Breaking Up with Russell Brand

after three years and fifty videos

I created my YT channel to respond to Russell Brand's longform interviews on his Under the Skin podcast on Luminary. Three years and 50 videos later, I'm breaking up. I look at the four areas of agreement that first drew me to him. Then, what's led me to be disillusioned and even suspicious, which is not the sextroversy. I analyze three recent clips of Tulsi Gabbard, Trump and RFK. Has he become the Amy Goodman of the right?

Three years ago it was possible to get on a Zoom call with Russell and 700 other people. He called on me and I told him about my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, which addresses the question we share about the logistics of small-scale sovereignty. He said, “That’s just the book I want to read, tell us how to get it in the chat.” I replied that my dilemma was if I should put it on Amazon and dance with the devil. He answered, “Dance with the devil but don’t go home with him.” So I did.

I built up my early viewers on YT by hovering by the keyboard at 10 am, hitting refresh, refresh, refresh until Russell posted. Although YT doesn’t allow links, I’d have a pithy comment ready to paste about my recent episode, hoping he’d be showing a clip from that interview. If I could get a comment in the first 30, I had a chance of getting it read. Within five minutes, it would be past 100 and into 1000 in an hour.

I also got into some ethical arguments on his threads that got me viewers. Many of my favorite and most loyal viewers came through Russell—Gan from Maine, Maria from Australia, and JoE from Utah have been ‘here from the beginning and here until the end,’ as Gan has said. Lindsey from Scotland gave me the phrase socio-spirituality to describe what I’m doing. They changed my whole sense of talking into the void.

It’s hard to even remember that initial, vulnerable place of putting out my first videos. The first person who responded turned out to be a predator. After quoting passages of my book back to me (from the Amazon preview), he tried to get a personal contact. When I refused, he told me no one would ever ‘get’ me like he did.

I remember others who were hecklers, simply there to ridicule and tell me I knew nothing. Those who found me through Russell already had a common bond and respect for each other. It wasn’t just what Russell was saying but how he said it. He was, not just polite, but enthusiastic and loving towards everyone he talked to. And that set the style of my first posse.

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the four agreements

The four areas of agreement I had with Russell:

1. Love the person, challenge the ideas.

2. People are inherently good and, when they behave badly, systems and stories are to blame.

3. Systems can be changed.

4. The direction of change should be local self-governance—anarchy in other words.

In previous videos, I’ve defended Russell’s affection for Yuval Noah Harari because he was consistent in challenging his ideas. I’m not sure he’s doing that any more.

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disillusion or disappointment?

I’ve done previous episodes, that I’ll link at the end, on why I thought the sex scandals were a manufactured media take-down. I still think that. But now I wonder if they were manufactured for the purpose of pushing Russell into Rumble and giving him street cred as someone who’d been attacked and smeared, and therefore was qualified as speaker for the opposition.

My primary reason to stop listening has been the commercialization. Now that listeners can support journalists directly, why do those with a couple million viewers need to also be hucksters for products? Kathleen wrote:

I find the frequent advertisements in Brand's show are good reminders to the viewers that where money comes in the door, independence often walks out. The 'Wellness Company' is everywhere it seems and I'm not liking their perpetuation of fear narrative as marketing technique (though subtler of course). I don't accept the invisible (germ theory) enemy stuff and they fully support that lie.

I replied that I was dismayed to find Glenn Greenwald also shilling for The Wellness Company, which discredits everyone associated with it. Russell uses titles that are some version of “You Won’t Fucking Believe This!” with the same wide-eyed expression. And his interviewees seem to be people I’ve already identified as complicit, captured or naive.

I’ve been glad, however, to find others responding to this YT who feel that Russell has changed, and not that we were starstruck and fooled. As Annabel wrote:

Russ was about Awakening wonders and going on a journey, and being subversive. Now I think just attention seeking whilst trying to deal with his own pain. I do feel disappointed but he is just a human after all and that's why we shouldn't put celebrities/gurus on a pedestal. They nearly always come crashing down!

I replied:

I'm really happy you responded, Annabel. It is like breaking up when some friends say, "That guy was always a dirtbag, we don't know what you saw in him in the first place." That undermines your own trust in your perception. What we recognized in Russell was real and unique. He was someone offering what no one else was in that moment. I'm disappointed in him that he didn't hold onto it. And it doesn't seem like you and I are too vulnerable to the guru syndrome, we haven't let him sway us into ignoring what we know is right and wrong.

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tulsi the weffie yugal

I watched some clips to see if they confirmed or contradicted my suspicions that Russell may have sold out. The first was Tulsi Gabbard responding on The View. She did a great job of quoting them back to themselves and making them look ridiculous. She was well-spoken in pointing out that she was a patriot and a proud woman of color. As an aside, if someone needs to tell you they’re a woman of color, do they really count as a woman of color? Are they saying they’ve faced discrimination for something that isn’t apparent?

Russell, who’s interviewed Tulsi before, highlighted her poise in contrast to the burblers of the View. No question about that. Yet Tulsi also threw her support behind Joe Biden when she withdrew from the 2020 election, after dividing support among similar platforms. Does Russell have no questions about that?

Or about her status as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader? From another video, Tulsi claims they put her photo and name on their site without her having anything to do with them. She saw other names there that she respected so she didn’t complain until she realized what the WEF was up to. Oh really?

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trump as my enemy’s enemy

The second clip was titled, “It’s Over. Did This Just Win It for Trump?”

It shows Trump’s Florida speech in which he states that there would be no war in Gaza if he was still President. There was peace in the Middle East under him, he claims. Iran was broke because of his economic sanctions, now they have $250M. He got the Abraham accords done. And moreover:

When I’m President, we will not allow our campuses to be taken over by violent radicals. If you come to this country and try to bring jihadism or anti-Americanism or anti-Semitism, we’ll immediately deport you.

He then gets the crowd to fill in the blank with “Everything they touch turns to ________!” Russell’s response was:

It seems like the main thrust of that speech was ordinary and expected ‘America First’ rhetoric, a willingness to shut down on insurgent groups, and other populist ideas. Now whether or not you agree with the policies of Donald Trump—and I know that a great many of you do—you would have to say that the rhetoric deployed there is an attempt to galvanize and address issues that Americans care about today.

To start, Russell uses a rhetorical trick when he says, “whether or not you agree with … Trump” followed by “a great many of you do,” and then saying something positive about him. It sets up an expectation of opposing viewpoints then follows with two statements of the same side.

Did that speech boil down to ‘America First?’ Is Israel’s assault on Gaza what Americans care about today? Here are some of the ways he could have addressed Trump’s false premises:

• Israel, not Iran, caused the war in Gaza

• Trade sanctions are economic terrorism

• the Abraham accords between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain were business deals

• the violence on college campuses is being enacted by Zionist students and police

Instead, Russell showed the celebrities the Biden campaign is rallying, and states, “If you care about freedom, you can’t afford to vote for Joe Biden.” He continues:

I don’t know enough about American politics to know if Donald Trump is going to be the solution you’re looking for but the establishment fucking hates him, and that’s some information right there. They’re using the judiciary, the media. … My enemies do not want Donald Trump in the White House, and sometimes that’s enough.

Really? Seems like the same tactics that gave Russell his street cred.

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rfk & some of his best friends …

The final clip was an interview of Bobby Kennedy where, once they got the brain worms out of the way, Russell said his viewers wanted to know about Israel. To summarize Bobby’s answer:

1. Some of my best friends are Palestinian

2. My Riverkeeper organization worked with Palestinians on the Jordan

3. My heart goes out to the victims, especially the children

4. Israel has the right to defend itself

5. When I’m President, I will keep the US promise to protect Israel

I didn’t watch Russell’s reply but I had little hope for it.

In closing, I don’t disagree with what Russell says. What disappoints me is what he leaves unsaid and the ways he doesn’t use his platform and celebrity to challenge the next level of the psyops. He’s too smart to be taken in by the cheap tricks he’s letting slide. Eliminating naive only leaves complicit or captured. Maybe both.

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This is the first video I ever made on Why Russell Brand?

My very first video, filmed in my pajamas with my dance teacher sitting in the dog bed so I'd feel like I was talking to someone. I explain my cerebral crush on Russell and why I'm vying to be in his cult and join his revolution to take down the empire using love, meditation, and meaningful conversations with interesting people. I mention my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, and my spiritual study of A Course in Miracles. I talk about the reasons I think we share the same purpose.

This is the YT playlist with my (now) 51 videos on Russell. It only has 9 views and is worth taking a gander at the list, which includes everything pre-Substack. I’m grateful for the 50 Dimensions of Tereza that Russell’s guests brought out. And this is the first one I did on the sextroversy:

I look at the allegations and impact of the Me3 smear campaign launched against Russell Brand. I've done 40+ videos responding to Russell's Under the Skin interviews. I explain the hypocrisy of the MeToo Psyops and what ‘believing the women’ could look like based on my recent episodes. I give a synopsis of other MeToo takedowns with Julian Assange, Mario Cuomo and Dominique Strauss-Kahn. And I end with my prediction for Russell 4.0 and why it’s a parable for all of us.