Another populist influencer has now been disparagingly affected by the ‘MeToo’ movement. We are going to take a look at what’s happening with Russell Brand and why he may come out of this stronger than ever.
“The mainstream media is not your friend. The government is not your friend. Big business is not your friend.”
~ Russell Brand
— Share Market Review (@Nse_ltd_) August 11, 2022
– Russell Brand is facing allegations of rape and sexual assault by four accusers for incidents occurring between 2006 and 2013.
– Reputation politics plays a significant role in today’s society, linking reputations to institutional arrangements and social hierarchies.
– The latest accusations against Russell Brand may not gain widespread credibility, signaling a potential end to the era of reputation politics.
Russell Brand was contacted by several UK media outlets over the weekend, all or most being owned by Rupert Murdoch, saying that they were going to publish allegations of rape and sexual assault made against him by four accusers between the years 2006 and 2013. In the UK there is no statute of limitations for rape accusations, so he was told that he should get ready to fight for his life. Now Russell Brand has denied these allegations, though he has fully admitted that his past life was filled with drug addiction as well as sex addiction.
He has had an extraordinary spiritual rebirth in the intervening years and has become a powerful voice for the populist left. But these allegations appear to be already ‘working their magic.’ Almost immediately, his agency announced that they were dropping him, very similar to what happened with Johnny Depp and Warner Brothers after the Amber Herd allegations. YouTube astonishingly has announced that they have demonetized his channel based solely on the accusations.
What just happened to Russell Brand is that he fell victim to something called ‘reputation politics.’ The key to reputation politics is that it recognizes the relationship between our reputations and the larger social structure we find ourselves in. Our reputations fit us into institutional arrangements and social hierarchies. Our Founding Fathers were aware of the manipulative power of things like character assassination, hence why constitutionally we are innocent until proven guilty. But the Founder’s world is far removed from the world in which we find ourselves today.
The world in which we live today is what scholars are calling a re-feudalized world where our society is increasingly resembling the kind of caste system akin to the class structure of the middle ages. Not only do we have a massive amount of power and money in the hands of very few but at the same time, we’re seeing today a comparable kind of religious fanaticism, not through a clerical class, but through what’s called a clerisy class. That is a pseudo-intellectual class dedicated to woke fanaticism made up of the environment, gender, and race, and that’s why we’re seeing the advent of Woke Inc where more corporations are enforcing this dogmatic ideology coming from the universities and the political class.
It is a sign of the uniformity of the ruling class, political rule, economic rule, entertainment rule, and all the major cultural levers of power, all used to enforce this radical woke fanaticism that protects the power and affluence of the billionaire and the bureaucrat. Those who refuse to comply with this woke fanaticism that’s used to keep people subservient to the billionaires and the bureaucrats are in effect excommunicated via cancel culture. These people are branded as a heretic, which today, involves being labeled a racist, bigot, sexist, all kinds of phobes!
The ADL, which Elon Musk is dealing with now, runs around like the Grand Inquisitor looking for heretics. The crucial point to get in all of this is that our reputations are now bound up in this neo-feudalist system. Our reputations are inextricably bound up within this neo-feudalist system, a system that by definition operates according to woke fundamentalist norms. Woke norms operate, by definition, by denying the possibility of any legitimate dissent. If you are a dissident like Russell Brand, you are now a legitimate target of reputation politics. Your reputation will be maligned in such a way that the social structure and institutional arrangements that surround your reputation will be required to cancel you lest they be tarnished with the same accusations of heresy. That is how our system operates today. The days of being legally assumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law are over.
Russell Brand can certainly come out of this stronger than ever just like Johnny Depp! As social commentator Douglas Murray pointed out, the Amber Herd trial did mark the end of the MeToo era. Amber Heard publicly and unambiguously destroyed the fundamental premise of the MeToo movement, which was ‘Believe all women.’ With the destruction of that fundamental premise, Murray argues, the whole ‘MeToo’ movement has come crashing down like a house of cards. This is likely why so many are completely unconvinced by these latest accusations coming 10 years later. Nobody is buying this. If enough people refuse to buy it, it may be that the era of reputation politics is coming to an end, and Russell Brand will have helped destroy it!
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