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November 12, 2023
The Russell Brand Conspiracy
Distortions in the Matrix
by Tony McKenna
“Russell Brand the Trews,” August 27, 2014.
This year, the UK television program Panaroma released an expose on the comedian, activist and lifestyle guru Russell Brand. Brand is a British star but also someone whose celebrity has crossed international lines; he has appeared in several Hollywood movies, been interviewed frequently on many of the biggest news channels in the world and will probably be familiar to the majority of CounterPunch readers.
A decade ago, Brand was a figure beloved by the left in the UK, someone who – quite rightly in my view – challenged the stagnation and decadence of a parliamentary democracy in which the popular vote had ceased to have any significant meaning; both major parties at that time following the ‘austerity’ line that emboldened the rich and crippled the poor. To the outrage of nice middle-class liberals, Brand averred that casting a vote was a waste of time – voting in itself was not the issue, what we had to ask ourselves was why there was no one worth voting for!
Brand was a curious, charismatic and intoxicating figure; absurdly verbose but intellectually creative, physically beautiful and yet raffish and unkempt, a clear womanizer but someone prepared to talk about the problems of toxic masculinity and reflect on the fact he had been damaged by it. He had the swagger of a cockney pirate, combined with the campness of a theatre queen; there was often a sexist edge to his rhetoric, but he managed to offset this with a playfulness and a certain vulnerability. I never thought a great deal of him as a comic; his observations were sometimes shrewd but rarely memorable; it was his charisma, swagger and cheekiness that saw him through.
In the last decade, Brand has undergone something of a transformation. A broader social critique that saw him appearing at various protests, providing much-needed visibility for those fighting against extortionate rents, or the tens of thousands of people who marched against the UK government’s austerity program in 2014 was gradually phased out in favor of a critique of the status quo which involved a deeper delve into the world of conspiracy theory.
Headers on his website in these later years included ‘Bill Gates Has Been HIDING This And It’s ALL About To Come Out’. It was the type of prompt to galvanize all those bewildered, atomized individuals disorientated by the pandemic and the fear of overweening state power – those whose susceptibility to libertarian ideals would whip them up into a frenzy. And it was these people who were becoming the mainstay of Brand’s followers, and perhaps that’s why Brand was more and more able to conceive of himself as a visionary, someone whose charisma and clarity were responsible for ‘awakening’ the disorientated huddled masses flocking to his message and sheltering under the glow of his eerie-eyed certainty.
For, in revealing to them the Matrix-like conspiracy behind the veil, Brand increasingly experienced himself as sharing a platform with figures like Jesus or Gandhi. More ‘banal’ modes of collective and social protest were relinquished before the eerie and sublime sense of himself as a transcendental figure, locked into a deeper form of spiritual commitment while at the same moment, more worldly and prosaic millions in hard cash flowed into the various avenues his accountants and business advisors had set up.
The allegations made against him by the Panorama program seem highly credible. They range from sexual harassment to rape. One victim alleged that Brand raped her against a wall of his house. This allegation pertains to 2012. The evidence to support the allegation consists of a text message she sent him telling him following the assault just how frightened she’d been, that ‘no means no’ to which he responded by saying he was ‘very sorry’. In addition, the rape crisis center she went to the next day logged her visit.
The accusation is a persuasive one, the victim’s account is supported by objective and documented evidence. But for the conspiracy theorist, such persuasive evidence does not speak to the likelihood of Brand’s guilt, instead it speaks to the power of the conspiracy set in motion against him. For such people, the ‘establishment’ is a mysterious, indecipherable but omnipotent force that is capable of almost any ruse, any conceivable warping of reality in the shape and direction of its own interests.
A woman comes forward with an allegation of rape, several women come forward with similar allegations – easy, they are in the pocket of the powers-that-be, they have all been paid or pressured by the establishment to take down the harrowed and hallowed man who threatens its power. One of those women is recorded as having visited a rape crisis center after the alleged attack more than a decade ago? And there is a written record that verifies this. Again, a no-brainer – the power of the establishment is such that it could easily have brought into being such a document on a whim, or even paid off the rape crisis center at the time to falsify documents, storing the ‘evidence’ against a clearly influential leftist to strike a blow against him in the years to come.
For the conspiracy theorist, the facts contradicting their narrative provide a stronger affirmation of it; the evidence produced against his or her position merely demonstrates just how deep the conspiracy goes – i.e., how many individuals and institutions have been co-opted by it so as to fabricate such ‘evidence’. In this way, the modern conspiracy theorist attains a certain parity with the Bible-thumping fundamentalist of yore; yes, the fossils of dinosaurs seem to suggest proof of evolution, but what they really tell you about is God’s power – He ‘planted’ the ‘evidence’ in order to test us, you see!
The narrative of the conspiracy against Brand, therefore, remains impervious to the facts on the ground; rather its ‘veracity’ is established through allusion and ominous suggestion. The conspiracy theorist sidles up, that gleam in their eyes – somewhere between sinister and knowing – in order to utter the rhetorical question ‘Why now?’ In the last few months I have heard so many people ask this, almost always with the same unbearable smugness – that sense that they are the ones with an ear to the ground, they are the ones with the inside track, whereas everyone else is just a dupe, merrily dancing along to the establishment’s tune. ‘Why now? Why are they going after Brand now?’ is meant not only to change the direction of the conversation – away from the distasteful subject of physical assault and rape. It also suggests that the change in tone of Brand’s politics to speechifying that increasingly encompasses conspiracy theory delivered from the pulpit of alternative media is somehow an existential threat to the political establishment itself.
In a well-researched and vigorous piece, the Guardian journalist George Monbiot scrutinizes these kinds of claims. The event of Covid 19 seemed to catalyze Brand’s descent into the realm of conspiracy theories with some of his videos promoting ‘“natural immunity” ahead of vaccines, and for a while pushed ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as treatments for Covid (they aren’t).’ The misinformation surrounding COVID, an issue that has become a locus point for conspiracy theory, isn’t simply related to the means of treatment. It is also related to the way the conspiracy theorist envisages the relationship between the state and the various international bodies like the World Health Organization which organized in the face of the pandemic.
When the World Health Organization called for better pandemic surveillance – i.e. more effective tracking of viruses and their patterns of migration – Brand leaped on the word ‘surveillance’ and, along with his fellow travelers, was able to conclude that such a call demonstrated the organization’s intent to monitor the population itself as part of a coercive program of control – ‘centralized systems of control where you are ultimately a serf’.
There is, of course, a genuine critique of big pharmaceutical companies to be had. But this doesn’t involve arguing, say, that the World Health Organization is a secret and subversive power waiting in the wings to take over one’s life. It doesn’t involve saying that COVID was manufactured in a lab to be purposefully unleashed so that drug companies could make billions. It shouldn’t involve arguing Bill Gates has secreted a microchip inside your granny!
The real scandal of Big Pharma is a lot more mundane. It involves capitalist CEOs or executives such as Martin Shkreli hiking up prices on medicine which can save lives to extortionate levels in order to turn the maximum profit. Or it involves the push by various multinationals in the US to sanitize and white-wash the use of opioids for pain treatment, insisting that these potent and often lethally addictive drugs did not promote dependency or addiction.
Or in the UK it involves shoddy backstreet deals between the government and various private enterprises whereby the former delivers to the latter vast funds from the state coffers to produce substandard PPE equipment. None of these things are the result of a world conspiracy orchestrated by a shadowy network of globalists; it is much simpler and more depressing than that – it is, in the words of the obnoxious Shkreli, ‘capitalism at work’; it is the way in which the drive for accumulation and market share increasingly encroach on the genuine health needs and requirements of the vast majority of human beings living under that same system.
Conspiracy theory, however, is something which is parasitic; it lives on the edges of a genuine critique of capitalist economic reproduction, it presents itself as ‘anti-establishment’ and yet its critique of the establishment is not developed out of concrete social categories – the historical interplay of different classes, different social agencies and groups; instead a single transcendental power – the Bilderberg Group, the Rothschilds, the Globalists – is opposed to the ordinary people who are nearly always the victims of the conspiracy, the dullards, the ‘sheeple’ who carry on trudging through the Matrix completely oblivious to the manipulations taking place behind-the-scenes.
The conspiracy theorist regards the vast majority of humanity with a combination of contempt and pity and recognizes in him or herself the obligation to wake them up from their dreary slumbers. For that reason, there are again parallels with more fundamentalist forms of religion – the cult leader, for instance, who finds himself anointed with sacred knowledge and must awaken his followers to trance-like heights of ecstasy and revelation.
Just consider one of Brand’s latest videos delivered after the Panorama revelations. He does not really examine the allegations in question, he does not address the specifics of the alleged crimes themselves; there is, in fact, almost no concrete detail. Instead Brand begins with a hallowed sense of revelation, he addresses the camera and the millions of his followers with ‘Hi there my awakening wonders!’ – and this is very much the creepy and eerily bereft tone of the cult leader tapping into the thought patterns of a series of desperate and lonely people. He then goes on to acknowledge there have been allegations of severe sexual assault made against him, but at this point, he at once enters into a long and rambling diatribe about big tech and the mainstream media.
And in a sense, this was all he need ever do. His followers do the rest. There is no need for a debate about the actual evidence in question. There is no need to scrutinize the details of the claims or to even go near the testimonies of the women. By shifting the conversation away to the power that facilitates the conspiracy, the members of the conspiracy cult can do the rest; to conclude with absolute glaze-eyed certainty that the allegations of these women are no more than the wild fabrications conjured up by big tech companies in alliance with mainstream media.
Such diversionary tactics are straight out of the Trump playbook. A wealthy and powerful man deliberately and systematically cultivated a libertarian sense of distrust toward the state and the mass media to shift the terrain from the actual documented evidence of tax evasion or testimonies of sexual assault to the all-encompassing category of ‘fake news’. A rationalistic examination of the evidence is superseded by an irrational and emotive account of a power so great, an influence so malign – that there is no fabrication, no distortion of reality, that it can’t achieve to secure its ends. The potential or possible crimes of anyone who claims to expose this power can simply be factored into the distortions in the Matrix the same power can affect – as it shows you the reality it wants you to see.
When the critique of the conspiracy-minded takes in something like the big pharmaceutical companies, its irrationality allows it to go far beyond the bounds of what is evidential. Any serious critique of medical practices should, as we have noted, encompass the profit motive, especially during a world pandemic whereby politicians are often doing shady, lucrative deals with private providers behind the scenes and gouging the public of their already dwindling and desperate funds.
But the conspiracy theory can take such social injustice and amp up its parameters to the nth degree; because the organization in question is so powerful – it is not simply that it can artificially inflate prices to trap and indebt the stricken and the desperate; rather the conspiracist can go one better. Big Pharma itself has artificially created the virus in order to unleash it on the world in an exercise of profit maximization, much of the conspiracy theory world has decided.
And this has significant consequences for the conspiracy theory production line and its own profit motives. If the virus has been manufactured as part of a global conspiracy by powerful corporate interests, then it also follows that the medical vaccinations and antidotes such interests peddle in the aftermath will be less than viable. Because it is not in the interests of profit-seeking companies to simply rid the world of the virus in one stroke. Better to allow it to linger so you can keep churning out new cures, and new boosts to profit. Or if the virus is in fact a smokescreen for some kind of biological marker or tiny microchip so as to allow George Sores to monitor you while you are on the bog (the perv!!) – then any ‘cures’, marketed by the same interests must be duds because the virus was only ever a chimera in the first place.
Of course, such conspiracy theories take things to the point of a colorful, gleeful almost purposeful insanity but they suggest something important more generally about the modus operandi of conspiracy theory. A sensible sociological critique can interrogate the ruthless economic practices of Big Pharma without suggesting that the science behind the medicine is a sham. But conspiracy theory tends to bolster the irrational with a pronounced current of anti-science; the drugs you are being sold are not just overinflated in terms of price, but they are also ineffective or outright dangerous to your health; in the conspiracy theory science itself nearly always presents as a false idol.
And this is fundamental I think. If the science that informs Big Pharma on the whole can’t be trusted, if science itself is another means by which those in the know seek to bamboozle and manipulate the population with their high-sounding language but low-rolling motives – then we require some kind of alternative. And it is here where the most visible and popular of conspiracy theory ‘activists’ tend to be most pro-active. If you go to the websites of those conspiracy theorists who have managed to crack the mainstream and have many millions of followers – like the unctuous Alex Jones for example – you realize that their anti-scientific irrationalism serves a more practical purpose. Jones has marketed ‘his own’ brand of alternative ‘cures’ which helps untether consumers from their links to mainstream medicine (and very possibly their lives, one can’t help but feel). His ‘treatments’ are, as you might suspect, glistening examples of the purest, unadulterated bat-shittery – they include sprays that will ‘cleanse’ your lungs, along with ‘anti-oxidant’ herbal remedies that will protect your prostate. In 2021 it was estimated Jones was making ‘at a minimum, tens of millions of dollars’ and that the lion’s share of this income was derived from ‘health’ and ‘dietary’ products.
Again, the mind turns quite naturally to tub-thumping fundamentalism. Just consider how so many religious racketeers in their fiery speeches absolve themselves of all the muck and the sin, and the avarice and messy desire that fissures through the modern world – and they do that from the purview of the promise of a higher and more spiritual reality uncontaminated by such things. But all the while, the whole time, the collection bowl is being pushed gently forward toward you – so that quietly and behind the scenes more earthly and material gains are clocked up in terms of dollars and cents.
And that brings us back to Russell Brand. While Brand has been posting on social media for many years, it is only in recent times, when he harnessed the power of religious revelation – or to say the same thing in secular terms – he harnessed the power to reveal the omnipotent forces behind the conspiracy, that his own coffers really started to fill. A video posted on You Tube which held some interesting thoughts and observations on ‘the power of comedy’ received a respectable 42,000 views, but when, post-Corona, he released a video that led with the sinister, rhetorical question – ‘”Bill Gates’s INCREDIBLY AWKWARD Interview — Is He Hiding Something??” – the viewership was at once catapulted into the millions.
Russell Brand makes millions as a result of these extra clicks and views, not to mention the fact that his Instagram webpage has a link to a merchandise store and also offers tickets to ‘ the wellness festival scheduled for next summer and hosted by Brand and his wife, with several tiers of weekend tickets costing between £160 and £195 each having already sold out.’ Unlike his Nazarean counterpart, Brand clearly prizes wealth; in fact, since the rape and sexual assault allegations broke, he has even taken the time to hit his disciples up for extra funding, urging them to pay $60 annually for subscriptions to his Rumble channel so that the great establishment ‘conspiracy to silence him’ might be thwarted.
To build a social movement is a fatiguing task. A few contribute to that struggle like El Che Guevara whose successes and, in fairness, whose failures – are written across the sky with a tragic and glittering silver. Most of us won’t ever see such stratospheric recognition. But that’s okay. Write a piece for a local newspaper which, though not many people will read, will nevertheless touch some. Because it will tell the truth. Or take part in a protest; it might not even achieve its aims, but it will set the basis for more protests, for greater hope. You will have been part of that. You will have been part of something that involves the best of people and I realize that sounds cheesy, but it is true – as anyone who has ever been on a really great protest or danced stupidly at a really wonderful concert can attest. Your smallness is what makes you in that moment so large, you are part of something greater than yourself, a shared and universal humanity.
It takes effort. The type of effort that is measured out in years, decades, perhaps even centuries, who knows? Our ordinary struggles, our everyday lives, coming together, sometimes meeting defeat and demoralization, but always providing the possibility of the kind of power that might challenge and transform the fundamental patterns of oppression that we all too often take for granted. Protests, strikes, marches sit-ins, glass-roots initiatives – all these things involve particular and practical ends; the need to reverse a particularly damaging and reactionary form of legislation, the need to focus attention on an unjust war or occupation perhaps.
But beyond specific ends, they have a more universal tenor. They involve a coming together of people from many different sections of society, and many different social groupings, and these have to find a way to communicate and express their shared interests and ethical standpoints as one. They have to be able to organize socially and politically in order to culminate the demonstration or the strike, and these forms of social organization are fundamental because they nearly always issue forth from the vast majority of people rather than being formed by writ in parliaments dominated by an elite minority of overwhelmingly wealthy people.
These forms of social organization are not imposed on us from above as when we are told to stand in line to receive a benefit check or a wage packet or to fill out a form in order to register a complaint which will go to human resources and might perhaps be returned with a letter whose first line reads ‘regretfully I must inform you that…’.
Radical protest allows grievances to be addressed through collective action rather than that petition to a local politician which filters through the legal channels only to evaporate in the malaise of petty injustice and helplessness that often characterize our individual lives. Or to say the same, by organizing collectively, directly – one bypasses the modes and forms of the status quo; in struggling toward new forms of social expression, one is positing the type of politics that provides an alternative to the modes and forms of capitalist social existence; and in this respect, every protest, every march, every strike – contains within itself the blue-print for a new world, something fundamentally more democratic and popular, something infused with the possibility of more universal freedoms. As the philosopher Leibniz once noted, in a grain of sand one can glimpse a whole universe.
But the conspiracy theory represents the death of such possibility. Conspiracy theory represents the death of collective action. It rises in the world, and it is most dominant, in that period of time where popular struggles have been successively defeated; where the possibility of transforming the fundamental forms of social existence by collective human activity seems at its most remote.
A good few years ago, the late, great Alex Cockburn commented on the rise of conspiracy theories. He was writing at a time when the neoliberal assault on the working classes and the social safety net was at an all-time high, where real wages in the US had not risen for more than two decades, and where collective action seemed to have reached some type of nadir:
Where was the American left in the recent campaign that ended in the recapture of both houses of Congress by the Democrats on 7 November? Was it in the streets fomenting opposition to the war in Iraq? No, the antiwar movement has been inert for months. When I was asked to give the keynote speech at a rare antiwar rally in my local town in October, three of my five fellow orators didn’t mention the war at all.
The Twin Towers had been brought down some five years before and this, along with political defeat, had led to a resurgence in conspiracy theories as a means to understanding the world at the expense of an analysis that flowed from the objective socio-historical categories that might offer the possibility of collective political transformation:
These days a dwindling number of leftists learn their political economy from Marx. Into the theoretical and strategic void has crept a diffuse, peripatetic conspiracist view of the world that tends to locate ruling class devilry not in the crises of capital accumulation, the falling rate of profit, or inter-imperial competition, but in locale — the Bohemian Grove, Bilderberg, Ditchley, Davos (2) — or supposedly “rogue” agencies, with the CIA still at the head of the list. The 9/11 “conspiracy” is the summa of all this foolishness.
Such a mentality, the supporters of Alex Jones, Russell Brand and Donald Trump all share. These three men are all absurdly wealthy. They all enjoy high levels of power and privilege. And they have all been accused of rape and/or sexual assault. But for their conspiracy theory advocates, their reputations cannot be tarnished, there is no amount of factual evidence from the victims in question that might ever taint their images.
And that is because when one evinces absolute faithlessness in the masses, when one decides that the vast majority of human beings are in some sense beneath you because they are, by and large, mindless dupes – then it is that much easier to seek salvation in the pristine, almost Christ-like individual who knows that which others don’t; who has the key to unlocking the Matrix and revealing all its secrets, casting off the husk, and giving you privileged and undiluted access to the reality behind the illusion. And what does he ask in return? Not so much really. Merely your absolute, unquestioning loyalty … and perhaps a donation or two along the way!
Tony McKenna’s journalism has been featured by Al Jazeera, Salon, The Huffington Post, ABC Australia, New Internationalist, The Progressive, New Statesman and New Humanist. His books include Art, Literature and Culture from a Marxist Perspective (Macmillan), The Dictator, the Revolution, the Machine: A Political Account of Joseph Stalin (Sussex Academic Press), Toward Forever: Radical Reflections on History and Art (Zero Books), The War Against Marxism: Reification and Revolution (Bloomsbury) and The Face of the Waters (Vulpine). He can be reached on twitter at @MckennaTony
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