“Reich Said Fred”: UK Band Turned Anti-Vax Cranks Promote Neo-Nazi Live Stream
“The boys share information they feel isn’t covered by the mainstream media, this is a rare example where the band got it wrong”
British band Right Said Fred, best known for their 1992 hit “I’m Too Sexy,” have gone down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole on vaccines and Covid—even sharing a neo-Nazi livestream this week.
The stream, hosted by UK white nationalist Mark Collett, featured neo-Nazi David Duke and white supremacist Jason Köhne.
In a statement after Right Said Fred’s sharing of the webcast sparked outrage, the band’s rep claimed in a statement that brothers Fred and Richard Fairbrass had made an uncharacteristic error.
“The boys share information they feel isn’t covered by the mainstream media, this is a rare example where the band got it wrong,” the rep said.
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Part of a pattern
Last year, Richard, who is unvaccinated, was briefly hospitalized after being unable to breathe—but that didn’t make a difference in his views. The band’s Twitter account claims that it was an incidental test after he was hospitalized for a fall.
The ties between the band’s anti-vax conspiracy theories and their right-wing tendencies aren’t unique. The so-called “conspirituality” movement, wedding New Age mysticism and far right politics, is on the rise. The members of Right Said Fred are just the latest prominent figures to embrace the intersection of fringe beliefs and the extremist politics that come with it.
More prominent musical figures in Britain have also embraced the anti-vax movement. Guitarist Eric Clapton, whose far-right views have been public for over 40 years, has in the twilight of his career reinvented himself as a conservative pundit-musician.
As Rolling Stone reported in a longform dig into Clapton last year:
In recent months Clapton has himself become a leading vaccine skeptic, part of a community that Dr. Anthony Fauci has said is “part of the problem — because you’re allowing yourself to be a vehicle for the virus to be spreading to someone else.” And while never explicitly condemning the lockdown, he’s said “live music might never recover” and joined Van Morrison for three songs that amount to lockdown protest anthems. By way of a friend’s social media account, he’s also detailed what he called his “disastrous” experience after receiving two AstraZeneca shots (“propaganda said the vaccine was safe for everyone,” he wrote).
Fellow aging Brit-rocker Van Morrison joined Clapton for an anti-vax single, “Stand and Deliver,” in 2020.
The “Conspirituality” Movement
As I’ve written in the past, the connections between New Age snake-oil salesman and reactionary politics go deep, and are increasingly taking in people on the left:
A mistrust of governmental authority mixed with a series of decades-old conspiracy theories about the dangers of modern society produced the core of the modern anti-vaccination movement, Eric Ward, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told me. But perhaps the wider ideological appeal of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories shouldn’t come entirely as a surprise. Traditional left-wing concerns about corporate influence mesh well with anti-vax fears that the pharmaceutical industry pushed federal regulatory agencies to sign off on the COVID-19 vaccines before they were truly ready. Skepticism about the safety of genetically modified food can easily blend into worries about mRNA vaccines. And an affinity for naturopathy and organic produce isn’t too far removed from rejecting the industrialization of modern medicine in the form of a shot.
I’ll be digging into the conspirituality movement more in the coming days. Tomorrow I’ll have a look at “wellness guru” Chervin Jafarieh, a prominent anti-vaxxer who claims the power of positive thinking can change the molecular structure of water and who has deep ties to tennis player Nolan Djokovic.
Also tomorrow, fitness coach Antonio Valladares joins me on my Callin podcast live at 5pm to discuss the roots of the “wellness” industry’s ties to fringe politics.
Valladares and I talked last year about right-wing conspiracy theorist and entertainer JP Sears—check it out here.
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Stop pushing the bullshit Covid lies and agenda, it’s all unravelling in real time how much of a farce it was. Don’t forget to put your clown nose on for extra protection against the cold. Honk honk!