Some thoughts on the media and the role of religion
(and about egomaniacs Tucker Carlson and Russell Brand)
It was already last spring that Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox News, yet it’s been on my mind again. Shortly before his firing, Carlson said in an interview that he regretted promoting the Iraq war. Simultaneously to this ‘great’ confession, he also attacked all media as being evil. This is not only disingenuous but dangerous. He is rightfully guilty and should be feeling shame, regret, and remorse for his thoughtless and mendacious act supporting the war and many other bad things from the pulpit of his TV show—masquerading as news—but he cannot then just slink into obscurity (didn’t happen of course), or resign as a politician would in earlier days when they realize they were on the wrong side of history. No, now he wants to take the entire fifth column down with him, a sort of dog in the manger move, where he says if I was so wrong, it can’t just be that I made a bad or wrong choice, but the entire system must be wrong. This is a form of selfishness that is dangerous because he is trying to discredit an entire part of society to ease his own guilty conscience. Yes, some media is fake, but he is responsible for that part of the so-called media. All journalists are not part of the problem.
One thing that is for sure, and that is that Carlson is not dedicated to the truth. In Germany, it is against the law to rile people up to hate others, ‘Volksverhetzung’ that is, hate speech, as the Germans know all too well where that leads. Tucker would have been in jail ages ago if he were under German jurisdiction for all his racist fearmongering.
When Carlson said he regretted supporting the war, Russel Brand frames it as so very amazing that Carlson selectively decides to apologize for one of his many lies:
The list of Carlson’s lies is just so long… and a simple online search will reveal many more. The video comments are interesting, as usual, with veterans piping in that it’s so great when no politicians did the same and that Carlson is the epitome of integrity and personal growth. Gag.
Russel Brand, the British comedian-turned-commentator/guru is a popular figure. I used to like his content and would watch clips on YouTube during my lunch breaks. What I appreciated was how he pleads for more Spirit in life, points out the hypocrisy of our governing bodies/people and institutions, and highlights the greater spiritual decay at the root of American and Western culture. For example, his thoughts on the Uvalde school massacre here:
When I realized that I couldn’t watch Brand anymore, it wasn’t just that he kept promoting increasingly alt-right content, but his nervous, is-he-crazy-or-on-drugs-energy made my blood pressure rise.
I have followed the rise of the alt-right with interest and am not as worried about it as the mainstream media makes it out to be (some of my best friends are alt-right fans, lol!), and here’s a good example of how the media portrays and ultimately ‘cancels’ people who voice inconvenient opinions or truths, by putting them in the alt-right category and explaining why they can’t be taken seriously. This Spectator article gives a good overview of Brand’s evolution, and here, another one in the New Statesman. In the latter article, you can really see the trick at work: by grouping all these issues together that Brand is into …“right-wing signalling trope: the ghoulish mainstream media, the dishonest and untrustworthy pharmaceutical industry, the West’s shameful treatment of Julian Assange and “American hero” Edward Snowden, and the Covid drug Ivermectin…” there’s no space to deal with each one individually, on its own merits. I can be pro-free Assange and against Covid-denial, for example.
Another Substack writer I follow is Derek Beres, host of the Conspirituality Podcast dedicated to “Dismantling New Age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy-mad yogis.” Being an anthroposophist, I could be categorized as belonging to a new-age cult, depending on who defines that, but I truly appreciate his scientifically rigorous, sober analysis of these topics that interest me.
I was eager to read when he wrote about Russel Brand here, where he analyzes Brand’s ‘charismatic BS’:
We all like having our perceptions confirmed, and Beres confirms my twitchy reaction to Brand’s screaming. Compare his ranting to the calm speech of Paul Kingsworth, another Substack writer I discovered last year:
Kingsworth describes some of the same phenomena that Brand decries, including many astute observations about the state of the world in all its decay and terribleness and addressing the basic issue of ‘conservatism’ yet in listening, I don’t feel assaulted by the man’s ego.
Paul Kingsworth is notable not just for his writing about technology. Here from his Substack About page:
“The ultimate project of modernity, I have come believe, is to replace nature with technology, and to rebuild the world in purely human shape, the better to fulfill the most ancient human dream: to become gods. What I call the Machine is the nexus of power, wealth, ideology and technology that has emerged to make this happen.”
But recently, Kingsworth has moved from plumbing the depths of the new Machine Religion to writing more about his newfound (orthodox) Christianity:
Given that people like Carlson and Brand both use religion and spirituality to increase their power base (Carlson has moved increasingly into the right-wing fundamentalist Christian camp and really just wants to be picked as Veep in the 2024 election, and though I have fewer doubts about Brand’s genuine spirituality, it seems to have fueled his ego even more than before his “enlightened” stage.) So I ask myself, is religion still relevant today, other than as a tool to grab more earthly power?
Another true journalist and Substack writer whose work has deeply influenced me is Chris Hedges. He lost his job at the NY Times in 2003 for not supporting the invasion of Iraq (yeah, that’s what it looks like to stand by your principles).
Hedges is interesting in that he studied at Theological Seminary as a young man but then became a war reporter, only getting ordained a few years ago. He has had a long and storied career as a progressive and increasingly prophetic voice reporting from all war zones of the past 40 years. His 2002 book, “War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning,” wherein he describes the false god-like addictive nature of war and its corresponding part of our soul, was pivotal several years ago in my understanding of my part in the War on Terror (I enlisted in the Army the week the US invaded Iraq).
Hedges’ books and writings are increasingly prophetic, revolutionary, and condemnatory, like this “speech he gave on April 6 at a protest at Princeton Theological Seminary demanding the removal of hedge fund billionaire Michael Fisch as chair of the seminary's trustee board.”
He says towards the end of his speech-sermon:
“…This is not to say that the church does not exist. This is not to say that I reject the church. On the contrary. The church today is not located inside the stone buildings that surround us or the cavernous, and largely empty houses of worship, but here, with you. It is located with those who work in prisons, schools and shelters, those who organize fast food workers, who serve the undocumented, who form night basketball leagues in poor communities…”
Do we need churches for religion to thrive? In Hedges’ view, the work of religion is to help the oppressed, and for that, we don’t necessarily need a central location called a church, in anything more of a community center to organize a social movement. Nowadays, it’s understandable that so few people want to have anything to do with organized, institutional religion, given its sordid history. Even Tucker Carlson was likely affected by the abuse scandal at his Episcopal boarding school,
But how are people to learn about religion, except by listening to Fox News or watching clips of Russel Brand on YouTube?
I was interested to read this Wired article about how religious practices help us deal with grief and promote gratitude, among other things, and thus improve our lives.
“Science and religion have often been at odds. But if we remove the theology—views about the nature of God, the creation of the universe, and the like—from the day-to-day practice of religious faith, the animosity in the debate evaporates. What we’re left with is a series of rituals, customs, and sentiments that are themselves the results of experiments of sorts. Over thousands of years, these experiments, carried out in the messy thick of life as opposed to sterile labs, have led to the design of what we might call spiritual technologies—tools and processes meant to soothe, move, convince, or otherwise tweak the mind. And studying these technologies has revealed that certain parts of religious practices, even when removed from a spiritual context, are able to influence people’s minds in the measurable ways psychologists often seek.”
Psychologists are like, wow! It turns out it’s not all hokus-pokus; communal practices, previously the domain of religion, are good for people. But we don’t necessarily need to attend a particular church to gain these benefits. A look at any platform organizing group events will reveal meetups for yoga, meditation, prayer, social action, gratitude-journaling, grief-support groups with rituals; you name it. There is a group of people on Eventbrite, Facebook, Meetup, or wherever you congregate and get socially networked, organizing some kind of communal practice that used to be considered ‘religious.’ Even churches are the organizers of all the above-listed types of events. But this begs the question, where is theology then in all this?