Thread by @ggreenwald

This @NewStatesman article is entitled "We Have Lost Russell Brand." The "we" appears to be "the left" (I never knew NS was the avatar and membership-arbiter of "the left").

What's fascinating are the views now identified as hallmarks of the "far-right"

newstatesman.com/comment/2023/0…

In order to argue that Brand is no longer on the left but the right (despite what it acknowledges is his ongoing admiration for Bernie and Corbyn), look at the views that are now identified - in the first paragraph - as ones that mark you as being on the "far-right". Just look:

For as long as I can remember, those views - contempt for corporate media and Big Pharma, anger over mistreatment of "heroes" Assange and Snowden - were deeply associated with the Western left.

They're views I always held and still did. Now these are right-wing views? Evidently.

It is indeed true that all those views - hatred of corporate media, distrust of globalized ("multi-national) corporate giants, holding the US Security State in contempt and its adversaries as heroes - are now right-wing markers.

Much has indeed changed. But Brand and I haven't.

Similarly, distrust of the motives of the US/NATO proxy war in Ukraine is also a far-right signifier. Here we have yet another inversion: the liberal-left reverses western security agencies, globalized corporations and their wars as benevolent. Only the "far right" distrusts them

Thus does this article end on what should be a bizarre, nonsensical note but instead has now become standard: Brand is not a leftist but instead has fallen in with the likes of Joe Rogan, Tucker and myself and our hatred for Western wars, the US Security State, and corporatism.

(And by the way: for all your poser-left types now slyly trying to distance yourself from the Biden/Pelosi/EU proxy war in Ukraine and even imply you were opposed all along: that won't work. When it mattered, only a few took those bullets and you, as usual, were unwilling).

I should note: the article's last paragraph stumbles into a truth it - and mainstream discourse generally - desperately avoids. The more relevant dichotomy than left/right or Dem/GOP is pro/anti-establishment. Failure to understand this makes one's political analysis worthless: