Moscow Bought MAGA
The price of treason? $100,000 a week
Shocker: MAGA influencers took Moscow cash. Yup, you never saw this one coming!
A few months ago, I searched YouTube for the name “Tim Pool.” I was curious, because Pool has been called the dumbest man on the internet—which is really saying something.
Pool is a YouTuber with 3.3 million followers and a total of over 1 billion views. He is a master whiner, who embodies the narcissism and shrugging cynicism of internet culture. His rambling live streams feature toxic masculinity, self-contradiction, spectacular failures of logic, and punching down. He bitches about women, tells young white men they are victims of wokeness, and promotes conspiracy theories about literally everything. (All of science. All of politics. All of history. All of sports. The Jews. 9-11. Kobe.)
Pool’s proud stupidity is sized perfectly for our moment. He poses as a cool skater guy and Alpha male, but a Washington Post profile revealed a lonely loser, surrounded by paid friends, and hated by most of the people in his town. During a very brief stint as a Vice reporter covering overseas protests, Pool was described by his colleagues as “A coward and a phony” who hid in his hotel room, “a joke” who faked his reporting, “staggeringly arrogant,” “totally full of shit,” “not smart” and “a bumbling doofus”.
But Pool isn’t just an idiot. He’s a useful idiot. That was the Soviet term for Westerners who undermined their own societies by eagerly promoting Russian interests.
This week the Justice Department indicted two Russians in a scheme to spread propaganda, sow division, and attack American values. The two Russians secretly funneled $10 million from the propaganda network Russia Today into the pockets of six of the most notorious MAGA influencers in social media. (Including Lauren Southern, the White Power Barbie). The Russians used front companies and pass-throughs to offer Pool and others an astonishing $100,000 per week. All they had to do was be on YouTube advancing their own noxious narratives about woke culture, election fraud, Russia being the victim in Ukraine, and American democracy being a corrupt lie.
Shocker: Tim Pool took the money. Collectively, these MAGA media whores got about 16 million views while on the Russian payroll.
Claiming ignorance is no excuse. But they weren’t ignorant. Pool’s direct employer asked the right questions. Tenet Media suspected the funding was Russian, demanded evidence, fact-checked it, and realized they were being lied to. But then they decided to shut up and take the money anyway. At one point, when they couldn’t get their invoices paid, they Googled “time in Moscow.”
So they knew.
Oxford Languages defines treason as “the crime of betraying one's country, especially by attempting to kill the sovereign or overthrow the government.”
So are these people really stupid grifters? Or traitors?
Variety, on the indictments and the media company that employed Pool https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/tenet-media-russia-rt-10-million-funding-right-wing-videos-1236131583/
Daily Beast on Pool’s fraudulent career: https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-coward-and-phony-tim-pool-became-one-of-the-biggest-political-youtubers-on-the-planet
Ryan McBeth explains the evidence.
Stupid grifters AND traitors.