This is intended to be an occasional column dedicated to subjects that Russell Brand is surprisingly quiet about or has discussed in the past but dropped when, for example, the story starts to contradict his narrative. Today, we're talking, or instead not talking, about the opioid epidemic!
I've been planning this for a while, but Russell got out ahead of me when, last night, Friday 3rd of March, he appeared on Bill Maher's HBO show as part of the current US media blitz accompanying his visit to Rumble HQ - presumably, for his annual appraisal and to receive fresh orders from the evil cabal that now apparently owns Russell.
The US opioid epidemic took up a portion of his interview with Maher, which I find interesting because of Russell's YouTube videos' almost complete lack of content on this subject.
Drug addiction and recovery have been very close to Russell's heart in the past. It was the subject of his 2017 book Recovery: Freedom From Our Addictions. He certainly claims to be a recovering heroin addict, and his ongoing recovery, involving the 12-step program, has played a massive part in the development of his personal identity and spiritual philosophy.
I must admit that I was never a massive fan of the old Russell Brand. Still, I did admire his commitment to addiction recovery and helping others, as evidenced by, in 2014, his establishing a cafe to help former prisoners and those struggling with addiction and his subsequent donation of the cafe to charity a year later. Brand also produced and presented a series of BBC documentaries, "Russell Brand: From Addiction to Recovery" in 2013 and "Russell Brand: End the Drugs War" in 2015 (I thought there was a third, but I could not find a reference).
It has been one of the things I find most puzzling about the current incarnation of Brand that he has barely mentioned on his YouTube channel the ongoing opioid epidemic and the pharmaceutical industry that fuelled it, even as the terrifying scope of their cynicism and corruption was being revealed through a series of lawsuits. These lawsuits have so far seen $50 billion of settlements from pharma companies, manufacturers, distributors, and retail pharmacy chains. Considering the amount of time he's spent excoriating "big pharma" for vaccine profits and supposedly shady practices, you would've thought Brand would've taken more of an interest. It's an open goal, why not take the shot!
In fact, a search of Brand's YouTube channel for the hashtagged terms "#opioids", "#opioid", "#Oxycotin", "#Sackler", and "#Purdue" produced only one video! Don't Trust Big Pharma? WATCH THIS!!!. Repeating the "opioid" search without the hashtag, however, returned a total of 46 videos, but only two of those were directly addressing the opioid crisis ( How Vaccine Makers Caused The Opioid Crisis and a repeat of Don't Trust Big Pharma? WATCH THIS!!!).
Instead of the opioid crisis, buried amongst the usual wash of half-baked conspiracism, seven of the 46 videos were directly about COVID vaccines, another seven were about other COVID issues (such as lockdowns and masks), four were about addictions to pornography, gambling or social media (oh, the irony!), three were about Russell's personal experiences (one of those from five years ago), three were about "The Great Reset", three were about Trump (of course!), and at least one included Hunter Biden (there's a surprise!).
Compare that with searches for the hashtags "#vaccine" = 40, "#vaccines" = 12, "#pfizer" = 24, and "#Johnson&Johnson" = 2. When combined and with duplicates removed, this gave a total of 65 individual videos (Note: I tried these searches without hashtags, but the deluge was nearly impossible to parse!) UPDATE March 9th: at the request of a Reddit user I did repeat and then quantify the non-hashtag "vaccine" search. It returned 482 individual videos in the search results!
So, to reiterate, that's 65 hashtagged vaccine videos to only two opioid ones!
So why the discrepancy? Why not discuss opioids on YouTube while still discussing them in interviews? We can only speculate.
Maybe this is some kind of "Motte and Bailey" fallacy - a rhetorical deflection named for the medieval castle. The bailey was a walled courtyard that encircled a fortified and elevated keep known as a motte. If the bailey was breached, the castle inhabitants would retreat to the more easily defended motte. And so it is with someone who puts forward a controversial argument and then retreats to a more uncontroversial position when their argument is threatened. Although this term is usually applied to someone who modifies their position on the fly while in an ongoing discussion, it could easily describe Russell's tendency to parrot "big-pharma" and anti-vax conspiracy theories on YouTube, where there is no one to challenge him, but moderate his conversation to less controversial territories when in discussion with possible interlocutors. I believe you see a similar moderation of opinions and subjects in his recent interview with David Sirota in Jacobin, which I intend to post about in due course.
Or is it because, as I said earlier, drug addiction and recovery have been subjects close to Russell's heart that prompted some genuine altruism and thoughtful output. Maybe he doesn't want to sully that good work by associating it with the stream of intellectual and moral effluent that is his contemporary YouTube and Rumble channels, even if just on a subconscious level.
What it does do, though, is throw into sharp relief the contrast between the person that Russell used to be with the vacuous, soulless husk that he is today.
Comments
Post a Comment