In light of the recent allegations, Matthew offers a backgrounder on what we’ve learned about Brand through conspirituality and cultic studies and from his opportunistic relationships to wellness, self-help, and Kundalini Yoga. Ending with a focus on how his yoga world LARPing became a launch pad for his success as a spirituality-coded conspiracy theorist in the age of COVID.
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Show Notes
Conspirituality 97: Brand Awareness
Russell Brand accused of rape, sexual assaults and abuse
Russell Brand - In Plain Sight (Dispatches) [couchtripper] - video Dailymotion
BBC and police begin inquiries as Russell Brand faces more claims
Russell Brand: BBC resists calls to release complaints filed against presenter
Russell Brand's Charismatic Bullshit - by Derek Beres
Russell Brand helps the homeless with his yoga teacher... and his new tantric tattoos | Daily Mail Online
Yogi Bhajan Turned an L.A. Yoga Studio into a Juggernaut, and Left Two Generations of Followers Reeling from Alleged Abuse
Conspirituality 36: Guru Jagat's Pandemic Brandwash
Conspirituality 37: Guru Jagat Cultjacks Kundalini Yoga
Conspirituality 64: Remembering Guru Jagat
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Hello everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality Podcast, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And today, I should add to that tagline, charismatic abusers.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
We are on Instagram at ConspiratualityPod, and you can access our Monday bonus episodes through Patreon or Apple subscriptions.
We've got a book out.
It's called Conspiratuality, How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat, and it's in print, ebook, and audiobook format, narrated by me.
Please get it.
Please enjoy it.
Please review it.
A brief alert before I begin.
This episode will discuss sexual assault and rape.
And you'll be hearing Russell Brand's voice.
This episode is a small part of a developing story about a figure we have covered in the past for his outsized influence on yoga world conspiracy theory culture.
You can check out episode 97 where we compile a lot of that material.
Now, depending on how the story unfolds, we may devote another full episode to updating that coverage in light of the recent allegations.
But this episode today is in our brief category, and I'll keep to the spirit of that.
What I'd like to do is concisely revisit what we already know about Brand from conspirituality and cultic studies, and from his opportunistic relationships to wellness, self-help, and kundalini yoga, and especially how his tourism in the yoga world became a launchpad for his success as a spirituality-coded conspiracy theorist in the age of COVID.
So my aim is to table some background and framing for how this unfolding story might be better understood.
And I think it's worthwhile because the response to the allegations against BrandsSoFar are shaping up to be a litmus test for our moment.
The world seems to be showing its whole ass in relation to understandings of power, the necessity of consent, the rules of journalism, the qualities of solid evidence, and the scourges of toxic charisma and structural misogyny.
I want to note that I'll be leaning into the work of Naomi Klein in Doppelganger as I address the mechanics of a spectacle that will do everything it can to obscure the reality of abuse and the voices of real people.
The mirror world is a place that allows narcissists to co-opt the language of solidarity, oligarchs to pretend they're rooting for the working class, manic comedians to pretend that they can teach meditation, and aggressive misogynists to pretend that they are interested in empowering women.
Now Klein's formulation of the mirror world is really perfect for Brand because it allows us to consider the theatre of a highly visible conspiracy theorist who has invented a counter-cultural, truth-telling persona that extemporizes on everything while investigating nothing beyond what the algorithms tell him will go viral.
It allows us to consider what happens when such a person who pretends to research is actually investigated by those who do not live in the mirror world.
First, I should review the headlines coming to us through a harrowing Channel 4 Dispatches documentary based on a Times and Sunday Times investigation by Rosamund Irwin, Charlotte Wace, and Paul Morgan Bentley.
Erwin was on the story for four years, and her colleagues signed on about three years in, and their investigation platforms the stories of numerous women who variously allege that Bran raped, sexually assaulted, or sexually abused them.
And the stories are uncanny in their similarity.
The women describe Brand's very direct and intentional targeting, periods of boundary testing, and how, at the peak of the alleged aggression, his eyes would go black and unresponsive.
In the Dispatches documentary, the broader context for these incidents is filled in by a former personal assistant and other sources who describe Brand's daily schedule being dictated by his insatiable predation.
Runners and production staff were enlisted to provide Brand with an endless supply of new sexual partners recruited on the fly from studio audiences.
The story that has received the most attention so far comes from a woman speaking under the pseudonym of Alice, who alleges that Brand grievously assaulted her during their three-month relationship 18 years ago, when he was 30 and she was 16.
She described how a car hired by the BBC, where Brand was working at the time, came to pick her up from high school and deliver her to Brand's flat.
The journalists discovered that Brand's management at the time took measures to keep the relationship secret.
In the UK, where this took place, Alice had technically attained the age of consent under a law passed in 1885.
And in follow-up interviews, Alice has stated that she hopes her story helps to change that law.
The story of Nadia, another pseudonym, is also crucial because she was able to provide the medical report from her visit to a rape crisis center shortly after Brand allegedly raped her.
And she was able to provide a string of text messages dated within hours of the incident between her number and a number confirmed to be Brand's.
In that thread, Brand apologized profusely for harming her in response to her clear description of an attack.
The Metropolitan Police in London have said they have opened an investigation into the allegations against Brand.
And what has Brand himself said?
The Times notes that they gave him eight days to respond to their reporting.
The day before the story dropped, Brand issued a preemptive denial of all of the allegations.
Here's a minute of that, that's all you need, of his last-ditch effort to dodge this train.
These allegations pertain to the time when I was working in the mainstream, when I was in the newspapers all the time, when I was in the movies.
And as I've written about extensively in my books, I was very, very promiscuous.
Now, during that time of promiscuity, the relationships I had were absolutely always consensual.
I was always transparent about that then, almost too transparent.
And I'm being transparent about it now as well.
And to see that transparency metastasized into something criminal that I absolutely deny makes me question Is there another agenda at play?
Particularly when we've seen coordinated media attacks before, like with Joe Rogan when he dared to take a medicine that the mainstream media didn't approve of, and we saw a spate of headlines from media outlets across the world using the same language.
I'm aware that you guys have been saying in the comments for a while, watch out Russell, they're coming for you, you're getting too close to the truth, Russell Brand did not kill himself.
So you get the gist.
Now, this video was instantly endorsed, or boosted by, among many others, Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, Ian Miles-Chong, and Canadian self-help and women's empowerment guru, Danielle Laporte, who shared the video to Instagram with the caption, Steadfast, unwavering compassion to you.
Now I should note that friend of the pod, Dr. Lissa Rankin, who also has a large following in the alternative medicine world, clapped back at Laporte and others by name, asking, why are spiritual white women reflexively defending an accused predator?
And that's a question I think will be with us for a long time.
Now, there were more intellectual or maybe pseudo-intellectual defenses.
Psychedelics author Daniel Pinchbeck published a Substack article in which he largely ignored the published allegations in favor of using the theories of René Girard to argue that Brand had become a ritual scapegoat for a conflicted and hypocritical culture.
All of the cruder endorsements alluded to the Deep State having no choice but to silence Brand's dangerous views.
He was over the target, as they say in QAnon, and the elites had no choice but to pull the Me Too lever.
They all suggested that the timing of the article was suspicious.
Why now, they asked, just as Brand is questioning vaccines and support of Ukraine?
And nowhere do these pundits indicate any understanding that it can take four years to nail down adequate sourcing and corroboration for an extremely important story, which could have fallen apart and been killed by the editorial or legal departments at any moment.
On the other side of the aisle, critics of Brand have made a lot of his preemption video and its endorsements, saying that his immediate appeal to the specter of a conspiracy against him indicates that he knows what his audience expects Or can be led to believe and that he knows who his friends are.
But some of this commentary strayed further into blue pill territory to settle on an appealing but I think flawed idea that Brand's most recent pivot during the COVID era into rightward-leaning conspiracy theory land was a strategic move designed to raise a digital army that would defend him against anything.
He knew it was coming, they say, and he plotted out his path to exoneration years in advance.
This is really implausible to me given everything we know about online opportunism and the speed of audience capture.
I think it's also implausible given how short-term Brandt's planning seems to be and how much he clearly depends on in-the-moment improvisation and a kind of vaudeville porno style of physical theatre.
I understand why folks would want a mastermind-type story.
The attraction is that it sidesteps the scarier problem that our media instruments are basically set up to magnify people like Brand.
And that's not a mustache-twirling villain problem.
That's a social architecture problem.
Now, Naomi Klein offered the non-conspiratorial, non-paranoid version of this idea by tweeting out the following.
Of course Russell Brand's followers deny the allegations.
He has groomed an audience to deny, disbelieve everything they see and hear, which is very different from healthy skepticism.
This knee-jerk denialism is precisely why people with plenty of skeletons in the closet love conspiracy culture.
They have a built-in defense against accountability.
It's all a conspiracy.
Always.
I appreciate that Klein uses the term groomed here in a way that merges the meanings of sexual and epistemological violence, but she doesn't directly connect the two by speculating on Brand's intentionality.
Now if Bran did have some big plan in the cooker, it's not working out so far.
He hasn't shown his face online since the story dropped.
His management company has cut ties with him.
He's cancelled an entire comedy tour in the UK.
YouTube has demonetised his channel and the UK Minister for Culture, Media and Sport has sent A kind of strange, maybe ill-advised letter to the CEO of Rumble inquiring as to whether the video platform has allowed Brand to monetize his preemptive strike against the investigation.
Now, before I move on to the background and context I mentioned, there is one other preemptive move that Brand made against this story, and he posted it on TikTok two days before his blanket denial uploaded to YouTube.
Christ's final words.
Forgive them, Father.
They know not what they do.
Of course, in this moment, Christ is referring to his own execution at the hands of the Roman judiciary and Pilate famously washing his hands of our Lord and Saviour.
But its relevance in that moment is very particular.
Of course, the sacrifice of a living God is a massive, seismic, epochal and defining human event.
Is it not more relevant right now, because as Joseph Campbell says, what does it matter if Christ dies on the cross 2,000 years ago if we are not continually dying and reborn unto ourselves that we may experience each moment anew?
Is this not exactly what Lord Buddha is referring to?
Remain awake, remain in the present.
Perhaps what is meant, or one interpretation that I might offer you, of Christ's words, forgive them Father, they know not what they do, is that most people, most of the time, are unconscious.
Forgive them, they know not what they do.
They don't know why they're saying that.
They don't know why they're doing that.
They don't know why they're driving that way.
They don't know why they're treating the planet that way.
They don't know why they're talking about one another in that way.
Isn't it our duty to, like Christ, awaken from the flesh body and into the transcendent being of light,
the elevated, escalating, transcending individual.
Let me know in the comments, if you agree with this interpretation,
that what we truly must become is conscious in this moment.
Now.
Okay, so with these two clips on board, I can get into the first core theme
that we here on the podcast have focused on in previous coverage.
And that's that Brand is a consummate bullshitter.
And I mean that in the sense put forward by American philosopher Harry Frankfurt.
On any given subject, Brand might be lying, Brand might not be lying.
You can't really tell, and it doesn't really matter because he doesn't seem to care.
He's not working his jaws in relation to any respect for what is true or useful.
He speaks to seize attention, create an impression, and weave a spell.
Here's what Frankfurt says about the difference between lies, truth, and bullshit.
Quote, Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game.
Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands.
The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether.
He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and opposes himself to it.
He pays no attention to it at all.
By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.
Now, in his ninth hour YouTube preemptive defense, we hear one valence of Brand's bullshit.
The gishgallop patter of urgent pivots, allusions, vagaries, and non sequiturs.
This is Brand's manic mode.
It's pressurized and claustrophobic.
A wall of words that can feel physically overpowering.
In the show notes, I'm going to link to my colleague Derek's close reading of one such brand scenario in which he pretends to debate journalist John Heilman on the Bill Maher Show.
The topic is the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News for knowingly implicating their company in electoral fraud and whether CNBC and other centrist platforms have ever been found to be likewise lying about what they know to be true.
Brand is claiming that all media institutions are equally corrupt and untrustworthy, but he cannot substantiate his point with any examples when Heilemann asks for the receipts.
And Derek emphasizes how, in the absence of having evidence, Brand gets physically aggressive.
Manspreading, leaning in, making intrusive eye contact, constant touching, and never shutting up.
And then if you roll the tape back to his earlier television and radio work on shows like Big Brother, all of that boundarylessness of speech and body is there.
That's his brand, so to speak.
In prior episodes, we've also talked about the neurotic speech that so many of the male influencers we cover seemed to get locked into through a process of self-entrancement.
In their different ways, Russell Brand, Alex Jones, Jordan Peterson, Tim Pool, Matt Walsh, Andrew Tate, Ben Shapiro, they all have it.
These are all men who cannot bear to pause, let alone be interrupted.
And given the nature of digital space, they never have to stop.
They throw off this sense that if they closed their fire hoses that their fragile selves would burn to the ground.
Now, in brand, this improvisational tick can ascend into something that sounds like spiritual ecstasy.
But the thing about the firehose of charismatic speech is that it can't just be water or sounds.
It really does have to be made up of words and phrases and ideas, but the quantity is so high that the quality and coherence cannot possibly keep up.
So that brings me to the second main observation we've made about brand and everyone who works this particular kind of shtick, that the content is never the point.
Sometimes it's compelling, as when Brand goes on an anti-corporatist rant.
Sometimes it's revealing, as in the endless partially told stories and allusions to his own behavior.
But it will never stay on the same topic.
Now, the principle of the content is never the point is also something we've tracked in relation to our work on cults, where a leader's point of view is nearly always impossible to clearly define.
If it changes, if he reverses himself, if he jumps the shark altogether, it makes little difference because what he's really doing is holding attention through affect and behavior modification and relational manipulation, not through ideas.
Why do you suppose people are so confused about Brand's politics?
Is he blackpilled and apathetic as he sits with Pacman admitting that he never votes?
Is he an anarchist trying to push Ed Miliband further to the left?
Is he a Trump apologist?
What exactly does he believe about vaccines?
Did he really cut a whole video about the trucker convoy in Ottawa being all about some kind of peaceful protest of the authoritarianism of public health?
People are confused about Brand because none of his ideas are coherent, and that's because the content is not the point.
The fickleness is a winning strategy for the chaos of the COVID-era conspiracism that we've covered.
One week, 5G tech will control your glands, then vaccines will be microchip carriers, then it's all about depopulation, then saving the children, and then the evil trans agenda, and finally Jewish space lasers.
The content doesn't matter.
But it's actually more than that.
Bran's ideological instability works in his favor because it pushes the relational dynamic more squarely into the spotlight.
There's nothing there but him.
On the podcast, we've also noted that one aspect of this transitory attitude to content shows up in the fact that cult leaders are often chronic plagiarizers.
They need a steady supply of material and they don't really care where it comes from.
And if you scroll through Brand's YouTube thumbnails, it quickly becomes apparent that the topic could be literally anything, tracking increasingly rightward and paranoiac over time, while the affect, jokes, and gesticulations stay the same.
And more importantly, so does the emotional urgency, the sense that everything is always on the line, the feeling that you should never not be around this intense crackle of panic and discovery.
There's something really elegant and just about Brand's relationship to truth and reality being exposed by a disciplined journalism that does the exact opposite.
As I mentioned, Irwin worked for four years speaking to hundreds of sources, keeping everything locked down until everything was watertight and bled dry of any speculation.
And if you just think about how much data a journey like that would render, how many asides, comments, colorful details, it would be enough for a 300-page book with a thousand footnotes.
But instead, Irwin and her team run their findings through a distillation process that boils down to 6,800 words and none of them wasted.
And the result is a super clear, subject-centered report showing enough detail To render a crystalline picture, but not so much as to cross over the line into the salacious.
It is a direct, economical, almost mundane form of devastating reporting.
And it's the perfect mirror image of what Russell Brand does every time he opens his mouth.
Okay, so those are some notes from our archive, from our collaboration here on the podcast, and they're all about Bran's general presentation, his charisma and affect.
The more concrete area of our study involves how he pivoted in the mid-2010s towards the world of wellness influencing via 12-step discourse and his fascination with kundalini yoga.
That career shift followed his resignation from his popular BBC Radio 2 program after a disgusting series of comments about his sexual exploits.
His redemption arc landed in California, where his movie career began to take off and where he became very enmeshed in the kundalini yoga scene, attending public classes, unlike most celebrity yoga students, and mentored by senior figures in the group, and getting the Sanskrit symbols for the chakras tattooed on his arm.
In 2012, he was often seen at red carpet and social events with his main teacher, Tej Karkhalsa.
He soon became an outspoken advocate for the ecstatic breathing and postural exercises.
So here he is in that incarnation, in 2018, in a selfie video.
Hello!
Many of you enjoy doing kundalini yoga with an unqualified yoga teacher.
That's good because that's exactly what I am.
This kundalini meditation is fantastic.
It says here in my teacher's training manual that this one is going to make us feel really healthy and like we're smothered in radiant light and beauty.
You could just get this book yourself and cut me out of the equation.
You have to do it for 11 minutes in real life and you do it while holding your So, pull that in a little bit, and have the elbows tucked comfortably against the ribs, extend the forearms out at a 45 degree angle from the body.
Thusly.
Right?
and while we're doing it we chant Ramada sa sa se so hung
in fact we don't prolong the hung we cut it off Ramada sa sa se so hung
and we pull that hung we pull that bander right in hung
We chop it right off.
Like that, with a little bit of lairiness.
Before we start though, you might want to pop a blanket on your head.
You might not want to.
You might be wearing a Make America Great Again baseball cap.
You can put whatever you like on your head.
I'm not going to judge you.
I don't mind.
Why do I care?
We'll all be dead soon.
We start with the old chant.
They say this is the tune-in frequency.
Repeat three times.
Hasn't changed much, has he?
The jokes, the sexual innuendo, the strategic self-deprecation.
But then also something that the majority of his six million plus subscribers on YouTube will have no clue about, which is that he's providing free marketing for an extremely abusive group.
If you're not familiar with the Kundalini Yoga organization, you can check out our episodes 36, 37, and 64, in which we examine the life and death of Kundalini Yoga celebrity Guru Jagat with journalist Stacey Stukin and religious studies scholar Philip Dislip.
Jagat was a millennial leader of an offshoot sect of Kundalini Yoga, and she inherited the founder's leadership.
Now that founder was Yogi Bhajan, who died in 2013, leaving behind a legacy of sexual abuse, allegations, and corruption.
The book that Brand is reading from in this video is one of the dozens of teaching manuals compiled by Bhajan's students from his public talks.
And at one point he turns the cover over to the camera and Bhajan is right there in a glossy photo.
Like the stories about brand, the reality of Yogi Bhajan's behavior was known for decades.
The real public reckoning, however, erupted in January of 2020.
We cover that in our book, and I'll quote it here.
Pamela Dyson, formerly known as Premka, published a memoir about her time as a secretary for Yogi Bhajan.
She described meeting him in 1968 at the age of 25 and quickly being swept up into decades of emotional and sexual exploitation.
Her renown within the group gave weight and volume to whispers that had circulated for years.
Within weeks, a Facebook group formed to study and support Dyson's book and soon attracted dozens of similar testimonies of abuse.
This spotlight brought renewed attention to Bajan's odious record with recordings of his lectures recovered and circulated on Facebook.
Quote, rape is always invited, unquote, he told followers in 1978.
Quote, a person who is raped is always providing subconsciously the environments and the arrangements.
If you do not provide the circumstances and the arrangements, it is impossible, unquote.
Now as this real history of the group became clearer, Guru Jagat and other Kundalini Yoga leaders began circling the wagons, denying the allegations and suggesting that Bhajan was being cancelled in his grave by people terrified of the liberating power of his spiritual teaching.
Does this sound familiar?
So Brand is not original in this distractive, yoga-inflected pivot into conspiracy fantasies.
But neither was Guru Jagat.
Yogi Bhajan, Jagat's late guru and the source for Brand's yoga jargon, was always going on and on about how the FBI was out to get him.
Now, in his pursuit of yoga, Brand may have earnestly been seeking a new perspective on life.
He may have been seeking absolution.
But it's a little too on-the-nose that he immersed himself in the techniques of a charlatan and a predator.
But if we set that strange intersection aside, we can look a little more closely at how effective yoga discourse and culture was at giving Brand a plausible cover for his actions and appetites.
And that brings me back to this 2018 video.
When I first saw clips from it in the Dispatches documentary, my breath caught a little bit.
Not because of any of his bullshit, which I'm used to, but because of what was in the background of the shot.
He's sitting at what looks like an office desk with a patterned shawl over his head, Indra Devi style.
But over his right shoulder behind him, two books are visible on a shelf.
There's Ram Dass's Be Love Now, which is a pretty milquetoast choice.
But the second book is Yoni Shakti, A Woman's Guide to Power and Freedom Through Yoga and Tantra.
It's written by Uma Dinsmore Tooley and published in 2014.
Uma is a beloved UK yoga leader who has focused on women's self-help in the face of predatory and cultic dynamics in the yoga industry.
I know Uma.
I've worked with her and presented at her cozily chaotic home studio in Stroud in the Cotswolds.
Her specialty is in teaching a form of yogic meditation that's somewhat like lucid dreaming, in which the whole point is to guide students through mythic and psychic landscapes towards personal and cultural healing.
Most of her students are women, and much of the community discourse centers around trauma sensitivity.
Now, Uma's book is a polemical reconstruction of a pre-patriarchal yoga culture in which she claims that such a practice would have been foundational and accessible to everyone.
Historians may find a lot to disagree with in that, but the activist message is generative and it resonated beyond her circle and into the mainly women demographic of the yoga world.
Now by setting the cover of this book up in the background of his meditation selfie, Brand is signaling, perhaps only to himself because the book is fairly niche, that his intentions are aligned with the Me Too movement, and that his engagement with the yoga world is focused on sacred sexuality.
Now I've asked around and it's not clear how Uma's book got to Brand, but I do know that her theme and tone is perfect for Brand to co-opt.
She translates the Sanskrit title of Yoni Shakti as cunt power in a very UK working class manner that he would be well able to take up and run with, as if he were an intersectional feminist.
Additionally, Dinsmore Tooley's social networks are late hippie, summer festival-centric and they overlap with neo-pagan and ecological movements.
And these are all aspects that would be very consonant with Brand's populist and anti-corporate rhetoric, regardless of how many millions he makes.
I'll wrap up there with this observation.
The Times Channel 4 reporting does an exquisite job of centering the stories of four women.
And it also brings the receipts for how Brand was propped up by media institutions that at some level had at least some idea of what women were saying to each other in whisper networks.
It will take a long time for the BBC and Channel 4 to get their houses in order on this and to reassure the public that there are measures in place to end the enabling of abuse.
The question that we here at Conspirituality Podcast can turn to starts to become more clear through that screenshot from that video, in which the work of a feminist yoga educator appears to bless the teaching of an alleged sex offender.
And here's my thought on how we'll approach that question.
I don't believe that Brand would have become so prominent in the COVID-era conspiracy theory discourse if he wasn't riding on an extremely online wave of yoga and wellness culture goodwill.
Many of his yoga fans followed him into his YouTube fever dreams.
His pontifications on 12-step philosophy, we'll have to look at this more deeply soon, plus his seeming commitment to awakened awareness and bodily purification, these things formed his street cred amongst the wellness consumers and promoters who pushed him into viral significance.
So on one hand, this looks like the story of an abusive charismatic who learned how to project accusations about his behavior out onto the world in the form of paranoid fantasies.
But on the other hand, what's more disturbing is in how that happened and who took him in.
Because the same charisma that allowed him to mock sexual assault in comedy shows transferred over seamlessly into a subculture that wants to think of itself as being centered in empathy and self-awareness.
So the BBC and Channel 4 held every door open for him.
But the yoga and wellness worlds gave him a cushion at the head of the class.
And they did it by mistaking his aggression for crazy wisdom and his bullshit for spiritual illumination.
And I believe we have to think long and hard about why that happens.
Thank you everybody for listening to another episode of Conspirituality Podcast.
