This article is trying so desperately hard and fails. It is simply a gratuitously nasty piece.
Brand’s dominant self is not ex drug addict, although that is part of him. It is a man on a spiritual journey who has turned himself into a super successful podcaster by providing intelligent alternative views and voices to the biased, corrupt and controlling sludge that is corporate media, big tech, big money, big business and large organisations.
Maybe Tanya has been asleep at the wheel for the last few years when so much came to light.

When the current Leader of the Opposition, the Speaker of Parliament, senior civil servants and the Tory Remainers conspired to ignore and then reverse the result of Britain’s largest vote, they didn’t understand what they were doing.
When the remnants of the Clinton campaign, the FBI and CIA leadership, CNN and the Never-Trumpers manufactured the Russia-gate impeachment ruse, they were unleashing forces they couldn’t control.
If you subvert public institutions for political ends, you cannot be surprised if people lose trust in them. Once you sow mistrust in the system, don’t complain that people look elsewhere for explanations.

Tanya has likely not listened to a single full podcast or video by RB if she can still spew such BS. The giveaway is her description of him as a “YouTube demagogue flirting with conspiracism and posting to 5.65 million followers” while offering 3 examples of his purported conspiracies. Well guess what, Tanya Gold: not one of those is any longer a conspiracy theory. Stay in touch, darlin’, if you’re going to comment: the difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth is about six months, and Russell Brand is on top of these things on a daily basis. Jeez, how I wish journalists would do some research before diving in. 

She has no plan to vote in a general election: she thinks there is no point. I look up her constituency, which is a Tory/Labour marginal. Her vote does matter. But Brand, despite his personal message of empowerment, would have his followers more disempowered. It’s the one thing I can’t bear about him: his anti-voting message. It’s fine for a rich man to shrug off politics. He doesn’t need them. He can invent his own, and he does. He is not so very different from the men he despises. They lay false trails.

This whole article reads like a false trail to me, as Tanya Gold’s pieces so often do. A kind of wandering cruelty, smirking at those who raise their heads above the parapet, but offering nothing but platitudes instead. This quote is a good example. Does Gold actually think that voting ‘in a Tory/Labour marginal’ in the current year will make any difference to anything at all that matters, especially on the level that Brand is addressing? Say what you like about the doubtless flawed man, but he responds to the crisis of the times and people respond to him in turn. All the author can offer is a kind of complancet, sneery reassurance that party politics will somehow shore up the culture as it collapses, and that any other offering is ‘conspiracy theory.’ This, presumably, is why his tours are sold out.

People are so jealous of his 5 million+ YouTube followers that they feel obliged to demean him as a demagogue and write him off as a conspiracy theorist. I’m off with a friend to see his show in Brixton tonight and I’ll keep an open mind. He isn’t a cult leader, I’m just interested in hearing a guy who is smart, funny and can take the mickey out of anyone he likes given he is not in anyone’s pocket.

It’s hard to know what Tanya is trying to achieve here. This is a botch job and I suspect she is out of her element. I wouldn’t go to one his shows. But I find his videos illuminating. We need him, society needs him, the world needs the likes of him. He may not always be right but he is right to get us to question and think independently. Tanya Gold sounds superior and supercilious. Tanya, what have you given the world apart from the low down on expensive restaurants ?

“I am not here for Brand: not really. … What interests me most about Brand is not him…”

No? If he’s as repellent, damaged and uninteresting as you make him out to be, why bother reading his memoirs? The thoroughness of the attention you pay him, and the strained subtlety of the critique, make this reader wonder what’s at the root of your odd fascination with Brand, and who’s the real addict here. If ‘misinformation’ and ‘decline’ are truly your main concerns, this article is a peculiarly elliptical way of manifesting them.
   
“So…Trump was RIGHT About Clinton & Russia Collusion!!”

Well, wasn’t he?

“Can We REALLY Trust Vaccine Fact-Checkers??!”

Don’t you wonder about this? I do, and my skepticism owes less to ‘conspiracism’ than to legitimate concern, as a retired reference librarian, about the reliability of information sources.

“They ask me who I write for because they do not trust the press.”

Do you? The decay of journalistic standards isn’t part of the ‘decline’ that’s caught your attention? I’ve always voted left, but I’m no more anxious to consume propaganda that purports to speak for my views than against them.
  
“I watch them gather. I would call his constituency either fragile and seeking, or angry and untrusting.”

Your powers of observation must be exceptional to permit such mass diagnosis of individuals at distance. Mere psychologists are forced to rely on personal acquaintance and logical inference.

““Much as he is an intellectual,” she says, “he teaches you in a nice way and actually I’d like to rip his pants off.””

 (?) Jealous, perhaps?

 “Her friend likes “his videos about conspiracy things. Well, they aren’t conspiracies. They are conspiracies for six months and then they are facts.””

You have the air of a nineteenth-century anthropologist reporting the quaint beliefs of credulous, superstitious ‘primitives,’ with every expectation that we will join in the mockery. But isn’t the friend essentially right? You unwittingly convey the impression that it’s the unworthiness of these “super-fans” that really bothers you. Shouldn’t Russell ideally be directing his appeals to women more discriminating and deserving–someone like you, for example?
 
“It’s the one thing I can’t bear about him: his anti-voting message.”

Your list of grievances is longer than this, and masquerading them as a concern for whether or not someone casts a ballot is dishonest. The real question this article invites us to consider is the extent to which you yourself are a target and willing consumer of the attempted deceit.
 
“Brand is weirdly Manichean. … The evil are evil, and will remain so.”

Projection at its most flagrant, coming from someone who’s clearly fully ideologically committed (*sigh!*).

“Sometimes he tends to Luddism and talks as if he would like to live in some kind of idealised village, or circle, and why wouldn’t he? He’s strong, and a man.”

How such embarrassing cliche managed to emerge from a sensibility so (supposedly) acute and non-credulous is deeply mysterious. Even taking into account that self-knowledge is the hardest kind to come by, this one’s a clinker.
   
“…and people fill the aisles to hug him. It looks intensely silly…”

[Translation:] ‘It should have been me!’

With all due respect to this love-hate thing you evidently have going on with Russell, I think he’d be well-advised to stay away from you: he’s not the only one who isn’t being “candid” about his/her “anger.” If your taste runs to cliche, how about, “The log in thine own eye,” Ms. Critic (Scoffer? Public Scold?); and, “Know thyself” (who was it who said, “Love and hate are horns on the same goat?”). Can you possibly suggest what we should call someone who apparently sees decline, delusion, disinformation, polemicism and audience-seeking posturing in filth-smeared Blackpool… on the internet… in the craniums of narrative skeptics… indeed, everywhere but when she looks in a mirror?

From the Sonnets, Mostly Bristolian, by Richard Craven
……….
Sonnet 78
Where to begin dissecting Russell Brand?
The matted rug’s quite Da’esh Caliphate.
Ditto the beard. The overactive glans
in God knows what kind of infectious state.
Creeping towards belated middle age,
the weeping winkie of this Peter Pan
has petered out, beset by phallophage.
May God have mercy on this ghastly man,
who can’t afford to put sleeves on his shirts.
Lo! On his mattress stuffed with last year’s pranks
this yahoo reeking worse than his own dirt
unglues his Bookywook and limply ouancks.
He says he wants a revolution. Well,
he’ll need a lot of antiseptic gel.

I cannot believe this, but I have just wasted 10 minutes of my life on reading about Russell Brand

The hugging is poundshop Morrissey. I find him exhausting personally. Now he’s a poundshop Paul Joseph Watson circa 2010, when Paul Joseph Watson was a conspiracy idiot.

Tanya, you found the hugging a little cringeworthy. Apart from that what have you got against RB? Did you not like that he wrote a book whilst at the country home of a wealthy girlfriend, or did you think it important we were told that? He has millions of followers, writes well on football (or he did) and doesnt take himself too seriously. Whats not to love?

great article, enjoyable read. tanya gold, ignore all the boomers in the comments coping & seething because they feel called out for liking this charlatan 🙂

Brand is a mediocrity, hence why he flopped in America but is fast becoming a “national treasure” in Britain.