Popular Liberal YouTuber Takes Dark Money & Becomes Libel Bully
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Transcript:
In the past year, there have been a few notable bombshells revealing the dark money that funds online discourse. In September of last year, a federal indictment revealed that rightwing influencers like Tim Pool and Dave Rubin were being funded by Russia to further the Kremlin’s “interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition,” which was pretty obvious to everyone, but the podcasters claimed they had NO IDEA that the Russians were behind the obviously fake billionaire offering them millions of dollars to continue doing what they were doing.
A month later, I reported about the revelation that Nazis were secretly funding some YouTubers who brand themselves as “skeptics” and “atheists,” like “The Jolly Heretic” Edward Dutton. This information leaked alongside the related news that the Nazis in question were paying off Dutton even though they found him annoying and lazy, which I still find very funny.
If you thought that it was only far-right conservatives secretly funding propagandists, a new report by Taylor Lorenz for Wired should set you straight:
“A Dark Money Group Is Secretly Funding High-Profile Democratic Influencers
An initiative aimed at boosting Democrats online offers influencers up to $8,000 a month to push the party line. All they have to do is keep it secret—and agree to restrictions on their content.”
Now, let’s get some things out of the way at the outset: first of all, no, I am not one of the “influencers” cashing those sweet checks. For a start, I am not an influencer. If anything, I am a de-influencer. I shit on brands’ marketing and advertising and have made myself un-hireable. I do not do ad reads, and I do not accept money from any corporations for anything. It’s partly because of ethics and partly because I am a child who cannot bear people telling me what to do, even if they’re just telling me to pretend to like a shitty keto cereal or Raid Shadow Legends, whatever the fuck that is.
For another thing, I am not high-profile enough. I tend to get around 30,000 views per video, which is pathetic compared to the “influencers” who are apparently part of this scheme, like “Barrett Adair, a content creator who runs an American Girl Doll–themed pro-DNC meme account” or “Suzanne Lambert, who has called herself a “Regina George liberal.” I will never achieve their heights.
There are also creators named in the piece who I have actually heard of, like the co-founder of the project itself, Brian Tyler Cohen. The project is called “Chorus,” and appears to be an effort to fund liberal influencers with hundreds or thousands of dollars (depending on the creator) and amplify them in order to spread Democrat talking points. Wired notes that Chorus is fully funded by The Sixteen Thirty Fund, a “liberal response to conservative dark money groups and organizations like the Koch network.”
As I’ve gone over before, a dark money group is one that specifically exists to hide where money is coming from so that wealthy people can influence elections and policies. Conservatives, Nazis, and the Religious Right–but I repeat myself–have been using them for years to great effect, and so instead of, say, working to curb this kind of blatant anti-democratic electioneering, Democrats decided to just do that, too. Fair enough, I guess we’re a long way from the current Supreme Court overturning Citizens United so sure, Dems should just be unethical, too, I guess.
The dark money source is only part of the issue here, though. According to WIRED, “the contract stipulated (that creators would) be kicked out and essentially cut off financially if they even so much as acknowledged that they were part of the program.”
“…the influencers are not allowed to disclose their relationship with Chorus or The Sixteen Thirty Fund—or functionally, that they’re being paid at all.”
Additionally, “creators in the program must funnel all bookings with lawmakers and political leaders through Chorus. Creators also have to loop Chorus in on any independently organized engagements with government officials or political leaders.”
“Creators in the program are not allowed to use any funds or resources that they receive as part of the program to make content that supports or opposes any political candidate or campaign without express authorization from Chorus in advance and in writing.”
“They also forbid creators from “disclos[ing] the identity of any Funder” and give Chorus the ability to force creators to remove or correct content based solely on the organization’s discretion if that content was made at a Chorus-organized event.”
Wired also describes a clause in the contract that says creators in the program cannot criticize anyone else affiliated with Chorus. Got a problem with something Brian Tyler Cohen says, or doesn’t say about a thing that rhymes with Ble Blisraili Blenocide? Too bad, shut your mouth.
So to recap, the criticisms are thus: no one knows who is funding Chorus, creators cannot disclose that Chorus is funding them, Chorus handles all creators’ bookings with politicians, creators must get permission from Chorus before criticizing or supporting any campaign, Chorus retains the right to remove any content made at one of their events, and creators can’t criticize one another at all.
I didn’t want to make a video about this until I saw how Chorus and their creators responded, since no one responded to WIRED’s requests for comments before publication. Luckily that happened pretty quickly after publication. First, Chorus had a lawyer reach out to WIRED to offer context, like showing a slide from some nebulous presentation that “offers several talking points if a member of the cohort wanted to discuss Chorus publicly,” which I guess means that maybe technically some creators might be able to talk about Chorus in those particular terms? And he says that “creators are free to work with other groups or take on other partnerships outside the Chorus program and say whatever they want as part of that work or on their own,” which I personally find confusing because nowhere in the article does it say that creators can’t work with other groups.
Brian Tyler Cohen had this to say to his 600,000 Twitter followers, though not his five million YouTube subscribers. Make of that what you will.
So, a few issues, here. For one, there’s a LOT of ad hominem attacks against Taylor Lorenz: she’s a “troll,” she also accepts money in exchange for her reporting, Candace Owens once said she likes her. It doesn’t really matter what you or Cohen or Candace Owens or I think about Taylor Lorenz. Personally, I follow her on social media because she does some good reporting but I also think she has some laughably terrible takes. It doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t matter if she’s also getting paid. It doesn’t even matter if she was doing what the piece accuses Chorus and their creators of doing, which is TAKING DARK MONEY AND FAILING TO DISCLOSE IT. Which there is no evidence of her doing, by the way.
What matters is that WIRED, with all their lawyers, verified her reporting, that:
- Chorus is funded by dark money
- They prohibited creators from disclosing the funding
- They forbid creators from criticizing one another
There’s also the contractual obligation for creators to run everything past Chorus, but here’s the thing: these creators were most likely chosen, in my opinion, because their existing views already aligned with Chorus’s. When Russian agents threw shit tons of money at Dave Rubin and Tim Pool, they didn’t put any conditions on what they could or could not discuss. Rubin and Pool were already doing the propaganda Russia wanted, so they gave them money to amplify that propaganda.
So I don’t personally get too wrapped up on that point, though WIRED says it is in the contract. Those other revelations, though, are blatantly unethical, and Brian Tyler Cohen meaningfully addresses exactly none of them. Instead, he “debunks” things that are not said in the article to try to make the average viewer think he’s debunking the article, like insisting that Chorus is NOT a shill for the DNC. He claims without evidence that Chorus “do(es) not control what they say and do(es) not control who they work with, and there’s nothing in the contract that could even be reasonably interpreted to say that we do.”
That’s a strong statement, and it’s odd that he didn’t give that to WIRED before the story was published, but okay, maybe he was on vacation or something. So…where’s the evidence for it? WIRED and all their lawyers say they have the contract that does say that. Why doesn’t Brian Tyler Cohen just post the contract and put it all to rest? Instead, he simply insists that Chorus is just a goodhearted “scholarship account, to teach creators.”
That’s funny, because one of the creators working with Chorus is David Pakman. David Pakman has been hosting a political show for twenty years. His YouTube channel currently has 3.3 million subscribers and he posts nearly a dozen videos every day. Extrapolating from my own channel with 220,000 subscribers and 8 videos a month, from YouTube ads alone he’s a millionaire. He also has a membership program starting at $7 a month (or maybe $5.83 a month?) AND he does ad reads for Ground News, Magic Spoon, AG1, and more. Why exactly does he need an “incubator program” to pay him an extra $8,000 a month to learn how to “launch his own show?”
But regardless, he must really, really need it, because HE posted a video in response to the WIRED story that’s actually even more disgusting than Cohen’s.
That’s right, he’s decided to be a libel bully. He isn’t actually suing, yet, he’s just letting Taylor Lorenz know that he might. He’s letting every other critic who might speak up know that he, a millionaire, CAN afford to bankrupt you if he wants, and so maybe you should consider that before making a video about it and posting it to your measly 220,000 subscribers.
He threatens to sue entirely over things that are not said in the article, which I guess is why he doesn’t ever mention WHO he is actually threatening to sue: that the DNC tells him what to say, that Chorus makes him get permission before he covers a topic, and that Chorus influenced his views two years ago despite it just being created recently. He says that people won’t be satisfied until he files and wins a defamation suit.
There are a few steps he’s missing, there. The first would be addressing what the WIRED article actually says, which again was
Chorus is funded by dark money
They prohibited creators from disclosing the funding
They forbid creators from criticizing one another
The second step would be to publish his contract, which would surely clear this all up. No lawyers necessary.
But no, he doesn’t even consider that. He admits that his problem isn’t with the WIRED article but with unnamed others who embellished upon it, and he says a very interesting thing at around the 4minute mark:
“Sugggesting that it’s AIPAC, or I-pac, I don’t even know how it’s pronounced, AYPAC, I-PAC, that’s funding this show.”
Here’s the thing: that wasn’t mentioned in the WIRED article but his fans have been suggesting for years that he takes money from AIPAC, which is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. AIPAC represents the interests of Israel, and is one of the most influential lobbying groups in the United States and one of the major reasons why the United States continues to fund Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. In 2022, AIPAC funded conservative Democrats to defeat progressives who were critical of Israel, which is why politicians who like to keep their job and their nice houses and cars refuse to admit that there’s a genocide happening. It’s not crazy to assume that they are also paying influencers to deny or downplay the genocide.
David Pakman has spread his own misinformation about the genocide that closely matches Israeli propaganda, and that plus his pro-Israel stance in the past has led his fans, even those on his own subreddit, to deem him “David AIPACman.”
As far as I know, there is no evidence to suggest that Pakman has taken money from AIPAC. The thought had never even crossed my mind, until this video. You’re telling me that a grown man who has been speaking about US politics every day for the past two decades doesn’t know how to pronounce the name of one of the most influential lobbying groups in the United States? That seemed very strange.
So, I did a little search. I scoured his Xitter posts and his subreddit until I found people calling him out for a video he posted in February of 2019. It only took me about ten minutes. In the video, he calls out Representative Ilhan Omar for pointing out that Israel’s top lobbying group gives vast amounts of money to politicians in order to work for Israel’s best interests. Let’s watch some of it.
That’s so strange! Six years ago, David Pakman knew exactly how to pronounce AIPAC and did so several times. I wonder what happened in the time since? How could he forget something so simple and so ubiquitous in the past two years? Unless…unless he’s just pretending to not know how to pronounce it, to make it look like he’s not even in the same universe as AIPAC? I mean, I only say this because one time my mom found a joint in my coat pocket and asked me about it and I said, “mary-ja-what?” in an attempt to do the same thing. It didn’t work.
Prior to the WIRED article, I had a bit of respect for Pakman as a moderate liberal who would occasionally score points in debates with Republicans. After the WIRED article, I was a bit disappointed that he would feel the need to stoop to accepting dark money without disclosing it. After his response to the WIRED article, I think he’s a piece of shit who sits alongside other libel bullies like Uri Gellar and Ethan Klein, and to be honest I now do suspect that he is accepting money from AIPAC, not because he needs the money but because he’s already spreading their talking points so he may as well cash a check alongside it. To be clear, that is entirely my own opinion and I have no evidence to support it other than the incredibly suspicious video where he suddenly forgets how to pronounce AIPAC.
It’s important to remember that it’s not corporate money that makes people biased. It’s everything. I don’t take any corporate money and I’m incredibly biased, just like everyone else. I have my own perspective and that informs the way I see the world and how I communicate to you. That’s why I think the common YouTuber sponsor Ground News is stupid–it insists that you need it to be able to tell whether a news source has a “conservative” or “liberal” bias, but the fact of the matter is that all news is biased in some way and it’s not always easy to say that it’s “liberal” or “conservative.” All of our media runs on money, and where that money comes from indicates and influences the resulting bias, whether that’s the billionaire Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post and dictating that the opinion page will now focus on “personal liberties and free markets” or CBS firing Stephen Colbert after he criticized their parent company settling a lawsuit with Donald Trump. Being able to follow the money increases our ability to understand how a particular newspaper, cable channel, or even social media influencer might be biased so that we can work that into our bullshit detection algorithm. That’s why it’s a huge red flag when anyone, on the right or the left or somewhere else entirely, purposely hides where their money is coming from.
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