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Mate if the government would have turned against you, it'd be when you were spouting left wing nonsense ten years ago, not now that you're spouting right wing nonsense that aligns with their beliefs.
There's an interesting suggestion by Matthew D'Ancona in TNE that Brand's actions of recent years in embracing far-right personalities, promoting a range of online conspiracy theories and building a weird cult of personality around himself are a direct response to the #MeToo movement emerging six years ago - knowing that eventually his own actions would come to light and so he needed to build a 'digital stockade' of useful idiots who would jump to his defence when the time came.
Now THAT'S a conspiracy theory I can buy into...
The guardian is reporting that he's on youtube complaining about being censored.
The utter gall to complain about censorship while your videos reach millions and are reported on by multiple national newspapers.
He's gone right wing? I didn't know that. I've not listened to anything he said in... well... ever. I was vaguely aware of him shouting lefty stuff a few years back but never paid much attention
He jumped the horseshoe. The fringes of right-wing extremism and left-wing extremism often end up having rather a lot in common - it's easy for people who define themselves against the mainstream first (and only for something second) to find themselves agreeing a lot with people who are notionally at the other end of the spectrum.
In Russell Brand's case, that meant embracing anti-vaxism, Covid denial, climate change denial, 5G conspiracies, etc. George Galloway did it by embracing Farage and trying to get selected as a candidate for the Brexit Party. Claire Fox went from a pro-IRA Revolutionary Communist Party activist and co-publisher of the Living Marxism magazine to a Brexit Party MEP. In the US, you see a lot of notionally right-wing US Republicans now starting to spout anti-capitalist narratives. At the fringes of politics, this sort of horseshoe-jumping happens all the time.
The horseshoe theory does not enjoy wide support within academic circles; peer-reviewed research by political scientists on the subject is scarce, and existing studies and comprehensive reviews have often contradicted its central premises, or found only limited support for the theory under certain conditions.
Theories like this sound ok on the surface but as soon as you start digging into it, it falls apart.
I'm open to your alternative explanation of the observed pattern of horseshoe-jumping: e.g. Russell Brand, George Galloway, Claire Fox, Piers Corbyn, Glenn Greenwald, Naomi Wolf, Melenchon voters backing Le Pen in the 2022 2nd round, etc - regardless of what theory explains the observed facts, there are a disturbing number of examples of it.
You listed six people out of eight billion plus.
It’s a rounding error that doesn’t need a theory.
I listed six politically high-profile individuals out of the set of politically high-profile individuals, which is a much smaller set than every person on the planet. If I knew the political views of every human on the planet then of course I would prefer to give you a more comprehensive picture.
I also listed the 16% of Jean-Luc Melenchon's 7.7 million 1st round voters who indicated they were backing Marine Le Pen in the 2nd round of the French presidential election last year - literally leaping direct from the far-left candidate to the far-right candidate in preference over the moderate candidate.
I shared a source that you can get into if you’d like to.