Benny Johnson Podcast, YouTube Show Undeterred by Russian Influence Ties

When news broke that a number of right-wing commentators had allegedly been funded by a Russian propaganda cutout, it was a head-scratching moment. Bloomberg reporter Devin Leonard, who’s written about right-wing media for Businessweek, digs in. Plus: Horror movies produce an adrenaline rush and a flood of cash.

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It was the day before the most recent presidential debate and Benny Johnson, the popular right-wing podcaster and YouTube show host, was amplifying the latest falsehood—soon to be heard direct from Republican candidate Donald Trump’s mouth—that Haitian immigrants were dining on people’s cats. “This story is insane, all right!” Johnson chortled on The Benny Show. “I doubt any corporate media is going to go and tell the story of Springfield, Ohio, but we have to, actually, as our social obligation to you.”

The Sept. 9 video racked up more than 132,000 views and helps explain why The Benny Show has more than 2.4 million subscribers on YouTube. It also illuminates why its host—once the viral political editor of BuzzFeed before he was fired for multiple instances of plagiarism in 2014—was recruited by Tenet Media, a right-wing Tennessee-based media company identified by the US Department of Justice this month as a “covert project” of RT, the Russian state-controlled media outlet. “Benny used to say, ‘Do you know the difference between a good click and a bad click? They’re just clicks,’” recalls Bubba Atkinson, founder of Bubba News, a daily center-right newsletter, who worked with Johnson in the past. “I think that’s demonstrative of the ethos he lives by, where, you know, almost all attention is good for him.”

Johnson has issued a statement saying he was unaware of Tenet’s Kremlin ties. So have several of the company’s other prominent commentators, most notably the self-described red-pilled former leftist Dave Rubin and skateboarding libertarian Tim Pool. That may very well be true. Still, that such relatively big names in right-wing circles could find themselves entangled with anti-American forces—wittingly or unwittingly—speaks volumes about the state of conservative media in the age of Trump.

If you think of the hierarchy of the right-wing media world, particularly on the personality side, as a three-tiered pyramid, the top is occupied by Fox News figures like Trump cheerleader Sean Hannity. Go down a level, and you’ll find Ben Shapiro and his co-hosts at the Daily Wire, the Nashville company aspiring to be a right-wing Walt Disney Co. Then there’s a third tier of self-employed figures like Johnson, Pool and Rubin. Without the protection or the guardrails of an employer, they must compete for traffic with everybody else and have a financial incentive to go to extremes.

That could mean Johnson mocking the Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney and Trump nemesis Fani Willis as “Big Fani,” or Pool hosting alt-right figures such as Richard Spencer and former Breitbart News senior editor Milo Yiannopoulos, who’ve been largely shunned for good reason elsewhere in conservative circles. But that only seems to have made Tenet’s commentators more attractive to RT. According to the indictment, their messages “are often consistent with the Government of Russia’s interest in amplifying US domestic divisions.”

“Look, the Russians were not stupid,” says Rick Wilson, co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project and a former Republican political consultant. “They recognized that these guys are very much influencers who can spread the kind of messages they wanted distributed to a wider audience, to drive social media engagement through the roof.” (Neither Tenet nor Johnson, Pool or Rubin responded to interview requests for this story.)

Given the nature of their businesses, the Tenet figures were also clearly more susceptible to the dangling of large checks—in at least one instance, $100,000 per video—than their peers with cushier employment arrangements. As Pool put it in an appearance on The Ben Shapiro Show after the indictment’s unveiling, he gets these kinds of offers all the time. “When someone reaches out to us, I say, ‘Great, cool. Someone handle it and talk to the lawyers,’” Pool told Shapiro. “The lawyers come back, do their due diligence, and then we say sure—or whatever.”

He added, “We have people tweeting at me, like, give the money back. Like dude, let me put it this way, we’re talking to our legal department.”

None of this impresses Cenk Uygur, founder of TYTs, a progressive online news network, who has appeared on Pool’s show—or at least he did before the news of the host’s RT connection. “Come on, man, somebody gives you $100,000 a video?” Uygur says. “That makes me ask, are other people giving you $100,000 a video? And who are they? If this is so normal, how often does this happen for right-wing media? And who else is giving you money for propaganda?”

As for Johnson, he’s continuing to rack up views on YouTube. Despite his association with Tenet, he’s had little trouble getting prominent Republicans to appear, including sitting members of Congress. The Benny Show goes on.

In the past decade, horror movies have captured a growing share of the North American box office and now regularly account for about $1 billion worth of annual ticket sales, or 10% of moviegoing in the US and Canada. This year, more than a month before Halloween, the genre has already grossed $587 million, boosted by hits including A Quiet Place: Day One, Alien: Romulus and Longlegs, the breakout indie film. (That’s roughly on par with last year but high relative to years prior.) Even as the wider box office struggles to return to pre-pandemic levels, horror has become a relatively dependable genre for theaters. “The communal experience of watching a horror film in the cinema is unmatched,” says Anthony LaVerde, chief executive officer of the Emagine Entertainment Inc. chain, which has 330 screens throughout the Midwest. “There’s a unique energy that comes from sharing the suspense, the screams and the thrill with others.”

Thomas Buckley and Dorothy Gambrell tell the story with data here: Why Hollywood Loves Horror Movies, in Four Charts

Related: Horror film director Parker Finn is on Bloomberg Screentime’s Ones to Watch list

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