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    New Statesman: 'We have lost Russell Brand' Archived Message

    Posted by Ian M on March 10, 2023, 6:10 pm, in reply to "The new Nick Cohen"

    We? WE???

    https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2023/03/have-lost-russell-brand

    Glenn Greenwald responds (looking forward to his takedown of Monbiot's dreck, but a lot of the below applies):

    *****

    https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1633109743181889537

    Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald

    This @NewStatesman article is entitled "We Have Lost Russell Brand." The "we" appears to be "the left" (I never knew NS was the avatar and membership-arbiter of "the left").

    What's fascinating are the views now identified as hallmarks of the "far-right"

    newstatesman.com
    We have lost Russell Brand
    This once-sexy communist has become an American culture wars pundit.

    Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald

    In order to argue that Brand is no longer on the left but the right (despite what it acknowledges is his ongoing admiration for Bernie and Corbyn), look at the views that are now identified - in the first paragraph - as ones that mark you as being on the "far-right". Just look:

    [Image text: 'Russell Brand can’t make up his mind. Speaking on the comedian Bill Maher’s talk show last weekend, Brand 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. He then pivoted leftwards, and rounded off his angry sermon with an endorsement for, erm, Bernie Sanders.']

    For as long as I can remember, those views - contempt for corporate media and Big Pharma, anger over mistreatment of "heroes" Assange and Snowden - were deeply associated with the Western left.

    They're views I always held and still did. Now these are right-wing views? Evidently.

    [Image text: 'But he has married these long-held beliefs with all the suspicions and anxieties of the new American right: America First, Drain The Swamp, distrust the MSM (mainstream media). Just last week he was pictured grinning with Donald Trump Jr – cutting a rather different figure to the man who used to lead anti-austerity marches in Parliament Square. What happened to the freewheeling entertainer praised by Mark Fisher for espousing a communism that was “cool, sexy and proletarian”? It seems that Russell Brand has been America-brained.

    In spite of the transformation, he still drips with charisma. Even when Brand shouts down a camera lens he is a rhythmic performer, where the cadence of slam poetry meets the content of Spiked. And hisYouTube channel is not devoid of self-awareness – Brand jokes that his viewers are “tin foil hat-wearing lunatics”. But he has outgrown the lightly heterodox and idiosyncratic manner that once characterised him. The benign – if abrasive – hippy is long gone. In his place? An American culture warrior with a cockney accent.']

    It is indeed true that all those views - hatred of corporate media, distrust of globalized ("multi-national) corporate giants, holding the US Security State in contempt and its adversaries as heroes - are now right-wing markers.

    Much has indeed changed. But Brand and I haven't.

    Similarly, distrust of the motives of the US/NATO proxy war in Ukraine is also a far-right signifier. Here we have yet another inversion: the liberal-left reverses western security agencies, globalized corporations and their wars as benevolent. Only the "far right" distrusts them

    [Image text: 'As for any self-styled alternative media guru, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a central theme of inquiry. Brand quotes long passages of text from Substacks about the true intentions of Tony Blair and Hillary Clinton; he suggests it is a proxy war fought with the ultimate ambition of privatising Ukraine. When he shouts about the military-industrial complex intentionally generating a state of perpetual crisis, he means it. Brand is not just paranoid about intervention, he’s actively conspiratorial about it.']

    Thus does this article end on what should be a bizarre, nonsensical note but instead has now become standard: Brand is not a leftist but instead has fallen in with the likes of Joe Rogan, Tucker and myself and our hatred for Western wars, the US Security State, and corporatism.

    [Image text: 'Whatever it is, Brand has internalised assumptions generated by a brand of heterodox American – Joe Rogan, Glenn Greenwald, Tucker Carlson – while clinging on to a veneer of old-fashioned British socialism. But perhaps that tension is not as awkward as it seems. The soul of Corbynism, for example, is the argument that a cabal of elite capitalists have manipulated the system against the everyman. “They’ve stitched up our political system to protect the powerful,” the former Labour leader said in early 2017, “to line the pockets of their friends.” There are few journalists in the United States who talk about the rigged system more than Carlson; it is exactly the mode of politics Brand trades in too.']

    (And by the way: for all your poser-left types now slyly trying to distance yourself from the Biden/Pelosi/EU proxy war in Ukraine and even imply you were opposed all along: that won't work. When it mattered, only a few took those bullets and you, as usual, were unwilling).

    I should note: the article's last paragraph stumbles into a truth it - and mainstream discourse generally - desperately avoids. The more relevant dichotomy than left/right or Dem/GOP is pro/anti-establishment. Failure to understand this makes one's political analysis worthless:

    [Image text: 'Perhaps the two movements are not as uneasy bedfellows as they appear. Brand’s transition towards the conspiratorial right seems perfectly seamless. But one thing is abundantly clear: Brand is fighting the American culture wars from a shed in Oxfordshire. His demand to be taken seriously is a rather weak one.']

    *****

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    (Full episode on rumble: https://rumble.com/v2caekc-system-update-show-51.html ]

    cheers,
    I

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