Brand On the Run

Why the 21st Century is the Golden Age of the Gilded Charlatan

By now there can’t be many people who read a newspaper or go online who haven’t heard of the Dispatches documentary, Russell Brand: Hiding in Plain Sight, with its sickening allegations of rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse. Since then, thousands of outraged words have been written about misogyny, toxic masculinity, and the protection granted to powerful sexual predators by the institutions they work for.

There has also been a fair amount of back-pedalling, limited mea culpas or silence from leftists and left-of-centre writers who once fawned over Brand and ignored his brazenly misogynistic cruelty for years because he echoed their political views. I remember very well that strange period in 2014-15, when Brand was considered so important to the left and even to the Labour Party that the likes of Naomi Klein, Alistair Campbell, Owen Jones and Ed Miliband all felt the need to pay homage to him.

It was grotesque and ridiculous at the time to engage in such craven celebrity-worship, and it seems even more so now. Watching the clips from his live shows on the Dispatches programme, I was staggered to see people laughing when Brand joked about gross acts of sexual humiliation that - it now appears - he was actually carrying out.

You shouldn’t have had to know that he was doing these things in order to find this kind of humour repugnant and disturbing. But there was a lot that people did know. It’s shameful how many high-profile people who should have known better ignored Brand’s vicious bullying of Andrew Sachs and the slut-shaming of his grand-daughter, or the fact that he tried to pimp his assistant out to Jimmy Savile in a live interview.

But then the same can be said about Brand’s fans today, such as the 2,000-strong audience that gave him a standing ovation at Wembley on the night the Dispatches programme was broadcast.

Apart from the mini-scandal that followed the Sachs affair, Brand’s open cruelty and depravity has not - until now - done him any harm whatsoever. 11.3 million Twitter followers; 6.3 million subscribers to his ‘Stay Free’ Youtube channel; wellness courses at Hay-on-Wye; articles for the Guardian and a guest-editorship of the New Statesman; books, tv appearances, Hollywood films - let no one say that toxic masculinity doesn’t pay if you wash it down with a Thesaurus and also make people larf, even if they don’t know what they’re laughing at.

Since his flirtation with revolutionary politics, Brand has moved away - or ‘metastasized’ as he would put it - into something very different, reaching into that increasingly wide Venn Diagram territory where ‘wellness’ and Gwyneth Paltrow-esque New Age spirituality overlap with alt-right conspiracy theory and anti-establishment ‘truth-telling’.

This is a man who calls his Youtube watchers ‘awakening wonders’, and sells Audible books on recovery and addiction which his website claims will awaken listeners ‘to the beauty and power in everything and how to escape the culture that wants to imprison you.’

Words are crucial to Brand’s grift. Orwell once said that the best prose should like a pane of glass, and reveal its meaning without drawing attention to itself. Brand’s public intellectual prose - and speech - is the opposite of that. It’s entirely designed to draw attention to himself and conceal its meaning, or hint at a meaning that is, if you think about too much, essentially meaningless. Consider this extract from a Big Issue interview that Brand gave last year:

‘Think about how the way you live today is connected to what you evolved for. Because when you came out of your mother, that infant was expecting to be living in a hunter-gatherer tribal society. Everything that’s happened to it since has been a jarring shock. And the psychological consequences you are experiencing are the result of that.’

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure I did not come out of my mother looking for nuts or a sabretoothed steak, nor am I experiencing any psychological consequences of that , but doesn’t it sound freakin’ deep? Morecambe and Wise, eat your hearts out. This is what Brand does. He sounds deep even when he’s just splashing about in the paddling pool. And this pseudo-intellectual verbiage is layered with a light seasoning of lefty/sub-Chomskyite discourse about the ‘MSM’ and bug-eyed swooning about secret elite ‘agendas’ and ‘narratives’ .

Brand’s own ‘narratives’ have touched a wide range of themes and individuals dear to the alt-right’s toxic heart: from anti-Vax and Big Pharma to Covid denialism; from US biolabs built by Bill Gates in Ukraine to UFOs and extra-terrestrials; from the anti-Covid benefits of Ivermectin to Teddy Kennedy, and Hawaiian fires orchestrated with a laser beam (Bill Gates again), from FBI DNA harvesting programs to the Great Reset and the World Economic Forum.

The Truth-teller

All this is part of Brand’s ‘just askin’ questions’/challenging the corporate media truthism, and all delivered with manic intensity by the shamanic Jesus-cum-Charles Manson lookalike with the necklace and beads and the pendant who might have stepped out of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia.

This is why Brand has received so much support from people like Alex Jones, Andrew Tate, Jordan Petersen, Dan Wootton, Ben Shapiro, Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jnr, Toby Young, George Galloway and Tucker Carlson. And it’s why you end up in pictures like this:

These are character references that you only want if you are trying to get a particularly warm place in Hell, and there’s a reason why you get support from people like this and - hint - it isn’t because of your support for social justice, equality and socialist revolution, or women’s rights.

Beyond these bigshot grifters, Twitter is awash with messages condemning the women who spoke against Brand, accusing them of making it up, doing it for money, or describing the Dispatches/Sunday Times team as instruments of Rupert Murdoch or, as Andrew Tate put it a ‘Matrix attack.’

This is the ‘agenda’ that Brand hinted at to his followers the night before the programme, and many of them appear all too willing to believe that he is indeed being ‘taken out’ by the ‘MSM’ or Big Pharma because he is an independent critical voice and an alternative media source.

No use trying to point out to these people that the allegations against Brand have been circulating for years, and - reportedly - subject to super-injunctions to prevent them from being made publicly. Or that the ‘MSM’ is not a monolithic entity at the beck and call of Rupert Murdoch and the pharmaceutical industry.

Or that Brand’s ‘truthtelling’ may not be as threatening as they think it is, because political dissidents aren’t usually millionaires who become even richer by monetizing their dissidence.

When Brand’s supporters say that Brand is being ‘tried by the media’ you can tell them till you’re blue in the face that the criminal charges that eventually put Harvey Weinstein in jail also began with a journalistic investigation. Or that the joint C4/Sunday Times investigation was a meticulous process that took more than a year to put together, and would not have reached the public eye had it not been absolutely legally watertight, which is why Brand’s lawyers have not taken any action against it.

Brand’s followers know what they want to know and believe want they want to believe. But this terrifying credulity - and the callous indifference to Brand’s victims that goes with it - cannot be attributed to misogyny alone. If Brand is an expression of toxic masculinity, he is also a product of a very 21st century phenomenon: the political and cultural charlatan.

Charlatanry is not the same thing as lying, though it may certainly include it. Because charlatans do more than lie: they sell versions of themselves and project ideas and illusions that reflect whatever their target audience wants to see in them. The political charlatan is a mountebank and snake-oil vendor, peddling imaginary cures for real or imaginary diseases, feeding on fear, cynicism and anxiety, and happily swimming in the most toxic waters.

To paraphrase Egeus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the charlatan seeks to steal the impression of other peoples fantasy in order to acquire fame, money, power, and cultural influence, or a combination of all these things.

The charlatan may or may not believe in what they’re selling. But because their beliefs are entirely directed towards their own personal aggrandisement, they can change their beliefs at any time, as Boris Johnson does, whenever it suits them. Because reality is only useful inasmuch as it can be bent to their whims and serve their own interests, charlatans can lie without considering the difference between truth or lies.

Needless to say, the early twenty-first century has been a golden age of charlatanry, and most, but by no means all of its proponents, are politically on the right. Some take up charlatanry from small beginnings as a career choice, and acquire huge followings by pumping toxic messages in the body politics - you know who they are.

Others, like Brand, use their celebrity status as a launching pad for all-out charlatanry. Some commentators this week have speculated that Brand intentionally began working the alt-right conspiracy seam in order to protect himself from the Weinstein-style reckoning that he knew would come. Personally, I doubt he had the foresight. Everything about the behaviour revealed in the Dispatches documentary suggests that he already felt powerful enough to do whatever he wanted, and sufficiently protected by his fame and money from any unwelcome consequences.

The grim ‘they’re coming for Russell’ and ‘why now?’ responses to the programme suggest that he was not entirely wrong. And this is the really alarming thing about our age of charlatanry: it’s not just the fact that charlatans exist, it’s the fact that so many people let them get away with it.

Because the golden age of the gilded charlatan isn’t just the mysterious product of individual charisma and amorality. It’s not just because there are new technological conduits available from ‘X’ to Youtube or Rumble, that enable them to gain access to wider audiences. The successful charlatan requires a willing and credulous audience that is waiting for the charlatan to appear - an audience that can be easily duped and perhaps wants to be duped. Nowadays, there is no shortage of digital crowds like this, to whom where the charlatan can offer anything from biolabs in Ukraine to Ivermectin so that they can ‘stay free.’

Distrustful and suspicious of politics-as-we-know-it and the media-as-we-know-it; frightened, disorientated and confused by a chaotic world that has no easy answers to complex problems; rocked by a seemingly endless procession of crises that challenge the late capitalist notion of the good life - the 21st century is an era overflowing with Gramsci’s ‘great variety of morbid symptoms.’

The entirely resistible rise of trashy, shallow narcissists and pseudo-libertarians like Russell Brand is one of those symptoms. And so is the collusion of his fans in his depravity and misogyny, and the cowardice and venality of those who once supported him and now, like Thomas Wyatt’s former friends, flee from the man who onetime did him seek.

There is no easy way out of this. If we live in an age of stupidity we also live in an age of depravity, in which way too many people are so desperate for the charlatan who can reflect their own paranoid views back to them, that they will not care if their hero is a rapist or a crook.

But in this particular instance, with this particular charlatan, it needs to end in court.

And if the allegations are proven to be true - and there is no reason beyond the conspiracy-sphere to believe that they aren’t - then we can only hope that this latest phase in Russell Brand’s ‘journey’ leads him to join Harvey Weinstein in jail, and that 2023 goes down as the year in which one more toxic charlatan finally got what he deserved.