(VIDEO) Russell Brand: 'No, Hollywood Isn't Liberal - It's a Part of the Machine'
Russell Brand chatted with Young Turks host Cenk Uygur on Monday and immediately scoffed at the notion that Hollywood is liberal. "No, it's a part of the machine," Brand said, "a big part of the machine."
The comedian and progressive activist was addressing critics who have dismissed his recent diatribes about rampant inequality by saying he's just a Holllywood liberal.
“It doesn't matter. Soon, I, like all human beings, will be dead,” Brand explained. “And the truth will still be the truth.”
His point is that it really does not matter who is speaking out about injustice and inequality—though more people might listen to him because he is a successful actor. "What you know, and I know, and all of us know is that if there’s a group of people who haven’t got any money and power," he told Uygur. "And that’s because somewhere else, there’s a smaller group of people with a lot of money and power.”
Brand talked about going back to his working class hometown of Grays in Essex, England, which he compared to Camden, NJ for poverty and despair. "People there think that the problem is immigration, or people that are slightly different than them." Brand's message is that the blame is misplaced. that massive and structural inequality is the cause of the spiraling misery.
So, no. Hollywood did not make him liberal and progressive. Neither did being an actor make him that way. More likely his background did that, and the fact that for all his on- and off-screen antics, Brand is a thinking man. "I'm speaking as a person," he said.
Wanting to get one last dig in at conservatives, Uygur chimed in, “I love when conservatives say, ‘Oh, we hate Hollywood liberals, they’re just actors, and by the way, our hero’s Ronald Reagan.’”
Watch the clip:
