Comedian turned commentator Russell Brand has weighed in on the ongoing wildfires in Maui, Hawaii, flouting conspiracy theories in his usual fast-paced, flamboyant style which are so outlandish, that he’s being compared to GB News anti-vaxxer Neil Oliver. Brand, who’s switched appearances on comedy films such as Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him to the Greek for his Stay Free podcast in recent years, uploaded a video to his six million subscriber strong YouTube channel on Thursday with the title, “Something Doesn’t Seem Right”. As the baseless conspiracy theory that the devastating crisis on the US island was not aided by climate change but rather a ‘space laser’ continue to spread online, Brand jumped in and dismissed those rightly questioning such a nonsensical argument. “Now, some people would say, ‘Oh, that’s dangerous misinformation – that should be shut down.’ I think the opposite. “Discuss it, look at it, investigate it. Either it’s true or it’s not true, we can decide for ourselves, let’s not get excited,” he says. We have, Russell – that’s kind of what journalists do for a job… Towards the end of the almost 23-minute-long video, Brand turns to the conspiracy that the fires in Hawaii were “started deliberately to benefit rich elites” such as the investment management company and financial services provider BlackRock. He continues: “Now look at the Ukraine war. Ukraine have already done a deal with BlackRock to rebuild their nation using BlackRock investment. “If you apply that mentality to this situation, if BlackRock end up benefitting from the fires in Hawaii, then the conspiracy is almost a redundant detail. Did they start it? Didn’t they start it? “Is it inevitable that the suffering of ordinary people leads to the benefit of rich elites and massive organisations like BlackRock and billionaires across the globe and why is Bill Gates buying all this agricultural land when he’s not a farmer?” Yes, that’s one whole sentence. “Doesn’t it all feel like a kind of macro-conspiracy that’s so diffuse, institutional, oddly abstracted and bureaucratically opaque, that sometimes you just want to simplify it into ‘they started this fire! They started it with a laser from space!’ “And whether it’s true or not, it not only feels true, in terms of its results it is kind of true. There is a conspiracy to keep you poor and benefit rich elites,” he vented, adding that the “next time there’s a pandemic” the elite are “gonna control you more”. In other news, thesauruses are in short supply around the world. And it’s Brand’s ranting about a shadowy elite and government control during a pandemic which has likely led to social media users on Twitter/X branding Brand (ha) a “frappucino Neil Oliver”, the GB News host who has long peddled conspiracy theories about vaccines and an impending “one-world government”. Back in August 2021 he said he’d happily catch Covid – y’know, an actually deadly virus – “for the sake of freedom”, just so you know the kind of dangerous nonsense we’re dealing with here. Others, however, have pointed out to user Matthew Dimitri – who shared a clip of Brand on X – that Brand was actually making an argument about elites and organisations benefitting from natural disasters like the one in Hawaii, and that Dimitri has “misrepresented” Brand: Except instead of rejecting the laser conspiracy theory outright, remember, Brand said he ‘thinks the opposite’ and that instead we should “discuss it, look at it [and] investigate it”, which isn’t a complete dismissal of the idea. He doesn’t really give a definitive answer on whether the claim is true or not, but rather suggests that the result of the whole ‘is it or isn’t it’ debate is more important, as if it’s part of a broader conspiracy or distraction “to keep you poor and benefit rich elites”. Perhaps a far more compelling argument around all this is that Brand should learn to keep things succinct, for the benefit of everyone... Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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As YouTuber, musician and boxer KSI gears up for his next fight against ex-Love Island contestant Tommy Fury in October, the content creator has been taking aim at his opponent in a series of posts on X/Twitter – but one tweet mocking Fury has seen the Sidemen member branded “ableist” by social media users. KSI, real name Olajide “JJ” Olatunji, took to X on Thursday evening to share a series of posts mocking Fury, one of which featured a video of a disabled model flexing his muscles. In a caption accompanying the TikTok video from user @the_honest_1, JJ wrote: “Can’t lie, Tommy Fury has never looked better.” The clip was taken from the account of 20-year-old Amine Sheik, a person with a shorter upper body who has more than 193,000 followers on the social media platform. However, Olatunji has since been criticised for his use of the video, with X users labelling the “Holiday” singer “ableist” and “pathetic” for using a disabled person to belittle his rival: Neither KSI or Sheik have responded to the tweet and the backlash since it was posted. It is not the first time KSI has come under fire for comments and actions around disability, with the social media influencer previously being filmed giving a video message to an autistic fan telling them to “get well soon” before asking his friends “am I being r****ded” when he was met with shocked reactions. He also forced his editor to subtitle gibberish in a video from 2020 after his YouTube content started coming with closed captions – a feature which makes videos accessible for deaf viewers. In April, the YouTube star took a break from social media and apologised after he was filmed saying a racial slur during a ‘Sidemen Sunday’ parodying popular daytime game show Countdown. KSI fights Tommy Fury on 14 October in Manchester, with Prime co-founder Logan Paul also on the card against mixed martial artist Dillon Danis. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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