Russell Brand’s journey of enlightenment is not political – it’s more important than that 

By MLR Smith and Niall McCrae

One of the most telling insights into the contemporary media landscape is how journalists and commentators often obsess about themselves, and confect ‘news’ stories based on each other. At one level it shows the superficiality and venality of modern journalism. Yet, there is something of interest to be observed in the underlying condition of politics when the media focus more on attacking other parts of the media than reporting on meaningful matters. It is instructive to ask why and to detect the underlying motives at work.

Illustrating this phenomenon is the spate of articles in British newspapers conducting a character assassination of Russell Brand.  Most egregious was a Guardian column by George Monbiot on 10^th March 2023, titled ‘I once admired Russell Brand, but his grim trajectory shows us where politics is heading’.

Back in 2014, Monbiot nominated Brand for the Guardian as his hero of the year., impressed by his energising of young people in the political arena. Having watched fifty of Brand’s recent YouTube monologues, Monbiot can hardly believe that it is the same man. Instead of challenging injustices, Brand is stupidly and dangerously dabbling in conspiracy theories, which Monbiot regards as fuel for fascism.

‘In 2014, he was bursting with new ideas and creative ways of presenting them. Today, he wastes his talent on tired and discredited tales: endless iterations of the alleged evils of the World Economic Forum founder, Klaus Schwab, the Great Reset, Bill Gates, Nancy Pelosi, the former US chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, Covid vaccines, medical data, the World Health Organization, Pfizer, smart cities and “the globalist masterplan”.’

Brand has the audacity to criticise environmental policies such as the nitrogen reduction programme in the Netherlands, which is threatening the livelihood of thousands of Dutch farmers. Monbiot, who regards farming as ecological destruction, is upset by Brand jumping on the bandwagon of ‘far-right conspiracists’ with their Nazi-inspired ‘blood and soil tropes’. The ‘nitrate crisis’ (according to Monbiot), has nothing to do with Bill Gates,, the World Economic Forum or the Great Reset.

Brand ‘manages to confuse the World Health Organisation’s call for better pandemic surveillance with coercive surveillance of the population’. Monbiot refers to the Great Reset frequently, but denies its existence: –

“As Naomi Klein has shown, the Great Reset conspiracy theory was conceived by a staffer at the Heartland Institute, a US lobby group that has promoted climate denial and other billionaire-friendly positions. It’s a bastardisation of her shock doctrine hypothesis, distracting people from the malfeasance of those with real power.”

George needs to wake up. Or is he is he deliberately denying the plethora of World Economic Forum material on this very concept, or Klaus Schwab’s book of that name in 2020?  If millions of ordinary people know about the Great Reset from simple internet searches, why can’t a leading newspaper columnist? It is apparent, however, that many members of the intelligentsia are unaware of the development of a global technocracy. Indeed, the likes of Monbiot are doing what he criticises in Brand and his followers: distracted by a climate crisis, Covid-19 and war in Ukraine, he cannot see that conspiracies of the powerful are real.

The worst line of Monbiot’s attack is that Brand is endangering people ‘such as Fauci, Schwab and Pelosi: subjects of conspiracy theories often become targets of violence’.  Somehow Monbiot turns some of the most powerful figures in the world into victims, yet he accuses Brand of abandoning his concern for the disadvantaged. Arguably, Monbiot is revealing himself here as a defender of the elite, with whom he wishes to ensconce himself.

Brand management

Cynics will never be convinced that the shift in Brand’s persona is anything but a sham. Yet his digital followers are likely to be on a similar trajectory in outlook. This is a point that the legacy media tend to miss. The significance of Brand as a media and cultural phenomenon is that he captures the movement of forces towards new forms of political understanding. He is a symptom as much as he is a cause, which is why attempts to smear him are ineffectual.

Many of Brand’s current audience may have been sceptical of their protagonist at first. They may have watched his early performances while being interviewed on Newsnight in October 2013 and concluded he was a egotist, mouthing slogans about the evils of ‘corporate and economic exploitation’; or his December 2014 clash with Nigel Farage on Question Time over immigration, in which Farage and some audience members got the better of him. Many newer fans probably saw him in the past as a classic champagne revolutionary.

If that was all that could be said about Russell Brand as a political phenomenon, then he might easily have remained a typical leftie-luvvy, railing against ‘the Tories’ and the inequities of capitalism while conspicuously enjoying the wealth that his fame brought him. By 2014 Brand had, nevertheless, proved his capacity for personal growth by beating a serious drug habit. Thereafter, he forewent a successful acting career, rejecting its blandishments, in favour of establishing his podcast series and YouTube channel to amplify his call for new forms of political engagement. This suggested that, despite the missteps of his early forays into the political arena, Brand was someone with the determination to follow through on his own rhetorical commitments.

Slowly he amassed an internet following, attracting attention as a long form interviewer. His subjects included people like Jordan Petersen whom he interviewed in February 2018. The fundamental rationale of his podcast series, ‘Under the Skin’, was to bring a wide range of opinions into lively debate. A turning point was his interview with American conservative author and political commentator Candace Owens in December 2018. Throughout the conversation, Brand showed himself to be a clever, informed and sympathetic interviewer, engaging Owens on her own terms but pushing back intelligently, critiquing her positions in a funny but chivalrous manner. The result was a thoughtful and reflective discussion of the kind that many audiences yearned for but found lacking in the contemporary media landscape.

Back to the Age of Aquarius?

It remains difficult to pinpoint Brand’s political position, though a left-wing communitarianism, rather than any overtly libertarian ethos, pervades many of his monologues. Brand’s languorous, long-haired demeanour makes him seem like a relic of a 1960s Californian commune. And in one sense that seems to be where his political spirit belongs, to an age committed to unjudgmental free-thinking and finding personal and collective connections among people who might previously not have felt they shared much in common. The hippy analogy raises the suspicion of Brand as a Maharishi-like guru, a fraudulent mystic, leading his gullible cult followers down the rabbit hole and onto whatever Jonestown level event that awaits.

A more charitable interpretation is that Brand is attempting to recover the communitarian promise of 1960s radicalism. Brand eschews the intolerant, divisive, race-obsessed ‘woke’ dogma that infects the intelligentsia and indoctrinated youth, focusing instead on the formal and informal systems of power that conspire to deny ordinary people a voice. For this reason, Brand devotes much effort in his broadcasts to expose the corrupt networks that operate between big corporations and government.

Brand is therefore reflective of the animating spirit of 1960s radicalism that was fiercely independent, anti-authoritarian and relentlessly suspicious of self-serving political and business elites. It is the political tradition that spans a raft of erudite thinkers from C. Wright Mills in the 1950s, Noam Chomsky in the 1960s and 1970s, to Richard Rorty and Christopher Lasch in the 1980s and 1990s. It may be said to live on in the work of journalists like Glenn Greenwald, Aaron Maté, Lee Fang and Thomas Fazi in the present.

Questioning power

The willingness of Brand to question existing structures of power led to recognition on parts of the political right that he spoke for many of their concerns as well: political marginalisation, economic impoverishment, and cultural exclusion at the hands of arrogant, unaccountable elites that often hide under the banner of social justice. In the years that saw the open revolt of the progressive establishment against democratically expressed rejections of their worldview in the form of Brexit, the election of President Donald Trump, and the rise of ‘populist’ politics in Europe and elsewhere, Brand’s disposition to understand rather than mindlessly condemn those who doubt the benevolence of our leaders gained him new devotees across the political spectrum.

His open scepticism towards the pseudoscientific Covid-19 regime significantly raised his profile. Brand’s probing into the complicity of the medical profession with the shady nexus of big pharmaceutical interests and big government, resulting in a public health despotism that quashed civil liberties and rational debate, was his major breakthrough.

Inevitably, Brand’s growing presence as a political commentator, especially one who could reach across political boundaries, began to attract the ire of the pro-state, pro-status quo media, with denunciations that he was now ‘right wing’. A New Statesman article in March 2023, claimed that during his appearance on Bill Maher’s show he had ‘launched into a tinny rant that encompassed every right-wing signalling trope: the ghoulish mainstream media, the dishonest and untrustworthy pharmaceutical industry, the West’s shameful treatment of Julian Assange and “American hero” Edward Snowden, and the Covid drug Ivermectin’. Leaving aside the curiosity that most of these ‘tropes’ at one time or another could be said to be more left wing rather than right wing causes, the title of the article itself, ‘We have lost Russell Brand’ was itself a revealing insight into the conformism and controlling nature of the pro-state left, which claims ownership of people and personalities, while renouncing them at the slightest hint of any independence of mind.

The reasons why Brand riles the commentariat are many. For one, he highlights the failings of mainstream journalists; their inability to hold power accountable, and indeed, their willingness as accomplices to official, often authoritarian, agendas. Second, he can command the loyalty of millions of followers, in contrast to the dwindling audiences for the tired narratives of establishment publications, which the New Stateman and Spectator typify. Thirdly, he can call out the hypocrisy and pretensions of mainstream news outlets with considerable wit. Following two attack pieces in The Independent in March 2022, accusing him of peddling conspiracy theories and ‘poorly-sourced controversy mongering’, he struck back at a newspaper that is partly funded by businesses linked to the Saudi government: ‘If you’re called The Independent and you’re funded by the Saudi Arabian state, you ain’t even got past the title without lying’.

Transpolitics

The main reason why Brand spooks the establishment though, is his contribution to an emerging movement that some of have called ‘transpolitics’, which threatens the political binaries that have traditionally enabled elites to divide and rule. Transpolitics is unsettling because a shared consciousness and cross-political solidarity disturbs the would-be permanent political class. According to Brand, in one of his most potent monologues: –

‘The mainstream media is not your friend. The culture is not your friend. The government is not your friend. Big business is not your friend. They are operating collegiately, in unison, to create a set of systems that are beneficial to them and disadvantage you’.

The predictable insinuations directed towards Brand from erstwhile left-wing publications like the Independent, the New Statesman and the Guardian is somewhat ironic given that his criticisms of unfettered capitalism almost certainly, in US political terms, make him more in tune with Bernie Sanders than Donald Trump. As disruptors, Sanders and Trump may seem politically incompatible, but while they are approaching the same problems (globalisation, economic injustice, misguided foreign wars) from different political places, they coalesce in having something interesting to say about the crushing nature of institutional power over the lives of ordinary citizens.

A consistent theme in Brand’s messaging is that political labels of left and right are void, and that the most obvious contemporary divide is between the rulers and the ruled. It is meaningless, for example, to define the Independent or the Guardian as left-wing, when they promote big business and unaccountable transnational bureaucracies like the EU, promote open borders, traduce the working class, and support policies that exacerbate income inequalities. Brand sees what they really are: instruments of corporate control that facilitate the transfer of wealth and power from the poor to the rich.

Brand calls for a different form of language and political communication. As he says in one of his broadcasts: ‘We want to be part of an open conversation… We want to provide alternative narratives, and not only provide narratives… [We] invite you to create the narratives with us’. If this sounds like a hippy, his detractors might also detect a whiff of hypocrisy. He makes a tidy living from his social media channels, and their paying subscribers, though the income from these sources goes into employing backroom staff that enable him to keep on top of current issues and to create shows that are well researched and maintain high production standards. That he has built up a successful social media platform suggests that Brand is a shrewd businessman.  Lacking leftist envy, his conservative-minded viewers may simply think ‘good for him’.

A mirror to the unmerited elite

Brand’s ability to relate to common folk is perhaps his greatest crime in the eyes of his hecklers in the media-establishment, because his success affirms that one does not need a privileged background or a degree from a (paradoxically titled) Russell Group university, to speak with insight on matters of contemporary importance. He is an affront to the media class of graduates, whose positions are attributable as much to patronage networks as discernible talent. They push trite, curated narratives; accuse those who don’t agree with them of being conspiracy theorists and purveyors of misinformation; and fail to hold the establishment to account… because they are the establishment.

It is not hard to detect the rudimentary class prejudice in criticisms of Brand. But, ultimately, Brand’s prominence as a political voice exposes the flaw and failings of the ruling class. In contrast to his success, they have no obvious claim to be an elite based on merit; indeed, they are living proof of the concept of meritocracy of which Michael Young warned six decades ago. That Brand is more popular, and often more incisive and articulate, underlines a fact: Brand is smart and they aren’t.

The exasperation that many people feel towards a remote political and media class with nothing novel or useful to say explains the tremendous reach of a candid personality such as Brand. People find in Brand something empowering: a sympathy for the modest request to have their views respected, to question and express oneself freely, and to explore new opportunities for human flourishing through open communication.

A new awakening?

Brand calls his social media subscribers ‘awakening wonders’. Instead of woke, Brand helps people to be awake. He promotes a redemptive awakening as guided by philosopher of mindfulness Eckhart Tolle, whose writings The Power of Now and A New Earth (and whom Brand interviewed in June 2020), call for individual reformation through spiritual awareness, reflection and personal responsibility. The invitation to participate in dialogues that aim for more authentic forms of human thriving beyond stale political divisions is appealing in a materialist, disenchanted condition of secular modernity.

You may not be able to change the system, but you can make a start by trying to change yourself. And if legions march to Brand’s tune, their boots may not only be heard by the establishment, but felt too. We are the many; they are the few.

 

An abridged version of this article first appeared in Country Squire Magazine, and this extended version is reproduced by kind permission.

Niall McCrae RMN, PhD is a social commentator with regular appearances on Unity News Network, Hearts of Oak, the David Vance Show and George Galloway’s Kalima Horra debates. His books include The Moon and Madness (2012), Echoes from the Corridors (with Peter Nolan, 2016) and Moralitis: a Cultural Virus (with Robert Oulds, 2020). He is an officer of the Workers of England trade union.

M.L.R. Smith is a writer and academic. He has worked in higher education for over 30 years, most of which were spent with King’s College London where he rose to become Head of the Department of War Studies between 2016 and 2019. He is the author of numerous publications. His latest book is (with David Martin Jones) The Strategy of Maoism and the West: Rage and the Radical Left (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2022).