Russell Brand: Right Wing? Left Wing? Grifting! 1:5 - Right Wing - Tucker Carlson's Western Chauvinist Vacation

Chapter Five, Tucker Carlson’s Western Chauvinist Vacation

We are coming to the end of our examination of Russell’s further, and surprisingly extremist, descent into the right-wing rabbit hole, as witnessed through his Tucker Carlson-themed videos, with this, our fifth and final chapter. We’ll soon move on to Part Two, where we’ll review Russell’s interviews with left-wing journo David Sirota, but that’s for another day because today, Tucker is off on his holibobs to jolly old blighty, and while he’s there, he stops in to visit his good friend, the Squire of Henley-on-Thames himself, Russell Brand!

When we last dropped in on Russell and Tucker, it was to witness Russell, once again, act as an apologist for Tucker’s blatant white supremacy. This is hardly surprising because Russell’s output appears to be entirely geared towards American rightwing, white grievance politics. And just like Tucker, Russell’s true enemies are the ruling elites, people just like, er, Tucker Carlson? But that’s OK because, as we’re about to find out, he is actually…

Tucker, The Revolting Elitist

Russell’s Oxfordshire estate is on the route back to London from Tucker’s trip to the Cotswolds, where he marvelled at the architecture, full of disbelief that those simple primitive olden days folks were able to make buildings out of sandstone! No, really, sandstone! He seems genuinely amazed to the point that I start to wonder what the f*ck he thinks sandstone actually is. Does he think they made their houses from out of literal sand like what you get at the beach? All packed into a bucket and turned upside down like a sandcastle?

He also marvels at thatched roofs. Why am I left with the feeling that if either Tucker or Russell saw a thatched roof on a building in Africa (maybe Senegal), they’d call it a mud hut?

Tucker laments the state of post-war architecture. Brutalist! What can you expect with a name like that? Best keep him away from Coventry, Russell! 

Mind you, I’m not altogether sure that Tucker's point here isn’t that if Britain had just sided with the Nazis, we’d have fewer of the brutalist council estates but still have all those lovely old buildings on London’s South Bank and Coventry would endure as the “jewel of the West Midlands”. It would certainly align with Russell’s Red-Brown alliance!

Tucker has also been to the Tower of London, where he’s learned about the peasants' revolt. He explains to Russell that the reason it failed is because it was led by a peasant - What, Tyler? A ha ha ha ha ha. You see, if you want to have a successful revolt against the elites, you’ve got to have a leader from the elites! That’s why Trump is so effective, and that’s why RFK Jnr is the best candidate, and that’s why Tucker is such a super mensch and a revolting elitist!

And Russell laps it up like the lap dog that he is!

Whatever you do, don’t tell these two clowns about Toussaint Louverture, the slave who led the world's only successful slave rebellion and the first successful revolution against European colonial rule.

Or Robespierre, leader of the French Revolution, born of a provincial lawyer and brewer’s daughter - hardly a chevalier of Louis XIV’s court.

Or Lenin - only a few generations out of serfdom. Certainly not part of the Tsarist elite!

What about the greatest revolutionary of them all? Jebus Herbert Chribst, a simple joiner! Let’s face it, if our Emanual was to turn up at either of Tucker’s or Russell’s palatial mansions, they’d send him round back to the tradesman’s entrance faster than the butler could say, “I do hope he’s not Jewish, his lordship won’t have them in the house, don’t cha know!” (And no, not that tradesman’s entrance, either! Get your mind out the gutter!).

Russell’s interview with Tucker is just over an hour long! Luckily the participants are such vacuous dullards there’s not too much worth repeating.

On the truncated version of the interview edited down for YouTube, there is Tucker’s attempt at the Russell Brand “awakening wonders” intro, which he flubs on the handover from Russell’s cold open, screaming with a paroxysm of what would appear to be an attempt at human laughter, if you’d been raised in hell and the only point of reference you had to inform your mimicry of laughter was the screams of torment and agony of the damned. I’m not exaggerating; it’s un-f*cking-holly. It’s the noise the banshee hears to announce that one of their own is about to die.

Mind you, Russell’s intro isn’t much better - wild-eyed unblinking stare, rocking back and forth as he bellows nonsense into the camera about RFK being the only one who can defeat the establishment or some such. As a culture, we’re altogether too keen to see someone in a state of agitation and ascribe it to stimulant abuse, but there really is some weird mania going on here that is raising questions. Maybe Russell has relapsed, maybe he’s hoarding and bingeing his ADHD meds, or maybe this whole thing is just an extended manic episode; Kanye in slow motion.

Russell questions Tucker on his status as a “Putin puppet”. Tucker admits his only Russian loyalty is a, not at all pretentious, affection for the works of Count Leo Tolstoy. Russell’s little ears perk up - perhaps Tucker is familiar with the author's Christian writings? Tucker replies, “Of course!” But quickly changes the subject with such haste that it leaves one in little doubt that Tucker is not particularly familiar with, or keen on, Tolstoy’s Christian writings. 

I’m curious, so I look them up. Characterized as “Christian Anarchism”, Tolstoy sees a fundamental innocence in people and blames social institutions such as the state and church as the cause of sin as opposed to mainstream Christian views of a “fallen” human nature. Of course! Right up Russell’s street - the potential for harmonious human existence facilitated by our innate spiritual innocence in counterpoint to our current corrupt society with its human failings caused by establishment institutions.

In a surprise to absolutely no one, Tucker is keen to let us know he considers himself “anglo”. Tucker Swanson McNeer Carlson - two of those names are Scandinavian and a third Irish. The origin of “Tucker”, however, is a bit more obscure: it's either Australian for food or descriptive of what Buffalo Bill did with his penis before the dancing scene in Silence of the Lambs. Not sure where the anglo bit comes from; application denied!

In case you were unaware, the use of the word “anglo” is essentially a dog whistle for self-identifying white supremacists. The appropriation is so extensive that it is no longer even a functioning dog whistle; it is pretty much a shibboleth for ethno-nationalists. The font has been so well and truly poisoned that even academics are no longer comfortable using “Anglo-Saxon” in the context of early English mediaeval history or language.

Anglo is a word with no real utility or even a singular definition. It is a euphemism that has been deployed variously as a synonym for the English people, as a broad catchall for people from Great Britain or as shorthand for the UK polity. It’s been extended to the entirety of the British Isles and even all of Northern Europe. It has been applied to the worldwide community of English-speaking peoples or English-speaking nations (sometimes limited to those with a majority white population). It’s use is almost always divisive and exclusionary - both as a declaration of self-identity for those laying claim to some coveted racial or cultural heritage or as an epithet from an observer of elitist bigotry and chauvinism.

Self-identification as “anglo” is a uniquely American phenomenon: there is no “anglo” race or ethnicity - not in any meaningful or historical sense. You don’t hear people in Britain going “I’m an anglo”. Tucker has claimed that he “doesn’t know what white nationalism even means”, but his assertion of being “anglo” is literally white nationalism. It is an attempt at manufacturing and normalizing a faux racial identity to supplant white America’s current obsession with specific European national identities. Tucker’s ultimate goal in awakening this white racial consciousness is to resurrect America’s old racial caste system. 

Perhaps a society stratified by immutable biological “racial” identities represents, for Tucker, a personal desire for an absolute social status that is inherent and can not be challenged or lost and is another manifestation of his class insecurity that we discussed in Chapter Two. Whatever lies behind it, it is undeniably racist and, as we also saw in Chapter Two, fascist.

Russell does attempt to address Tucker’s racism. Well, kind of, sort of, maybe. Some of, like, his mates, you know?, kinda from LA, like say, that maybe, some of what Tucker says is, kinda, sorta, maybe, racist? Tucker quickly deflects first with a call to his supposed religious beliefs - god created all people with “equal value”. A strange equivocation - the US Declaration of Independence, for example, says “all [people] are created equal”. What’s with the “value” part? Is that a nod to the old segregationist “equal but separate” stance, Tucker?

And then he deflects again by equating racism with affirmative action and pretending that he’s been criticized solely for his stance on that subject rather than his naked white supremacy. Of course, affirmative action = racism is an old trick for Tucker and his ilk. It allows them to claim that white people are the actual victims of racism as they attempt to move the clock backwards on US efforts for racial justice and equality. It’s also a troll that they believe allows them to be racist in public. Here’s Tucker dog whistling that affirmative action led to the death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of black Memphis city police officers. Contrast that with his repeated denials of the existence of white supremacy and his apologia for racist violence by white supremacists.

On the subject of immigrants, he’s not against them because of race, it’s just a fact that change is harmful - the Industrial Revolution led to communism, which led to Nazism. Wait, so immigrants caused fascism? 

It’s a recurring theme for Tucker that, despite being the pinnacle of human civilization, white Europeans are somehow powerless to control their urge for violence and fascism in the face of different- presumably inferior - cultures.

Of course, Russell, the bold interlocutor who is unafraid to address difficult topics head-on and, as we saw in the last chapter, has claimed to abhor racism and bigotry, doesn’t let Tucker off the hook that easily! He presents Tucker with a sequence of examples where Tucker has used dog whistles or just flat-out racist language, demanding an explanation for each one! Pfffft! Don’t be f*cking stupid! He lets Tucker’s weak ass excuse slide like water off a duck’s back.

In fact, never one to miss an opportunity for arseholery, Russell simply decides to throw his hat into the racist ring with his objection to cultural mixing on racial grounds again; 

“Imagine getting someone from Iceland, and someone from Sudan, and someone from London, and putting them all in a room and saying ‘you lot, you’re all the same’”. 

What, an Esquimaux, a Hottentot and a good Christian Englishman, all in the same room? Don’t be ridiculous, the savages would immediately try to eat the Christian, but their crude spears are no match for the Englishman’s trusty service revolver! 

Yeah, imagine thinking that people are fundamentally the same regardless of where they happen to come from. Wild. And I love how London, the city, is elevated to the same status as Iceland or Sudan, the countries!

Russell - you live just outside London, one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world. You could hop on the train, pop into town and within an hour be enjoying cultural experiences of Icelandic, Senegalese or Sudanese origin. I guess if you want to satisfy your mockney leanings and experience whatever your stereotype of “London” culture is, you can go for a right old knees-up down the rubba-dub, with some jellied eels and maybe a spot of pie, mash and liquor! 

This theme, some kind of fear of or resistance to an enforced cultural (and racial) homogenization, keeps rearing its head - it’s been a frequent trope in the preceding videos, and here it is getting another airing in this interview as Russell claims, “It seems like the need for homogeneity is ultimately driven by systems of dominion and their requirement for profit and that the ideology is secondary, and its function is to create division”. Wut?

OK, non-sequitur word salad aside (the function of imposing homogeneity is to create division?) and the fact that he’s saying this to Tucker, “how exactly is diversity our strength?”, Carlson, what is lying underneath Russell’s panic on this subject?

I go looking and dig up this interview of Russell for The Big Issue from March 2022, in which Russell lays out his theory that, as a species, we evolved to live in small hunter-gatherer tribal communities of 30-150 people, and when communities are scaled up to the size of modern nations, it starts to cause “tension”,  and that our modern world is, therefore, “a jarring shock” with unspecified “psychological consequences”. Russell concludes that “some of the cultural issues would not be so spiky if people didn’t think we all have to be homogenised into one unit.”

We’re making progress! We not only have the enforced homogenization, but it also hints at a desire for smaller communities - a recurring feature of Russell’s output, where he often talks about “decentralization” and “devolution”. It’s also been a feature of Russell’s interview with Tucker. At one point, Tucker makes the statement about the street where he lived in Washington “We would’ve been a pretty good self-governing country because we had common geography. We will ultimately get back to that because that’s a much more natural way.” At the time, it felt clunky, an answer to an unasked question, in retrospect, it may reflect Tucker the chameleon aligning with a theory that Russell had shared off camera.

This is a fruitful line of enquiry in attempts to devine Russell’s political philosophy, and it’s one that I will likely come back to with a stand-alone post. What is of interest to us just now, however, is the idea that Russell had already developed some of his thoughts around “cultural issues” and cultural mixing in March 2022, some eight months before his official jump to Rumble in November of that year. The Big Issue interview was published during a period of time when Russell still sought to maintain a leftist patina. Here he is a month earlier, in February 2022, on YouTube, flabbergasted at being labelled as one of Joe Rogan’s “right-wing” guests, stating that he”s “way, way, way, way to the left of any government or party, anywhere in the world” and reading out a list of his political stances to support his claim.

In contrast to his smarmy disavowal of the right-wing label, The Big Issue interview hints that Russell had already been considering how to integrate his beliefs with those of the right-wing fever swamp. Russell makes a statement in the interview that true democracy meant: “Accepting that tradition has to be observed at the same time as progressivism, where some people want to raise their children gender neutral and other people want to raise their kids double Orthodox, and both of those perspectives are going to have to be respected, otherwise we’re going to live in continual tension.”

We saw some of those same words used by 2023 Russell, in Chapter One, with the pairing of “traditional” and “progressive”, but now expanded to be joined by the pairings of “gun control”, “not gun control” and “abortion”, “not abortion” (ever the wordsmith) - an indication that Russell is developing a more nuanced knowledge of rightwing grievance. And, as we shall see, the raising of kids as “gender neutral” has now evolved to raising kids as “trans”.

We also see the “homogenisation” fleshed out to some degree in The Big Issue interview, with the statement that both traditional and progressive “perspectives are going to have to be respected”, a statement that implies there is some forceful intolerance of either the “progressive” culture or a “traditional” one. But which side is doing the intolerance? Russell does not elucidate, typical of Russell’s purposeful vagueness and ambiguity. 

He COULD be expressing concerns over right-wing attempts to co-opt legislative processes in order to force their lifestyle on the rest of society. However, progressives tend not to frame their concerns in this way, the sentiment is much more aligned with the right’s culture war hysteria of an enforced “wokeness”, especially when invoking gender in proximity to raising children. Besides, the placement of traditional ahead of progressive in the wording “Accepting that tradition has to be observed at the same time as progressivism” is an arse backwards non sequitur that implies that progressivism is already being observed and it is the “tradition” that is not being accepted.

Of course, at odds with Russell’s distrust of society is the fact that we know our current liberal democracy CAN accommodate both progressive and traditional lifestyles. Progressives may feel that their freedoms are not yet fully embraced, but we have been undergoing a century-long societal evolution that has seen minority groups and interests granted ever-increasing recognition, status, and freedoms (even if we appear to be going through something of a regression recently). On the other hand, traditionalists are accommodated by definition - they are the tradition -  but may fear, well, what, exactly? Most of the traditionalist fears I see expressed are culture war strawmen - gender-affirming healthcare, Critical Race Theory, M&Ms. It’s only efforts at gun control that actually impinge on the rights of the traditionalist to live the lifestyle that they want - well, that and changing mores that have restricted the public use of certain slur words. And is gun control even a “progressive” issue - over 70% of the US public wants to see sensible reform, and, traditionally, gun control laws have been more severe in the past. Truth is, it’s increasingly obvious that Russell’s “traditionalists” are the ones seeking to foist their lifestyle on everyone else - abortion bans, teaching bans, bathroom bans, book bans. Yet in Russell’s panic of cultural homogenization, whose culture dominates his output?

We should consider that Russell’s apparent aversion to cultural mixing is an attempt to resolve the dissonance between the residual of his old tolerant beliefs (exemplified as acceptance of “trans”) and the intolerant beliefs of his new friends and allies. To resolve the dissonance, he seeks out assurances from his new allies that, in their post-great awakening utopia, those with differing lifestyles will be allowed to exist in their own autonomous communities, free from harassment in a quid-pro-quo/live-and-let-live arrangement. A futile effort considering the history of far-right movements breaking agreements and turning on their erstwhile allies. 

But maybe we’ll get a chance to see how the “traditional” plans to tolerate alternative lifestyles when Russell asks Tucker, a man who we have established will say whatever he thinks is expedient for his current situation with no regard for his true feelings on any subject, “Would you be willing to stand … with people who had opposite views from you when it came to things like Trans, or raising kids trans, if it meant you and your community would be at complete liberty to raise your children and raise your community the way you wanted to?”

To which Tucker replies, “Well, of course!” all while emphatically shaking his head.

Run Russell! GET OUT!!

Lol!

So what have learned about Russell through his dalliances with Tucker Carlson? 

We’ve seen Russell’s response to charismatic flattery, his desire for clout, and audience capture, combine to make him an apologist for racists and white supremacists. That his animosity towards our current establishment and political system is so great that he is willing to collaborate with and actively seek out fascists. But we’ve also seen that Russell isn’t alone in this desire, that even as the left calls out the centre for “siding with fascists”, there is a clamouring from the far-left for a red-brown socialist-fascist alliance. 

We’ve seen surprisingly regressive attitudes from Russell earlier in his journey than we might have expected if his extremist attitudes were formed solely from exposure to Tucker Carlson and the Rumble crowd from late 2022 onward. We saw how, in early 2022, he had already adopted right-wing grievance talking points through the idea that the right is the victim of a woke agenda that is being forced upon it from the left. And, since that time, we’ve seen Russell become resigned to the idea that cultural differences between groups can not be overcome or accommodated and that different communities must be kept separate to avoid violent tensions. And we’ve seen Russell define his thoughts on those “cultural” tensions in racial terms; Africans from Sudan and Senegal at odds with Europeans from London and Iceland (although “Iceland” may actually be a particularly ignorant attempt to reference First Nation North Americans).

More disturbing and more pressing for the real world in which we currently live, we’ve seen Russell talk openly of “reaching for firearms” in the context of defending oneself against the state as he sets out to alarm an audience that he knows is already armed and anti-social.

And so we’ll leave it here today before we move on to Part 2: Left wing, the David Sirota interviews.

But that’s enough from me, what do you think? Is Tucker Carlson a racist fascist, or is he actually a fascist racist? And is Russell Brand willfully ignorant of Tucker’s racism, or is he choosing to turn a blind eye to Tucker’s racism? And will anyone notice that I completely skipped over video number seven on my list? But whatever you do think, be sure to like, comment and subscribe. Cling-a-ding-ding!