Jack Rear
Sat, 16 September 2023
After achieving mainstream success, Brand’s politics came to the fore - Jonathan Brady
Once known for the comedy which he used to skewer the political establishment in the early-2010s, how has Russell Brand evolved into an anti-woke podcast hero of the alt-right with a subscriber base of 6.59m on YouTube?
Brand grew up in Essex with his mother after his parents separated when he was six months old. He was diagnosed with ADHD and developed bulimia at 14. At 16, after disagreements with his mother’s boyfriend, Brand left the family home and began taking drugs. In 1991, he was accepted into Italia Conti drama school on a scholarship from Essex County Council but was expelled due to drug use and poor attendance.
Brand made it onto the London and Edinburgh comedy scene in 2000, aged 25, and began a presenting career with a stint on MTV’s Dancefloor Chart where he toured clubs in London and Ibiza, projecting himself as a figure of anarchic mirth. He has always courted controversy and was fired after coming to work dressed as Osama Bin Laden.
In 2002, Brand began bringing counter-cultural views into the mainstream with a short-lived television series RE:Brand on the now-defunct UK Play, in which he aimed to challenge taboos by meeting a neo-Nazi, inviting a homeless man to live with him, and masturbating another man in a public toilet.
He returned to the Fringe in 2004 with a one-man show discussing his heroin addiction, which received critical acclaim. A nationwide tour of a show about his caddish reputation hastened his move from counter-cultural outsider to ubiquitous mainstreamer: in 2007 he performed for Elizabeth II at the Royal Variety Performance.
James Blunt, Russell Brand and English National Ballet principal dancer Agnes Oaks after the Royal Variety Performance, 2007 - Anna Gowthorpe
By then a Guardian columnist, he published his autobiography My Booky Wook, detailing his drug abuse, troubled relationship with his father, promiscuity and sex addiction.
As his star was on the rise in America, Sachsgate – when Brand and Jonathan Ross left a series of lewd messages for Andrew Sachs, about Brand’s relationship with his granddaughter – resulted in a BBC suspension and Brand stepping away from his presenting role to focus on film roles.
With mainstream success, Brand’s politics came to the fore. In a 2013 Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman, Brand described British democracy as ‘ineffectual’ and encouraged viewers not to vote.
Asked in another Newsnight interview whether 9/11 had been perpetrated by the US government, Brand replied: “we have to remain open-minded to [that] kind of possibility”.
He guest-edited an issue of the New Statesman where he railed against capitalism and supported environmental issues and he continued to make frequent appearances at political demonstrations, criticising austerity, the war on drugs, and UK independence from the EU. In another book, Revolution he expounded on these points.
In 2015 he was still aligned with the left: ahead of the general election, Brand interviewed Labour leader Ed Miliband on his YouTube show ‘The Trews’ (a portmanteau of ‘true news’) where he encouraged viewers to vote Labour or Green. Later Brand supported Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership bid, but when the Covid-19 pandemic struck in 2020, Brand pivoted to his current persona, sharing anti-vaccine talking points and pro-Russian conspiracies in relation to the war in Ukraine. Brand’s TikTok channel was a source of Covid-19 misinformation: in 2022 he was forced to retract a claim that the drug ivermectin was an effective treatment.
He currently has more than 13m subscribers to his accounts on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and the right-wing streaming site Rumble, with more than six million on YouTube, where he posts daily and has been sharing videos for more than a decade, filmed from his home in Henley, where he lives with his wife and two daughters. About 300,000 watch his Rumble show daily.
He was making political videos for YouTube regularly long before the current generation of influencers; what’s changed is the intensity and frequency of his output (making multiple videos a day), and the kind of guests he features (increasingly those from the hard-right).
His success at building such a strong online audience is partly that his persona has remained the same, using the same passionate-but-mocking delivery, and the same rhetoric about capitalism; the elites; the mainstream media. Increasingly, his content attracts and panders to an alt-right audience.
Conspiracy theories swirl around Russell Brand allegations
Comedian’s claim of ‘concerted agenda’ taken up by X owner Elon Musk and misogynist Andrew Tate
Jessica Murray
Comedian’s claim of ‘concerted agenda’ taken up by X owner Elon Musk and misogynist Andrew Tate
THE GUARDIAN
Sun 17 Sep 2023
After allegations of sexual assault and rape against the comedian Russell Brand were published, some were quick to take up conspiracy theories about why they had been published.
Brand set the wheels in motion when he published a video in which he rebutted the allegations the night before they were aired and claimed they were linked to an attack on his freedom of speech.
He said he was the victim of a “coordinated attack” from the mainstream media outlets who published the allegations – the Times, the Sunday Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches – and that there was a “serious and concerted agenda” to control his voice.
He compared his experience to the media critique of Joe Rogan, the US podcaster who has been accused of promoting falsehoods and misinformation about Covid vaccines.
“It’s been clear to me, or at least it feels to me, like there’s a serious and concerted agenda to control these kind of spaces, and these kind of voices, and I mean my voice along with your voice,” he said, signing off by telling his followers to “stay free”.
An investigation spanning a number of years, and published on Saturday by the Sunday Times, revealed that Brand had been accused of sexual assault, rape and predatory behaviour between 2006 and 2013 by four women. Brand denies all the accusations.
According to the paper’s report, one woman claimed she had a relationship with Brand when she was 16 and he was 31, and alleged that he would refer to her as “the child” and encourage her to lie to her parents.
Another woman alleges that Brand raped her against a wall in his Los Angeles home and that she visited a rape crisis centre the same day. She received therapy there for the next five months.
Hours after the allegations emerged on Saturday, Brand performed at a sold-out gig at the 2,000-capacity Troubadour Wembley Park theatre in north-west London where he received a standing ovation from fans. He apparently told the crowd there were certain things he could not talk about during the show.
While Brand was being dropped by his talent agency and a charity he was affiliated with, those who came to his aid included Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur and owner of X (formerly Twitter), who responded to his video statement: “Of course. They don’t like competition.”
He also replied to another tweet defending Brand, saying: “No more canceling. Enough is enough.”
The self-proclaimed misogynist influencer Andrew Tate, who is awaiting trial in Romania on charges of rape and human trafficking, announced to his followers that he would hold an “emergency meeting” on Sunday evening to “tell everybody the truth about what’s happening to Russell Brand”. “I know things I shouldn’t know,” he said.
He had already tweeted Brand saying “Welcome to the club”, and shared a post saying that Brand was getting the “Andrew Tate treatment”.
The former Fox News host Tucker Carlson also posted on X suggesting the allegations were linked to Brand’s views on topics such as “drug companies … and the war in Ukraine”. The GB News host Beverley Turner said Brand was welcome on her show “any time” and that he was being attacked for creating “autonomous, knowing and original content” on his channels.
Brand’s sister-in-law, the television presenter Kirsty Gallacher, initially seemed to show support, sharing his video statement on her Instagram story with a red love heart, although she later deleted it.
Brand has amassed a large following on social media – 3.8 million accounts on Instagram, 2.2 million on TikTok and 6.6 million on YouTube – with his videos often featuring interviews with far-right influencers and promoting conspiracy theories on issues such as the Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the climate crisis.
Videos he has posted in recent weeks include titles such as “What REALLY started the Hawaii fire?”, “State of fear! Covid propaganda exposed!” and “Zelensky’s MASSIVE Ukraine censorship EXPOSED.”
One of his videos was removed from YouTube last year for allegedly “spreading Covid misinformation”, prompting him to move to the video channel Rumble, where he livestreams almost daily.
Brand set the wheels in motion when he published a video in which he rebutted the allegations the night before they were aired and claimed they were linked to an attack on his freedom of speech.
He said he was the victim of a “coordinated attack” from the mainstream media outlets who published the allegations – the Times, the Sunday Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches – and that there was a “serious and concerted agenda” to control his voice.
He compared his experience to the media critique of Joe Rogan, the US podcaster who has been accused of promoting falsehoods and misinformation about Covid vaccines.
“It’s been clear to me, or at least it feels to me, like there’s a serious and concerted agenda to control these kind of spaces, and these kind of voices, and I mean my voice along with your voice,” he said, signing off by telling his followers to “stay free”.
An investigation spanning a number of years, and published on Saturday by the Sunday Times, revealed that Brand had been accused of sexual assault, rape and predatory behaviour between 2006 and 2013 by four women. Brand denies all the accusations.
According to the paper’s report, one woman claimed she had a relationship with Brand when she was 16 and he was 31, and alleged that he would refer to her as “the child” and encourage her to lie to her parents.
Another woman alleges that Brand raped her against a wall in his Los Angeles home and that she visited a rape crisis centre the same day. She received therapy there for the next five months.
Hours after the allegations emerged on Saturday, Brand performed at a sold-out gig at the 2,000-capacity Troubadour Wembley Park theatre in north-west London where he received a standing ovation from fans. He apparently told the crowd there were certain things he could not talk about during the show.
While Brand was being dropped by his talent agency and a charity he was affiliated with, those who came to his aid included Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur and owner of X (formerly Twitter), who responded to his video statement: “Of course. They don’t like competition.”
He also replied to another tweet defending Brand, saying: “No more canceling. Enough is enough.”
The self-proclaimed misogynist influencer Andrew Tate, who is awaiting trial in Romania on charges of rape and human trafficking, announced to his followers that he would hold an “emergency meeting” on Sunday evening to “tell everybody the truth about what’s happening to Russell Brand”. “I know things I shouldn’t know,” he said.
He had already tweeted Brand saying “Welcome to the club”, and shared a post saying that Brand was getting the “Andrew Tate treatment”.
The former Fox News host Tucker Carlson also posted on X suggesting the allegations were linked to Brand’s views on topics such as “drug companies … and the war in Ukraine”. The GB News host Beverley Turner said Brand was welcome on her show “any time” and that he was being attacked for creating “autonomous, knowing and original content” on his channels.
Brand’s sister-in-law, the television presenter Kirsty Gallacher, initially seemed to show support, sharing his video statement on her Instagram story with a red love heart, although she later deleted it.
Brand has amassed a large following on social media – 3.8 million accounts on Instagram, 2.2 million on TikTok and 6.6 million on YouTube – with his videos often featuring interviews with far-right influencers and promoting conspiracy theories on issues such as the Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the climate crisis.
Videos he has posted in recent weeks include titles such as “What REALLY started the Hawaii fire?”, “State of fear! Covid propaganda exposed!” and “Zelensky’s MASSIVE Ukraine censorship EXPOSED.”
One of his videos was removed from YouTube last year for allegedly “spreading Covid misinformation”, prompting him to move to the video channel Rumble, where he livestreams almost daily.
Inside Russell Brand’s conspiracy-fuelled fan army – and why it will never let him be cancelled
Guy Kelly
THE CONSERVATIVE TELEGRAPH
Public backing
As well as his millions of fans across YouTube, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok, Brand has received immediate support from various other “free” thinkers who command legions in the murkier suburbs of the internet. Those posting supportive messages about the 48-year-old, who has been accused of rape and grooming a 16-year-old schoolgirl, include Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan, Elon Musk, Tommy Robinson, Tucker Carlson, Laurence Fox, and Michael Barrymore.
It’s quite a fantasy dinner party, and also at the table is Alex Jones, the American far-right radio host and conspiracy theorist who was last year ordered to pay nearly $1.5bn in damages to the families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, after long promoting the lie that the shooting was a government-staged hoax.
Andrew Tate, currently facing allegations of his own, has publicly backed Brand - Alexandru Dobre
“The matrix is coming after Russell Brand, anybody that challenges the globalists, anybody that challenges Big Pharma, anybody that’s popular, that comes out against the establishment… is going to be accused of assaulting women,” Jones said, in a new TikTok video seemingly filmed at an airport departure gate.
In a gift to anybody playing conspiracy theory bingo from home, he goes on to mention Jeffrey Epstein and the assassination of John F Kennedy within the same sentence, before revealing he knows Brand personally, and admires him.
“I’ve never seen women throw themselves at anybody like him [...] Nobody ever accused him of assault. Now, because he comes out against the New World Order, suddenly the allegations are happening to him.” Then, for clarity: “I stand with Russell Brand, he’s completely innocent.”
Suspicious manner
Brand’s support is by no means exclusively online. A rousing ovation at his Wembley Park Theatre show in London on Saturday night, not quite the O2 Arena he used to sell out in 2010, attests to that. Yet in an era when conspiracy theories drifted into the mainstream as traditional and social media melded, his always suspicious, always questioning manner found a natural audience on the internet.
A former publicist for Brand’s memoir, Henry Jeffreys, once told the Telegraph that he recalled Brand being obsessed with things “going on beneath the surface [that] you don’t really understand, you know – ‘Wake up, people!’” even in the late noughties.
A few years later, after Brand had written for the Guardian and New Statesman, battled Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight, interviewed Ed Miliband and published Revolution, a book advocating a non-violent social revolution, his radical politics were clear, making him a hero to certain sections of the British left.
His YouTube show The Trews (a portmanteau of True News, and this was before Donald Trump’s “Fake News” became a common phrase), gave him a new, mainly online audience at a time when the likes of Joe Rogan were still building their brands.
This, of course, was a time when Donald Trump built a political career from a calculated lie about Barack Obama’s birthplace. Under the pretence of simply asking questions nobody dares ask, YouTubers and podcast hosts, as well as some politicians, were quickly able to draw huge (mostly young male) followings. Seeded by harmless “open-minded discussion”, conspiracy theories bloomed in that environment: if they’re lying to you about one thing, why not everything?
Brand has compared himself to several revolutionary figures in the past
Sun, 17 September 2023
The allegations span a period of seven years, during the height of Brand's fame - Suzanne Plunkett
As is the custom among his generation of celebrities, a few years ago, when Russell Brand was bored and financially peckish, he decided to write a children’s book. His is a fertile imagination, as anybody who has seen his stand-up (or political theories) knows, but were that to fail, the entire canon of literature was available for him to plunder – dinosaurs, pirates, wizards, animals. As it was, Brand elected to directly retell a very old tale: The Pied Piper of Hamelin.
“I think the Pied Piper is such an interesting figure,” Brand said at the time. “When you think about [it] it’s weird what he did, taking them children away, and it makes you ask questions. Why did he do it? Is that OK? Why did it happen?” The Piper who leads the young from Hamelin in revenge for being unappreciated by the masses is, Brand thought, “a trickster [...] there to bring about change.”
The eventual booky wook, Russell Brand’s Trickster Tales: The Pied Piper of Hamelin, published in 2014, carried illustrations by the then-children’s laureate Chris Riddell. On the cover, the titular figure is depicted as a tall, slender man with a nest of long, knotted dark hair. He wears ill-advisedly tight clothing, winklepickers and black nail polish. It does not take a close reading to work out who he may be based on. “More than anything else,” Brand said, “I’m the trickster.”
Since the publication and broadcast this weekend of an investigation by The Times, The Sunday Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches, which accused Brand of a rape, sexual assaults and emotional abuse in a period spanning seven years and during the height of his fame, a lot of old interviews suddenly read differently. All of his work does, relit as it is in a new light.
A still from Brand’s most recent YouTube video - PA
But one look at the comments underneath Brand’s most recent deposit to his YouTube channel, “So, This Is Happening” – a two-minute pre-denial posted on the eve of the investigation being made public, in which he ‘absolutely refutes’ the allegations insisting his sexual encounters were always consensual – show the Pied Piper comparison scarcely goes far enough. He doesn’t have mere followers, nor old-fashioned fans; he has an army.
“We’re with you, Russell,” writes one, yielding 4,000 ‘likes’. “I’ve been wondering how long it would be until they tried to pull this card,” another reads, beside a crying emoji. “I’m with you all the way Russell. They did it to Assange. They tried it with Bernie Sanders. They did it to Corbyn. They’ll try it with anyone they find a threat,” laments a third.
All over social media you’ll find similar sentiments: that since Brand repositioned himself as a YouTuber and podcast host, gaining a vast international following for his daily Stay Free broadcasts – in which he speaks to “awakened beings” and “say[s] the unsayable” about everything from Covid vaccines to the Ukraine war – “they” have had his card marked.
The allegations span a period of seven years, during the height of Brand's fame - Suzanne Plunkett
As is the custom among his generation of celebrities, a few years ago, when Russell Brand was bored and financially peckish, he decided to write a children’s book. His is a fertile imagination, as anybody who has seen his stand-up (or political theories) knows, but were that to fail, the entire canon of literature was available for him to plunder – dinosaurs, pirates, wizards, animals. As it was, Brand elected to directly retell a very old tale: The Pied Piper of Hamelin.
“I think the Pied Piper is such an interesting figure,” Brand said at the time. “When you think about [it] it’s weird what he did, taking them children away, and it makes you ask questions. Why did he do it? Is that OK? Why did it happen?” The Piper who leads the young from Hamelin in revenge for being unappreciated by the masses is, Brand thought, “a trickster [...] there to bring about change.”
The eventual booky wook, Russell Brand’s Trickster Tales: The Pied Piper of Hamelin, published in 2014, carried illustrations by the then-children’s laureate Chris Riddell. On the cover, the titular figure is depicted as a tall, slender man with a nest of long, knotted dark hair. He wears ill-advisedly tight clothing, winklepickers and black nail polish. It does not take a close reading to work out who he may be based on. “More than anything else,” Brand said, “I’m the trickster.”
Since the publication and broadcast this weekend of an investigation by The Times, The Sunday Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches, which accused Brand of a rape, sexual assaults and emotional abuse in a period spanning seven years and during the height of his fame, a lot of old interviews suddenly read differently. All of his work does, relit as it is in a new light.
A still from Brand’s most recent YouTube video - PA
But one look at the comments underneath Brand’s most recent deposit to his YouTube channel, “So, This Is Happening” – a two-minute pre-denial posted on the eve of the investigation being made public, in which he ‘absolutely refutes’ the allegations insisting his sexual encounters were always consensual – show the Pied Piper comparison scarcely goes far enough. He doesn’t have mere followers, nor old-fashioned fans; he has an army.
“We’re with you, Russell,” writes one, yielding 4,000 ‘likes’. “I’ve been wondering how long it would be until they tried to pull this card,” another reads, beside a crying emoji. “I’m with you all the way Russell. They did it to Assange. They tried it with Bernie Sanders. They did it to Corbyn. They’ll try it with anyone they find a threat,” laments a third.
All over social media you’ll find similar sentiments: that since Brand repositioned himself as a YouTuber and podcast host, gaining a vast international following for his daily Stay Free broadcasts – in which he speaks to “awakened beings” and “say[s] the unsayable” about everything from Covid vaccines to the Ukraine war – “they” have had his card marked.
Public backing
As well as his millions of fans across YouTube, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok, Brand has received immediate support from various other “free” thinkers who command legions in the murkier suburbs of the internet. Those posting supportive messages about the 48-year-old, who has been accused of rape and grooming a 16-year-old schoolgirl, include Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan, Elon Musk, Tommy Robinson, Tucker Carlson, Laurence Fox, and Michael Barrymore.
It’s quite a fantasy dinner party, and also at the table is Alex Jones, the American far-right radio host and conspiracy theorist who was last year ordered to pay nearly $1.5bn in damages to the families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, after long promoting the lie that the shooting was a government-staged hoax.
Andrew Tate, currently facing allegations of his own, has publicly backed Brand - Alexandru Dobre
“The matrix is coming after Russell Brand, anybody that challenges the globalists, anybody that challenges Big Pharma, anybody that’s popular, that comes out against the establishment… is going to be accused of assaulting women,” Jones said, in a new TikTok video seemingly filmed at an airport departure gate.
In a gift to anybody playing conspiracy theory bingo from home, he goes on to mention Jeffrey Epstein and the assassination of John F Kennedy within the same sentence, before revealing he knows Brand personally, and admires him.
“I’ve never seen women throw themselves at anybody like him [...] Nobody ever accused him of assault. Now, because he comes out against the New World Order, suddenly the allegations are happening to him.” Then, for clarity: “I stand with Russell Brand, he’s completely innocent.”
Suspicious manner
Brand’s support is by no means exclusively online. A rousing ovation at his Wembley Park Theatre show in London on Saturday night, not quite the O2 Arena he used to sell out in 2010, attests to that. Yet in an era when conspiracy theories drifted into the mainstream as traditional and social media melded, his always suspicious, always questioning manner found a natural audience on the internet.
A former publicist for Brand’s memoir, Henry Jeffreys, once told the Telegraph that he recalled Brand being obsessed with things “going on beneath the surface [that] you don’t really understand, you know – ‘Wake up, people!’” even in the late noughties.
A few years later, after Brand had written for the Guardian and New Statesman, battled Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight, interviewed Ed Miliband and published Revolution, a book advocating a non-violent social revolution, his radical politics were clear, making him a hero to certain sections of the British left.
His YouTube show The Trews (a portmanteau of True News, and this was before Donald Trump’s “Fake News” became a common phrase), gave him a new, mainly online audience at a time when the likes of Joe Rogan were still building their brands.
This, of course, was a time when Donald Trump built a political career from a calculated lie about Barack Obama’s birthplace. Under the pretence of simply asking questions nobody dares ask, YouTubers and podcast hosts, as well as some politicians, were quickly able to draw huge (mostly young male) followings. Seeded by harmless “open-minded discussion”, conspiracy theories bloomed in that environment: if they’re lying to you about one thing, why not everything?
Brand has compared himself to several revolutionary figures in the past
- CAPITAL PICTURES
Since the Covid pandemic and Ukraine war, Brand’s fanbase of credulous keyboard warriors has only swollen. The titles of his videos are always immaculately clickable, luring viewers in with a suggestion that, yet again, “they” have been distracting and manipulating you, and Brand is the valiant one with the truth. The Pied Piper, speaking to camera in a deep-cut t-shirt and beaded necklace, his hair Messianic and his backdrop a converted pub garage near his £4 million riverside home in Henley-on-Thames, toots his flute and along they come.
“So, Trump Just Said THIS About Vaccines And It Changes EVERYTHING”, is one recent video. “The FBI Have Been Harvesting Your DNA?!” exclaimed another. Earlier in the year, he asked “What REALLY Started The Hawaii Fires?” He often likes to attack Volodymyr Zelensky, seems extremely preoccupied with Hunter Biden, and briefly quit YouTube last year after having a post “censored” for allegedly “spreading Covid misinformation”.
He could never stay away for long, though. His follower count consists of four million on Instagram, 2.2 million on TikTok and 6.59 million on YouTube. It is a vast reach, and for all his anti-capitalist bellowing, online popularity pays.
Familiar tactics
In the past, Brand has compared himself to Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, and even Jesus Christ. He sees himself as a revolutionary, but while the revolution has yet to come, judging by the support he’s been shown since Saturday, he could at least claim to lead a very successful cult.
“Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance,” he’s fond of saying. It’s true, and to watch his YouTube channel for 20 minutes is to see a tyrannical ego at work. And by positioning himself as the scourge of the mainstream media and frightened establishment, he has insulated himself against full cancellation.
It is a familiar tactic: bang the drum of being “silenced” enough, and they won’t be able to listen to anything other than you. The more “they” attack Brand, the more he can claim he’s being hushed, and the more powerful his “truth” becomes. It is a carousel of protection. Besides, it’s not easy to cancel anybody who broadcasts alone from a pub garage.
And so his army stands firm, for once incredulous, forever loyal. “We are all behind you Russell,” one message left on YouTube assured Brand this morning. Those children’s books, Russell Brand’s Trickster Tales, were supposed to be a series. In the end, he never got beyond the first. The Pied Piper was enough. Now, the trickster will keep playing the same tune until they’re bored of it. No sign so far. They’re all behind him, all right.
Since the Covid pandemic and Ukraine war, Brand’s fanbase of credulous keyboard warriors has only swollen. The titles of his videos are always immaculately clickable, luring viewers in with a suggestion that, yet again, “they” have been distracting and manipulating you, and Brand is the valiant one with the truth. The Pied Piper, speaking to camera in a deep-cut t-shirt and beaded necklace, his hair Messianic and his backdrop a converted pub garage near his £4 million riverside home in Henley-on-Thames, toots his flute and along they come.
“So, Trump Just Said THIS About Vaccines And It Changes EVERYTHING”, is one recent video. “The FBI Have Been Harvesting Your DNA?!” exclaimed another. Earlier in the year, he asked “What REALLY Started The Hawaii Fires?” He often likes to attack Volodymyr Zelensky, seems extremely preoccupied with Hunter Biden, and briefly quit YouTube last year after having a post “censored” for allegedly “spreading Covid misinformation”.
He could never stay away for long, though. His follower count consists of four million on Instagram, 2.2 million on TikTok and 6.59 million on YouTube. It is a vast reach, and for all his anti-capitalist bellowing, online popularity pays.
Familiar tactics
In the past, Brand has compared himself to Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, and even Jesus Christ. He sees himself as a revolutionary, but while the revolution has yet to come, judging by the support he’s been shown since Saturday, he could at least claim to lead a very successful cult.
“Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance,” he’s fond of saying. It’s true, and to watch his YouTube channel for 20 minutes is to see a tyrannical ego at work. And by positioning himself as the scourge of the mainstream media and frightened establishment, he has insulated himself against full cancellation.
It is a familiar tactic: bang the drum of being “silenced” enough, and they won’t be able to listen to anything other than you. The more “they” attack Brand, the more he can claim he’s being hushed, and the more powerful his “truth” becomes. It is a carousel of protection. Besides, it’s not easy to cancel anybody who broadcasts alone from a pub garage.
And so his army stands firm, for once incredulous, forever loyal. “We are all behind you Russell,” one message left on YouTube assured Brand this morning. Those children’s books, Russell Brand’s Trickster Tales, were supposed to be a series. In the end, he never got beyond the first. The Pied Piper was enough. Now, the trickster will keep playing the same tune until they’re bored of it. No sign so far. They’re all behind him, all right.
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