The Union Jackal, September 2023

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Russell Brand

2,329 words

A toxic Brand

The biggest story currently distracting the British public is the fall of Russell Brand [2]. American readers may not be familiar with Brand, an English comedian and actor who has recently reinvented himself as a YouTube influencer. He is currently the subject of rape and sexual abuse allegations, having been a notorious rake before settling into family life (he is 48), and opinion divided quickly into two opposed camps.

On the basis of apparently evidence-free allegations by four anonymous women, the Left are baying for blood, reminiscent of the #MeToo social media movement in America during the Kavanaugh accusations [3]. The Right, on the other hand, suspect dirty work at the crossroads.

Brand was a rabid Leftist, expertly surfing the woke zeitgeist and becoming an icon, particularly among women, a great number of whom successfully tried to sleep with him. The man has clearly been in more beds than an orphanage teddy bear.

But now he has defected from the Left, and his YouTube channel is critical of Big Pharma and vaccines, Bill Gates, the military/industrial complex, George Soros, and many other sacred cows. When a British Member of Parliament (MP) leaves the Labour Party to join the Conservatives, or vice versa, it is called “crossing the floor,” referring to the floor of the House of Commons, in which the two parties’ MPs sit facing one another across a central divide. Oswald Mosley did it. But, as a figure in today’s public eye, if you try crossing the floor from Left to Right outside the Westminster bubble in the era of social media, you had better have money in the bank for you and your family, because you may find work hard to come by.

Brand’s ability to earn income was decimated in three days. YouTube demonetized him, the BBC dropped all content featuring him, his stand-up tour was cancelled, and both his publisher and his publicist dropped him. Brand has been forced to close a pub he owns as well as two of his companies. Without having been arrested, charged, and tried, Brand has been found guilty by a higher court, and all on allegation and rumor.

American courts use the phrase “hearsay” to dismiss comments made by lawyers deemed not to be backed by evidence, and it is appropriate here. Certainly, ex-junkie Brand’s [4] sex life was a rat’s nest, and he has made a lot of trouble for himself by acting like a lewd schoolboy, but the infamous court which dispenses “trial by media” has sat, deliberated, and given its verdict. The really sinister stuff, however, comes when the government inevitably gets involved.

[5]

You can buy Mark Gullick’s novel Cherub Valley here [6].

Member of Parliament (MP) Dame Caroline Dinenage is chair of something called the “Culture, Media and Sport Committee,” and that title alone should give pause for thought. Not one of the three areas within its remit is in the public sector; they are all composed of private business concerns. This should not be the province of government.

But Dame Caroline wrote [7] to the BBC, GB News, Twitter, Rumble, and TikTok to intimidate — or try to intimidate, in the admirable case of Rumble — these organizations into taking preemptive action against Brand by removing him from their platforms.

In her letter to Rumble, Dame Caroline makes the following staggering request:

We would be grateful if you could confirm whether Mr. Brand is able to monetize his content, including the videos relating to the serious accusations made against him. If so, we would like to know whether Rumble intends to join YouTube in suspending Mr. Brand’s ability to earn money on the platform.

We would also like to know what Rumble is doing to ensure that creators are not able to use the platform to undermine the welfare of victims of inappropriate and potentially illegal behavior. [italics added]

“Potentially illegal behavior.” Four anonymous allegations and a formal complaint of sexual assault made to the Metropolitan Police are not grounds for the government to pressurize a private company to alter its policy. Rumble emerge as the heroes in this murky affair, although they have already lost advertising revenue and stock value as companies scramble to withdraw for fear of being tainted by association. Their reply includes the following;

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 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 . . . [and] emphatically reject the UK Parliament’s demands.

Dame Caroline didn’t clear sending the letters with the committee she heads, showing that British politicians can now go rogue and act alone in line with their personal politics.

The British media has become a surrogate judicial system. The Crown Prosecution Service has effectively outsourced due process to journalists and social media gossips in the same way your bank outsourced their telephone services to India. Brand hasn’t done himself any favors now that ethical standards have been radically overhauled by the woke commissars, but his treatment is a disgrace.

Brand denies all the allegations, believing himself caught up in a concerted government-sanctioned effort to end his career and silence him. He hinted that the infamous Online Safety Bill — which I wrote about in its early stages here at Counter-Currents [8] — was also a factor, and the soft totalitarianism Britain has been nurturing since COVID is beginning to harden. Think what you will of Brand, he is a coalmine canary for those who have shown a change of heart politically. Bill Maher seems to be going through a similar arc of development — as screenwriters call a character’s personal journey in a movie — in the United States.

If you are famous and find yourself crossing the floor from Left to Right, beware of what is on the other side.

Heartbreak hotel

This story exemplifies England’s assisted migrant invasion, containing every element of managed dysfunction. The day after the United Kingdom’s government insisted it was taking steps to cease the practice of housing illegal immigrants in hotels rented by the Home Office at taxpayer expense, it was announced that the Chichester Park Hotel would be closing [9] so that the Home Office could house illegal immigrants there at taxpayer expense.

It is important to step back from these stories and not react emotively, but at my age I worry about my blood pressure. The staff were dismissed with a few days’ notice — they are often replaced by migrants — events and weddings were cancelled, and a company that has taught children to swim in the hotel pool for 15 years have now lost the facility, just as they were building their business up again after COVID. Red Cross medical training classes were also cancelled. In their place will be several hundred fighting-age men — there are very rarely women among the migrant invaders — who may well be free to roam around the pretty town of Chichester.

The immigration crisis in England is intentional and it will not stop. It is exactly the same in the US, where what is happening on the southern border is seen by the Biden administration — doubtless with Obama and his friends in globalist Jewry as the puppeteers — as a feature, not a glitch. In Britain, the inevitable friction between migrants and locals is already evident, and will inevitably reach the point where clashes begin. Then we will see the British police tear themselves away from pride marches, all diversity training will be cancelled, and the police will do what they dare not do to Black Lives Matter rioters, Just Stop Oil protestors, or shoplifters. They’ll start cracking heads. And they may have a fight on their hands.

If the British government was deliberately trying to goad the white British public to provoke a violent response, I am struggling to think of a single thing they would be doing differently. The Home Office ensured the Chichester Park Hotel had a four-star rating on the UK’s five-star system, three stars being the minimum requirement for migrants. They are given credit cards and phones, as well as accommodation, good food, and luxurious facilities — about all of which they will doubtless complain.

And for distraction, should these budding engineers and surgeons find themselves in idle hour, there is always the town. An English town is a beautiful thing: winding lanes and old shops, an ancient church with wild daffodils in the graveyard, an air of peace (for now), and of course the pleasure of watching the schoolgirls tripping along to school . . .

These people are going to keep coming because they have every incentive to do so. Who they are, no one can know. Undocumented, the arrivals are pointlessly fingerprinted and then it’s the bus to the hotel, like any other pampered tourist. The criminal elements will soon make themselves known by doing what it is that they do, and there will be many criminals. If you can afford to pay many thousands of euros for a Channel crossing, you could have flown to Britain for a lot less and applied for asylum through the usual channels — unless, of course, there was something in your past which made that awkward. So, a dinghy it is, escorted to British waters by the French, who hand it over to British Border Force boats, who then escort the arrivistes to their waiting bus and a new home: a good hotel in a historic British town.

As Jim Morrison once sang in a song appropriately titled “The End”:

The West is the best.
Get here, and we’ll do the rest.

Diversity sure is strength

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You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Trial of Socrates here [11].

Anyone who has spent time in London will know that blacks and Asians are not on the best terms. Even though young Muslims ape black street culture by acting, talking, and dressing like blacks, like those creatures who have evolved to mimic other animals for protection or food, the two tribes remain at war.

Peckham is a particularly horrible and very black district of London. As is often the case, a local hair and cosmetics shop is owned and run by Pakistanis. (Stock market tip, by the way: If blacks ever get reparations, get into hair weaves and fried chicken.) Blacks don’t seem terribly inclined to entrepreneurship, and perhaps that is why they worked on the plantations but didn’t own any.

Well, one day a black woman came by Peckham Hair and Cosmetics wishing to return products and was told that, although the store did not give cash refunds, they did offer store credit. In that coquettish way fat black women have, she went berserk, attempted to steal products, slapped the storekeeper, and began clubbing him with a shopping basket. He restrained her, at one point seeming to place his hands around her porcine neck.

She stormed out and the incident was over. Or so the owner thought. A video of the fight went viral, and very soon a phalanx of blacks had gathered outside the shop. They plastered the windows with messages which would be considered racist in another context [12], and various chunky black women made speeches, one of which managed to bring white supremacy into an event which featured a negroid and a Pakistani.

One of the many benefits of diversity is that it teaches us about other cultures, and there is much to learn. Firstly, ensure that you live nowhere near them, and secondly, observe that they don’t much like living near each other.

England’s green and racist land

There is a certain morbid fascination in watching the spread of “anti-whiteness” — also known as “blancophobia [13]” — across the United Kingdom, itself increasingly a misnomer. The latest traditional aspect of white British life to be deemed racist is the countryside.

This is not a brand-new conceit. It has been simmering for a year, and an indication of how seriously the anti-white lobby is taking this latest example of racialized oppression is that it is being thoroughly investigated. This from The Daily Telegraph [14] in March of this year: “The English countryside [Note: not the Scottish, Welsh, or Northern Irish countryside] will be studied by hate crime experts to establish whether it harbors ‘rural racism.’”

Academics specializing in British colonialism and hate studies have been commissioned to record the “lived realities” of ethnic minorities “living, working, or hiking in the country.”

It is true that you will see no black faces on an English country ramble, and that is one of the many pleasant aspects of such a jaunt. The implication of the blancophobes, as ever, is not that blacks do not choose to spend their time among field and hedgerow, but that whites are somehow preventing them from doing this. The first option would be to assume that blacks have no volition or personal agency, which the Left don’t believe blacks possess. Blacks are just dolls to the white man, to be placed in or excluded from any space he chooses.

Always anxious to sow racial division, The Guardian has added detail [15] to this sorry tale of white oppression, citing a study that finds that the whitest areas of England and Wales enjoy “144% more footpaths than the most ethnically diverse areas.”

Might I suggest that this is because non-whites tend to live in cities while whites gravitate to more rural areas (and currently in ever-increasing numbers), and that one of the key definitions of a city is that it is not the countryside?

So, the inventory of racist phenomena grows by the week. Perhaps one day scientists will discover a rare sub-atomic particle which is not racist — but, until then, I suggest adopting the working principle that everything that white people do, particularly if they are insolent enough to enjoy it, is racist. I think that would be best.

 

Here’s to old England!

The Union Jackal.

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