Russell Brand, Part 3: To Leave or Become the System
Russell Brand, Part 3: To Leave or Become the System
Governance by Aggressive Nonsensical Guruism
I am fully aware that some readers aren’t sure this story relates to the pandemic, or the crazy events of the world. I can assure you that it does. This third article completes a buildup, but it will be the second half of the story in which a lot of new relationships will be revealed, and some very serious questions asked. I believe the payoff will be enormous for those who get there.
An Instant Circus
"Just cause you got the monkey off your back doesn't mean the circus has left town." -George Carlin
Many wise people follow a self-imposed rule of not commenting on such controversies surrounding initial allegations for 24 hours, if not three or seven days. Or…and this may sound strange…after doing enough research to feel comfortable that you've developed a reasonable range of the likely endpoint of a confluence of evidence and circumstances. Yet surprisingly strong opinions on Brand and the sexual assault allegations in particular were instantly abundant a mere 82 seconds after allegations hit the air waves.
And that's how a circus gets created. Emotions are high while pundits step in, mix behavior A with behavior B in a blend, mix allegations about person X with those against person Y in a blend. Pretty soon, it's hard to navigate the smoke and mirrors.
Observation: There is no reason that we cannot treat the subjects of demonetization and cancel culture differently than the rape and sexual assault allegations. In fact, there are many obvious good reasons to do so.
I'll come back to the important topics of demonetization and cancel culture in a different section of this article.
Of course, the underlying ante includes issues surrounding the plandemonium, including vaccines. This is a once-in-a-lifetime moment. It might be a once-in-a-solar-system moment, and similarly difficult to navigate. We seem to be in the middle of World War E, and angels seem to be dropping out of the heavens, left and right. Hopefully, they're here to help us, right?
Why express a hot take when new information might come out in a week and leave you with egg on your face? Is creating a circus the goal?
Hypothesis: Whether or not there is more information incoming is a known quantity to some of the people forcefully stating their opinions, or to their handlers.
I wasn't sure who Mel Tucker was before hearing and reading about some people talking about his case and Russell Brand's in the same breath. From USA Today,
The accused is Mel Tucker, the head football coach at Michigan State University and one of the highest paid coaches in all of sports. Accusing him is Brenda Tracy, a rape survivor who has made educating athletes about sexual violence her life’s work.
Over eight months, they developed a professional relationship centered on her advocacy work. Tucker invited Tracy to campus three times – twice to speak to his players and staff and once to be recognized as an honorary captain at the team's spring football game.
But their relationship was upended during a phone call on April 28, 2022, Tracy says in a complaint she filed with the university’s Title IX office in December that remains under investigation.
According to her complaint, Tracy sat frozen for several minutes while Tucker made sexual comments about her and masturbated. His violation, she said, reopened 25-year-old wounds from her rape by four men – two Oregon State University football players, a junior college player and a high school recruit.
I'm not here to say whether anyone's allegations are true or false, but while masturbating over the phone may be ugly, it's not in the ballpark of the allegations that Russell Brand forced his penis down a woman's throat, and wrenched another woman's legs apart to forcefully penetrate her. Not only that, but I see no reason why the truth of the two stories should be any more correlated than any two sets of allegations. It seems bizarre for pundits to be covering these stories together as some are, except possibly to focus the audience's emotions about one in order to project it onto the other.
The excuse that seems to be given is that this is the moment we know that #MeToo went too far, but I find that reasoning hard to buy given that nobody presented the discussion with something like a sober, long-form analysis of the #MeToo movement. It's Russell Brand being moved between the circus rings, spotlights on and off him. Off and on.
Why take a position of strong defense of a media personality when that defense could strip you of your credibility? Is your hand that good? Are you going all in with the nuts? The 2006, 2007, and 2008 Shagger of the Year's nuts?
Hypothesis: People do not like uncertainty. Given any bias, people are susceptible to influencers collapsing the wave function of superposition between innocence and guilt of a parasocial icon for them.
And a lot of that is clearly on the alternative media.
New information has already dropped, though it hasn't filtered well through the noisy alt infosphere. The law enforcement investigator who worked the Jimmy Savile case (not exactly a paragon of "the machine", most likely) has been tasked with the Russell Brand case. The LAPD has also opened an investigation. Others could follow as more women have been said to start coming forward. Whether or not it will become part of a court case, one of these is an Australian woman who shared a story in which she claims Russell Brand followed her into a bathroom, cornered her, exposed himself, and told her that he was going to have sex with him even after she said no.
Russell has repeatedly claimed that all his sexual encounters were consensual, but if a large man shoots back at a cornered woman, telling her that he's going to f*** her while whipping out his penis, nothing after that aggression could possibly be viewed as consensual. Is that what happened? Predators understand the art of pushing boundaries, and using shock to disarm and discombobulate their victims. They strategically climb the rungs of acquiescence, emotionally or physically pummeling their targets into giving them what they want.
After the alleged incident, Russell went on radio and told part of the story to entertain an audience.
Are you not entertained?
Predators gather amused confidants to make their methods both more menacing and harder to expose. Having been the target audience for the post-abuse comedy performance, I eventually realized that the predator's social hack is to admit most of the crime openly, making the abuse into too much of a joke for the audience to later take seriously. Perhaps because they've been implicated—brought into the abuse process through the laugh. I've witnessed that with a childhood friend (a thief, actor/comedian, liar, but probably not a rapist) whom I eventually cut off from a business relationship and social circle after a few weeks of research into the nature and forms of narcissism. Once you recognize the patterns, your judgment about predators can improve.
Of course, this doesn't prove any one of the allegations, but it's part of the confluence of facts and circumstances, if not a reason why the circus-level dynamics should not exist. The circus short-circuits your opportunity to meditate on whatever lessons your mind leads you toward when they're important to you.
But the circus takes bolder steps than most of us would on our own. While we shouldn't walk on egg shells, we should approach a topic such as sexual assault with a respectful recognition that even the conversation can trigger people who have experienced various forms of sexual abuse. And inviting three attractive, fast-talking women on with Piers Morgan as third-party pundits to discuss have a cat fight about these matters apparently qualifies as somebody's definition of "respectful".
Did I say "third-party"? One of them is a friend of Russell's who depends on work as a comedian, and shares Piers Morgan's expressed opinion that Russell Brand has always and in all ways been a perfect gentleman along his spiritual path of shagging enumerable women. Is anyone else slightly creeped out by the combination of the calm way in which she talks about her own rape, along with her unquestioningly and complete exoneration of Russell? Something just seems strangely unnatural about her.
Understand that I am more suspicious of Piers Morgan, whom I never previously paid attention to beyond having caught a snippet here or there, than I might otherwise be after a tweet like this one.
Piers left out a key part of the context of Georgina's full commentary (which was quite reasonable, IMHO). What she said was (bolded is the dropped part), "I, from my own personal experience, do not see Russell Brand as a rapist. However, a lot of the evidence is very compelling, so one has to keep an open mind." Georgina expressed the opinion that the police should investigate, that she wants Russell to continue on a path of recovery [from addiction], and that his accusers should be believed. That last part did not sound as though she meant their story convicts Russell, but that the women should be taken seriously in walking through the process of having their story evaluated. But Piers picked a phrase that, removed from context, a Twitter reader might see, evaluate the statement as one of character exoneration, and then continue on with their doom scrolling. All I think Georgina really meant was that her experiences with Russell were consensual given that she made it clear that she cannot adjudicate the claims from her position.
Why play games with such quotes? And if we can't trust a man seemingly groomed for the news industry by Rupert Murdoch, who can we trust?
Honestly, watching this ring of the circus feels like V for Vendetta found its way into the tent. Is that an accident?
Do we even know what important topics or ideas we're being distracted from, both within and outside of this story?
Hypothesis: The circus, which includes portions of both the MSM and the alt media, is working to steer the messaging within an artificial Hegelian pinball both to soak up your attention, and also to herd you into media corners where you can best be hypnotized with future propaganda.
Remember: Not all the players need to understand the circus in order to participate.
And if there is a more important story, I do apologize for joining the circus and taking up our time. I do so because now seems like an important moment to shed light on some startling aspects of the circus. The lesson of loud and aggressive misdirection is a valuable one. Understanding the possibility that the Matrix is arranged from all the mirrors in the hallway is of critical importance. We'll talk a lot more about that later.
"This is How They'll Come for All of Us."
"Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." -Matthew 22:21
Is it weird to hear a man who got rich working in the system say, "fuck the system," and then plead to millions to support him because the system took away one of his paychecks? If the alternative media weren't here to tell me how much of a victim he is, I'd probably just pity him. But there is a story here about how the system can come for people.
If they can come for one of us, they can come for all of us. And we are given blurred boundary conditions in the game of exercising freedom. That's the nature of modern government in a nutshell. Always was, really. Certainly during our lifetimes, even when we were less aware of it. This is the meaning of monopolies on money and violence that define government. Your liberties were always a convenient fiction unless you had tribute to pay up into the invisible hierarchy. Because that's how it stands up against the rising of the tide.
I'm not saying that's what government has to be, but getting back to something more liberating of the human spirit will be a monumental enterprise. In the meantime, maybe we should all hole up in the same cave at once. We can call it "Rumble's Cave". Or is the risk that it turns into Plato's Alternative Cave? Would we even know if the government were to tell Rumble how to weight its algorithms with a secret intelligence-level order?
Demonetization of content creators exercising their freedom of speech is a tough puzzle to think through, fully. Freedom of association butts heads with freedom of speech in online platforms. Certainly advertisers have the right not to support content it finds adversarial to their principles. Advertisers can contractually shift the burden of policing and judging content to large online content hosts that become de facto monopolies. Even with rising competition, that's the position YouTube sits in. Complicating that ethical complexity is the fact that governments can twist arms to coerce those decisions. And then we must think through new layers of conflicts of interest.
Perhaps Web 3.0 development will lead us out of this challenging moment, but this is where we stand.