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Russell Brand is on the move. Again.
The bawdy British pushed socialism not too long ago. He smited Western culture, savaged capitalism and when, pressed on his fiscal hypocrisy, didn’t take it well.
Brand began to change his views roughly around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. He called out media bias, pandemic misinformation and more.
His YouTube channel soared, and he gained a new, right-leaning audience in the process. He eventually embraced Christianity and even penned a new book under the Tucker Carlson imprint.
“How to Become a Christian in 7 Days (May Take 50 Years of Sin and Serious F*** Ups to Get Started)”
His book promotion tour found him chatting with Piers Morgan this week. Suffice it to say, the interview didn’t go well for Brand.
Morgan pressed him on a particular Bible passage that helped him at the start of his February court date on rape and sexual assault charges. Brand brought a Bible to the proceedings and appeared to be leaning on its wisdom.
The comedian rifled through the pages, mumbling to himself for a while but coming up empty.
Piers Morgan to Russell Brand: What passages were relevant to you when you brought the Bible into court?
*two minutes later*
Russell Brand: “I can’t actually find the verse I had that day.” https://t.co/GcjNaJVxEe pic.twitter.com/7IbTQ59WNX
— CONSEQUENCE (@consequence) April 25, 2026
Later in the chat, Brand repeatedly touched Morgan during a contentious exchange, never threatening the host but using physical intimidation. He casually admitted he might be a grifter, either a blast of self-awareness or a way to defuse Morgan’s questions with humor.
During his interview with Piers Morgan, Russell Brand got increasingly defensive and didn’t want to answer any questions.
Here are the final moments when he melted down: https://t.co/E5eTevdbAD pic.twitter.com/KuQKH0sK0H
— Gadget (@Gadget440) April 25, 2026
The most alarming part of the exchange, though, came when Morgan asked Brand to condemn the Oct. 7 atrocities committed by Hamas against Israel.
It’s akin to saying, what color is the sky or something equally simple.
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Murdering 1,200 people, torturing men, women and children, plus committing unspeakable assaults on innocents should be condemned, full stop.
Except Brand couldn’t do it.
Piers Morgan repeatedly asked Russel Brand to “condemn” October 7th.
When he refused to play his game, Piers called him “intellectually dishonest”. pic.twitter.com/tbxW7LtHOW
— smile2jannah (@smile2jannah) April 25, 2026
When pressed, Brand quickly brought up Ben Shapiro to change the subject. It’s unclear what the Daily Wire co-founder had to do with the topic in hand, except the fact that Shapiro is Jewish.
“We’re running out of time,” Morgan said, while Brand said his sense of right and wrong are guided by Scripture. That’s not an answer, so Morgan repeated the question.
“So was it an act of terrorism?” Morgan said, but Brand suggested it was an unfair conversation.
“I’m just asking a basic question about what Hamas did that day,” Morgan said.
“It’s not a basic question … you know what we’ve learned, there are no basic questions,” Brand answered, dissembling.
“Actually, there are. That’s the problem about being intellectually dishonest. When you have an act of obvious, grotesque terrorism, you just say what it is. You don’t think, ‘how is this gonna play to my audience or spin out on social media,'” Morgan said.
“You look at how it happened, when it happened, a potential ton of narratives,” Brand said before cross talk muddled his speech.
“You’ve answered by not answering,” Morgan said. “You have, haven’t you?”
“It’s wrong to kill people. Thou shalt not kill,” Brand offered up. “That’s in the Old Testament.”
“Let’s end on that,” a flustered Morgan said.
It’s notable that Brand’s new book comes from Team Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News pundit whose anti-Israel rage has become a defining part of his brand.
The post Russell Brand Won’t Condemn Oct. 7 Attacks appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.
It was the hair tousle that changed the course of a TV institution.
Jimmy Fallon had successfully taken the baton from Jay Leno to host NBC’s “The Tonight Show” in 2014. The former “Saturday Night Live” player seemed a good fit for the gig, and in those early months Fallon kept the show atop the late-night ratings heap.
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Two years later, Fallon invited presidential hopeful Donald Trump onto the show. Trump had previously worked with NBC on the blockbuster reality series “The Apprentice.” Trump also hosted the Peacock network’s “SNL” – twice.
So, on paper, there was nothing unusual about booking Trump on the NBC institution.
Except Trump Derangement Syndrome had just taken hold, and any attempt to “normalize” the real estate mogul was seen as a betrayal by the Left and the Legacy Media (but we repeat ourselves).
Fallon conducted an amiable chat with Trump, but midway through Fallon playfully ran his fingers through Trump’s unique hairstyle to show audiences it wasn’t a toupee.
It’s the kind of moment tailor-made for late-night banter. Silly. Funny. Human.
That’s when the Left and the media (but we repeat ourselves) melted down. The blowback proved so ferocious Fallon publicly apologized for the act of treating a “Tonight Show” guest like a … guest.
The host of “The Tonight Show” tells The Hollywood Reporter he “made a mistake” and apologized “if I made anyone mad.” He adds that he “would do it differently” looking back on the Sept. 15, 2016 episode… “I did not do it to ‘normalize’ him or to say I believe in his political beliefs or any of that stuff.”
Guess what happened next? “The Tonight Show” took a lurch to the Left. The show never became a DNC propaganda outlet a la “The Late Show” or “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” Still, the opening monologues hit the Right harder and much more consistently than the Left.
Misbehaving Democrats were off the table for punchlines, by and large, and Trump gags became the order of the day. Plus, while Fallon’s competition ignored President Joe Biden’s obvious decline and Kamala Harris’ word salad speeches, he refused to pick up the slack.
And, over the years, the iconic “Tonight Show” fell behind both Colbert and Kimmel in the ratings.
The most recent ratings for Q1 2026 had “The Late Show” literally doubling what Fallon generated.
Yet Fallon still insists he conducts a fair and balanced late-night show. Now, that’s funny.
Watch: Jimmy Fallon gets visibly uncomfortable when asked about the partisan optics of his show:
“Our show’s never really been that political. We hit both sides equally… and uh, we try to make everybody laugh.”
They know their propaganda machine is nearing its end. pic.twitter.com/kH0OnBO83e
— Dralone&_DR145 (@draloneboy) April 25, 2026
“Our show’s never really been that political. We hit both sides equally… and uh, we try to make everybody laugh. Our monologues are the same since Johnny Carson was doing ‘The Tonight Show.'”
“The Tonight Show,” like its peers, very rarely invites openly conservative celebrities on its program. When Fallon dared to bring Greg Gutfeld on last year, it was seen as a major news story.
That’s because Fallon’s “Tonight Show” is a liberal institution. Period.
Carson famously didn’t pick a political side. And, chances are, if Carson were hosting “The Tonight Show” when President Joe Biden was in the Oval Office, he’d likely joke about the leader’s dementia-like state, but in a manner that wasn’t cruel.
What late-night host is the most Carson-like in his/her approach to TV interviews?
The post Low-rated Jimmy Fallon Lies About ‘Tonight Show’s’ Liberal Bias appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.
If prices are instrumental in providing needed information to market participants, then inflation can be seen as introducing static into the system, creating more uncertainty and leading to bad choices.
The word “democracy” is almost sacrosanct in modern society, yet what advocates call “our democracy” is not what it claims to be. Real democracy can be found in the workings of the free market, not the political halls.
But corporate greed or price gouging has never been a plausible theory of price changes, let alone inflation. Corporations with substantive market power don’t need pretext. They can always extract high prices by artificially limiting supply. And firms without market power that try to pocket a windfall invite undercutting by rivals; that’s especially true of hypercompetitive retail gas stations. When prices rise simultaneously across an entire industry—nay, across the entire world—the far simpler explanation is either a demand shock or a common cost shock—precisely the sort a war-driven supply shock produces. Consumers have to be willing and able to pay the higher prices, after all.
A lot of politicians around the world seem to get upset if prices for retail gas spike on inventory that was acquired at lower cost. They regard that as unfair “gouging.” Few of them, I suspect, insist on selling their homes for the price they paid for them. But fundamentally, this misunderstands the role of market prices, which reflect the relevant scarcity of the products in each new context. The opportunity cost for firms of selling oil below what the market will bear today is the price that could be obtained elsewhere in the world. Firms also need to replace inventory at the new market price. So, yes, they might make a short-term accounting profit on some inventory, but this is quite transitory.
Timothy Taylor shares insights from Richard Baldwin’s new monograph, World War Trade. Two slices:
We have been living through the silly season of Trump’s tariff policy for some months now. Baldwin lays out the details: here’s my own summary. The Trump administration has made innumerable announcements about tariff policy, and you will be stunned to learn that every single one of them is a greater triumph than the one before, natch. High announced tariffs? A triumph. Announcing an agreement that would reduce those tariffs? Another triumph. Creating exceptions and loopholes in the lower tariffs to ease the pain on US consumers and on US firms importing inputs to production? Yet another triumph. Announcing a new round of high tariffs? One more triumph. A new tariff policy has a completely different reason than the previous tariff policy? Yet another triumph of statesmanship. Indeed, every time a previous tariff policy is changed, or even abolished, it simply demonstrates that all previous tariff policies were triumphs. Then the US Supreme Court ruled that most of the tariffs imposed since April 2, 2025, were all unconstitutional to begin with. And President Trump reacted by imposing yet another round of tariffs with another pretextual legal rationale.
As US manufacturing firms struggle to deal with higher prices and cutoffs and heightened uncertainty of their global supply chains for inputs, and US consumers face higher prices as a result of tariffs, what’s the rest of the world doing? Baldwin argues persuasively that other nations of the world are pursuing regional free-trade agreements that pointedly leave out the United States–so that US firms have no voice in the negotiations. Baldwin calls it the “domino theory of regionalism,” which is the idea that regional free trade agreements benefit those who are inside, and thus disadvantage those who are outside. Every time an outsider decides to join up, it’s one more domino falling into place.
…..
Baldwin writes of Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs announced on April 2, 2025: “Donald Trump’s Rose Garden tariffs were historic in the most disruptive sense of the word. By raising tariffs on almost everything from almost every nation, he broke most of the trade promises America had ever made.” That epic level of promise-breaking will echo into the future of US diplomacy on all subjects.
Alan Beattie compares Tariff Man to Nixon. Two slices:
Donald Trump came into office as the self-styled “Tariff Man” superhero who would tear apart global trade and refashion it under the muscular doctrine of America First. He seems likely instead to be remembered as the supervillain “Epic Fury”, who set the Middle East ablaze and endangered worldwide prosperity and the US’s standing with it.
A year on from his supposed “liberation day”, which imposed sweeping tariffs across the board, Trump has certainly delivered a rupture from the multilateral system which came before. But rather than regressing to the protectionism of the 1930s — not least because other countries have declined to join in — he seems to have stumbled back only to the early years of President Richard Nixon.
…..
Two Republican presidents who started with a somewhat similar attitude to trade both hit the real-world limits of fighting a trade war. Yet it’s revealing how toxic the US attitude to trade has become that the 1970s original shifted towards liberalisation bounded by agreements, while the 2020s redux continues to regard open and rules-based trade with unremitting hostility. It’s not often that historians look back to Nixon’s presidency with nostalgia, but his legacy seems like a golden era of multilateral openness compared with the destructive economic nationalism of Trump.
James Pethokoukis tweets this line from this report in The Economist:
‘Here is an uncomfortable truth for hand-wringing policymakers: Europe’s dependency on America is in no small part Europe’s own fault. Decades of over-regulating the old continent’s economy left businesses there unable to compete with American firms’
America, Eberstadt says, has had “the most robust demographic growth of any developed society.” The Social Security Administration, predicting what it must desperately desire, projects another 100 million Americans by 2100. But intractable pathologies — including government’s fiscal incontinence and “pay-as-you-go entitlements” — spell catastrophe for a nation with an upside-down “population pyramid,” where each generation is smaller than the previous one.
“Who is Hasan Piker?” – Jim Geraghty has the unattractive answer.
Also writing about Comrade Piker and his ethically challenged ilk is Reason‘s Robby Soave. A slice:
Stealing is bad, and you shouldn’t do it. It’s really as simple as that. Children understand this, even from a young age, and it’s taught to them by their parents, grandparents, teachers, and other mentors. Some people, of course, find themselves in desperate circumstances, and are forced to steal to survive. We may empathize with them, and we may even decide that their situation mitigates the blameworthiness of the offense. That doesn’t change the wrongness of stealing, though. If you catch your kids snatching a candy bar from the grocery store checkout line, you invariably punish them. You don’t commend them for striking a blow against capitalist oppression.
Enter leftists Hasan Piker and Jia Tolentino, who have been roundly and deservedly mocked on social media after participating in a podcast interview for The New York Times titled “The Rich Don’t Play By the Rules. So Why Should I?” Already, we are on shaky ground here, since the headline—a direct quote from host Nadja Spiegelman—positions Piker, Tolentino, and Spiegelman as a trio of people that should be contrasted with the rich. This is ridiculous: All three are members of the wealthy, successful, cultural elite. Spiegelman is a culture editor for the Times, an author, a cartoonist, and the daughter of legendary cartoonist Art Spiegelman (creator of Maus, a well-known graphic novel about the Holocaust). Tolentino is a relatively famous feminist writer of not-exactly modest means. Piker is a wildly successful far-left Twitch streamer and nephew of The Young Turks‘ Cenk Uygur, who gave him his start. Suffice it to say, these are not people who need to steal to survive.
And yet, their conversation includes a full-throated defense of shoplifting.
Peter Suderman watched Michael so we don’t have to.
The post Some Links appeared first on Cafe Hayek.
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