None apparently concerned about due process or the concept of innocent until proven guilty. All apparently still under the #Metoo spell of 'believe all women' with no consideration that women are as capable of lying or misremembering as men are. No lessons learned from the Assange case. No analysis about why the media & govt would be so keen to push these allegations and the subsequent need for skepticism. Even if all the allegations are true this display of unquestioning conformism disguised by poses of feminist solidarity is truly disgusting.
jeers, I
*****
Naomi Klein:
'Of course Russell Brand's followers deny the allegations. He has groomed an audience to deny/disbelieve everything they see and hear, which is very different from healthy skepticism. This knee-jerk denialism is precisely why people with plenty of skeletons in the closet love conspiracy culture: they have a built-in defense against accountability. It's all a conspiracy, always. I have met Brand, been on his show (years ago). It took a hell of a lot of courage for these women to come forward. They have all my solidarity.' - https://nitter.net/NaomiAKlein/status/1703743886022127971
Ash Sarkar:
'The details of these allegations are horrifying. And for those asking why women are only coming forward now, imagine what it must be like to go though the trauma of abuse, knowing that the person you're accusing has all the advantages of wealth, fame, and a loyal following.
The reality of sexual violence is that it can be deeply disorienting and confusing. It's easy to sit on the sidelines and say "well, if it happened to me, I'd do *this" but that's not how trauma always works!' - https://nitter.net/AyoCaesar/status/1703069656901161314#m
Monbiot has more to say (reposted the initial thread from below):
'I've no insight into the grave allegations against #RussellBrand aired this weekend. But I've been concerned for a while about the way he now amplifies groundless conspiracy theories and the far-right influencers who promote them. theguardian.com/commentisfre…🧵 I once admired Russell Brand. But his grim trajectory shows us where politics is heading | George... In an age of distortion, public figures have powerful tools and a responsibility. This is an object lesson in how that can go wrong, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot theguardian.com
As Brand repeatedly points out, there's a lot wrong with the mainstream media. But there's also a lot wrong with shows like his, whose audience numbers appear to depend on propagating ever more ridiculous claims and conspiracy fictions.
Brand is not on the far right. But I see him as cynically using the themes, obsessions and spokespeople of the far right to boost his numbers. In doing so, he is assisting them, by mainstreaming far right politics. Even though this is doubtless not his intention.
The question I've never been able to resolve is why far right conspiracy fictions seem, for so many online influencers, to be the key to massive audiences. What is it about this nonsense that attracts so many people?
Here's a thread from before in which I explore these questions in more depth, placing Russell Brand's journey in the context of similar influencers who have travelled from progressive critiques of power to amplifying far right themes, such as @ggreenwald.
1. What the hell has happened to Russell Brand? Here’s my column on his terrible political journey, plus a thread on the wider context, that explains what makes his shift so dangerous. 1/ theguardian.com/commentisfre…' - https://nitter.net/GeorgeMonbiot/status/1703324378660847812#m
[...]
'Alice, one of the women who has accused Russell Brand of of rape or sexual assault, has neatly expressed the problems with the way that he and his fans have framed his defence. The following thread consists of quotes from her interview on Woman's Hour.🧵
"it’s laughable that he would even imply that this is some kind of mainstream media conspiracy. He’s not outside the mainstream – he did a Universal Pictures movie last year, he did Minions, a children’s movie."
“He is very much part of the mainstream media, he just happens to have a YouTube channel where he talks about conspiracy theories to an audience that laps it up."
"it may sound cynical, but I do think that he was building himself an audience for years of people that would then have great distrust of any publication that came forward with allegations. He knew it was coming for a long time." ' - https://nitter.net/GeorgeMonbiot/status/1703741282210787400#m
Hadley Freeman wants you to pay for the Times investigation:
'If you care about stories like this, if you want the powerful and predatory to be exposed, please don’t share links that break the paywall on this story - journalism like this COSTS MONEY TO DO. Free journalism = clickbait about who said what to who on Twitter that day' - https://nitter.net/HadleyFreeman/status/1703352760844861639#m
'Dannii Minogue on Brand in 2006, Piers Morgan interviewing him in 2006. Both describe him as a “predator”, one seriously, one jokingly. Yes, things were different in the past. But not that different' - https://nitter.net/HadleyFreeman/status/1703511788619284612#m
Billy Bragg retweets:
'Rosie Holt @RosieisaHolt You’ve got to hand it to Russell Brand; painting himself as an outlier and rebel, persecuted by the system, when the reason why this took so long to come out was he has lots of money and power that allowed him to use the system to be quite litigiously nasty.' - https://nitter.net/RosieisaHolt/status/1703354954247733349#m
When his BBC career eventually imploded, over an obscene prank call that Brand and Jonathan Ross made on air to the actor Andrew Sachs, Hollywood snapped him up. When that star too waned, he reinvented himself in Britain as an anti-capitalist, anti-mainstream leftwing thinker, surfing the coming wave of Corbynism and lionised this time by a liberal political establishment anxious to show young people that they got it. The then Labour leader, Ed Miliband, famously submitted to an interview with Brand carrying more than a whiff of political cool girl vibes, but the editors of Newsnight, Question Time and the New Statesman were equally seduced by his edgy glamour – and yes, for a while he wrote a column for the Guardian, too. When all that dried up, Brand evolved into a YouTube wellness guru peddling conspiracy theories about Covid-19 or the war in Ukraine, building a cranky rightwing following to replace his leftwing one.
It really has gone full-on from all quarters. The one incident so far referred to the Met is the only legal gesture; the rest of it is trial by media and massively so....no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party...So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
Err that was by me, and should have the title "Hinsliff too"
They are all jumping on the bandwagon thought. Expect "think" pieces from all of them in the next few days.
It may be hard to trot out the "cancel culture is a myth" line after this latest escapade....no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party...So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
It really is frightening when these so-called 'liberals' dump the most fundamental legal principles and methods; like the presumption of innocence, the right to a fair trial, the right to cross-examine witnesses; in favour of the mob and trial in the media, as a substitute. They label Brand a narcissist, but just look at them, a case of the kettle calling the pot black!
They appear totally unaware that they are agitating for a new kind of liberal fascism, where untried people are effectively broken on the wheel without the right to defend themselves, hounded byu a media posse that has already eliminated the need for actual charges, a fair trial and tiresome possibility of an acquital by a jury who bother to examine the facts and details of the case.
One wonders whether the current media feeding frenzy and close to mass hysteria, aimed at a designated outlaw individual, really is the best way to examine these kind of things. It's unpleasant, worrying. It's as if we're sinking back towards the era of the witch hunt, with all that this implies for society and what it means to be a liberal.
Is there a more despicable category of human being than these fake radicals who've made a nice little money-spinning niche for themselves pretending to have a conscience, yet parrot the dregs of the system when it really matters?
Re: Klein, Sarkar, Bragg...
Posted by Chris Rogers on September 18, 2023, 9:14 pm, in reply to "Klein, Sarkar, Bragg..."
Given Ash Sarkar has already opined on Assange as a rapist and jumped on the Labour Party antisemitism crisis, as did Bragg, their opinion is worth a very large zero. If there is any validity to these media charges then it is a matter for the police, judiciary and due process, not paid Centrist spivs.
Brand has called for ordinary people to mobilise across party lines..which should be intuitive at this point now that the elite use of this tactic is pretty much out in the open..
Radical opposition simulators will be out of a job the second any informed and collaborative opposition movement starts to gain momentum.
Orville, lol... I forgot Jones put Brand's endorsement on the cover of his book. Must be embarrassing for him, bless. He finally piped up, clutching his pearls because GB News gave a platform to someone who called Brand a 'hero':
'It's commendable Turner is challenged here - but it's beyond shocking that a channel is allowed to tolerate a presenter holding these views.
Calling someone a hero after they're accused of rape and sexual assault will have a traumatic impact on other survivors of male violence.'
Previous Message
On GB News we put free speech first - even when we disagree with each other. @toryboypierce furiously clashes with @beverleyturner over a tweet in which she called Russell Brand a ‘hero’ after an investigation uncovered accusations of rape and sexual assault.' - https://nitter.net/OwenJones84/status/1703852624456343626#m
The exchange in question:
Again, 'accused' and the other GB News presenter hyperventilating about 'these allegations'. What if the accusations are false? What if the allegations turn out to be untrue? How can it be 'traumatic' if the facts aren't even known yet? Are we supposed to just take peoples' (anonymous) claims at face value and ask no further questions for fear of offending X victim demographic? Turner is clearly aware of the media/establishment bias against Brand, albeit seeming to think he's getting cancelled for swinging to the right, while being a 'darling' when on the left, and the 'hero' remark was most likely intended as a counterweight against a smear campaign, and to remind ppl of the actual work he's done. Nothing wrong with that. Besides, can someone no longer be praised if they did some bad things in their past?
In short, GB News has taken a more honourable stance than Jones here, probably not for the first time either.
He's really out of the club now, isn't he! Only met him twice, and just because his job forced him to, honest? Pull the other one, mate.Tell your story; Ask a question; Interpret generously http://storybythethroat.wordpress.com/tell-ask-listen/
nmClio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
Re: Oh wow, there was more, Marina Hyde edition
Posted by RaskolnikovX on September 19, 2023, 7:09 am, in reply to "Oh wow, there was more"
Of course she couldn't resist sticking several knives in and she seems to be extrapolating Brand's various, exhaustingly referenced recently, past bad behaviour to a wider issue of ...... the evil patriarchy:
Contemplating the notion of crossing the line, Russell Brand once remarked: “As I always say, there is no line. People draw that line in afterwards to #### you up.” Anyway: here we all are in the afterwards.
Back in the day, though, a lot of people were thrilled to be on what they thought was Russell’s side of the line. For a certain type of mournfully uncool man on the left, Russell Brand was quite the excitement. You only had to watch their little faces in his presence – lit up at being fleetingly indulged by the kind of guy who would probably have bullied them at school. He was a sports columnist at the Guardian (often also writing opinion columns), he guest-edited the New Statesman, while the apogee of this particular stage of Brand’s inevitable journey toward alt-right-frotting wingnut was surely the ludicrously feverish speculation over whether he’d endorse Labour in the 2015 general election. Keen to be awarded his royal warrant, the then Labour leader, Ed Miliband, traipsed to Brand’s London flat during the final stages of the campaign, for a filmed interview where committed non-voter Russell inquired rhetorically: “Since suffrage, since the right to vote, what has meaningfully occurred?” Nothing much, he reckoned. Somehow, this disqualifyingly moronic assumption did not deter his political acolytes.
I had no truck with any of this bollocks – but I don’t think it will quite do for me to spend even a nanosecond on self-congratulation, because I got other things wrong. Today I want to talk about something that at the time was called Sachsgate, because it seems quite a useful way round the current insider debates on “who knew what when” as far as Brand was concerned. This is because Sachsgate wasn’t comedy circuit rumour, or backstage telly whispers, or anything else that you or I never heard of, being out of those loops. It happened on air, then played out in the full glare of the media spotlight. So total was this story’s Fleet Street dominance for weeks that it knocked a certain other little story – the 2008 financial crisis – off the front pages day after day.
Somewhat like the out-of-control bankers, Brand was a master of his universe, and one October evening found him prerecording his Radio 2 show with guest co-host Jonathan Ross. Andrew Sachs – Manuel from Fawlty Towers – had been due to be a phone guest. Brand had had a fling with his granddaughter, who was called Georgina Baillie, and when the then 78-year-old Sachs didn’t pick up, the pair began leaving messages on his voicemail. In the first one, Ross shouted “he ####ed your granddaughter” – and three more messages to Sachs later, the pair had added grimness to horror, including singing songs. “It was consensual and she wasn’t menstrual,” warbles Brand at one point. Brand subsequently revealed Ross had tried to make him cut the calls from the broadcast, but he refused. The BBC aired it. From here, I’ll assume you have access to Wikipedia.
As for the wider backdrop, explaining “the culture” for women during the 2000s is quite hard if you weren’t there. (I am very much looking forward to Toxic, a forthcoming book by the writer Sarah Ditum, which promises to enlighten those who swerved the decade and bring back shudder-inducing memories for those who didn’t.) When it wasn’t unremittingly vicious (Britney), it was weird and gross, top to bottom. And 2008 was also the year in which even the then Lib-Dem leader, Nick Clegg, felt moved to tell GQ he had slept with up to 30 women.
What is completely bizarre, with the benefit of 2023 hindsight, is how the Sachsgate story was framed, both by those who were reflexive defenders of the BBC and “comedy” and free speech (then a somewhat lefty preoccupation, funnily enough), AND by those who wished their destruction. Fleet Street quickly settled into tribes and covered it as a story where each assumed the other was acting out of vested interests. This was back when our only culture wars were about things that happened on the BBC. (My how we’ve grown.) Mail vox pops were incandescent; some Guardian ones found it an “overreaction”.
When the Brand expose broke last weekend, I found myself transported back to that time. And with my 2023 head on, rather sickening alarm bells began to ring, because I knew – I knew – that I wouldn’t have centred anything I wrote about it on Georgina Baillie. I had this shaming suspicion I had treated it as a sort of media story – and so it proved. My mentions of it say Ross and Brand were total scumbags, but they chiefly ridicule the fact that people complained to Ofcom because of the Mail titles’ coverage, despite never having heard the original broadcast. I mean … so what?
Yet despite getting it right on the vileness of the broadcast, the tabloids pursuing the BBC got it wrong by endlessly and ferociously ####-shaming Georgina Baillie (even though ####-shaming wasn’t a term people used at the time). They cast the entire affair as an insult to Andrew Sachs, instead of to Baillie as well. She was roundly blamed. I’m sorry if the Guardian’s cuttings archive is incomplete and I’ve missed something, but I couldn’t find a single column centred on defending Baillie in any contemporaneous newspaper. A year later, Baillie sold an interview and underwear photoshoot to the Sun in which she said the media maelstrom had sent her “insane”, subsequently telling the Guardian she was “a tart with a heart, a nice girl”. I am mortified to see I reacted to this by saying she should stop banging on about the whole thing.
In fact, Baillie sank into addiction and out of the public eye (barring the fact that the Brand story will probably be all anyone sees when they Google her for the rest of her life). But last weekend, she gave an interview to the Mirror in which she reiterated that her relationship with Brand had been consensual, though the radio prank and its nuclear fallout had obviously been anything but. Brand made millions with a standup tour in which he mined the incident and further humiliated her, while – among other desolations – her grandfather didn’t speak to her for eight years. She revealed that Brand had got in touch apologetically a few years ago, and paid for her stint in rehab. Georgina’s reflections were so without fury and blame as to be utterly heartbreaking. “For about 10 years after Sachsgate it was very hard,” she said, “because I didn’t know whether I was in the wrong, so when he apologised it was a huge weight lifted off me.” That quote floored me. She spent a decade thinking it was all her fault. That’s “the culture” right there.
I’m just one of the many people who got many different things wrong about how that story should have been covered and framed. If we have learned anything – and I’m not entirely convinced we’ve learned nearly as much as we think we have – then it is vital we all treat these newly uncovered stories better, as the Sunday Times, the Times and Dispatches most certainly have with their painstaking investigation. And as I hope I have done with other stories, as I got older and a bit wiser. Tribalism is the enemy of truth and justice – even more now than then – and the victims must always be put at the heart of the stories which are, after all, theirs. However belatedly, that’s the right side of that line. ...no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party...So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
"As for the wider backdrop, explaining “the culture” for women during the 2000s is quite hard if you weren’t there..."
-Tricky one this retrospective judgement thing when you were a participant in the excesses...
But this says it all:
"For a certain type of mournfully uncool man on the left, Russell Brand was quite the excitement. You only had to watch their little faces in his presence – lit up at being fleetingly indulged by the kind of guy who would probably have bullied them at school..."
So...according to Marina to fit in with the zeitgeist of the day either you had to be like Russel Brand or you were in the eyes of the opposite sex a " mournfully uncool" lefty.
But now in hindsight...rather than edgy rogues like Brand the mournfully uncool bullied-at-school lefties should have been what women really desired...or maybe not...cos they weren't and ummm...clearly still aren't. But its a woman's prerogative to change her mind right?
I couldn’t find a single column centred on defending Baillie in any contemporaneous newspaper
Plenty putting the boot in though, eh Marina?
Today in Jesus Wept: the Satanic #### speaks. Again.
Today in Jesus Wept we must turn to Sachsgate breakout star Georgina Baillie, who has thus far managed to parlay Russell Brand's insult to her dignity into an excruciatingly candid red-top buy-up and a number of semi-mucky photoshoots.
But can we please draw the line at the trenchant newspaper comment pieces? It seems not. Breaking another ten second silence, Manuel's estranged granddaughter takes to the pages of today's Sun with an opinion column unlikely to give PJ O'Rourke any sleepless nights.
Entitled "My View", it sees the Satanic #### attempt to gain some sort of purchase on this latest Jonathan Ross "outrage", the details of which I literally cannot be bothered to even look up, let alone confect horror over. The world can now be divided into people who genuinely think caring about this crap is important, and people you might wish to know socially.
Anyway, about halfway down Georgina manages to wrench the subject matter back to herself – she hasn't the most gossamer of authorial touches, bless her – as she drones:
"I then realised that although he had sent a letter of apology to my family, he never actually directly addressed me with an apology...."
Georgina, Georgina, Georgina... In the name of all human sanity: please just let it go. They were total scumbags, but it's over. O-V-A-H. Failing that, ditch the Satanic ####s and form a new dance/burlesque/whatever troupe with oversharing divorcee Liz Jones and Rod Liddle's perma-wronged ex-wife. You can call yourself the Single-Issue Human Beings. ...no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party...So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
Jesus, what a repulsive woman, sounds like the worst kind of male chauvinist pig. The irony and lack of awareness of complaining about the beeb's s1ut-shaming when she used that exact word in a sneery, dehumanising put-down at the time is astonishing. At least Brand apologised and paid for her rehab. This was not an apology, but instrumentalising her in order to attack someone she disagrees with while trying to make herself look all righteous & humble at the same time. Sickening...Tell your story; Ask a question; Interpret generously http://storybythethroat.wordpress.com/tell-ask-listen/
Monbiot: ' Ye gods, his fans. They're as bad as Trump's. Perhaps they are also Trump's.'
I guess people objected to his smearing of Brand as a right wing conspiracy theorist. But it's ok, Monbiot can dismiss these criticisms because those making them are probably all right wing conspiracy theorist Trump supporters too.
on September 18, 2023, 7:18 pm
I forgot Jones put Brand's endorsement on the cover of his book. Must be embarrassing for him, bless. He finally piped up, clutching his pearls because GB News gave a platform to someone who called Brand a 'hero': 
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