Trump campaign about this speech pattern, he tweeted their verbatim response: “Must be your shitty hearing. Get your ears checked out.” (Campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung did not respond to a separate request for comment.)

The conversation seems unlikely to move the needle for voters, but it did seem to preview a possible future partnership for Trump and Musk. Trump, seemingly in a reference to mass layoffs Musk engineered at Tesla in April, complimented Musk on being “the greatest cutter,” and suggested he would be “very good” at cutting government spending.

“I would be happy to help out,” Musk replied. 

In recent weeks, in his prolific activity on X, the social network he owns, Elon Musk has shared a deepfake of Kamala Harris, calling it “amazing.” He’s shared inflammatory posts about England’s anti-immigrant riots while opining that “civil war is inevitable.” He’s fended off calls from five Democratic secretaries of state to reform Grok, X’s AI bot, after it shared false electoral information.

All of this follows years of stalling engagement on the platform and a broader decline under his ownership, as advertisers fled a site newly-receptive to racist pseudoscience, antisemitism, and restoring noxious figures’ accounts. Their departure may have been hastened by Musk advising advertisers, twice, to “go fuck yourself,” during an on-stage New York Times interview. Or it may be because Musk used his privileged position, as a study released Thursday said, to become one of the site’s mostly widely-seen purveyors of election disinformation, racking up 1.2 billion views on the subject between January and July.

But on Tuesday Musk revealed where he’d like to place the blame by announcing a lawsuit targeting two related ad industry trade groups, alleging they had worked together to “withhold” billions of dollars in advertising from X in a “coercive exercise of market power.”

“We have tried peace for two years,” Musk declared in launching the suit. “Now it is war.” 

According to Brian Hauss, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, Musk “is clearly outraged at the precipitous drop in advertising dollars since he’s taken over… Instead of owning up to the fact that its the change in the content moderation policies that he’s instituted and take responsibility for that, he’s trying to point the finger.”

The attention-grabbing antitrust lawsuit accuses the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a WFA project, of engaging in an illegal group boycott against X. The suit specifically names several WFA alliance members, including CVS Health, Mars, Orsted, and Unilever.

While the WFA declined a request to comment, according to its website, GARM was founded after the Christchurch mass shooting, when the killer live streamed the attack on Facebook. “This followed a slew of high-profile cases where brands’ advertisements appeared next to illegal or harmful content,” which, the site explains, spurred the initiative’s launch. “For advertisers who have invested heavily in these platforms, the danger of seeing their brands next to harmful content has become a major issue,” a GARM FAQ, which has been pulled down in the last two days, read. “No one wants to be inadvertently funding people intent on causing damage to society.”

It’s unclear how far GARM got with such goals, but the suit has already had an effect: the WFA announced on Thursday morning that it would be “discontinuing” its GARM initiative, Business Insider reported, although it said it planned to contest Musk’s claims in court and “demonstrate our full adherence to competition rules.”

This is not the first time X and Musk have sued critics whom they say cost the company advertising dollars. In July 2023, X brought a suit against the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate, accusing it of orchestrating a “scare campaign” to drive away advertisers by convincing them the site was full of “harmful content.” It was thrown out in March, with a federal judge ruling X’s lawsuit had clearly been “about punishing the Defendants for their speech.” Musk also sued Media Matters over a report they produced showing ads were appearing next to neo-Nazi and white nationalist material; the company claimed Media Matters manipulated X’s algorithms to show combinations that were “manufactured, inorganic and extraordinarily rare.”

In a post on this week’s lawsuit, X CEO Linda Yaccarino wrote that the company decided to sue after a July report by the Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee that found “GARM and its members directly organized boycotts and used other indirect tactics to target disfavored platforms.” The report claims advertisers worked together to silence conservative, “disfavored voices like Joe Rogan” and “weaponized claims of misinformation to influence the 2020 presidential election.” 

The WFA has insisted that GARM is apolitical and that its recommendations to WFA members are voluntary. “Suggestions that GARM practices may impinge on free speech are a deliberate misrepresentation of GARM’s work. GARM is not a watchdog or lobby. GARM does not participate in or advocate for boycotts,” the site reads. “GARM frameworks and tools are voluntary, intentionally broad, and individual companies are free to review, adopt, modify, or reject them.”

Twitter can’t claim it didn’t know that the WFA and GARM were concerned about its direction under Musk. In 2022, GARM and Twitter had at least two meetings on brand safety. But the House Judiciary report rejects the idea that advertisers left Twitter because of “alleged hate speech or concerns about brand safety,” claiming they did so as part of a plot to use “their marketing dollars to silence certain disfavored views.” The report concludes GARM’s work “to demonetize disfavored content” is “likely illegal under the antitrust laws and threatens fundamental American freedoms.”

William Markham, an antitrust attorney in San Diego, says the cases against GARM and WFA should probably be dismissed. “A group of private citizens, in this case private companies, are expressing their strong disapproval of a company’s speech by refusing to patronize that company,” Markham explains. “All this falls under the rubric of protected free speech.” Things would be different, Markham adds, if X could prove that the advertisers were cooperating with a rival platform to destroy it—but Musk’s suit makes no such allegation.

“This suit sits at the uncomfortable junction of antitrust law and free speech,” says Mitch Stolz, the competition and IP litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Advertisers have a First Amendment right to decide what platforms they will place their ads on, and to stop advertising on a platform if they don’t like the content their ads appear next to. On the other hand, it’s illegal under the antitrust laws for a group of competing companies to come together and agree with one another that they won’t do business with a supplier, if that agreement leads to higher prices or lower quality services.”

“If X/Twitter continues with the suit, it’ll be quite hard for them to prove that GARM and its members harmed competition, and had no legitimate reason for boycotting X,” Stolz continues. “They will probably also have to prove to the court that their safety protocols for advertisers actually are effective. And they will have to contend with some First Amendment defenses.”

All of that, he added, “will be difficult, but a win for X is not out of the question.”

One thing Musk and X have going for them stems from their decision to file the case in Wichita Falls, Texas, where it was assigned to Judge Reed O’Connor—once described by Vox as “a notoriously partisan former Republican Senate staffer, known for handing down poorly reasoned opinions giving major policy victories to right-wing litigants.” (O’Connor, who is already hearing the case Musk filed against Media Matters, owns stock in Musk’s Tesla.)

While Hauss doesn’t think the suit will go far, he described Musk’s strategy of trying “outré theories in a friendly court” as a “spaghetti test—throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks.” Given the advertisers’ solid free speech claim, if Judge O’Connor concludes X’s arguments have merit, Hauss adds dryly, the decision “would involve a fair amount of legal innovation.”  

In recent weeks, in his prolific activity on X, the social network he owns, Elon Musk has shared a deepfake of Kamala Harris, calling it “amazing.” He’s shared inflammatory posts about England’s anti-immigrant riots while opining that “civil war is inevitable.” He’s fended off calls from five Democratic secretaries of state to reform Grok, X’s AI bot, after it shared false electoral information.

All of this follows years of stalling engagement on the platform and a broader decline under his ownership, as advertisers fled a site newly-receptive racist pseudoscience, antisemitism, and restoring noxious figures’ accounts. Their departure may have been hastened by Musk advising advertisers, twice, to “go fuck yourself,” during an on-stage New York Times interview. Or it may be because Musk used his privileged position, as a study released Thursday said, to become one of the site’s mostly widely-seen purveyors of election disinformation, racking up 1.2 billion views on the subject between January and July.

But on Tuesday Musk revealed where he’d like to place the blame by announcing a lawsuit targeting two related ad industry trade groups, alleging they had worked together to “withhold” billions of dollars in advertising from X in a “coercive exercise of market power.”

“We have tried peace for two years,” Musk declared in launching the suit. “Now it is war.” 

According to Brian Hauss, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, Musk “is clearly outraged at the precipitous drop in advertising dollars since he’s taken over… Instead of owning up to the fact that its the change in the content moderation policies that he’s instituted and take responsibility for that, he’s trying to point the finger.”

The attention-grabbing antitrust lawsuit accuses the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a WFA project, of engaging in an illegal group boycott against X. The suit specifically names several WFA alliance members, including CVS Health, Mars, Orsted, and Unilever.

While the WFA declined a request to comment, according to its website, GARM was founded after the Christchurch mass shooting, when the killer live streamed the attack on Facebook. “This followed a slew of high-profile cases where brands’ advertisements appeared next to illegal or harmful content,” which, the site explains, spurred the initiative’s launch. “For advertisers who have invested heavily in these platforms, the danger of seeing their brands next to harmful content has become a major issue,” a GARM FAQ, which has been pulled down in the last two days, read. “No one wants to be inadvertently funding people intent on causing damage to society.”

It’s unclear how far GARM got with such goals, but the suit has already had an effect: the WFA announced on Thursday morning that it would be “discontinuing” its GARM initiative, Business Insider reported, although it said it planned to contest Musk’s claims in court and “demonstrate our full adherence to competition rules.”

This is not the first time X and Musk have sued critics whom they say cost the company advertising dollars. In July 2023, X brought a suit against the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate, accusing it of orchestrating a “scare campaign” to drive away advertisers by convincing them the site was full of “harmful content.” It was thrown out in March, with a federal judge ruling X’s lawsuit had clearly been “about punishing the Defendants for their speech.” Musk also sued Media Matters over a report they produced showing ads were appearing next to neo-Nazi and white nationalist material; the company claimed Media Matters manipulated X’s algorithms to show combinations that were “manufactured, inorganic and extraordinarily rare.”

In a post on this week’s lawsuit, X CEO Linda Yaccarino wrote that the company decided to sue after a July report by the Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee that found “GARM and its members directly organized boycotts and used other indirect tactics to target disfavored platforms.” The report claims advertisers worked together to silence conservative, “disfavored voices like Joe Rogan” and “weaponized claims of misinformation to influence the 2020 presidential election.” 

The WFA has insisted that GARM is apolitical and that its recommendations to WFA members are voluntary. “Suggestions that GARM practices may impinge on free speech are a deliberate misrepresentation of GARM’s work. GARM is not a watchdog or lobby. GARM does not participate in or advocate for boycotts,” the site reads. “GARM frameworks and tools are voluntary, intentionally broad, and individual companies are free to review, adopt, modify, or reject them.”

Twitter can’t claim it didn’t know that the WFA and GARM were concerned about its direction under Musk. In 2022, GARM and Twitter had at least two meetings on brand safety. But the House Judiciary report rejects the idea that advertisers left Twitter because of “alleged hate speech or concerns about brand safety,” claiming they did so as part of a plot to use “their marketing dollars to silence certain disfavored views.” The report concludes GARM’s work “to demonetize disfavored content” is “likely illegal under the antitrust laws and threatens fundamental American freedoms.”

William Markham, an antitrust attorney in San Diego, says the cases against GARM and WFA should probably be dismissed. “A group of private citizens, in this case private companies, are expressing their strong disapproval of a company’s speech by refusing to patronize that company,” Markham explains. “All this falls under the rubric of protected free speech.” Things would be different, Markham adds, if X could prove that the advertisers were cooperating with a rival platform to destroy it—but Musk’s suit makes no such allegation.

“This suit sits at the uncomfortable junction of antitrust law and free speech,” says Mitch Stolz, the competition and IP litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Advertisers have a First Amendment right to decide what platforms they will place their ads on, and to stop advertising on a platform if they don’t like the content their ads appear next to. On the other hand, it’s illegal under the antitrust laws for a group of competing companies to come together and agree with one another that they won’t do business with a supplier, if that agreement leads to higher prices or lower quality services.”

“If X/Twitter continues with the suit, it’ll be quite hard for them to prove that GARM and its members harmed competition, and had no legitimate reason for boycotting X,” Stolz continues. “They will probably also have to prove to the court that their safety protocols for advertisers actually are effective. And they will have to contend with some First Amendment defenses.”

All of that, he added, “will be difficult, but a win for X is not out of the question.”

One thing Musk and X have going for them stems from their decision to file the case in Wichita Falls, Texas, where it was assigned to Judge Reed O’Connor—once described by Vox as “a notoriously partisan former Republican Senate staffer, known for handing down poorly reasoned opinions giving major policy victories to right-wing litigants.” (O’Connor, who is already hearing the case Musk filed against Media Matters, owns stock in Musk’s Tesla.)

While Hauss doesn’t think the suit will go far, he described Musk’s strategy of trying “outré theories in a friendly court” as a “spaghetti test—throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks.” Given the advertisers’ solid free speech claim, if Judge O’Connor concludes X’s arguments have merit, Hauss adds dryly, the decision “would involve a fair amount of legal innovation.”  

By the time J.K. Rowling, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump were falsely referring to her as a man, the lies about Imane Khelif had already traveled halfway around the world. Last week, two Olympic boxers—Khelif, from Algeria, and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan—were subjected to brutal international scrutiny about their sex and gender, and whether they were entitled to compete in women’s events; the attention on Khelif became particularly acrid after her opponent, Italian Angela Carini, quit 46 seconds into their bout, declaring that she had “never been hit so hard in my life.” A photo of the two women exiting the ring, Carini in tears, Khelif casting a glance, was widely shared, with people like Rowling—who’s promoted transphobic views for years, but has denied being transphobic—offering heated and derogatory commentary about Khelif.  

“Could any picture sum up our new men’s rights movement better?” Rowling tweeted. “The smirk of a male who’s [sic] knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head, and whose life’s ambition he’s just shattered.” 

The boxing association’s president isn’t shy about expressing a broad fixation with gender and sexuality.

While the attacks on Khelif are of a piece with familiar recent Western controversies over who is allowed to participate in girls’ and women’s sports, many of the articles and individuals magnifying the debate relied on or relayed the claims of a discredited group with strong ties to the Russian government, a deep grudge against the International Olympic Committee, and a seemingly vested interest in proving that the IOC-run games are, as the group’s leader has claimed, a venue for “sodomy.”

In trying to unravel what led up to this moment, many individuals and news outlets cited a statement released by the official-sounding International Boxing Association, which stated that both Khelif and Yu-Ting had previously been disqualified from competing in the IBA-administered Women’s World Boxing Championships in March 2023. The women were barred from that competition, which took place in New Delhi, following tests the organization has not publicly clarified, citing privacy rules. At the time, IBA president Umar Kremlev told a Russian state news agency that the women had been found to have “XY chromosomes” and claimed the two had “pretended to be women” and “tried to deceive their colleagues.”

Even if the IBA’s findings were true, having XY chromosomes does not automatically make someone male—women with Swyer syndrome, a rare genetic condition, have XY for instance. Nor are XY chromosomes proven to constitute an “unfair advantage,” although that is exactly what an IBA official claimed in a press conference on Monday. One pediatrics expert told NBC in 2009—one of the innumerable times this issue has been raised in women’s sports—that such a claim was “malarkey.”

The IBA, previously known as the AIBA, oversaw Olympic boxing for decades. But it began an open feud with the IOC in 2018 after the AIBA elected Gafur Rakhimov as president, an Uzbek businessman who was placed on a 2012 US treasury sanctions list over alleged ties to a criminal organization and heroin trafficking, charges he has denied. 

In 2019, despite Rahimov having stepped aside, the AIBA was barred from overseeing boxing at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics after a widely-reported scandal surrounding the organization’s impartiality and leadership. The AIBA elected Kremlev in 2020 and changed its name to the IBA in December 2021, but its rift with the international sporting community grew as the organization announced Gazprom, the majority Russian government-owned energy company, as its main sponsor—a move the IOC would describe in a June 2023 report as raising questions about its “financial autonomy.” The IBA also forewent new leadership elections in 2022, a decision the IOC said left it “extremely concerned.”

Kremlev has established ties with Vladimir Putin: a 2022 Le Monde story outlined the two men’s shared ambition to use boxing to extend Russia’s international soft power. Kremlev is said to be “a member of the order of St. George, Russia’s highest military distinction,” as Le Monde put it, as well as a past member of the Night Wolves, a motorcycle club with nationalist views and Kremlin ties. He has variously been described in news stories as having made his money running a security firm, a jewelry business, in construction, and in a taxi business.

When Khelif and Yu-Ting were disqualified by the IBA back in New Delhi, skeptics questioned how it benefited Azalia Amineva, a Russian fighter. The women were not ruled ineligible until after they’d already competed and Khelif had won a bout against the previously undefeated Amineva. While IBA officials said the sequence of events was due to a week’s delay in being provided testing results, as the Associated Press has pointed out, the decision meant the Russian fighter’s perfect record was retroactively restored.

Kremlev isn’t shy about expressing a broad fixation on gender and sexuality, with him, as the sports website Defector has pointed out, decrying the IOC on YouTube for promoting “outright sodomy and the destruction of traditional values.” In the wake of the Paris games’ opening ceremony, he blasted the spectacle, which featured queer performers, as “pure sodomy,” while saying the IOC “burns from pure devilry” and that its president is a “chief sodomite.” He also claimed that “men with changed gender are allowed to fight with women in boxing at the Olympics.” (Videos with such remarks have been helpfully subtitled in English to draw a wider, Western audience.) Last week, Kremlev announced the IBA would give $50,000 in prize money to the defeated opponents of Khelif and Yu-Ting.

Following Khelif’s fight with Carini, the vitriol was taken up by Khelif’s next opponent, Hungarian Anna Luca Hamori. Khelif defeated her in a Saturday quarterfinal, but not before Hamori had posted and deleted a cartoon on Instagram of a slight woman in a boxing ring looking up at a monster with devil horns. She made another clear dig at Khelif, declaring, “If she or he is a man, it will be a bigger victory for me if I win.” 

The IOC, for its part, released a statement on Sunday defending both Khelif and Yu-Ting and their right to compete, with a spokesperson blasting what the women have gone through at the IBA’s hands since 2023: “The whole process is flawed. From the conception of the test, to how the test was shared with us, to how the tests have become public, is so flawed that it’s impossible to engage with it.” 

The Khelif affair captures English-speaking transphobes with rigid ideas about the nature of womanhood picking up on a politically motivated campaign from a discredited organization at open war with the IOC. Indeed, right-wing organizations in the United States, including the Independent Women’s Forum and CPAC, via its chair Matt Schlapp, have paid for sponsored posts on Musk’s X platform, calling her “a man“—posts that appear when users search for information on the controversy.

While the modern Olympics have often been a political tool, suffused with nationalist grudges and rivalries, this incident operated on both a grand scale and a frighteningly intimate one, with individual women placed under scrutiny clearly meant to humiliate. That’s seemingly just what Kremlev wanted, when, in an interview with Chinese state media in the run up to the games, he spoke about sports as an avenue to promote “traditional family values”—and offered warm words about their ability to “unite mankind.”

The aftermath of Sunday’s elections in Venezuela has been sustained chaos, with both incumbent President Nicolás Maduro and his opponent Edmundo González Urrutia declaring victory. Masses of protesters have poured into the streets, calling on Maduro to step down. Hundreds have been arrested; some have been killed.

In the United States, pro-Trump disinformation peddlers seized the opportunity to darkly warn that similar chaos and authoritarianism would befall the United States if their candidate loses in November. It’s a topsy-turvy bit of discourse that has political figures who aren’t bothered by Trump’s attempts to stay in office after losing taking sides against another leader who they argue is doing the same thing.

Prominent disinformation peddlers declared that the US under Biden is also in the grip of an authoritarian leader.

Venezuela’s recent voting was marred by allegations of impropriety by Maduro’s United Socialist Party, who have become crushingly unpopular over his 11-year reign, as inflation has soared, social programs gone bankrupt, and millions of people fled. This week wasn’t the first time forces supporting Maduro have been accused of election interference, and obvious attempts at voter suppression were on display in the lead-up to this election, as critics warned international election observers were being kept from monitoring voting.

But when Maduro quickly declared an improbable victory on Sunday night—with choreographed fireworks streaking Caracas’ skies—prominent conspiracy theorists and disinformation peddlers in the US sensed a moment of possibility; they declared that the United States under Biden is, too, in the grip of an authoritarian leader, and shared scenes of unrest from Venezuela as a prequel to what could happen here if Trump is, in his supporters’ minds, unjustly denied the White House a second time. 

Infowars was among the first to jump on the emerging narrative, declaring in a headline on Monday, “Venezuelan Election Nightmare Foreshadows What’s Coming to America!” The site also declared that Venezuela “may soon break down into civil war,” adding that “globalists” were “pushing USA towards [the] same fate.” The article, as was often the case in the right-wingers’ Venezuela conceit, managed to ignore that it is the right-leaning sector of US politics that is home to calls for civil war if their candidate loses.

Elon Musk also speedily got aboard, sharing a tweet from a MAGA account that declared, “The United States will become Venezuela if Trump is not elected,” and was greeted with replies from the former president’s fans suggesting the US had, in denying Trump the White House in 2020, already gone well down the path to becoming a banana republic. Elsewhere on X, smaller accounts than Musk’s fretted about the Venezuela-ification of America; on Sunday night, an account called Diligent Denizen with 45,000 followers, which claims to cover breaking news, convened a Twitter space that drew about 1,000 listeners at its height. The conversation was explicitly devoted to drawing parallels between Venezuela and the US. “We’re all on edge,” one speaker declared, referring to their shared fears that the election would again be snatched away from Trump. “We don’t want the same thing happening to us that’s happening in Venezuela and that happened here in 2020.”

Mike Adams of the far-right conspiratorial site Natural News also got onboard, posting a broadcast on Brighteon in which he approvingly reported on the protests in Venezuela attempting to dislodge Maduro before declaring, “We had a stolen election in 2020. And the Democrats had no interest in checking that out. In fact, they shut down anybody who questioned that.”

Former Trump official turned podcaster Sebastian Gorka took a similar line, posting a video interview on Rumble with Joseph Humire of the right-wing Center for a Secure Free Society, where they agreed, as Gorka put it, that if Maduro’s attempts to stay in office go unchallenged, “everybody will try it.” Another Rumble account with 40,000 followers, a podcast called ScrewBigGov, was even more blatant, with a video pontificating about whether anti-Trump forces will steal November’s election, with a discussion titled “Venezuela: Could It Happen Here?” (Yes, the hosts concluded: “Do we think for a single second this can’t happen here in November?” one asked. “I think they’ve already got it nailed,” the other agreed.) 

Across Telegram, QAnon-promoting figures like Jordan Sather and New Age conspiracy theorists like David Avocado Wolfe—who both have large audiences in their respective corners of the conspiracy-verse—celebrated the protests as signs of a brave populace rising up against a tyrannical government. But, Sather fretted, “Hoping this revolution in Venezuela isn’t CIA-backed just to install a new globalist puppet.” 

Interestingly, Sather was accidentally crossing streams with another emerging and unproven notion that was more prevalent on the left: the claim that the protests in Venezuela are covertly backed by the US government or Western forces. Of course, the United States has a long history of meddling in Latin America politics and did secretly finance coups and regime changes there and elsewhere throughout the 20th century, and some commentators and news sites have pushed suggestions it is happening again. Alan MacLeod of the site MintPress News, a Minneapolis-based outlet that often runs pieces broadly critical of US policy, tweeted on Monday, “There is an attempted coup d’etat underway here in Venezuela, as the US-backed opposition is trying to overturn yesterday’s election results.” (MintPress has a record of reporting sympathetic to the repressive governments of Iran, Russia, and Syria, and the site was a major node for disinformation about the White Helmets, a volunteer civil defense and disaster-relief organization that operates in Syria and Turkey. Bellingcat has reported that MintPress and some of its main personalities were awarded a monetary prize in 2019 by a pro-Assad lobbying group.)

Some of the entities claiming the US had rigged opposition to Maduro’s election—and ignoring both Venezuela’s deepening economic and social crisis and his growing unpopularity—have political reasons to do so. Fiorella Isabel, a journalist for the Russian government–backed news outlet RT America, for instance, tweeted, “None of this is spontaneous. This attempted coup is a common pattern of US-backed opposition forces that have been working to make Venezuela a colony of Washington, & have punished it for resisting & demanding its national sovereignty.” The network also brought an election observer from South Africa on air who claimed the elections “were run transparently and democratically.” (Russian officials were excited after Maduro’s claimed victory, with Vladimir Putin sending him a warm message boasting of their countries’ “strategic partnership.”)

In one way, the chaotic discourse is indeed a likely preview for November in the United States, where a bitter, deeply divisive election will be fought—both at the ballot box and in an online environment studded with hucksters, scammers, and grifters, and suffused with bad-faith or incomplete information. The fact that far-right disinformation peddlers so deeply identify with Venezuela’s democratic collapse is its own serious warning.