America This Week, September 22, 2023

And now the news landscape is sort of overpopulated with Russell brand stories. And there's a number of things to discuss here. We're probably going to get to everything, except the actual case. But what were your first impressions of this?

Anti-establishment.

He's no longer a comedian, really, he's a kind of high satirist who combines his skills for witty expression with pretty resolute, anti-orthodox ideas. And so he was in the crosshairs, and he was especially in the crosshairs having come from Hollywood. Which I don't think brooks much difference with the normal line. He was doing something that was very high risk, in other words.

And here came this story. And I not only don't want to talk about the specific charges. I refuse to because none of them have been proved, none of them have resulted in legal action. None of them are particularly traceable to a source.

And as much as I might be bothered if they were true, as a person, I find myself having to stick by my principles. They picked someone and they picked a situation in which many of us might find it hard to stick by a person.

I didn't have any accusers, it was purely based on something somebody had written once, and, you know, there were settlements later on. But in the moment, it's paralyzing, it's kind of designed to be socially isolating.

Your friends will not answer your phone calls and things come at you from all different directions. But what I went through was even like, you know, a generation ago, compared to the sophistication of how these things work now. Right? When somebody who is that much more famous goes through something like this now, there's instantaneously a slew of consequences that ensue before anyone could have even theoretically reviewed enough evidence to know anything.

So, you know, in Russell's case, his tour was canceled, that, you know, that might have been partly his decision. I don't know for a fact there what happened, but he was dropped by his publisher.

He lost his agency.

YouTube demonetized his show and there were a number of other financial consequences that came right away. And for me, this is the really concerning part, which is they've kind of institutionalized this idea. That before there's any kind of investigation, before a person's charged with a crime. We don't have to wait for any kind of review or response, anything of that nature, we just go ahead and do the punishment. And that's partly, you know, a reflection of a new mentality about these issues.

But it's also, I think, a withering of the whole idea of the presumption of innocence. Like we're supposed to actually believe that a person's innocent until the jury comes in. Like, that's kind of the way this thing works. I think we're supposed to, at least, you know, remind ourselves that that's true. And the idea of there not being consequences until that's been proven, it's supposed to be important, or at least I thought it was, but not anymore, apparently.

I don't know, I was just curious, what's your take on that?

And the public giveth and taketh away.

Not that it's just, but that's just the way it works.

He decided he made a decision at some point in his life to become a public figure of a different kind. Rather than a comedian or a sex symbol or a wacky movie star, he wanted to address serious issues.

And he might have known, I think, that that put a target on him almost instantly. Now, a year from an election, when so many people who go against the flow are, I think, being selected for, you know, cancellation, nullification, demonization. The bullet came for him.

As I say, I can't adjudicate the claims in the story, I don't think it's a great story. Personally, you know, the anonymity of the accusers makes it very difficult to assess, but....

They picked this guy they had, you know. It's like 500 cars go past a cop car and he pulls over the one of the guy who, you know, has been making eyes at his wife.

We know about the principle of selective, you know, selective accusation here. Because we have had presidents who've been charged with many of the same things and yet continue to have a.

So we know what's going on, we know why he got the treatment and then we get to what are the punishments? In this case? He was demonetized from YouTube.

Does YouTube have any duty to let anyone monetize their content?

You know, some vague sense of harm, I think, was attached to his case as the justification for demonetization.

You know, it's too bad that we have these near monopolies on social media, or, you know?

Video distribution they've got, they've got a competitor in rumble, I guess. But one would think, though, that the laws of celebrity, if people don't like you anymore, they stop listening to you, should be sufficient in this case. And you don't need corporate interference at the same time.

And it's amazing how quickly a story like this comes out, and instantly all sorts of other inferences are drawn, not only.

Is he guilty of being, you know what one? I saw one headline describe him as a sex pest in a headline which I personally would have been afraid to use. That term, you know, before there was a judgment in a court case, but apparently not anymore, right? So we throw these words around in ways we never, we never did before.

But we also, we also say, well, in addition to his bad behavior, that we didn't know about. It turns out that all the things that he's been saying all along, you know, have been exposed as a con or a grift of some kind. And there are perhaps other things about him that, you know now, warrant further investigation. So there was.

There was a story that blew my mind that was in Buzzfeed. And the headline is after the BBC removed shows featuring Russell Brand amid rape and sexual abuse allegations. More troubling content from the comic has come to light. And if you go down and read what the story says, it digs up an old show that he did, where he was on. I guess it's something called Leicester Square. It's a podcast filmed in front of a live audience in 2013..

And.

He's doing a gag about sort of Greek theoreticians, and he's in about how they had sex with kids. And he says it says of the kids they didn't mind it, did they? They were clever, weren't they? And then he starts doing an impersonation of a Greek person, saying, I've done another triangle, I'm fucking a little kid. This is great.

Fuck the kid with a triangle. And, you know, so then they, they, they. They ask a spokesperson for the BBC if they're going to ban him as a or, or that show as a result.

They've, they talk to Channel 4, making sure that they're going to take off every every piece of content involving Russell brand in the past. Now that that joke about having the Greek, the Greeks having sex with kids. What comic hasn't gone towards that kind of material before? I mean, I seem to remember Louis C..K. doing jokes like that like many times.

Remember, he did that whole thing where he was looking at a couple walking down the street. And, you know, imagining what their lives were like and then speculating if they had children. And then he starts imagining, like, Well, what if I had sex with the kid in? The audience groans, and he says, OK, I wouldn't do that. Maybe if he was dead, I would do it, you know? And then it goes on and on and on.

And the whole idea is, he actually says, I'm just doing this to be terrible, to make you laugh, right? It's a joke. And but now they're going to raise the specter that maybe there are other things in his closet. And, you know, as CNN, CNN put out a piece where the headline was, The mythology of Russell brand is finally exposed.

So it's we're going to reexamine everything that he's ever said. The mythology of Russell brand, Let's see, I mean, what was the mythology that he was?

I remember when a movie called The Aristocrats, Oh my God, what was an art house special, you know, full of, you know? The idea was that comedians share this joke among themselves in a kind of oral tradition, that there's a kind of private competition to gross each other out with this joke. And it's an open source joke in which you just funnel in as much disgusting, and, you know, morally stained content as possible. And this thing was celebrated. This movie, oh my God, so outrageous and comic after comic, competing to be more, more revolting than the other.

And then suddenly we get this, you know? Turn up the puritan dial whenever we want and shoot this beam at people and then we go back. If this is going through England, too, I mean, it's interesting. Hollywood would, I think, be a little more careful in this campaign against him. It has a lot to lose. But coming from the stuffy British and the BBC home of Jimmy Seville, famous pedophile.

But but anyway, yeah, whenever I see it, whenever I see a witch hunt like this.

I wonder if they're going to be suddenly across the board with their revulsion, and they never are. You know, it's always to take one out and then return to business as usual.

And you know, the?

They they pretend to care about about the original charges, are they investigating those? No. They use those as a launchpad and they're already into phase two.

But yeah, for instance, The Guardian had an incredible headline just a couple of days ago, and this is from chief reporter Daniel Boffrey. I've actually never heard of that person, maybe I should have. But the headline is Russell Brand's Wonderland, the online soapbox where the star pushes his free speech and free speeches in quotes.

And it does an intro talking about one of his episodes, and then it says. The subject of the daily episode was not the usual diet of conspiracy theories, critiques of the mainstream media and whimsical football chat. But instead, the U.S Libel trial involving Johnny Depp and Amber heard. Anyway, he goes on to talk about something he said about Johnny Depp. But this constant refrain of all of these stories is he's either abusing the concept of free speech to transmit disinformation and conspiracy theories.

You know, or it's not. What he's doing is actually more sinister than that. It's, it's a it's a con. it has been a con the whole time.

And now it's been unmasked and thankfully we can move past the Russell brand episode. His career is over. There's been a There's a lot of that, too.

Like, you know, his star has fallen like never to come back again, which, of course, is not true. I feel pretty confident that he's going to be back relatively quickly.

And as evidenced by the fact that they feel a need to. To try to clamp down on access to his show, which, as you say, there would be no need for that if the audience was departing him. But Matt, let me start, I don't think it's going to happen.

And but now, but now, my, my passion, my intellectual solidarity with the First Amendment has to be held hostage to some guy's sex life. That's what they're trying to do, you know, they want to muddle and muddy and muddy the waters, as we're afraid for last week. Because apparently winning on the merits in their case against free speech isn't working. So let's go make a scumbag out of somebody and say he practices free speech. Quote unquote.

Therefore, you know, it's like it's like trying to smear hockey, because, you know, Jeffrey Epstein liked to watch it or something. So you know, nobody's fooled by this. I'm sure it's gaining a lot of readers.

It's a very clickable story, I mean, it's.

It's probably going to go on forever now, without much, you know, on the side that believes in it. Because it's got a kind of pornographic allure, and actually pornographic allure. In some ways. You get to be high minded and read about sex, or talk about sex, or think about it, you know, it's. It's like one of those viruses that rides another virus. Here. We have a sort of governmental state censorship issue hooked on to a sex issue so that it can get past the immune system.

An MP reaching out to.

Rumble, essentially asking, how come you haven't also?

The heading? It was a committee, that of a committee. Yes, yes.

The The Guardian story begins like this. Rumble, a video sharing platform used by Russell Brand, has has accused a parliamentary committee of deeply inappropriate behavior after it asked whether the site would suspend payments to the comedian Caroline Dinanage. Or I don't know how you pronounce that, the Conservative chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee wrote this week to Rumble's. The Culture, Media and Sport committee wrote this week to Rumble's chief executive, Chris Pavlovsky, to express concern. That brand may be able to profit from his content on the platform.

And you have this letter, I. I'm just stunned by this that any government committee would get involved with.

Trying to convince a private company to remove somebody's source of income.

In the in the middle of, you know, something that has nothing to do with the government. There's no investigation that I know of. So why are they? What's the justification for this kind of behavior? We accept it because we know they do this kind of thing now.

But legally, how does that happen, and why is it happening, and why are people OK with that?

It would be immediately appalling, but I think Americans are a little baffled by the British and so less likely to rise up against something like this. But yeah, I mean.

To actually question the the right to individuals to have a livelihood based on newspaper stories using anonymous sources. And to do it under the flag of the Crown. Or the British government is the worst precedent you could set, short of it being the American government, which concerns me more. But it's all the building of a model, you know, how far can we take this? And.

I don't think for the people who are all exercised about, you know, Russell Brand's character, they've taken it far enough that they're revolted. Yet they are firmly now, and have been for a long time, of the belief that people making other people feel unsafe or whatever, having some.

Conspiratorial glaze to their identity should be taken out by whatever means possible.

Are journalists in America crossing sides so to speak, to defend or to condemn this onslaught? I haven't seen it yet.

And listen to the letter that this committee sent to Rumble.

The Culture, Sport and Culture, Media and Sport Committee is raising questions with the broadcasters and production companies who previously employed Mr. Brand. To examine both the culture of the industry in the past and whether that culture still prevails today. However, we are also looking at his use of social media. Including on Rumble, where he issued his preemptive response to the accusations made against him yesterday made against him by the Sunday Times and Channel 4's dispatches. While we recognize that Rumble is not the creator of the content published by Mr. Brand, we are concerned that he may be able to profit from his content on the platform.

We would be grateful if you could confirm whether Mr. Brand is able to monetize his content, including his videos related to the serious accusations against him. So they specifically want to make sure that Rumble does not afford him the opportunity.

To protest his own innocence in public, to offer a defense, to offer an explanation.

Right, you know, I.

It's madness.

It's it's riding in on the back of of a celebrity gossip story. And yet the highest authorities are willing to ride that horse. Now, you know, it's not just the U.S. Senate which has relaxed dress codes, and, you know, codes of comportment.

Apparently, the British Parliament is now in the job of, you know.

Tabloid investigation.

Rumble shouldn't answer that letter, I wouldn't answer any such letter. I I throw it in the trash I have.

You know, Twitter files and seeing sequences where?

Institutional actors that were once clearly separate, all talking in the same cooperative spirit, right? So, you might have the FBI passing on an analysis by the Clemson Media Forensics hub about, you know, certain accounts they think are Russian.

That will go to the Washington Post, all three of them will then petition Twitter together. And then they'll have a sort of, you know, a conversation all all at once about what to do about these accounts. Even though all of those actors they, they shouldn't be, you know, partners in this kind of endeavor, but with this kind of thing, I, you know, whether it comes from some culture and sport committee in the House of Commons, or whether it comes from.

The BBC, or, you know, the British office of YouTube. It does feel like it's coming from the same, from the same place. And but again, it's so striking that they're going after the idea of speaking in your own defense. Because this is a consistent, this is also a consistent theme of that era. As you point out the gag order on Trump, and there was a no matter what you think of Trump. There was a kind of an incredible op ed in the Washington piece this Washington Post this week about, like, yes, you should do that.

We should gag Trump, but it's in line with freezing, you know, the GoFundMe fundraisers for January 6th. Defendants or any kind of defendants like you, you should never do that. The government should never be involved with that. No, no NGO should be involved with that.

You know, a person really hasn't been fairly and truly convicted of a crime. If they're not really afforded a real defense, you want them to have a good defense. If you want the case to stick and to have public impact, I don't.

I don't understand that unless this is just people who, you know, they're, they're applauding this new sort of bureaucratic form of government.

Everything became inevitable.

They hire, you know, they hire intelligence people, they hire law enforcement people at these companies, they get quite high in the companies. Everybody's linked up socially and career wise. They've built an ideological structure around the metaphor of, you know, informational warfare that allows them to use the rhetoric of you know, security and so on. They've built everything perfectly, you know, last week we talked about the press finally coming out as somewhat state sponsored, in the sense that they now reprint virtually.

Verbatim press releases from the White House.

Well, here we see another instance of something similar, more, you know, state sponsored social media, and.

We have a case down in Missouri, of course, where you know that, prohibiting the Biden administration from from issuing edicts to social media. But we're seeing workarounds galore. I mean, they may lose, the administration, may lose that case in the Supreme Court, but.

There were by that time, and already are so many sort of triangular ways to do the same thing. Including now letters from the British government to American companies.

The CDI, I forget what that the.

Disinformation Index. I forget what, I forget what the first of the C stands for, but they're funded by Global Engagement Center, they rate.

News outlets according to trustworthiness, using this very amorphous standard, and that up and down ranks companies and massively affects their their financial viability. And again, it's, it's, it's not, it's in this gray area between official censorship.

And sort of in market forces, it's it's neither.

You know, the traditional?

Method of just just boycotting somebody, you know, and letting them have their voice, you know, it's like a basically a free speech battle. That's kind of the marketplace of ideas, what concept of how this is supposed to play out instead?

It's a sort of sub rosa.

Bureaucratic structure where they build these relationships, some of them are financial. And if you want to have, you know if you're Twitter or Facebook, and you don't want to have a problem with widespread advertiser boycotts. And you get a letter from one of these, these, these outlets saying, Yeah, we'd like you to pull these nine accounts. You're likely to do it like you're suddenly presented with this very serious financial conundrum.

And none of this really involves the public. It's it's all done, you know, quietly. In Russell Brand's case. We're now, we're, we're finding out about all of this. But it doesn't make it look any better. I mean, this stuff I find really frightening.

And again, it just it's. It's so counter to the idea of, like, what, what's supposed to happen when somebody is accused of a serious offense?

They're being right, they're being explicit about that now. It's disingenuous. It's probably all about his content and very little about his person when it really comes down to it. You know, the targeting is.

I'm sure aggravated by his content, and I seriously doubt this would be happening if he had other views, but.

But to stop a second once again, I'm going to bang this drum. The Anglo-American special relationship seems to have been re-cemented, or more deeply cemented over this censorship issue. And, you know, we know, and this disinformation issue, remember, this disinformation word and concept goes back to Russiagate really, doesn't it?

You know, the idea that Donald Trump, somehow colluded, conspired with Putin to fill the American mind with?

Misleading propaganda to influence the election. Well, that was all through this Christopher Steele British spy cut out type.

And I'm starting to see a method here where, you know, it's funny. Back in the old days, I remember the Clintons accusing the Right of having this kind of pipeline. In which charges against Bill Clinton would first appear in British tabloids and then they would be taken up here.

The the. I think the special opportunity here with Russell brand was that he's British. And that they can kind of run the operation from over there. And do things that maybe the American government or the American establishment might hesitate to, like, send out letters from committee, so right?

Years ago before, we started tinkering with the the Broadcasting Board of Governors rules. And they started repealing parts of the Smith Act, which prohibited the intelligence agencies from playing around in the domestic sandbox. We never had, you know, either the Department of Defense or the C.I.A. or any of these, or any of the law enforcement agencies. They weren't propagandizing locally. There was actually a story at Rolling Stone when I was there by. I think it was James Bamford. Involving a an Iraqi scientist named Adnan Al-Haydari, who had been given a lie detector test by the C.I.A. and flunked it. But they didn't want to waste the story that he told, which is that Saddam had all these chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. They didn't want to waste that opportunity.

So they shopped it to Australian television and then to some local news outlets in the Middle East. The story then got to Judith Miller.

Who flew out and interviewed this person? And through that, you know, circuitous route, they were able to get around. The prohibition of messing directly with the American news landscape. Now, Britain has clearly been acting as kind of a proxy for.

You know, it's so, as you say, it's a work around certain restrictions, you know. Are we allowed to spy on American or to send confidential informants into an American political campaign, presidential campaign? Well, that would be pretty fraught to do in the territory of the United States. But they did do it, as you say, with that Oxford Group. But you're right.

Yeah, like there. It looks like the UK has now become sort of a launching pad for this kind of stuff, which now, which then filters its way back to the US. It also seems, you know, sort of informally, just from looking, you know, it's a little bit.