Dirty Russian money and the American far right: The case of Dave Rubin
Corruption is a many-headed monster
Rubin in Budapest prasing the local strongman [Danube Institute]
I was flicking through the US news sites when the name of Dave Rubin flashed by. He was being used by Putin’s agents to spread pro-Trump propaganda, I read, and being paid royally for his services.
Hold on a minute, I thought, I know this guy.
Or, rather, I did. Back before Trump was elected in 2016, Rubin interviewed me. He was an American political journalist, who invited guests who shared his classically liberal positions on to a successful YouTube show. It made him a minor celebrity, who collected about 1.5 million or so Twitter followers.
How times change. The indictment against the Russian-financed media company that sent Rubles to Rubin and other pro-Trump pundits, without them knowing where their fees originated from, said that: “The Justice Department will not tolerate attempts by an authoritarian regime to exploit our country’s free exchange of ideas in order to covertly further its own propaganda efforts.”
How could a supposed believer in freedom become the unwitting tool of an authoritarian regime’s campaign against the very United States he professed so loudly to love?
We think we find a conclusive answer when we “follow the money” and see a suspect pocketing bribes. He sold out and they paid him. Nothing could be simpler.
But what of Trump supporters, who have never received a penny, but sincerely believe in overthrowing free elections in the United States and pleasing Vladimir Putin? Are they any better than the suborned agents of foreign powers? Throughout history selfless fanatics have been every bit as terrifying as the merely corrupt, after all.
And what of conservative influencers like Dave Rubin, who did not apparently know that the money in their bank accounts flowed from Moscow? Rubin’s attacks on the Democrats came first. It was his support for Trump that brought him to the Russians’ attention. They did not need to instruct him, merely to encourage him.
In other words, all corruption begins with the corruption of the intellect, and before you follow the money, you need to know why the money wants to follow you.
For if the protestations of innocence from Rubin and his fellow pro-Trump conservatives are to be believed, they were saying what the Putin regime wanted them to say, without needing to be told, and without needing to know that Moscow was paying them. (And if I may just take a break here and note how odd it is to live this far into the 21st century and find that, in my old age, Moscow is paying off western conservatives rather than western communists.)
Rubin seemed an interesting liberal when he interviewed me. He’d picked on a book I had written in the early 2000s called What’s Left. It looked at how and why liberals and leftists supported Islamist movements, whose misogyny and homophobia, and hatred of democracy and human rights, represented everything they said they were against.
One only needs to note the uncritical support for Hamas and Iran today from the worst of the Western left to see how little has changed.
Leaving all questions of intellectual consistency to one side, liberals and leftists cheering on Islamists who hate everything that liberals and the left stand for is ridiculous.
Almost as ridiculous, you might say, as Rubin and his fellow US conservatives cheering on Donald Trump, whose attempts to overthrow fair elections and support for Putin go against everything conservatives are meant to believe in.
Rubin was generous about my book, and I was grateful. He then made an argument that was common at the time. White leftists were frightened to talk about Islamist extremism for fear of being accused of Islamophobia. Their cowardice handed the issue to the far right, which was only too happy to attack Muslims.
You could see it happening in Europe, Rubin said, and in the US. At that very moment Donald Trump was proposing banning Muslims from entering the country. Trump’s idea was “idiotic, over the top and ridiculous,” Rubin continued. But “if we make no distinction between people who are trying to talk about serious issues versus people who trade on fear [such as Trump] then we help the real xenophobes”
You get the picture. Rubin did not support Trump. On the contrary, he wanted to stop progressives helping Trump take power. His argument against the left gifting issues to conservatives needed to be heard as the authoritarianism of the woke movement of the late 2010s drove millions rightwards
Now Rubin is embracing the politicians he affected to despise and becoming a “real xenophobe” in the process. Now he says Democrats are “evil”, interviews Viktor Orban on bended knee, and praises Trump as a “man of the people”.
I am in no position to speculate about Rubin’s motives. But anyone watching the US will have seen Republican politicians biting their tongues and refusing to criticise Trump, even when his supporters stormed the Capitol. All they would have endangered by speaking out was their career in the Republican party. But that was enough. Fear of losing their jobs bought their silence.
Similarly, right-wing journalists and influencers would have undoubtedly lost viewers and money, if they had found the courage to stand up to Trump after 2016.
But it was not as if they were living in a dictatorship. It was not as if the secret police would have dragged them from their beds in the middle of the night. If they lost their audience, all they needed to do was go off and find a new one, as writers have done throughout history.
What is so pathetic about the collapse of the American right before Trump is that it took so little to bring it to its knees.
Saying what you need to say to keep your job or your audience is a kind of corruption, of course. But the Russians did not bribe US conservatives, and made them take positions they would not have otherwise taken. Moscow looked at the propaganda they were already spouting and liked what it saw.
The US Department of Justice’s indictment showed how RT, the Russian propaganda network, funded an organisation called Tenet Media in the United States. It was a Nashville-based “content creation company” co-owned by yet another well-known conservative media pundit, Lauren Chen.
We do not know how many Rubles went to Rubin. According to the indictment, one unidentified influencer received $400,000 (£304,000) a month for 16 videos, plus a performance bonus and a $100,000 signing fee, but it may not have been him.
The offers of money came via a mysterious Brussels-born businessman named Eduard Grigoriann. If they had bothered to look for him on the Web, conservatives would have found that the reason that Mr Grigoriann was so mysterious was because he did not, in fact, exist.
Rubin’s colleague Tim Pool declares “Ukraine is the enemy of this country” as cash tills ring merrily in the background
The Russians got what they wanted. In one clip from the channel now circulating online, Tim Pool a conservative recruited alongside Rubin, called Ukraine the “greatest threat” to the United States and the world. The Russians pushed the channel to tie a terror attack in Moscow to Ukraine, even though ISIS claimed responsibility, according to the indictment. The Russians also asked the channel to provide suitably adulatory coverage of a Tucker Carlson visit to Russia.
When the scandal broke, the conservative journalists denied that they knew of the Russian involvement.
“I knew absolutely nothing about any of this fraudulent activity” Rubin declared. “I and other commentators were the victims of this scheme.”
Isn’t this always the way? The supposed hardmen of the right, who mock the woke for their cult of victimhood, are always the first to clutch their pearls and scream “I AM THE REAL VICTIM HERE” when the going gets tough.
The Washington Post reported that
“The news that some of the right’s biggest online stars had, apparently unwittingly, taken millions from the Kremlin provoked a wave of schadenfreude from their critics. On X, never-Trump conservative writer Christian Vanderbrouk, quipped that Tenet’s stars managed to see conspiracy theories everywhere — yet never questioned why a mysterious Belgian was paying them to prop up a little-watched YouTube channel.”
And indeed, there is a temptation to quip and laugh and dismiss this story.
But think before you scoff. I asked at the start how could a supposed believer in freedom become the alleged tool of an authoritarian regime’s campaign against the very United States he professed so loudly to love?
The answer has nothing to do with the motives of obscure YouTube propagandists and everything to do with Donald Trump. He represents Russian interests like no US leader before him. Trump has radicalised his base and his cheerleaders. The Russians did not need to persuade men like Dave Rubin to repeat their lines. Trump had ensured they were repeating them anyway. All Moscow needed to do was pump in money to reinforce a pre-existing message.
As things stand, the US, the arsenal democracy, could soon re-elect Trump, an admirer of Vladmir Putin and enemy of Ukraine. The threat is not abstract. The capture by Russia of the dominant faction on the American right has already seen the US Congress delay sending military aid to Ukraine. Soldiers have died, civilians have been tortured and murdered in the occupied territories, and cities have been bombed because of Trump’s admiration for Putin.
Pick any time you want: the Second World War, the Cold War, name your crisis, and you will see that we have had nothing like before. For the first time in modern history, an enemy of the West and of the US constitution is the Republican candidate for president of the United States.
Glancing at the US news sites once again, I see that he has a fair chance of winning.
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Nick, I think you missed a third motivation for these “victim” influencers. Like Trump, they have become addicted to continuous attention. They can't let go of one audience and find another. A single moment without attention will be more painful than they can bear. And, of course, attention can come in the form of unexpected money.
Thank you for writing this. It deserves to be widely read. It would be reassuring to think that our new government had an understanding of these issues.
The long-standing (since 2016/17 at least) refusal of governments to properly publicly acknowledge that U.K. democratic processes can now be subverted so easily by targeted misinformation does not seem to be an issue that many of our politicians have the courage to address.