Niall McCrae
21st Century Wire
Returning from a freedom march in London on Saturday, I found myself sharing a train carriage with attendees of a nearby rally to rejoin the EU. Someone left behind a copy of the fanatical New European newspaper, which I snaffled for research purposes. Prominent in this edition was a scathing attack on Russell Brand, the scandalised celebrity, by Matthew d’Ancona, entitled, “Russell Brand is not a martyr and the claims against him are not a conspiracy.”
It’s the revenge of media whores: television presenters, journalists and commentators who toe the line and can’t stand someone speaking so freely and controversially thereby winning money and fame. D’Ancona rejects Brand’s perceived martyrdom after several accusations of sexual impropriety, and of course it is fair to say that the long-haired Essex lothario has given plenty of ammunition to his trial by media; for example, the offensive call he made live on air to a former Fawlty Towers actor, claiming carnal knowledge of his daughter.
As Laura Perrins, writing in The Conservative Woman, observed last week, society (fed by mainstream media), displays a double standard in idolising morally challenging personalities while simultaneously endorsing sensitivity and victimhood, “You can have the sexual revolution or common decency – but not both.” The #MeToo movement has slayed many a male wanderer, although often on spurious grounds. Is Brand about to be toppled from his pedestal to which he was elevated by the entertained masses?
To be sure, Brand is in serious trouble, after he was systematically targeted by a gang of hacks. Women who had experienced Brand’s attention two decades ago were actively pursued to tell their stories. The Sunday Times and Channel Four’s Dispatches, two heavyweight media organisations, combined for a sensational exposé.
This successfully amplified Brand’s critics across the political spectrum, and some BBC haters are even smearing him as another Jimmy Savile.
‘Lambs to the slaughter’, one BBC production worker said of the queue of young women in the studios who sought to be bedded by Brand. Those who did were often disappointed by his lack of interest afterwards, failing to answer their calls. This was ‘emotional abuse’, allegedly, a concept now elevated to crime in the minefield on which men tread.
Promiscuity, promoted by a permissive society, has become perilous. But Brand’s sexual partners, although some were teenagers, were of adult consensual status. No doubt his defence will argue that it is not natural justice for Brand to be punished for having sex with willing women, just because they look back and regret it (or potentially worse – incentivised to divulge damning details).
D’Ancona, however, does not dwell on the ‘kiss and tell’ aspect of Brand’s downfall. Instead, he focuses on the perceived evolution of a camp comedian to an ‘alt-right’ extremist:
‘The key to Brand’s ideological cosplay in recent years has been the airtime he has given to conspiracy theories. This pivot became especially apparent during the pandemic, when he started to embrace anti-vax propagands; attacks on Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, that would delight Vladimir Putin; the ludicrous notion of the “great reset” (Covid was simply a drill to soften us all); nonsense about 9/11; and many other misinformation narratives.’
This paragraph perfectly summaries why Brand, previously an icon of the political left, has become persona non grata to the intelligentsia (including New European readers). Absurd though it is to the awakened readership of this website, a majority of the professional bureaucratic stratum of society, alongside the arts and culture establishment, know nothing about the World Economic Forum and how it informs the socio-economic, energy and public health policies in their own governments. They simply hear and believe the presented narratives of a climate crisis, the manipulated messages of the global health industry digital surveillance sold as convenience, along with Putin as Hitler, etcetera. D’Ancona must surely know that Klaus Schwab wrote The Great Reset, a book that quite literally shows how Covid-19 was exploited in order to expedite a globalist technocratic agenda. So why describe this phrase as ‘ludicrous’? I suspect that d’Ancona is doing his bit for the powers-that-be.
We the people are not meant to know about the dastardly, dystopian programme enacted by the UN, WEF and international bankers in their pursuit of a new world order. ‘Conspiracy theorist’ is deployed as an insult because our leaders are determined to blind citizens to the actual conspiring.
Brand has amassed six million followers on his YouTube channel, enlightening them on who’s really running the world and why things that happen are not random but carefully planned. In a recent televised interview with Bill Maher, Brand gave a punchy summary of the threats to society:
‘If you have an economic system in which pharmaceutical companies benefit from medical emergencies, where a military-industrial complex benefits from war, where energy companies benefit from energy crises, you are going to generate states of perpetual crisis where the interests of ordinary people separate from the elite.’
The studio audience cheered loudly, despite Maher’s attempts to stop Brand’s monologue.
The worst crime for anyone with a public standing is to criticise vaccines, and the obscene profiteering by Big Pharma. Back in 2020, when vaccination for Covid-19 was under development, organs of the British state were pushing the message that ‘anti-vaxxers’ were a danger. The 77th Brigade, an information warfare arm of the British military, were deployed in spying on members of the public who dissented from the official narrative. Deputy commander of the 77th was Mark Lancaster, who happens to be the husband of Dame Caroline Dinenage MP, head of the Culture, Media and Support Committee at Westminster who wrote an official letter to video sharing platform Rumble imploring them to demonetise Russell Brand’s channel, citing the recent anonymous accusations aired in mainstream reporting. Indicating the real motive for the contrived debacle, Dinenage, in her government capacity, wrote to social media companies demanding that they demonetise Brand’s various channels. Acting on principled company, Rumble, refused to play ball, sending an excoriating reply to the government.
D’Ancona is furious that Brand attributes his sexual exposé to a plot of the powerful to cancel him. ‘It is alarming that this garbage has any traction at all’. D’Ancona lauds the ‘painstaking investigation’ of the ‘mission of journalism at its very best’. But the New European has form here: that’s the same plaudits it issued for Carole Cadwalladr’s tissue of lies about the Kremlin running the Brexit campaign.
In an ideal world, a newspaper that presents itself as liberal and progressive would be screaming out at the abuse of government power and defending the fundamental democratic tenet of innocent until proven guilty. But no – to the New European and its smug metropolitan readership, truth-tellers are the problem.
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Niall McCrae is a researcher and educator, and author of ‘The Moon and Madness’ (Imprint Academic, 2011), and ‘Moralitis: a Cultural Virus’ (Bruges Group, 2018). See his 21WIRE archive here.
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