Yes. The defenders of Brand – including some who I’d hoped better of – seem so captured by crazy narratives of conspiracy and controlling hidden hands that their objective and critical reasoning faculties have finally and publicly collapsed. Their demand for evidence is easily satisfied by both the growing number of accounts and witnesses and by Brand’s own output which has consistently drawn attention to how he uses fame and position to obtain sex. Those querying the lack of due process wilfully ignore the glaring culpability and active enabling by those (BBC, Channel 4, production companies) who were actually in a position to hold him to account and who could have ensured due process. Those engaged in whataboutery have apparently lost any sense of compassion or professed solidarity for those on the receiving end of Brand.
What is the most shocking thing about this whole affair isn’t the allegations about Brand (are they even a surprise given the endless number of red flags that many just chose to ignore or elide in their cheerleading of his half-baked ‘politics’?) but the number of seemingly otherwise sentient people backing him up and finding themselves in a horrible alliance with other post-truth nutters. This includes people on the left who have, it seems, finally jumped the shark in their defence of Brand. I always knew, in theory, that the internet and twitter in particular was producing a parasitic and largely useless set of politics based on political and personal virtue displayed through association with celebrity and consumptive culture, but I’d never realised that it was as large scale and warped as it patently is