The Tenet Six, Part 1: The Tenet Six Member Who Was Most Active on January 6 Is the Only One No One Is Talking About
The Tenet Six, Part 1: The Tenet Six Member Who Was Most Active on January 6 Is the Only One No One Is Talking About
By focusing mostly on Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Lauren Chen, American media is giving a pass to the man whose obsession with domestic drama the Kremlin was likely most attracted to this year.
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Introduction
{Note: This report incorporates the entirety of every article in the January 6 archive at Proof that deals with any of the topics discussed below. Readers can use the search function in the January 6 section to find such reports. Since Proof is a work of curatorial journalism, readers can get the full picture of these critical events by reading all relevant articles in the archive.}
As we just learned from the breaking news in the Washington Post, the current pro-Donald Trump election interference conspiracy masterminded by the Kremlin is “more sophisticated than in prior election cycles”—and that the focus of this new sophistication is the care with which the Russians are targeting fringe-right MAGA influencers for recruitment.
One cell acting in furtherance of that Kremlin election-inference conspiracy—though whether its members were doing so knowingly or unknowingly hasn’t yet been finally determined by the FBI, which is still investigating—was just destroyed by DOJ via the indictment of two of its covert RT (Kremlin-controlled Russian television) funders.
All eight of the far-right MAGA influencers caught up in the RT scheme targeting Tenet Media—Lauren Chen, Liam Donovan, Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, Dave Rubin, Lauren Southern, Matt Christiansen, and Tayler Hansen—claim to be its victims, even as they insist, in statements that strain credulity, that virtually no red flags were raised for them when a mysterious backer they had never met and could find nothing about on the internet, supposed Belgian moneybags “Eduard Grigoriann”, began paying them several times more for their content than any metric could have justified.
The six of these eight MAGA celebrities who nominally qualify as on-air “talent”—Pool, Johnson, Rubin, Southern, Christiansen, and Hansen—are now known as the Tenet Six. Of the six, Pool has spoken has been the most prodigious and inartful in speaking about the DOJ indictment, insisting that the $10 million the Kremlin paid him and his co-stars via a cutout was “inconsequential” to him and “market value” for his services (it was actually two to three times his market value) and, while he has no plans to give any of the money back, he didn’t need any of it. He added that, with equal forced equanimity, that though the deal would have been worth $100 million in payments over ten years, “we didn’t need the deal, the deal didn’t do anything for us.”
That no one in media, and perhaps no one at the FBI or DOJ, is buying any of this is no block to the Tenet Six continuing to find ways to make millions off of Trump’s cult of personality—and the racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, transphobic, disinformation-laden Kremlinist milieu that both surrounds and feeds it.
All of which is why it’s so surprising that so little attention has been paid thus far to the question not of who the Tenet Six are but why they were selected by—in the first instance—their MAGA producers Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan, and/or (through these two) the Kremlin agents who Ms. Chen and Mr. Donovan have allegedly been working with, whether knowingly or unknowingly.
While followers of the Tenet Six saga now have a Big Data analysis of the key topics the Tenet Six were most obsessed with—no surprise, it maps quite well to the reams of thematically organized domestic disinformation that the Kremlin has been trying to spread stateside this decade—and while we have several autopsies dissecting how Tenet Media fell now that it has officially folded up shop, there is still no insight into why these six people in particular were the right targets for the Kremlin. Indeed, in his unusual statements about the Tenet Six (see links above) even Mr. Pool implies that while he knows the other five in the group, he was not necessarily the one who chose them. That decision was made higher up the chain—which means it may well have been made with the direct input of Kremlin agents who work in Russian state media.
So what do we know about the Tenet Six, and what does this tell us about why they might have been chosen?
As USA Today breaks down, Tim Pool used to work for VICE; Benny Johnson used to work for BuzzFeed; Dave Rubin is a self-described “liberal” who used to have a show on the left-leaning Young Turks network (as well as a network associated with the late CNN star Larry King); Lauren Southern is a Canadian who has run for office as a libertarian; and Matt Christiansen is a former liberal gamer turned Republican. These five are popular in the MAGAsphere, but don’t do the sort of gangbusters numbers on YouTube or elsewhere that would cause them to get tens of millions of dollars, Pool’s ludicrous claim that he gets eight-figure offers similar to the Kremlin’s “fifty times a year” (i.e., once a week) notwithstanding. While all these individuals are now far-right provocateurs who use their prior liberal and/or mainstream-media bona fides to build lucrative gravitas with their easily duped MAGA audience—which likes hearing fellow MAGAs agree with them only slightly less than hearing alleged “former liberals” agree with them—none of the five present as a classic, dyed-in-the-wool right-wing radical, that is, the sort of Republican who was down with the Tea Party in the 2000s and early 2010s and was an instant convert to the nihilistic, principle-free kitsch of Trumpism.
Southern is possibly to the closest to this model, but as a Canadian her cultural cred amongst the American far-right set is naturally slightly muted.
Put bluntly, besides playing up false claims of political corruption inside Ukraine, demanding that America’s European ally immediately surrender to the Russian war criminals who invaded it in 2014 and reinvaded it in 2022, and working overtime to incite racial animus among working- and middle-class whites who feel they are now (all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding) the most disadvantaged demographic in America—all notions we know the Tenet Six have spent a lot of their air-time on—the best way to garner credibility in the midst of the ongoing pro-Trump disinformation campaign that has taken over U.S. social media is to have been present in some way for the events of January 6. Being a “J6er” seems to be the sine qua non of abiding cred in MAGA-dom.
But while there’s no question the five members of the Tenet Six whose ultra-brief bio squibs were just provided above are national leaders in spreading pro-Russia and pro-Trump disinformation, where were these five when militant Trumpists self-executed their ultimate loyalty test and stormed the U.S. Capitol in service of a known rapist, con man, and fraudster?
Take Tim Pool, for instance. While he alerted listeners of his far-right disinformation program (Timcast IRL) in advance that January 6 was going to be a big pro-Trump event, the most the House January 6 Committee ever said about his involvement with same was that he “promoted” the event—and when it said even that little of his role in the January 6 narrative, Pool howled with anger, writing a scathing reply in the digital pages of Newsweek that read in part, “I have condemned political violence hundreds of times on my show Timcast IRL—like I did on January 6 itself, after the violence had unfolded.”
As for Benny Johnson, while he infamously floated the deranged conspiracy theory that January 6 was the work of FBI agents, he appeared to retract the claim as soon as the House January 6 Committee aired vivid footage of the far-right terrorist attack.
While Johnson was once Chief Creative Officer (CCO) at Turning Point USA—the far-right youth-recruiting operation run by Charlie Kirk, who’s been framed as almost a surrogate Trump child—and while Turning Point was a somewhat minor player in providing logistical support for certain events that occurred in D.C. in January 2021, (though it did get some notice for advising and/or being advised by key MAGA figures like Ginni Thomas, Donald Trump Jr., and Kimberly Guilfoyle during this period), Johnson was not himself associated with any of the goings-on at the Capitol beyond lying about them ex post.
{Note: Johnson did attempt to use January 6 footage released by House Republicans in 2023 to falsely claim that former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi had planned January 6 and that the whole event was a “movie”—a deranged claim in no way supported by any evidence—this merely maintained his reputation as a post-January 6 truther who hadn’t accrued his MAGA gravitas on the day itself but during the after-the-fact, far-right-blog coverup of its horrors.}
Lauren Southern has repeatedly been accused of being a white supremacist, and has certainly hung out with white supremacist leaders like Gavin McInnes of the Proud Boys, but beyond spreading the usual post-January 6 MAGA lies her touchstone issues point to her being an unscrupulous grifter whose moneymaker is virulent racism (see here, here, here, here, and here for more).
Ms. Southern may be adept at framing her racist crusades in militaristic terms, telling an interviewer that her life’s work is a “fight for dominance [over nonwhite cultures]”, but she wasn’t about to personally put herself on the line on January 6.
And in America’s current political landscape, one in which half of Americans believe that a second U.S. civil war is imminent, this distinction really matters. Why? Because if Donald Trump loses in November, we would expect the Kremlin to want those it has invested so much money in to be seeking not just the continuation of a (by then) failed U.S. disinformation campaign—as that campaign was going to continue post-election regardless—but something more on the order of an intermittent, deeply destabilizing domestic armed conflict.
Ms. Southern doesn’t appear to be a candidate to lead that particular charge. Indeed, an academic treatise entitled “Rebel Yell”, about Southern’s time at the far-right Rebel News—known for its association with other far-right disinformation merchants like Jack Posobiec, Laura Loomer, and Sebastian Gorka—the Canadian is described as “framing serious issues through a mocking tone, illustrating a canny attunement to a younger reactionary audience” (emphasis supplied). While Southern clearly hates Muslims and trans people and wants to wipe out at least nonwhite cultures in the U.S., mockery does not lend itself to paramilitary leadership in the event of a hot civil war.
What Southern is most adept at, frankly, is falsely claiming her free-speech rights are being abridged. There’s no quicker path to a MAGA-based income than insisting on one’s own victimhood—as Donald Trump himself proves every fundraising quarter.
As for Matt Christiansen, sure, he’s spent hours and hours spreading disinformation about DOJ’s January 6 prosecutions as a way of aiding an active insurrection through legal means, but his objections to the DOJ’s prosecutions are—beyond being deeply misleading—highly technical in nature: he crankily objects to the use of the Seditious Conspiracy statue against the Proud Boys; he opines that the January 6 prosecutions constitute a novel weaponization of the criminal justice system; and he falsely frames as “free speech” much of what happened on January 6, 2021. He may—again falsely, and of course without any apparent legal training—likewise claim that the January 6 prosecutions lacked sufficient evidence, but all this is a far cry from planting himself in the midst of the U.S. Capitol attack. Spreading conspiracy theories alleging that the FBI was involved in the January 6 attacks is easy, and Christiansen has certainly done that, but evidence of him being a paramilitary pro-Trump activist is essentially none.
But then we come to Tayler Hansen.
Hansen is the member of the Tenet Six almost no one is talking about. Which makes no sense, given that he was literally neck deep in the events that unfolded on Capitol grounds on January 6, 2021. In fact, he’s one of the main characters in the celebrated HBO documentary about January 6, Four Hours at the Capitol, for which film Hansen presented himself as a “reporter” for a notorious far-right fake-news website, The Gateway Pundit (which, yes, made him a fake reporter—but a fake reporter with some amazing January 6 footage that clearly HBO’s filmmakers weren’t willing to give up).
As Hansen told HBO on-camera, “I saw that first group [that breached the barriers on federal grounds] congregate—they were Proud Boys.”
It was no coincidence Hansen was present to see the launch of an armed insurrection; he had more familiarity with the activities of the Proud Boys than he was willing to allow in speaking to HBO, just as Proud Boy Eddie Block (who Proof was the first American publication to write about) wasn’t being truthful when he told HBO he just happened across some of his Proud Boy friends meeting at the Washington Memorial on January 6—as in fact we now know that that was the official, pre-planned Proud Boy meeting spot for Phase 1 of their January 6 plot.
Whereas British documentarian Nick Quested was stunned on January 6 when the Proud Boys, a group he’d been embedded with as a bona fide professional journalist for weeks, turned their morning march away from Trump’s speech at the White House Ellipse to head to the U.S. Capitol instead—yet had no choice but to stay with the militant group, given his journalistic assignment—Tenet Six member Hansen has no explanation for how he knew he should turn away from what everyone assumed was the main event of that day (an unprecedented Certification Day speech by the sitting President of the United States) to tag along with a rag-tag group of rabble-rousers. He boasts that he watched from mere feet away as the Proud Boys “broke[ ] through all the barriers”, crowing that “I was the first was of the first ones in that area [where the breach of Capitol grounds first occurred.”
As the insurrection begins in earnest, Hansen is heard in real time saying, in footage from the HBO film, “They’re storming it. Storm that shit.” Having revealed his non-journalistic motivations, he shortly thereafter starts egging on insurrectionists under the guise of interviewing them; standing in the midst of an armed mob fighting with—and in many instances injuring—USCP officers, Hansen asks a rioter, “What’s the solution to this situation right here?” To which softball question the rioter dutifully yells, “Storm the Capitol!”
So how did a member of the Tenet Six closer to the events of January 6 than not just any other Tenet Six member but any J6er—present, as we can see in Four Hours at the Capitol, at First Breach; present at the Battle of the Portico; present at the Battle in the Scaffolding; present at The Stair Rush; present inside the Capitol itself during The Capitol Occupation (protected only by the false premise that he was a journalist); present in the Battle in the Crypt; self-admittedly at the “front” of the fighting during the Standoff at the House Chamber; present at the shooting of Ashli Babbitt (Hansen is actually the one who shouts, “He’s got a gun! He’s got a gun!” just seconds before Babbitt is shot)—become the only one of the Tenet Six who no one is talking about?
How did a man who would later try to claim January 6 had been the work of antifa and the FBI, but who first told HBO filmmakers that the attack was the work of “Trump supporters and QAnon groups”, morph from a man spreading a narrative no one in the Kremlin would have paid for to one it wanted to throw tens of millions at? How did a man who admits to spending well over an hour amidst January 6 “rioting” go on to make the Kremlin’s apparent ultra-shortlist of highly sought-after American assets?
Keep in mind, as you read what follows, that Tayler Hansen claiming he had a right to trespass on federal grounds during the January 6 insurrection because he was acting as a “reporter” for “The Gateway Pundit” would be like someone claiming the right to park in any parking spot on the Eastern Seaboard because they work as a diplomat for Chuck-E-Cheese.
