BONUS: Hangin' out with Eiynah 4 - Russell Brand, Patriarchy, etc - with Dr Caitlin Green
Another little bonus to tide you over. Jack briefly went back to eX-Twitter to hangout in a Space with best-friend-of-the-pod Eiynah and the excellent Dr Caitlin Green to talk about Russell Brand, Lauren Boebert, Danny Masterson, the hypocrisy of those who scream about groomers, patriarchy, etc. The bit where Caitlin talks about reactions to the Brand allegations among the 'Gender Criticals' is particularly interesting. Thanks to everyone who showed up to listen and/or join-in.
Hello everybody, Jack here, just popping in to let you know that IDSG is still on its way back, not quite there yet.
In the meantime, here's a recording of a space, lightly edited recording of a space on the site that used to be called Twitter, that I did recently with our friend, friend of the pod, Ina Mohammed-Smith, and the excellent Dr. Caitlin Moria.
It's about Russell Brand, and patriarchy, and Right-wing hypocrisy and all the stuff you would expect, so hope you enjoy it and see you soon!
Hello, hello everyone!
Thank you for joining us today for a Twitter space about all the bizarre-ass hypocrisy that shows up in the right-wing sphere when someone is actually A groomer or a sexual predator, you know, the people that like to accuse everyone generally of being a groomer.
Those people suddenly run to defend the actual groomer.
So it's been really interesting watching what's been happening lately, especially in terms of Russell Brand.
Some horrific, horrific allegations have surfaced from years ago.
And apparently it wasn't even that much of a secret.
Like people supposedly knew that like there have been multiple allegations of a brand raping, sexually assaulting and abusing multiple women.
Um, I think there was like a police report going back in time.
There were complaints to the channels and also, uh, one of his victims visited a rape crisis center.
So it has been quite something to watch all these right-wingers surface and come to bat for this actual groomer, because one of his victims was 16 years old.
Like, he used to pick her up from school, for fuck's sake!
And yeah, what do you think, Caitlin?
What have you been seeing?
Yeah, so after this happened, I went over to look at all of the Oh, interesting.
what people are saying in all the various spheres.
And I, I found like a major rift in the gender critical space over this, like they're in disarray over all of it.
Oh, interesting.
Yeah.
So what's going on over there?
Well, I think that there's a certain like subset of that group that really came to their transphobia through feminism.
them.
And obviously the feminism that I believe in is not compatible with those kinds of beliefs, but they seem to be able to make it work for themselves.
And so there's a set of Pretty much exclusively women in the gender-critical space who are, like, centering the victims, sharing the journalism, like, just doing what you would kind of expect feminists to do.
And then they're getting, like, chastised by their male allies in the gender-critical space who are talking about, like, due process and presumption of innocence.
And they're correctly pushing back and saying that's not how it works when a celebrity gets pointed at.
We're not doing it with a jury.
We're not doing trial by jury.
We don't need to submit evidence and argue in court and then have it come out.
It's okay to be upset about allegations that have not technically been proven in court.
Right, they do this thing with free speech as well where they hold it to like the legal definition when people having opinions online is not really bound by what is supposed to happen in court like in any way.
Right, this sort of tendency to impose legalistic definitions of terms that have at this point got a lot of colloquial baggage with them like it's okay Not to use these words the way that they're intended in a courtroom.
Right, right.
And it's okay to be horrified.
Like, you don't have to, in regular everyday life, presume that every person that has multiple allegations against them, multiple credible allegations, against them that they are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law like that's just such a i don't know it's such a whataboutism like it's such an excuse oh yeah to just yeah
and uh i i'm surprised to hear actually that there are well listen it's not a huge that there are actual like feminists among turfs uh that are defending the victims and believing the victims and not just jumping to the right-wing conclusions because from what i see
and you are definitely much more familiar with that space than i am they're always like just cozying up to the right and uh so the fact that they are At least squabbling on this is interesting.
Yeah, I would say that there's probably three main types of response that happened here.
And one of them is users that are primarily motivated by the justification that it's feminism are out there saying, like, we should believe these victims.
We should, you know, withdraw any support for Russell Brand.
We should not be doing all this whataboutism and due process nonsense.
And also talking about the systemic influences that allowed Bram's rise to power, like the media landscape in England and in the US.
Yes!
In the aughts and the way that his flamboyant, boyish, bad schoolboy kind of attitude
was really welcomed and allowed and the way that he would sort of use confession as like an obfuscation tool where he would talk about all the bad stuff that he had done and everyone's like oh my gosh what a grown-up like he really understands where he went wrong like we love him and it's kind of like What Marilyn Manson used to do, in a way?
Yeah!
Or Richard Hennessey, right?
He wrote that essay about how he used to be a dickhead and now he's not.
Right, right, right.
Like, I've really changed things, but also my views are bad enough in public anyways, so what are you gonna hold me accountable for?
I'm already saying these things in plain sight.
Saying and doing, right?
So Richard Hanania was pretty damn racist, even though he was writing on multiple white nationalist websites.
I can't remember the details.
Under a pseudonym, but his public views were not too different for that.
Just slightly, you know?
And I guess, uh, Brand was confessing all these, like, bad behaviors and being, like, super promiscuous, but, or joking about, like, liking school girls or just really gross things that I've seen today, you know?
Um, and, uh, like, you know, people laughed at his jokes and, uh, the media just thought it was a fun act.
Even Louis C.K.
actually, you know, that comes to mind.
And when I was saying about Manson, That one comes to me specifically because as a teenager, I was a fan of Manson's Embarrassing.
I know.
But, um... Well, when I was a kid, I didn't watch Grand, so we've all been there.
Oh, there you go.
It's kind of like, um... I read an expression in an article one time called, uh, a wolf in wolf's clothing?
Oh, yes, yes.
Right.
Yeah.
So it's like not in sheep's clothing.
You're just like, I am who I am.
And when people like Manson do it, it personally really upsets me because he's like out there being this like, you know, freak and he's hiding behind that and being like an actual moral monster, you know, it's not just like his clothes or, you know, he's like punching people and locking them up or whatever the fuck he did.
Yeah.
But, um, Yeah, so yeah, people have been commenting on that.
Oh, hi Jack!
I'll say some names that might not mean anything to you, but like, Jane Clare Jones is an example, and like, she is a person who was in grad school doing like, feminist theory, and met a trans person who like, made her uncomfortable or something, and then she became like, a professional transphobe.
So she was doing feminism first, and then she got weird.
And so she is somebody who was calling out, like, you don't need to be doing this, like, due process thing.
And also one of the people who pointed out that he's been spending the last few years gathering, like, a populist audience and a conspiracy-prone audience that would not abandon him during this time.
And right, because this is a sort of reporting procedure, like the way that it works.
It's taken a long time to put together.
He's had a lot of warning that this was going to happen at some point.
And so he had a lot of time to kind of pivot his content and get ready.
And sort of like brace for the impact.
Yeah, you know, that's the sense I got to like I when I was listening to his interviews today from like years ago, I felt like He knew it was gonna drop at some point, so he was just gonna, like, say little pieces here and there that might cushion his fall.
Like, I already said this stuff, but not really, you know what I mean?
Right, and so there's a couple of people in the gender-critical sphere, especially Olly London, who absolutely fell for it.
Oh, that name is familiar.
Olly London is a detransitioner who Also, like, it's really confusing the life story because he also is the one who wanted to look as much like a K-pop star as possible.
Wait, can you explain what a detransitioner is just for people who may not know?
Yes, this is a person who transitioned in some way, you know, socially, medically, surgically, whatever.
They did some of the steps of transition or all.
And then they decided that it wasn't right for them, and they undid those steps to the best of their ability.
And it's like a really tiny percentage of people who transition.
Less than 1%, I think.
But sometimes, when you detransition, you get kind of love-bombed by the gender-critical group.
And so there's a, I don't know if they're still on there, but Reclaiming Trans was really good where they talk about like what that was like and how for a little while they were like politically active about, you know, going against the rights of trans people to access medical care.
And now they realize that that was because the people around them were using them as a pawn, you know.
So Ollie London is a really interesting example because he was trying to transition both in gender, but also clearly was trying to get himself to look as Korean as possible, which is also very confusing.
That's so strange.
And then has done a lot of procedures to try to undo all of that, and also recently wrote a book, an anti-trans book, And is just sort of like a wild blue check who's out of pocket all the time.
And so he tweeted, if you are wondering why the mainstream media has suddenly done a coordinated trial by media campaign against Russell Brand, then this video will tell you exactly why.
And the video is a clip of Russell Brand on Bill Maher yelling about Pfizer.
So okay, he's like whistleblowing about Big Pharma.
And so the media elites conspired to destroy him through allegations.
So yeah, Jordan Peterson has been on that Big Pharma thing as well in regards to the Russell Brand story.
But let's just think this through for a second.
Okay.
Like, imagine that there were these allegations years ago.
What, people just sat on them for years until there was a pandemic and then Big Pharma came up with a vaccine for that pandemic and yeah, that's when they released the information?
Obviously, obviously, because he was, I've heard QAnon guys say he was over the target so he's getting flack.
That's The only time that you catch slack is when you're over a target.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Otherwise, like... Nobody ever gets in trouble unless they're over some kind of target.
Yeah, nobody had a problem with these allegations before.
Nobody reported them or complained or anything.
Everyone just sat quietly waiting for this big pharma situation to happen so then they could release the information.
Get them!
Get them!
Yeah.
It's perfectly reasonable.
Okay, as Deacon Calvin Robinson, another prominent British transphobe.
Oh gosh!
Yes, I know him, unfortunately.
I know of him.
I don't know him.
He thinks that it's extremely silly to say that Brand amassed a bunch of followers as cover for his bad behavior, which I think it's just funny because he put a mind-blown emoji and then a clown emoji after that.
He's like, oh yeah, of course, that's what happened.
Whereas the other feminists, the other gender-critical feminists are like, no, that is what happened.
Yeah, so what's he implying?
What's the real story according to him?
The real story.
He doesn't really want to talk about what the real story is.
He's just saying that you should be considered innocent until proven guilty.
Obviously.
Oh, the other really good one is this guy, Gaslighting Services.
I don't know him, but he's a gender critical blue check.
And he wants everyone to know that Russell Brand is being treated in a similar fashion to J.K.
Rowling.
And it's sad that some of the gender critical feminists don't see them as the same.
Wow!
Way to throw J.K.
Rowling under the bus!
He thinks that he's elevating all of them, right?
So yeah, so Frances Wheatman was like, that comparison is so ludicrous, it's offensive.
Because she thinks that J.K.
Rowling is good, she called J.K.
Rowling's deal a belief in safeguarding and biological sex, right?
Which is lovely.
All I said was that we should keep children safe.
Oh, this window is open.
And then what Russell Brain did, obviously, was sex crimes.
And then the guy comes back and is saying, no, I'm showing you that the same thing happens to all of these people if they question any of the various state-sponsored narratives.
Trans, Ukraine, climate, vaccines, immigration, etc.
If you are offended by the truth, I can't help that.
Okay, so yeah.
So if people say... If people say offensive things or do sex crimes, it's all kind of under the same umbrella.
It's fucking absurd.
you know, to stop him from telling the truth about vaccines.
It's fucking absurd, like how they even buy that themselves.
Well, let me tell you.
Let's ask.
This is just like the research that I did on academics that get in trouble for sexual misconduct.
That like, you know, a defense system gets rolled out, they get op-eds and podcasts and YouTube documentaries All about how their findings were so challenging to the woke orthodoxy that the system had to bring them down with these allegations.
And that becomes the narrative.
Fucking unbelievable.
But yeah, totally believable, actually.
Yeah.
So then we also had a bunch of gender critical people who Um, took this Russell Brand news and all they wanted to do was talk about Owen Jones, uh, who's a British... Oh yeah, using it to target, like, the left, right?
Like, because... Or the perceived left.
They reviewed each other's books, right?
So they, they each, uh, Russell Brand's Revolution and Owen Jones's, I forget what his book is called, um, something like The Establishment, um, they each have a blurb from the other of, like, this is amazing!
And then Owen Jones also hosted like a panel for the Guardian that Russell Brand was the main speaker at.
And so they're just using photos and clips of those two things over and over and over again.
And it's all they want to talk about.
They don't want to talk about the victims.
They don't want to talk about the crimes.
They don't really even want to talk about Russell Brand that much.
They just want to talk about Owen Jones and Billy Bragg.
And then my My favorite is Hadley Freeman, right?
Who, uh, I forget where she works.
She's American, right?
Hadley Freeman.
Um, anyway, she wants to talk about Owen Jones and how bad Owen Jones is by extension.
And then on the very same day, she also, uh, reposted an article about why Woody Allen is innocent.
So we can tell where her values are.
Oh my God.
Wow.
Okay.
Let me ask Jack, our British correspondent for what he's been seeing over there on the Island.
Hello.
Hello everybody.
Hello.
Okay.
So you want my Island perspective?
Yes.
But can you turn your volume down a little bit?
You just sound really loud.
I'll just move the mic further away.
How's that?
Oh, perfect.
Yeah, that's much better.
Clearer.
Okay.
Good.
Yeah, I mean, British press is the British press.
You know, they do what they do.
After years of effectively covering up for the guy.
And excusing what he does, because I think what Caitlin said was great.
He's been doing this in the open for a long time, and you too, the wolf in wolf's clothing, that's great too.
I mean, that's what he's been.
I remember when the news first broke, my feeling was just, well, we knew this, didn't we?
But not really, because when you read the list of new accusations, it's It's absolutely horrifying.
There were moments reading it where I was almost physically sick.
Some of the stuff in there.
And it is worse.
It is a lot worse than we knew.
But at the same time, it's not surprising.
It's one of those things where it's horrifying, but it's not surprising.
And the British press, as I say, and media generally, after literally decades now of Covering for the guy, either in plain sight or just not talking about stuff.
They've switched to, you know, feeding frenzy mode.
So it's just, it's pretty much what they do.
And one of the things that's happening over here is that various outlets or media sources or whatever, whatever you want to say, they're turning it into an anti BBC thing.
Yeah.
It is.
I mean, the BBC hired the guy and let him get away with all sorts of dreadful stuff while he was working for them.
But so did loads of people, you know, and I think the BBC are the only people who actually fired him for his conduct.
You know, I'm not praising the BBC because they only did it when he offended a celebrity and the newspapers ginned up an outrage cycle about it.
But they did fire him for his conduct and they're basically the only people in the British media You know, loads of them platforming the guy and employing him, whoever did that, but they're of course turning it into a, oh, the BBC this, the BBC that, you know, questions to answer, scandal, controversy, et cetera, because they all hate, all the private media outlets in Britain hate the BBC because it's ostensibly a public company.
So yeah, that's really the inflection here.
Yeah, you know, I saw an interesting clip from Douglas Murray on this topic.
He was on Piers Morgan.
And, you know, at first I was, like, surprised because he was not defending Brand at all.
And he was like, yeah, well, some of us didn't think he was great.
And I was like, wow, OK, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then he's like, because, you know, and then he took the chance to blame the left and the Guardian and whoever he perceives as the left.
Right.
And that's That's his angle, right?
He's like, no, no, no, this is the left's fault.
And then he went on to talk about how, you know, it's good that, you know, he's getting called out for this shit now and he hopes to see, like, more people taking allegations seriously.
Again, I'm like, whoa, Douglas, how am I agreeing with you?
What's happening?
And then he changes it to the... He changes it to the, um...
Muslim grooming gangs angle.
Yeah, I saw a couple headlines about that.
Oh, hang on.
I just disconnected.
Just give me one second.
I'll take up that pointing to the left.
So some of the gender critical feminists who are upset about being told they have to respect due process
Um, and presume innocence and whatever, which they were correctly mad about that, but then they would say, oh yeah, the people telling me to do that are anarchists, or they're speaking leftoidies, and so they would again, they're pointing to the left, uh, even though it's, the call is coming from within the house, it's their own male allies, and some of their female allies, Sal Grover, who made that, um, the anti-trans dating app for lesbians,
She wants due process.
She wants presumption of innocence.
Blair White wants presumption of innocence.
But they are strictly looking to the left.
They're saying it's leftist and anarchist.
Yeah, we're hearing a lot of the innocent till proven guilty stuff.
Elon was, because of course Elon immediately rushed to Brand's defense, you know, because One entitled right-wing man-child is going to cover for another.
But he's been doing that innocent until proven guilty thing.
Which, yeah, in court.
In court, Elon.
That's in court.
Right.
We don't have to be bound by... You know, everybody knows this.
We don't have to be bound by innocent until proven guilty.
We can make up our own minds.
Well, Blaire White says it's a slippery slope if we decide that we don't like him.
In public opinion, who knows what will happen after.
And another gender critical user was saying that, you know, saying that we think that he did it is the same as lynching him publicly.
And that is not the same thing, actually.
Yeah.
Saying that we think he's a bad guy.
At the same time, all these people are Elon Musk, in particular, is talking about the ADL and George Soros and everything, because he's going further and further to the Nazi right, essentially.
I don't remember the ADL being found guilty of ruining Twitter in court.
I don't remember George Soros in court being found guilty of undermining Western civilization.
They're trying to, they're doing, the right generally are doing this gigantic sort of larp of, you know, impeaching Biden.
You know, and I'm not a fan of Biden, but... Sorry, I'm so sorry to interrupt.
I just managed to reconnect again, so I just wanted to ask if that messed up the space, or if you could... I kept getting a phone call that was not letting up, and it was ruining my connection with my earpods, so...
Yeah, was the space okay?
I think so, yeah.
Yeah, I think so.
We were talking to each other.
There was no, like, yeah, you could not hear me talking on the phone?
No.
No.
Okay, good.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry, I interrupted.
Please continue.
That's okay, I was just running through the usual litany of right-wing hypocrisy, you know.
At the same time, they're saying innocent until proven guilty about Russell Brand.
Because this left-wing, right-thing thing, re-brand, is interesting.
I'd like to get onto that maybe later.
But yeah, at the same time they're doing that, the entire sort of US right is doing this gigantic larp about Joe Biden essentially being the head of an international crime family and impeaching him despite the fact that they don't appear to have any evidence of anything at all.
It's just pretty standard right-wing hypocrisy.
Just constant.
Yeah, it is constant.
I mean, the question of how much to focus on right-wing hypocrisy is definitely really interesting just because they know that they're being hypocrites.
In fact, like, not being required to adhere to logic is kind of a feature, not a bug, right, of the movement.
And so, you know, of course, of course, they're looking at all of these issues from whatever angle most benefits them in the moment, and then they'll change their values completely around.
Because the goal is power, number one, and everything else is secondary.
Yeah, yeah, and yeah, I just feel though that pointing out the hypocrisy is still, while it may be useless in terms of shaming right-wingers, I feel like it's still useful for people who are on the fence, who don't properly see these things for what they are, and just to point out for others, you know?
I mean, you've got to hope so.
For solidarity, right?
like we're making ourselves feel better.
It's one of those things that it often is, sorry.
No, go on, go on.
I was just going to say, it's one of those things that often is pointless and it's a, it's a, it's an endless exhausting task, but you kind of got to do it, partly for solidarity and partly because you, you can't let some of these outrageous things go unaddressed.
So, I think the thing is to constantly point out their factual impoverishment and their hypocrisy and double standards and everything, but not expect too much from it.
Certainly not expect them to kind of wither away under the onslaught of reality or anything like that.
Yeah, yeah.
No, I just think that it's good to have them on record, or, you know, for people that might be on the fence, that's about it.
But yeah, we can't expect them to be embarrassed by their inconsistencies like a normal, regular person would.
Am I able to share tweets on here?
I forget how that works.
Yeah, you can, but I don't know how to.
It used to be obvious, and Elon made everything worse.
Okay, well, I can always tell you what Julia Serrano said who I really like about the Russell brand and hypocrisy thing specifically.
So she said in the wake of the brand news, I'm seeing a new wave of grooming hypocrisy charges that typically take the following form, right?
A person calls trans or LGBTQ plus people groomers, then they show support for a celebrity or politician who literally grooms minors, and therefore aren't they hypocritical?
And she says, so I must point out yet again, while most of us reserve the term grooming for instances involving actual CSA, conservatives and fascist adjacent people, e.g. gender critical or turst, use it as a general synonym for contamination or corruption, use it as a general synonym for contamination or corruption, which typically takes the following form.
Their in-group is imagined to be upstanding, untainted, and pure, whereas the stigmatized counterparts are contaminated and contagious and capable of corrupting and thereby converting members of their in-group.
So it's ideological grooming, right, that they are concerned about.
And these are conversations that I've watched like James Lindsay and Chris Rufo have in public about what grooming really is.
They deliberately conflate it and leave it sort of vague too, right?
Exactly.
And that's how they justify to themselves that a guy, you know, You know, dating and having sex with a teenager is not something to get upset about, but teaching kids that like trans people or regular people is.
I think that's great, and I often feel with this sort of thing that the hypocrisy and the double standards are kind of the point.
I mean, you point them out as if For other people looking on, maybe people will see it and see the bankruptcy of it and that'll be helpful, but for the right themselves, as you say, they know they're being hypocritical and their audience all know that they're being hypocritical as well.
The performance of hypocrisy is kind of the point because what they're saying, I think, is yeah, well we can just We can just condemn who we don't like and forgive who we do like, and we don't care.
Because it's all like a big power move.
It's just like, yeah, we want it our own way all the time.
Our side is our side.
We're going to throw you to the wolves if we don't like you, defend you if we do, and deal with it.
Well, they love to use the tools that they criticize the opposition for using against the opposition.
They think that's a very fun win, right?
And so with the Owen Jones thing, right, when they were pointing out the couple of times that they've shared a space with Russell Brand, Owen Jones was like, okay, so you're using a Guilt by Association fallacy against me.
And that's really weird, because you always yell about Guilt by Association whenever I point out that you like, yes, invited the far right to your event or whatever, on purpose.
And Bessie Braddock said, that's the point.
Owen Jones is a big fan of guilt by association.
Hopefully this will teach him a lesson.
I doubt it though.
He has zero self-awareness.
And so all of this stuff all about how Owen Jones is the worst because he met Russell Brands sometimes.
They're enjoying it a lot that they're using this like faulty Yeah, they don't even understand it though, right?
So a lot of times when someone is saying, well, you invited this person to your event, and therefore that kind of taints the whole event.
Yeah, they don't even understand it though, right?
So a lot of times when someone is saying, well, you invited this person to your event and therefore that kind of taints the whole event.
That's like a current thing.
that they're okay with or looking the other way on at best yeah that is the association whereas if you go years in the past and someone who didn't know this information about a bad actor has uh associated with them yeah then that is just that that doesn't that's not the same thing right i mean personally i have no idea how much owen jones knew about brand's behavior and i do yeah
i i do have a lot of hard feelings towards people who were in his vicinity and didn't do or say anything right uh yeah Yeah, yeah.
And in the case that that applies to Owen Jones, then fuck Owen Jones, right?
Absolutely.
But saying that they wrote a blurb on each other's book or they shared a stage one time at the behest of the Guardian, that is like, that's some weak shit, guys.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I don't know, who else did you cover in regards to the brand situation while I was away?
Oh, I don't remember who we talked about, but I do want to give a little bit of attention to the gender critical people who decided that it was gender ideology's fault.
What a surprise.
Particularly, I found this one really egregious.
I think it was, was it Leslie Simmons?
Hang on, sorry.
I'm just trying to load everything up so I get it all right.
Yeah, so Dr. Leslie Simmons, who has dinosaurs in her PF, in her, like, username and keep prison single sex, so we know she's very dedicated.
She says, Brand was using Alcoholics Anonymous to predate That type of behavior was why Alcoholics Anonymous set up single sex groups.
They are now single gender and everyone knows what that means.
Hashtag sex, not gender.
Hashtag safeguarding.
So she is using Russell Brand, a man.
But wait, what?
Going to Alcoholics Anonymous to find, like, you know, victims as a reason to keep trans women out of women's Alcoholics Anonymous groups.
But Russell Brand is not trans.
No.
And that never seems to be very important.
No.
That reminds me of that thing Graham Linehan said about how, you know, because of gender ideology, if Jimmy Savile were around now, he'd be living in a groomer's paradise and he'd just be able to... And you're listening to that and you're screaming at the screen, but he did, Graham.
He did live in paradise.
Yes.
Long before this gender ideology that you're so upset about arose.
He did, he was doing it for years and he got away with it.
Can you move your mic back again just a bit?
Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
No, no, no problem.
Yeah, yeah, and you know Savile again, not trans, just a predator, cis one.
But what they're ignoring, right, is that the media landscape that both Savile and Brand were Thriving in was like a bad boys paradise.
That was like the way that it was it was not about Trans people it was not about gender fluidity It was not about any of the things that they are obsessed with right now It truly was about like boys being boys Yeah, and apparently channel 4 like when they received complaints and Well, isn't that how it always is, though?
It's the feminist killjoy effect, right?
they would take female staff off of the crew if Brand was hosting.
So like, who is that punishing really, right?
Like women who've worked hard to get to that position and wanna work on the shows, no, they should be removed 'cause this creep is hosting. - Well, isn't that how it always is though?
It's the feminist killjoy effect, right?
You notice the problem, you speak up about the problem, you are seen as the problem and you get moved out.
Yep.
Yep.
Yeah.
And also, I don't know if we mentioned the fact that Brands Management knew that he had a teenage girlfriend and advised him not to be seen with her in public.
Oh my gosh.
I know.
I, well, like talk about enabling.
He dropped her off for her GCSEs.
Right.
And I was like, Oh, this reminds me of didn't Jerry Seinfeld do that too for his teenage girlfriend?
Fucking gross.
There must be a term for a society which just normalizes and accepts rape.
I don't know.
Somebody should think of a catchy term for that.
You're very dangerously close to what I like to call gender ideology and I don't support that.
I mean, surely no one would oppose such a term that describes a problem that is, you know, systemic so perfectly.
Can I just get up on my little linguistic soapbox for a second and tell you how upsetting it is?
Please do.
If you're a linguistics grad student in 2015, just picture it, and you've got your little blonde highlights in, and your new blazer, and you're so excited to learn about linguistics, and you go to your classroom, and you learn about language ideologies, which are beliefs that people have about the way that language works.
So things like, it's bad grammar to end a sentence with a preposition, or People who speak a language natively are more competent than people who don't.
Or, you know, like those kinds of beliefs.
Those are called language ideologies.
Cool, okay, I got it.
Now you have graduated that class, and you go to your language and gender class, and you learn about something called gender ideologies, which are things that people believe about the way that gender works.
Like that males are naturally more aggressive, or, you know, that women speak more indirectly, Or that women speak more than men.
And you're like, oh yes, those are gender ideologies, I understand that.
And then you go out into the world, and they're like, gender ideology, that's grooming.
And it should be illegal also.
And if you have gender ideology, you should be removed from your job.
And you're also hearing that gender ideology is everything that a certain group of people don't like.
Everything is gender ideology.
In the meantime, they're saying things like trans people should be monitored and imprisoned because trans women have The male propensity for aggression or whatever.
And you're like, so that right there is a gender ideology.
Like, I swear I just heard a gender ideology come out of your mouth.
And yet, no, because it means a completely different thing.
Yep.
So that's very frustrating that like a phrase that is a normal part of my life and my work has become unusable out in the world.
Right, like, and they did that, that's by design, right?
They just need a phrase that they... It's more difficult to talk about what they're doing.
Yeah, and they did that with CRT, right?
Whether it applies or not, that is the term that is used to toxify all discussions on race and racism.
Yeah, it very much feels like splitting the zone with shit.
Yes.
Yeah.
But, um, Speaking of right-wing hypocrites, have we talked about Ben Shapiro being an apologist for a literal groomer?
Oh, yeah.
I was watching that earlier.
Whoa.
Your mic is super effective.
How's that?
Is that any better?
Still very loud.
I think it sounds all right.
- I just sit on the other side of the room.
- How's that?
Is that any better?
- It's still very loud.
- I think it sounds all right.
I don't know.
- Yeah?
I don't know.
Maybe it's just my earbuds that are stupid.
I don't know.
Okay.
Maybe.
He is my favorite Jack, as you are my favorite Caitlin.
So nice.
So I am not sure.
I feel like Jack has a better perspective on what it's like in other countries.
But like here in the United States, I think people have a hard time really coming to grips with and understanding the various subcultures of Like right-wing America that feel like children's bodies and women's bodies are just property and should be controlled by the other people in their household, i.e.
the men.
And how very much that ethos kind of permeates the way that they talk about sex, sexuality, gender, women, children, all of that.
This whole, like, groomer hypocrisy thing.
These are people who believe that they should be in charge of the behaviors, the gender presentation, and the bodies of the people in their dominion, as they consider it.
Right.
Very kind of religiously inspired, almost.
Yeah.
And I think it takes almost, like, growing up in an environment like this to really understand how true that is.
People who didn't kind of think it sounds fantastical.
And I'm one generation removed from it.
I was raised by parents who are nice and normal, but their families were not.
And so I have seen that attitude play out and access to like your children's bodies and their private spaces, taking away their privacy, all of that stuff is very normal and is in fact the only way to like properly train up a child.
Right, don't even give them a chance to be called what they want to be called amongst their peers.
You gave them the name for a reason, they don't have the right.
Take off their bedroom door off of its frame if you have to.
If they can't be trusted, then they have to be surveilled at all times.
Take them out of school if the school is introducing them to these horrible ideas.
That phrase, to train up a child, that's actually from the Pearls book, isn't it?
Yeah.
The book of sort of religious fundamentalist advice to people on how to basically psychologically and emotionally and physically abuse your children so that they grow up to be religious fundamentalists like you, which has sold millions and millions of copies, depressingly.
It sure has.
Yeah.
And if you read it and you're a person who thinks that children are people, you will cry because it is some of the coolest stuff I've ever seen.
Just like passed off as normal parenting advice.
Yeah.
And it's because of the world we live in, it's intensified with girls.
That's why you get these endless stories about like the Duggars, you know, these endless stories.
Girls being mass abused inside these Christian sects and cults and things.
That's right.
Which is, it certainly happens in Britain, but it's less, I think it happens less in Britain because we have less intense religiosity, less intense Christian sects and things like that here.
But yeah.
So anyway, that is all A way to frame what happens with people like Ben Shapiro, who will call everybody else a groomer for the crime of being themselves in a place where children might be, or allowing children to be aware that other kinds of people live in the world.
Yeah, that there is diversity, that people can be gay or trans.
While condoning literal abuse of children's bodies and minds.
Right.
The thing with Ben is that it's all about the moral status or the spiritual status of the men.
I listened to his apologia for Brand and It's all, I mean, the thing Caitlin's talking about, one of the most visible manifestations of that, I think, is this thing where when men are discussing rape or whatever, they say things like, well, I have daughters or I have a sister and things like that.
And it's entirely about their feelings.
And really what they're saying is, you know, if somebody did that to my property, I'd be very angry.
And that's what it's like in Ben's apologia for For Brand, it's all about Brand's moral status and, you know, he used to be a vile person but since then he's changed and he's become a seeker and somebody who's trying... because Ben likes him now because Russell Brand is now a right winger.
Which he denied!
He actually...
He said he used to be left-wing when he engaged in this behavior but then he's like and then the left-wing media were paying him but then he also simultaneously said but he's not right-wing and then continues to like defend him he's my friend and you know he's changed so like what?
The fact that he's raped multiple people is okay because he's your friend?
Well, you know, Slimy Ben, he doesn't quite say it, but he's implying, of course, that it's a, you know, it's a deep state hit job or something like that.
The utter nonsense that loads of people are... Sorry, that was also him giving in a little bit of identity work, right, where he couldn't resist a chance to give himself some rationality points at the same time, to say, like, and also, look, I'm friends with a guy who was left-wing and who's not right-wing now, but I could see I can see the points that he's making because of how great I am at thinking, basically.
Right, right, but he's also vile when he was left-wing.
When he was left-wing, of course.
Yeah, but he's not right-wing now, or anything.
He massively overstates the importance of brand on the left, certainly on the British left, but they're all doing that.
The journalist Jonathan Cook did a Did an article about this on his blog, and from reading that, again, it's very slimy.
He goes sort of repeatedly, he makes these points, and then he says, that doesn't mean I'm condoning rape and sexual abuse, even though that's exactly what he's doing all the way through when it's done by somebody he likes.
And one of the things, as I say, from reading it, you'd think that Brand was like this Incredible, like a revolutionary leader, you know.
You'd think he was our modern Lenin and capitalism was just about to topple under Brand's onslaught, you know.
And the reality is that this guy is nowhere near, even if you grant that he's left-wing, which I don't, he's right-wing.
I think he's a fascist, personally.
Even if you grant that he's left-wing, he's far from the biggest left-wing YouTuber or anything like that.
He doesn't have this influence that these people are talking, you know, all these dark mutterings about, well, why now?
Why now?
It's because he's getting... I mean, firstly, they say, why now?
And then they don't tell you why now, because there's nothing particular about Brand at the moment.
He's been doing the same stuff about Big Pharma and vaccines and all that for ages now.
And secondly, why him particularly?
Why did the evil globalists who run the world single him out rather than any of the other left-wingers on YouTube or rumble with bigger channels?
It's completely incoherent, and they know it.
Well, it's because he was, you know, hang on, I'll get there.
It's not, it's not going to materialize, right?
Right, but it is a useful, if you don't think about it too hard, if you squint, it's a useful diversion. - Yeah, and I mean, Ina was asking earlier about the response in Britain.
One of the interesting things has been the variety of responses, certainly from talking head type people, because Brand has done... He's far from a stupid guy.
He's very smart.
One of the things people say about these guys when they go off the edge is they're stupid or something like that.
They're saying stuff like that about Kanye now that he's gone full Nazi.
No, these guys aren't stupid.
They know what they're doing.
And they're actually very similar figures, I think, because Brand's so-called revolutionary politics was always that exact kind of Love Everybody thing that Kanye uses to cover up his anti-Semitism.
Love Everybody, including Nazis.
It was exactly that sort of wishy-washy New Age stuff that Brand's doing as well.
But he's managed to position himself in this very fuzzy brand.
positioned himself in a very fuzzy zone politically and I think genuinely, certainly in Britain, there's a lot of confusion among the sort of political commentariat about exactly where he falls which is why you see this variety of responses like Douglas Murray is not, you know, he's not on Brown's side and Jacob Rees-Mogg who's this horribly right-wing politician we have in this country, in case people don't know, he's been saying, well, you know,
He was behaving like that because of a lack of moral fiber and a lack of Christian conscience and stuff like this.
And then of course you have Andrew Neil and Piers Morgan weighing in on it but it's quite equivocal and there's a lot of disagreement on this sort of reactionary British media side and it's because they don't know how to place him because he has done a very effective job of Of muddying the waters of where his politics lies.
Maybe a little before, but I feel like now it's super clear.
All his thumbnails are reactionary, obviously right-wing.
Chats with Tucker Carlson and all sorts of awful right-wingers.
Yeah.
He's spoken to Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson and Jordan Peterson.
He's in that club.
He's in the right-wing media influencer club, totally.
But a lot of the stuff that he puts out, a lot of the right-wing conspiracy theory nonsense he puts out, that's stuff that a lot of people who think they're on the left think are left-wing issues you know because because they're cloaked as such he he does his yeah stuff and his covid conspiracy stuff under the rubric of well we've got to criticize big farmer and um he does his apologia for putin under the under the guise of
well we've got to uh criticize american imperialism right and stuff like that yeah and it's not it's not so cloaked that the right generally don't know what he's doing but a lot of people on the supposed left they are fooled by it or they let themselves by it.
Right, because it feels aesthetically right.
It's got the sort of the dressing of something that they feel good about.
And also, you know, he's in the same audience capture cycle that they all are in, right?
He knew he needed to find an audience that wouldn't believe the allegations against him, that would stick with him no matter what.
And those are the people who are also, unfortunately, going to expect you to continue the radicalization process.
Yeah.
Can I just go back to Shapiro before we go further?
Because I don't want to let that go without actually putting enough attention on the kinds of things that Shapiro said.
So firstly, he said he was, you know, a good friend of his and that he's remade himself Somehow that is supposed to excuse what he's done in the past.
He says that, you know, this is just a he says he said she said situation and there's no like DNA evidence.
So how can we really believe it?
Whereas like, you know, there are multiple allegations from different people.
There's been a police report, there's been a victim that's gone to a rape crisis center.
Right.
And then Shapiro floats the conspiracy that Brand is targeted for political reasons.
He says, like, oh, you know, he was left-wing when he engaged in this behavior, and that's when that media was paying him.
But now that he's sort of crossed over, now they're releasing all of this.
You know, the timing is suspicious.
And it's like, again, think this through.
They had all this information, but they're like, no, no, no, he politically aligns with us, so we'll just Sit on this and we'll wait for him.
Investigation began four years ago.
Yeah, to believe all these things, you would have to not understand how the criminal justice system works or how journalism works, right?
Because this intense focus on, like, well, we don't have DNA evidence, like, as if that's the only thing that has ever convicted somebody.
It's not even in the top list of, you know, things that convict people.
And then also, yeah, like, Knowing that investigative journalism like this takes years to finish, we know that he had the heads up about this wave coming at him a long time ago.
So you have to just pretend that's not true, basically, to believe this.
Right.
Clearly, reading the Sunday Times investigation, it's clear that unless they're literally just making stuff up, which I don't believe, even the Sunday Times, it's clear that there's loads of evidence.
One of the accusations, they've got screenshots of messages back and forth between him and the survivor of the attack, where he basically admits it.
He apologizes for doing what she accuses him of doing.
Yeah.
Is Russell Brand now trying to frame Russell Brand because Russell Brand's over the target?
I mean, come on.
Yeah, the part of him that's still left-wing is trying to take down the part of him that's not.
That's great.
There was even a tweet about, like, someone floating the idea that this was all because Wales had imposed some, like, new speed limits or something.
And so...
Um, I don't know.
Oh yeah, that was my favorite one!
That was so good.
So ridiculous.
The human mind is a wonder.
They're just, like, people are just pinning it on their own personal, like, thing, right?
Oh, they sat on this information until, you know, whales came out and did this.
Love how the Russell Brand story comes out when the Welsh government is implementing its 20 mile an hour zone across the country, which they admit is an attempt to stop people using cars.
So it's a 15 minute city thing, right?
I'm just disappointed Wales uses miles.
I know, right?
Goodness.
What are you doing over there, guys?
Yeah.
Um, but yeah, so this is Ben Shapiro, man, like Ben Shapiro, who screams about children's shows, grooming children, uh, defending an actual, you know, pedo groomer.
Like he also said specifically, like, you know, it's, it's a creepy behavior.
Uh, but is it criminal behavior?
Because the age of consent is like 16 in England.
So.
It's like, fuck, dude, what are you making excuses for?
The grownups in the room are talking about whether that law should be different or, you know, like, what should be done about that.
He's just, like, using it as a full stop, like, well, he didn't commit a crime.
Yeah, and this is... His style of argumentation is fundamentally pedantry.
That's how Ben Shapiro argues.
He finds little facts like that, and then he makes... He doesn't argue, he just makes pedantic points.
The age of consent is 16, ergo he didn't break the law.
Yeah.
Okay, and... This is what right-wingers do, often.
Yeah.
Yeah, like, why is that the end of the conversation?
Yeah.
This is the guy who finds fault with Blue's Clues for fuck's sake.
Blue's Clues he was mad at.
The children's show.
That's because having the complete control over the mind and body of the children in your household is good, okay?
And getting them exposed to any ideology that you didn't personally pre-approve is the worst thing that can happen.
And you have to go to war about it.
Yeah.
Yeah, totally.
And then Elon, Elon who, you know, said that he was focused on removing like, uh, I don't know, child porn from Twitter and then let on a guy, let back on a guy who literally shared child porn.
That, that Elon, he also is like, you know, we're not going to suspend a brand innocent before innocent until proven guilty as a wise and fair Maxim and then he was like, you know, um, what else did he say?
He was like, uh, he also did the, he's been targeted for like, you know, some kind of, I don't know, political views or something.
He floated that bullshit.
And then Matt Walsh was outraged that Brand's channel was demonetized.
These are all the anti-grooming constantly on the fact that any LGBTQ person is grooming your kids, coming for your kids.
They have a literal groomer here that they're defending.
I just, I cannot get over that.
That is like more blatant.
At the exact same time, you've got Lauren Bobert giving a handjob in public to her boyfriend, you know.
You can see children in the audience in the footage.
Despite all of the evidence, published, peer-reviewed evidence, That sex education in schools has an impact on children's safety, right?
That it helps them report and prevent abuse.
They still want to take it out of schools.
And the reason for that is because they don't want children to know that stuff.
Yeah, because they want to abuse them, essentially.
They want to have access.
Yeah, they want to have all the tools in their toolkit for coercion and control.
Because we're fundamentally a colonialist society.
Yeah.
But this level of blatant, blatant hypocrisy, I think they've crossed a new level recently.
Like, I don't know if you saw that video clip of Bobert, like, where they had that clip from the theater, and juxtaposed with her, like, speaking About how they're coming for your kids, and this grooming must stop, and sexually inappropriate behavior.
It was just so bizarre to see, like, you know, her giving someone a handjob while she's, you know, at the same time as hearing her talking about that stuff.
Yeah, it really is sick to watch her tell, like, drag queens to stay away from children, when the person who's staying away from children is her.
Yes, and also the guy that was, you know, feeling up her breasts in the theater, he apparently is a guy who owns a drag-friendly bar, and she's fine with him.
Nothing means anything, it seems like.
He said the lesson she learned from that whole thing was don't date Democrats.
Yeah, please.
I even doubt that he's a Democrat, honestly.
He's just a business owner.
Like, who would date Lauren Boebert?
Right, if you had any values at all, you would not.
Yeah.
You know when she's lying because her lips are moving.
It's just, it's really something to see these two stories and how people that are going on about groomers usually have come out in these situations.
Yeah, that's because all of those values are window dressing.
It's all for power.
Yes.
Yeah.
And again, it's kind of a power move.
It's kind of a, yes, we're being hypocritical, so what?
What are you going to do about it?
She had a very, I can do what I want attitude the whole way through, right?
Do you know who I am?
Flipping the bird.
Yeah.
It's like with the 2020 election being rigged.
What they're actually saying when they say the 2020 election was rigged is not that.
They all know that's not true.
What they're saying is, we should be in power whatever people vote for.
Elections shouldn't have any effect on us being in power.
We should just be in power perpetually.
That's what it means.
They all know that.
And the more hypocritical you are, the more that message gets hammered home, I think.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, and also on the Boebert topic, the Fetterman controversy they've tried to create about his wearing shorts.
Right.
To work.
It's just absurd, like, as if this is a comparable controversy.
And then he tweeted something about, oh, maybe if I grab the hug, During work hours, or I forget what his exact tweet was, but something about grabbing the hog.
Maybe they'd make me a folk hero or something.
Right.
It's like they're filling a quota or a demanding schedule, you know, to provide a quota of bullshit rage stories for the right-wing media to just run with for a cycle.
That's what the right, the public right, that just seems to be their job, provide some new bit of bullshit.
Right.
Yeah.
It's like the tan suit.
Nate Silver is the one who said, I'm starting a new political party for people who don't give a shit either about how John Fetterman dresses or what Lauren Boebert does on Twitter.
She's like, Olympic-level sizing.
Honestly.
That is very Andrew Yang.
And then Matthew Iglesias, of course, chimes in, I want a fourth party that thinks both of these stories are funny.
And it's like, no, no, one of them is funny and the other one is a sex crime.
And that...
And I want a fifth political party that puts both of those guys in jail.
I am so sick of hearing from them.
Wait, you want to put Matt Iglesias and Nick over?
They can go.
Oh, okay.
They can at least go to Twitter jail.
And Andrew Yang as well.
Yeah, him too.
Why not?
Yes.
Let's just clean up.
Twitter kind of is jail.
Yeah, it's hell and the devils are all here right now.
Yeah, yeah.
Jack's made a bit of an escape, but you know, I brought him back today.
I apologize.
I'm just popping back in.
Anything for you, Ina.
Thank you.
But also I wanted to address the, there's like some kind of leftist people that are saying that criticizing Bobert in the theater is sex negative.
Is sex negative?
I really don't think so because sex positivity does not include like getting off in front of children.
Sex positivity is generally pretty concerned with consent.
And that, like, everyone involved in the sex act be happy to be there.
And that is not what happened in this case.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And now that I guess we've talked about most of the related stories, unless you guys had anything to add, I thought we could quickly open up the floor for other speakers.
Did you want to add anything before we do that?
No?
Okay.
All right.
So yeah, I guess we have, we had a couple of requests, but now we have one.
We're the Union Jack.
I'm scared of that one, but let's, let's, let's risk it.
All right.
Let's see.
What do you have to say?
All right.
Hello.
Food poisoning.
He's working on it.
Oh, he's gone.
Oh, I see.
Anybody else?
Oh, okay.
Does anybody else have anything to say on this topic?
Yeah, John did.
Yeah, OK.
All right.
Hello, John.
We'll see.
It takes time.
Oh, there he is.
Hello?
John?
Can you hear us?
John, you're muted.
Okay, now I'm finally connected, I can hear you again.
Yeah.
All right, hello.
Hi, yeah, I just had a question that, I don't know, it was kind of more appropriate earlier when the conversation was more focused around like the, their hypocrisy, particularly on the grooming issue.
And I think that the two are actually kind of logically related, because to me, it seems that they rely a lot.
I mean, like we, you know, you've talked a lot about the way this is all just a play for power, right?
And to me, they position themselves as parents, right?
Paternalistically, with regard to society.
You know, you listen to Michael Knowles or Ben Shapiro or any of these people, it's always that they know, right?
And they know better.
So they get to tell everyone else what to do.
Right?
And they don't really have to explain themselves because apparently, they explain themselves to a toddler.
You know what I'm saying?
And like, do you guys see that too?
I mean, do you see this?
How they're kind of positioned in this paternalistic manner, like, free them up to sort of be, do as I say, not as I do kind of types?
Yeah, absolutely.
It's very much because I said so.
And if you're like me, and you're also kind of in the parenting space, you can see they have a lot of disdain for things like gentle parenting and respectful parenting.
Because, like, when you said, like, you don't explain yourself to a toddler, I was like, well, I explain myself to my toddler all the time.
Because that's, like, the parenting philosophy that I that I have taken up, right, is that it's better for her.
Yeah, I was saying that more like from that perspective, that's how one would be.
But they just fundamentally do not respect that perspective, right?
They're in the because-I-said-so camp, and it's because authority is more important than anything else, because it's hard for them to conceive of like, we can't create a system in which everyone is always going the right way unless I have total control over them.
Yeah I think that's absolutely right.
That's what it's about.
It's about control.
I mean it's called patriarchy for a reason.
It depends on the patriarchal family at the bottom level all the way up through the entire system.
The pattern of male authority.
And like you said before, men are the only ones that have a real perspective and a real soul and a real brain.
Everything has to be filtered through their experience.
So rape is bad because I have daughters.
It's a great example of that.
Yeah.
And it's kind of a way of saying that the people with the power are the only ones whose opinion matters.
They should be in control.
What you think doesn't matter.
Because, of course, in patriarchy, that's men.
Or, you know, relatively speaking, on different levels.
And, yeah, it's just about saying It's the authoritarian mindset, isn't it?
Because that's just what right-wing politics is.
It's just anti-democracy, authoritarian mindset.
Right.
Well, and when the colonists came to the Americas, the way that they talked about the people who already lived here was childlike.
Childlike and feminine.
Those were the ways that they described them.
And that's for the exact same reason.
And didn't Peterson also recently say something like rape being a crime against women is not enough a deterrent?
So it should be like a crime against men's property?
Yeah, you should have to pay it like liability to the men in her life.
Like fucking...
Like, I just hear this stuff and I'm like, you know that people can hear you, right?
like how do you say this shit in public well and i remember being a teenager and watching russell brand stand up because again i was a nerdy kid who was like really into british comedy right so i watched his stand up and he even said uh his attitude towards women changed when he had a daughter and it's like you had women in your life before that like women existed in the same world as you your daughter to make you think that like maybe
maybe we should not be like as monumental of dicks and then of course he continued to be a dick but um he even he the fact that he was only able to even have that thought like looking at his baby yeah yeah Maybe that works for some men.
I don't know.
Maybe there are men who hate women and discount them and then they have a daughter or they meet a woman they like for the first time and they say, oh yeah, women are people after all.
Hey, how about that?
And maybe they grow from there and okay, great.
Most of the time, I think what they're actually saying is, you know, I now have a stake in women, you know, because I've got one.
I've got one that's my property now.
Though, you hear it about, like, oh, you know, I have a mother, how can I be a misogynist as well, right?
Like, they have to centre themselves, it's about what they have and who they have and, you know, who else uses this when accused of sexism is my pal.
Sam Harris, he talks about, you know, whenever he's like talking about how Me Too has gone too far or whatever, he always begins with, you know, I have two daughters and I was raised by a single mom.
So of course, how can I be, you know, anti-feminist or sexist or whatever he's being accused of that day.
But speaking of him, you know, what's highly interesting and amusing Is the fact that the guy has such a bad fucking record, such a bad judge of character he is, that everyone he's friends with or everyone he appears with eventually gets, um, I don't know, so embarrassing in some way or another.
Either they're totally anti-vaxx or just embarrassingly, openly fashy.
Sam Harris likes his Right wingery, a little more cloaked.
And then he just decided just a couple, I don't know, a couple of days ago, a couple of weeks ago to show up on Brands Podcast.
And at that time, we hadn't heard this story and I'm sure he didn't know.
But still, it's just funny because The guy is already known for making bad decisions with who he appears with or who he has on or who he associates with, like constantly.
That's his whole thing with the IDW.
He had to turn in his imaginary card.
Brand's content was already so egregiously bad by then.
Exactly!
Exactly!
I mean, he was already embarrassed by his buddy Majin Noir for being super anti-vaxxed then why go on Brand's show and legitimize that sh-t again?
Then why not entertain Bret Weinstein whom he said he won't debate on the subject, right?
Like, it's just a weird, weird move.
And then he also recently apologized to Majid Nawaz, you know, for being highly critical of his anti-vaxx BS.
So, I don't know, that guy's such a mess.
On the subject of what we were talking about, the male empathy for women conditional on them having a stake in female property ownership, that reminds me, I was talking earlier about how the BBC did fire Brand back in the day, but what they fired him about was that whole ridiculous thing where he made a Yeah, exactly.
He made a prank call to Andrew Sachs, the actor.
And the thing that's supposedly beyond the pale was that he told Andrew Sachs that he had slept with his granddaughter.
And of course, the press make it into this gigantic comedies too offensive thing and poor Andrew Sachs' feelings.
And of course, nobody at any point was concerned about the feeling of the woman involved, who was dragged into the public Spotlight.
It was about how Andrew Sachs felt about the fact that he'd been publicly told that somebody had slept with his granddaughter.
So there you go again.
It just runs through the entire story from the beginning.
Meanwhile, she said it was 10 years of torture.
Her experience was so bad that she had mental health issues.
She had to go to rehab.
She had the worst decade as a result of that, and the media did not care.
Yeah, she was on Pierce Morgan too just recently talking about, you know, how he's not so bad and, you know, but she believes the victims but, you know, he also is nice and sent her to rehab but, you know, part of rehab is that you have to make amends for your mistakes.
I don't know, she seemed a bit wishy-washy to me but, yeah.
Mustache Bob.
Oh, hi, I just wanted to say thanks for You're entertaining me while I'm changing the transmission on this bulldozer and I think my audio is probably too bad to speak too much.
But wouldn't it give you guys pause if you were in a political movement which required you to defend these awful people doing these awful things like Brand did?
I don't want to use any spicy words about the crimes he's done.
But I've seen people like Ben Shapiro and Harris, I think, was defending him.
I know Peterson was defending him.
Wouldn't that give you pause?
Did you say Harris was defending him?
I think he was.
I might be confused.
They all kind of blend together after a while.
Fair point.
I'm sorry.
But wouldn't that give you pause if your political movement required you to defend horrific crimes against women like that?
You would think.
Yeah, I, yeah, certainly.
And especially if you had to do it over and over again, like, and you're known as the anti-trafficking, anti-grooming kind of crew, but yeah, I don't know.
But I will say I haven't heard Harris on this subject yet, so.
I don't know.
The ability to do that is what marks out the good party man, isn't it?
It's the ability to master doublethink.
That's what makes the level plus good duck speaker.
Yeah, that's a great point.
Again, thanks for keeping me company while I'm changing this annoying part on this old machine.
Thanks.
Yeah, good luck with it, man.
Yeah, I was just thinking about how some of the people who don't They want to blame the left or they want to blame whoever, right?
So, some people decided they wanted to blame tribalism, right, for what happened.
Which is such, like, heterodox code for... It is, absolutely, and you can see it in the heterodox... I love it when people blame abstract nouns.
Oh, it's tribalism.
Oh, it's division, or something like that.
That's right.
I blame adverbs.
Yeah, it's their fault, really.
We should abolish them, as a linguist.
But the thing about using this word, tribalism, is that it immediately marks you as unserious, in my opinion.
Because what do you think tribes are?
What is this, like...
You're using the word tribe for a reason.
You're trying to make an allusion to a group of people that you think of as irrational and knee-jerk and, like, in-group only, and it just ties back to this, like, horrible evo-psych attitude.
And then, like, yeah, to say that people have in-group solidarity is, like, so banal as to be pointless.
And to say that like, yeah, people, but like to extend that to something like defending someone who's committed crimes against other people is, it beggars belief.
It doesn't make sense.
And, and it absolutely is just an attempt at both sides, right?
Because if you think the problem is polarization, and not that somebody is extremely egregiously and immorally wrong, Then you are not looking at the same set of facts.
Absolutely, yeah.
Yeah.
Alright, can we get DS, I think is next?
Yeah, I've always been mystified by the Russell brand, by his appeal.
I've never liked the guy, but I was just curious if anybody can tell me What's the... I'm not that familiar with this Mark Fisher guy, who I think is no longer alive.
But I know he wrote some essay praising brand or something.
I was just wondering if anybody can give background on that.
I don't know who that is.
I can, if you like.
Yeah, that'd be great.
Yeah, Mark Fisher was a leftist college lecturer, I believe, university lecturer and intellectual who had a blog in the early 2000s called K-Punk.
It was a very good, interesting blog.
And he is dead now.
He committed suicide a few years ago.
And his work is very interesting.
He's the man who coined the phrase capitalist realism, which has turned out to be a very useful concept, I think.
Sort of a condensation of the whole neoliberal, there is no alternative thing, but extended very, very usefully.
But one of his most controversial essays is called Leaving the Vampire's Castle or Escaping the Vampire's Castle or something like that.
Exiting, that's right, yeah.
And he's, in that, he's essentially, it's a very bad essay in my opinion.
It's one of the worst things he ever wrote.
It reeks of posters sickness, you know, and just coming off Twitter feeling sore because somebody criticized him.
And it's essentially an argument about sort of, well it's tribalism again, it's essentially an argument about left tribalism and left censoriousness and moralism and things like that.
And he sort of spins that into an argument.
It's pretty familiar really, it's the whole identity politics undermines the left because we should be having class solidarity sort of thing, just couched in very over-complicated ways and focused on social media.
But yeah, Russell Brand is a big part of that essay because, and again it was a long time before we had these horrific allegations.
But again, Russell Brand was Russell Brand.
We've kind of already always known who the guy was.
It was after he'd made his supposed left turn and started talking about revolution, you know, the need for revolution in, as I say, that particularly, you know, apolitical, depoliticized, we-need-to-love-everybody sort of way, you know.
Mark Fisher's defending him because he's supposedly a working class person, despite the fact that, as Mark Fisher says, he's a millionaire.
A millionaire media star by this point, according to Mark Fisher somehow.
I don't know how Fisher got here, because he's an intelligent guy.
But he thinks, you know, Russell Brand is a working-class voice and he's being sneered at and ignored by the left because the left is kind of bourgeois and moralistic, etc.
when we should be getting behind him because he's putting down establishment voices and stuff like that.
And it's a completely wrong-headed argument, I think.
Yeah, I wasn't trying to bash Fisher.
I need to read his... I mean, I'm just amazed to have discovered that there were people on the left that Like, regarded brand as some kind of like thought leader.
And I would watch him on TV.
This is going back years.
I'm just like, it's like a parody.
It's like, don't you know?
Oh, yeah.
It's about love.
And the system tells you it's like was a spinal tap.
It's like it's like spinal tap.
Yeah, he's so fake.
I mean, I hate this thing everybody does when something like this happens.
Everybody sort of goes, oh, I never liked him.
You wonder how Jimmy Savile, for instance, you wonder how he had the great big long successful career he had in Britain, because apparently nobody in Britain ever liked him.
It's really weird.
But I genuinely never did like Bran.
From the perspective of a person who was a teenage girl when he was just a stand-up, And who was a fan?
I was an actual, I was a fan.
I will admit that.
I'm brave enough.
And he would lose me when he would get into his like revolution stuff.
But like, I just, I liked his turn of phrase.
I liked his silliness.
I liked his sort of like non-threatening bad boy aesthetic, right?
The things the teenage girls like, which I'm sure helped him prey on us, right?
Yeah.
Those are things that we liked, right?
I don't, I was not a fan of the, yeah, when he would get into the big thought leader stuff, because I did not buy him.
The look, I think the look was really important, because he does have the, he, that, because that's what I remember struck me, I think it's with a lot of people the first time I saw him, is he has that whole pirate sort of look.
And that was always... Alright, I gotta...
Yeah.
And I set a hook, line, and sinker for the wolf and wolf's clothing thing, too.
Like, absolutely.
Yeah, I find that a really useful term.
But I've got to end the space in, like, five minutes, so I can probably take one more comment.
If it's quick, then maybe two.
So let's try to, okay, rationally dense.
You're up.
Hello.
Hi.
Hello.
Oh, so I'm kind of commenting on something that was brought up earlier.
There's this idea that, uh, you know, you end up having to defend all of these people who have done terrible things.
And I wonder to what extent, because, uh, something that often gets in responded to is like, well, where does it stop?
And, There is a very real sense in which, like, much of the mythology surrounding a lot of ideologies, and a lot of national ideologies especially, depends upon worshipping some people who are pretty objectively horrible people.
Like, you know, people will ask, well, you know, at what point do you go, well, you know, this guy was a rapist and therefore we can't celebrate him.
Okay, well, what about things Thomas Jefferson?
Do we not celebrate Thomas Jefferson because he was also a rapist?
And I think there might be something to this idea that there's a genuine fear that you have to dismantle pretty much the entire ideological framework.
your country for things that you believe if you start making moral judgments, such as, you know, rape is bad, which is pretty unfortunate because rape is bad and you should condemn people who do it. - Yeah, I think which is pretty unfortunate because rape is bad and you should condemn people who do it. - Yeah, I think to some extent, people who do defend this stuff,
I mean, there must be a reason why they defend this stuff, but obviously there has to be a difference in terms of a current figure and a historical figure.
It's not okay either way, but like.
Well, and you have to have reasons why you believe the things that you believe that are not tied to a hero.
Because that is just never going to work out.
Like people suck.
People are terrible.
And the people who we consider to be like the originators of amazing ideas or amazing inventions.
They are people who got power.
And when you get power, you know, a lot of people abuse it.
And so you have to be comfortable with the fact that like a good person is not necessarily the guy that gave you the things that you value. - Thank you.
Yeah.
And you also, I love this.
So I wrote a chapter with my friend Ricker in a book about the myth of the lone genius, right?
No amazing thing or idea came from one person.
It just does not work that way.
I think it's definitely true when it comes to, you know, where does a particular idea come from, but there are still kind of mythical figures that are central to an ideology, and it's hard to keep the ideology together while discarding those mythical figures that have this kind of hero status within it.
And so I wonder if it's like... We want narratives, right?
And that means that we want characters in our narratives.
Yeah, exactly.
You need the narrative that comes with the person, and so it becomes very hard to be like, well, okay, I guess I'm going to be proud to be whatever this ideology is, but I'm going to discard all the narrative that's been built around it now.
That's not a justification, obviously, but I wonder to what extent that explains things.
The whole idea of the hero or the genius is kind of just inherently linked to patriarchy, you know?
And it's like, if you just insist upon, if you want to have a hero or a genius figure, then you kind of have to ignore the patriarchal stuff that they inevitably did.
Because if they were, as Caitlin says, if they were a person powerful enough to make that kind of mark, then they probably abused their power.
So you just kind of have to ignore it and stop yourself thinking about it.
Because if you don't, again, I know you used the phrase unraveling, that's the perfect phrase, because it is like a string.
And if you pull on the string, the whole fabric of patriarchy will just sort of unravel in front of you.
And I think people kind of, People kind of having internal mental defenses against, you know, well, okay, I'll think up to here but no further because that'll lead me somewhere I don't want to go.
People get really anxious about this.
This is like, this is all wrapped up in a lot of anxiety and insecurity.
Yeah.
Yeah, all right.
Well, thank you everyone.
I am so sorry we couldn't get to everyone's questions but I really do have to run now.
Thank you Caitlin and Jack.
It's always lovely speaking with you guys and we will do more spaces so you know do join those too.
One thing I did want to say is that Brand fucking sucks and I hope he gets what he deserves and what really sucks though is that even though now we might see the People, the predators, sometimes, famous ones, getting some sort of, I guess, some sort of, like the victims getting some sort of justice.
We don't see the enablers facing any consequences, you know what I mean?
Brand had so many enablers and, you know, just like in the Masterson situation, there were many enablers.
We don't see them ever, ever face consequences.
So that's that.
And it's almost, it's almost parodic, isn't it?
It's almost like it's just laid out for you how the structure of patriarchy and authority and capitalism just enables these guys via the, like the living metaphor of Scientology.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I had wanted to touch that topic, but I didn't realize that brand would basically take up the whole hour and a half.
But another time.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, everyone, thank you.
And we shall do this again.
This space will be recorded so you can listen to it after.
And yeah, all right.
It'll go up on the I Don't Speak German feed as well, as long as that's okay with you, Ina.
Yeah, absolutely.
And also the Polite Conversations feed, if that's okay with you, Jack.
Absolutely, yeah.
No, this has been great.
Thank you very much.
Always nice talking to you, Ina, and it's very nice to finally talk to Caitlin.
