Lauren Chen brings people together.
When the Russians were on the hunt for American influencers to produce propaganda, they hired a conservative YouTuber to scout for stars, according to the Department of Justice. And Chen, unnamed by the DOJ but identified by NBC News from business records, delivered. She connected employees of the Russian state media operation RT with 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 lucrative deals with the high-profile influencers to pump out online videos — in what turned out to be a nearly $10 million covert Russian propaganda campaign, the DOJ alleged. The DOJ did not name Tenet Media but NBC News identified the company based on its description in the indictment.
Unlike the influencers alleged to have been victims of RT and Tenet Media, who denied knowing they were working for Russia, Chen has said nothing since the indictment made news. Chen, who is referred to as “Founder-1” in the indictment, did not respond to requests for comment. She has not been charged with a crime.
Years before she would allegedly recruit famous conservative influencers for Russia’s propaganda operation, including Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, Benny Johnson and Lauren Southern, Chen served as another type of conduit. At a time when the alt-right was just forming its online network — a community on YouTube, where the loudest and most reactionary voices got rich and famous and leaned on one another’s growing audiences to become more so — Chen gained a following by bridging some of the internet’s most noxious far-right voices to more mainstream conservative creators.
“You’re like the biggest thing on YouTube,” The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles gushed in a 2017 interview with Chen where the pair discussed the political power of online conservatism and defended speaking with white nationalist Richard Spencer, though both said they disagreed with his ideas.
“Everyone goes on everybody’s shows,” Knowles said. “We are dominating the Internet.”
Those connections made Chen an ideal recruiter. In early videos announcing the Tenet Media channel last year, Southern and other contributors specifically noted their relationship to Chen, who had known most if not all of the contributors professionally, having come up together online roughly a decade ago and having appeared on each other’s shows for years. Indeed, the indictment suggests based on her internal communications that Chen knew that the money for Tenet was coming from “the Russians,” and that she was being funded not for her commentary but for her connections.
Chen started posting online in 2016 under the moniker Roaming Millennial. The Chinese Canadian was a fresh voice in the far-right online ecosystem, a young woman of color who had lived all over the world, in Shanghai, Singapore and London, entering a mostly white, American male-dominated movement. Chen posted anti-immigration, anti-LGBTQ rights, anti-feminism and anti-diversity content, explaining in her YouTube channel’s bio section that she hoped to opine on the “debate” between hate speech and free speech, crediting Milo Yiannopoulos, one of the first professional far-right internet trolls, for her foray into video.
“It’s fair to describe them as my offspring, my sort of ideological descendants,” Yiannopoulos told NBC News this week of Chen and the other Tenet commentators, though he hardly remembered Chen despite having appeared on her channel. “She was such a nonentity,” Yiannopoulos said. “Terminally unremarkable.”
“No one can remember anything Lauren Chen did, because she’s never done anything,” Yiannopoulos added. “Until now.”
On numerous podcasts and videos, Chen has described coming from a naturally conservative family and moving further right in college, first at the University of Southern California where she joined the College Republicans club and then at Brigham Young University where she studied political science and screenwriting. About a year after graduating, she started making videos.
At the time, YouTube was becoming the place for young conservative activists to make a name for themselves. Political and algorithmic incentives amplified the most extreme and entertaining voices and reactionary takes, making stars of creators on the ideological fringes. Open white nationalists and conspiracy theorists alongside mainstream libertarians and conservatives became online influencers, tapping into a countercultural appeal that worked in the new attention economy.
Chen described her early 2016 videos as “little dinky slide show presentations about social issues.” Even those early videos showed an affinity for RT; she quoted the Russian-controlled media outlet in videos including “Hate Speech or Free Speech? The Dangers of Censorship.”
As her following grew, what was once a “side hobby” became a full-time gig. In 2017, after a year of railing online about the perceived censorship of conservatives and offering right-wing hot takes on racial and gender issues, Chen joined a digital startup and began to take posting seriously.
Over the next two years, while social media companies including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter were cracking down on far-right creators, including Yiannopoulos, and banning accounts for hate speech and harassment, smaller creators like Chen, who shared much of the political ideology of the far right but were more polite and less overtly extreme in their videos, grew more popular.
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 being unified by the core belief that white identity is under attack.
Spencer, who promoted and spoke at the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that same year, called Chen “a very nice girl, she’s very smart. She’s basically kind of alt-right sympathetic, I mean she’s not really alt-right.”
Before the platforms were outlawing their most outspoken extremists, Chen acted as a kind of 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’ well-known study argued the linked collaborations created pathways to radicalization and the mainstreaming of extremist ideas.
“By connecting to and interacting with one another through YouTube videos, influencers with mainstream audiences lend their credibility to openly white nationalist and other extremist content creators,” Lewis wrote.
By 2019, Chen had more than 400,000 subscribers and 45 million views on YouTube as an “alt-lite” creator, which she parlayed into even more mainstream success. She contributed to the anti-feminist magazine Evie and joined CRTV, an online channel for incendiary conservative voices, including Mark Levin and Michelle Malkin, that merged with 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 monthly op-eds for the state-backed media channel, with headlines including “America’s ‘white supremacy’ is a myth,” and “If you’re American and oppose war with Russia, expect to be smeared as unpatriotic.” At the same time, according to the indictment, the Russian government, through RT, was paying “Founder-1,” identified by NBC News as Chen, to create and publish over 200 videos to her personal YouTube channel without disclosing the sponsorship. In January 2023, “Founder-1” received an “Influencer Talent Scouting” contract from RT employees, which included finding commentators for Tenet, according to the indictment.
While Chen fronted Tenet — albeit quietly; her name was not featured on the company website and she didn’t include her title of CEO on any of her social media platforms — she aligned herself publicly with fringe and extremist voices, including posts praising white supremacist streamer Nick Fuentes’s take on the Israel-Gaza war, and goading other conservatives who supported U.S. funding for Ukraine, such as posting that former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley “should move to Ukraine and run for its presidency.” Her positions on Ukraine and Israel seem likely to have cost her some of her former mainstream conservative support.
Following the unsealing of the indictment, TheBlaze fired Chen and Turning Point USA removed her author page from its website. YouTube terminated all four of Chen’s pages, erasing thousands of videos and nearly a decade of work, including the channel for Tenet Media.
At the channel’s launch last November, several of the six commentators Chen allegedly recruited for Tenet released announcements on their personal channels. In his video, Tenet commentator Matt Christiansen said that Chen and Donovan “picked me because they see a lot of value in my material.” In a since-deleted video, Lauren Southern told her followers, “The reason I’m going with Tenet is because I know the people running it and I know they’re going to let me actually speak my mind.”
CORRECTION (Sept. 12, 2024, 4:39 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article incorrectly described Michael Knowles’ interactions with Richard Spencer. They have spoken but have not appeared on a video together.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com