Russell Brand: Right Wing? Left Wing? Grifting! 1:4 - Right Wing - Tucker Carlson, Out of the Wilderness

 Chapter Four: Tucker Carlson, Out of the Wilderness

This is the fourth chapter  in our (now) five chapter examination of Russell Brand’s bromance with Tucker Carlson. So far, we’ve seen Tucker rebel against his former globalist masters in the mainstream media, and how, to Russell, and to some very misguided voices on the left, Tucker remains the Great White Hope. We saw how Tucker was martyred and how he paid for his insubordination, first with his job, and then with an entirely warranted attack on his character. But, thanks to Russell’s cleansing, we have seen how Tucker not only survived those attacks but is redeemed and washed clean of his prior racism! Tucker is now born-again, free to host his new Twitter show, and even to appear for an interview on Russell’s Rumble channel, where his rebellion continues, as we shall see with…

Tucker The Rebel

Our next video is Russell’s review of Episode One of Tucker’s new Twitter show, as posted to YouTube on Jun 13, 2023 “We Won’t Be SILENCED!" Tucker FIGHTS BACK Against Fox! 

As the video opens, Russell declares, “CNN is dead! Long live Tucker Carlson!” and he once again speculates whether Tucker’s move to Twitter may be “signifying the end of an epoch for cable news?”

“Certainly”, says Russell, “ if CNN's apparent collapse is anything to go by”.

Sorry, what? What’s CNN got to do with Tucker? Absolutely nothing; Russell is simply shoehorning a gloating reference to the firing of CNN’s chief executive Chris Licht into his video about Tucker Carlson. Licht was let go after a series of disastrous “missteps'' in his attempts to push CNN further to the right culminating in a town hall with Donald Trump with an audience stocked almost exclusively of Trump supporters, which was roundly panned as chaotic and a de facto Trump campaign rally. 

But maybe you thought Russell wanted to see a broader discourse from across the political spectrum in the mainstream media; surely he should be celebrating Chris Licht’s efforts to move CNN to the right and not gloating at his failure?

Yeah. Funny that. It’s almost as if Russell doesn’t actually give a flying f*ck about any of the issues he pretends to care about and simply uses his platform to air his own petty grievances while flattering his erstwhile allies (oh yeah, and fleecing money from rubes).

Regardless, the main feature of this video is Tucker’s first Twittercast, from which Russell plays only two small clips. The first one includes Tucker saying the following: 

“A small group of people control access to all relevant information, and the rest of us don't. We're allowed to yap all we want about racism but go ahead and talk about something that really matters and see what happens”. 

Yeah, we’re back here again. Tucker’s “racism is not something that really matters” is another example of his denial of the existence of racism in American society. We’ve already seen his assertion that terms like “racism” and “white supremacist” are used to oppress the true victims in society - white people -  it’s something Tucker has done time and time again. 

As discussed in Chapter Three, this is the person that Russell claims “let go of” and “disavowed” their racism in 2021, a fiction that Russell uses to justify ignoring Tucker’s ongoing racism.

Keep this in mind as Russell decides to “add” - not refute, nor disavow, or criticise, but “add” - to Tucker’s “comment on race” as follows, “If we form new alliances if we refuse to bait one another if we refuse to row on the subjects of identity and culture, then their tools of control are diminished”.

Fool. 

“Baiting”, “rowing”; this isn’t squabbling siblings in the family car on a vacation road trip. And it’s not “one another”; in case you failed to notice, racism is decidedly one-sided. Oh, yeah, and “form new alliances”? We shouldn’t need to form “alliances” with people from different races because we’re already supposed to be part of the same civic community.  If you want to incorporate racial diversity within your political movement, just be inclusive and recruit from within the different social communities within the broader civic one. Explicit in Russell’s “new alliances” is the concept that he does not consider himself or his audience to be in communion with people whom they could “bait” or “row with” over “race”, “identity and culture”, i.e. black or brown people. Again with this weird cultural division along racial lines that we saw in Chapter Two.

Russell is once again acting as an apologist for Tucker Carlson - he’s pretending that Tucker’s dismissal of racism is a call to unity when it’s actually part of an ongoing project to reverse racial inclusion and equality in our society. Tucker is actively seeking to eliminate the stigma of being called a racist so that he can enable more racism. Of course, it is just a sublime irony that, in defending Tucker, Russell invokes racism as part of the "tools of control" of some unspecified "their" - when that's precisely what Tucker does! 

Our modern world is the inheritor of empires where minority rule was facilitated by concepts of racial hierarchies - with white Europeans firmly at the top. The USA was built on the principle of a divinely mandated European “Manifest Destiny”, which tapped into racial constructs to justify the displacement and genocide of non-European peoples and the redistribution of their wealth to white European colonists. Race-based chattel slavery was the norm for over 100 years, only to be replaced by a vicious racial caste system for another 100 years. To this day, the institutions of the USA preserve racist structures; attempts to reform them are now being thwarted and reversed by the one-simple-trick of erasing racism from the cultural consciousness. This is the project of cynical politicians supported by their media enablers who profit by appealing to the basest racial grievances in society.  Media enablers, like Tucker Carlson, who, as we’ve seen, has been relentlessly spouting racist, white supremacist garbage for years with no hint of remorse. And now we can add to the list of enablers one Mr. Russell E Brand!

The second clip of Tucker that Russell plays is hardly any better. Putting words into his Illuminati/NWO/PEZ ruling class of puppet masters, the perennial villains of Tucker’s fantasy (see Chapter Two), Tucker projects, “Stop asking how we got so rich. Here's another story about racism; go eat each other!”. Tucker further explains, “That's how most of us now live, here in the United States, manipulated by lies, silenced by taboos.”

Again, according to Tucker, racism doesn’t exist; it’s just a lie, a slur that's been created to make you feel bad about yourself to distract you from their wealth and power. Cultural norms like prohibitions on racism and racist language are actually manufactured taboos directed at “most of us”, i.e. the white majority, to inhibit us from talking about race in the way Tucker wants us to: in terms of a “great replacement” of "legacy Americans", or in support of a racial hierarchy, and, of course, to be free to use racial slur words while doing so.

These are the only two clips that Russell plays! Both of them contained the “racism is not a thing” thing. Russell chose these two clips out of the entirety of Tucker’s video. Mind you, most of the rest of the video was absolutely cram-packed with antisemitism directed at Ukraine’s president Zelinsky: “rat-faced” persecutor of Christians and so forth. For a more detailed breakdown of Tucker’s video, please check out the Knowledge Fight podcast episode 816. All the same, I’m sure if he’d tried hard enough, Russell could’ve found something less white-supremacisty.

For a while now, I’ve been asking myself, “Who, precisely, is Russell Brand’s demographic? Who is he speaking to?” Because, despite his prodigious output and its largely American focus, he seems to only address trivial or hypothetical topics of mild inconvenience to very specific parts of American society while ignoring very large and immediate areas of concern for some other parts. For example, for all the time spent on COVID lockdown protests, he’s barely mentioned BLM protests and the wider movement for black lives - one rather academic interview with a UK professor on the colonial origins of modern racism that was jarringly out of touch with the situation then unfolding on the streets of America. The deaths of numerous black people at the hands of police have been active topics in our broader cultural discussion, yet Russell’s coverage has been sparse, and when he couldn’t ignore the conviction of Dereck Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, he sought to whitewash the racial aspects of George Floyd’s murder and appropriate it to his anti-establishment agenda - by downplaying Floyd's status as a black person killed by a racist cop empowered by a racist system, to instead presents him as a victim of “the centre”, an entity which apparently threatens us all equally, regardless of race.  

Even Russell’s title for that video is utterly ignorant:  “Can Derek Chauvin Conviction Heal Divided America?”. Really? 

It’s an unserious response to a serious issue. Russell acts like this is an isolated incident now resolved rather than a symptom of a broader, unaddressed structural illness and asks the black community to ignore the ongoing injustice by shutting up and moving on. Indian farmers protesting the end of government price fixing? According to Russell, that’s pukka! French rioting over pension reform? C’est tres bien! Black people protesting murders by cops? C’mon now, steady lads, enough’s enough, let’s just let bygones be bygones. But for whose benefit? 

Over-policing is a net negative to pretty much all of US society, but it is not applied equally and is absolutely used to disproportionately target black communities. It is fueled by racist fear-mongering of dog-whistle tropes like “super predators” and is a massive barrier to social justice and equality. So contrast Russell’s meagre two videos on BLM and George Floyd to his touting of the ludicrous conspiracy theory that the FBI instigated the Jan 6th attack on Congress, as can be seen from this sampling of his YouTube videos (not exhaustive):

• Aug 21st 2022: Russell Brand on Jan 6
• Aug 20th 2023: Jan 6th - What Really Happened
• May 24th 2023: FBI Whistleblower’s Bombshell About Jan 6 Informants
• Mar 20th 2023: What They're Not Telling You About Jan 6
• Mar 18th 2023: You’re NOT ALLOWED To Say THIS about Jan 6th
• Jun 17th 2022: Jan 6. They Don’t Want You To Know This
• Jan 14th 2022: Hang On… Have We All Been CONNED By Jan 6th?!

Hmmm. So the real victims of US policing were the peaceful protesters and hapless tourists who were coerced into forcefully entering Congress that day?

Russell likes to tell his audience that they are victims of a fictionalized elite: big business, big government and big media, but there are real-life victims of our society - including an underclass of migrant workers abused by the industries that feed, clothe and house us; a class of people who are excluded from healthcare, denied political and legal representation, and live in fear of law enforcement. Russell built a YouTube following of 6.5 million subscribers by sulking about masks and public health measures during the COVID pandemic but he completely ignored the impact of COVID on those poor and undocumented communities that serve the food processing industry in cramped conditions and without ready access to healthcare. And while real-life food industry executives were betting on the weekly death toll among their workforce, Russell was prattling on about some ill-defined evil doings of a nebulous conglomeration of international banks, global corporations and drug companies. 

Along with his ignoring topics of immediate concern to brown and black people, he also seems to omit topics that may be unwelcome or uncomfortable for some other parts of society. The relationship between mass shootings and gun ownership does not seem to rank highly on Brand’s agenda, despite the fact that, as a Brit, these are some of the most prominent and troubling issues of American culture. Another glaring sore point to a Brit in America - Universal healthcare - is a topic close to the heart of his hero Bernie Sanders and an immediate concern for millions of Americans, yet Russell’s coverage pails into insignificance next to his output on vaccine scepticism and his vilification of the FDA and WHO.

Undoubtedly there were elements of audience capture and pandering as Russell aggressively set out to cultivate first his YouTube audience and now his Rumble one, both recruited from the ranks of the online right. Indeed, we’ve now seen in these Tucker videos that, since taking to Rumble, Russell now panders to the Second Amendment, Christian Taliban and neo-secessionist crowds by presenting the idea that differing opinions on gun control and reproductive health are indelible cultural artefacts that are impossible to reconcile and therefore a justification for societal cleavage in the form of secession and the break up of the American state. 

With all this in mind - avoiding topics of interest to racial minorities, skimming over topics of discomfort to conservatives, and pandering to topics of interest to right-wing, grievance-based culture warriors, we’re left with the fact that Russell really seems to care exclusively about, well, angry, white, conservative Americans. 

It explains why, in Russell’s videos, even when he tries to distance himself from Trump, he presents Trumpism as the manifestation of a downtrodden underclass rather than a spoiled middle class mobilized by racial grievance. He is blind to this reality even as support for Trump manifests as an obvious and obnoxious exercise in conspicuous consumption: expensive boats and trucks festooned with flags and placards. I guess to an isolated and cloistered elite like Russell Brand, a pickup truck is a symbol of the common working man, even one that costs as much as a Mercedes or BMW.

He’s fallen for the Trumpian myth that white people have seen their opportunities dwindle to the benefit of minority groups that are overwhelmingly made up of people of colour. Pandering to the white grievance of his chosen demographic and their supposed loss of status has become the issue most deserving of his attention. Well, that and supporting Putin’s war in Ukraine.

But I know what you’re thinking “Yes, Russell may have adopted some right-wing attitudes towards race, and he does seem to be advocating for neo-secessionism, but has he truly embraced right-wing terrorism?”

Consider the following statement to his viewers… 

I know many of you who have strong views around firearms are essentially reaching towards the idea… why should the state have the ability to inflict violence on you and you not have the right to defend yourself from the state?

So Russell’s now leaning toward violent resistance to state authority? Unless you’re black, of course. Please note, this is not taken out of context, he made this observation and did not seek to dissuade his audience from this path. Russell makes this comment when he introduces, out of nowhere and with no discernible relation to the topic at hand, the concept of the state’s “monopoly on violence”, which Russell defines thus “the state is able to be violent toward you, to incarcerate you, to control you”.

The “monopoly on violence” was defined by everyone’s favourite late 19th/early 20th-century German sociologist, Max Weber. He coined the term to describe a fundamental aspect of Western liberal democracy; that individuals have surrendered the right to interpersonal violence and instead rely on the national community (i.e. the state) to resolve disputes and to enforce law and order, thus differentiating our society from, for example, feudal societies where private warfare was permitted under certain circumstances. Bit of a mouthful, hence the slightly snappier term “monopoly on violence”, or, the slightly more precise “monopoly on the legal use of force”. It’s worth noting that, in reality, the “monopoly” is very rarely a complete one;  most countries have laws regarding personal self-defence (and, in some US states, insane “stand your ground” laws). And the monopoly is not unconstrained; most countries have strict limits on how violence can be deployed by state actors (e.g. the police), although the USA is again letting the side down with, not only the death penalty, but also their insane “qualified immunity” of police officers which is, as already noted in Chapter Two, something that Tucker supports!

Anarchists, and to some extent libertarians, are necessarily concerned with how a society can be made to function without a state to hold a monopoly on violence. How do we tackle anti-social behaviour that would otherwise be addressed by state force (the police)? How do we prevent interpersonal violence from being used for dispute resolution that would otherwise be mediated by courts and enforced by peace officers?

Russell’s dalliance with anarchist/libertarian philosophies is probably the source of his knowledge of the phrase, although he has twisted the concept to paint a childishly simplistic caricature of a sinister state, from which Russell and his audience are alienated, that will use unconstrained violence to control its subjects.

Previously, Russell’s answer to this has been his “great awakening” where a mass spiritual enlightenment would render us all sublimely innocent, happy little campers, with no need for coercive force to ensure a harmonious existence. Now it’s “from my cold, dead hands”?

Russell is speaking on Rumble, a site that is a “bridge to extremism”, riddled with far-right conspiracy content. He acknowledges that his audience owns firearms, which they are “reaching toward” in order to “defend” themselves against the state. We’ve got to consider that Russell has cause to believe that there’s a portion of his viewership harbouring extremist and antisocial sympathies. Against that background, at what point do Russell’s statements about the state’s “monopoly on violence” and videos such as  “Who Is A Bigger Threat, Trump Or The FBI?” cross a line from mere irresponsibility to become something more, well, stochastic? 

How long before we get reports that a fan of Russell’s is embroiled in some anti-government shootout? Or before he gets a name check in some mass shooter’s manifesto?

Are these the new allies that Russell is courting? Are these the new conversations? Racism, political violence, social division, cultural apartheid and secession? 

And where’s the other side of this alliance? After all, surely what Russell is hankering after with his “periphery versus the centre” is a so-called “Red-Brown Alliance” between far left (red) and far right (brown). It’s not a new idea, I mean, his good pal Yanis Varoufakis who came on Russell’s show to tell him about all the fascists what are in Ukraine, forgot to mention that during his time as Greek finance minister, he served in a coalition government with the far right ANEL party. Indeed, as Slate observes, “The far-left and far-right find it astonishingly easy to unite”.

It amuses me that I’ve found, over the past few years, that many online leftist spaces have embraced the mantras that “capital always sides with fascism” or “liberals always side with fascists”. A sentiment that has only increased since the election of Biden. And yet I’m seeing figures from the far left somehow overcoming their aversion to the hate and bigotry of the far right to make common cause against the establishment. A phenomenon that has only accelerated since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as the transatlantic right covets Putin’s authoritarianism and their supposedly leftist counterparts swoon for his anti-Americanism. Here’s an interesting post from the Oakland Socialist blog, exposing the  sham anti-war protests of February 2023:

The 'Rage Against the War Machine' event is significant: it represents a dangerous escalation of a developing red-brown alliance

They further elaborate:

Fascist movements have historically tried to expand the base for their reactionary agenda by building red-brown alliances using leftist slogans and posturing. 

You see, working with fascists, it’s not just about overcoming an aversion to some trivial foible, is it? It’s not possible to spend time in the proximity of evil - to make excuses for it, justify it -  without becoming corrupted and tainted yourself. As every Nazi’s favourite philosopher, Nietzsche, said, “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.” 

You could view this a few ways. One, if you fight against monsters, that’s to say, you define your enemies as inhuman monsters, you might adopt inhuman or monstrous strategies to defeat them, making you a monster.

Another interpretation could be that if you ally yourself with and fight alongside monsters, you risk developing their habits and practices and thus become a monster yourself.

Both of these interpretations could apply to Russell - his good vs. evil Manichean worldview posits Western liberal democracy as an evil the opposing of which justifies any action: adopting an anti globalist agenda that does little more than support Russian and Chinese imperialism; promoting outsider candidates to destabilize the political process even though it risks returning a fascist to the US presidency; courting a racist populist in order to gain an audience of white supremacists. All requiring him to work with monsters from whom he is now adopting monstrous habits: repeating the pro-Russian/Anti-Ukraine lies and propaganda of the likes of Max Blumenthal and Chris Hedges, spreading RFK Jr’s antisemitic conspiracy theories, and pushing Tucker’s white supremacist talking points.

And this is where we should leave it, but we’ve got our bonus on Russell’s interview with Tucker, which we will pick up again in Chapter Five!