I used to enjoy watching RT America, which began its short cable life in 2010, as its high production values and intriguing content made it refreshing for stretches, and it boasted such stars as Dennis Miller, Larry King and Jesse Ventura. Then I would remember it was propaganda, and the first rule of propaganda is that it only works if you don’t realize it’s propaganda. Once you know it’s propaganda, you see right through it. Formerly known as Russia Today, RT was one of the first casualties of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as it was banned in early 2022 by Ottawa in both English and French as foreign propaganda that would “undermine democratic institutions within Canada.” One RT program I enjoyed for its comedic value was Watching the Hawks, whose slogan was “making the people better through social activism.” It featured such episodes as “The rise of internet punditry & the US addiction to incarceration” and “Playing respectability politics in a 21st century civil rights movement.” Fortunately, these broadcasting classics live on in RT’s vast online archive of programming.

By far my favorite RT offering, however, was The Keiser Report hosted by loose cannon Max Keiser, a former talk show producer and stand-up comic who combined those roles for RT in such classics as this take on the Ottawa truckers protest. Uncertain whether we have a prime minister, premier or president, and which exact Trudeau was in power, Mad Max deigns at the 9:56 mark to explain the issues “in terms that Canadians will understand.” It involved Bobby Orr and somehow ended up with Don Cherry being endorsed for prime minister. Watch it for two minutes and I swear you will be hooked. With the demise of RT America, Keiser now pushes Bitcoin in El Salvador.

Even after the plug was pulled on RT America, Moscow kept a small staff in the US capital to provide content for RT’s English-language service, which you can still watch live online. Apparently they were engaged in more than just journalism, and unfortunately for them their bureau chief bragged on state TV earlier this year that Russia had an “entire empire of covert projects” in the West aimed at shaping public opinion on the war in Ukraine. That no doubt caught the attention of US investigators, and what they found led to charges of conspiracy to commit money laundering against two Russian nationals in an indictment unsealed last week.

The indictment exposed what Attorney General Merrick Garland called “a $10 million scheme to create and distribute content to US audiences with hidden Russian government messaging.” The propaganda effort was obviously aimed at helping to elect Donald Trump as president in November, but it also had a considerable Canadian component and could well have been intended to influence our upcoming federal election as well. The allegations involve a Nashville-based content farm referred to only as “US Company-1,” which published videos on social media platforms including TikTok, Instagram, X and YouTube. “Since publicly launching in or about November 2023, US Company-1 has posted nearly 2,000 videos that have garnered more than 16 million views on YouTube alone,” claimed a Justice Department press release.

US Company-1 has been identified as Tenet Media, which described itself as “a network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues,” adding: “Our goal is to support creators who question institutions that believe themselves to be above questioning.” Tenet Media was founded by married Canadians Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan, who previously lived in Montréal, and in only a year it posted more than 4,000 times on X, where it attracted more than 48,000 followers. Chen, 30, was born in Québec but raised in Hong Kong, according to Wikitubia, and her first online videos featured cartoon characters discussing cultural and political issues. She then began interviewing figures ranging from Jordan Peterson to US Senator Marsha Blackburn on a YouTube channel known as The Roaming Millennial, which gained more than 572,000 subscribers but has reportedly been deleted along with that of Tenet Media, which YouTube claimed “violated our community guidelines.” Chen produced a program for conservative commentator Glenn Beck’s BlazeTV from 2019 to 2020 called Pseudointellectual with Lauren Chen, in which she reportedly commented on politics from a Christian Conservative perspective, then started a new YouTube channel in 2021 called Mediaholic to discuss pop culture and books. Chen began contributing up to four videos a week for BlazeTV in 2022, which has now dropped her.

The indictment named neither Chen nor Donovan, but mentioned that a founder of US Company-1, who has been identified as Chen, billed RT’s parent company for producing hundreds of online videos and writing dozens of articles. “Founder 1’s invoices reflect that (she) billed ANO TV-Novosti for approximately 217 videos, of which approximately 209 were published on Founder 1’s personal YouTube channels,” it read. “Founder 1 also wrote approximately 25 opinion articles that were published on RT’s website, at least 19 of which Founder 1 billed to ANO TV-Novosti.” In a nine-month period ending last month, the indictment alleges that RT sent about US$9.7 million in wire transfers to US Company-1 from shell companies in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Mauritius, which were often claimed to be payment for electronics. “For example, the wire note for a $318,800 wire payment from a shell entity in Turkey to US Company-1 on March 1, read: ‘BUYING GOODS-INV.013-IPHONE 15 PRO MAX 512GB.’”

The indictment claimed that Founder-1 started working for ANO TV-Novosti in the spring of 2021 and began recruiting high-profile conservative commentators in 2023 with lucrative offers to contribute to a new media outlet. It alleged that Chen began billing RT in part through her Canadian company, which has been identified as Roaming Millennial Inc. and is registered to an address in Montréal. In one May 2023 email, the indictment claimed, Founder-I wanted “my personal payment [to] be under [Canadian Company-I] but the payments for the influencers go directly to [US Company-I].” Her monthly fee of US$8,000 would increase to US$25,000, according to the indictment, under performance incentives that included signing two un-named contributors. Commentator-I’s contract provided for four videos a week to be livestreamed by US Company-I in exchange for a monthly fee of US$400,000, the indictment added, plus a US$100,000 signing bonus. An un-named Commentator-2 provided weekly livestreamed videos for a fee of $100,000 each. Reached for a response to the indictment, RT quipped that “2016 called and it wants its clichés back.”

One alt-right influencer who provided content for Tenet Media was Lauren Southern, who is from the Vancouver area and ran for Parliament in 2015 as a Libertarian Party candidate in the riding of Langley-Aldergrove. Southern, 29, was one of the first stars of the alt-right movement, according to a CBC report, and was an early proponent of so-called “replacement theory,” which holds that white majority populations are being replaced by immigrants of colour. Southern was denied entry into the UK in 2018 as “a threat to the fundamental interests of society,” she told the BBC, for distributing flyers earlier that year claiming that “Allah is a gay god.” She instead went to Russia, where she interviewed one of that country’s leading neo-fascists, Alexander Dugin, in a video that was “drenched in softball questions,” according to ThinkProgress.

Southern produced many videos for Tenet, including some with titles like “Canada Is Becoming A COMMUNIST HELLHOLE,” which was an interview with Russian-born Katrina Panova, a contributor to the Canadian far-right media outlet The Counter Signal under the alias Kat Kanada. Another titled “Mean Tweets = Life in PRISON in Canada?!” criticized Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, which is currently before Parliament. An analysis by PressProgress of Tenet Media’s YouTube content prior to its takedown counted at least 51 videos on Canada that had been viewed about 434,500 times, most of which were produced by Southern. The videos touched on “a wide range of hot button issues,” according to PressProgress, “including immigration, crime, ‘anti-white’ sentiment, anti-LGBTQ+ paranoia, residential school unmarked graves, as well as inflation and the housing crisis. The subtext of many videos suggest Canada is on the brink of chaos or the impending collapse of the social order.” One Southern video focused on international students in Prince Edward Island and claimed they had “gamed Canada’s immigration system,” while another titled “Pipeline Wars” attempted to discredit Indigenous protesters in BC as “eco-terrorists” and “antifa.” Both Chen and Southern were featured in the 2023 book Women of the Far Right: Social Media Influencers and Online Radicalization.

Coming so close to November’s US presidential election, not to mention Canada’s pending federal election, the revelations could have an effect similar to that of the 2016 Wikileaks dump of Hilary Clinton’s hacked campaign emails. Many blamed the revelation that Clinton had used a non-government email server, along with an election eve announcement by then-FBI Director James Comey that he was re-opening an investigation into the emails, for helping Trump win the election. This time the revelations could instead taint Trump and help to cement perceptions that he is a Russian asset. Conservatives in Canada could similarly suffer from guilt by association. Some, such as Conservative Party of BC executive director Angelo Isidorou, have already been questioned about their association with Chen and/or Southern. Depending on how wide it grows, it is likely that the scandal could taint them and hurt their cause at the polls. It could also diminish what little credibility remains for alt-right media in Canada, such as The Counter Signal, True North and Rebel News, the latter of which has featured the work of both Chen and Southern.

The scandal should at least negate the effectiveness of such propaganda, since it only works if you don’t know it’s propaganda. Once you realize it’s propaganda, the jig is up.

Marc Edge is a journalism researcher and author who lives in Ladysmith, BC. His books and articles can be found online at www.marcedge.com.