The corporate left, unable to engage with the substance of Russell Brand’s arguments, has lamented the loss of the once darling-of-the-left, in its characterization of his current politics, to the “far right.”
Via the New Statesman (emphases added):
[Brand’s] lionization of [Bernie] Sanders is evidence enough that the old version of Brand – the one who ran rings around Jeremy Paxman in 2013, telling the astonished presenter that a socialist revolution was on the horizon – is still there.
But he has married these long-held beliefs with all the suspicions and anxieties of the new American right: America First, Drain The Swamp, distrust the MSM (mainstream media). Just last week he was pictured grinning with Donald Trump Jr – cutting a rather different figure to the man who used to lead anti-austerity marches in Parliament Square. What happened to the freewheeling entertainer praised by Mark Fisher for espousing a communism that was “cool, sexy and proletarian”? It seems that Russell Brand has been America-brained…
Brand’s transition towards the conspiratorial right seems perfectly seamless.
Note the sneering, pejorative smear of Brand as “America-brained.” These people hate regular Americans — the “bitter clingers” as Barack Obama once termed them — with an undying passion. It’s supremely ironic, as most of the British media figures like the author of this screed, Finn McRedmond, have never actually met an American outside of coastal elites, who are more European in their cultural disposition than American at any rate.
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The same process works itself out with every corporate media semantic engineering project: “conspiracy theorist,” “transphobe,” “white supremacist,” etc. The new phrase pops into the lexicon by way of endless parroting on the part of talking heads on cable news and Huffington Post columnists.
The targets of these new smears then proliferate. Eventually, the term becomes so widely applied that it loses all of its meaning and, therefore, its effectiveness to marginalize dissident voices. It is then pastured in favor of the new smear, and the process plays itself out all over again.
How much further can the term “white supremacist” be taken, for instance, when it’s applied to Kanye West? It loses all meaning.
Here’s the rub, as the British would say: if Russell Brand can be slapped with the “far-right” label or Kanye West with “white supremacist,” so can literally anyone.
I respect Russell Brand immensely. If he is “far-right,” I don’t mind the label. Likewise, if Tucker Carlson, whom I also respect, is “far-right,” that’s all right by me. If Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi can be categorized as “far-right,” I will ironically embrace the smear as a compliment.
