The meaning of Russell Brand
A disgraced comedian, media arse-covering and the revolt of the half-educated
Back in 2013 I described the weird veneration by progressives of the comedian Russell Brand as follows:
“a comedian who won fame by sexually humiliating a woman on the radio and who apparently thinks it normal to harass every woman in his vicinity is now Che Guevara because he uses words like ‘pre-existing paradigm’ in conversation with Jeremy Paxman”.
I bring this up not to say I told you so but because we are currently being told that Russell Brand is entirely a product of a wider misogynistic culture, and that his success, public prominence and (potential) crimes are nothing to do with the individuals (i.e. journalists and politicians) who indulged and enabled him over the past decade.
And indulge him they did. The noughties culture in which Russell Brand rose to prominence was certainly grim - sleazy magazines such as Nuts and Zoo, Little Britain with its poor-baiting, a preponderance of Oxbridge-educated men pretending to be working class. But it’s too convenient to outsource blame for Russell Brand entirely to ‘the culture’, which is a synonym for everyone, which can so easily become a synonym for no-one.
When I wrote that article back in 2013 Russell Brand was being feted by influential figures on the left as some sort of revolutionary messiah. He appeared on current affairs programmes such as Newsnight and Question Time, was brought before a Home Affairs select committee, guest edited the New Statesman and attended editorial meetings at the Guardian. In 2014 he took to the stage with the left-wing journalist Owen Jones, whom he described as ‘our generation’s Orwell’ (Jones was at that time writing propaganda for the dictatorship in Venezuela, which made this comparison to the great anti-totalitarian socialist hurt even more), and the Labour leader Ed Miliband went on Brand’s podcast The Trews.
While Brand was being feted as a revolutionary - a sort of rapscallion, tattooed, louche cockney version of Oscar Wilde - the comedian’s ex-wife Katy Perry described him in a 2013 interview as “very controlling”. Prior to that, in 2006, the pop star Dannii Minogue called Brand a “vile predator” who “wouldn’t take no for an answer”.
As well as puffing Owen Jones’s book The Establishment, whose promotional blurb echoed the conspiratorial nonsense Brand would embrace wholeheartedly a few years later - ‘Behind our democracy lurks a powerful but unaccountable network of people who wield massive power and reap huge profits in the process’ - one of Brand’s blurbs was splashed across another book: The Rules of the Game, a pickup artist manual by the journalist Neil Strauss. Within the book’s pages, Strauss even admitted that some of the techniques might be problematic. “So is this material manipulative? Of course it is,” Strauss wrote. “Every great romantic comedy begins with some sort of manipulation.” Strauss’s writing “turned me from a desperate wallflower into a wallflower who can talk women into sex,” wrote Brand on the cover.
The comedian’s predatory behaviour was, as the Dispatches documentary noted, right there in plain sight. But only for those who were willing to look. Many were not and the media luvvies who were taken in by Brand because he echoed their ideological a prioris - and perhaps also because they wanted some of Brand’s celebrity stardust to rub off on them - shouldn’t be allowed to flatten out blame for Brand’s antics onto ‘the culture’. Plenty of people were sounding the alarm about Brand a decade ago - and yet at the time he was warmly welcomed into progressive spaces.
During the 2010s, as Brand the comedian morphed into Brand the self-styled revolutionary, he struck me as a morbid symptom of the era in which we lived. Emancipatory mass movements no longer existed in any meaningful sense - and so people began to look to charismatic individuals for salvation. The student protest movements had fizzled out and Britain was ruled by a clique of former Etonians who were busy demolishing the state. A crackpot posing as a genius always has a certain chance of being believed, as Hannah Arendt noted; and in Russell Brand the magic spell he cast over left-wing political audiences drew on the aforementioned sense of political despair. “His energy is totally infectious,” cooed the Guardian.
Brand’s formula as a charismatic guru involved a display of unshakeable, gleaming-eyed conviction tempered by a stylised vulnerability - a potent mix. “Don’t get distracted and deluded by your selfish nature!,” he told the audience in Westminster during a Guardian Live event with Owen Jones in 2014. Today, with the comedian facing multiple allegations of rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse - claims that Brand emphatically denies - this sounds more like projection. Later in the same show Brand would expand further on his own insatiable desires: “I want attention. I want women. I want drugs. I want food. I want, I want, I want. I exemplify the problems of our culture . . . I’m a viciously authoritative, controlling man.” he told the crowd.
Here’s to believing women - and to taking people at their word when they tell you who they really are.
The Covid-19 pandemic caused a form of epistomological breakdown in lots of people. It felt at times as if otherwise sane people had emerged from lockdown having been brushed by madness. I suspect this was a result of extra time spent on the internet against a sustained backdrop of dread and uncertainty. Out of genuine conviction or acquisitive opportunism - I suspect it was a mixture of both - Russell Brand reinvented himself during this time as a right-wing-adjacent conspiracy theorist. In doing so he discovered a large constituency of people who were (to paraphrase Arendt again) ready at all times to believe the worst, no mater how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because they held every statement to be a lie anyhow.* From the converted pub in Henley-on-Thames that is Brand’s podcast studio, he produced conspiracy-laden videos on topics such as the Covid vaccine (“how can we really continue to just ‘trust the science’?”), global warming and Russia’s war on Ukraine.
This potent blend of cynicism and credulity has become incredibly financially lucrative in recent years: income from Brand’s YouTube channel alone (Brand also broadcasts on Rumble) grew from $750,000 in 2019 to $4 million in 2023. I don’t believe that money alone explains why Brand fully embraced conspiracy theories. I think he’s always been a crank. But Brand was given a free pass because he was ranting against ‘the establishment’ and that chimed with what fashionable opinion was saying at the time.
I spent the pandemic cooped up in a small town in Somerset shielding my grandmother. As things began to open up I started encountering more and more people - in the pub, at the gym, among family friends - who were being influenced by conspiratorial content they were consuming online. Russell Brand’s name came up on several occasions.
It’s not that such people don’t exist in London - obviously they do - but I always seem to encounter more of them - before, during and after Covid - when I am visiting family out in the provinces.
Perhaps this is because a sense of thwarted potential is fertile ground for conspiracy theories. Eric Hoffer has suggested that those who become possessed by exciting ideas are frequently “selfish people who were forced by innate shortcomings or external circumstances to lose faith in their own selves”. This sounds like quite a condescending thing to say, but as a lower middle class autodidact myself I feel somewhat permitted to make the observation that conspiracy culture often resembles a revolt of the half-educated. There are probably millions of people in Britain whose intellectual pretensions have been unrealised or thwarted by their social origins. For these people, a supercilious elitism - the notion that they have access to some ‘truth’ or nugget of information that the normies don’t have - may function as a sort of psychological palliative for internal feelings of inferiority.
Another ‘type’ that seems susceptible to conspiratorial content are those who have achieved modest success in business and wonder why the esteem generated by this success is not reflected back at them elsewhere. They have made a bit of money and, because that’s often quite difficult, they view themselves as experts in everything. (Society frequently promotes the idea that ascent in business represents the ultimate form of personal triumph, which is why we have Donald Trump and Elon Musk). Yet those who occupy the intellectual commanding heights in our society - academia and the media - look down their noses at this haughty merchant class. Indeed, there are few people the intelligentsia loathe more than those with a predilection for selling things. And so members of this merchant class begin to chafe at the ‘establishment’ and - downstream from that - a ‘legacy media’ which views them with distain. Consequently, everything they believe about the world is framed in stark opposition to the mainstream. Members of this group like to think of themselves as an alternative intellectual elite.
I am opening myself up to criticism in typecasting people like this. By affixing condescending labels - ‘midwits’, ‘pseuds’, purveyors of ‘deepities’ - to the creators and consumers of independent media, one can sound as if one is saying that only privately educated leader writers for the Times should be allowed to expound on the state of the world.
In the aftermath of the 2016 Brexit vote there was a lot of faux concern swilling around in Britain about the ‘left behind’ classes and how they were being sneered at - as I may be accused of doing above - by ‘metropolitan liberal elites’. Arguments that took this form were often deployed by grifters and charlatans who feigned a pugnacious plain-man’s dislike of ‘intellectuals’. Yet the depiction of an elitist media class is not itself without merit. There is a fatuous and self-satisfied counterargument to the conspiratorial complaints heard in the alternative media space which says, effectively, that people have ‘never had it so good’. In other words, individuals are searching for saviours and gurus for no reason other than their own stupidity and selfishness. I’m afraid to say this attitude comes across in a piece by Will Lloyd published yesterday in the Times:
“Brand is only right about one thing. He really does exemplify the problems of our culture. On the same day the allegations against him were published, polling found that a third of British adults “regard the system as broken and are highly suspicious of those they hold responsible”. A similar poll in January found that 38 per cent of the British population agrees with the statement: ‘The world is controlled by a secretive elite.’ This is Russell Brand’s Britain.
“Endless excuses are made for that nation. If only they were not manipulated by social media companies. If only their manufacturing jobs hadn’t been obliterated. If only the elites had managed the fallout from the financial crisis better. These excuses treat this demos like a succession of media managers seem to have treated Brand — as a difficult and helpless child who needs to be abetted and soothed. Everything is somebody else’s fault. A blind eye is always turned.”
I have no personal beef with Will and I’m sure he’s a perfectly nice chap; yet passages such as this simply won’t do. When people are losing their homes because of high interest rates, does blame not at least partly lie at the door of a narcissistic ruling class that has cost the treasury £30 billion through utopian experiments? When families are unable to get a doctor’s appointment for three weeks, can a finger not be pointed at the Etonians who used the financial crisis to take vast amounts of money out of public services? Are we reduced to blaming everything on ‘personal responsibility’ and making those who are angry about the state of the world feel embarrassed for their occasional lapses into commitment?
The rage of individuals such as Russell Brand, Tucker Carlson and Andrew Tate may resemble the anger of a disappointed child. For Tate specifically, it is obvious that ‘the Matrix’ is simply a synonym for any form of authority or restraint that is placed upon his pursuit of a rampant and selfish individualism.
But institutional vehicles for rebellion hardly exist and that at least partly explains why it’s such a propitious time for grifters selling snake oil on the internet. “When there’s no worthwhile banner, you start to march behind worthless ones,” the anarchist and Russian revolutionary Victor Serge once wrote. “When you don’t have the genuine article, you live with the counterfeit.”
And so it is with Brand and all the other gurus, messiahs and therapists currently being foisted upon us.
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Great piece of writing👏
Great article! One of the better I've seen on Brand.