It’s amazing to me that democrats can watch a genocide for nine months, and do nothing but make excuses, but one debate with grandpa has them freaking out. I didn’t even watch the debate. Anyone invested in that guy before the debate was just as cooked as he is. I just caught a few clips and spent a few minutes laughing through hexbear’s reactions, as is proper.
We talk a lot here about how pointless it is to vote but it’s way worse for capitalism if we are unemployed, simply because we refuse to generate labor for the capitalist class. I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been working full-time for almost three months after being unemployed for years and it just sucks to be aware that even the wages I get eventually end up back in the Cayman Islands, where they are then reinvested in blowing up Palestinian children.
Fascism is just capitalism from the perspective of the exploited. Liberalism is capitalism from the perspective of the exploiters. The term “fascism” originates in anti-union activity in early 20th century Italy, but capitalism itself (a market society in which every aspect of existence is subordinated to market imperatives) begins in 16th century England, though it has some deeper roots in Florence (see the Ciompi Revolt) and Venice (sort of like a medieval proto-USA).
A lotta yall still don’t get it
AI holders can solve physics with a single AI
Try again elon
I was going to say this. Every third white male millennial looks like him. Source: am white male millennial.
I’m really enjoying this discussion, my question is, for imperial countries like the USA, wouldn’t the two mountains that need to be removed in this case be the Americans themselves? I can understand having little to no faith in westerners, but I will never lose my faith in humanity.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about population these days. Fascists obsess over white replacement, but maybe there is actually something to this. It’s obvious, but colonial projects tend to fail sooner when they have smaller proportions of “white” people. I think for instance that Korea never had more than five or at most ten percent of its population being Japanese during the colonial period, and the portion of Americans now living in the south is much less than 1% (which kind of negates this idea). Algeria was ten percent French, apartheid was officially swept away when South Africa’s population was ten percent white, and now Israel is disappearing when half its population consists of settlers. The USA however is about 70% settler, which makes it a much tougher nut to crack, since settlers almost always think of themselves as their nationality first and barely if ever conceive of themselves as workers.
I think, as an ML, the difference just comes down to: do you support AES? I support China, the DPRK, Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos, plus the Maoist revolutionaries in the Philippines and India, among others, plus Russia, Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Ansarallah. These last few are not, on the surface, AES, though their anti-imperialism basically makes them that way. So many Americans of many political stripes are ready to admit that the USA has problems. But to say that China is genuinely better and that Hamas deserves our support? I would guess that the number of westerners (even leftists) who think this way is very small.
Long post coming up.
I started my first full-time blue collar job a few months ago. I live in a purple state. I expected all the guys I worked with to be Trump guys. Only one I've encountered has been truly a fascist, though he said nothing about Trump. The rest are just kind of ideologically adrift. A different coworker I've mentioned here a few times I've been riding with for months. Seven hours a day, five days a week, talking. Personally I like him. I guess I would describe him as an ideologically malleable Berner. Sometimes I despair about changing him. This last week, though, he was really impressing me with some of the things he was saying. We talked about landback, ending America's imperialist wars, China, Russia, and I've even started using the word "communism." "Communism is about workers running society, what's wrong with that?" I said. No pushback from him. I have not told him that I'm a communist. But how can he not suspect?
Then a few days ago I talked about the PNN guy on tiktok harassing dickheads on at the Capitol, and my coworker basically said that we should confine our efforts to peaceful protests. (I live in a very rural area and some of these guys are just living in a permanent fight-or-flight mode it seems, they really tense up when I talk about protestors, they all want to live in the middle of the woods, they say they hate people, and they and always empathize with whoever is being protested.) That was where our conversation ended since we had arrived at our job site.
He has little American flags at his house, which his girlfriend (fifteen years older than him) is apparently close to losing; he just bought a truck he cannot afford; he ran out of money and was unable to buy lunch once; he has several kids from two relationships (difficult to keep track) but two of them are trans; he grew up working on farms because he was unable to afford school supplies (he is white). He thinks the government is oppressing him (and has no awareness of which class constrols the government), but has spoken positively of the police. He was shocked when I mentioned that Ansarallah has claimed to have struck the USS Eisenhower multiple times, and said that the military would not lie about getting hit. (Admittedly it would help if we had some photographic evidence to prove this here.)
I've just been thinking that usually people do one hour a week of therapy. I'm doing about twenty hours a week of therapy with this guy. I'm not a qualified therapist (most therapists worship Mayo Pete), but I've been in therapy, I've read Freud and Lacan and Reich, I'm a Marxist (and have studied all kinds of texts for years), I have some organizing experience, and, most importantly, I post a lot on hexbear. Even with all this, I'm still up against this guy's roughly thirty-five years of existence in a reactionary hellhole. I'm up against Facebook, which he is constantly browsing for treats he cannot afford. I'm up against everyone he talks with, everyone he knows, because there are at best only a handful of communists for a hundred miles in every direction. The hardest thing I'm up against, which my own therapist (a good guy) has told me, is the fact that my coworker doesn't think he has a problem. The client, the patient, cannot change unless he wants to. Insert lightbulb joke. It's okay, my coworker thinks, to be ideologically adrift in a raging ocean of fascism. I like him but don't trust him and don't consider him a friend. He would ditch me for his job in a heartbeat. There is no solidarity at this place. And while my coworkers might be ideologically adrift, they might not be interested in voting for Biden or Trump, they always come down on the side of white supremacy and helping the company's owners get richer.
Think about hexbear's demographics. I SUSPECT, but am not sure, that most of us here are radicalized labor aristocrats. Most of us are white with college degrees, which means, in this apartheid society, that most of the people we know are going to be the same. And let me tell you, the life of the labor aristocrat, even in this shithole, is a good one. I've seen so much fucked up shit in this job, heard so much fucked up shit you wouldn't believe. It basically amounts to people working full-time but either being homeless or on the edge of homelessness, having no access (forgive the term) to necessities. The vast majority of labor aristocrats have no awareness of this. They, we live such pampered lives, it blows my mind. To get up, drive to work, spend all day sitting in an office doing unproductive labor, chatting about TV and restaurants and weekend nonsense at the air-conditioned water cooler, and then to come home and watch Netflix, the biggest worry being your impostor syndrome, ah, how easy that is. I used to do it until I moved back to the USA from overseas, and found that even as a qualified white liberal, I couldn't get a good job. So I radicalized.
If you live this kind of life, why question it? Why change it? Come out as a communist, risk your career for Palestine, and you're in for a world of pain, at least in the short term. Friends, family, and career will all abandon you. It's always been easy for labor aristocrats, so why risk that ease? Things have always been the same, so how could they change?
Am I wrong in saying that trots are at least better than the DSA? If they actually did things (other than sell newspapers, splinter into smaller groups, and criticize AES) I would support them.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery with regard to that second graphic there, but I guess people from across the political spectrum imitating communists is nothing new.
I saw multiple people with American flags billowing outside their cars today and it’s really been years since it’s been like that here. There are also flags in so many places and so many houses. This is an elderly purple area of a rural purple state.
Back when I used to talk with my dad he would get so angry if I called him a boomer (even though that’s what he is). My kids and I call each other boomers whenever we have the slightest problem with technology.
Class matters more but most boomers are bourgeois and vice-versa. At the same time, republicans blame immigrants for the USA’s problems while liberals blame boomers.
My job isn’t high-paying yet but it has potential to be in the near future if I can hang on and not fuck things up. But together my spouse and I are basically at the bottom of the top ten percent in the USA. I have more money and financial security now than I ever have. And I’m just continually amazed at encountering people every day who think that this country is normal or that it has a future. I’ve been riding around with one of my coworkers for weeks. Imagine spending thirty hours a week with a hexbear who is trying to convert you to communism without using any Marxist trigger words. I was full of despair with this guy a few weeks ago. I even talked with my therapist about it. He told me the true cliché, that a patient can’t change unless they want to. And my coworker owns next to nothing. He is so much closer to homelessness than he realizes. And he still put out little American flags for Memorial Day at his house. Lately however things have gotten better. I’ve started using words like “communism” and told him about my desire to live in China. I don’t get any pushback. At the same time I know that he’s not a Marxist, he looks at Facebook for treats all the time despite the fact that he is broke and his girlfriend is heavily in debt, that without guidance or study he’ll drift straight back into deep reactionary thought. He could also just be humoring me. Personally we like each other. But sometimes it’s amazing how much you can get white male Americans to agree with, at least temporarily. Yesterday I told him that if the USA stopped fighting imperialist wars and if it gave all its land back to Native Americans, it would cease to exist. No pushback. No “that would be bad.” On the other hand, he said something super ignorant about how the government is trying to brainwash him with propaganda. He’s not wrong, but the idea that the government is just one of many tools used by the ruling class to enslave humanity—that just doesn’t register with these people. They love the police and military but hate the government, even if half the government budget goes to the police (while the bourgeoisie steal 99% of the value that American labor aristocrats generate).
I agree with others here: if you get rich and cease to be a communist, then you were never one to begin with. At the moment I’m donating as much as I can to Palestinians without pissing off my spouse.
I’m kind of divided about this because I was once hardcore coveting my neighbor’s cattle but once I read the Ten Commandments I decided to just go to church every Sunday instead.
It’s her turn 
For real though it doesn’t even matter who they run. The democrats are petite bourgeoisie who believe whatever the corporate press tells them. They’ll fall in line behind whatever dogshit candidate the DNC chooses because whoever the RNC chooses will somehow be worse even though they’ll actually be the same, just with slightly different definitions of what constitutes politeness.
If global communism isn’t a thing, that means we need to fight much harder.
I’ve had people laugh. Others just stare. One or two people murmured some kind of critical response that I couldn’t hear. I find it strange and just wanted to know if this is an ordinary experience. It’s rare for someone to agree. I live in a rich white area.
Haha take that commies.
I was masked in a hardware store. A guy who looked like Tom Skerritt from thirty years ago but taller and thinner looked at me and started ranting about communism with his employee. Did you know that communists want to get everyone dependent on the government? That’s their plan!!
He also said that he had read Marxists and recommended that his employee do so.
This guy also wears some kind of uniform with an American flag on the shoulder every day. I always got bad vibes from him but never really heard him speak. Until now.
I didn’t say anything because I go to this place all the time for work and I see him there constantly and suspect that he may be the owner.
So I just started my first blue collar job a couple of weeks ago. I live in a rural, coastal purple state that has been trending blue for years. I've spent more than a few hours chatting with "the guys," and as a terminal hexbear user I feel like I'm extremely sensitive to their political views. If you want to call them liberals, conservatives, right or left authoritarians or libertarians, it just makes no sense at all to me. They seem to hate corporations—except for the "good" ones that provide their treats. (They're also fond of the large business we work for, or just terrified of even consciously complaining about it.) Some police are bad but others are just trying to do their job. One told me that we "really needed" a new police station that just opened up in town, while he has also stated that racism is bad. One Gen Xer told me that he has "made some money" through cryptocurrency, but he also has a dim view of the USA's future (and climate change) and has said that he'll be happy to just sit back and watch as the country burns down. It's wrong that there are so many unoccupied houses here, but for you to become a landlord, that's a totally legitimate thing to do. Some have asked about my masking, others totally ignore it. No one has been aggressive about it—yet.
What makes more sense to me is just having a spectrum ranging from "collectivist" to "individualist." Libertarians and fascists go on the far right; liberals and conservatives on the right; social democrats / democratic socialists on the center-right, and communists and anarchists on the left. It just seems like this makes my coworkers' political views much easier to understand. They're individualists. They don't like when rich people or the police get in their way. But they're happy to be rich (at everyone else's expense) and to have the same police protect them.
As an aside, I've been doing white collar work since I graduated from college and I only just moved into the blue collar field a few months ago. (If you google my name, you'll see that I'm a communist, which means that it's impossible for me to do white collar work at this point.) I'm writing a book about the whole experience. I would also make videos about it but I need to remain anonymous because there's so much money in this field and I'd like to start a worker co-op as soon as I feel comfortable working with this shit. (There's tons of blue collar work to do, but living here is very expensive and the state is running out of workers because it's more profitable for landlords to have AirBnBs.) I'm interested in training communists, constructing at-cost housing, and doing a political takeover here. We would only need a few hundred people to have enough voters to take over the town, defund the police, and drive out the landlords. These plans are pretty vague though and would take years to pull off, so please feel free to critique them.
The world has "fallen" to communism. The last liberals and fascists on Earth flee to Puerto Rico (sorry) and basically turn it into another Taiwan for a few months or years. The ruling class there maintains that it has suffered only temporary setbacks at worst and that victory is at hand. And besides, if you like communism so much, why don't you move to [the rest of the world]? And they aren't even real communists there anyway because they have not instantaneously transformed the planet into paradise. They're just befogging the masses, who are too stupid to understand that the best days of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and patriarchy lie ahead!
I'm just thinking about this because of the Yankee cope I'm seeing all over the place. Ukraine just needs more weapons and European soldiers, then it's bound to prevail against Russia, which is collapsing anyway. China is a heartbeat from balkanizing. Haiti is just run by a bunch of cannibal criminal gangs. Palestine can't possibly win. Etc.
Dude took off his shoes and then put them back on again twenty times before walking into his own home. When I was a kid I thought his show was fucking boring. I think libs are just pretending to love him because he was a civility republican. CMV.
PS: what the fuck is the deal with Lamb Chop’s Play-Along?
I’ve spent years arguing with people online and really have nothing to show for it aside from my own education and amusement. I was radicalized by discovering r/chapotraphouse back in 2018 I think. Nobody argued with me there, I just lurked, loved the memes, thought it was the funniest place online, then started reading theory because so many people there talked about it. Even though liberals are obviously ignorant about communism, their ignorance is willful: they never thank us for educating them, they always get angry and double-down. (In real life, it’s much easier to embarrass them and get them to shut up.) Still, I admit that it’s possible to change someone’s mind in an online debate, I just haven’t seen it happen when it comes to communism (libs on r/changemyview can change their minds about lib shit). Have you ever seen a lib admit that they were wrong about communism?
“You must be fun at parties.” Uh why would I want to party with Nazis?
“So edgy.” If I cared what liberals thought, I wouldn’t be a communist.
“You’re just a larper.” Larp it till you make it, am I right? Also, what have larpers ever done to you?
“Nazism and communism are the same.” Yes, Nazism is when you want to destroy Nazism forever rather than fund it the way you do.
We know they like to stick flags on everything. We've maybe all seen the Kelly cartoon where some guy complains that their neighbors only put up their flags for the fourth of July. But do they really notice if you don't have a flag on your house or your car? Also, what's the deal with reactionaries randomly removing their flags? A guy I know whose father or grandfather was probably in the klan took his flag down a month or two ago and I have no idea why. "Hunter Biden has tarnished our glorious nation's reputation" or something is probably the reason. I have another neighbor whose shitty wooden flagpole has lacked a flag since Biden won the election.
I've heard they put Blue Lives Matter stickers on their cars to get the police to leave them alone. But if you put a gun sticker on your car, will the police actually leave you alone, or think twice about pulling you over, or just blow you away because you were driving 5 MPH over the speed limit?
Bonus: I have a neighbor who has been flying a full-sized Ukrainian flag upside-down since February 2022.
I also once saw someone with a tiny house like sort of tucked behind everyone else's, but he managed to put a flagpole in his yard and get like, an American flag, an Israeli flag, and a Blue Lives Matter flag all on that pole. Very impressive !brainworms
Is it because Palestine is the underdog while Ukraine seems to be the underdog…? What is the deal with this?
I’m just talking about the corporate media here. Obviously you will lose your job if you advocate for peace in Ukraine or Palestine from a left perspective. In the media landscape, you can criticize the Ukraine War all you like from the right, but only some dissent regarding Palestine is permitted from the left. What is going on here? There are also very few protests in favor of peace in Ukraine from the left, but massive leftwing protests in favor of a ceasefire in Palestine.
Yesterday I made the mistake of watching random comedians on youtube. One guy I saw had an audience of thousands of people in Australia, and he told nothing except painfully racist anti-China jokes. (Yes, it might have been the algorithm being like: "You like China? Well, howabout a comedian advocating genocide on China?") Everyone on hexbear knows that this is typical for comedians because the audiences at comedy shows tend to be drunk bourgeois scum, etc., etc.
But it's not just comedy. How many movies have you seen or books have you read where any of the characters, at any point, says something incredibly basic like: "capitalism bad, communism good." I'm not even sure Soviet or Chinese movies go that far (with the notable exception of Eisenstein's films...which were made before 1945). Plenty of works of art might imply that there is something corrupt about the military, police, or the powers-that-be, but they will never say that the system is the problem and that a better system exists. One very rare exception I can think of is The Battle of Algiers.
Also think about the dogshit novels Americans have to read in school: Animal Farm or To Kill A Mockingbird. The moral of both stories is basically: "Opposing the system is futile. Accept the system." Nabokov is hailed as the greatest novelist of the latter half of the 20th century, but he's basically a highbrow version of Ayn Rand, and repeatedly condemns communism by name in his books. We also know that the CIA had (and has) its fingers in every pie, and that the PMC also knows that it's not allowed to "get political," i.e., provide context. Even when it comes to classical Russian literature, Dostoevsky is probably the most popular in the USA, and the guy is a reactionary Christian monarchist who recycles the openings to his novels and is apparently nowhere near as popular in Russia.
I've just also been thinking about the greatest works of Statesian literature, how they are few and far between, how they were all written before 1945, and how they rarely were recognized for their greatness until long after their authors were dead. Steinbeck is one exception. The Grapes of Wrath is great (it was also written before 1945), but doesn't advocate for a better system. Poe and Melville are as good as the best writers from any other country, and Melville specifically inveighs against colonialism in his earlier novels, but both of these dudes were dead before they were recognized as titans. (Melville enjoyed some early success but then faded into obscurity long before he finished Moby Dick.) Are any post-1945 Statesian writers as good as Poe or Melville? Maybe just Octavia Butler, who was dead before she was a household name AFAIK. She advocates for communism in Parable of the Sower, but has to hide it behind mystical language ("God is change"). Sorry To Bother You is one possible cinematic exception, but it never goes beyond saying that the system sucks.
I'm wrapping up a trilogy of novels at the moment, and they are blatantly pro-communist, and I'm just preparing myself for the fact that they are almost certainly not going to be a success, not just because of the numbers involved (millions of books published every year), but because of the passionate anti-communism in western countries. These books don't have people saying "capitalism bad, communism good." But they do have workers and peasants forming Soviets (even though they aren't called Soviets), and I know from experience that even if as a writer you never turn to the camera and say "capitalism bad, communism good," readers will still pick up on the fact that something is wrong, from a capitalist perspective—that workers aren't capable of doing anything on our own, we need guidance from our enlightened masters, "human nature" is futile to oppose. I think there's just a dialectical materialist style of writing that liberals and fascists pick up on without necessarily knowing that they're picking up on it (because they spend their entire lives asleep).
Also I thought about this because I just saw and liked Trumbo, even though I was like: the blacklist never ended lol, where is my biopic about Paul Robeson, a Black colossus who never backed down from praising Stalin? Even if your job is dog shit picker upper (which I have done), you’ll lose that job if you praise Stalin.
And yes, this is a Arby's.
Power users and mods just keep repeating: "History is not a science because culture (i.e., god) is all-powerful. We might use evidence but we distrust grand theories."
I have not actually watched this film (because it’s probably not good). And yes I’m aware that Dracula is actually an anti-semitic caricature of the feudal aristocracy. Doctor Frankenstein is the actual bourgeois, while the monster is his proletarian creation. Neither can actually exist without the other. The monster is the real hero of the story and the proletariat is the hero of history.
His exceptional popularity probably won't last. But it still says something important about the race.
🤡 !yea
Seriously wtf, amerikkka now has three different flavors of fascist to choose from for president.
https://nypost.com/2023/10/20/jon-stewarts-apple-show-abruptly-ends-due-to-disagreements-over-china/amp/
Sorry to link the NY post but it was actually the only source I saw that mentioned both Apple’s manufacturing interests in China as well as its interest in hawking goods there.
I feel hopeful that the CPC’s policy of hanging the capitalists with the rope they sell them is working. Is it possible, as unbelievable as it may seem, that American journos will one day soon lose their jobs for criticizing China?
Sorry if this was already covered elsewhere. I searched but couldn’t find anything.
The dingdongs I live with keep sending out mass e-mails without concealing the recipients and I want to sign up a shitload of randos for communist propaganda. Does anyone have any email lists they can recommend? The only one I know of is the PSL’s. I know email is, like, so last century but plenty of people are still forced to use it.
And if nobody has any to recommend then fuck it, I’ll do this shit myself!
Edit: it was the gym teacher who sent out an email to everyone at the school without concealing the recipients lol.
https://www.tampabay.com/news/crime/2022/12/12/doom-guy-matthew-council-january-6-capitol-riot-sentence-football-cte/
No jail for ‘frothing’ Capitol rioter who faced mental health struggle
Riverview’s Matthew Council went viral for his Jan. 6 photo, but the former football player faced “delusions.”
[object Object] Matthew Council, from Hillsborough County, is seen in the bottom left corner, as Trump supporters clash with police and security forces as people try to storm the US Capitol Building in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021. [ JOSEPH PREZIOSO | AFP via Getty Images ] The tableau of riot police and screaming crowds colliding under flapping American flags makes for a powerful enough news photo, but what really stands out is the red-faced man in the corner.
Drool drips from his mouth. His wincing eyes point up. Even in a giant crowd outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the man seems alone, enraged but also pained. Court documents suggest all that was true.
Hillsborough County resident Matthew Council, the man in that photo, was sentenced Monday in federal court to 180 days of home incarceration and five years of probation. He had pleaded guilty to felony charges for his role in the attack on the Capitol, where he charged a line of officers like a fullback.
Even without his name, Council’s face must have said something about the Jan. 6 riot. His anonymous photo topped articles online from The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Herald, Time and others. And now, court documents reveal even more, offering a grim portrait of a struggling man in the grip of delusions, conspiracies and cognitive decline.
First, though, the image went viral on Reddit, where Council was labeled a “frothing berserker” and became meme fodder. His resemblance to a video game character got him dubbed “Doom guy.” Amateur open-source investigators analyzing Jan. 6 video to assist the FBI tagged him with a meaner nickname, #rabidchipmunk.
Some who commented on the news stories asked about the unidentified man: “Anybody check on the guy foaming at the mouth?”
A worried father
Court proceedings later revealed the man in the viral photo as Council and provided the details of this story. Council’s attorney declined to make his client available for an interview, pointing instead to a sentencing memorandum he filed.
Council is a 51-year-old former college football player who at the time of the riot lived with his parents in Riverview. He survived on disability payments due to a litany of physical ailments and chronic pain said to be brought on by his sports career.
Council and his doctors believe he has CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease linked to repeated blows to the head. CTE can cause cognitive impairment, impulsive behavior, depression, substance misuse and dementia. The sentencing memo states: “Matt has all these symptoms.”
In 2019, he was part of a lawsuit against Liberty University and the NCAA over concussions.
Council’s father, Claude, calls his youngest child his best friend. On Dec. 30, 2020, days before the Capitol riot, he emailed Council’s psychiatrist:
For the last 6 to 8 months ... he has been spending most of his time on Twitter. He is a digital soldier in General Flynn’s army. And he spends his days trying to convince others on Twitter to believe in Trump and points out the deep state corruption and devious ways. He has been kicked off Twitter many times, 12 or so times permanently. He reopens fictitious Twitter accounts to keep going. Up sometimes at 3:00 AM. He shows us everything that he sends out online and is hyper focused on all current events relating to politics. ...
June and I are in our late 70s and don’t see the meaning in most that he sends out. This really frustrates him. ... Mentally – I will give you a few words that seem to be where he is at. Agitated, loud, gross, impulsive, irritable, paranoid, anxious, depressed, sleep troubles, irrational fears, he won’t do his meds. His mother has to keep the many pills that he takes current. ... The birds on the pond that he feeds are his only friend.
“General Flynn” was Michael Flynn, the retired lieutenant general and former national security adviser to Donald Trump, and more recently, an influential far-right conspiracy theorist and Sarasota resident who trademarked the term “digital soldier” and promotes the stolen-election lie that Council latched onto.
Mental illness runs in Council’s family, and Council has long struggled with it, his lawyer said in a recent filing. By age 10, records state, Council drank alcohol and had tried to die by suicide through an overdose of pain medication. But for a while, football seemed to offer a path.
Struggles with mental illness
Council helped John I. Leonard High School in Palm Beach County go undefeated his senior season. The running back earned a scholarship to West Virginia University, but transferred to Liberty after an incident in which he drunkenly smashed a resident adviser’s car window. He played well, scoring four touchdowns in one game. He met his first wife and had a daughter. He had what his lawyer called “a few strange behavioral incidents.” He dropped out.
He worked in sales, but would always abruptly quit. He got divorced. He earned certification as a medical assistant and found his way to teaching at a vocational high school, which is where, his lawyer wrote, Council “truly thrived for a time,” helping coach football and track.
In an online fundraiser he organized to help his medical assistant students get better equipment, he wrote, “The first time a student told me she was homeless, I was in the middle of telling her she could not pass the class if she didn’t turn in a major project. ... I had to quickly leave the classroom so I didn’t cry in front of her. ... I could fill a book with stories of their hardships, but that would overshadow my kids’ accomplishments.”
Even as his second marriage deteriorated, Matt and his wife adopted three children out of foster care, worried they’d end up on the streets. “His conscience ‘could not leave them in the system,’” is what he told his lawyer. After the divorce, he sent most of his teacher pay to his ex and the kids while he lived in a rented room, ate from the dollar store and rode a bicycle to work.
His first delusion, his lawyer wrote, came in 2016. Council believed the school’s football players had been raping a girl and that he needed to investigate. Then he got worried he’d be falsely implicated himself. None of it was true, but feeling a great deal of pressure, Council tried again to take his own life.
Rarely alone, but alone on Jan. 6
Matthew Council After a hospitalization, Council left South Florida to stay with his parents. “Matt was almost never alone” in those years, his lawyer wrote. It was somewhere in this time he began devouring political content online.
Council traveled to D.C. on Jan. 5, 2021, with his brother-in-law driving. They’d discussed wanting to see Trump’s final speech as president, a historic moment. They joked and laughed. Council had a couple beers and went to bed.
But when Council woke at 3 a.m., his brother-in-law later told a lawyer, he “snapped.” Council insisted they go to the National Mall right then, long before others arrived, and he spoke incessantly about the “deep state” and a conspiracy to remove Trump. He said Trump’s speech would reveal secrets.
In a later interview with the “Sovereign Souls” podcast on Parler, Council said he expected Trump to expose “like, the flies with the cameras on them” — that the president had conducted surveillance of election tampering with fly-mounted cameras.
After the president’s speech, Council’s brother-in-law wanted to head back to the hotel. Council insisted on marching to the Capitol. He was alone.
Chaos at the Capitol and the photo
Prosecutors documented Council’s movements through the Capitol chaos with surveillance stills, news photos and public social media videos. Their records sometimes contradict Council’s own, more flattering accounts in post-riot interviews.
Council was pepper-sprayed outside the building, multiple times — once on the West Plaza before his viral photo. Prosecutors, in asking for a 30-month prison sentence, pointed to that as a moment when he could have turned back.
Council claimed in a podcast that protesters weren’t toppling barricades or looking for confrontation, but video shows thousands had surrounded the west side of the Capitol, climbing scaffolding and hurling projectiles onto officers’ heads. Council himself is seen trying to shove a barricade aside.
By 2:28 p.m., the police were in retreat, prosecutors wrote in a filing, and rioters were in control. Council followed a torrent of people flowing into the building. He later said he used his size and strength to breach the door. The scene in the hallway packed with Trump supporters and flags, he said, “gave me chills.”
A still from video taken inside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 shows Matthew Council holding up his phone, seemingly recording. A still from video taken inside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 shows Matthew Council holding up his phone, seemingly recording. [ U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ] He told an interviewer he “backed the blue” and protesters were never there to hurt police. But, “Soon after Council entered the Capitol through the parliamentarian’s door,” prosecutors wrote, “he decided it was in fact permissible to attack the blue.”
Council made his way to the front of the crowd, where a line of police officers blocked the way. He lowered his head, stuck out his arms and rammed into them, pushing them 50 feet back, in his own estimation. He fell, and immediately surrendered to arrest. Officers described him as cooperative and remorseful.
In asking for a sentence of probation in lieu of prison, Council’s attorney, family members and doctor portrayed him as a loved son, sibling and father in the throes of mental illness. They say he has finally stabilized his delusions through medication, supervised care and sobriety. He’s no longer a danger, they said, but he risked relapsing if sent to prison.
Council’s diagnosis, attributed in court documents to forensic psychologist and defense expert Scot Machlus, is schizoaffective disorder, characterized by delusions and hallucinations.
Aftermath and conspiracy theories
Things got far worse for Council after Jan. 6 before they got better.
In one episode, he believed his parents’ neighbors were pedophiles who had stolen his marijuana. When his father intervened, Council pushed him down and was arrested for battery on a person over 65. The charges were dropped.
He was involuntarily committed to a behavioral health facility in Tampa after hearing voices at the jail, saying he had seen guards point guns at him through the cell door and identifying himself as an admiral in the Space Force.
Around this time, far-right, independent media began interviewing him. He seemed to fit into a story they wanted to tell about the mistreatment of accused Jan. 6 “political prisoners,” and a liberal conspiracy to incite the Capitol riot. Though Council admitted to being delusional at points, he described what he believed were corrections officers tormenting him with music and chanting, tapping guns on his window and raping people nearby so he could hear it.
Out of his parents’ house, Council barricaded himself in a hotel room as deputies tried to serve him court papers and caused thousands of dollars in property damage. He claimed people were trying to blow up the floor beneath him. He was hospitalized again. Council now lives in an assisted living facility and, his attorney stated, has turned a corner with medications, regular treatment and sobriety.
“I truly thought I would never get my dad back,” Council’s daughter wrote in a letter, before saying that he has “done a complete 180.”
She wrote: “A punishment to him now, for something he did during that time, would be like punishing a person for someone else’s mistakes.”
Prosecutors argued that Council’s crimes on Jan. 6 “were not an isolated event in an otherwise law-abiding life.” They said his actions while awaiting trial show “a propensity towards substance abuse and violence,” and his social media statements after Jan. 6 “are those of a man girding for another battle and seeking to overthrow the current government.”
But Council’s lawyer said Monday that the judge took Council’s mental illness into consideration when handing down a lighter sentence.
How to get help
If you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or chat with someone online at 988lifeline.org.
Liberals: “China’s economy is collapsing!” China’s projected GDP growth for 2023? 4.5%.
Also liberals: “Bidenomics is amazing!” The USA’s projected GDP growth for 2023? 1.5%.
What am I missing here exactly?
"The Keys to the White House is a checklist of thirteen true/false statements that pertain to the circumstances surrounding a presidential election. When five or fewer of the following statements are false, the incumbent party candidate is predicted to win the election. When six or more are false, the incumbent party is predicted to lose." (The keys correctly predicted that Trump would lose in 2020.)
Midterm gains: After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than after the previous midterm elections. (false)
No primary contest: There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination. (RFK Jr. currently polling at 15% in the primary so probably true)
Incumbent seeking re-election: The incumbent party candidate is the sitting president. (true)
No third party: There is no significant third party or independent campaign. (true, although if West runs all the way to election day and earns five percent of the vote, this will be false (Democrats will also completely lose their fucking shit if this happens and Biden loses))
Strong short-term economy: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign. (true...for now)
Strong long-term economy: Real per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms. (false I think?)
Major policy change: The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy. (false)
No social unrest: There is no sustained social unrest during the term. (true I guess, but this could change rapidly)
No scandal: The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal. !hunter
No foreign/military failure: The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs. (Afghanistan + Ukraine so false)
Major foreign/military success: The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs. (false)
Charismatic incumbent: The incumbent party candidate is charismatic or a national hero. (false for sleepy joe)
Uncharismatic challenger: The challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero. (false, Trump is the most charismatic Republican since Reagan)
I count eight falses. It's not lookin' good for joe. One of those falses is maybe debatable but the others probably aren't going to change from here to election day. We could have Trump winning the presidency from a prison cell and pardoning himself lol.