The Contrarian/Anti-Woke left continue trend of Anti-Democrat/Black & Dirtbag Leftist grift
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AquaCityBoy
Veteran
TYT is butthurt about it too.
So transparent. TYT never once covered Jean Pierre until she insulted their friend. They're only mad because Marianne Williamson will actually come on their show and every progressive who actually wins immediately ghosts them when they get in office.
So transparent. TYT never once covered Jean Pierre until she insulted their friend. They're only mad because Marianne Williamson will actually come on their show and every progressive who actually wins immediately ghosts them when they get in office.
I can't believe it. These crazy MFers are really gonna back Marianne Williamson 
Bernie Sanders says Marianne Williamson will run a 'strong campaign' and raise 'very important issues' in 2024
Bernie Sanders says Marianne Williamson will run a 'strong campaign' and raise 'very important issues' in 2024
I once admired Russell Brand. But his grim trajectory shows us where politics is heading | George Monbiot
In an age of distortion, public figures have powerful tools and a responsibility. This is an object lesson in how that can go wrong, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot
www.theguardian.com
I once admired Russell Brand. But his grim trajectory shows us where politics is heading George Monbiot
George Monbiot
Russell Brand hosts the MusiCares Person of the Year Gala at the Convention Center, Los Angeles, on 24 January 2020.
Russell Brand hosts the MusiCares Person of the Year Gala at the Convention Center, Los Angeles, on 24 January 2020. Photograph: Rob Latour/Rex/Shutterstock
In 2014, the Guardian asked me to nominate my hero of the year. To some people’s surprise, I chose Russell Brand. I loved the way he energised young people who had been alienated from politics. I claimed, perhaps hyperbolically, he was “the best thing that has happened to the left in years” (in my defence, there wasn’t, at the time, much competition).
Today, I can scarcely believe it’s the same man. I’ve watched 50 of his recent videos, with growing incredulity. He appears to have switched from challenging injustice to conjuring phantoms. If, as I suspect it might, politics takes a very dark turn in the next few years, it will be partly as a result of people like Brand.
It’s hard to decide which is most dispiriting: the stupidity of some of the theories he recites, or the lack of originality. He repeatedly says he’s not a conspiracy theorist, but, to me, he certainly sounds like one.
In 2014, he was bursting with new ideas and creative ways of presenting them. Today, he wastes his talent on tired and discredited tales: endless iterations of the alleged evils of the World Economic Forum founder, Klaus Schwab, the Great Reset, Bill Gates, Nancy Pelosi, the former US chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, Covid vaccines, medical data, the World Health Organization, Pfizer, smart cities and “the globalist masterplan”.
His videos appear to promote “natural immunity” ahead of vaccines, and for a while pushed ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as treatments for Covid (they aren’t).
He championed the “Freedom Convoy” that occupied Ottawa, which apparently stood proudly against the “tyranny” of Justin Trudeau’s policies. He hawks Graham Hancock’s widely debunked claims about ancient monuments.
A wildly popular clip from one of his videos about the Dutch nitrate crisis offers a classic conspiracy theory mashup: a tangle of claims that may be true in other contexts, random accusations, scapegoating and resonances with some old and very ugly tropes. He claims that “this whole fertiliser situation is a scam”. The real objective is “to bankrupt the farmers so their land can be grabbed”. This “shows you how the Great Reset operates”, using “globalist” regulations to throw farmers off their land. He claims it’s “connected to the land grab of Bill Gates” and the “corruption of companies like Monsanto”.
In reality, the Dutch government was forced to act by a legal ruling, as levels of nitrate pollution, largely from livestock farms, break European law. Its attempts to curb this pollution have nothing to do with the World Economic Forum and its vacuous rhetoric about a “Great Reset”. Or with Bill Gates. Or with Monsanto, which hasn’t existed since 2018 when it was bought by Bayer. So why mention them? Perhaps because these terms have become potent click triggers.
Brand is repeating claims first made by far-right conspiracists, who have piled into this issue, claiming that the nitrate crisis is a pretext to seize land from farmers, in whom, they claim, true Dutch identity is vested, and hand it to asylum seekers and other immigrants. It’s a version of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, itself a reworking of the Nazis’ blood and soil tropes about protecting the “rooted” and “authentic” people – in whom “racial purity” and “true” German identity was vested – from “cosmopolitan” and “alien” forces (ie Jews). Brand may not realise this, as the language has changed a little – “cosmopolitans” have become “globalists”, “aliens” have become “immigrants” – but the themes have not.
On and drearily on he goes. He manages to confuse the World Health Organization’s call for better pandemic surveillance (by which it means the tracking of infectious diseases) with coercive surveillance of the population, creating “centralised systems of control where you are ultimately a serf”.
Some of his many rants about Bill Gates are illustrated with an image of the man wearing a multicoloured lapel badge, helpfully circled in red. This speaks to another widespread conspiracy theory: those who wear this badge are members of a secret organisation conspiring to control the world (so secret they stick it on their jackets). In reality, it shows support for the UN sustainable development goals.
Such claims are not just wrong. They are wearyingly, boringly wrong. But, to judge by the figures (he has more than 6 million subscribers on YouTube), the audience loves them.
Some of his theories, such as his recent obsession with UFOs, are innocuous enough. Others have potential to do great harm. There’s the risk to the people scapegoated, such as Fauci, Schwab and Pelosi: subjects of conspiracy theories often become targets of violence. There are the risks misleading claims present to public health. And bizarre stories about shadowy “elites” protect real elites from scrutiny and challenge.
While I’m not suggesting this is his purpose, it’s a tactic used deliberately by powerful people to disarm those who might otherwise hold them to account. Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, had a term for it: “flood the zone with shyt”. As Naomi Klein has shown, the Great Reset conspiracy theory was conceived by a staffer at the Heartland Institute, a US lobby group that has promoted climate denial and other billionaire-friendly positions. It’s a b*stardisation of her shock doctrine hypothesis, distracting people from the malfeasance of those with real power.
Worse still, conspiracism is fascism’s fuel. Almost all successful conspiracy theories originate with or land with the far right. I’m not suggesting for one minute that Brand is sympathetic to fascism, but his videos are likely to assist its spread. As for his own politics, while he claims to have transcended left and right, I see a clear rightward shift. He concentrates his fire on centrists – Biden, Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Trudeau – while appearing to support Trump. He extols Trump’s “virility”, which he contrasts with “Biden’s senility”.
So what’s going on? Brand has yet to reply to questions I emailed him last week, so I can only guess. I have seen other people drift into absurdity by telling their followers what they want to hear, and I wonder whether it’s happening here. At one point, he tells his audience: “We are amplifying the voice that you give us. We are feeding back to you the truth that you have long understood.” Of Ron DeSantis, the extreme rightwing Florida governor, he says to his viewers: “I know a lot of you guys like him”, which might explain his weirdly equivocal reporting of DeSantis’s vicious state censorship, which is everything he claims to oppose.
Until recently, I thought younger people, demanding a fairer, kinder world, would transform our politics. Now I’m not so sure. I believe Brand and others are helping to confuse and distract them in their millions, shutting down meaningful engagement. He has, in this respect, become the opposite of what he was.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
AquaCityBoy
Veteran
TYT handling Bernie with kid gloves again.
Let literally any other Democrat propose this bill and they would (understandably) be getting destroyed for playing 'theater.'
Bernie writes some funky ass bill that has zero chance of passing the House full of Republicans who think all teachers are groomers and predators and TYT goes
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Reject the Left-Right Alliance Against Ukraine - Dissent Magazine
If American leftists take seriously their commitment to self-rule and loathing of foreign aggression, they should shed their ambivalence about supporting Ukraine.
Reject the Left-Right Alliance Against Ukraine
Reject the Left-Right Alliance Against Ukraine
Michael Kazin
If American leftists take seriously their commitment to self-rule and loathing of foreign aggression, they should shed their ambivalence about supporting Ukraine.
The “Rage Against the War Machine” rally on February 19, 2023 (Pamela Drew/Flickr)
At critical times, foreign wars have tested the moral convictions of American leftists and affected the fate of their movement for years to come. The Socialist Party’s opposition to entering the First World War provoked furious state repression but later gained a measure of redemption when Americans learned that U.S. troops had not made the world safe for democracy after all. Leftists proved prescient again in the late 1930s when they rallied to defend the Spanish Republic against a right-wing military and its fascist allies, Italy and Germany. The republic’s defeat emboldened Adolf Hitler to launch what quickly became the Second World War. When, twenty years later, American Communists backed the Soviet Union’s crushing of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, they shoved their party firmly and irrevocably to the margins of political life, which opened up space for the emergence of a New Left that rejected imperial aggressors of all ideological persuasions.
The war in Ukraine has a good chance of turning into another such decisive event. Who to blame for the bloodshed in that country should be obvious: a massive nation led by an authoritarian ruler with one of the world’s largest militaries at his disposal is seeking to conquer and subjugate a smaller and weaker neighbor. In pursuit of that vicious purpose, Vladimir Putin’s soldiers have committed countless rapes and acts of torture. His air force is systematically trying to destroy Ukraine’s infrastructure and economy, hoping to undermine its citizens’ will to resist. Yet Ukrainians, with the aid of arms from the United States and other NATO countries, have so far managed to fight this superior force to a stalemate.
A sizeable number of American leftists have embraced an alternate reality. For them, the culprit is NATO’s post–Cold War expansion, fueled by the drive of the U.S. state and capital to bend the world to their desires. The popular author and journalist Chris Hedges cracks that the war in Ukraine “doesn’t make any geopolitical sense, but it’s good for business.” The Green Party condemns the “perpetual war mentality” of the “US foreign policy establishment” and concludes, “There are no good guys in this crisis.”
These critics ignore or dismiss the fact that every nation that joined NATO did so willingly, knowing that Russia was capable of launching the kind of attack now underway ≤in Ukraine. In the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s demise, the expansion of NATO may well have been too hasty. But not one of its newer members has done anything to threaten Putin’s regime. And every country that joined the alliance enjoys a democratically elected government. They contrast sharply with the handful of nations, besides Putin’s, that voted against a UN resolution last month demanding the Russians withdraw from Ukraine: Belarus, North Korea, Syria, Nicaragua, Eritrea, and Mali. All but the last are one-party dictatorships, and Mali relies on Russian mercenaries to battle Islamist rebels.
It seems not to bother these leftists that they are making common cause with some of the most atrocious and prominent stalwarts of the Trumpian right. Tucker Carlson routinely bashes the U.S. commitment to Ukraine with lines like “Has Putin ever called me a racist?” while Marjorie Taylor Greene recently declared, “I’m completely against the war in Ukraine. . . . You know who’s driving it? It’s America. America needs to stop pushing the war in Ukraine.”
On February 19, some members of the alliance of right and left staged a demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington to vent its “Rage Against the War Machine.” Speakers included Ron Paul and Tulsi Gabbard as well as Jill Stein, the Green Party’s 2016 nominee for president, and Medea Benjamin, the founder of Code Pink. Carlson promoted the event on the highest rated “news” show in the history of cable TV. At the Memorial, several protesters flew Russian flags.
To paraphrase August Bebel’s famous line about anti-Semitism, the hostility of those leftists who oppose helping Ukraine is an anti-imperialism of fools—although, unlike past Jew haters, they are fools with good intentions. Wars are always horrible events, no matter who starts them or why. And we on the left should do whatever we can to stop them from starting and end them when they do.
But neither the United States nor its allies forced Putin to invade. In speech after speech, he has made clear his mourning for the loss of the Soviet empire and his firm belief that Ukraine should be part of a revived one, this time sanctified by an Orthodox cross instead of the hammer-and-sickle. As the historian (and my cousin) David A. Bell wrote recently, the United States is not “the only international actor that really matters in the current crisis.” It may have the mightiest war machine, but Biden is not shipping arms to Ukraine in an attempt to subjugate Russia to his will. We should, Bell writes, “judge every international situation on its own terms, considering the actions of all parties, and not just the most powerful one. . . . the horrors Putin has already inflicted on Ukraine, and his long-term goals, are strong reasons . . . for continuing current U.S. policy, despite the attendant costs and risks.”
The monetary cost is obviously not small. By the end of January, the United States had spent $46.6 billion on lethal aid to Ukraine. But as a portion of what our bloated military has available to it every year, that sum is little more than a rounding error. The defense budget in the past fiscal year was close to $2 trillion. The cost of the latest U.S. aircraft carrier ran to $13 billion all by itself. The Navy now has eleven aircraft carriers. Isn’t helping Ukraine defend its right to exist as an independent country a worthier expense?
The debate over the war among American leftists could have an impact on whether the United States keeps sending substantial aid to Ukraine’s armed forces. Progressives wield more influence in the Democratic Party than they have in decades. So far, most have followed the lead of Bernie Sanders in denouncing the Russian onslaught and endorsing the NATO effort to repel it. More Republicans oppose aiding Ukraine than Democrats. But if that changes, public backing for U.S. policy, already slipping after a year of inconclusive fighting, could crumble entirely. A negotiated settlement may be the only way the war ends. But without a strong and consistent policy of support to the government in Kyiv, the agreement would be on Putin’s terms.
One doesn’t have to think the stakes of the conflict in Ukraine are similar to those in the Spanish Civil War to hear echoes from that benighted past. If American leftists take seriously their commitment to self-rule and loathing of foreign aggression, they should shed their ambivalence about supporting Ukraine. But I’ll let a democratic socialist from Ukraine have the last words. “I know that the left tends to look for a nefarious U.S. plot behind everything,” writes the sociologist Alona Liasheva. “Of course, I think it’s important to analyze every conflict to understand all the players, the dynamics, and who’s culpable.” But “In the case of Ukraine, it’s far simpler than many on the left think. Ukraine was attacked by an imperialist army, and as a result we are in a struggle to defend our lives and our very right to exist as a sovereign nation. . . . This is not an abstract question for us. The international left can make a material difference in whether we are able to win or lose.”
Michael Kazin is co-editor emeritus of Dissent. His most recent book, What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party, just came out in paperback.
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