The following blog post is syndicated from Alex Story The Aussie Wire News’ UK Correspondent

Russell Brand is innocent until proven guilty.

As Margaret Thatcher said “if you ever get trial by television or guilt by
accusation that day freedom dies”.

Matters of guilt or innocence, she added, must always be dealt in a court of
law.

On that basis, our freedom is long dead.

The presumption of innocence, the cornerstone of a civilised polity, has been
visibly torn from under our feet, revealing in the process our leader’s
unbearable sanctimonious hypocrisy.

Lionised when a flotsam on the self-consuming and demonic seas of Fame &
Stardom, Mr Brand is now censured for having found a way to a meaningful
life.

He now hosts a regular podcast. He has more followers than the FA Cup final
mustered this year.

His aim is to inform and find the truth.

Too much has been revealed over the last few years by our leaders for the
curious to be satisfied by the incoherence of their orthodoxy.

We know too much about their shortcomings, in terms of competence,
intellectual ability and moral fibre.

This has created a vacuum that Russell Brand has naturally exploited. In so
doing, he has valiantly, and often successfully, tried to look beyond the
smokescreen across many topics.

Few stones have been left unturned.

His following has grown immeasurably because of this approach. Beholden to
no-one, he set out to be an old school truth seeker.

This, it turns out, is deeply unpopular with office seekers and holders.
They are often far too compromised. They don’t like to attention. They would
rather kill the messenger than look in the mirror.

Mr Brand’s journey should interest all who believe in the redemptive qualities
of humility, introspection and calling.

However, while the intensity of the loathing and accusations are something
from which to recoil, it is the speed at which the United Kingdom Parliament
sought to destroy his livelihood that should ring every alarm bell.

Indeed, only a few days after the allegations against Russell Brand were aired
on Channel 4’s Dispatches, it was revealed that Dame Caroline Dinenage,
Chairman of the Culture, Media and Sports Committee, wrote to Rumble, an
online video platform, to demand they demonetise Mr Brand.

To Chris Palovski, CEO of the platform, she wrote she “would be grateful if you
could confirm whether Mr Brand is able to monetise his content” and whether
“Rumble intends to join Youtube in suspending Mr Brand’s ability to make
money from the platform”.

Mr Palovski responded with the deepest contempt.

“We devoted ourselves to the vital cause of a free internet”.

He added rightly that “we regard it as deeply inappropriate and dangerous that
the UK Parliament would attempt to control who is allowed to speak on our
platform or to earn a living from doing so.”

“Singling out an individual and demanding his ban is even more disturbing
given the absence of any connection between the allegations and his content
on Rumble”.

“We emphatically reject the UK Parliament’s demands.” And quite right too.
A little later, more letters from the hapless Dame were leaked.
She had been a very busy bee, working overtime to destroy a fellow human
being. Indeed, she wrote to Facebook, Tiktok, and GBnews among others with
a similar message.

In her zeal, Caroline Dineage even authored a badly written letter to Angelos
Frangopoulos, the CEO of GBnews, attacking anyone who might have said
something supportive of Russell Brand. He had not even been on the channel.

In this instance, she had just used the kerfuffle as a snide pretext to put
pressure on the station to deal with two popular anchors and accuse them by
association – A most Maoist trait.

In her crosshairs came Dan Wootton and Beverley Turner: The first had been
subjected to smear campaigns by Byline times, an unregulated Stalinist blog,
experts mainly in slander, defamation and disinformation; The second,
because she refused to throw Russell Brand under the proverbial bus.
Indeed, Mrs Turner was named only because she had the audacity to call Mr
Brand a “hero” for his commonsensical defence of civil liberties during our
government’s collective descent into the COVID insanity of lockdowns and
mask and vaccine mandates.

Completely unaware of the egregious nature of her asinine totalitarian
demands, Dame Caroline explained that she “remained concerned that having
a presenter so clearly supporting an individual who is subject of intense media
coverage… undermines any perception of due impartiality in the
broadcasting.”

In short, the overpromoted and charmless parliamentarian sought to strip a
British subject of his right to appear on television because he was “subject of
intense media coverage”.

How intellectually mediocre can one be to write such a sentence? What would
happen to television if Caroline Dinenage’s new criteria was applied to all
people subject of media interest?

As shocking as the issue is on a stand-alone basis, however, this is a harbinger
of things much darker to come.

The pursuit and hoped for destruction of individuals such as Russell Brand,
with all the civil rights collateral damage it entails, is happening in the context
of the freshly passed Online Safety Bill.

According to sceptics, this grants sweeping censorship and surveillance powers
to the government and characters like Dame Caroline, all done in the name of
the important desire to protect children from online harm.

Beyond the new law itself, we find the Trusted News Initiative.

It is a coalition of left-of-centre legacy media organisations and Big Tech
companies, set up by the BBC in 2019 working to strengthen their power in
controlling their “narrative”.

Anyone with a memory of the Brexit debates, COVID, the decade long
institutional silence on grooming gangs and much more should see this attack
on Russell Brand’s ability to work, before he has been tried in a court of law, as
further sign that we are inching towards a thought dictatorship.

To paraphrase the Iron Lady, freedom dies if the media becomes our judge,
jury and executioner. It seems this is were we now are.

You can watch Alex’s latest interview with Topher on The Aussie Wire News here