English actor-comedian Russell Brand slammed the mainstream media in Britain — which have attempted to turn him into their very own Joe Rogan-style figure of controversy — proclaiming, “We’ve been accused of being anti-vax, simply for saying unvaccinated people might have rights.”
“The establishment and the mainstream media are coming for me and coming for this channel, saying I’m a conspiracy theorist, a right-wing nut, and an anti-vaxxer,” Brand said in a recent video.
“If you don’t think that I’m those things, and I don’t think that I’m those things, could there be any other reason why the mainstream media and establishment want to shut down open discourse and dissent?”
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Brand addressed the establishment press calling him “the new Joe Rogan.”
Last week, two major British newspapers likened Forgetting Sarah Marshall star and comedian turned YouTube commentator to American comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan, who became a fixation of the establishment media for his refusal to follow the party-line on various issues.
Now, on the other side of the Atlantic, Brand finds himself under attack for similar reasons.
“The initial articles have been provoked by video we did about Justin Trudeau, saying that his invocation of the emergency act and refusal to rescind it entirely in case of certain financial components against peaceful trucker protests smacks of the kind of authoritarianism that might diminish his right to overtly condemn anti-democratic actions elsewhere. That’s what we said,” Brand said.
“We’ve been accused of being anti-vax, simply for saying unvaccinated people might have rights,” he added.
“What I said is that perhaps people that are reluctant to become vaccinated shouldn’t be treated as criminals, condemned, and treated as social pariahs,” Brand clarified.
The comedian went on to declare, “The mainstream media is not your friend. The culture is not your friend. The government is not your friend. Big business is not your friend. They are operating collegiately, in unison, to create a set of systems that are beneficial to them, and disadvantage you.”
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To Brand’s point, corporate media, mega corporations, and big tech conglomerates have all been on the receiving in of an avalanche of criticism in recent weeks over scandals that involved them defending Democrats or a liberal agenda.
The elite press suffered the ultimate fake news humiliation last week, with the co-founder of NewsGuard the establishment “news-rating” project — that presents itself as a source of expert knowledge on which news sources can be trusted and which ones cannot — finding itself in an awkward situation after initially labeling the Hunter Biden laptop story a Russian “hoax.”
The New York Times finally acknowledged, after two years, that Hunter’s “laptop from hell” is real. Mario Tama, Jim Watson/Getty Images, BNN Edit
“The point of this channel is to have an open conversation and much of what we do is about critiquing news,” Brand explained.
“We’re looking at news, and analyzing news,” he added. “That’s what we’re doing, just to be clear. We’re not claiming to be a news channel. So the idea of ‘misinformation,’ this is opinion.”
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