The unhinging of the conservative mind
Dominic Green
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Reports of the death of the legacy media may be exaggerated. Last week, some fearless reporting by the Atlantic revealed that Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) makes his own TV dinners from frozen salmon steaks given to him by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK). “He didn’t especially like salmon, but found that if he put it on a hamburger bun and smothered it in ketchup, it made for a serviceable meal,” the Atlantic reveals. Sen. Murkowski represents Alaska; hence the salmon steaks. Sen. Romney has been in Siberia for years; hence the TV dinners for one.
I didn’t especially like the Republican Party in 2012, but they made for a serviceable alternative to a second serving of Barack Obama. In 2023, the Republican Party is in such disarray that we may yet be smothered by what would amount to a fourth Obama term. Consider this week’s other big stories from the ruins of the Right.
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In Denver, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) was filmed being fondled by her date, a registered Democrat, in the stalls of Beetlejuice the musical. Rep. Boebert and her handsy beau were then expelled from the theater for vaping and general rowdiness. At the Clay County Fair in Iowa, Vivek Ramaswamy made his case not by chowing down on a pork chop but by performing pullups for social media. Also on X, formerly Twitter, the big guns of the digital Right fired off in defense of the left-wing comic and sex maniac-turned-spiritual guru and podcaster Russell Brand.
On Saturday, Sept. 16, a joint investigation by the London Times and Sunday Times newspapers and the U.K.’s Channel 4 TV accused Brand of multiple sexual assaults between 2006 and 2013. British libel and privacy laws favor the plaintiff, so the British outlets will have done their homework. This was classic investigative work of a kind that only legacy media can do. That did not stop some of the Right’s most prominent thought leaders from claiming that Brand was the victim of a concerted hit.
“Criticize the drug companies, question the war in Ukraine, and you can be pretty sure this is going to happen,” said Tucker Carlson, who also criticizes the drug companies and questions the war in Ukraine but has not been accused of rape.
“How slave-minded must you be to be a fan of Russell Brand, and then an article come out, and six and a half minutes later say he’s a rapist?” asked Andrew Tate, the macho influencer who currently faces charges of human trafficking, rape, and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women. “They’re rabid dogs. It’s ideological.”
“I know Russell Brand personally,” said Alex Jones, who lied about the Sandy Hook massacre for financial gain. “No one ever accused him for the last 15 years of assault because he’s such a big sweetheart. And now, because he comes out against Big Pharma, he comes out against the globalists, he comes out against the New World Order, suddenly the allegations are happening to him.”
During the period of the alleged assaults, Brand was a regular contributor to the Guardian and a regular on the BBC and Channel 4. He guest-edited the New Statesman magazine and was interviewed by Labour’s leader Ed Miliband. In 2015, the readers of Prospect magazine — yes, all five of them — voted him the fourth-most important thinker in the world. Brand was the darling of the PC Left, despite his incoherent gabbling, his ludicrous costumes, his onstage jokes about rape, and his offstage boasts about the sexual perks of fame.
Suddenly, Brand’s old patrons on the Left have turned on him, and his new friends on the Right are the kind of people he used to bait. Of course, Alex Jones sees a conspiracy: Alex Jones sees a conspiracy when he looks at the screen during his colonoscopy. But there is no conspiracy by legacy media, the MSM, the WEF, the WWE, or even the ADL. Brand’s opinions haven’t changed. He was and is a crank lefty, Noam Chomsky camping it up as Jack Sparrow. What really joins Brand to Carlson, Tate, and Jones is that he is no longer part of legacy media.
Brand and his defenders have all moved to digital media, where evidentiary standards are low and partisanship is absolute. When they defend Brand, they defend their business model. So there is, as often with conspiracy theories, a small grain of truth in their claims. When Brand was on the inside of the old media, his bosses looked out for him, Channel 4 included. Now that he’s on the outside, Brand and the business model he represents are the enemy. This is about the medium, not the message.
Boebert and Ramaswamy are also digital-first. So are Donald Trump and AOC. Ron DeSantis is not. Neither is Mitt Romney, which is why he is now defrosting salmon steaks of an evening instead of musing in his presidential library. Republicans and conservatives started to lose the plot in 2008 when John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate. Had the iPhone and Twitter, both of which launched in 2007, already started to change the script?