On Brand: a podcast worth checking out
The loony-verse of failed media celebrities enjoying second careers as right-wing propagandists
There’s no shortage of rabbit-holes you can explore for a look into modern life’s more depressing aspects. Educating yourself on dark subjects might be an unpleasant task to give yourself, but I think it’s a worthwhile pursuit to do for the sake of understanding the world.
Understanding horrible things doesn’t always give us the power to change them, but sometimes that understanding can help us protect ourselves and those we care about.
With the presidential election coming up in the United States, I often hear people expressing some form of these questions: how can so many people take Trump seriously as a politician and why do they believe what he says?
There are a lot of answers, but one which I’d like to point out here is that there is an entire media ecosystem of propaganda designed to lure people into their belief system.
If terms like “belief system,” “lure” and “propaganda” conjure associations of fascism or high-control groups (“cults”), that’s no accident: the figures of this media ecosystem use manipulative practices to brainwash their audience.
What I described earlier as a “media ecosystem” could equally be described as an “industry” because there’s a lot of money to be made in it and the scale and coordination of this propaganda happens on an industrial level.
Thus, we come to one of my personal favourite rabbit holes to go down when I am ready to think about something unpleasant: the current day careers of Tucker Carlson and Russell Brand.
Recent years have seen both men fall from grace.
People around my age will remember Russell Brand’s moment as a hot-properly film actor. Think the years following Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008), when he appeared in films like Arthur (2011) and Get Him to the Greek (2010).
Then ask yourself this, what was the last film you can remember Russell being in? You probably have a sense that his career in the media dropped off at some point in the early 2010s.
But why?
Nothing was particularly clear at the time.
My general assumption at the time that Russell had made a passion-motivated switch to political advocacy, since all I ever saw of him in the mid 2010s was during interviews in which he spoke about such things.
It’s now been about ten years, and the reasons behind his disappearance from the spotlight are becoming more clear. It started with an extensive journalistic investigation by Channel 4 in his native UK which then became a police investigation that is still ongoing.
What’s being investigated are an army of women coming forward with claims of having been sexually assaulted by him. The claims are numerous and consistent in their details — painting him as a predator with a violent modus operandi who does not consider himself bound by laws, human decency or the legal age of consent.
You can watch the full Channel 4 documentary here provided that you can access the website from a British location. The testimony of Russell’s alleged victims is heart-wrenching. The preponderance of evidence surfaced by the journalists is convincing. The police responded quickly with their own investigation.
If you’re not able to watch it on the Channel 4 website, On Brand does a thorough summary and breakdown of the documentary in their 20th episode.
When taken together, the timings of the incidents and the trajectory of Brand’s career suggest that Russell was so open and serial in his raping of his professional associates that the British media could no longer tolerate him as part of their professional milieu — and refused to work with him.
Remember that this is the same industry that enabled people like Rolf Harris and Jimmy Savile. They covered for both men for decades, and in Savile’s case, long enough for him to die an old man, decorated with the nation’s highest honours.
The scandal of this disclosure coincided with the timing of when Russell started to suddenly lose work.
A likely connection there I see is this: Russell’s behaviour was well known. People in industry who knew him to be a walking time-bomb scandal, covered their own asses by not working with him any more.
“People” meaning pretty much everyone who was not comfortable being associated with the next Jimmy Savile scandal.
Speaking of Savile, Russell once had an on-air conversation with him in 2007. Listen to it and see what thoughts come to your mind about it. One which I always notice is how immediately the rapport between the two men comes to feel like one of mutual respect — despite the two men not knowing each other well. Watch a few of Jimmy Savile’s interviews with other people; he doesn’t treat many people with the latitude he gives Russell.
The expression “game recognise game” comes to my mind.
About the numerous allegations and criminal investigation, Russell has a different story. He claims to be the victim of a conspiracy between business interests and governments to silence him from talking about long-debunked lies about the dangers of vaccines promoted by con-men like Andrew Wakefeld.
Russell is light on details, so the conspiracy he claims is against him remains poorly-explained. But he is very insistent it is real.
If there was such a conspiracy, it has been a remarkably incompetent one. Much like Dave Chappelle has made the essence of his career to say things to audiences which he claims he is not allowed to say to audiences, Russell has turned his bullshit ideas into a lucrative new career as a conspiracy theory influencer.
Business has been good for him. He’s got his own corner of the conspiracy theory grift market for himself, and he’s indoctrinated some of his old fans into the same belief systems as people like Alex Jones.
Just like Jones, Russell Brand strategically erodes his audience’s critical thinking because he has business model designed to capitalise on the power it gives them. Their audience becomes their followers.
A normal person off the street wouldn’t buy a common vitamin supplement if the price were marked up by 900%, but people like Russell and Alex groom their followers into it.
The On Brand podcast has been following this phase of Russell’s life — analysing his professional output from the lens of understanding the grift. How Russell’s been able to tap into ignorance and anger as a way to fatten his own pockets, much in the same way that Donald Trump has, and with the same bad intentions towards the people who buy their lies.
As a subject, it’s a depressing area to consider. But, I quite enjoy the On Brand Podcast, enough that I have seen about half their episodes in full. The questions that Russell Brand’s success raises are interesting, and the shows hosts, Al Worth and Lauren B., tackle them with a range of lenses.
Plus the details are often hilarious.
When looking at the content Russell puts out these days, he comes off very differently without the scripting and editing that other people used to do for him.
On his self-produced podcast, Stay Free with Russell Brand, viewers get a less-filtered version of Russell. We see he is a man with much charm, and that beneath his glib wit, there is little to be admired.
He is lazy, petulant and undisciplined. Russell speaks many words about love and respect, but his body language and tone of voice communicate disdain for the people he works his, his fans and for the guests he has on his shows.
It’s particularly fascinating when Russell speaks about his family. There are always things to be felt in his words, but rarely warmth towards his wife or children. And he speaks about them often, since they are useful props for a man who wears loudly his identity as Christian.
Episodes of Russell’s show feature long form interviews. The guests are usually with part of the right-wing propaganda ecosystem in some way, and most are trying to sell Russell’s audience something.
The resulting interviews are reliably funny because Russell is a terrible interviewer.
He is a man with almost no capacity to listen to other people. He is so lacking in social generousity that he rarely allows his guests to speak more than a sentence before interrupting them to vomit a torrent of words that always have more to do with whatever haphazard dozen or so thought fragments he has at a time and wants to talk about, than whatever it was his guest had been trying to share.
One of the ongoing jokes in On Brand is what they call a “bramble” (when Russell Brand rambles a question). This is what happens when Russell begins speaking as if he is asking the guest a question, however, he will continue speaking in paragraphs, throwing in a dozen more questions.
There is an epic example of a bramble during Russell’s interview with Richard Dawkins, in which Brand does a five minute word salad of hundreds of words with very little meaning. Dawkins nods politely along for the whole ride.
All guests that Russell has on his show find themselves bamboozled by brambles, and the results are often memorable.
Like when Russell Brand interviewed Roseanne Barr.
The famous comedian has gone full MAGA in recent years. Roseanne, I mean, not Russell (though the statement is true of both). Unlike Russell, whose cynical and predatory profiteering is obvious and demonstrable, Roseanne seems more ideologically driven.
Unlike Russell, whose outrage about social issues seems shallow and performative, Roseanne has taken on MAGA beliefs as a core motivator. She believes in the depths of her guts that Donald Trump is a saviour sent by God to fight Democrat demons and save America’s soul.
She’s a zealot. And like all zealots she has a lot to talk about.
Only talking is not something Russell generally lets his guests do, so there’s a juicy narrative arc to how it all plays out.
From the beginning of the interview, it’s clear that Roseanne is unmoved by Russell’s charm. She treats Russell on the basis of the content of his speech and makes the effort to listen to what Russell says and respond accordingly.
It doesn’t take Roseanne very long to realise that Russell is an idiot and there is no point in humouring him as he brambles.
So she does what very few people seem to be able to do: she asserts he space in the conversation and demands Russell listen to her. Or at least that he shut up for long enough that she can speak.
Russell hates it.
The frustration it causes him so much frustration to not be the person speaking is visible. The mixture of rage and impotence that you see in his face would belong perfectly to a villain in the Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The way Russell smiles at Roseanne during this interview looks like how a chimpanzee does: as a gesture of hostility.
Watch whatever is going on with Russell’s face in the clip that begins at 1:31:17 and tell me if that does not look like the face of a violent and angry person.
The tone of voice you are hearing there is not that of man who is enjoying himself.
If it’s too subtle there, check out some of the other clips in the show.
Try watching this subsequent clip, in which Roseanne opens the door to anti-semitic conspiracy theories.
Russell gets very excited about this, because it’s a subject about which he has a lot to say.
It’s a touchy one too. Not because Russell disagrees with anti-semitic conspiracy theories (he doesn’t), but because he prefers them discussed in coded phrases such as “world bank” and “George Soros.”
Russell wants so much to take the floor from her, but Roseanne doesn’t cede, and Russell’s body language plays out a story with at least five distinct acts, in which each involves some level of anger: from simmering to outright raging.
Welcome to a Russell Brand interview. It’s going to be a dominance struggle against a very aggressive man, but Roseanne gets him to shut up.
After Roseanne has hung up from the interview, Russell loudly trashes her to his audience complaining at length about how rude she been and that she had not allowed him a chance to speak.
Seconds earlier in the show, Russell had been praising her to her face, telling her how grateful he was for her presence and comparing her to the Great virgin Queen Mary, who Russell says Roseanne is like an American working class version of (whatever the hell that means). His parting words to her are “I love you.”
Such is the bizarre spectacle of Russell Brand in 2024. A serial rapist whose attempted brand is as a loving Christian man.
In Episode Number 75, posted at the top, Russell meets Tucker Carlson.
Tucker Carlson had his own fall from grace. He’d been a primetime host of Fox News and used his position to boost Donald Trump’s political career — a key ally within the media that enabled Trump to lie his way into the presidency and lie his way out of the consequences that should have come to him.
Like Russell, Tucker had enjoyed the protection he received as a powerful man in the media world, but his toxic behaviour eventually became too much even for Fox News to have any interest in running cover for. Being a major cause of the almost $800 million lawsuit Fox News lost to Dominion surely didn’t help him keep allies.
Since being fired from Fox News, Tucker Carlson has been able to start his own operation. Unbound from the constraints of commercial television, Tucker has been able to go mask-off and come out as the neo-Nazi he had long been suspected of.
He makes his money these days out of saying all manner of hateful stuff to audiences well-primed by the slide towards fascism that United States society has been going down.
Such are the conditions under which Russell Brand and Tucker are talking: as part of Tucker’s live show touring the fly-over states of the US to sell extremism and hate. Tucker himself has little respect for the blue collar audiences who come to his show, something evident in his private text messages which surfaced as part of the Dominion law suit against Fox News.
Of course, none of this has made Tucker Carlson so toxic that Fox News would stay away from him forever. In June this year it was announced that he would be rejoining the network.
If you’ve ever had the misfortune of having seen Tucker Carlson during his time on Fox News, then it’s worth watching this interview. You’ll see what he says when not under a script for Fox News.
The aforementioned “extremism and hate” give you an idea of the underlying intentions, and yes, it’s ugly.
But like Russell, the details are fascinating. Tucker has much less charisma than Russell and my own responses to him tend on the side of feeling immediately creeped out by him.
Tucker has this way of laughing that sends a shiver down my spine. It’s high pitched and sounds juvenile — like you’d expect from a preteen on a sugar high. But because he’s a grown man and the context of his laughter is generally mean-spirited, it is more like something you would expect from a serial killer in a horror movie.
(Again, yes, I know another serial killer allusion — both men inspire such.)
Watch this clip here and tell me honestly that his laugh does not make you feel unsettled. Or try this one here in which he relates that 4th grade teachers want to castrate children.
Another fascinating one sees Tucker laughing nervously about how he felt when he was invited by Russell to pray with him. I avoid making assumptions about people’s sexual orientation, but in this case it’s Tucker himself who brings up a whole lot of associations with homosexuality.
His laughter has a different character when it comes to Russell Brand, one which feels very much to me like he is using it in a nervous way to cover a feeling of sexual attraction Tucker wishes he didn’t have towards Russell.
That’s my opinion, you can make up your own mind when you watch the videos. You’ll have plenty of source material, because Tucker does this particular giggle in response to practically everything Russell Brand says to the audience.
A person’s sexual identity should normally remain private if they desire it so, however in the case of Tucker Carlson, there is an issue of public harm that makes it relevant. Some of the most influential people in facilitating LGBTQI+ repression, have been closeted gay conservative men.
They adopt anti-queer crusading as a way of as a way of hiding their own sexuality, and do so with an existential fanaticism that makes them very harmful figures in society.
Tucker Carlson definitely qualifies two for two on being an anti-queer crusader and in terms of seeing the stakes as existential.
And if you need some further evidence of how deeply weird Tucker Carlson is, here is a clip of him breaking the ice in his live show with a misogynist aside during an anecdote about his dogs, in which his female dogs are the target.
So, if what I have said tickles you to go down the rabbit hole of some horrible people in the world, enjoy the show.
You’ll probably enjoy another podcast, Knowledge Fight, which primarily covers the career of extremist conman Alex Jones. It’s the king of podcasts of this genre, and it’s very well done, so I’ll write a full post on that another day. They’ve covered Tucker Carlson and do an excellent job unpacking all the weird Christian nationalist beliefs he has, which include him seeming to believe Democrat party figures in the United States are actual demons come from hell to corrupt humanity with homosexuality, transgenderism and government welfare support.
If you’re not sure why a podcast like this is worth anyone’s time, you’re entitled to consume other media.
However, to come back to the question mentioned at the start of this post, how could anyone be brainwashed enough to follow Donald Trump, well, people like Russell Brand and Tucker Carlson are making a cushy living doing exactly that.
Podcasts like On Brand explore the sophisticated techniques of manipulation used to make this happen. How people like Russell Brand present information in ways that is intentionally distorted so as to interrupt logical thinking. That is to say, they have ways of hijacking people’s cognitive processes to make them buy into extremist ideological systems.
Not because they’re trying to start a populist revolution. They exist to fleece money from the plebs and white-wash their rightly tarnished reputations.