“Conspiracism is fascism’s fuel. Almost all successful conspiracy theories originate with or land with the far right.” So wrote Guardian reporter George Monbiot in his critique of Russell Brand, published 10th March 2023. And he’s not wrong. But he’s not 100% right, either. Monbiot’s approach downplays both the prevalence and significance of conspiracy theories on the far left. It fails to acknowledge the damage that conspiracism does to the leftist cause. And it ignores the fact that wherever you think Russell Brand lands in the political spectrum today, he was radicalized on the left and by the left.
This post was originally intended as the conclusion to my three-part "Topsy-Turvy" series about Russell’s video of February 1st 2023, but I decided to post it separately as a standalone, which can be understood without reading those earlier posts. I’ve also added footnotes so that I can indulge in my tangential digressions without ruining the flow of the discussion. Well, that’s the hope, anyway.
In the first of those Topsy-Turvy posts, I linked to a discussion of Marx’s antisemitism as expressed in his 1844 essay “On the Jewish Question” and his 1856 New York Daily Tribune article “The Russian Loan”. In those writings, Marx presents tropes of “huxtering” Jews whose god is money and who “ransack pockets”. He blames a “free-masonry of Jews” for making money into a “global power” and for “furnishing the sinews of war”. He claims that “we find every tyrant backed by a Jew, as is every pope by a Jesuit”, as he paints a picture of a sinister network of Jewish families as a “Jew organization of loan mongers as dangerous to the people as … landowners”. A conspiracy theory that might as well have been plucked from the pages of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (PEZ).
But Marx’s writings predate the publication of PEZ by more than 60 years. They even predate the supposed forerunner to PEZ by more than a decade. They also precede Marx’s Das Kapital, and we should therefore consider that there is an argument that conspiracy theories informed Marx’s political philosophy and are foundational to it.
This is a thread that recurs throughout Marx’s descendants. The row over Russell’s daddy-issue man-crush, Jeremy Corbyn and his alleged antisemitism brought attention to a foreword penned by Corbyn for a 2011 reprint of an old socialist political tract. That work, “Imperialism: A Study”, was written in 1902 by British socialist J.A. Hobson, a virulent antisemite who, amongst other things, constructed a conspiracy theory that the Boer War had been instigated by the British for the benefit of Jewish financial interests through control of industry, banks and the news media. Sound familiar? It’s pretty much the same conspiracy theory that Russell Brand was spreading about Ukraine, as discussed in Part 3 of my Topsy-Turvy series: a war instigated by Western governments, with the support of the media, on behalf of banks and corporate interests.
It seems that Russell, who sporadically claims to object to the arbitrary left/right divide, has managed to find himself at the intersection where the far right and far left meet. Here’s Henry Ford, famed industrialist and antisemite, in 1920, expressing his own conspiracy theories around the causes of war: “International financiers are behind all war. They are what is called the international Jew: German Jews, French Jews, English Jews, American Jews” (source, Antisemitic Myths: A Historical and Contemporary Anthology by Marvin Perry and Fredrick M. Schweitzer, 2008. ISBN 0253219507).
One of the authors of Russell’s conspiracy sources used a photo of another of Marx’s descendants as their Twitter profile; Ulrike Minehoff, co-founder of the Bader Minehoff group. As I discuss in Part 2 of my Topsy-Turvy series, she referred to those murdered in Nazi death-camps as “Money Jews” in an attempt to portray their murders as anti-capitalist as opposed to racist, and so, to her mind, exonerate the German proletariat for their role in the Holocaust.
This was not an isolated incident. Writing about the post-war German left, sociologist Dr Thomas Haury identifies the antisemitism lurking behind the anti-zionism popular amongst the left of the 1970s. He blames a combination of a reductionist approach to anti-imperialism and disappointment at the failed ambitions of the 1960s as warping into a revival of old antisemitic conspiracy theories.
In his analysis of these conspiracy theories, Dr Haury identifies three basic structural features:
- Personification: the attribution of societal phenomena as arising from the conscious efforts of malevolent people, as opposed to the product of natural forces. This inevitably gives rise to conspiracy theories, almost by definition.
- The second is what Haury describes as “Manicheasm”, a worldview that casts everything in terms of antagonism between two principles; good and evil, light and dark. The focus of the conspiracy theory isn’t just bad; they’re evil, and those who oppose them are “good”, or at worst just regular bad. These ideal enemies, however, are the ultimate existential threat, whose eradication provides the possibility of an eschatological redemption. (Footnote 1)
- The third feature is a need to identify The People as a “we group”, a threatened collective that is a counterpoint to the evildoers without whom The People would exist in a harmonious community free from economic competition, political argument and cultural conflicts.
All of these features can be detected in Russell Brand’s output. Every video has a villain; every calamity has a human agency at its root. The villains aren’t just bad; they’re an evil with no redeeming qualities. Their victims are the downtrodden masses, hero protestors and a population of “wonders” that will ultimately resolve their victimization through a spiritual great awakening.
Thus pandemics don’t come about as the product of factors such as urbanization, human encroachment on natural disease sinks, and a more mobile population. It’s the CEOs of US-funded, money-hungry globalized pharmaceutical companies covering up lab leaks while profiting from the chaos they’ve unleashed on humanity.
Public health measures are not the result of deadly contagions and the attempts to contain them by concerned governments informed by public servants providing the best available science. They’re an excuse for aspiring dictators to permanently impose draconian controls on a hapless populace. Or else they’re sinister experiments of “globalists” rehearsing their plans for world domination.
Politicians do not emerge from political traditions and structures derived from centuries of political and social discourse and their corruption isn’t merely petty mortal weakness. They’re cultists, installed by the World Economic Forum, where they worship money as their true god, at the expense of the electorate.
Mainstream centrist cable news is no longer insipid and vapid moving wallpaper; its propagandistic nutcrackery, peddling polemicizing lies to bamboozle viewers and enrich their corporate overlords.
And, yes, “Putin bad”, but he’s a hapless victim of the true villains; NATO and Western corporations.
From these foundations, Russell has constructed an overarching conspiracy theory that posits an elusive and ill-defined elite who wield establishment institutions for their own benefit as weapons to exploit and dominate the rest of humanity. Meanwhile, the only hope of societal progress is through attainment of mass group consciousness which sees the enlightened resist and ultimately destroy the evil elite. It is identical to the conspiracy theories of Marx, Hobson and Ford, only substituting the explicit antisemitic fountainhead for a nebulous and mercurial enemy: “globalists”, “elites”, “New World Order”, “deep state”, Tropes that many would consider to be dog-whistles anyway - feel free to add triple parentheses as you see fit.
I am puzzled as to the timing of The Guardian’s and the New Statesman’s split with Brand in March of this year. Brand had spent the prior two years spouting versions of this conspiracy theory, boosting COVID skepticism and Putin apologia. Other outlets took note; one year ahead of The Guardian and New Statesman, in March 2022, the UK’s Independent newspaper did two pieces on Brand (here and here). As I wrote about at the time, this criticism caused free-speech-loving Russell to respond with an ad hominem attack that the paper could not be trusted because it was owned by Saudis; requiring him to ignore the paper’s largest owner - a Russian oligarch. Lol!
Two months earlier, in January of 2022, Slate published a piece on Russell’s COVID nonsense, and several months before that, here’s The Daily Beast in October 2021. In September of 2021, UPROXX and Forbes, published stories about Brand’s rightwing conspiracy theories.
And yet, The Guardian and the New Statesman, both of which have hosted Brand as a guest editor, somehow missed this turn? I personally believe that even after his move to Rumble and right up until his appearance at Rubmble HQ in tow with Donald Trump Jnr, Brand would’ve been able to receive a warm welcome at either publication. Hell, leftist media outpost Jacobin posted David Sirota’s interview with Brand in February and continues to reward him with approval by association as a journalist from their stable, Branko Marcetic, recently appeared on his Rumble show. Similarly, heavily left-leaning news site The Intercept’s Lee Fang showed up on Russell’s YouTube Channel to fuel vaccine skepticism by implying some kind of corruption arising from Pfizer’s partnering with charities to promote public health understanding in marginalized communities - even though those activities predate COVID by at least three years! (Footnote 2).
Russell Brand’s position on the Russian invasion of Ukraine was codified when left-wing politician, champagne socialist, and Greece’s former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis appeared on Russell’s Facebook page exactly one week after Russia’s 2022 invasion (I wrote about the YouTube version here). In that video, Varoufakis laundered Putin’s talking points to not-so-subtly undermine Ukraine and insisted that the West immediately surrender on Ukraine’s behalf. His position has only hardened since, even in the face of Ukraine’s unexpectedly successful resistance and criticisms levelled at him by Eastern European fellow travellers who accused him of anti-NATO “Westsplaining”. Instead, he weaves conspiracy theories that deflect criticism from Putin and place the blame for the war on the West: “The West Must Stop its Proxy War”, which he asserts is a plot to bring about Russian regime change, and “The US wants to turn the Ukraine war into a permanent conflict” which he claims they achieve by finagling other nations into paying for the war to the benefit of the US military-industrial complex and oil producers. That conspiracy theory again; the West instigates war in order to create profit for corporations.
In Varoufakis’s stance, we see the same structural features that were the foundation of leftist antisemitic conspiracy theories of the 1970s: the personification of The West/US/NATO as the progenitors of the war; an irredeemable Manichean evil that profits from war and seeks to prolong it; exoneration of The People, Varoufakis’ socialist “we-group” through his ridiculous invention of an anti-war “manifesto” supposedly sent by mysterious, unattributed “Russian socialists”, while ignoring actual socialists in the form of Poland’s Left Together party who protested Varoufakis by quitting the “Progressive International” organization he helped found. (Footnote 3)
Given The Guardian’s opprobrium of someone as trivial as failed TV presenter and former wellness influencer Russell Brand, what must they make of the descent into conspiracy nut-crackery of high-flying Yannis Varoufakis, former minister to an EU country, socialist poster boy and thorn in the side of Angela Merkel? Has he been shunned and exiled from their pages? No, he gets invited to provide a commentary on mayfly British prime minister Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget, dispensing a hot-take so devoid of content it made the Daily Star’s lettuce look like Pulitzer prize candidate material.
For years, much of what comes from Russell’s mouth might as well have come straight from the pages of The Guardian. Here, in 2014 as Russia initiated its proxy war in Eastern Ukraine, “It's not Russia that's pushed Ukraine to the brink of war”, claiming instead that “Nato expansion” and Western influence were to blame. The author of that piece Seumas Milne (who would go on to become Jeremy Corbyn’s chief strategist), sought to draw a false equivalency between the unarmed protestors gunned down in the Ukrainian Euromaidan and the Russian-backed gunmen seizing government buildings in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea.
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| Above, Top: Unarmed Euromaidan protesters confront riot police in Kyiv. Notice the absence of assault rifles and the prominence of Ukranian flags. Bottom: assault rifle-wielding gunmen seize and then raise Russian flags over Ukrainian Police Stations. Which one of these is a foreign-backed coup? Lol. |
During a recent interview with Bill Maher, Russell tried to denigrate Ukrainian president Zelinsky for his alleged ownership of overseas bank accounts, as revealed by the Pandora papers. Russell’s likely source for the story? As one of the receivers and publishers of the leak, The Guardian was the first to break it in October 2021, which it did by pouring scorn on Zelensky in a piece headlined, complete with scare quotes, “Revealed: ‘anti-oligarch’ Ukrainian president’s offshore connections”. The breathlessly pleonastic subtext continued in the body of the text, describing how Zelensky, as a candidate, “railed against politicians hiding wealth” but now “sits in a cavernous office” replete with ”gilded stucco” where he “secretly transferred” shares in a “sprawling network of offshore companies” (emphasis added to emphasize the emphasis).
Read without the attitude or emphasis, or sensationally superfluous adjectives, the facts of the story as set forth within the article are somewhat less nefarious: The offending companies were established on, or before, 2012, which is at least seven years before Zelensky entered office, and broadly contemporaneous to his airing of a TV show which satirized Ukrainian politics at a period of time when the country was prone to political corruption, violence, and abuses of power. In that light, transferring money out of the country seems like a wise precaution for anyone who may be concerned with providing for their family in case of their own political imprisonment and asset seizure.
The authors acknowledge that Zelensky had publicly declared his part ownership in three out of four offshore companies but chided him for the apparent omission of the fourth, despite further alleging that he “secretly transferred” his ownership of that undeclared company before taking office. So that means he divested himself of one company and publicly declared his interest in the three remaining companies? Isn’t that what he’s meant to do? (Footnote 4)
Can we really blame Brand, then, for constructing anti-Ukrainian conspiracy theories while vilifying Zelensky? Is this the reason that Monbiot, when recounting the subjects of Brand’s conspiracy theories, counts Klaus Schwab, the Great Reset, Bill Gates, Nancy Pelosi, Anthony Fauci, Covid vaccines, medical data, the WHO, Pfizer, smart cities, the globalists, even Graham Hancock’s ancient aliens, but omits Brand’s corruptions of the Russian invasion of Ukraine?
And if Monbiot is really concerned about conspiracy theories that “benefit the far right”, surely he’d place near the top of the list “Pizzagate” an unhinged fantasy of elite Democrats running a paedophile ring from the basement of a Washington pizza restaurant. Pizzagate, a progenitor to the sprawling “Q” conspiracy theory, has its origins in the hacked emails of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta as published by Wikileaks. Efforts to obscure Russian government hackers as the source of the leak gave rise to another grotesque conspiracy theory, one that claimed a young and enthusiastic Democratic Party staffer, Seth Rich, who had been killed in a robbery had actually been the source and was assassinated as a result. Accounts of the Rich family are distressingly similar to that of the Sandy Hook parents as subjects of Alex Jones’ conspiracy theories. The gruelling slog of the victims’ families already grieving their loss while being forced to battle to hold onto the last vestiges of their loved ones; the simple truth of their existence.
The originator of those conspiracy theories is Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, who released the Podesta emails without any journalistic commentary as part of a personal vendetta against Hilary Clinton, and who then went on to dishonestly promote the lie that Seth Rich was the source of the leak for little more than sh*ts and giggles.
Where’s The Guardian’s “We thought Assange was cool in 2014, but now we realize he’s an a*sehole. Whoops!” piece on Assange? Seems that’s saved for the real villains like former funnyman Russell Brand.
And if you want a Guardian insider turned right-wing conspiracy booster, what about Glenn Greenwald, former Guardian journalist and Russell Brand role-model, who recently debased himself by trying to launder the reputation of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on the eve of the Sandy Hook defamation trial?
It turns out that conspiracy theories are not the sole preserve of the right. But when they appear on the left, they have the ability to harm leftist causes to the benefit of the right. Director of research at the anti-extremist group Hope not Hate, Dr Joe Mulhall, writes about how leftist refusal to recognize, or even acknowledge, the potential for antisemitism within their ranks can give rise to unconscious expressions of antisemitism and provide a safe haven for those who espouse overtly antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the British Labour Party was marred by failures to adequately address accusations of antisemitism directed at him and the far left of his party. Among the personal charges against Corbyn was his foreword to the book by aforementioned anti-semitic conspiracy theorist J.A. Hobson and his support of a conspiracy-laden antisemitic mural in London’s Shoreditch neighbourhood (hardly helped when the artist of the piece reached out to arch-conspiracist and antisemite, David Ike! Lol).
The response of Corbyn and his supporters often came across as dismissive and sometimes blithely wandered into conspiracy theories of their own making. These attitudes arose from a failure within the left to identify their antisemitism as arising from the roots of conspiracism and ultimately doomed the leadership of Corbyn. The resulting fallout has tarnished the far left within the Labour Party and has seen the party recoil back towards the centre (and, arguably, further).
The right thrives on conspiracy theories- their elites knowingly deploy them to motivate and inspire their base. Conspiracy theories on the left alienate allies, obscure enemies and provide ammunition to detractors.
From Varoufakis to Corbyn, Chomsky to Brand, and beyond, the war in Ukraine has exposed many heroes of the left as conspiracy theorists succumbing to their overly reductive and simplistic worldview. Worse, it has revealed the bad faith actors who seek to mislead us and provide succour for dictators.
In the first of my three topsy-turvy posts, I lamented the boring spectacle of America’s liberal media handwringing over failures to live up to their own journalistic standards. But maybe I was wrong; maybe we could do with a little self-reflection on the left and an honest disavowal of those former fellow travellers who are now trying to lead us down the wrong path.
Footnotes:
1: In referring to Manicheaism as his second structural feature of antisemitism on the left, Dr Haury is referencing the dualism of gnostic religions. Dualism believes in a universe caught between opposing forces, usually equated as “good and evil”, although it can be expressed as a morally ambiguous “pure” divine heaven at odds with a “corrupted” corporeal world. Unspoken by Haury, but implicit in his further reference to an “eschatological” resolution, is the dualist concept that the physical world that we occupy is fundamentally corrupt (base, vulgar). This lends extra context to his the concept of the first structural feature , “Personification”, where ALL social processes and relationships result from the conscious efforts of a malign human agency (i.e. the entirety of our current society is evil/corrupted). The eschatology of dualism occurs when all parts of the divine are reassembled, which causes the corrupt material world to cease to exist (which is our corporeal world). Haury is therefore implying that antisemitic conspiracy theorists believe that Jews are the root cause of all corruption in society which can only be elevated to a pure state when the Jewish corruption is eliminated, which further plays into his third feature of leftist antisemitism, construction of The People as a victimized class whose progress towards harmonious existence depends on the removal of the Jewish corruption.
Haury's eschatology metaphor resonates with revolutionary communism, particularly when viewed through the lens of Gnosticism/Manichaeism. According to this ideology, the corrupted material world can only be brought to an end when the scattered fragments of the divine are reunited, having escaped their captivity within humans. In order for the divine light to be liberated, the human hosts must attain an awareness of their inherent divinity, known as Gnosis (knowledge). This bears parallels to the Marxist concept of a proletarian "class consciousness" being a necessary precursor to communist revolution. There are also obvious parallels with Russell Brand's spiritual beliefs which see a popular Great Awakening as a means of rejecting our reigning authority and overcoming the baser urges and interpersonal conflicts within society that necessitates any kind of external or moderating authority within society.
2: Somewhat at odds with The Intercept journalist Lee Fang's accusation that charities who receive contributions and work with pharmaceutical companies can not be trusted to opine on public health, The Intercept was founded by billionaire eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar and has received cash from Sam Bankman-Fried, con-man founder of the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, who gave funds to curry favour with leftist media outlets - do these apparent conflicts of interest not render The Intercept untrustworthy?
3: Interestingly, the anti-war manifesto being touted by Yanis Varoufaks (that actually just pushed Putin’s talking points) was supposedly sent by "Russian socialists" to the Progressive International organization that Varoufakis helped found. Yet it does not appear to have been published on their website - weird, that.
4: In their article about Zelensky’s overseas businesses, the Guardian reference a dividend payment that it claims was intended to be paid to Zelensky from the business that he divested AFTER the divestment. Interestingly, one of the by-lines for this article was Ukrainian reporter Elena Loginova, who published the Zelensky story in the Kyiv Post on the same day as the Guardian piece. It contained much of the same content as The Guardian piece but with fewer of the superfluously supercilious adjectives, although maybe that was lost in translation. It did include some additional analysis by UK-based financial crimes investigator Martin Woods.
Woods' analysis was expanded on in a story that Loginova published the following day to the Ukrainian investigative reporting site, Slidstvo. In this story, she includes a statement from Woods that the dividend payment, if it went ahead, would be “illegal”. The fact that neither The Guardian nor the Kyiv Post included claims about the legality of the dividend makes me think that their lawyers rejected the idea. Perhaps this is not surprising when the source of the dividend claim originates in a routine form used to collect client information for Fidelity Bank, where the lawyer completing the form listed a Zelensky-owned company (Film Heritage) as one of the “Known Suppliers / Trading Partners” of the divested company (MALTEX ). There was a note added to this part of the form that “Main payments will be paid to shareholders as dividends”. This is the only reference to dividends on the form.
The form does not claim to identify any shareholders; Zelensky’s company is identified as a “supplier” or “trading partner”. It does not say that “these are the shareholders to whom dividend payments will be made”, nor does it say that dividends will be the ONLY payments, just the “main” ones. The claim that this form is evidence that Zelensky was to be paid a dividend after he had divested himself of the company is very, very tenuous. The further accusation of engaging in illegal activity is likely libellous.
The only solid claim of any kind of wrongdoing in this entire episode is this insinuation that Zelensky transferred his ownership in the MALTEX company without payment on the understanding that he would receive illegal dividend payments from the company at some later date. Without this central allegation, The Guardian is left with some thin soup, and their story really does read like a meanspirited attempt to smear Zelensky.
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