“Professional metropolitan people don’t like working class people, don’t like ordinary people,” says actor-turned-provocateur Russell Brand in a particularly insightful interview with Tucker Carlson posted Tuesday.  “And now they’ve found a way to legitimize their hatred: ‘Oh, they’re all disgusting.  They’re all racist.  Look at them in their MAGA hats.  Look at them with their white vans and their flags.  Look at them with their perspectives and their ‘honored’ views, and their belches and their beer.  It’s a kind of legitimization of a loathing of the people most connected to the nation, people that, generally speaking, a couple of generations ago, were asked to sacrifice the lives of their sons and daughters, for the ‘idea’ of nation, an idea that they’re now being told doesn’t exist.”

Brand has, apparently coincidentally, nailed the elitist attitude described in GOD, GUNS GRITS AND GRAVY.  He’s from Britain and not a conservative, but is very much an individualist and can clearly see Americans’ rights as individuals being sacrificed on the altar of political power.

Whether you actually drive a white van and/or drink beer (or, it must be said, belch) isn’t the point of his rant.  If you have conservative views and support Trump, this is how you are viewed in the eyes of these people.  We’re talking about condescending, authoritarian political elitists like the ones described yesterday in this newsletter in the discussion of the so-called Transition Integrity Project, those longtime inside-the-Beltway dwellers who want to control the messages we rubes can receive and the candidates we can support.  They’ll work feverishly to remove our candidate from the ballot if that’s what it takes to keep him from getting elected, and they’ll perversely insist it’s to preserve “democracy,” one of those old-fashioned ideals that, unlike themselves, we haven’t been “educated” out of supporting.

As we discussed yesterday, these elites have taken to the courts to try to destroy former President Trump.  With polls showing he has a very, very good chance of being elected President again, they’ll do whatever is necessary, even dismantle our electoral system, to stop him.  They’ve repeated the lie that Trump is “a dictator” so often that they probably believe it themselves.  Most likely, they operate similarly to the character in George Orwell’s “1984,” Ministry of Truth worker Winston Smith, who can know something isn’t true (because he changed it) but believe it is true at the same time.  He takes pride in his skill at “cleaning up” records of the past to conform to what the leaders want said today, and yet he accepts it as truth.

Unless the elitists really are psychotic, that might be one way they can look in a mirror or sleep at night.  You’d think they’d understand that if Trump really were a racist and a dictator, they wouldn’t have to keep creating hoax after hoax.  Hillary told lies relentlessly about Trump and Russia, doing all she could to counter the “deplorables” (her word) who supported him, and likely still believes her own lies.  Keep in mind, every frame-up of Trump, every “trumped-up” lawsuit, has been created by minds as twisted as this.  Our speculation is that people like Marc Elias and John Podesta not only can sleep at night, they risk breaking their arms from all the patting on the back they give each other for going as far as necessary to save society from Trump.

But it’s not Trump --- it’s the monstrous image of him that they’ve created.  He’s the “Goldstein” of
“1984,” the object of the daily “Two Minutes’ Hate,” the ultimate hobgoblin of H. L. Mencken’s famous quote: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and thus clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”  We’ve got other hobgoblins being trotted out to control us, of course --- the threat of more pandemics and climate chaos, to name the biggies --- but Trump is the individual who has to be demonized and destroyed because he poses the most serious threat to the power structure.

Russell Brand can relate to what’s being done to Trump because he himself was targeted over political/societal opinions he expressed on the Ukraine war, the pandemic response/Big Pharma and other subjects.  Brand wasn’t talking in a conservative bubble; he came from the left, and he had a large platform with potential to win hearts and minds.  Someone that persuasive had to be made to shut up, as Tucker Carlson explained in his introduction.

“The censorship campaign against him began with governments...their intel services and their policy makers,” Tucker explained.  It happened largely away from public view.  In March of 2022, he was accused, bafflingly, of being “an agent of Chinese propaganda” for his views on Ukraine.  Then, about a year later, he faced a wave of accusations of sexual assault and was demonetized and censored as a result.  The allegations against him first appeared in an “anti-disinformation newsletter” (uh-oh) called Coda Story, which according to Brand has connections with the U.K. government and the CIA.  Brand is stunned that even a “marginal voice” like his was considered a significant enough threat that it had to be silenced.  The moves being made by the global elite to shut down independent media and inconvenient, contrarian views are “astonishingly aggressive,” he says.

He had an awakening from this experience: “It’s astonishing if you regard your government to be in a position of service rather than a position of domination and control, but what’s become apparent in recent years is what the nature of our relationship with government is.  They are there to rule and control and dominate.”  They may do it with “an aesthetic of care,” he says, and the “language of inclusivity,” but he sees “the threat of authoritarianism as far, far greater from those who use the language of liberalism” as opposed to the more nationalistic, populist messages.  We can see what the leftists really mean through their actions.  By their fruits ye shall know them.      

Brand is hoping to see a kind of populism rise up that transcends what we typically understand as “left” and “right.”  And he sees the internet as being at a crux point, a fork in the road.  It can be used by elites to control the message --- that’s why they want to wipe out independent media --- or it can be “a tool for informing and awakening.”  (NOTE:  just as we’re trying to use it here.  You’ll notice we’re not ad-supported anymore!)  Brand has hope, in that he sees the elitists’ lies about Trump backfiring.  In their zeal, they’ve overplayed their hand.  “People aren’t buying it,” Brand says.  “...The more they hate him [Trump], the more people like him.”

“...They don’t trust the establishment any more.  They CAN’T trust the establishment anymore.”  People on both the left and right can see catastrophe coming, he says, and it will serve as an invitation to get involved.

But the elitists’ long-term plan is to wear us down so we don’t fight back anymore.  (An example we’d add:  They want us not to bother with the political process and accept that courts will choose our leaders for us.)  Brand asks a big question: “Are people going to wake up to the reality we’re being confronted with, or are we going to sort of nervously cling on to the idea that somehow through comfort and panaceas we might hold on to some old life?”

This is a powerful interview, a must-see.

https://twitter.com/tuckercarlson/status/1752466469454061656?s=51&t=J4D-_h2kFjBAjWxykloF4w