If there is one thing Donald Trump is excellent at, it’s bringing slimy worm grifters out of the woodwork. He inspired insipid gas bags like Marjorie Taylor Greene and convicted felon George Santos to run for office, paved the road for Lex Luthor wanna-be Elon Musk to try and red-pill America, and launched the podcast careers of forgettable-looking white dudes with wiener complexes across the nation.
Host of The Culture War podcast and misguided singer Tim Pool is just one of Trump’s many followers. The right-wing commenter has found himself in the hot seat after an indictment from the Department of Justice was released on September 5. Though it doesn’t directly name the “Tennessee-based online content creation company,” the company description matches Tenet Media, the umbrella company that housed Pool’s podcast, among a bevy of other vitriolic conservative voices.
Tenet Media on YouTube describes itself as a “network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues,” and lists six familiar crappy commentators – Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, Dave Rubin, Lauren Southern, Taylor Hansen, and Matt Christiansen – as some of its primary “celebrities.” The company, which was allegedly funded by “Eduard Grigoriann” – a fictional persona – was actually two Russian proprietors of RT, formerly Russia Today.
On September, 5 the DOJ filed an indictment accusing the Kremlin of dumping millions into media companies across Canada, The United Kingdom, The European Union, and the United States “designed to shape public opinion” (read: push Russian propaganda). The two employees are accused of using “fake personas and shell companies,” to tap right-wing commentators and use them to, knowingly or otherwise, peddle Russian-fed sentiments on “immigration, inflation, and other topics related to domestic and foreign policy.”
The content was meant to amplify “U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition to core Government of Russia interests, such as its ongoing war in Ukraine.” U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Russia had heavily influenced the 2016 election through hacking, the use of bots, and spreading disinformation in an expansive online campaign.
Pool took to X.com to clear his name, insisting that any media created under Tenet’s label was “only licensed by” the company. He asserted that if the allegations do prove to be true, he and the other commentators “were deceived and are victims.”
It’s nearly impossible to feel bad for Pool. He’s used to momentum to double down on his divisive comments, spending no time reconsidering how well his positions align with one of America’s greatest longtime enemies, just like daddy Trump’s.
To prove how anti-Russian he is, Pool tossed “Putin is a scumbag, Russia sucks donkey balls” into his statement. Pool has been a vocal critic of America’s involvement with the Russian/Ukraine war, openly declaring Ukraine “the greatest threat to this nation and to the world.”
In the court of public opinion, Pool and his witless colleagues have already been proven to be traitors. At best, they are inflammatory idiots conned into being a foreign country’s mouthpiece, at worst, they actively sold out their countrymen in a bid to make $100k a week.
“I didn’t know it was illegal,” isn’t exactly a viable route to staying out of jail. It’s a lesson Pool should be well familiar with, since his rhetoric was used to encourage the insurrection on January 6, 2021, which landed nearly 500 defendants behind bars. Maybe it’s time Pool followed his own advice and used this as his “now or never moment” to leave the country for good.