Supported by
By Matt Flegenheimer
On September 12, four days before arriving at the Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre for another sold-out show, Russell Brand asked his fans for a favor. “I’ve struggled with authority and being told what to do,” he wrote at ticket holders’ price, attaching a questionnaire for a planned game with his audience. “Even when it’s something small, like a doctor offering me a seat, I’ll willingly refuse rather than comply. Tell me about your appointments with authority, if you have a tendency to give in to authority or fight it.
Open this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.
At the time, Brand’s pursuit of lasting care spanning more than two decades unfolded along two axes. In mainstream entertainment circles, home and abroad, he remains the disappearing but still profitable British comedian whose selectively confessional narratives about heroin addiction and promiscuity have made him an avatar of a very average type of celebrity: the guy who played a rock version of himself in the 2008 film “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and who would later marry Katy Perry (it was brief). But to fans of Brand’s quarantine canyon, he had come to seem more like a no-nonsense politician.
With shoulder-length hair, tattoos of multiple religions and promises of an unspecified revolution, Brand, 48, had in recent years reached millions of people daily through a media and welfare empire, fusing the top-down dogmatism of a true guru with bloodless dogmatism. Algorithm power YouTube. Su project was nothing less than “a socio-political-spiritual movement,” he told listeners. His main contribution was a trove of disturbing and misleading videos from his flagship series, “Stay Free with Russell Brand,” presented to a cumulative audience. from more than 20 million fans on social media. The titles of his episodes hint at the ideological hole of a guy who once used his celebrity to raise progressive causes: “STATE OF FEAR!COVID Propaganda EXPOSED!« Leaked Audio PROVES Trump Right!»
Over the past year, Brand’s recording studio in the Oxfordshire countryside has been blessed as an emerging powerhouse of the American right, or at least the anti-anti-right, with a procession of radiant presidential candidates. Just in July, Brand interviewed Ron DeSantis, who favorably compared Brand to disgusting “corporate journalists”; promoted a pull-up contest with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. , the conservative media’s favorite Democrat and Covid conspiracy theorist; and marked the first interview with Tucker Carlson after the Fox News host’s firing. “Maybe I’ve been called a right-wing lunatic for so long that I came up with IArray,” Carlson told me recently. “But while I agree with almost everything, Russell Brand says, ‘I don’t know what I am. ‘”
Like Joe Rogan, the carnivorous killjoy of this intellectual space, Brand seemed interested in teaching a certain type of person how to be a certain type of person, exploiting the tension between “think it yourself” riffs and the conclusions of he listens to her. (He has been a regular guest on Rogan’s podcast. ) Unlike Rogan, he seemed to have a broader view of masculinity: vegan, sober, quoting Aldous Huxley. The Wembley event, part of an excursion planned for late summer and early fall, seemed designed to accentuate Brand’s overlapping profiles: live electric performer and synchronized terminal online click-seeker. As has been the case with much of his output of late, the market would help dictate his direction. The excursion was called “bipolarization” for two reasons, he joked: because he would question other people and “because I have a serious mental illness. ” His September email to participants asked for reactions to several pending meal prompts. “What’s the strangest way you’ve given in or contravened authority? » is read in the first consultation. “What’s the weirdest/naughtiest/most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done as a reaction to being told what to do? » asked another.
Three days later, Brand’s fans got less fanciful communication. In an initial video posted on his social media, Brand said he nearly faced “very serious allegations that I surely deny,” without detailing them. He insisted that everything, beyond the dating, was consensual. He grimly warned that “another agenda” could be at play, noting that his supporters had long warned him to oppose “getting too close to the truth. “The next day, Sept. 16, the Sunday Times, The Times of London, and Channel Four Dispatches published a year-long joint investigation in which four women accused Brand of sexual assault between 2006 and 2013. The accounts were expressly repugnant and, in some cases, backed up by medical records and other recent evidence. The accusers included a woman over the age of 16, the British age of consent, who was dating Brand, who was in her early 30s. She said Brand had forced her in the past to perform oral sex while she struggled to push him away, but only stopped after punching her in the stomach.
There was a time, just a few years ago, when this kind of reputational earthquake would almost have followed the respectful rhythms of celebrity crisis management: performative introspection, nominal contrition (often related to a narrow denial of the most serious offenses ), a promise. disappear for a while. Instead, Brand’s story has temporarily become evident in two divergent realities.
In the first, which was still tied to classical notions of scandal and consequences, Brand became overnight an outcast and a suspected criminal. London police have opened an investigation. Other women have come forward, adding an additional one in the 2011 film “Arthur,” who filed a civil lawsuit in New York, alleging that Brand assaulted her in the on-set bathroom. Brand’s controlling company fired him almost immediately. YouTube suspended him from being banned from making money from his channel, which has more than six million subscribers. A parliamentary committee chairman wrote to Rumble, the right-wing video platform that exclusively broadcasts full episodes of Brand (shorter clips still appear on YouTube), expressing fear that he could continue to profit from it and “harm the welfare of victims. “
In the reality of the moment, the victim was Brand, and his well-being suddenly became the fear of many, from the tough new friends he made to the “wonders of awakening” (as he makes his way to his flock) who refuse to give up on him. The example is an unrepentant case study in a very 2023 style of public survival, a post-post-#MeToo lesson on loot and fortifications that can be obtained for those ideas that should be despised by the right people. “Criticize pharmaceutical companies, question the war in Ukraine, and you can be pretty sure it’s going to happen,” Carlson said of Brand on X (formerly Twitter), to which Elon Musk, the site’s owner, responded, “Of course, that turns out to be the case!”Rumble also posted on X, calling the congressional letter a “deeply inappropriate” intrusion into the state.
For those who help Brand and for those who do not, his fate is already being treated as a kind of referendum: on who will decide the fate of the accused; whereupon a supernaturally charismatic figure would possibly be convinced or removed; about the limits, or limitlessness, of tribal loyalty.
Although the rest of his live excursion was cancelled within days, Brand went to one last appointment, on September 16 at Wembley, hours after the allegations arrived. “You’ve come,” he told a crowd of about 2,000 people, according to the BBC. while marching to “You Don’t Own Me,” the popular feminist directed by Lesley Gore. He told his guests he enjoyed them and talked about teaching his children to be skeptical. One fan held a sign that read, “We will be with you. “Another threatened to knock down a staircase with paparazzi outside. And until the end of the night, the room had a new answer to Brand’s questions before the show.
How had they despised authority in the most memorable way?How did they react when they were told what to do and think?
With a status ovation for a newly indicted predator.
More than a week after the accusations, “Stay Free” returned, undefeated but visibly shaken. Brand appeared to be alone, with his bare chest visible under a very unbuttoned white shirt. The opening credits of the show, which once had around 20 names, were gone, not necessarily because Brand’s entire team did it, but perhaps because associating with him was more complicated. “The global corporate and media war on free speech is in full swing! Brand told his listeners. How do I know? Guess what.
Sitting at a desk, with a montage of videos and text in the style of the “Daily Show,” Brand blamed “collusion between Big Tech and government” and a “centralist state and globalist elite” that he said were persecuting him. Parliament’s letter, alleging links between Google and Google (“a competitor of Rumble”). He welcomed Jimmy Dore, another comedian, podcaster and conspiracy theorist, for a remote interview, thanking him for his temper “at a time when I obviously want him. “”Stay strong,” Dore said.
This reserve selection was notable. Dore, who has been accused of sexual harassment, is part of an organization of prominent Brand supporters who seem wedded to the concept that false or agenda-driven accusations pose an occupational threat to his destiny. Andrew Tate, the misogynistic mega-influencer awaiting trial for rape and human trafficking in Romania, tagged Brand in X: “Welcome to the club. ” Donald Trump Jr. , whose father has been impeached multiple times, posted a meme on Instagram featuring former President Brand, the Tate and Julian Assange. WikiLeaks founder accused of rape. “Are you noticing a trend?” The meme said, along with Trump Jr. ‘s caption: “One day they’re going to come for you. I don’t believe in so many coincidences and neither do you.
For Brand’s audience, long encouraged to regard his voice as too damaging to be respected by entrenched interests, the accusations constitute a proof of concept, which only makes him more credible. “A lot of us know what’s going on here,” confides one employee. him on his return. ” No wonder they’re trying to silence him,” another posted in an October video criticizing President Biden.
“It’s almost like writing off equity,” Nick Marx, a professor of film and media studies at Colorado State University and co-author of an e-book on right-wing comedy, told me. “It’s anything that he recognizes as having a price separate from money. ” With Trumpian brio, Brand reframed the accusations against him as an act of war against all those who help him. “They are here to attack you,” he told his audience in November, mentioning “censorship forces” like YouTube and quoting Kafka’s “The Trial. ” “I’m on my way”. And like the former president, Brand learned the lessons of his early rise, betting on his lower self, and on the hotels and calculations made by those around him.
Since his public debut, Brand has drawn his strength from seeming to get away with it, saying and doing what others would never do. His fame was combined with an almost ostentatious misogyny, a sizzling roll of abused women, and a gleefully mediocre flavor for which he was widely celebrated. Her memoir, a 2007 bestseller, tells such funny stories as smashing a Turkish sex worker’s phone in the middle of an assembly because the doorbell bothered her. British tabloid The Sun hailed him as its Shagger of the Year from 2006 to 2008. A lighthearted GQ profile from 2008 gave a nod to “remembrance. “Brand picked up a photo shoot (“her call is Penny”) and shared an anecdote from another. romantic spouse who claimed to have told him, “My calling is Russell Brand, I can do whatever I want. “Brand denied this, semantically. Possibly it would be an enlightening attitude,” he told the magazine, “but it’s never said explicitly. “
Even the scandal served Brand’s interests. In 2008, he and a co-presenter sparked a national outcry after broadcasting on the BBC radio show Brand the ridiculous voicemails they had left for Andrew Sachs, a beloved former “Fawlty Towers” actor. Sachs’ granddaughter, Georgina Baillie, was dating Brand in her early 20s. The messages to Sachs included Brand’s melodious words: “It was consensual/And she wasn’t on her period. “» Suspensions followed. Gordon Brown, the incumbent Prime Minister, reprimanded him. Brand eventually resigned. His legend as a scoundrel to the masses was still growing. “It was very rewarding,” Baillie, now 38, told me. “I didn’t even realize I deserved an apology. “
In interviews, others who know Brand have described me as someone almost pathologically incapable of not having an audience and willing to do almost anything to keep one. He admitted it, joking that it could be whatever his followers wanted. “Are you yourself out of excuses?” he asked in August. “Because I’m not. I apologize. Hello, it’s me. Is this suitable for everyone? I can replace it if you want. ” (Brand and a former associate did not respond to interview requests or fact-checking questions. )
In a 2008 GQ article, Brand acknowledged an apparent gift (“getting attention”) and jokingly warned that his broader influence needed to be curbed. I don’t think for a moment that I’m the user proposing how to organize a new post-apocalyptic world order,” he said, “because I think I’d exploit it to attract girls. “
When Brand now speaks of forging a new social order, he attributes, quite accurately, its rise as a media force to a collapse of acceptance as truth in classical institutions. What goes unsaid is that Brand himself was a creation of the guardians of the legacy and his clients — the media corporations that hired him, the media that toasted for him, the audience he couldn’t resist — and a dismissive testament to his priorities. What has caught the attention of some in recent years is not the fact that so many other people didn’t notice the symptoms about it, but why they seemed so willing to forget about them. In recent months, two former employers, the BBC and Channel 4, have announced internal investigations into behaviour beyond Brand at work. Channel 4, where Brand was accused of exposing a colleague, aired an investigative documentary about him in September. Its title: “In Plain Sight. “
“With that kind of nonchalance, it’s exciting to break through barriers or just have no barriers, and women were less than that,” Shaparak Khorsandi, one of Brand’s first co-stars in comedy, told me of the moment he did it. A guy with dreadful habits, surely, got endless radio and television contracts. “
The topic of the day in December 2014, immigration, and the list of participants on a BBC political panel, rightly so, formidable: a Conservative MP, some other Labour MP, a Sunday Times columnist. But two fighters stood out: Nigel Farage, then leader of the United Kingdom. Independence Party, echoing his argument that newcomers to Britain were a harmful drain on resources, and Brand.
“There is a corrupt organization in our country that uses our resources, takes away our jobs, our homes and does not pay taxes,” Brand acknowledged. But it is the “economic elite” that Farage’s party budgets for. the city farted,” Brand continued, with Farage “pointing at the immigrants” and “holding his nose. ” The studio audience roared.
Raised as a painterly class “type” in his common discourses, Brand had long sought to magnify his voice on the left, infusing in his early appearances intentionally shocking allusions to global affairs. He is pleased to say that on September 12, 2001, while being hired as a presenter on British MTV, he appeared in the pictures dressed as Osama bin Laden. The following spring, he was arrested by police after stripping completely naked at a protest in Piccadilly Circus, explaining himself by saying he was ‘eco-friendly’. Armageddon’ and ‘culture’ without much sense,” according to a report at the time. (“Oh my God,” an MTV spokeswoman said at the time. “Sounds like Russell. “)
“Even before he was famous, I thought I was a bit like Che Guevara,” Khorsandi told me. Once he became famous, Brand proportionately expanded his political footprint. In 2012, he was invited to testify before a parliamentary committee on drug policy, walking the halls in a no-nonsense black tank top and bolero. The same year, he developed a short-lived communications program for American television, FX’s “Brand X With Russell Brand,” with Matt Stoller, a liberal policy researcher. (The men met while Brand was filming “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” directed by Stoller’s brother, Nicholas; they reconnected in 2011 at the Occupy Wall Street protest in New York’s Zuccotti Park. )”They wanted to do a more radical edition of ‘The Daily Show,'” Stoller told me about ‘Brand X’ in August. “It was a bad display. “
Brand’s political breakthrough came in a viral 2013 BBC interview with Jeremy Paxman, one of Britain’s most formidable interrogators. Paxman called Brand an “insignificant man” whose calls for revolution and apathy toward the vote betrayed him. “So when someone like me, a comedian, says, ‘yes, they’re all useless, what’s the point of committing to one of them?'”You’re bothering me because I don’t have deficiencies anymore. ” The industry cemented Brand as perhaps the country’s leading left-hander. “It had a huge impact,” George Monbiot, a well-known environmentalist and writer, told me. It galvanized people and it galvanized me.
Before long, Brand was hailed as something of a crossover intellectual, validated by authors and thinkers who visited his home in east London to appear on his popular YouTube series, “The Trews,” an acronym for “real” and “news. “The scholars said they might be fascinated by Brand’s free-form associative conviction on his subjects, even when he seemed only half-sane, absorbing the quick wit and baroque vocabulary of a presenter, most likely to display “insight” or “radiant. “”I don’t forget to think at the time, ‘Oh, this is how a new faith was going to be born,'” Edward Slingerland, an expert on ancient Chinese ideas who now teaches at the University. from British Columbia, told me about his interview.
For activists, Brand has become a valuable ally, attending demonstrations (to oppose austerity, protect tenants, firefighters) and invariably attracting the gota. He also began to curry favor with more classical politicians, at one point corresponding with Bill de Blasio, whose victory as mayor of New York in 2013 had briefly stirred up the left. “I don’t forget to think of him as a fellow traveler,” de Blasio told me. In 2015, Ed Miliband, then leader of the Labour Party, made a pilgrimage to Brand’s home to watch the internet series, hoping to triumph among young voters within his seven-figure audience. Both men came to repent of their decisions. ” Obviously, knowing what I know now, I regret doing it,” Miliband said after the attack allegations. Brand’s doubts came earlier, when his approval failed to save him a Conservative election victory. “My only regret,” he said later, “is that it occurred to me that I could participate. »
Although Brand was disillusioned, he was not alone on the British left. “They used Russell,” Monbiot said of the Labour Party. But they never kissed him. “Since then, Brand must live “beyond all political systems. “
Among his former admirers, the most generous interpretation of Brand’s political transformation is grim but simple: Today’s version of him is the logical result of social media incentives, a boundless ego, and a personalized personal radicalism that has been a bit eerily amorphous. (“I don’t know how to describe Russell’s politics,” Marianne Williamson told me in August, warmly recounting the fundraiser he helped organize for her during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. )
In this reading, Brand is exactly who we told him to be, or at least what the ruleset did. He is known for obsessively sticking to his social media trends and staying up to date with visitor count and video performance. A task The post on Brand’s online page earlier this year for a “YouTube Optimizer” is pretty self-explanatory: the task was to grow the audience and create topics “based on topics covered through similar channels and those that our audience watches. “that leads from interviewing favorite right-wing commentators, like Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson, to videos aimed at Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson enthusiasts, and increasingly searching like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson.
“You can try to lead the masses or you can be led through them,” Faiz Shakir, Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign manager, told me after appearing at Brand’s exhibit in August to advertise his nonprofit that supports workers. “It’s more motivated through them. It’s like, “This is where I think they already are. “
Brand said at least some of his audience is in the United States. After interviewing DeSantis last summer, a user familiar with the campaign’s decision-making procedure told me that the host was seen as a conduit for men under 45, that is, those who were not long-term Republicans. . On air, Brand can rarely seem uncomfortable with his new clientele. Last year, he advised Peterson to “prioritize compassion” over antagonizing trans people. During the albeit sloppy consultation with DeSantis, Brand all but begged him to admit that imposing an ideology on others was illiberal. “What happens to the freedom of those who oppose it? » asked the brand. But those flashes are rare. In 2015, Brand called Trump a joke whose “punchline is a worse world for everyone”; Last February, he posed with Trump Jr. at a Rumble event in Florida. He once quoted Gandhi on nonviolent protest; He now mocks those who “clutch their pearls in their hands on January 6th. ” Jeff Krasno, Brand’s former director, warned on his own podcast in September that Brand now “probably had his own kombucha,” adding, “there is a transparent business logic to Russell-generated content. “
On stage, Brand boasted of a thrill-seeking game. “You have to be fair and equitable,” he said of his comedy, “self-aware and willing to take risks. “Still, in many ways, Brand’s reinvention is incredibly safe. He would be rewarded for betting on successes, for doing what he expected. It would be nullifiable, if necessary, with an army of supporters in a position to distrust anyone who attacked it.
This is the least charitable reading of Brand’s evolution: his shift to the right—and his growing insistence that the mainstream media were corrupt agents of the prestige quo—more or less coincided with the investigative journalism of the mainstream media that he now calls corrupt agents. of the prestige quo. According to the Times of London, reporting began in 2019 and Brand’s team became aware of an assault allegation in 2020. In the years that followed, Brand “increasingly cemented himself as the sole voice of truth. “Monbiot, a former progressive ally of Array Brand, told me, “That would certainly line up with an attempt to exculpate himself by employing the same argument. “
Even in private, Brand’s orbit becomes increasingly paranoid. After the allegations became public, Brand’s father, Ron, wrote to Monbiot, who in the past had been critical of Brand’s policy changes, to recommend that no one be part of the conspiracy that had ensnared his son. “Do you think you could be next?” Ron Brand asked, according to messages Monbiot shared with me. Brand Sr. then sent out a conspiracy video about the World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum, two favorite targets of Brand’s and others that use the term “globalist” without irony. Tucker Carlson, who said he and Brand spoke often, told me that the allegations against Brand were “inevitable,” suspicious and cynically designed to play on the libertine afterlife of a now-remarried man with children. “We’re leaving the part of the story where other people are trying to convince each other with intelligent faith,” Carlson said. “We are entering the phase where we simply imprison our belligerents or accuse them of crimes. »
So far, visitors to Brand’s podcast have also remained loyal. In an industry full of voices insisting they’re about to be silenced and saying out loud things they swear they can’t say anymore, Brand puts on a thrilling show: staying free despite the designs of a sinister. “They. ” The cancellers of the world seem, with each passing week, to be more and more dead at their jobs,” Matt Taibbi said on Substack in October, selling his interview with “Russell Brand, who is still visibly breathing. “”
In a November interview with Infowars’ Alex Jones, who described the attack allegations against Brand as a grand conspiracy, Brand as a kinship: “Have you noticed,” he said, raising two hands in fright, “how many of the Alex Jones members have the wildest ‘conspiracy theories’ come true?”
More than anything else, Brand tests a tantalizing kind of freedom against a band that loves that word. He alluded to a currency crisis since YouTube began locking in his profits and told the Rumble audience that he is “clearly in a position where your direct” But if Brand’s strategy is successful – if he can do it without the establishments that have helped for a long time, without the collaborators who abandoned him, without the former enthusiasts who could now shudder at his cinematic scenes -, there is a new kind of strength in that freedom, and a new kind of freedom in that strength.
“We are making plans to form new communities, as the apocalypse is probably unfolding before our eyes,” he told listeners on Oct. 26. “Without you, we are nothing. ” Moments later, the episode turned to another would-be leader of the movement: Vivek Ramaswamy, a returning guest and the first presidential candidate to appear with Brand after the allegations. Speaking from Iowa, in the middle of the campaign, Ramaswamy called for a “great uprising” against the forces of the status quo. “It’s when you’re told to shut down that you want to expand your spine to be more vocal than ever,” Ramaswamy said.
“I can understand why they would prefer to censor it,” Brand replied admiringly. The presenter thanked his guest for “raising the caliber of verbal exchange” in its “free flow. “Episodes: the Covid lab leak theory, the verbal exchange with Jordan Peterson, “the need for radicalism in politics. “Then he made a promise.
“Next week,” Brand promised, raising his hand, “the revolution will get a little stronger. “
Matt Flegenheimer is a journalist who covers national politics. He was in The Times in 2011 at the Metro office, guilty of public transport, City Hall and the countryside. Learn more about Matt Flegenheimer
Advertising