Speaker 1: So you probably didn't know this, but this program is mostly funded by viewers like you,
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on our website. We do an extra show every day for our members. I would love for you
to join the membership ranks and you can do so at join at Packman dot com. I want to talk
about comedian and actor Russell Brand in this segment. Now I'm not going to do the lazy. He's an
anti-vaccine nut sort of thing that's been floating around. There have been some articles
written that straight up say, Russell Brand is anti-vax. I find it lazy, quite frankly.
There is a Daily Beast article called Comedian. Russell Brand has become a powerful
voice for anti-vaxxers, which comes maybe a little closer to the reality of what's going on
and the way we're going to look at some clips. We're going to look at a lot of different things.
The way that I characterize this is that Russell Brand is definitely dancing around on the topic
of vaccination. He's asking questions and making suggestions, all in ways that encourage vaccine
hesitancy or skepticism without, like really explicitly taking an anti-vaccine position. Now,
one can make the argument that doing it the way he's doing it might be more pernicious than
straight up, just doing anti-vax propaganda. I don't know what his intentions are, and we'll talk
about that at the end. We'll look at the material first, but what's clear is that whatever he's been
doing, it has worked well to build an audience and in particular around these sort of contrarian
ideas, as we might call them. And that may play a role in how he's choosing to frame issues. Maybe
he's being encouraged to do this stuff because it's doing well. I don't know. Let's start with
the evolution, and we're going to hit kind of a few different points and go from there.
Here is Russell Brand many times talking about how he is neutral about everything and just sort of
look into everything. He has no opinion or advice for you about COVID or vaccines or
treatments. He's neutral. Let's take a listen. Speaker 3: I am Switzerland when it comes to
this subject, no view at all. I am merely a floating series of molecules
spores in space that for the spike protein could attach to something. Now I'm completely neutral.
You can do your own research into the impact of coronavirus. I would suggest that you look
beyond the mainstream media into the impacts of vaccines and the efficacy of vaccines and
make your own decisions. OK, I have no opinion. I'm not offering any advice or suggestions or
even opinions around the treatment of COVID. Just measuring and judging the conversation
that takes place around it. Speaker 1: OK, so
maybe it's good to be neutral sometimes, I guess. But the really important takeaway here
is neutrality is not objectivity. Neutrality and objectivity are two different things.
If I say I'm neutral between water being necessary for human life or water being the biggest scam on
Earth that humans don't really need to live, I'm staking out a position of neutrality, but there's
nothing objective about it. I'm just completely wrong. I'm not adhering to the facts in my
neutrality. I'm neutral, but I'm completely wrong. So that's one reason to always be skeptical about
loudly professed neutrality, because neutrality and objectivity are two different things. So let's
now look at Russell Brand's first statement that I could find about COVID. This was back in March of
2020, March 13th of 2020. I believe this was just a few days after Trump made the big speech about
We're closing this, we're closing that, and there's a virus, and it's already sort of like
a little bit woo woo. And starting to this is the type of stuff that lends itself to people
looking to you to justify their own skepticism and disbelief, even about things you're
not directly talking about. Take a look. Speaker 3: My personal take on it is it's
a reminder that reality lies below the surface, the deepest realities cannot be seen, you know,
microbiology kind of any point or to the game. And what about what's happening even beneath that
held in fields of invisible energy? So I suppose, you know, so
Speaker 1: it's, you know, Speaker 3: wash your hands. Yeah,
be sensible. Significantly, remember how often we live in concepts and constructs
that are not real and are not beneficial. Speaker 1: So, you know, I guess, wash your
hands. But at the same time, you know, we can't really see a lot of this stuff. And I don't know,
it's starting to get a little bit squishy. OK. Then we cut to this year where it's
really ramped up as his follower base has grown, this type of stuff has ramped up.
This is now we're going from last March 13 to this September 13, just under a month ago.
Russell Brand says the problem of COVID is small compared to that of the vaccine
mandates. So now we're really getting into some meaty stuff for the anti-vax crowd.
Whatever Russell's view is of vaccines per se. Speaker 3: The problem of coronavirus is small
compared to the problem of the framework that we are discovering. Hold it a
framework of disdain, contempt and conflict as long as we forget fundamental basic values,
kindness, open communication tolerance if we forget those things. There is no society
worth saving, no matter what you believe. Speaker 1: Now this is one of those things
where like, yeah, kindness, OK. Sure, sure. But the problem of COVID is still a big problem,
and that this idea of this, this minimizing again, whatever his views are, it feeds into it,
feeds into the people who want to say, we don't need the vaccine or the mandates are definitely
bad or whatever now. Here's a little bit of a break into something that also is part of this.
Russell spoke with Tim Poole. Tim Poole is this guy. We've interviewed him before,
he said. He used to be on the left, or he sort of still claims to be 90 percent of his content
is anti-democratic. I've talked to him about it, you know? No, no. It should not come as a shock to
many of you that he he said he voted for Trump in 2020. So this is another one of these like,
I'm sort of I'm on the left. I'm kind of an enlightened centrist, really. It just seems like
at least you're mostly doing content that criticizes the left and you're voting for Trump.
OK. So Russell brings on Tim Poole, and they do this schtick about we're very close to Civil War,
very, very close to Civil War, and this is a trope now. But the the left is ripping us apart.
They're pushing us to the brink of civil war. Speaker 3: He used to say more frequently,
at least as far as I'm aware that you felt that. I think, I guess in the final days of Trump,
America was on the brink of some kind of civil war, and I still do. Still, yeah,
Speaker 4: yeah, there's but there's been polling data that I think may evolve that
opinion. Notably, there was a YouGov data that showed I think it was YouGov, that there's five
regions in the United States. There's the, erm, there's the Southern, and there's the heartland,
there's the West in the mountain regions and in each region. There was a large plurality of
people who wanted to secede from the union and form their own regional government. Essentially,
if you if you normalize for population and each by each state, I did the math. You end
up with thirty seven point two percent of the US population wanting the country to break apart.
Speaker 1: OK, now I don't exactly know the normalization he's referring to. I know what
normalization means. I remember we talked about that, that poll, I don't exactly know.
I don't know if he means maybe he doesn't even mean normalization. He just has extrapolated.
I think maybe Tim doesn't know the difference between extrapolating and normalizing. What he's
not mentioning is that those disproportionately wanting to secede are southern Republicans,
and this entire civil war narrative that he and some others have been pushing in,
sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly. I will. I will grant that it's not always explicit
is that the left's intolerance or unwillingness to do whatever is what's pushing us to the brink
of civil war. The reality is that, you know, the closest thing that we got to a civil war starting
that I can recall in the last many years was the Jan. six insurrection. It was exclusively Trump
is who did it? And even if you look at secession and secession and Civil War, two different things.
It's disproportionately southern Republicans who want to do it. And this is the type of stuff that
that Russell platforms. I would say it's not responsible platforming, and that is not really
ready to rebut the substance of what's being said. OK? Then Russell Brand shares a tweet which seems
to be telling people how to get around. Owned COVID safety measures during his comedy tour.
OK. This is called the 33 tour. Russell Brand tweeted this and it's 33 tour info, and it says
there are some misunderstandings around the venue requirements for the 33 tour. This should address
the concerns we've seen expressed. No venue requires you to be double vaccinated, so that's
sort of like you can just go and get one and not the second, and you're going to be able to get in.
Most venues do not ask for any certification again, saying it's kind of the honor system at
a lot of places. You can probably go without being vaccinated. Some require proof of a negative test
and then saying if you have a ticket that requires you to have a test and you don't want, one
will move your ticket to another venue, it might require travel. So again,
it's it's all kind of slippery. Like, no one of these things is that egregious, but it's
all fomenting a particular line of thought from the people that follow him. OK, so now we'll go
to a more recent clip in this clip. Russell Brand suggests looking beyond the mainstream
media for information about vaccines, and what's really slippery and squishy about this one is.
I'm the first to agree you can't just trust corporate media for everything.
But the implication here is that there's this whole other hidden truth that's not being
presented in the corporate media about vaccines. And if you're if you're aware that the general
narrative which is accurate is, well, the vaccines are quite safe and quite effective. If you're
being told there's some other completely different narrative without him telling you anything
anti-vax per se. You start to think, Wow, what? What am I not being told? Let's take a listen.
Speaker 3: Do your own research into the impact of coronavirus. And I would suggest that you look
beyond the mainstream media into the impacts of vaccines and the efficacy of vaccines and make
your own decisions. I have no opinion, right? Speaker 1: He has no. He still has no opinion.
But again, it's this idea that you may not be getting told all the things you should
be getting told and you've got to look for it. Here is Russell Brand then on vaccine passports,
which he equates to totalitarianism. Speaker 3: It's very interesting how
this particular issue is being treated with a very specific, and one might argue totalitarian
mindset where elsewhere our cultures are built on principles of individual and we like anybody or
any individual, you're responsible for your own life. You're responsible if you are in prison
or if you can't make a go of life yourself, you will fall less your responsibility. So it's being
regarded uniquely as opposed to someone like me that's skeptical and sometimes downright cynical
about government, the agenda of governments and relationships of government with big business.
Something like this makes me concerned about the direction we're headed.
Speaker 1: So again, it's just vaguely alluding to the idea of freedom. Freedom
is not anybody requiring a vaccine for sure that that's absolutely not it. And then this
is just where it starts to get really weird. Russell says he saw a dead fish in the river,
and that seems like a bad omen from the standpoint of totalitarian vaccine passports.
Speaker 3: Whatever your views on the pandemic, where it came from, how it came to be
here, yeah, what the impact of it is on a sort of individual social and cultural level. The
fact is that now the response to it does align with some people's opinions about government
agenda i.e. further control, further invasion, further regulation of your life. The very idea
that you might not be able to attend a public event without showing a possible that concerns me,
you might say, Well, we've all got National Insurance numbers and stuff like that. And I
don't know, man, like the other day I was on the River Wyre and I saw dead fish in that river like,
you know, and like when you see things that feel like an indication of something foreboding, it's,
I think, foolish not to respond to it. Speaker 1: So it gets that strange. OK, that
now it starts to get really strange. And then just to give you kind of like just a final tour through
this, here is Russell saying Russiagate quote Russiagate was cooked up by the Clintons, which
is becoming very popular among the right world. Speaker 3: Move so fast there's almost no time for
history. It seems like years ago that we were hearing that Trump was colluding with Russia.
They wouldn't have won the election without Russia, that his whole presidency was a kind of
Putin plot. Well, there's now serious evidence that it was the Clinton campaign and Hillary
Clinton acolytes who were directly involved in the generation of what has proven to be a conspiracy
untrue. Think about how much media you watched. Speaker 1: So this this is just a know straight
up right wing talking point. And then lastly, here, he says vaccine
fact checkers may not be trustworthy. Speaker 3: You have to be open minded and
open eyed about the reality of the information you're being presented elsewhere. In another one
of our videos, we talk about the sort of appetite for a I'd like. People have not been vaccinated
should be pushed this way. You know, I don't have a strong opinion about what you should do
with your life. You should be free. All I should be free. We should be free to talk.
We should be free to disagree. But what I have concerns about the legislation and
regulation around the way that information is communicated. Information is censored because
I want to feel like I can trust people. I want to feel like I can trust the media. I
want to feel like I trust the government. I don't enjoy. I do enjoy doing this,
but I feel that the systems themselves are so dependent on their own sort of corrupt
spiraling into a relationship that is not possible for it to operate freely. I don't even think
there's anyone evil at Facebook or at CDC or whatever. I just think that's just a big sort
of tidal rolling of profiteering that so sort of embedded that people can't see that it's happening
is bigger than them. That's what a system is. A system is like. We're all a set of nodes operating
in a. Ruled Trajectory A The Telos and none of us can sort of like sort of step outside and go,
hang on, what's going on, is this the best way to do things? And if you can't see a situation
like a fact check, a being funded by people whose fact-checking it is quite out there,
then then you'll know over minded enough. Yeah. Speaker 1: So anyway, even the fact checkers maybe
cannot cannot be trusted. OK, so so what's the bottom line here? The difficulty here is
that this is not like straight up anti-vax and calling Russell Brand anti-vax is lazy.
It's not. It doesn't really encompass it. There's no real single anti-vaccine clip.
He's dancing. He's encouraging anti-vax people to become more anti-vax,
not saying he's doing it on purpose, but he is. The videos he pumps out all have the same sort of
like tinge, which we're going to look at problems with the vaccine studies against the vaccine,
famous proponent of the vaccine who you can't trust, and he hints one way while
claiming to be neutral. But clearly, he's not objective. I mean, just we'll we'll look
at some of his clip titles here. Oh, the Wuhan lab leak debate just got even something else.
Ah, the way. Hold on, let's look at which are the vaccine related ones. How Big Pharma CEOs plan to
profit from keeping you. Maybe it's sick. Can we really trust vaccine fact checkers?
Thought Biden couldn't sink any lower think again? Vaccine apartheid? Don Lemon's COVID bombshell?
Good science or irresponsible? This is why you can't trust Big Pharma. Shocking Wuhan evidence,
et cetera. Its vaccine mandates an assault on your bodily, whatever. It's actually quite similar to
the Jimmy Dore idea. It's very similar to what Jimmy Dore does. Fauci has no answer.
Study vaccines being administered incorrectly Vaccine side effects reported sudden hearing loss.
Vaccines cause hurricanes. Biden says vaccine, which is just a model. It's just, you know,
that's kind of the Biden dementia story. COVID surge among vaccinated. It's the exact same type
of idea. A couple of different things could be happening. One. Some individuals are just taking
their distrust of the pharmaceutical industry, which we should all have to some degree. And
broadly applying it to COVID and to the vaccine in a way that maybe is well-intended but is very
much misguided. For others, this is a straight up grift. I don't know which one it is for Russell
Brand. I genuinely don't know which category I put him in. Taking pharmaceutical skepticism too far
grift. Delusional. I don't know. But the evolution of Russell Brand is giving significant comfort,
so to speak, and encouragement to those already skeptical of just going out and
getting vaccinated. Let me know what you think it is that's going on with Russell Brand