A Fall Mystery
It’s that time of year when there is a tragic beauty to the season. The light is golden, but the shadows grow longer. A darkness is coming. There’s something about the chill in the air and frost on a pumpkin that makes mysteries all the more intriguing (admittedly, it could be author’s bias). This is a strange story, to be sure. Be advised, this is not a story about ideology as much as the pursuit of power and the ruthless tactics people are willing to use to advance their agenda. It’s been a month, and now that the dust has settled, it’s a little less toxic to examine.
Fall in the Pacific Northwest isn’t as pronounced as it is in other climates. The rains return. On some days, it’s dreary, a bit like Eastern Europe. Could there be a better setting for Russian covert information warfare operations? Unlikely. It’s easy to imagine suitcases full of cash mysteriously dropped off on a rainy fall evening under low cloud cover. More’s the pity none of it happened like that.
Hailing from that neck of the woods, deep in the Fraser Valley, Lauren Southern is (to put it mildly) a very complex person. Even though she’s been gifted with stunning features and quick wit, it can’t be easy to walk a mile in her wet-season Chelsea boots. By West Coast standards, her politics could be described as slightly to the right of Attila the Hun. Whether deserved or not, some of the worst venom comes from her own countrymen in a nation where she is considered a pariah among what passes for polite society in Canada. By that standard, she is the perfect target, despite already having paid dearly for her beliefs. Her recent history has been marred by many moments of professional and personal hardship. Up until last month, Lauren scraped out a living as a relatively minor public figure and media “influencer.” So odious was this influence that in 2018, Southern was barred entry into the United Kingdom on grounds she was “not conducive to the public good.” More bluntly, her views on the Islamization of Europe were not welcome in Britain. Her beliefs and publications certainly have a place in the story, but they’re almost beside the point. Lauren made a very convenient villain, and since September 4th, she has been painted as the young and beautiful face of Russian propaganda.
Just being branded a right-wing bigot wasn’t enough. It was necessary to completely ruin Lauren. Last month, the point was driven home through much of North American media. Now the matter is pretty much settled. Luckily, the news cycle has shifted, and much of the pressure surrounding the topic has dissipated, making it easier to investigate dispassionately.
A certain narrative was painted: Lauren Southern and her confederates were accused of being on the take from the Kremlin. Her detractors all echoed the same charge: she was paid by a foreign news agency to disseminate material. Regardless of the facts (or lack thereof), the corporate news machine got its story out within a few days and never looked back at the lives it succeeded in destroying. Efforts were made in early September to paint several digital media personalities with the same brush. There was talk of a Russian disinformation campaign with several tentacles. Tim Pool, Lauren Southern, Dave Rubin, Lauren Chen, and Benny Johnson were all named and shamed. Were they charged? No. None of these people have been charged with a crime in the United States or even named by government lawyers as conspirators. The media has solely led the charge in uncovering the names and companies allegedly involved in the plot. Two of the "influencers" (both named Lauren) are Canadian nationals. Out of all of them, Tim Pool is the only one who is very well known. For those unfamiliar with Tim, he has a very popular podcast on YouTube with 1.4 million followers (mostly under 35). None of these people have a meaningful foothold in broadcast television or traditional media.
Were any of them distributing Russian propaganda or misinformation? In this context, Lauren Chen is an easy target. Chen runs the Tenet media company, and it could well be the one implicated in the foreign payments. Yet this shouldn’t be a shock. Before 2022, she worked with RT (a Russian state-funded media outlet) and published in its opinion section. It’s no surprise Chen was hired. RT is a media firm. Larry King, Dennis Miller, Lee Camp, Governor Jesse Ventura (of Minnesota), Rick Sanchez, and Ed Schultz were all part of RT at some point. The list of Americans hired by the network prior to the Ukraine war was quite long. By that association, maybe they’re all operatives too. Who knows at this point?
The truth (if it still matters to anyone) is that RT had a significant U.S. presence before they ceased daily operations in New York and Washington. What is explicitly stated in the indictment is that the company (in the Justice Department’s estimation) was acting as a propaganda branch of the Kremlin. In a very flat sense, it probably was (see para 5 on page 3). Journalism has a slant. Al-Jazeera has one, as does Haaretz, Le Figaro, and the South China Morning Post. They all do. The implicit assumption surrounding the case (and echoed by the media) is that some slants are dangerous and that it’s up to government lawyers to decide which ones are threatening or divisive. In the absence of pesky things like freedom of the press, the argument holds together. It’s almost an East German way of thinking. When even the most basic liberal principles are applied, the whole affair becomes meaningless. That’s why, even after a month, no one is in trouble. What started on September 4th was a confection for the public to consume.
Getting back to Lauren Southern, the closest she ever got to Russian propaganda was in 2018 when she did an interview with Aleksandr Dugin. Like Southern, Dugin has also led a tragic life, especially since the assassination of his only child by Ukrainian nationalists in 2022. At one point before the fall of the Soviet Union, he too was considered a pariah and was forced to sweep the streets of Moscow. Now a notorious political philosopher and academic, Dugin is the father of an ideology aptly named Eurasianism.* His views are extremely distasteful, and his history is quite off the mark, but his works offer an interesting glimpse into the mind of one of the West’s greatest detractors. It’s possible that much of his outreach and influence contributed to an article published by Dmitry Medvedev on Anglo-American Fascism. Southern’s interview was fascinating, but (even though it took place years before the timeline of the case) the interaction likely started a chain of events that has ultimately made her politically radioactive. Was it propaganda for the Russian state? Not strictly, but it’s the closest that any of the pundits named in the media have come to actual propaganda from the most radical Russian nationalist source on earth. Whereas even Lauren Chen’s last article for RT on the Ukraine war could be interpreted as just an op-ed. Yet according to the indictment, directly propagandizing was just one of many threats. There is a critical subtext in the charges that interprets skepticism about the war in Eastern Europe as “malign influence,” though a better word might simply be “subversion.” As for the others named only by the media, they haven’t done much of anything at all. It must also be stressed that barring any new information, the rest of the people named (Pool, Johnson, Rubin, and any other names the press can conjure up) are nothing more than unwitting victims in the affair.
So far, it’s clear: two Canadian women were accused of pumping out Putin’s propaganda or, at a minimum, spreading subversive thought. The CBC did its best to shape the narrative, parroting the talking points of other major news outlets, including NBC, The Washington Post, ABC, The LA Times, and CNN. Not to be outdone, the Canadian Minister for Public Safety opportunistically went out of his way to drive the narrative home. Not only was he working with U.S. officials, but he also stated that any attempts to illegally assist Russian disinformation would “face the full force of Canadian law.” Ouch.
Obviously, given the indictment by Merrick Garland’s Justice Department, they are eventually going to be charged as clandestine agents of a foreign power, right? No. Nothing. Not even Tenet Media is facing prosecution under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). In the entire indictment, the only two people charged with violating FARA were two Russian nationals: Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva. It should be noted that these names weren’t widely circulated (one CBC story didn’t bother to mention the actual defendants’ names at all). Dig deeper, and it gets even murkier.
Who the heck are Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva? They’re Russian nationals, of course. They work for RT as employees of the news company. Even stranger is that nowhere in the indictment does it mention a very inconvenient reality that is pertinent to the whole affair. It’s almost purposefully obscured, and it remains unreported. The problem with charging Russian nationals is that a heck of a lot of them tend to live in Russia. There is no record of either employee setting foot on U.S. soil to commit the caper; most of this happened online and through correspondence. Neither is there extradition between Russia and the U.S. Barring the chance that the two will hand themselves in to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, no one will ever face trial. Some outlets even went so far as to say the two Russians “remain at large,” which conjures a purposefully misleading picture. They’re likely still sitting in an office in Moscow. Nobody’s on the run, living on the lam in Bangkok.
Even more outlandish is the fact that no journalist anywhere at any time has ever been convicted of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Zero. Lauren Southern and Lauren Chen have a better chance of being prosecuted in their own country than by the United States Justice Department. This is likely why Lauren Southern hasn’t publicly stated anything since the whole thing started (she probably will, but it’s been a month without a peep). Members of the Canadian Federal Cabinet don’t make idle threats. Luckily for both ladies, the current government’s days are numbered.
Here, the real mystery is laid bare. Why did any of this happen? If journalists like Southern and Chen are protected by the First Amendment, and the Russian employees of RT can’t be prosecuted, what’s the point of laying an indictment? Even better, why isn’t RT being prosecuted? That would be reasonable, given the serious nature of what’s alleged. RT is still a multinational corporation. RT obviously put up the money. RT’s employees were clearly following instructions from higher-ups in the company. RT is still a legal entity. RT could be brought to court. However, if it were, RT would be entitled to a robust defense and the discovery of evidence. The charges would have to be clear. The process would have to be transparent. For now, none of that is happening. This doesn’t let the two Laurens off the hook, but it casts doubt on whether the case was brought in earnest. The indictment brought by the Attorney General alleging a Russian conspiracy is a road to absolutely nowhere. Convicting these two RT employees is impossible. It’s speculation, but investigating the paymasters of journalists and media personalities is not a thread the Justice Department wants to pull on.
The whole business could lead someone with a more jaded outlook to conclude this was all for show, and the motivations behind the charge were ulterior and political. It’s a way of striking at opponents and stirring up hysteria over a third Russian disinformation campaign. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s hard to see it as anything else. The livelihoods and reputations that have been harmed are just casualties in the current political season.
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*Eurasianism has many fathers and can trace its roots back to the early 20th century, but Dugin has resurrected it in the last two decades and made it his own.