What happened to Russell Brand and Charles Eisenstein?

Turncoats, Part 2

I find I am still brooding over my erstwhile friends, Charles Eisenstein and Russell Brand. I try to understand the path they took over the last years that led them to support the Trump-ian Right, either indirectly in Charles’ case, or directly, with Russell. I suppose it doesn’t really matter in the “grand scheme of things” (what does?). But I find it infuriating. I feel betrayed as well as gobsmacked. I feel like I have a splinter in my brain that I can only remove by writing through all of my ideas on the subject.

For both Russell and Charles (among others), something switched with the Covid pandemic. The lockdown and vaccine controversy channeled their thinking and public expression in strange new directions. In retrospect, I would say the pandemic intensified, brought to the surface, latent flaws in their psychology and ideology. Less noticeable in earlier phases of their careers, those flaws are now glaring.

Here—for fun—is a chat between myself and Russell Brand from nine years ago, after he wrote about my ideas extensively in his book Revolution. We were in his deluxe hotel room in SoHo, speaking about Capitalism and anarchy:

Here, for a bit of contrast, is Russell Brand and Alex Jones, from a few months ago, two “devout Christians” praying together for God or Jesus Christ to lift Alex Jones’ financial burdens (because Jones had to pay the parents of the murdered children from the Sandy Hook mass killing for defaming them and it hurt him a lot):

As anyone can tell from this clip, Russell and Alex are definitely not grifters, praying with all the sincerity of World Wrestling Entertainment performers throwing each other around. No, they really mean it.

I suppose both Charles and Russell, in their different ways, are highly motivated by the desire to be “in the mix,” to stay relevant, newsworthy, and important. After all, this translates into financial success and “power,” at least in some illusory sense.

Both Charles and Russell express a deep, overriding concern with the abstract notion of “sovereignty:” Bodily sovereignty, political sovereignty, and so on. This concern links them to Libertarianism, particularly its gnarly Right Wing variety. In Charles’s 2020 Coronavirus essay, he emphasized the weird idea that the virus was somehow a mythic “coronation” for humanity, ushering us into a vague new utopia, based on “true” sovereignty:

Already we can feel the power of who we might become. A true sovereign does not run in fear from life or from death. A true sovereign does not dominate and conquer (that is a shadow archetype, the Tyrant). The true sovereign serves the people, serves life, and respects the sovereignty of all people. The coronation marks the emergence of the unconscious into consciousness, the crystallization of chaos into order, the transcendence of compulsion into choice. We become the rulers of that which had ruled us. The New World Order that the conspiracy theorists fear is a shadow of the glorious possibility available to sovereign beings. No longer the vassals of fear, we can bring order to the kingdom and build an intentional society on the love already shining through the cracks of the world of separation.

The overblown, grandiose prose combined with a lack of specifics is typical of many passages found in Charles’ work.

I discovered Charles when I was publishing the original Reality Sandwich, which I started around 2006 with the late Ken Jordan. I gave Charles an early platform, and he used our Evolver Network to tour and build his fanbase, speaking to the Evolver communities across the US who had formed around the magazine. I felt very aligned with his work back then. I still appreciate some of his earlier essays¹.

I set up an Evolver publishing imprint with North Atlantic Press, where I edited and published Charles’ Sacred Economics, among other works. At the time, I was quite impressed with Sacred Economics, although it fell short on tangible solutions. My goal with Evolver, Reality Sandwich, the Evolver Network, and Evolver Editions was to help support the development of a “spiritual Left:” We would integrate indigenous shamanism, local currencies, permaculture, consciousness exploration, alternative relationship models, Tantra, transformational festivals, participatory democracy, nonviolent communication, and so on, into a new initiative and civilizational paradigm. I didn’t even build a website for myself for many years. I believed the collective mission was essential—we were in a race against time.

I felt we needed to define a movement that would be more exciting and amazing for individuals and communities than the Capitalist/technocratic death trip we are still on today. This seemed to me the problem with the traditional Left, as we also saw with Occupy Wall Street and Extinction Rebellion: It is too flat in its outlook, too materialist, too grim. If we need to sacrifice ourselves in some ways to transform our society, we must hold a vision of a future “utopia” that turns us on and inspires us — not just the end point, but even the process of getting there must feel electric, sensuous, enlivening.

Morgan Brent, an author and shaman (he grew Terence McKenna’s ayahuasca in Hawaii), told me that the 1960s idea of “Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll” was a ruse used by corporate Capitalism to manipulate the “natural vitalizing impulses” of the human being, channeling these instinctive forces into commerce. I thought our “Spiritual Left” movement to build a participatory regenerative system could focus on accessing these natural vitalizing impulses in a healthy, holistic way. As Brent put it, we would turn “Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll” into Tantric/ conscious sexuality; ceremonial experiences of nonordinary consciousness using visionary plants; and organic musical expressions generated within communities.

I was delighted I found Charles because I was overextended in my effort to build this alternative infrastructure of media and communities I believed we needed to deal with the looming ecological, geopolitical emergency. I could barely write anymore as I tried to hold the organization together and raise funding for it. Charles seemed an articulate holder of our shared vision: I was happy to give him a platform.

It was only years later that I started to reappraise Charles’ work and found it troubling and specious. His combination of willful naivete and his Hamlet-like tendency to never define his position started to annoy me. I began to feel his tone of moral superiority naturally appealed to middle class people with an interest in spirituality, who wanted to feel they were above quotidian matters like politics or even climate change, because they possess a special, more encompassing perspective.

I also found his “Story of Separation” to be increasingly irritating, one dimensional: A kind of catchall he applied to everything. The same tendencies are apparent in his latest essay on RFK, Trump, and so on, where he combines this incapacity to take sides with his typical grandiose pomposity:

I won’t play the game of denouncing or endorsing. The psycho-social patterning of “which side are you on” springs from one of the chief narratives of the mythology of Separation. It understands the world by simplifying it into a drama of good versus evil, and also simplifies the human beings who play roles in that drama into subhuman or superhuman caricatures.

Few people today have been more caricaturized than Donald Trump. I hate to disappoint any of my readers who demonize or lionize the man, but, having at this point something of a backstage pass, I can tell you that neither pole stands anywhere near the truth. It is almost impossible to see the real man through the fog of today’s information war.

He is not a strategic genius out-maneuvering the deep state in a match of 4D chess. Nor is he a Mussolini figure, a bigoted fascist marshaling resurgent far-right forces to elevate him into dictatorial power. He is not even particularly right-wing.

Kennedy described to me a conversation he had with Trump about Project 2025, promulgated by the Heritage Foundation as a program for a conservative makeover of the United States. It has been widely associated with the Trump campaign, but when Kennedy asked him about it he said, “That thing? I didn’t even know about it until people started to complain. It was written by some right-wing asshole. There’s something crazy on every page. We’re not going to do any of that stuff.”

I find it astonishing that Charles seems willing to take Trump at his word here, considering Trump’s endless lies, manipulative strategies, bullying, and so on (RFK is, also, prone to lies and exaggerations). He fixates on what he calls the “psycho-social patterning” that, he believes, lies beyond using discrimination to make choices. But actually, policies do matter to many millions of people, and the choice seems pretty clear.

The Heritage Foundation and Christian Right who back Trump have already denied abortions to women in many states, and will pursue a universal ban, along with other controls on reproductive rights. Trump seeks tax cuts for the wealthy and intends to raise taxes on the poor and middle class, which will cause more misery. He wants to rescind Biden’s partial forgiveness of student debt. He wants more punitive policies toward illegal immigrants and asylum seekers. He makes many openly racist comments, dogwhistles to Fascists and White Christian nationalism, exacerbates social divisions, intends to eliminate environmental restrictions and the Department of Education, and so on.

Personally, while I do not think the Democrats go far enough in addressing wealth inequality, the ecological crisis, healthcare costs, and other issues, I find their policies far less destructive in most areas. I will dive back into the Ukraine war and Israel/Palestine in future essays. I believe Trump’s cavalier decision to move the capital of Israel to Jerusalem caused cascading consequences that emboldened extremists, leading to the war in Gaza.

Charles cuts Putin the same slack he offers Trump, refusing to acknowledge that the Russian dictator is a brutal psychopath who routinely poisons and tortures his enemies. Putin has made it clear that he wants to rebuild the former glories of the Russian empire. My view is that Putin undertook a voluntary war of conquest that the US and Europe need to oppose. Like Charles, Russell has taken a stance of appeasement and forgiveness toward Putin. This appeals to a large swathe of under-informed citizens who can be manipulated by disinformation.

We now know that many social media influencers with large followings — Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, etcetera — were getting huge payoffs ($100,000 a week) from Russia via shell media companies. Other influencers, like Russell or Charles, benefit in different ways. Charles, for instance, gets paid $20,000 a month as an adviser to RFK, who receives large-scale funding from the same financial backers who support Trump, such as banking heir Timothy Mellon. According to Business Insider, in his autobiography, ““Mellon wrote that Black people became "even more belligerent and unwilling to pitch in to improve their own situations" after the expansion of social welfare systems.”

Having a closer or “backstage” view of someone doesn’t necessarily make you better at judging them effectively. It can actually make your perspective more prone to error, as you forget or choose to ignore your first intuitive sense of them. I find, often, when I first encounter someone, I have a powerful intuition about them that usually turns out to be true. Later on, I may abandon that intuition, or be convinced or talked out of it, for many reasons. My suspicion is that Charles has been seduced by proximity to power. He maintains an illusion that he can influence the Right. More likely, he will be used and discarded by them.

I remember my initial meeting with Russell Brand: I was emailed out of the blue by his assistants who seemed to feel they were sharing some incredibly amazing news with me that Russell actually wanted to meet me.