The Fall of Russell Brand

On the surface, this is a story about

Russell Brand, but it's also a wider

story about institutions, trust, truth,

and certainty, fear, cover-ups,

questioning about how we all think. It

delves into the most fundamental of

human questions. What are the stories we

tell ourselves? Who gets to tell those

stories? And what is truth?

Russell Brand's career as an entertainer

was based on promiscuity, shock,

extravagance, wit, intelligence. But

that's the case for so many comedians.

In 2013,

Brand did something most comedians

don't. He talked to Britain's chief

mainstream media political interrogator,

Jeremy Paxman.

How do you imagine the people get He

told the incredulous Paxman that he

didn't vote. What's the point?

Yeah, I know I don't vote. And it went

viral at the time, not least because

Brand is one of Britain's most

recognizable faces, but because it

seemed to many to capture the mood. An

ordinary person telling the truth up

against the establishment. It was the

start of a shift towards politics. In

2014, after a stint in Hollywood, Brand

wrote a book, Revolution, which he

discussed in another much-talked-about

interview on Newsnight in the UK.

The same year, he started The Trews on

YouTube, reading and commenting on the

UK papers, interviewing a range of

people, and mostly making loosely

progressive arguments.

Of course, for many people, the pandemic

changed a lot of things. And in January

of 2021,

two videos stand out as having millions

more views than usual. Both about the

Great Reset.

It's a topic that Brand comes back to

several times, and they always have many

more views. Around this time, Brand

becomes more critical of policies

surrounding COVID-19.

Much of it is reasonable, and he shifts

to his current regular format called

Stay Free, a full-time regular show with

millions of subscribers, advertisers,

co-presenters, and guests. A few months

later, in the middle of 2021, stories

began running, mostly drawing from

tweets on Twitter, that Brand is a

conspiracy theorist. And by 2022, two

competing narratives are set.

For many, Brand has become a crackpot

tinfoil hat conspiracist. And for Brand

and others, there's a centralizing

authoritarian mainstream agenda

dominated by the mainstream media, the

political establishment, big tech, and

global corporate interests, all to take

away our freedoms.

I want to look at several stories as

they unfolded: COVID and vaccines, the

Great Reset, the Dutch farmers' protest,

and the allegations against Brand in

September of 2023,

to ask a question which I think is

fundamental to our information age. What

does it mean to be called a conspiracy

theorist, especially if there have been

real conspiracies in history?

Iran-Contra, Watergate, the Pentagon

Papers, the Holocaust, all the way back

to Julius Caesar's assassination.

All of these were the result of a real

conspiracy.

We'll look at the history and the

psychology, too, to try and separate

fact from fiction, asking, what drives

Russell Brand? Is there any truth to

what he says? How can we think about the

establishment, the mainstream media, the

so-called global elite? What does all of

this tell us about the society that we

live in?

Brand talks about lots of different

subjects in a lot of different ways, but

there's a few themes and topics he comes

back to again and again.

He is very aware that he's been framed

as a conspiracy theorist, and frequently

points out that he's just reading facts

from a variety of sources, some of them

mainstream: The Guardian, The New York

Times, The Washington Post. Some, as

we'll see, a bit more fringe. So again,

how can we disentangle fact from

fantasy?

At the beginning of 2021, clips began

circulating on the World Economic

Forum's The Great Reset.

The Great Reset is an initiative from

the WEF to drastically change the

direction of the economy after COVID-19

by addressing social issues and to,

quote, reflect, reimagine, and reset our

world. Depending on who you ask, the

Great Reset is anything from capitalist

propaganda to a genuine attempt to

address the problems with capitalism to

a global conspiracy to exert more

control over the population.

In the case of Brand, he argued that

The video is reasonable. It criticizes

those who think the Great Reset is part

of an authoritarian plan to take control

through the justification of a

manufactured fake climate crisis, for

example. But the video is a hit. It has

a million views, compared to his other

videos of the time, ranging around

100,000 views. He makes another saying

This time, 2.7 million views.

And a year later, he says

Continuing that

Okay, so what is the Great Reset? Well,

it began as a book written by the

founder of the corporate lobbying group

the WEF, Klaus Schwab, and his

co-author, Thierry Malleret. One review

describes three main themes. First, a

push for fairer incomes in the global

market and to address the massive

inequalities produced by global

capitalism. Second, efforts to address

equality and sustainability by urging

governments and businesses to take

things like racism and climate change

more seriously. And third, embrace

innovation and technological solutions

that could be used to address global

social problems.

All of this sounds reasonable enough,

admirable even. But as political author

Ivan Wecke has pointed out, Schwab and

the WEF's ideas have something fishy

about them. The initiative could be seen

as an exercise in corporate PR that

gives multinational business leaders

more power, not less. That gives

political elites more power, not less.

In another review of the book, Stephen

Umbrello concludes that the book does

point out a lot of the problems we face,

but has no substantive solutions. And of

course, liberal elites love this stuff.

Trudeau, for example, has used the

language of needing a reset after COVID.

There's plenty to criticize, but as

Brand explores the Great Reset, he

connects it to other events. BlackRock

buying up houses, for example, or

emphasizing one video ominously claiming

that in the future you'll own nothing

and be happy, or increasing government

restrictions during the pandemic, Bill

Gates, and the Dutch farmers' protest.

He seems, for example, to be more

aligned with the Alberta Premier, Jason

Kenney, who has claimed that the Great

Reset is quick

and failed socialist policy ideas.

Agenda is used frequently. And as he

said, it's not a conspiracy, he's just

reading the facts. So, what is a

conspiracy?

One definition is the belief that a

number of actors join together in secret

agreement in order to achieve a hidden

goal, which is perceived to be unlawful

or malevolent. Another, by Professor of

Psychology Jan-Willem van Prooijen,

argues a conspiracy has five components.

First, it makes connections that explain

disconnected actions, objects, or people

into patterns. Second, it involves that

it was an intentional plan. Third, it

involves a coalition or a group. Fourth,

the goal is hostile, selfish, evil, or

at odds with public interest. And five,

it operates in secret. Another

definition proposes a simpler

four-criteria model. One, a group. Two,

acting in secret. Three, to alter

institutions, usurp power, hide truth,

or gain utility. Four, at the expense of

the common good. There's also many types

of conspiracy. Within government and

institutions, without in the form of

another country or a nefarious power.

Above in the form of shady elites or

even below in the form of ordinary

people organizing to overthrow

capitalism, for example.

By Pruling's criteria, the Great Reset

can be thought of as a conspiracy. After

all, it's intentional. It involves a

group of people. Some argue it's not in

the public interest. And at least in

part, it operates in secrecy, in

boardrooms and at places like Davos. But

Brand points out that it's not a

conspiracy. They're saying it publicly,

after all.

Being as I said, this is not a

conspiracy theory, I'm going to read you

the actual facts here. But I think the

more interesting component is the first

one. It makes connections that explains

disconnected actions, objects, and

people into patterns. Brand does this

often, hopping between topics. So, let's

look at another one of these topics, the

Dutch farmers protest.

The Dutch farmers movement, beginning in

2019 and continuing today, are protests

that argue that farmers are being

unfairly targeted in efforts to address

climate change. The Dutch government

have passed a range of policies aiming

to cut nitrogen pollution and livestock

farming in the country. Brand says,

Bloody farmers protesting, hating the

environment. What is it? Are farmers all

bastards? Or are we seeing the beginning

of the Great Reset play out in real

time? In short, the Dutch government's

policies are a power grab, taking power

from ordinary farmers. And he connects

the protest to other stories he covers

frequently: the Great Reset, WEF, Bill

Gates, and the mainstream media failing

to cover the events appropriately.

So, what's actually happening in the

Netherlands?

Studies since the '80s have known that

nitrate pollution in the ground, through

drinking water, and into wider

ecosystems have been an increasing

problem. Nitrate pollution can cause

blue baby syndrome, increases in bowel

cancer, respiratory problems, and

premature birth. It causes havoc in

rivers, which nitrate-based fertilizer

runs into, killing fish. The EU has

identified what it calls Natura 2000

areas, fragile ecosystems that are home

to rare and threatened species that need

protecting. The Netherlands is an

agricultural superpower. It's the second

largest exporter of agricultural

products in the world and the EU's

number one exporter of meat. And

unfortunately and complexly, being close

to the designated Natura 2000 areas,

this makes nitrate pollution in the

Netherlands a big problem. The

Netherlands is also an EU member state,

with its freedom of movement, courts,

European Parliament, and so on. And

support the staying in the EU in the

Netherlands is very high, around 75%.

The EU has legislated to reduce nitrate

pollution by 2030. And more broadly,

worldwide, agriculture contributes to

around a quarter to a third of all

greenhouse gas emissions. The Dutch

government and the EU have agreed a 1.5

billion euro package to help 2,000 to

3,000 peak polluters, including farmers,

to either innovate, relocate, change

business, or, as a last resort, buy the

mag. Now, obviously, among many farmers,

this is deeply unpopular. The Guardian

reports that for agricultural

entrepreneurs, there will be a stopping

scheme that will be as attractive as

possible, said Van der Wal in a series

of parliamentary briefings. For

industrial peak polluters, we will get

to work with a tailor-made approach and

tightening permits. After a year, we

will see if this has achieved enough.

Does it seem hypocritical to focus

efforts on ordinary farmers rather than

industrial peak polluters? Well, without

speaking Dutch or looking in depth at

the legislation, on the surface, yeah,

it does. And none of what I've just said

is to blame farmers, of course. But it's

obviously a complex problem with a lot

of different interests, a lot of

different ideas.

Their protests in Sri Lanka are

comparable as well. And in the middle of

the video, Brand makes some reasonable

points. In Sri Lanka, the outright

banning of all fertilizers and

pesticides was disastrous. He makes

points about focusing on farmers rather

than finding ways to shift attention to

corporations and the 1%. He says it's

always ordinary people rather than the

powerful, all of which I can agree with.

But he ignores some of the complexity.

The Dutch government has also ordered

coal power plants to close, for example.

And the biggest polluter in the country

is Tata Steel, which the regulation does

focus on and is one of the country's

biggest employers of ordinary people,

too. So, it is a complex issue. But what

stands out from Brand is the framing.

It's about the Great Reset, Bill Gates,

the agenda, and the next piece of the

puzzle.

There are several ongoing COVID-19

pandemic vaccine debates: the lab leak

hypothesis, the efficacy of vaccines,

Big Tech censorship, the legality or the

ethics of lockdowns.

And what should be clear, wherever you

stand on a particular issue, is that

each of these that I've just mentioned,

while having a lot of crossover in that

they're all to do with COVID, are

somewhat different.

Some of Brand's many COVID-19 videos,

like the one on vaccine passports, for

example, have a lot to agree with.

However, like with other topics, Brand

has a tendency to take a story and spin

it into a wider pattern.

We hear it a lot recently. It's about

the narrative. The lab leak lab leak

theory that the COVID pandemic was

caused by a leak from a Chinese

government-controlled lab.

The lab leak hypothesis isn't about

laboratory safety precautions or lack

thereof, but about a cover-up involving

world governments, the WHO, and Big Tech

censorship. A WHO epidemic surveillance

network across the world that monitors

the outbreak of communicable diseases

and does a lot of good work COVID aside,

becomes about an elitist surveillance

society that spies on us.

The WHO, or World Health Organization,

what is it you like most about it? That

you fund it out of your taxes? That Bill

Gates is its second biggest funder? Or

that nobody elected it? A doctor

describing helping with outbreaks

becomes an object of derision. Take this

video, one of many on vaccines. A former

Pfizer worker has turned whistleblower

suggesting It's about Pfizer falsifying

the data of vaccine trials, a serious

issue. It's based on a British Medical

Journal article in which a whistleblower

raised a number of concerns with a trial

site they worked at. And those concerns

included one, participants placed in a

hallway after injection and not being

monitored by staff. Two, lack of timely

follow-up of patients who experienced

adverse events. Three, protocol

deviations not being reported. Four,

vaccines not being stored at proper

temperatures. Five, mislabeled

laboratory specimens. And six, targeting

staff for reporting these types of

problems.

Fine, all worrying concerns. And Brand

repeatedly points out that he's just

looking at the evidence objectively,

just asking questions. He describes

himself as a glass funnel, reporting

information carefully and unbiasedly,

while the mainstream media report it

morally, telling people what to do. No

opinions around medical matters,

policies around medical matters. I'm

sort of basically like a glass funnel.

There are a few points of irony here.

First, obviously, Brand has a moral

position here, too. We all do, unless we

read a story without comment or opinion,

which Brand is doing. Second, he says

this isn't being reported on by the

mainstream media, while using reports

from mainstream institutions, the BMJ,

CBS. And it's been reported by the Daily

Mail and the Conversation. I find a

brief reference to it in the Financial

Times, too.

But, it might be reasonable to ask,

should there not be more of an outcry,

more focus on it, more reporting? I

can't find it mentioned on the New York

Times or the BBC websites, for example.

As the conversation article points out,

the concerns raised are important and

worrying, but don't meaningfully

undermine wider evidence on COVID-19

vaccines. It involved three Pfizer trial

centers out of 150. Those three sites

involved around 1,000 people total, and

they weren't even run by Pfizer. This

was a third party. And of course, around

the world, hundreds of thousands took

part in trials involving many different

pharmaceutical companies, third-party

trial centers, universities, and

hundreds of regulatory bodies. And most

of the whistleblower's complaints were

about sloppiness. Photos of things like

needles thrown away inappropriately,

participants' IDs left out when they

shouldn't have been. One section reads,

"An executive identified three site

staff members with whom to, quote, go

over e-diary issue, falsifying data,

etc. One of them was verbally counseled

for changing data and not noting late

entry, a note indicates." Now, all of

this is obviously worrying, good

reporting, worth investigating, and so

on. But it's always important to keep a

sense of proportion. This is a single

third-party trial center in Texas, but

Brand spins it into a wider narrative,

claiming in another video, for example,

that The mainstream media are preventing

their own medical experts from

accurately reporting on potential COVID

problems. Meanwhile, they continue to

repress information about vaccine

efficacy. As Professor Douglas Drevets,

head of the Infectious Diseases

Department at the University of

Oklahoma, has written, "There have been

so many other studies on the Pfizer

COVID-19 vaccine since the phase three

trial that people can be confident in

its efficacy and safety profile. That

said, Pfizer might be wise to rerun

their analysis including all Ventavia

subjects and show if that does or does

not change the results. Such an analysis

would give added confidence in the phase

three results. Pfizer reported that they

looked into the complaints and said that

Pfizer's investigation did not identify

any issues or concerns that would

invalidate the data or jeopardize the

integrity of the study."

Now, I want to be absolutely clear. I'm

not saying that Pfizer's claims should

be taken at face value or that

pharmaceutical companies don't have

perverse profit incentives and so on, or

that this isn't worth someone digging

into, someone looking at it in detail.

The point is that this is a very small

story. It has been looked at, and I'd

imagine that if you're an editor at a

large TV station or at a newspaper with

hundreds of other competing stories to

present, you might decide, on balance,

that there are more important issues for

the day.

News reporting is a matter of selection

and emphasis in the greater scheme, with

the most important issues, with the most

important debates, on balance with the

rest of the evidence. And with only a

limited number of positions on a

half-an-hour news show or on the front

page of a newspaper, the important

question is what's included and what's

not.

Brand says that the mainstream media are

censoring information, when in fact, the

opposite is true. There are, again,

issues with the mainstream media that

we'll come to, but it's an endorsement

of the press that, unlike, say, in China

or Russia, a relatively minor issue

could be reported and investigated and

decided was not appropriate to include

and say, on the front page news or on a

news program on television.

Brand constantly says things like, "This

is what happens when you politicize

information," without the awareness that

by weaving insignificant details into

wider narratives, deciding to give small

stories weight, he is himself obviously

politicizing information. There's

nothing wrong with that. It's just

hypocritical to accuse one side of doing

it when you're doing it yourself. The

whistleblower was also reported to be a

vaccine skeptic more broadly. While

Brand also relies on jokes as innuendo

to spin it into a wider conspiracy

narrative, while saying he's just

relying on facts, he also jokes, for

example, that the whistleblower was

found dead. Freedom, importantly,

individual freedom, individual ability

to make choices for yourself, based on a

wide variety of sometimes opposing

evidence and sometimes contradictory

information that places you in the

position as an adult to make decisions

for yourself. That's not what the

mainstream media want,

But it doesn't use a wide variety of

evidence. He selects minor stories and

connects them to the narrative. There

are many, many, many more sources that

report things like vaccines have saved 3

million lives in the US alone, 96% of

doctors are fully vaccinated,

myocarditis has been reported in 10 out

of a million shots of the vaccine, but

is more likely to be caused by the

COVID-19 virus than the vaccine. There

are debates to be had, there always are,

but what Brand doesn't have is a good

sense of the weight and significance of

a story. And what he does have, as we'll

get to, is a good sense of how to tell a

compelling, scary, and entertaining

story.

But wait, just because it's a small

story, it doesn't make it automatically

wrong.

And yes, there are moneyed interests,

powerful lobbies, values and ideas that

are dominant and others that get

sidelined.

The risk is throwing out the baby with

the bathwater. And as we saw at the

beginning, some conspiracies do turn out

to be true, and they weren't reported

on, either. So, is there any other way

to separate fact from fiction?

History is full of conspiracies, but

they tend to be limited, a small group

of people with a limited set of goals.

Most conspiracy theories have turned out

to be wrong, or at the very least,

there's little evidence for. Vaccines

don't cause autism, a farmer was born in

the US, the Earth is not flat, witches

weren't conspiring to encourage the

harvests to fail, Jews weren't

conspiring to take over the world in

Weimar Germany.

But the idea that there's some kind of

agenda to take over the world that

connects dots between disparate events

is as old as time, and they've usually

turned out to be wrong, or at least, as

we'll get to, miss the real point. Some

have been speculating that the real

estate bubble in 2020 and into 2021 is

the start of the global elite's great

reset agenda. Now you're interested.

In the middle of the 19th century, it

was a common belief in America that the

Catholic Church and the monarchies of

Europe were not only uniting to destroy

the US, but had already infiltrated the

US government. One Texas newspaper

declared that "It's a notorious fact

that the monarchs of Europe and the Pope

of Rome are at this very moment plotting

our destruction and threatening the

extinction of our political, civil, and

religious institutions. We have the best

reasons for believing that corruption

has found its way into our executive

chamber and that our executive head is

tainted with the infectious venom of

Catholicism." Before that, it was the

Illuminati, who, according to one book

in 1797,

were formed for the express purpose of

rooting out all the religious

establishments and overturning all the

existing governments of Europe.

In an influential 1964 article, The

Paranoid Style in American Politics,

Richard Hofstadter points out that

throughout history, there have been

suspicions of plots that have infected

all major institutions, that there's

been a fifth column, that all in power

have been compromised by an evil

conspiracy.

At the time conspiracies about the

Illuminati were rife across Europe and

America. The inventor of the telegraph,

Samuel Morse, wrote that "A conspiracy

exists. Its plans are already in

operation, were attacked in a vulnerable

quarter, and cannot be defended by our

ships, our forts, or our armies."

Morse, sounding eerily like Brand,

wrote, "The serpent has commenced his

coil around our limbs, and the lethargy

of his poison is creeping over us. Is

not the enemy already organized in the

land? Can we not perceive all around us

the evidence of his presence? We must

awake, or we are lost."

Another article worried that the Jesuits

are prowling about all parts of the

United States in every possible

disguise, expressly to ascertain the

advantageous situations and modes to

disseminate popery.

It was alleged that the 1893 depression

was the result of a conspiracy by

Catholics to attack the US economy by

starting a run on the banks. World War I

began because the Austro-Hungarian

Empire believed the killing of the heir

to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand,

was the result of a Serbian government

conspiracy, and so they attacked Serbia,

setting off a chain of events leading to

a world war.

There was no evidence for this.

Historian Michael Shermer calls it the

deadliest conspiracy theory in history.

Senator McCarthy famously believed a

communist conspiracy had infiltrated

every American institution. In 1951, he

said that there was a conspiracy on a

scale so immense as to dwarf any

previous such venture in the history of

man. A conspiracy of infamy so black

that when it's finally exposed, its

principals shall be forever deserving of

the maledictions of all honest men.

During the Red Scare, influential

businessman Robert Welch wrote that the

communist influences are now in almost

complete control of our federal

government, the Supreme Court, and we

are in a struggle for control of the

press, the pulpit, the radio and

television media, the labor unions, the

schools, the courts, and the legislative

halls of America.

One of the key distinctions here is

between phrases like an agenda and

conspiracy.

Brand, while defending himself as not

being a conspiracy theorist, tends to

use terms like agenda or they a lot or

things like the global elite.

The difference between purposeful

collusion across institutions in secret

with an evil plan and a pattern of say

certain values aligning between

corporations and neoliberal politicians.

Sometimes the difference between the two

is a gradient more than black and white,

but another way we can untangle this is

to look at studies about who believes in

conspiracies and for what reasons.

First, a lot of people believe in them.

1/3 believe Obama is not American, a

third that 9/11 was an inside job, a

quarter that COVID was a hoax, 30% that

chemtrails are somewhat true, and 33%

believe that the government are covering

up something about the North Dakota

crash.

Never heard of it? That's because

researchers made it up. They polled

people about their beliefs in

conspiracies and included a completely

made-up event in North Dakota, and

people instinctively believed that the

government was hiding something about

it.

People are naturally suspicious of

power, which is, of course, a good

thing. But for some people, that leads

to a belief in conspiracy. Why?

Well, there are several factors that

psychologists have looked at. The first

is uncertainty. Psychologist Jan-Willem

van Prooijen points out that at a

fundamental level, conspiracy theories

are a response to uncertainty. He

writes, "Conspiracy theories originate

through the same cognitive processes

that produce other types of belief,

e.g., New Age spirituality. They reflect

a desire to protect one's group against

a potentially hostile out-group, and

they are often grounded in strong

ideologies. Conspiracy theories are a

natural defensive reaction to feelings

of uncertainty and fear."

Responding to uncertainty and fear by

hypothesizing a threat is an

evolutionary instinct. You're better off

jumping at the sight of a stick in the

long grass than by being bitten by a

snake, for example. The same thing

happens when we see shapes in the

darkness. We are risk-calculating

creatures, always on the watch for

danger.

And we do this by looking for patterns.

Jonathan Kay writes that "Conspiracism

is a stubborn creed because humans are

pattern-seeking animals. Show us a sky

full of stars, and we'll arrange them

into animals and giant spoons. Show us a

world full of random misery, and we'll

use the same trick to connect the dots

into secret conspiracies."

Psychologists call it pattern

perception. I like to think of it as

patternification.

Prooijen writes, "Pattern perception is

the tendency of the human mind to

connect dots and perceive meaningful and

causal relationships between people,

objects, animals, and events. Perceiving

patterns is the opposite of perceiving

randomness."

Again, all very reasonable, but

sometimes the stick in the grass is just

a stick in the grass, and sometimes an

event is just random, meaningless, an

accident, a result of incompetence,

ignorance, and so on.

Prooijen writes, "Sometimes events truly

are random, but most people perceive

patterns anyway. This is referred to as

illusory pattern perception. People

sometimes see meaningful relationships

that just do not exist."

We do it all the time, but what's

interesting in research is that some

people see patterns more readily than

others.

In studies, people who see patterns in

abstract paintings, random dots, or coin

tosses were more likely to believe in

conspiracy theories, paranormal

phenomena, and be religious. People who

believe in astrology, spiritual healing,

telepathy, and communication with the

dead are all likely to believe in

conspiracy theories. Belief in

conspiracies have also been shown to

increase after natural disasters, when

people feel a lack of control.

Threat leads to the formation of a

belief in a pattern in response to that

threat.

While we're all distracted

by no means all, but many of Brand's

videos, small stories, a small sample of

data, a single piece of evidence, or

fringe ideas become spun or magnified

into a wider pattern. In this video, he

links the Great Reset and the WEF's

video, You'll Own Nothing and Be Happy,

to movements in the financial markets, a

story about BlackRock buying up real

estate. It's all part of the agenda. He

throws in that the mainstream media

apparently reports it as good news, a

housing bonanza that's going to be great

for everyone, insinuating that all

journalists are part of the agenda and

ignoring the irony that he's citing the

New York Times.

What's it got to do with the Great

Reset? I honestly couldn't tell you. I

wonder if bitcoin.com,

Brand's source in this, has an agenda.

In this video, the Great Reset is linked

to the farmers' protests, throw in Bill

Gates, throw in some vaccines, and it

all becomes part of the simple good

versus evil narrative.

Author Naomi Klein describes it as a

conspiracy smoothie. She writes, "The

Great Reset has managed to mash up every

freakout happening on the internet, left

and right, true-ish and off-the-wall,

into one inchoate meta-scream about the

unbearable nature of pandemic life and

of voracious capitalism."

Conspiracy theorists become, through

patternification,

totalizers. Everything gets lumped in

together as part of the same simple

single narrative. It becomes zero-sum,

good versus evil analysis. But this

doesn't answer why some people do this

and others don't as much, nor does it

answer when the dots should be

connected.

To see why people do this, we'll look at

two categories: cognitive biases and the

need for control.

Studies have shown that education above

high school level halves the tendency to

believe in conspiracies from 42% to 22%.

Why is this?

It's kind of counterintuitive

because in many ways education actually

teaches you, more than anything, to be

skeptical. The scientific method, for

example, is built on skepticism of

received wisdom. In history, which I

did, you're taught to be skeptical of

and scrutinize the literature and the

primary sources. In politics, which I

also did, many approaches, liberalism,

Marxism, post-structuralism, and more,

are at their core skeptical about the

state and about institutional power.

If you're skeptical about what you're

told, surely you're going to be more

likely to believe that something is

going on behind the scenes.

Except while skepticism is key,

education also teaches you to draw on

evidence, being led by evidence as much

as possible, and importantly, all of the

evidence. If you only drew on

bitcoin.com to make a case, you wouldn't

get far, which is why most undergraduate

essays or dissertations and papers to

submitted journals require a literature

review. Show that you've assessed and

understood the literature, identified

weaknesses, and then can make an

argument. In fact, the very basis of the

modern scientific method in both the

hard sciences and the social sciences

and humanities is peer review. You must

reference, show you understand the

evidence, site sources in a

bibliography, show how experiments can

be rerun, and submit it to a body of

peers to check over the work. This idea

that work is checked and can be

responded to runs through the heart of

our institutions.

We rely on the work of others. We build

upon it. We respond to it. It has its

limits, is often biased, it's

middle-class, it can be wrong,

sub-disciplines are at loggerheads,

criticize one another, but that's

precisely what makes it work. It's

tentative. It's open to critique, and it

can be checked. It's how knowledge is

built up communally. We'll come back to

its benefits and limits shortly.

Another mistake conspiracy theorists

make is the proportionality bias. The

idea that a large effect necessarily

needs a large cause to create a sense of

cognitive harmony, a balance between two

ideas. JFK couldn't have been killed by

a lone assassin, he was the president of

the US after all. Princess Diana

couldn't have been randomly killed in a

car crash, it must have been the Royals.

9/11 couldn't have been the result of 19

backward guys from the Middle East, it

must have been the government.

freedom came under attack

in a series of deliberate and deadly But

we're all human, including presidents.

But if a US president and your neighbor

Ned died randomly on the same day, which

one would there be a conspiracy theory

about?

In one study, two groups were told two

different stories about a president of a

small country being assassinated. One

group was told the assassination leads

to a civil war, the other group doesn't.

And people were more likely to believe

the assassination was a conspiracy

if it led to a war. Pruitt says that the

proportionality must have a big cause.

There are some other biases, too.

Tribalism leads us to protect our

in-group, divide the world into us

versus them, good versus evil. Another

is the intentionality bias that leads us

to believe that the negative effects of

other people's actions were intentional,

whereas if we did them, it would be an

accident or we'd have a good reason to.

Every banker is evil, while our own

pension fund is necessary. Or in the

form of Hanlon's razor, never attribute

to malice that which is adequately

explained by stupidity.

So, there are biases of thinking that we

all make, and I think in many ways they

can be summed up in the way that Brand

talks about the mainstream media.

I think combining these fallacies and

thinking about the way Brand tells a

small story, like the Pfizer data

falsification story, and turns it into a

global elite agenda, gives us a good

frame to think about Brand's critique of

the mainstream media. It's almost always

part of his narrative, and even more so

since the accusations against him began

in September. Now, the mainstream media

has lots of problems. They're diverse

problems, not least of which that they

tend to be close to elites,

institutionalized, cozy with

politicians, centered in and overly

focused on places like Washington,

London, and New York, and have financial

interests. The list goes on.

But to paint hundreds of thousands of

journalists, and that's the figure in

the US and the UK alone, as part of an

agenda, is not only naive, it's

dangerous.

First, large media institutions could

not get away with relying on small

stories to construct speculative

narratives like Brand does. They're

always going to be led, for good and for

bad, by the dominant body of evidence

that's available. If 99% of scientists

believe that the vaccine is safe and

effective, the BBC is going to report it

that way. That's what you get from the

mainstream media. Media literacy is to

read the news widely, knowing

institutions' biases, and to read

elsewhere, too.

Second, the surge in independent media

is a great thing. You're watching it

now. Obviously, I'm an enthusiast.

However, independent does not

automatically mean authentic, unbiased,

giving a voice to the voiceless, free,

or any of the other superlatives that

you hear.

Independent media largely relies on

stories investigated and first reported

by the same mainstream media they go on

to criticize. Brand does this all the

time. Independent media rarely have the

budget to execute year-long

investigations, report from war zones,

get access to archives and data quickly,

get to the scene of a disaster or a

protest while it's happening, get the

connections to talk to the right people

quickly. Media institutions

are important for these very reasons. We

need institutions with the budget and

connections to do these things. Compare

this to Brand reading from bitcoin.com.

And third, to paint everyone in the

mainstream media in the same way is to

ignore that the media is made of

millions of people around the world

doing work passionately, carefully, with

varied opinions and interests. To frame

the mainstream media as monolithic, and

use language like us versus them, is

dangerous. By now, you're probably aware

that the British government have asked

big tech platforms to censor our online

content, and that some online platforms

have complied with that request. Brand

paints anyone who is part of the

narrative as a stooge for a centralizing

corporate and government agenda to take

away your freedom. But as any cursory

look at a textbook on propaganda will

show, that's not how influence works in

authoritarian countries, let alone

liberal ones. Brand relies on a kind of

top-down model of propaganda in which

power and money directs information,

education, news, opinion downwards

through the press and the schools into

the minds of a mindless population.

But as Jonathan Auerbach and Russ

Kostelanetz point out in their

introduction to the Oxford Handbook on

Propaganda, propaganda is not total,

even in totalitarian regimes. Persuasion

by information is much more complex. And

they write, "People consume propaganda,

but they also produce and package their

own information, just as they always

create and spin their own truths." If

you think that the mainstream media are

just propagandists, then I implore you

just to look at the facts on any one of

these issues that we've looked at. For

example, just to take one quickly, 1

million people have died from COVID-19

in the US alone, and vaccine hesitancy

has been estimated to have led to

300,000

preventable deaths. That's a study from

Brown, Harvard, the New York Times, and

more. If you think that the mainstream

media are just propagandists, take a

look through the Pulitzer Prize nominees

at the investigations from just the past

year.

Again, I want to be crystal, crystal

clear on this. I'm not saying that there

aren't many, many criticisms to be made,

and that obviously the mainstream media

are de facto in the center, and that any

collective, radical, or in particular

socialistic solutions or candidates will

never get a fair shot, and that lobbying

and money will always delegitimize

certain solutions that don't align with

their interests, and that supporting

independent, progressive media is

crucial to countering that.

But none of these criticisms paints the

mainstream media and all the people in

it as monolithic, evil propaganda. It's

simplistic, it's dangerous, it's wrong,

and as we'll see, it's often about

something else. Narcissism, control, and

in some cases, outright lies.

Sex. The love of a

In September of 2023,

Channel 4 and The Telegraph in the UK

released an investigation into Brand

that included allegations of sexual

assault and rape. The day before, Brand

posted a video on YouTube and Rumble

denying the allegations. Obviously, it's

been an extraordinary and distressing

week, and I thank you very much.

What happened next for many seemed to

prove Brand's point. The media focused

its attention on Brand. Countless

articles were written, news items

broadcast, investigations launched at

places like the BBC. He was dropped by

his agent, a tour was canceled, YouTube

removed advertising from his account so

he could no longer make money from it.

The charity he did work for cut ties,

and on and on. One platform stood firm,

Rumble.

And a letter from a UK MP asking whether

Rumble was going to stop Brand earning

money was ridiculed and criticized by

many, including Rumble, who said in an

open letter, "We regard it as deeply

inappropriate and dangerous that a UK

Parliament would attempt to control who

is allowed to speak on our platform or

to earn a living from doing so."

Inevitably, it became a story about a

story. Free speech, cancel culture, the

establishment, the agenda.

There are again reasonable debates to be

had here. I for one am not sure YouTube

should have taken a stance based on

allegations alone, no matter how strong

the allegations are. But, interestingly,

a week or so after the allegations, the

I newspaper in the UK ran a story about

adverts on Brand's Rumble channel.

One of them was from a company called

The Wedding Shop, and they said,

"We're on the phone right now to our

agency to ascertain which of these

networks is showing our ads on Rumble so

that we can effectively remove ads from

the platform. It goes without saying

that we would not be happy to be

featured on Russell Brand's videos."

They continued, "We use a media agency

to spend our advertising budget, and we

have never chosen to advertise on

Rumble, which must be part of the

Google, Bing, or Meta ad network. Where

our ads are placed is not something we

generally control. It would be for

Google, Bing, or Meta to decide whether

or not to include or exclude particular

platforms." Now, if you believe in free

speech, you must then believe in the

Wedding Shop's right to advertise where

they want to advertise and to not

advertise in front of the videos of

someone who has been accused of sexual

assault. I'd imagine that goes against a

company called The Wedding Shop's

values. The story also reports that

several companies, including Burger

King, Xerox, and Fiverr, have stopped

their ads running on Rumble. The stories

they told are similar.

A Fiverr spokesman said, "These ads have

been removed, and our partners and teams

have been alerted to ensure this doesn't

happen again. We have excluded his

channel both on YouTube and on Rumble.

We take brand safety and ethical

advertising placement seriously, and we

do not condone or support any form of

violence or misconduct."

A toy manufacturer said something

similar. Now, back in 2017, YouTube went

through something that's referred to as

the adpocalypse. Advertisers pulled out

of YouTube en masse when they realized

that their ads were being placed in

front of videos that were accused of

being things like anti-Semitic,

homophobic, or just plain scammy.

All of this points to an obvious human

conclusion. Charities, agencies,

advertisers, institutions would prefer

not to be linked with someone accused of

sexual assault and rape. It's not great

PR. YouTube, in particular, has to

balance between supporting creators and

attracting advertisers. And so, the

middle ground is to limit ads on videos

that advertisers are likely to pull out

of before the advertisers pull out of

YouTube completely.

Of course, for Brand, this quickly

became part of the agenda. In a Rumble

video, he criticizes something called

the Trusted News Initiative and argues

that the mainstream media are targeting

independent media in an attempt to

control the narrative. It appears that

apparently independent, or at least

separate, news organizations are

collaborating and I hesitate to use this

word, conspiring to control global news

narratives in some of the most important

stories in the world. Why? Well, they

explain to you that their intention, it

appears, and this is explicit, and we

have a quote that undergirds this claim,

the explicit intention is to shut down

independent media voices. Trusted News

Initiative is an effort by many media

organizations and big tech platforms to

counter fake news, false reports, viral

disinformation, and so on. Not

dissenting opinions, but purposefully

false information, which studies have

shown get shared six times as much as

real news stories on sites like

Facebook. Fake stories like this one.

Ilhan Omar holding secret fundraisers

with Islamic groups tied to terror,

which got shared on Facebook 14,000

times. Brand argues that Let's find out

what the Trusted News Initiative is. In

short, I can tell you that it's a

collaboration between legacy media and

big tech sites in order to prevent

independent media voices communicating

He uses a story from Reclaim the Net

that focuses on a lawsuit filed in the

US by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that claims

that dissenting views are being stamped

out unconstitutionally

by the Trusted News Initiative,

violating freedom of speech and

antitrust laws.

It's a minor story from 9 months ago,

but it's useful for Brand because it

supports his main point. He's under

attack.

Not only does he rely on a single fringe

source to tell a biased story, he either

lazily or willfully distorts it. He

reads from parts of the article, then at

the end says again that Plainly, this is

a story that is much bigger than me.

Plainly, the Trusted News Initiative has

an agenda, an explicit agenda to

throttle and choke independent media.

Plainly, the government are really But

he's completely distorted the language

that even he's read just a second ago.

Again, there may be legitimate concerns

about this, but if you look at the

lawsuit available online filed to the

district court, the so-called explicit

agenda is to find ways to throttle and

choke false information, fake news

stories. The comments about independent

media are separate, and even those are

misquoted.

The quote Brand reads out is from Jamie

Angus at BBC News saying this.

So, here's that quote. Because actually,

the real rivalry now is not between, for

example, the BBC and CNN globally. It's

actually between all trusted news

providers, trusted means members of this

cartel, trusted news providers, and a

tidal wave of unchecked reporting,

uncensored reporting that's being piped

out mainly through digital platforms,

independent media like this. That's the

real competition now in the digital

media world. Of course, organizations

will always compete against one another

for audiences, But this is a misquote.

Both Brand and RFK Jr. and others

reporting this uncritically have

conveniently left out the parts of the

quote that dilute their point. Anyone

can watch the actual clip. It's linked

below. What Jamie Angus actually said

was that the real rivalry now is not

between, for example, the BBC and the

CNN globally. It's actually between all

trusted news providers and a tidal wave

of unchecked, incorrect, or or in fact

explicitly malicious nonsense that's

being piped out mainly through digital

platforms specifically to destabilize

regions of the world. That's the real

competition now in the in the digital

media world. Of course, organizations

will always compete with each other for

audiences, but the existential threat, I

think, is that overall breakdown in

trust so that, you know, the context is

not only left out, it's manipulated. The

entire discussion is about how much

newsrooms need to do now to verify the

vast amount of information that dealing

with, how much newsrooms have changed

and the challenges they face, and how

many more technicians and specialists

are required. Angus is talking about

wars, verifying whether a TikTok, for

example, from Ukraine is manipulated or

useful evidence, employing specialists

in things like geolocation verification,

and using satellite imagery to

understand bombings. He even praises

what he calls citizen journalism and

talks about opening up the news

ecosystem. It's an interesting watch.

Brand and his like have to do none of

that difficult work. Not only that, they

rely on it, use it, feed off it while

denigrating the many, many ordinary

people who make it possible, that do the

hard work.

And you might say that, well, Brand is

just one person. He's just an

entertainer. He's just commenting on

articles and news. He's not producing

it. It's not his responsibility to

fact-check every story. And that's

exactly the argument I've heard Brand

make, too.

But if I,

with a budget of almost nothing, can

quickly check a source, then maybe Stay

Free with Russell Brand might also do a

bit of work. I'm not saying they should

have a newsroom of fact-checkers and

specialists and technicians sifting

through each and every claim, but with

the following, the net worth, and the

status Russell Brand has, he clearly has

the budget to do due diligence, to check

sources, to not misrepresent.

With a channel that large, you have a

clear moral duty to.

Instead, the laziest and most

entertaining interpretation comes first,

and laziness fosters conspiracy, because

thoroughness exposes truth.

So, how Brand has framed this is an

outright lie. I'm not saying we

shouldn't be very concerned with Big

Tech being in control of what can and

can't be said. I disagreed with them

taking down clips and interviews about

COVID and vaccines. I think Big Tech

platforms should be committed to freedom

of speech.

But Angus is talking about genuine

floods of disinformation, propaganda

machines, Russian bot farms designed to

lie to people, the amount that newsrooms

have to sift through now, the amount of

deception they have to go through with a

fine-tooth comb, the amount of experts

that they have to employ, geolocation

experts, experts that can detect fake

videos and imagery and audio. This is

the context. This is what he's talking

about in this video, and he's absolutely

right. Whatever the dangers and

criticisms, I think it would be

irresponsible of the mainstream media to

not think carefully about these issues.

They just have to. It took me a few

minutes to search through the court

document. You don't even have to read it

all. You can search. It's digitized.

Then watch the clip to see that Brand

and his source had either willingly or

lazily misquoted the source so as to

spin it into their own narrative.

Combine it with another quote to make it

seem more malicious, and in Brand's

case, use it to defend against

accusations from many ordinary women

that don't have power like he does of

sexual assault.

If that doesn't make you angry, I really

think it should.

In his book on conspiracy theories,

Michael Shermer writes that seeing

patterns everywhere, patternification,

is the need for control. He writes, "The

economy is not this crazy patchwork of

supply and demand laws, market forces,

interest rate changes, tax policies,

business cycles, boom and bust

fluctuations, recessions and upswings,

bull and bear markets, and the like.

Instead, it's a conspiracy of a handful

of powerful people variously identified

as the Illuminati, the Bilderberger

Group, the Council on Foreign Relations,

the Trilateral Commission, the

Rockefellers, and the Rothschilds." He

continues, "Conspiracists believe that

the complex and messy world of politics,

economics, and culture can all be

explained by a single conspiracy and

conspiratorial event that downplays

chance and attributes everything to this

final end of history."

Instead of acknowledging messiness,

complicated people, multiple motives,

conspiracy thinking sees a pattern as a

result of purposeful agency in an

attempt to control others.

Psychologists Mark Landau and Aaron Kay

looked at studies that show how people

compensate for perceived loss of control

by trying to restore control themselves

by, quote, "Bolstering personal agency,

affiliating with external systems

perceived to be acting on the self's

behalf, and affirming clear

contingencies between actions and

outcomes, and seeking out and preferring

simple, clear, and consistent

interpretations of the social and

physical environments."

In another study, participants were

asked to think of an incident in their

lives where they felt in control, while

another group were asked to think of an

incident where they weren't. The latter

group were more likely to believe in

conspiracy theories presented to them

after.

Psychologists Joshua Hart and Molly

Graver did a study and found that

conspiracy believers, quote, "Are

relatively untrusting, ideologically

eccentric, concerned about personal

safety, and prone to perceiving agency

in actions."

One of the most important findings in

studies is that narcissism, the belief

in one's superiority,

a need for special treatment, is a very

strong predictor of believing in

conspiracies.

Narcissists are also more sensitive to

perceived threats.

As one paper notes, the effect of

narcissism on conspiracy beliefs has

been replicated in various contexts by

various labs, and that narcissism is one

of the best psychological predictors of

conspiracy beliefs. It continues,

"Grandiose narcissists strive to achieve

admiration by boosting their egos

through a sense of uniqueness, charm,

and grandiose fantasizing."

Narcissism arises out of paranoia that

threats are powerful, and narcissists

tend to respond with a bolstered sense

of ego, the need for personal dominance

and control. The need to feel unique

makes narcissists feel like they have

access to special information that

others don't.

Remind you of anyone?

It's also been found that narcissists,

quote, "Tend to be naive and less likely

to engage in cognitive reflection." To

put it bluntly, they're more gullible.

Narcissism has been linked to low levels

of intellectual humility, according to

another study.

Obviously, the entertainment industry is

full of narcissists who are particularly

suited to voicing special opinions and

entertaining people. There is a sense in

which Brand knows this is entertainment.

He says things like, "You're going to

love this story. It's right up your

alley." It's a strange way to frame a

story if you really think it's an

existential threat. Klaus Schwab WEF

stuff, you're going to love it. These

new systems of social credit

What you get is a kind of narcissistic

news porn based on paranoia and a need

to control a narrative. Brand's an

entertainer, and I don't want to be

psychoanalyzing anyone, so take this

with a pinch of salt, but Joe Rogan,

Elon Musk, and Brand, three major

figures who talk about conspiracy

theories a lot, come from a place, as I

understand it, where maybe they wished

they had more agency, more control over

their lives. Musk had a very troubled

and abusive childhood in South Africa.

Rogan has talked about how he moved

around a lot and got bullied, and I

think learned to fight to defend

himself. And Brand has a well-documented

history of addiction.

What this can lead to is an idea of not

being in control, a world of threat, and

a sense of paranoia. The Merriam-Webster

Dictionary defines paranoia as

systematized delusions of persecution.

It leads to the need to form a narrative

to help a person feel superior by having

access to special knowledge about larger

forces out to persecute them, and that

they themselves have overcome. And guess

what? You, too, can overcome them.

In The Paranoid Style in American

Politics, Hofstadter pointed out that

the paranoid sees an enemy that's

pervasive, powerful, conspiratorial,

pulling the strings, and importantly,

everywhere.

He wrote that the proponents of the

paranoid style regard a vast or gigantic

conspiracy as the motive force in

historical events. History is a

conspiracy set in motion by demonic

forces of almost transcendent power. And

what is felt to be needed to defeat it

is not the usual methods of political

give-and-take, but an all-out crusade.

He continued that the enemy is a perfect

model of malice, a kind of amoral

superman, sinister, ubiquitous,

powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving.

He makes crises, starts runs on banks,

causes depressions, manufactures

disasters, and then enjoys and profits

from the misery he has produced. He

controls the press, manages the news,

brainwashes, seduces, has control of the

education system, and for the paranoid,

nothing but complete victory will do.

Since the enemy is thought of as being

totally evil and totally unappeasable,

he must be totally eliminated.

And it's why Brand seems to get on so

well with Tucker Carlson.

Russell Brand has been an actor,

comedian, a podcast host for decades.

Carlson is well-versed in something his

former employer Fox News revolutionized.

I talked about this in another video.

News as entertainment. Flashy graphics,

sensationalist language, us versus them

narratives, a conspiracy involving every

institution that they keep coming back

to to draw viewers in.

Fox News nearly Fox realized that it's

the ongoing narrative, the good versus

evil story that keeps people coming

back. And so Carlson and Brand like him

pick a small story or a study or a

witness that supports their long-running

dramatic, paranoid, narcissistic

narrative that gets views rather than

doing it the other way round where you

take the larger story and talk about it

rather than fitting it into your

narrative.

It's not reporting. It's not journalism.

It's not news. It's entertainment. They

take a few points and the rest is how

it's said, with anger or charisma, with

jokes, with a story of good versus evil.

It's shallow news porn.

None of this is to disagree with Brand's

wider alleged motivations. None of this

is to defend a political system that's

failing ordinary people in many, many

cases. None of this is to deny that

inequality is widening, that wealth is

moving upwards, that wages have

stagnated for a long time, that people

are underrepresented.

None of this is to deny that lobbying

money, selfish interests, corporate

greed all play a central role in

politics. And none of this is to argue

that there's anything wrong with looking

at big farmers' financial incentives,

criticizing the Great Reset, or

emphasizing the concerns of farmers in

climate policy.

None of this is to say that we don't

need radical solutions.

What this is absolutely to reject is the

framing, the paranoid style, the good

versus evil narrative, the narrow

selection of stories and evidence to

suit your own entertaining, dramatic

narrative, the linking of every issue

together into a totalizing agenda.

Brand paints the mainstream media

narrative as a lie. His is not only a

bigger lie, but also a self-aggrandizing

and dangerous one.

George Monbiot writes that he appears to

have switched from challenging injustice

to conjuring phantoms. If, as I suspect

it might, politics takes a very dark

turn in the next few years, it will

partly be as a result of people like

Brand.

The point is, if you're not selecting

the stories, facts, evidence of the

things you cover by their wider

significance, if you're picking up on

perspectives and narratives based on

fringe evidence and ideas, then all

you're doing is being led by your own

individualistic, narcissistic ego, which

is why his criticism of the mainstream

media has only increased since an

investigation into his very well-known

behavior in the past was released. It's

clear that these organizations

collaborate in constructing narratives,

whether that's around the war or the

pandemic. And of course, there are other

examples. It's obvious that his isn't an

objective analysis. It's driven by his

own fragility.

is, is there another agenda at play?

His own little world.

And that's when we get narcissistic news

porn rather than careful study and

analysis.

To paint the mainstream media as totally

propagandized is to miss that people are

multifaceted, complex, have competing

incentives, are torn between different

ideas within them.

What many people missed about the

investigation into the recent

allegations against Brand is that it was

as much an investigation into a BBC and

a Channel 4 that facilitated Brand as

about Brand himself.

Just think about that. Channel 4 aired

an investigation into itself. Would you

ever see that on Brand's channel?

Brand does no original reporting. He

sits in his shed and reads from

journalists who have gone out and done

the work while at the same time howling

about how terrible they are.

To be crystal clear again, I'm not

saying that there aren't many critiques

of the mainstream media to be made and

that more journalism, more independent

voices ultimately are a great,

potentially revolutionary thing.

But when you totalize and cram

everything into the agenda, you paint

the world in paranoid, apocalyptic terms

of us versus them that dehumanizes the

other as individuals to be gotten rid of

rather than look at real, collective,

structural solutions to the problems we

face. This is why Brand gravitates to

figures like Tucker Carlson. Carlson

doesn't want collective solutions. What

he wants is more of the same with people

like him in charge. He pretty much says

as much in his book Ship of Fools. With

the kind of framing Brand has, you do

not get collective solutions. If every

institution is tainted, part of the

centralizing agenda, you get

libertarianism. You get more corporate

power, more greed, more unregulated

pollution, more inequality.

That's what history tells us. You get

the opposite of what Brand claims we

need.

If you portray every institution as part

of an agenda, then what's left to do?

Revolution, maybe. But then what? What

are your solutions? What's your theory?

What are you putting into practice? What

are the policies? What are the ideas?

What are the forms of organization? What

replaces the current system?

Conspiracy thinking is the easiest type

of thinking. Everyone does it. It's easy

for showman like Brand because at the

end of reading off a few quotes from one

source, you can just link them to the

agenda, the Great Reset, Big Pharma, the

centralizing agenda, the globalists, the

World Economic Forum, and Bill Gates.

It's like having a nice, cozy safety

blanket to return to that says, "Don't

worry.

The world is evil,

but you you know the truth.

You have it figured out in a nice,

simple little package with a nice little

bow tie.

Don't worry.

You never have to think again." What a

lovely, simple, neat story.

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