There is one brief, strange moment in 2015 when Russell Brand mattered in mainstream British politics. In the upcoming election, the opposition Labor Party is ahead in the polls against a coalition government that is the definition of establishment-led by an Eton- and Oxford-educated prime minister of David Cameron and his Westminster – and Cambridge-educated deputy, Nick Clegg, now president of global affairs at Meta. So the Labor leader, Ed Miliband, sought the endorsement of Brand, the actor, comedian, and burgeoning online provocateur whose anti-corporatist screed has garnered 9.5 million Twitter followers and 100,000 subscribers on YouTube gives him the appearance of a power player. Miliband got Brand’s endorsement but lost the election.
Since then, Brand’s reach has exploded. His YouTube channel currently has 6.6 million subscribers, his X account over 11 million followers. But his anti-establishment message has changed, from a broader, almost coherent political response to the fiscal austerity that shaped the UK after the 2008 financial crisis to a series of cults, driven by conspiracy narratives leading to Covid denial, Russian disinformation, and the far-right inspired “Great Reset” theory, combined with the meta-conspiracy that the mainstream—the “elites”—have darker agendas which is based on control.
On Saturday, the UK’s Channel Four aired a one-hour documentary in which several women accused Brand of rape and sexual assault. Before the broadcast, the comedian came out swinging. In a video on his YouTube channel, titled “So, This Is Happening,” Brand not only denied the accusations, but leveled some of his own: “[It] I asked, is there another agenda at play?” he said.
One of Brand’s alleged victims, speaking to the BBC, called his statement “insulting” and “ridiculous.” But within the alt-media, there has been a show of support from figures including Andrew Tate, the misogynist influencer awaiting trial for rape and human trafficking in Romania, Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News anchor, who is now runs a conspiracy-inflected. show on X, and Alex Jones, fined $1.5 billion for lies about school shooting victims. X’s owner, Elon Musk, posted under Brand’s video: “Of course. They don’t like competition”—referring, apparently, to those same dark forces that the comedian was referring to. The friendship between conspiracy theorists, the alt-right, and the “manosphere,” are terribly predictable. Their shared narrative is one of alienation from the mainstream, outsiderdom, and black forces assembling to stop them.” Contrasting day, but with real consequences for people,” said Marc Owen Jones, an expert on disinformation and social media at Hamad bin Khalifa University in Qatar, put it.
It is also their audience strategy and the foundation of their business model. Conspiracy influencers are content producers. Moments that generate intense emotions—even if the content producer is, themselves, the focus of the scandal—are attractive for participation, and they feed the intense economy of the conspiracy business.
Brand’s YouTube channel is a compendium of contemporary bullshit. Covid lockdowns are exercises in social control. The US has “biolabs” in Ukraine; Western support for Ukraine is capitalist imperialism. Central bank digital currencies are the government’s attempts to control your money. Evolving gender norms are causing a “masculinity crisis” and declining fertility. There are the usual crossovers between Brand’s content and the wider conspiracy cinematic universe, with clips on his channels of conspiracy theorist Robert Kennedy Junior, far-right Hungarian president Viktor Orban, and Carlson, who recorded an interview with Brand in August.
