I am going to play for you something quite stunning.
And this goes to you know we've talked before on the program about the pseudo intellectual
and anti-intellectual movement and this has come overwhelmingly from the American right
wing, although sometimes the left engages in it as well.
And one of the things that has been a staple, one of the aspects to this that has been a
staple from the right, is that thinking too much actually isn't that good.
Formal education is little more than liberal indoctrination, and so we shouldn't even really
be praising or seeking out intellectual ism.
But there's another aspect to this which is making nonsense people out to be intellectuals
that they are not.
And I have an example of this that is quite stunning.
Tucker Carlson introduced an interview that he did with, I guess, former actor and now
YouTuber Russell Brand.
Tucker Carlson refers to Russell Brand.
Russell Brand as a public intellectual.
Now, I know, I know that will come as a shock to many of you.
But what is stunning is that then Russell Brand proceeded to rant completely unintelligible
about COVID for 5 minutes, and Tucker just sits there looking dazed.
Take a look at this.
There is a lot that I want to talk about from this clip.
Let's listen.
Speaker 2: So as we told you, we sat down yesterday with Russell Brand, the comedian,
actor, and now, frankly, kind of a public intellectual for about an hour and a half
on our show, Tucker Carlson today.
We want to share more of it tonight.
In particular, Brand spent a lot of time thinking about and telling us about the thinking lockdowns.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the point Russell has thought about it, a lot of.
Speaker 2: Them was maybe the clearest explanation we have heard of what we've just lived through.
Here it is.
I think COVID provided a lens through which we could scrutinize the machinery of power
and how the intentions and agenda of power able to play out, coalesce, and let's call
it conspire when a crisis occurs.
Speaker 1: Now, remember, there's two things here that might trick right wingers into thinking
that this is deep thought.
One is that for the American audience, you know where I'm going.
Russell Brand speaks with a British accent, and that actually is quite an effective tool.
This this applies both to left and right.
I hate to say it into making it sound like someone is actually speaking quite intelligently.
The other thing is that he is only feeding back to a lot of these right wingers the things
they already believe.
Speaker 2: A tendency, a globalist tendency to increase surveillance and big tech appetite
to capture data and a comparable appetite within government converge is the great American
comedian George Carlin used to say there is no need for conspiracy where interest converge.
It seems that even if it's an event, it was a legitimate crisis and I certainly wouldn't
make any contention around that.
It was opportunistically handled in order to enhance regulation and control time where
regulation and control are increasingly difficult to implement as people are more suspicious
of institutional power.
So in a sense, the best way to understand COVID, I believe, is to take COVID out of
it and figure out how the institutions by.
Speaker 1: Ignore COVID, to understand COVID.
Speaker 2: And government behaved around it.
Speaker 1: Pretend almost like there was no COVID and then be like, Well, none of this
stuff made sense if you remove COVID from it, right?
Well, but there was COVID.
Speaker 2: How did they benefit?
How did they utilize it?
What narratives did they disseminate and which narratives did they control and curtail?
Even with the recent text messages from our Health minister at that time.
Matt Hancock you can explicitly say it was exploited.
Oh no, we need to scare people.
Is there any way high net worth individuals can get to the country?
All these conversations, but many people that are cynical about the behavior of the powerful
believed were happening, were indeed happening.
The way that natural immunity was discussed proved it to be true, i.e. that natural immunity
is effective.
They probably understood earlier than they admitted that natural immunity was effective
and for reasons that to.
Speaker 1: Note the use of the word probably.
Speaker 2: What could it be?
What could be the reason that a monetizable solution to COVID was prioritized over non
monetizable?
Is there anyone involved in the situation?
Speaker 1: Well, one interesting aspect to that would be the dramatically higher death
rate of people who got COVID rather than unvaccinated versus people who got COVID vaccinated.
That would be one interesting reason why you would prioritize the vaccination program.
Speaker 2: That has a profit motive.
Let's look at the data know.
So what?
It was just revelatory, like the apocalypse always will.
Speaker 1: And remember, Tucker Carlson hasn't said a word where 2 minutes in.
Speaker 2: A the apocalypse, his revelation of what was always there corruption, convergence
of interests, alliances.
This is not conspiratorial.
No.
The new recital of economic interests and the ordinary movements of the powerful.
If people can honor one another and one another in good faith and recognize that anybody can
say this, the whole debate between like I've so felt a little bit around me, even for coming
here, I feel like it used to just be normal that someone in your family would be a conservative
and someone in your family would be liberal, and someone in your family would be socialists
and someone in your family would be trans and someone in your family would be gay.
And different races are coming together.
This is part of who we are.
And if it isn't the part of who we are, it's okay.
Speaker 1: So this goes on and on and on and on and on.
Okay.
So couple of different things here.
First of all, most of the things that Russell is saying actually just aren't true.
And if you really kind of dissect all of this different stuff, you see there's really nothing
there.
But I want to zoom out and talk about this this the framing that Tucker Carlson gave
of saying that Russell Brand is now he's a public intellectual, quite frankly.
I think it is what Tucker Carlson said.
Now, what do we mean by a public intellectual?
Many of us can imagine sort of like the academic, intellectual, Right.
This is someone who and this is this is the caricature.
And I'm understand I'm playing into the caricature.
But the idea would be the academic, intellectual is someone who, if you put a camera in front
of them for a TV show, they're not really good at explaining their ideas and they're
not concise.
And they go on and on and they talk about their work and their thoughts in a way that
is not relatable to the average person.
And they are sometimes seen as as as maybe elite or condescending to the average person
or so public intellectual would be.
It's someone who is well known and an intelligent, you know, learned person from an academic
pedigree of sorts, but who is also contributing their knowledge in the sort of more popular
culture, I guess we would say, and is recognized both on the academic side but also on the
nonacademic and sort of like.
Media side and by members of society in general.
So obviously, by that definition, Russell Brand is not a public intellectual.
But the bigger story here for me is I've said before, you know, sometimes Marjorie Taylor
GREENE will rant somewhere and I will say to you all.
A lot of a lot of the American right wing sees her as a thinking person.
And Lauren Boebert will rant or, you know, Ted Cruz will make some statement about a
legal precedent during a hearing.
And I will say there are a lot of people in the U.S. on the right who see that as what
it means to be a thinker.
And, of course, Russell Brand is very far from really what I would consider to be public
intellectuals.
Now, public intellectuals today do look and sound a lot different than at times past.
So I'll give you some examples of people that I do think are sort of public intellectuals.
One that comes to mind and I was just recently listening to some of his podcasts, and that's
why he's on my mind.
Cal Newport Cal Newport is a Ph.D. computer scientist who teaches at Georgetown.
He's been on the show before, who writes both for academic audiences and for general audiences
about the socio cultural impacts of technology and so many other things.
He's written articles that would be really for an academic audience, and he's also written
great popular books like Deep Work and A World Without Email and Others.
That to me makes a lot more sense as like a modern public intellectual.
And when you when you listen to Cal's podcast, you realize, wow, this is a very different
thing than Russell Brand.
Cal doesn't have a British accent.
I will mention that other examples, maybe Jared Diamond, someone who has done a ton
of academic work and and really deep field work and also has written books for popular
consumption.
This one I'm less sure of, but someone like Kazuo Ishiguro, the British, Japanese, British
writer Salman Rushdie comes to mind.
Camille Paglia even if you don't like her views.
Hard to argue that that's not you know, when we talk about a public intellectual today,
that's what we're talking about.
Daniel Dennett would be another example.
So anyway, it's an interesting thing.
I don't know if Tucker is is serious when he says Russell Brand is a public intellectual
or not.
But it's a very interesting phrase to hear, amused, particularly when the right has spent
a long time sort of deriding the value of public intellectuals until they found someone
they can try to pass off as one in order to try to make some kind of political point.
Interesting and interesting use of
that term.