While the Twitter Files revealed...not much at all...the right continues to push Elon Musk's "revelations" as hard as Hunter Biden's magical laptop, which seems to absorb every ill in society like Pandora's infamous box. And then there's Russell Brand, who can't turn away from a good conspiracy, or a bad one. He talks about Hunter's laptop and more with Matt Taibbi in a recent hour-long Rumble session.
This week is part one of Derek and Julian's deconstruction of what went down, why it ultimately doesn't matter, and why it matters very much to both Brand's and Taibbi's brand building. Show Notes
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I pointed this out in our Russell Brand episode months back.
He has a habit of hiding the media sources that he's sharing on his show.
So he sets up the opening of this episode that we're covering by decrying American leftist biased media and their treatment of Putin.
But then I looked into the screenshots he shared.
Well, the first one is from the U.S.
Sun, which is the U.S.
online edition of Britain's largest tabloid.
The next screenshot, The Daily Star, another British tabloid, followed by another screenshot of the U.S.
Sun.
So again, put this in perspective.
He's talking about the leftist, American-biased media by showing British tabloid screenshots.
But you wouldn't know that because he actually cuts off who each of the articles is from.
And I'll just say for anyone who hasn't lived in England, the sun is best known for on page three, having a topless young woman that is like the page three girl of the day or of the week or whatever.
Wow.
I didn't know that.
Okay.
He's doing the exact same thing that he's criticizing media outlets is doing, which is manipulating images and ideas to suit an agenda.
I could go on with the way he treats Joe Biden based on a less than three second clip That doesn't even match his accusation, which he then turns into an extended dialogue with his sidekick about Biden and Macron not being able to properly use their hands.
And he also is constantly championing the erosion of American democracy.
But let's turn to the Matt Taibbi discussion, which is the heart of this.
This was all preamble that I was just talking about.
Yeah, you know, I want to say too that it's probably a good sign.
It's probably because he's moved to Rumble that he's using music that he probably doesn't have the license to because YouTube is much more strict about catching that, right?
And so it's like, right, debuting on Rumble, here's some tricky for you sampling Public Enemy.
But yeah, as you said, he glosses over A lot of these obvious right wing talking points, if you pay attention to right wing media, it's like the overlap is pretty, pretty ubiquitous, as if they're situated in his, I mean, Russell positions himself as this kind of lefty anarchist.
But then he goes into these Gish Gallop laundry list of describing, you know, what's going on with the mainstream media as if as if all of the mistakes they're making or the false falsehoods they're perpetuating are settled fact.
It's a lot.
But the first clip, when Russell Brand dropped the first excerpt of his Matt Taibbi interview, I was expecting at least some discussion of what we have been talking about so far, especially some kind of revelatory explanation of why the Hunter Biden story was so important.
But here's where Russell starts.
It is fascinating, because I suppose back in the utopian early days of online spaces, I think what all of us understood is that a new territory had emerged, and like any territory, it could become democratised, it could become a tool of connection, a revolutionary tool, something that would finally usurp the monopolised media spaces and their ongoing support of an elitist agenda, for want of a better phrase.
But what has happened is that expertly these social media spaces themselves have been corporatized and corralled and what you have demonstrated through these revelations, through your revelations, is just examples of that In practice that these spaces are no longer free spaces they are managed and controlled spaces they're not organic and the idea that social media could be used to create insurrections even if they are ideological insurrections rather than sort of actual social revolutions is being quite strongly prohibited.
Wow.
You know, this is Russell's grand narrative about the internet.
It's a kind of mythology.
There were these utopian early days that have since been corrupted by corporatism enacting the elitist agenda, which is a classic right-wing talking point.
But it's like he's completely unfamiliar with 4chan.
You know, I don't know what these utopian early days were.
And he's comfortable using the language of right-wing populism regarding the elite in the context of seeing the early internet as being some kind of democratizing force, which it was to some extent, but ignoring that it's also inevitably been a megaphone and a viral vehicle for everything from flat earthers to pornographers to pseudoscience, alternative medicine, to anti-vax, to Pizzagate, to QAnon.
