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| Read on for a fun Russell Conspiracy-Facttm at the end of the blog! |
Look, we all know that we live in a rigged system, it’s just that we need rich and wealthy people to tell us about it. Lucky we have the likes of Russell Brand to tell us just how rigged it is and exactly what we think of it! Where would we be without him???!!!!
Welcome, you awakening serfs, mere non-player characters as it were, in the solipsistic RPG that is the life of our humble and not-at-all-elite celebrity overlords! I think that all us peasants could agree - if we actually had any agency and weren’t mere two-dimensional simulacra of sentient beings - that we were lucky to have millionaire celebrities who are willing to sink to the level of us scum to think, feel and emote on our behalf! And, because you don’t have any agency, you may as well give Russell Brand a big pile of money for the privilege of wasting your summer sat in a field with the lanky tw@ while he LARPs as a yoga master at whatever tawdry festival he is currently hawking tickets for.
But while you pine away waiting for your pre-booked ½ hour session of sunning your perineum in the ethereal glow that is generated by Russell Brand’s sense of self-regard, you might consider watching the video that he posted to YouTube On November 15th, 2022, titled “Dave Chapelle on Trump”. The video was a clip from, and essentially an advert for, his Rumble channel. It features Russell’s reaction to footage of Dave Chapelle’s opening monologue as the guest host of Saturday Night Live broadcast the previous Saturday (November 12th), which was the first weekend after the 2022 US midterm elections.
At that time, the relatively poor performance in the midterms of the Republican party, and the especially poor performance of candidates backed by Donald Trump, was being touted as indicators that Trump’s grip on the GOP is waning and that he is a spent force in US electoral politics. In the clip played by Russell, however, Chapelle was not so sure, stating that he knew Trump remained popular outside of “New York '' because he heard it “every day”. The secret to Trump’s abiding popularity, according to Dave, can be divined from the debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton in the run-up to the 2016 election when Trump stated, “I know the system is rigged because I use it!"
The YouTube video then cuts back to Brand in his studio who turns directly to camera, gives it the full “blue-steel” and says “Yeah, that's the moment that many of us acknowledged that something unusual was happening in American politics”
Bwaaaaa! Hahahahahahahhahahahahahahaha (see this, kids? This is what we had to do before someone invented the term “lmao”. Where was I, oh yeah…) Bwaaaa! hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. What a pretentious wanker! Where to even start with this (pretentious wanking aside)?
Well, first up, I think we need to acknowledge the enormous debt of gratitude that we owe to multimillionaires like Brand and Chappelle for deigning to descend from their ivory towers to explain to us ordinary common people what it is that the ordinary common people think. Oh, thank you kind sirs! How very gracious!
Russell Brand, Squire of Henley-on-Thames, is in good company with Dave Chappelle, of course, the defacto Lord of Yellow Springs, Ohio, who uses his $65 million dollar investment in the town as ransom to prevent the building of affordable housing in his fiefdom. Dave is deeply connected and in tune with the common salt-of-the-earth, why one need look no further than his recent, ill-judged decision to bring (then) world’s richest man, Elon Musk, onto the stage during his San Fransisco show to resounding boos. He further cemented his down-to-earth bonafides when he dismissed the heckling directed at Elon as coming from “the cheap seats”. The entire spectacle being nicely topped off with Musk screaming "I'm rich bitch!" at the audience. Power to the people, indeed.
But what is the “something unusual” that Russell and so many of us were supposedly acknowledging as happening in American politics? One would hope that neither Chappelle nor Brand are naive enough to be surprised at the idea of a rigged system that benefits those with obscene wealth and privilege, rather to Chappelle and Brand, it is the idea that Trump is willing to admit to the rigged system that is somehow surprising or unusual. Trump’s apparent admission implies that his political opponents not only profit from the rigged system but because they are politicians, they are the ones responsible for rigging the system in the first place. Donald Trump, therefore, is an outsider and a victim of the system, much like us ordinary people. But his genius is to play them at their own game, and his success is a symbol of his resistance to the rigged system! Isn’t he great? Except that it's nonsense, of course. Carefully rehearsed political rhetoric, but nonsense nonetheless. Effective nonsense -if anyone is stupid enough to fall for such an obvious line - a deflection that not only “turns a negative into a positive” but manages to seize the high ground from his opponents.
And exactly how stupid do you have to be to fall for such an obvious line? You can virtually hear the debate prep as some political consultant stands in front of Trump…
“Our polling indicates that the public view you as corrupt and are suspicious of the fact you used to donate to Democrat politicians. We’ve decided that instead of trying to run from this you should embrace it, turn a weakness into a strength, tell people that your flip flopping political allegiances and blatant corruption are the very reasons that you are best suited to fight the system” “Surely” Trump responds “Surely, no one would be so stupid as to fall for that?” “Oh, you’d be surprised”
Brand and Chappelle are supposed to be stand-up comedians, masters of the spoken word. How could they not see through this transparent con job?
Chappelle, at least, has got the excuse of pretending he’s merely reporting what he hears from other people, what he says may not be his personal opinion. But Brand drops himself right in it with the inclusivity of his “many of us” comment.
And so, “that’s the moment” that it dawns on Russell that something's up? This debate was in October 2016, a full 16 months after Trump descended the golden escalators to announce his run for president by labeling Mexicans as rapists and drug dealers. Trump’s claims of a corrupt and rigged system were a recurring theme throughout his campaign, dating back to the GOP primaries. Vox, for example, in August of 2015 noted that Trump “made one shockingly insightful comment during the first GOP debate” when he bragged about how he deliberately gave money to politicians so that he could later get favors from them. That didn’t raise an eyebrow from Brand? Then there was Trump’s somewhat crude and homophobic claim that he “could’ve told Mitt Romney to drop to his knees” in return for political endorsement - seen by many of us as implying that said endorsement would induce the 2012 Republican nominee to fellate Donald Trump, metaphorically, of course. Incidentally, a joke that Trump thought was so good he would go on to reuse it for Elon Musk in July of 2022.
Even the word “rigged” became a mantra for Trump throughout his 2015/16 election campaign. On April 11th, 2016 he claimed that the Colorado GOP caucus was “rigged” after it was won by Ted Cruz. In August of that year, he again asserted that the GOP primaries were rigged against him (even though he had won by this point), and expressed fears that the upcoming presidential election would be similarly rigged. Politico noted at the same time that he had used the term repeatedly over the course of three campaign rallies to gripe about what he perceived as failings of the FBI investigation of Clinton, the election system as a whole, and the news media in general.
It took sixteen months before Brand “acknowledged” something was going on? This is Russell Brand, the man whose celebrity mates, in 2015, vouched for him to go and study for a Master's Degree in Global Politics from the prestigious London SOAS university. A man who, in that same year, was voted the world’s fourth most influential thinker. Yet he somehow slept through the entire primary and then general election campaign of Donald Trump, perhaps the most brazen and scandal-ridden political campaign in living memory? An election cycle where he constantly referred to his opponent as “crooked Hillary”, and he didn’t notice the allegations of corruption for 16 months?
And as for “crooked Hillary”, let us consider the corruption alleged by Trump versus his own personnel corruption. His accusations are vague; what were the supposed favors he was receiving in return for his donations? At that first GOP debate, he claimed, “When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them." Something? What something? When further challenged about what he got from Hillary, he claimed, “I said, be at my wedding, and she came to my wedding. You know why? She had no choice! Because I gave.”
Really? That’s the Faustian pact of accepting campaign money from Donald Trump? Attend a wedding, free dinner, open bar? A couple of hours, a polite excuse, and you’re home free with a pocket full of vol-au-vants, and a bottle of Dom Perignon stuffed up your sleeve! Hilary Clinton was a senator from New York at the time, and Trump a prominent New York citizen - a celebrity billionaire. I think he might’ve been able to get her there without some sinister bribe.
Must've come as a surprise for him, then, when his giving wasn’t enough to secure the reciprocal invitation to Chelsea Clinton’s 2010 wedding that he so desperately sought. Hillary didn’t appear to “have no choice” on that one.
Meanwhile, Trump was embroiled in his own grubby corruption scandal. In May of 2016, Judge Gonzalo Curiel ordered the release of documents from an ongoing lawsuit against Trump for his shady Trump University scam. The scam itself had been under various forms of legal peril pretty much since its inception in 2004, with the first lawsuit in 2005. The release of documents by Judge Curiel resulted in Trump launching racist attacks against him while on the campaign trail. It was a bit of a topic at the time, hard to miss for anyone paying even the most cursory attention to the news.
Trump had used his celebrity status, along with his manufactured reputation as a real-estate magnate, to con ordinary Americans out of their life savings. The same ordinary Americans that Chappelle and Brand somehow think they can scry for their enthusiasm toward Trump. Trump ultimately settled the case for $25 million in November 2016, and since then, we have been exposed to more and more of his tawdry corruption, robbing from his contractors and abusing the trust of his fans. He has hurt ordinary people, and intentionally targeted vulnerable people; there were 6,000 individual victims in the class action lawsuit against Trump University. The malfeasance alleged against his political foes? Blowing billionaires and attending their weddings.
And what of Chappelle’s claim that he hears, on a daily basis, from people telling him how great they think Trump is? Trump, who responded to white supremacists as “good people” after the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, who launched what is seen by many as a racist campaign seeking the death penalty prior to the trial (akin to a lynching) for five black and Latino youth wrongly accused and convicted of raping a jogger in Central Park, and continued his hate campaign against them even after DNA evidence had identified that actual perpetrator. This is the Donald Trump who represents the most bigoted and racially divisive wing of mainstream American politics; the people who rail against the Black Lives Matter movement and Critical Race Theory, who’ve banned books and forbidden teaching of the holocaust or America’s blood-soaked history of chattel slavery. I live and work in the deep south, surrounded by Trump supporters, and I do not have people telling me daily how much they love Trump. If I was a black man in America and someone was telling me, on a daily basis, that they liked Trump, I do believe I would question that person’s motive.
Of course, it’s lies. It’s all lies! Trump’s lying, Chappelle’s lying, Brand’s lying. For Chappelle, it’s a poke at what he perceives as "New York" elites, for Brand, he’s bending the knee to Chappelle while indulging the malleable fiction that is his ever-revisionist autobiography. But what is it about Trump and this lie that draws Chappelle and Brand in? For goodness sake, it’s two years since Trump lost the election. The debate they are referencing was six years ago! What is it that they’re clinging to in Trump?
Perhaps it is the message, the underdog fighting the “rigged system”. Success in spite of it all. Maybe they want to identify with this Trumpian fiction, project themselves onto this heroic narrative. The corollary of this is that Trump, Chappelle, and Brand all see themselves as persecuted victims. Trump is the victim of rigged elections (which he won), Chappelle’s victimhood was on full display in his pitiful complaint that he “can’t go to the office anymore” after his transphobic Netflix special because transgender Netflix employees are now being mean to him (although, in firing them, Netflix themselves found it much easier to “cancel” transgender employees than cancel Dave Chappelle), and Brand’s visceral, mean spirited attacks on the media are fueled by his nursed grievance over what he perceives as attempts to “cancel” him during the Sachs-gate scandal of 2008.
In victimhood, there is also the deflection from personal misdeeds, the excuse for malfeasance - playing the system, beating them at their own game. Does this render as a noble act of resistance Chappelle’s holding a small town to ransom in order to stop affordable housing? Does this rationalize Russell Brand, a campaigner against wealth inequality, the acquisition of great wealth and possession? Is knowingly misrepresenting facts in order to build internet clout so you can sell out and become a lackey to the right-wing media hate machine “one in the eye” to the “rigged system”?
But what do you think? Are Brand and Chappelle victims of a rigged system that has showered them with never-ending fame and fortune? Or are they plucky underdogs fighting against a rigged system by the cunning tactic of being nihilistic narcissists willing to do whatever is convenient to take money from the pockets of their fans? Or is it simply that their crippling narcissism forces them to believe that they are being victimized and that the world is tilted against them, despite all objective evidence to the contrary?
Actually, it doesn’t matter, I’ll just let Brand and Chappelle tell me what you think. But do be sure to like, comment and subscribe! Cling-a-ding-ding!
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