"Russell Brand, the comedian and actor, has been charged with one count each of rape, indecent assault and oral rape, as well as two counts of sexual assault...."

The London Times reports.

Scotland Yard said the charges related to alleged historical sex offences against four separate women, between 1999 and 2005, and are alleged to have taken place in Bournemouth and London....

The Times gets into some of Brand's "historical" bad behavior: 

In 2000, Brand took a presenting job on MTV. He was sacked a year later after he arrived at work the day after 9/11 dressed as Osama bin Laden....

"We will let you know if there is any news made in that speech, if there is anything noteworthy, something substantive and important."

Said Rachel Maddow, quoted in "Rachel Maddow defends MSNBC's refusal to air Trump's Iowa victory speech: ‘Not out of spite’/Maddow claimed that not airing Trump's victory speech was 'not an easy decision'" (Fox News).

You can read that or — better — watch Russell Brand's presentation of Maddow's travesty of journalism:

MSNBC and CNN REFUSE to air Trump's victory speech in Iowa🇺🇸 We took a closer look and unpicked their HYSTERIA🚨 pic.twitter.com/5oFQVC5w5r

— Russell Brand (@rustyrockets) January 16, 2024

"The British government writing to tech firms demanding they financially punish and cancel Russell Brand...."

The British government writing to tech firms demanding they financially punish and cancel Russell Brand before he’s been through due legal process over the allegations against him is a very disturbing Orwellian development. pic.twitter.com/6hWPDOF8V3

— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) September 21, 2023

"Am I for kids being able to read about anything in school? Yeah, I am. I don’t give a shit what kids read."

Said Howard Stern, quoted in "Howard Stern Tells Off Critics Who Say He’s ‘Woke’/Now: I’m Anti-Trump, Pro-Vaccine and Support Transgender People… ‘I Am Woke, Motherf—er’" (Variety).

Does he have "woke" right? Not "giving a shit" about what kids read?

He also said "I support people who want to be transgender." Isn't that ideologically incorrect? Aren't you supposed to manifest a belief that people are transgender and not that people just "want to be transgender"?

Let's compare Howard Stern to Russell Brand. Both were, in the past, something some people might call sexist pigs. Whatever, it's arguable. And both have restyled themselves either to keep up with the times or because they've gotten older and matured or declined. You can speculate. But Stern is appealing to the left while Brand is appealing to the right. More or less. And Brand is the one experiencing retaliation while Stern seems to be protecting himself.

Anyway, searching the 2 names together, I came up with this old interview (perhaps from 2017). Watch it while you can, and don't miss the random reference to the Roman Empire (within the first 2 minutes):

"[T]here’s... recorded evidence, documented on TV comedy specials and on [Russell] Brand’s own radio show during the 2000s..."

"... that Brand relentlessly harassed women he worked with, sexualizing and dehumanizing them on air, and then belittling them to the public when they objected. This was the particular insidiousness of aughts-era misogyny, which people like Brand propagated but absolutely didn’t invent: the idea that if girls, or young women, complained about how they were being treated, they were joyless scolds, too uncool to get the joke and too ugly to be concerned about anyway. The trap was that women were expected to cheerfully participate in their own objectification or risk being not just exploited but also vilified.... Brand’s raptorial sexuality was his personality, his unique selling point, and for a very long time he was handsomely rewarded for it. If people really want to reckon with the legacy of such strikingly recent cultural misogyny, in other words, it’s best not to comfort themselves too soon with the idea that Brand was in any way an anomaly."

Writes Sophie Gilbert, in "Russell Brand Wasn’t an Anomaly/The former TV host and actor was a mascot, at best, for a media culture that routinely dehumanized and hypersexualized young women" (The Atlantic).

Gilbert links to a 5-star review of a new documentary, "Russell Brand: In Plain Sight review – so many red flags ignored for so long/From demeaning sexual remarks on radio to offering his assistant naked to Jimmy Savile, every disturbing detail of this cogent documentary makes it mind-boggling that these alleged abuses have taken so long to surface" (The Guardian). Excerpt:

"YouTube suspended the comedian and actor Russell Brand on Tuesday from making money from videos posted to the social media platform..."

"... three days after British news organizations published an investigation in which several women accused Mr. Brand of sexual assault.... A spokeswoman for YouTube said in an email that Mr. Brand, whose channel on the platform has 6.6 million subscribers, was suspended for violating YouTube’s 'creator responsibility policy.' 'If a creator’s off-platform behavior harms our users, employees or ecosystem, we take action to protect the community,' the spokeswoman said."

The NYT reports. 

How does the action taken — demonetizing current videos — protect anyone from the "off-platform behavior" — which took place, if it took place, long ago? The current videos don't have anything to do with the conduct he's accused of. It seems to me that the demonetization is at most punishment in retribution for what he is accused of having done. The only conceivable "protection" it offers is from the current speech, which is about culture and politics. YouTube isn't admitting to this kind of viewpoint-based censorship, but the NYT alludes to it:

While Mr. Brand’s earlier stand-up routines had a broadly left-wing focus, skewering the British establishment and focusing on subjects like social inequality, he has recently reinvented himself to focus on conservative talking points, often seeming to target an American audience.

NOTE: This post was edited a bit to make it easier to read.

"As her taxi approached Russell Brand’s home, Alice remembers the driver begging her not to go inside."

"Recognising the destination, he had started to ask questions. Alice admitted she was 16 and still in school. She says the driver replied that his daughter was the same age and entreated Alice: 'Please, I’m asking you not to go in there, you could be my little girl, and I would want someone to do this for her.' He offered to take her home without charge, but Alice insisted she was fine.... During a relationship that lasted for about three months when Brand was a BBC radio presenter, she says that he referred to her as 'the child'..."

From "Russell Brand accused of rape, sexual assaults and abuse new/Four women, including one who was just 16, make allegations after an investigation by The Sunday Times, The Times and Channel 4 Dispatches" (London Times). 

Twitter banning Trump was "the right decision for the company, but the wrong decision for the world," said Jack Dorsey.

Jack Dorsey, co-founder and ex-CEO of Twitter is joining me on the show today and reveals what REALLY happened around Trump's infamous Twitter suspension @jack pic.twitter.com/2fwTty30an

— Russell Brand (@rustyrockets) July 6, 2023

Dorsey said that he came of age as "a punk." He loved that "ethos" — "challenging the system." He didn't want to become an entrepreneur, but that's where he found himself, and he needed to learn how to grow the company. Learning that, he "learned what [he had] forgotten... about what [he] loved about the internet in the first place," which is that it was decentralized.

"I loved early Democratic Socialists of America leader Cornel West. I loved author of the 1993 book Race Matters West."

"I loved everything about West until he supported spoiler Ralph Nader against then–Vice President Al Gore in 2000. A lot of my political friends supported Ralph Nader back then. And a lot of them have since apologized. Even Michael Moore.... West never apologized. He didn’t see a third party playing a spoiler role to Democrats as bad—obviously, since he’s about to do it again. He did support Barack Obama in 2008, but he turned on him fairly quickly, making criticisms that went way beyond Obama’s political decisions. Then he supported Jill Stein in 2016. More recently, West has gone off the deep end. He promoted his 2024 candidacy, on the fringe People’s Party line, with an appearance on former comedian Russell Brand’s Web show, now frequented by right-wingers.... This is a downhill spiral even for West, who also spiraled downward after Obama’s victory.... [C]alling the president 'a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats' was awful. West went on to claim that Obama was afraid of 'free black men' thanks to his white ancestry and Ivy League education.... What does West bring to the [2024] race?"

Writes Joan Walsh in "Cornel West Should Not Be Running for President/He doesn’t see a third party playing a spoiler role to Democrats as bad—and that’s inevitable" (The Nation). 

West was on Russell Brand's show? Let's take a look:

"So I Went On Bill Maher And This Happened..."

And here's the insane "Morning Joe" appearance from 2013 that he talks about (in which Mika Brzezinski acts like a complete idiot):

Does Rolling Stone portray Glenn Greenwald and Russell Brand as not just right-wing but "Far-Right"?

Here's how it looks at Rolling Stone:

 

Here's the article — "Far-Right Superstars Are Failing on Rumble. Who’s Winning? The outsider streaming site that just partnered up with Donald Trump Jr. is growing — but not in the way most people think." 

"The large on-line platforms allow anonymous troll demons to rampage through society with no cost to themselves...."

"They're not even human anymore, in my estimation. They're literally a demonic force...."

Tonight, I am serving up 9 TikTok videos. Let me know what you like.

1. Your brain would just like to go over a few things.

2. Prompting the AI image generator with nonsense words like "plism sprute."

3. Ricky Gourmet reveals where he got his VibeSmith certification. 

4. A young woman finds it hard to believe the harsh reality of adult life: You have to register your car. Every year.

5. "I'm like: What has Leon the lobster got going on?"

6. She's tried to be normal, but will now be as weird as possible.

7. The TikTok algorithm — thinking this man is a woman — has revealed to him the secret knowledge of what women want.

8. How do you explain the Upper Peninsula? Did Wisconsin lose a war?

9. Russell Brand contemplates heroic sacrifice.

Russell Brand has fun with Kamala Harris's "passage of time" and Joe Biden's difficulty clapping.

"I'm watching this trial. It's a cautionary tale. It's a cautionary tale about believing in bullshit. Like: forming a narrative in your head, like: We're rebels together!"

 

ADDED: A similar, but different analysis:

"An increasing number of digital products that monitor students’ online behavior are being adopted by schools in association with Big tech – so what’s in it for them?"

"Have you seen the news? I'm right wing now!"

The heart of this video is a series of statements in the form "If X is right wing, then I'm right wing." His self-identification, stated at the beginning, is strongly left wing.

People were attracted to "your strident certainty," Russell Brand tells Jordan Peterson, who's been through severe trials and is amazed to still be alive.

 

(To comment, can email me here.

"I was aware too that this burbling and manic man-child that I watched on the box on my Nan’s front room floor... struggled with mental illness and addiction."

"The chaotic clarity that lashed like an electric cable, that razzed and sparked with amoral, puckish wonder was in fact harvested madness. A refinement of an energy that could turn as easily to destruction as creativity.... Robin Williams could have tapped anyone in the western world on the shoulder and told them he felt down and they would have told him not to worry, that he was great, that they loved him. He must have known that. He must have known his wife and kids loved him, that his mates all thought he was great, that millions of strangers the world over held him in their hearts, a hilarious stranger that we could rely on to anarchically interrupt, the all-encompassing sadness of the world. Today Robin Williams is part of the sad narrative that we used to turn to him to disrupt. What platitudes then can we fling along with the listless, insufficient wreaths at the stillness that was once so animated and wired, the silence where the laughter was?... That all around us people are suffering behind masks less interesting than the one Robin Williams wore?"

Wrote Russell Brand.

ADDED: Brand is an interesting (if purple) writer. I like the verb "burble," and had just used it myself, before reading this, in a comment on an earlier post: "Hate speech. When is it cool and cute and something to burble about?"

AND: "The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame/Came whiffling through the tulgey wood/And burbled as it came!"

"If it'd been the sacrifice of Miley Cyrus or Justin Bieber, that we are invited to anticipate daily..."

"... we could delight in the Faustian justice of the righteous dispatch of a fast-living, sequin-spattered denizen of eMpTyV. We are tacitly instructed to await their demise with necrophilic sanctimony. When the end comes, they screech on Fox and TMZ, it will be deserved. The Mail provokes indignation, luridly baiting us with the sidebar that scrolls from the headline down to hell."

So goes the roiling prose of Russell Brand, who's feeling no sense of narrative completion from the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman. Brand, himself a recovering drug addict, wants to leverage the occasion of the Hoffman death into an argument for changing the drug laws.