Russell Brand published a YouTube video on Tuesday railing against people accusing him of being “right-wing” and otherwise criticizing him for multiple recent interview appearances on Fox News, including Greg Gutfeld and Donald Trump hater Tucker Carlson. Brand asserts that he’s not right-wing at all, and rather that he “broadly speaking” belongs to “what you might call the cultural left.”
Not exactly the most assertive statement, but yet the accusations of not being on the left seem to have severely upset Brand, or at least enough to make a 17-minute video about it.
The video seems like it’s coming in a little late, as Brand has been accused of swerving to the right for years now. Brand has interviewed far-right figures such as Jordan Peterson, Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro. He also appeared to go full anti-vaxxer and COVID denier in 2021 with YouTube videos sporting titles like “Vaccine APARTHEID: Don Lemon’s Covid BOMBSHELL.”
Many on the political left have been saying that the right can have him, considering his erratic and often highly messy behavior, like the time he said the Nazis “did look f—ing fantastic” and then goose-stepped on stage at the GQ Awards. While some of his “activism” has seemed left-wing on the surface, his critics on this end of the spectrum often feel that it’s really all about Russell Brand to Russell Brand.
This new defensive video doesn’t seem to be convincing a lot of these folks.
“I went on Tucker Carlson and Greg Gutfeld’s Fox News shows leading the neo-liberal establishment to attack me as a right-wing conspiracy theorist,” he says.
Speaking on Carlson in particular, Brand emphasized that he agreed to the interview because he felt like he could find common ground with the M&M-obsessed question-talker even if they disagreed on other things.
“Both of us came to it knowing that both of us would presumably disagree about a lot of issues,” he continued. “I broadly speaking belong to what you might call the cultural left. He’s a conservative person, you might say. We were surprised in fact about how many things we agreed upon, I suppose because we both agree with individual and community freedom.”
This isn’t a particularly convincing argument considering the fact that very recently, it was confirmed by seized text messages from Fox News employees that Carlson seems to value the Fox Corp. stock price more than sharing accurate information with his audience. Carlson thoroughly trashed Trump and members of the “Stop the Steal” movement in his texts while at the same time going on air to promote election lies.
So it’s not much of a surprise, if you know much about Brand’s history, that the two of them ended up agreeing on “many things.”
He attempted to prove that he’s no friend to Fox News by clipping in a video of himself being threatened with arrest outside of their building because he really, really wanted to interview Sean Hannity. It’s unclear how this was supposed to be at all convincing.
One way you can determine where Brand is on the political spectrum is by going on Twitter, searching his name, and seeing all the right-wing accounts praising him while leftists tear him apart for making claims like “Tucker Carlson is a friend to the homeless.”
