Lauren Chen brings people together.
As Russia hunts down American influence to generate propaganda, it hires conservative YouTubers to look for stars, according to the Justice Department. And Chen, not named by the DOJ but identified by NBC News from business records, was sent. They linked employees of Russia’s state media operation RT to unwitting right-wing content creators and their millions of followers, according to a federal indictment unsealed last week.
Chen, co-owner with her husband, producer Liam Donovan, of Tenet Media, an online collective of pro-Trump creators, negotiated a series of good deals with high-profile influencers to pump out online videos – in what turned out to be. nearly $10 million secret Russian propaganda campaign, DOJ alleged. The DOJ did not name Tenet Media but NBC News identified the company based on details in the indictment.
Unlike the influencers allegedly victimized by RT and Tenet Media, who denied knowing they were working in Russia, Chen has not said anything since the allegations hit the news. Chen, referred to as “Founder-1” in the indictment, did not respond to a request for comment. He has not been charged with a crime.
A few years before he would recruit prominent conservative influencers for Russian propaganda operations, including Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, Benny Johnson and Lauren Southern, Chen became another type of conduit. While the alt-right was just forming an online network — a community on YouTube, where the loudest and most reactionary voices became rich and famous and depended on a growing audience — Chen gained followers by connecting some of the most dangerous right-wing voices on the internet. for more mainstream conservative creators.
“You’re like the biggest thing on YouTube,” Michael Knowles told the Daily Wire in a 2017 interview with Chen in which the pair discussed the political power of online conservatism and defended talking to white nationalist Richard Spencer, even though the two disagreed with him. idea.
“Everybody is in everybody’s event,” Knowles said. “We dominate the Internet.”
That relationship made Chen an ideal recruit. In the initial video that announced the Tenet Media channel last year, Southern and other contributors specifically noted their relationship with Chen, who most know that not all of the contributors are professional, had come together online about ten years ago and had appeared on each other’s shows. for years. Indeed, the indictment shows based on his internal communications that Chen knew that money for Tenet came from “Russia,” and that he was funded not for his comments but for his connections.
Chen began posting online in 2016 under the moniker Roaming Millennial. Chinese Canadians are a fresh voice in the alt-right online ecosystem, young women of color who have lived all over the world, in Shanghai, Singapore and London, entering a predominantly white American male-dominated movement. Chen posts anti-immigration, anti-LGBTQ, anti-feminism and anti-diversity content, explaining in his YouTube channel bio section that he hopes to moderate the “debate” between hate speech and free speech, crediting Milo Yiannopoulos, wrongly the first professional right-wing internet troll, because he entered the video.
“It’s fair to describe them as my offspring, a sort of ideological offspring,” Yiannopoulos told NBC News this week Chen and other Tenet commentators, although he hardly remembers Chen despite having appeared on his channel. “He’s not like that,” Yiannopoulos said. “Terminals are not expensive.”
“No one can remember what Lauren Chen did, because she never did anything,” Yiannopoulos added. “Until now.”
In several podcasts and videos, Chen describes coming from a naturally conservative family and moving further to the right in college, first at the University of Southern California where he joined the College Republicans club and then at Brigham Young University where he studied political science and screenwriting. . About a year after graduating, he started making videos.
At the time, YouTube was a place for young conservative activists to make a name for themselves. Political incentives and algorithms amplify the most extreme and reactionary voices, making star creators on the ideological fringes. Open white nationalists and conspiracy theorists along with mainstream libertarians and conservatives are online influencers, tapping into the countercultural appeal that operates in the new attention economy.
Chen described the early 2016 video as “a little slide show presentation of a social issue.” Even those early videos show an affinity for RT; he quotes Russian-controlled media in videos including “Hate Speech or Free Speech? The Dangers of Censorship.”
As he grew older, what was once a “side hobby” turned into a full-time gig. In 2017, after a year online of censorship of what he considered conservatives and right-wing offerings on race and gender issues, Chen joined a digital startup and began taking his posts seriously.
Over the next two years, while social media companies including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter cracked down on far-right creators, including Yiannopoulos, and banned accounts for hate speech and harassment, small creators like Chen, who shared their political ideology. right side but they are more polite and less overtly extreme in their videos, growing in popularity.
She interviewed Spencer for her channel in 2017. Spencer is known as the creator of the alt-right, a 15-year-old movement described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as united by a core belief that white identity is under attack.
Spencer, who promoted and spoke at a Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that same year, called Chen “a very nice girl, she’s very smart. She’s very sympathetic to the alt-right, which means she’s not really alt- right.
Before the platform banned the most outspoken extremists, Chen acted as a bridge between them and more mainstream conservative creators. In a 2018 network analysis of 65 political influencers on YouTube, Stanford researcher Rebecca Lewis, then with the research nonprofit Data & Society, connected conservative pundit Ben Shapiro to Spencer through Chen, who appeared on Shapiro’s YouTube show. Lewis’s famous study states that linked collaborations pave the way to radicalization and mainstreaming of extremist ideas.
“By connecting and interacting with one another through YouTube videos, influencers with key audiences lend credibility to white nationalists and other extremist content creators,” Lewis wrote.
As of 2019, Chen has more than 400,000 subscribers and 45 million views on YouTube as an “alt-lite” creator, which he continues to grow. She contributed to the anti-feminist magazine Evie and joined CRTV, an online channel for incendiary conservative voices, including Mark Levin and Michelle Malkin, who joined Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze in 2018. Chen joined TheBlaze as a video creator with her own show titled “Pseudo -Intellectual.”
In the spring of 2021, Chen began working for RT, writing at least a monthly op-ed for the state-supported media channel, with titles including “white supremacy” America is a myth, “and” If you are American and oppose. war with Russia, hoping to be considered unpatriotic. At the same time, according to the indictment, the Russian government, through RT, paid “Founder-1,” identified by NBC News as Chen, to create and publish more than 200 videos to his personal YouTube channel without disclosing the sponsor. In January 2023, “Founder-1” received an “Influencer Talent Scouting” contract from RT employees, which included finding commentators for Tenet, according to the indictment.
When Chen fronted Tenet – although quietly; his name does not appear on the company’s website and he does not include the title of CEO on any social media platform – he publicly aligns himself with fringe and extremist voices, including posts praising white supremacist streamer Nick Fuentes about the Israel-Gaza War, and targeting conservatives others supported US funding for Ukraine, such as posting that former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley “should go to Ukraine and be president.” His positions on Ukraine and Israel seem likely to cost him some key conservative support.
After the unsealing of the indictment, TheBlaze fired Chen and Turning Point USA removed the author’s page from its website. YouTube terminated all four of Chen’s pages, removing thousands of videos and nearly a decade of work, including channels for Tenet Media.
When the channel launched last November, some of the six commentators Chen allegedly recruited for Tenet announced the announcement on their personal channels. In the video, Tenet commentator Matt Christiansen said that Chen and Donovan “chose me because they see a lot of value in my material.” In a video that has since been deleted, Lauren Southern told her followers, “The reason I’m going to join Tenet is because I know the people who run it and I know they’re going to let me say something.”
CORRECTION (September 12, 2024, 4:39 pm ET): An earlier version of this article misstated Michael Knowles’ interaction with Richard Spencer. They have spoken but did not appear on video together.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com