There’s potentially something about what algorithms push here too. If you make a slightly controversial YouTube video, it is likely to get more engagement and be pushed more into people’s feeds and end up being a bigger hit than your more mainstream positions. This can quickly lead to falling down a rabbit hole of looking for more controversial opinions as you financially benefit from them and ending up believing them because you spend so much time immersed in them. I’m not sure that Brand was always batshit, I just think that he was rewarded for becoming more batshit over time.

Or to drive engagement, and by extension, revenues.

He's not even batshit. Alt-right is literally the easiest route to $$$ right now if you've any form of celebrity and if you don't give a shit about what you say, dive in.

As I said he's just a narcissist. Attention is the be all. Money helps too.

And definitely target the US because that’s the biggest market for it. (And having a British accent makes Americans assume you’re smarter than they are.)

Dark Soldier wrote:

He's not even batshit. Alt-right is literally the easiest route to $$$ right now if you've any form of celebrity and if you don't give a shit about what you say, dive in.

As I said he's just a narcissist. Attention is the be all. Money helps too.

Not sure that we a million miles apart here, it’s just a question of what the motivating factors are. I’m not sure that he ever made a conscious decision to play for the alt-right, I think that he decided to follow the attention/money (the two are indistinguishable in this instance, attention means money for a YouTuber) and he’s reached a point where he’s too immersed in that world to see where the things he’s saying because they’ll bring him attention end and where his actual opinions begin.

Not that we can ever know the thought process behind this, of course.

LivDiv wrote:

A fair amount of alt-left interest as well. Your Piers Corbyn types. The old horse shoe effect.

Oh, dickheads.

A friend of my brother fucked up his life with heroin. This guy approached Brand after seeing one of his shows, and asked if he had any advice for breaking addiction. They chatted, kept in touch, and when my bro's friend relapsed, Brand paid for his rehab at some mad expensive private clinic. This was an ongoing thing for years. the bill must have run into hundred of thousands. He only asked in return that my bro's friend promise not to take the story to the papers. i liked him, if only for that. didn't realise he'd gone a bit mad

His work around addiction is definitely admirable, the documentary he did was good.
Although he's a bit too much of an evangelist for the 12 step programme for me, a programme which has quite a poor success rate given its fame and popularity.

Well he’s been well and truly rustled now. He’ll be branded for life.

Daniel Sloss is on talking about stuff he’s heard within the circuit.

EvilRedEye wrote:

Laid out like this, it does make you wonder how he was able to fail upwards and accumulate so much power over people. It’s not like he’s from an upper class or well-connected background, why didn’t the broadcasters just pull the plug on his career?

He’s not had much, if anything, of a mainstream career for a while now. His career is mainly YouTuber these days.

Dark Soldier wrote:

Same way Saville did. Saville did a lot of good too. Its a good mask for another side. Get a bit of power, get a bit of dirt on someone, you're in.

Looking at the Wiki entry on Saville, it does look exactly the same in that seemingly the misconduct was going on from the very start of his career. I do think there’s a big difference in that society was much less atomised at the time that Saville was famous, so his power is more understandable. With Brand, I just look at the time he was on E4 and think ‘Would it have mattered that much to Channel 4 if they’d just fired him?’ He was just some guy fronting a Big Brother spin-off on E4 and the show could have probably kept chugging along without him without too much of a hit.

Not posting to defend Brand here but reading the article on the guardian website:

[font=GuardianTextEgyptian, "Guardian Text Egyptian Web", Georgia, serif]The most serious accusations appear to date from a time after Brand claims to have beaten his addiction to drugs and following a period of treatment for sex addiction, according to the [/font][font=GuardianTextEgyptian, "Guardian Text Egyptian Web", Georgia, serif]Sunday Times[/font][font=GuardianTextEgyptian, "Guardian Text Egyptian Web", Georgia, serif]. Back in 2007 he wrote in his autobiography: “At one point, about five years ago, I had a harem of about 10 women, whom I would rotate in addition to one-night stands and random casual encounters. But shagging – incessant as it was – no longer seemed to have the required calming effect.”[/font]

This does not feel like much to hang a hat out. I hope there is way much substance to this because otherwise this will just feed his support. So he was a promiscuous slag who used his looks and fame to sleep with loads of people. Shrug. Men and women do this all the time.

I'm hoping the guardian writer simply doesnt have the full details.

The reason so many people are willing to believe accusers is because of how difficult, treacherous, unrewarding and indeed dangerous it is to come forward and accuse someone relatively powerful.

Brand has access to the best lawyers, and libel laws in this country are very skewed in favour of people able to afford good lawyers and take advantage of the law.

You can guarantee that the Times’ and Channel4’s lawyers will have scoured the evidence and statements very very carefully indeed and would never have proceeded to publish / broadcast without being sure it could stand up in court. This will have taken months of hard work. For me, it’s always important to be sceptical (especially if it’s some social media post made by the wrong party, because that’s so much more like unsubstantiated he said / she said, despite on the whole believing that again coming forward at all takes bravery and is highly unrewarding), but a dual investigation by multiple respected journalists backed by legions of lawyers tends to help me favour the accusers

Reading back through my post it (as is common in my expression) reads like I’m accusing you of not taking it seriously. That is not my view, I’m sorry. I was trying to address the idea that there isn’t much to the accusations, before going off on a related rant.

I get very moralistic and didactic (ranty) too often, I shouldn’t make gonz my role model