Yeah, I'm honestly finding this question quite irritating.

As you say, first of all, Brand isn't really saying or doing anything new. He's always been "anti-establishment." In word if not in deed. If the mysterious powers that be wanted to take him down, they could have stopped him from rising in the first place.

But more than that, I think this question is coming from a bunch of people, mainly guys I'm sad to admit, who just can't understand how a man could get away with this behaviour for so long and not be convicted until now. "There must be something else going on," they insist.

And yes, what's going on is that women are so often ignored or silenced or shamed when they accuse powerful men of sexual assault that it takes years of trying before somebody takes them seriously enough that there's even a possibility of a conviction.

And instead of taking this self-evident fact seriously, a fact writ large in all of the other names I mention in the article who weren't challenging the "establishment," instead of taking the opportunity to recognise the existence of this layer of societal misogyny, they keep repeating this silly assertion that it must be because Brand (like thousands of others) talked about the "global elite" on his YouTube channel.