It’s a country that gave the world George Orwell, but now, it’s a ‘Brand’ new world for free speech in once-great Britain, which these days specializes in doling out the unwelcome gift of Orwellianism.
Dame Caroline Dinenage, the chair of a British Parliamentary committee, has been writing to social media platforms Facebook, TikTok and Rumble, asking them if they plan to follow YouTube’s lead and demonetize the accused sex pest Russell Brand. On committee letterhead, Dame Caroline wrote to express the committee’s concern that Brand will not be able to make money on the platform and thereby “undermine the welfare of victims of inappropriate and potentially illegal behavior.”
Potentially illegal. This Conservative MP is using her powerful position to attempt to crush Brand’s ability to make a living, even though he denies the allegations, and they have not been subject to any sort of trial. This member of the British government is attempting to demonetize Russell Brand himself, based solely on allegations.
If this outrageous intimidation is allowed to stand, no one is safe in Britain. All it takes is for the right people to level fashionable accusations against you—ones having to do with racism, sexism, LGBT-phobia, ‘toxic masculinity,’ and whatnot—and you could see your livelihood evaporate overnight. You could even see your own government persecute you, as the committee headed by Dame Caroline, Baroness Lancaster of Kimbolton, is doing to Brand.
Chris Pavlovski, the Rumble CEO, sternly rejected the parliamentary committee’s letter in a statement posted on X. After first pointing out that none of the allegations against Brand have anything to do with his broadcasting on Rumble, Pavloski went on to say:
We regard it as deeply inappropriate and dangerous that the UK Parliament would attempt to control who is allowed to speak on our platform or to earn a living from doing so.
Singling out an individual and demanding his ban is even more disturbing given the absence of any connection between the allegations and his content on Rumble. We don’t agree with the behavior of many Rumble creators, but we refuse to penalize them for actions that have nothing to do with our platform.
Although it may be politically and socially easier for Rumble to join a cancel culture mob, doing so would be a violation of our company’s values and mission. We emphatically reject the UK Parliament’s demands.
What happens when a leader of the cancel culture mob is a leading member of your government? You begin to understand, maybe, why so many Cold War emigres from the Soviet bloc to the West started saying a decade ago that they were seeing the rise of something that reminded them of what they had once fled.
It’s totalitarianism of a soft kind. Under hard totalitarianism, the state would simply jail Russell Brand and seize his assets, with a show trial if he was lucky. But under this kinder, gentler form, the state leans on the legally innocent man’s sources of income, and implies that it would be in their interest to strip him of his ability to earn a living—this, to promote the “welfare of victims.”
Nice online platform you have there, fellows. Sure would be a shame to make an enemy of the British government by defending the free speech right of a man that all right-thinking people in the British elite once loved as a bad boy of progressivism, but now despise as History’s Greatest Monster.
If Russell Brand wrote you a cheque, you’d better cash it now, before they debank him. That’s coming, you may be certain. Now, imagine that this had happened to Brand after the UK instituted the ‘digital pound,’ the Bank of England’s name for the Central Bank Digital Currency it says it is likely to introduce.
Sure, the Bank of England promises it will still keep cash around. Don’t you believe it. The progressives who run the British government—including Conservatives like Dame Caroline—will not be able to refuse the power to instantly exile a pariah to the economic desert for ‘anti-social’ behavior. Thus will China’s wicked digitally-run ‘social credit system’ arrive in the West: as a tool for fighting all the bogeymen feared and loathed by the woke.
You do not have to believe Russell Brand is not guilty of the allegations against him, or even like Russell Brand, to recognize that the cancel-culture mob action against him, which now has elements of the British state helping lead it, is a sinister, even terrifying, sign of the coming totalitarian attempt to control thought and expression. As Sebastian Milbank wrote this week in The Critic, the UK’s left-wing media and culture makers adored the debauched Brand when he was a celebrated leftist. It was only when Brand cleaned up his act and developed an online following as a critic of progressive shibboleths, including COVID authoritarianism, that the celebrity’s former admirers turned on him.
I was never a fan of Russell Brand, who the last time I paid attention to television, was an obnoxious left-wing twit. When the recent news broke, I was appalled not only by the allegations against him (the most serious of which is that he raped a woman in Los Angeles in 2012), but also for what we knew without a doubt was true, based on his past behavior as a drug-addled sex fiend.
What I did not realize until a friend pointed it out this week is that Brand has for many years been a model of sobriety, chastity, and redemption. In a 2014 interview with Vanity Fair magazine, Brand—at the time still a fashionably leftist influencer, but also sober and prayerful—confessed that he could be fairly accused of misogyny based on his past behavior.
“But as a person who’s trying to live a decent, spiritual life, misogyny is not part of my current palette of behaviors,” Brand added. “In a way, redemption is a great part of my narrative. I’m talking about disavowing previous lives, previous beliefs, previous behaviors.”
The entertainer went on to say, of the suspicion some women have of him, “I suppose my hope is that, in my ongoing journey, that will seem less and less relevant, and more and more of the past.”
Nearly a decade after that interview—a decade in which none of the dirty deeds now being attributed to him are alleged to have happened—the repentant Russell Brand suddenly finds himself turned into a pariah whose ability to make a living with his words is under attack even by his very own government. When I interviewed former Soviet bloc denizens in 2018 and 2019, about what they find so chilling about life in the West today, many of them said precisely that you can be personally and professionally destroyed on the base of mere allegations that you said things, or did things, that were normal once upon a time, but had become politically poisonous.
Brand may never get to defend his reputation in court. The one clear criminal allegation—the California rape claim from 2012—may be filed with police thanks to a new #MeToo-inspired ‘lookback’ law that gives alleged victims of long-ago rapes until the end of 2026 to consider charges. Other than that, Brand may be left in limbo, still proclaiming his innocence, but unable to rebuild his career because we no longer live in a culture that believes in liberal democratic values. That this loss of faith has even overtaken Conservative members of Parliament serving in a liberal democratic government shows you how deep the woke rot has, well … progressed.
A Brand-New World for Free Speech in Orwell’s Native Land
It’s a country that gave the world George Orwell, but now, it’s a ‘Brand’ new world for free speech in once-great Britain, which these days specializes in doling out the unwelcome gift of Orwellianism.
Dame Caroline Dinenage, the chair of a British Parliamentary committee, has been writing to social media platforms Facebook, TikTok and Rumble, asking them if they plan to follow YouTube’s lead and demonetize the accused sex pest Russell Brand. On committee letterhead, Dame Caroline wrote to express the committee’s concern that Brand will not be able to make money on the platform and thereby “undermine the welfare of victims of inappropriate and potentially illegal behavior.”
Potentially illegal. This Conservative MP is using her powerful position to attempt to crush Brand’s ability to make a living, even though he denies the allegations, and they have not been subject to any sort of trial. This member of the British government is attempting to demonetize Russell Brand himself, based solely on allegations.
If this outrageous intimidation is allowed to stand, no one is safe in Britain. All it takes is for the right people to level fashionable accusations against you—ones having to do with racism, sexism, LGBT-phobia, ‘toxic masculinity,’ and whatnot—and you could see your livelihood evaporate overnight. You could even see your own government persecute you, as the committee headed by Dame Caroline, Baroness Lancaster of Kimbolton, is doing to Brand.
Chris Pavlovski, the Rumble CEO, sternly rejected the parliamentary committee’s letter in a statement posted on X. After first pointing out that none of the allegations against Brand have anything to do with his broadcasting on Rumble, Pavloski went on to say:
What happens when a leader of the cancel culture mob is a leading member of your government? You begin to understand, maybe, why so many Cold War emigres from the Soviet bloc to the West started saying a decade ago that they were seeing the rise of something that reminded them of what they had once fled.
It’s totalitarianism of a soft kind. Under hard totalitarianism, the state would simply jail Russell Brand and seize his assets, with a show trial if he was lucky. But under this kinder, gentler form, the state leans on the legally innocent man’s sources of income, and implies that it would be in their interest to strip him of his ability to earn a living—this, to promote the “welfare of victims.”
Nice online platform you have there, fellows. Sure would be a shame to make an enemy of the British government by defending the free speech right of a man that all right-thinking people in the British elite once loved as a bad boy of progressivism, but now despise as History’s Greatest Monster.
If Russell Brand wrote you a cheque, you’d better cash it now, before they debank him. That’s coming, you may be certain. Now, imagine that this had happened to Brand after the UK instituted the ‘digital pound,’ the Bank of England’s name for the Central Bank Digital Currency it says it is likely to introduce.
Sure, the Bank of England promises it will still keep cash around. Don’t you believe it. The progressives who run the British government—including Conservatives like Dame Caroline—will not be able to refuse the power to instantly exile a pariah to the economic desert for ‘anti-social’ behavior. Thus will China’s wicked digitally-run ‘social credit system’ arrive in the West: as a tool for fighting all the bogeymen feared and loathed by the woke.
You do not have to believe Russell Brand is not guilty of the allegations against him, or even like Russell Brand, to recognize that the cancel-culture mob action against him, which now has elements of the British state helping lead it, is a sinister, even terrifying, sign of the coming totalitarian attempt to control thought and expression. As Sebastian Milbank wrote this week in The Critic, the UK’s left-wing media and culture makers adored the debauched Brand when he was a celebrated leftist. It was only when Brand cleaned up his act and developed an online following as a critic of progressive shibboleths, including COVID authoritarianism, that the celebrity’s former admirers turned on him.
I was never a fan of Russell Brand, who the last time I paid attention to television, was an obnoxious left-wing twit. When the recent news broke, I was appalled not only by the allegations against him (the most serious of which is that he raped a woman in Los Angeles in 2012), but also for what we knew without a doubt was true, based on his past behavior as a drug-addled sex fiend.
What I did not realize until a friend pointed it out this week is that Brand has for many years been a model of sobriety, chastity, and redemption. In a 2014 interview with Vanity Fair magazine, Brand—at the time still a fashionably leftist influencer, but also sober and prayerful—confessed that he could be fairly accused of misogyny based on his past behavior.
“But as a person who’s trying to live a decent, spiritual life, misogyny is not part of my current palette of behaviors,” Brand added. “In a way, redemption is a great part of my narrative. I’m talking about disavowing previous lives, previous beliefs, previous behaviors.”
The entertainer went on to say, of the suspicion some women have of him, “I suppose my hope is that, in my ongoing journey, that will seem less and less relevant, and more and more of the past.”
Nearly a decade after that interview—a decade in which none of the dirty deeds now being attributed to him are alleged to have happened—the repentant Russell Brand suddenly finds himself turned into a pariah whose ability to make a living with his words is under attack even by his very own government. When I interviewed former Soviet bloc denizens in 2018 and 2019, about what they find so chilling about life in the West today, many of them said precisely that you can be personally and professionally destroyed on the base of mere allegations that you said things, or did things, that were normal once upon a time, but had become politically poisonous.
Brand may never get to defend his reputation in court. The one clear criminal allegation—the California rape claim from 2012—may be filed with police thanks to a new #MeToo-inspired ‘lookback’ law that gives alleged victims of long-ago rapes until the end of 2026 to consider charges. Other than that, Brand may be left in limbo, still proclaiming his innocence, but unable to rebuild his career because we no longer live in a culture that believes in liberal democratic values. That this loss of faith has even overtaken Conservative members of Parliament serving in a liberal democratic government shows you how deep the woke rot has, well … progressed.
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