Robert Bridge
Once again, a courageous soul who challenged the establishment has been virtually silenced, Robert Bridge writes.
Once again, a courageous soul who challenged the establishment has been virtually silenced - tarred, feathered and portrayed as guilty of sexual assault before any trial has begun. Is this another example of a media-coordinated hit job against an inconvenient voice?
Imagine what a wonderful world it would be if journalists dug into stories like 'Russian election collusion' and 'Hunter Biden's laptop' with the same amount of gusto as they do with stories involving the sordid sex lives of celebrities. And not just any celebrities, but specifically those who have touched the third rail, so to speak, exposing the establishment for their egregious crimes against humanity.
Russell Brand is/was that sort of spirited and fearless individual. While initially part of the Hollywood circuit, appearing in films and performing stand-up comedy, the loquacious Brit eventually found himself ostracized from tinsel town after pointing out during the 2013 GQ Awards that the sponsor of the event, Hugo Boss, manufactured uniforms for the Nazi Party during World War II.
Having successfully torched his Hollywood career, Brand began to focus attention on his YouTube channel, where his fierce wit, intelligence and machine-gun-style delivery saw his number of subscribers climb to almost 7 million in 10 years. These are the sort of figures that land social media personalities on the 'truth radar,' a system backed by an army of left-wing fanatics and civil rights nut jobs devoted to enforcing 'community standards' with pure fascist fervor. Brand fell so far afoul of the mainstream media narrative that he was playing in an entirely differently stadium.
It's hard to say exactly when the powers-that-be decided to take down the YouTube sensation, but his March 2023 appearance on the Bill Maher show would be a safe bet. Appearing alongside John Heilemann, a national affairs analyst with MSNBC, and Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders, Brand went on a tangent about the Covid-19 pandemic and the pharmaceutical industry.
"The pandemic created at least 40 new Big Pharma billionaires; pharmaceutical corporations like Moderna and Pfizer made $1,000 in profit every second from the Covid-19 vaccines; more than two-thirds of Congress received campaign funding from pharmaceutical companies in the 2020 election; Pfizer Chairman Albert Bourla told Time magazine in July 202 that his company was developing a Covid vaccine for the good of humanity, not for money, and of course Pfizer made a $100 billion dollars in profit in 2022."
Maher, desperately trying to get a word in edgewise on his own show, reminded Brand that "a lot of people would be dead without the vaccine."
To which Brand snapped back: "If you have an economic system in which pharmaceutical companies benefit hugely from medical emergencies, where the military industrial complex benefits from war, where energy companies benefit from energy crisis, you are going to generate states of permanent crisis where the interests of ordinary people separate from the interests of the elite."
Thus, in a matter of seconds, Brand laid bare the inner workings of the business world and 'crisis capitalism,' where the solutions to society's myriad problems, many of them manufactured, work to the benefit of the corporations and political elite at the expense of tax-paying society as a whole. These are utterances rarely mentioned on primetime television.
Whether by chance or design, on September 16, a joint investigation conducted by the Times, Sunday Times and Channel 4 Dispatches was published, detailing four separate sexual-assault allegations, including one charge of rape, made against Brand that were said to have occurred between 2006 and 2013.
Brand vehemently denies the allegations and in a So, This Is Happening said he had been "very promiscuous" in the past, but all of his relationships had been "absolutely, always consensual".
All of this is very suspect. After all, 10 years is a long time, so what compelled four women to make allegations against Brand simultaneously. The obvious answer is that these media groups dispatched a goon squad of investigate journalists to find women who were 'violated' by Russell Brand, and considering the reprehensible reputation of the British media this was undoubtedly a simple task, and even more so when monetary incentives are included. Of course, this is not to suggest that Brand is innocent of the charges; he may very well have committed heinous acts in his past. We just don't know. But it forces one to question why these very serious allegations are surfacing now. Is the British media really so desperate for stories that it had to open an investigation into Russell Brand's past sex life? No, clearly this was a well-planned operation to destroy the man. And it seems they are succeeding.
YouTube announced that it had "suspended [monetization] on Russell Brand's channel for violating our Creator Responsibility policy...If a creator's off-platform behavior harms our users, employees or ecosystems, we take action to protect the community."
It seems like the real harm here is the perception that YouTube would eject a member of its "ecosystem" without due process first.
Ever since the emergence of the #MeToo movement, the legacy media and social media have developed a mob justice mentality, refusing to allow for the possibility that the accused (male) may actually be innocent. In fact, that's the agenda from the start. And it goes without saying that the media are in the extremely powerful position to mold public opinion to their will. This was evident in a Russell Brand accused of rape, sexual assault and abusive behaviour of the anonymous victims, some of them portrayed by actual actors, discussing their experiences. The production is complete with ominous background music and close-up silhouettes of the emotional women. This is cinematic manipulation that would certainly help to sway the public, not to mention some future jury, and not in a way favorable to Russell Brand's defense team. Why is the media, which is supposed to take an unbiased approach to its reporting, resorting to manipulating the emotions of their audience? The answer is obvious.
Much like was the case with Julian Assange, who faced similar age-old charges after releasing information damning to the U.S. establishment, Brand is a very articulate individual who is not afraid of speaking truth to power. Much like Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, and hundreds of other dissident voices, his anti-establishment opinions could not be tolerated, and once again the mainstream media was activated to do the dirty work of character assassination. It's a sick reality, but that's the depraved sort of 'journalism' Western audiences can expect to receive - until they demand better.