Russell Brand, Alec Baldwin: The rich flee climate change

Energetic thinker Russell Brand — whose brand new book is called Revolution — has a YouTube show called The Trews (“The Trews is news if the news were true”) on which he discusses current events and world problems. Back in August, The Trews gained attention through Brand’s public feud with Fox News.

Above, in Monday’s installment (the second half of a two-parter that began with a discussion of Ebola and ISIS on Thursday), we find host Russell Brand joined by actor Alec Baldwin, plus Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert, co-hosts of something called Keiser Report on RT, the Russian TV network that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry criticized as a “propaganda bullhorn” for Russian President Vladimir Putin back in April.

Aside from Alec Baldwin’s throbbing discomfort at Brand’s pesky invasions of his suave aura, the fascinating thing here is Baldwin’s revelation that “wealthy and extremely wealthy people in the U.S. are buying tracts of land in the northeastern United States — especially way up north, and into Canada — in response to their fears about climate change.” Baldwin quotes an anonymous but prominent entertainment business friend of his as predicting, “We’re all going to be growing our own food in 15 years.” Baldwin says that there are “a lot of people” he knows who are “buying, like, 6,000 acres of abandoned timber land in Maine.”

In this liberal elite, “eat local” version of the coming apocalypse, Baldwin tells how these landowners will have people come “and work, feudally, on a farm.”

Perhaps we should all start figuring out where our favorite stars are relocating, and which ones we want to be growing kale for in 2029. If you’re planning on working for the notoriously hot-tempered Lord Baldwin himself, you would do well to study the “Harlan, Kentucky” chapter of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success beforehand.

And ladies, take note: Baldwin also goes on to talk about how, with sexuality currently being “tamped down” in movies and TV, today’s female stars “are very cerebral, very mannish, very competent, very capable, they get things done.” He insists that “Gina Lollobrigida would never act in films today. Sophia Loren would never act. Bardot might not act in films today.”

Amazing stuff. There’s an old saying about a squirrel, in the America before Europeans, being able to climb a tree on the Atlantic coast and not come back down to the ground until the Mississippi River. Now, we may have fewer trees, but more conspiracy theories and secret beliefs. It would be entertaining to be able to hop from dinner table to dinner table this Thanksgiving, sampling the sincerest suspicions of all the crazy uncles.