The Russian influence peddling scandal rocks the right-wing media ecosystem

As some in the media might have said a couple decades ago, this scandal has legs. The couple who provided the money to fund Tenet Media have been charged for violation of sanctions and money laundering. It's believed they are back in Russia, so good luck with the extradition. As Kevin Drum says, the Russians have been targeting the far right in the US all along. The right-wing influencers who accepted considerable sums of the now-defunct Tenet Media were at best useful idiots. I guess if you pay people enough money, they'll look away and pretend like everything is legit? I have a hard time buying the excuses of ignorance. Then again, from what I do know of these influencers, if any of them were to come up with an original thought, it would die of loneliness. 

As of now, the Tenet Media YouTube channel has been taken down and the couple who took Russian money to effectively bankroll the output of the comrades who spewed Kremlin talking points, while not yet facing charges, have dissolved Tenet Media practically overnight. At least one of the YouTube influencers caught up in this whole mess is going to cooperate with the FBI. The others? We'll see. My guess is they will try to cover their butts. Apparently the venture was not a very successful one, as this group of influencers was really more interested in promoting their own individual brands than the job that they were being paid to do (produce Kremlin-friendly videos to sow chaos and discord ahead of a pivotal US election), which is probably for the best. As mentioned by Jay Kuo, the videos posted by these MAGA idiots were not exactly getting a lot of views. As investments go, this doesn't seem like the Kremlin got much to show for their spent rubles. In the meantime, it appears that anyone in their orbit is in a panic. This could be just the tip of the iceberg. We shall soon see. 

This sad spectacle is somewhat reminiscent of the influence operations the Nazi Party and later the Nazi-led German government were involved in during the 1930s and 1940s. Back then, it was the America First crowd, many of whom were Nazi sympathizers (see Prequel by Rachel Maddow for more details). That effort slowed down US military involvement in Europe at a time when Nazi Germany was terrorizing Europe and the Britain, and brazen enough to start a shooting war with the USSR. We came dangerously close to losing our own democracy then. We are in similar straits now. As much as I will continue to mock the useful idiots who get caught up in these schemes, I am deadly serious about the potential consequences of Kremlin-based efforts to kneecap our own democratic institutions. I hope the FBI and CIA are doing what needs to be done to quash these operations before they do any more damage than has already been done.