From Revolution to Revival: Russell Brand Embraces Trump and Israel

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Not so long ago, Russell Brand was a socialist icon, preaching global revolution and the redistribution of wealth and power to the masses. Today, he is a born-again Christian who endorses Donald Trump and has headlined events at the Republican National Convention and Turning Point USA..

Where once he preached eco-socialism, anti-racism, and described Israel as a terrorist state, he now attacks Greta Thunberg, Bob Vylan, and other prominent Israel critics, all while hobnobbing with the same racist politicians he once warned the public not to follow.

What explains Brand’s dramatic shift? MintPress explores the political evolution of the comedian, host, and self-appointed thought leader.

 

From “Commie Scum” to GOP Star

Russell Brand is a conservative star. Last month, the English comedian headlined the annual conference of the pro-Trump pressure group, Turning Point USA. There, he led the young crowd in prayer and told them that:

A lot of good is being done here. I hope you are turning away from the values of a culture that does not value you. That sees you as a cog, as a consumer, as a recipient of the vaccines and bad food and bad agriculture, little more than a cog in the machine to serve elites.”

With his populist right-wing rhetoric, Brand is firmly aboard the Trump train, endorsing the president as “hands down” better than any Democrat. “People are tired of polished politicians, and we’re starting to see why: many are blackmailed, compromised, and controlled,” he explained. He also described Vice-President J.D. Vance as a “pretty spectacular guy” who it was “difficult not to get excited about.”

Brand’s podcast platform is a who’s who of conservative influencers. Among those appearing on his shows are Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Steve Bannon.

Last year, he spent an entire week at the Republican National Convention, promoting right-wing politics and glad-handing with the likes of Charlie Kirk, Dan Bongino, and Nigel Farage.

For many people who have only recently begun to follow politics or know him only as Katy Perry’s ex-husband, little of this information will be shocking. Yet less a decade ago, Brand was one of the most vocal and recognizable figures on the global revolutionary left.

In 2013, he edited a special edition of the New Statesman magazine, entitled “Revolution.” The following year, he authored a non-fiction book with the same name, taking inspiration from leftist figures such as Noam Chomsky, David Graeber, and Che Guevara.

At the height of his fame, he used his platform to urge the public to rebel, to boycott the electoral system, and to call for a communist-style revolution. “The planet is being destroyed. We are creating an underclass. We’re exploiting poor people all over the world. And the genuine, legitimate problems of the people are not being addressed by our political class,” he told the BBC.

When asked what his solution was, he responded:

A socialist egalitarian system based on the massive redistribution of wealth, heavy taxation of corporations and massive responsibility for energy companies and any companies exploiting the environment. The very concept of profit should be hugely reduced. [U.K. Prime Minister] David Cameron says profit isn’t a dirty word. I say profit is a filthy word.”

Brand hosted a regular media criticism show on YouTube called “The Trews,” a portmanteau of “true news.” There, he would critically analyze and dissect propaganda from corporate media, highlighting their pro-war and pro-business agendas, as well as conflicts of interest. On one episode, he described Fox News as a “terrorist” network promoting pro-war fake news, an utterance that led network host Greg Gutfeld to label the comedian “left-wing commie scum.” By 2023, however, Gutfeld was gushing with pride and “super excited” to host Brand on his Fox News show—a marker of just how far Brand had travelled.

Lee Camp, another left-wing political comedian, was dismayed at his metamorphosis, telling MintPress that:

Russell Brand’s arc is truly pathetic and sad. These days, much of the time, his stances (if he has any) aren’t even coherent. I remember when he was anti-war and pro-Occupy Wall Street. It was never his main thrust, but it was nice to have someone with his platform occasionally talking about those issues. Now he’s moved on to having cozy interviews with neo-Nazis like Steve Bannon.”

 

From Climate Crusader to Skeptic

The climate emergency was once a driving force behind Brand’s politics. In the same 2013 BBC interview, he stated that our political system “shouldn’t destroy the planet,” and that “The measures that are currently being taken around climate change are indifferent, will not solve the problem.” Yet, on this issue as well, his position has undergone a transformation. Climate change denialists were a favored target on “The Trews.” But by 2023, Brand was hosting controversial climate skeptic Bjørn Lomborg on his podcast. And earlier this year, he attacked Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg.

The British actor described Thunberg as a “puppet” of “the system.” I respect Greta Thunberg’s conviction—but let’s not pretend she isn’t being used. She’s a cultural symbol, deployed to serve an agenda masked as virtue,” he said, adding:

Climate change is being exploited to legitimize new measures of control, and Greta Thunberg is being promoted by the culture because she somehow perfectly represents the pagan idea of Cassandra—a hysterical figure at the edge of the culture.”

Brand was reacting to the news that Thunberg had been captured and abducted by the Israeli military. She had been sailing to Gaza in an attempt to break the blockade and alleviate the man-made famine. In reality, as a MintPress News study found, far from being promoted, she has been widely ignored by corporate media, precisely because of the anti-capitalist, pro-Palestine positions she has taken. In 2019, 460 articles mentioning Thunberg were published by The New York Times and The Washington Post. By 2024, however, that number had dwindled to just 34.

Thunberg’s Israel-Palestine positions are not even as radical as Brand’s once were. In 2014, he hinted that Israel might be considered a terrorist state, and even compared Hamas to Nelson Mandela and America’s founding fathers. Palestine was clearly a fundamental driving issue for Brand, who attempted to organize the mass boycott and divestment from banks, pension funds and other big businesses that, he said, “facilitate the oppression of people in Gaza”.

Throughout the years, though, his tone changed markedly. By 2021, he was refusing to take a stance on the issue and even claimed that people who want to take sides are “part of the problem.” And by February, after nearly 18 months of genocide, Brand was reiterating his unshakable support for Israel’s right to exist. “As a Christian, when you read the Old Testament, you have to acknowledge that there is a unique, particular and sacred relationship between the Jewish people and that land,” he said on his show, “Stay Free.”

He also went out of his way to attack Palestine supporters at the Glastonbury music festival. Reacting to the video of punk rap duo Bob Vylan, leading a crowd in chanting “Death to the IDF,” Brand denounced those in attendance. He claimed that neither Vylan nor the crowd were “examining the complex religious, political, economic, resource based history of Israel,” and that few in attendance understood the significance of the Palestinian flag. Palestine, to them, he said, is a meaningless marker of general anti-establishment sentiment.

Going even further, the comedian appeared to endorse Presi dent Trump’s plans to annex Gaza and turn it into a Dubai-style playground for the ultra-wealthy. In response to an AI-generated video of Trump in Gaza, Brand commented that this was “another example of Trump’s unique brilliance.”

This is a far cry from the days when Brand used to mock and excoriate Trump as “mad,” a “wanton baby,” an “absurd and ludicrous character,” a “joke,” a “narcissist,” a “grotesque” and an “idiotic” person who “pollutes their air with toxic thinking.” Today, however, he can be spotted enjoying time with Trump’s son, Don Jr.

 

From Fighting Racists to Backing Them

Brand was once a pillar of British politics, sounding the alarm about the rise of the far-right. As far back as 2002, he made the documentary, Naziboy, in which he trailed Mark Collett, the leader of the youth wing of the fascist British National Party (BNP). The documentary culminates in Brand standing up to and embarrassing Collett so badly that he flees the scene, almost in tears.

This was not the only time Brand dismantled a far-right leader on camera. In 2014, on the BBC’s flagship politics show, Question Time, he deconstructed Nigel Farage’s ideology so succinctly that the clip went viral. Addressing the far-right politician’s downwardly mobile base of white supporters, he said:

I know a lot of people are frightened in our country. I know a lot of people are feeling afraid and frustrated. And there is a sense that there is a corrupt group in our country, using our resources, taking away our jobs, taking away our housing, not paying taxes, exploiting us. And there is. There is an economic elite that this man [Farage’s] party is funded by.”

Explaining the effects of the economic crisis, he stated that Farage’s “friends” in the financial district of London farted, and that he held his nose and pointed at immigrants and the disabled, as if they were the culprits. Brand finished with a warning, featuring some of his signature cockney flourishes:

As much as any of us, I enjoy seeing Nigel Farage in a boozer with a pint and a fag, laughing off his latest scandals about breastfeeding or whatever. I enjoy it. But this man is not a cartoon character. He ain’t [beloved sitcom character] Del Boy. He ain’t [actor] Arthur Daley. He’s a pound shop Enoch Powell. And we’ve got to watch him.”

The phrase “pound shop Enoch Powell,” the British equivalent of “dollar store Barry Goldwater,” went so viral that it entered the common lexicon, and is still regularly used today to mock the racist right-wing.

Ironically, though, Brand has come full circle, embracing Farage and other far-right figures. On his show last year, he described him as “a man who has certainly captured the hearts of many people in our country and whom the establishment and mainstream media loathe.”

Shortly afterward, he shared a stage with Farage at the Republican National Convention, where Farage gave a similar nativist speech to the one he gave on Question Time, scaremongering about imposing on Western communities “young men, who come from totally different cultures, who are not assimilating, who are not treating women in a way we would think to be fair and reasonable. And in many cases, coming from organized crime groups and going straight into drug farms.”

This time, however, Brand did not call out Farage for racism. In fact, he noted, referencing their 2014 encounter,  “Last time we [met], it was in a similar panel environment. Barbed remarks were flung around wildly. But since then, it appears that via the discourse around anti-establishmentism, Nigel and I have found common ground,” he explained, adding that:

We have been talking about how the Republican Party now is truly the anti-war party…[and how] a Vance-Trump partnership in the White House will mean an end to the Middle Eastern war, an end to Ukraine-Russia war.”

His predictions for peace, needless to say, have not come to pass.

Worse still, Brand has also openly endorsed fascist agitator Tommy Robinson as “pretty good,” and an “authentic, working-class voice, that I believe ought to be supported.” On his show, he euphemistically described Robinson’s antics to his audience, stating:

He’s under attack. This is someone who has been under attack most of his life, as he has tried to work out how to express that where he is from, in Luton, there is a hostility between working-class white people and, as he always says, Sikhs and Black folk, and the Muslim population.”

A former member of the BNP, Robinson has a long history of fomenting racial violence in the U.K., and has spent much of the last 20 years in and out of prison.

Although now a marginalized figure, Collett endorsed Farage for prime minister at the 2024 General Elections, claiming that he has “adopted” the BNP’s positions and noting that the BNP’s old policies “were actually markedly tamer than Farage’s current rhetoric.” Farage’s current platform, Collett said, is more explicitly about demographics (i.e., race) than his was.

Thus, in just two decades, Brand has gone from mocking the far-right as racist grotesques to joining them, becoming one of their most visible public defenders. MintPress contacted Collett and his party for their opinion on Brand’s transformation, but has not received a response.

 

Allies, Accusations, and a Trial Ahead

What explains this significant shift in Brand’s political outlook? For some, the answer is obvious. Facing mounting allegations of sexual assault and rape, Brand realized his existing leftist following would reject him, so he chose to move to the United States, embrace Trump and religion, and cultivate a reactionary fan base that would have little problem with his alleged sex crimes. If this is indeed the case, Brand would be far from the first to do so. Indeed, scholars and commentators have named this well-trodden path the right-wing “grift drift.”

From 2023 onwards, Brand has faced waves of accusations of sexual misconduct, as hosts of women (including one girl aged only 16 at the time) have come forward, alleging rape and sexual assault. Only four of these allegations have so far resulted in charges. Earlier this year, the comedian and film star was charged with the rape, oral rape, sexual assault and indecent assault of four women between the years of 1999 and 2005.

Brand has vigorously denied all the allegations, insisting that his relationships were “always consensual.” “I was a fool before I lived in the light of the Lord. I was a drug addict, a sex addict and an imbecile, but what I never was was a rapist,” he said in a video posted on his social media channels.

He also suggested that he was being persecuted for his political activism. “We are very fortunate, in a way, to live in a time when there’s so little trust in the British government,” he said, “We know the law has become a kind of weapon to be used against people, institutions and sometimes entire nations that will not accept and tolerate levels of corruption that are unprecedented.”

Brand’s new conservative allies overwhelmingly came to his defense, claiming that a political witch-hunt against him was taking place. “I support Russell Brand. That man is not evil,” wrote Elon Musk. “Criticize the drug companies, question the war in Ukraine, and you can be pretty sure this is going to happen,” said Tucker Carlson. Alex Jones agreed, posting a video stating that. “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.” Donald Trump Jr. compared him to imprisoned publisher Julian Assange.

In May, Brand pleaded not guilty to all charges. His trial is scheduled to begin in June 2026.

At the same time as the new wave of allegations surfaced, Brand became a born-again Christian, being baptized by celebrity survivalist Bear Grylls, in London’s River Thames. Christianity has become a central part of his life and his character; the comedian regularly discusses his journey on stage, or even performing the Lord’s Prayer on stage with Jordan Peterson in front of 25,000 people.

Another explanatory factor, for some, is the COVID-19 pandemic. Brand increasingly voiced his opposition to government measures and to vaccines, leading him down a rabbit hole of conspiratorial thinking. He was far from the only YouTube star to traverse this path, and like many others, for Brand, it was a lucrative one. His videos on COVID performed vastly better than his other content, netting 10-20 times the audience and unlocking advertising deals with products as diverse as coffee, VPNs and anti-radiation amulets. Analysts note a distinct change in subject, tone, and style of his videos from that point, towards a more conspiratorial, right-wing angle.

For Camp, the financial allure of joining the right-wing media sphere is the most salient factor in Brand’s realignment. “It’s just a pure money grab,” he said, adding:

According to Media Matters, 82% of online media and commentary is right-wing or right-leaning. So that’s where the biggest audience is. And yes, we’ve seen a similar shift (not always as severe though) with other comedian commentators. Joe Rogan being one of the best known. In his earlier days, he supported Bernie Sanders and had on guests like me occasionally. Now he’s endorsing Trump and having guests like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Interviewing bigger, more sociopathic celebrities is where the golden clicks are.”

Whatever the reason—be it conviction, a religious awakening, a money grab, or a calculated attempt to find new allies amid multiple sexual assault and rape scandals—it is clear that Russell Brand has undergone a dramatic political shift. While he may have lost an entire audience on the left, his pivot to the right, which has seen him embrace Trump, Fox News stars, and the Republican Party, has netted him many friends in high places. Whether they can protect him in the future remains to be seen.

Feature photo | Russell Brand leaves Southwark Crown Court where he is charged with rape and sexual assault in London, May 30, 2025. Alastair Grant | AP

Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. He completed his PhD in 2017 and has since authored two acclaimed books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams. Follow Alan on Twitter for more of his work and commentary: @AlanRMacLeod.

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