On September 19, Matt Christman was hospitalized with, in the words of his colleagues on the podcast Chapo Trap House: “a sudden, severe medical emergency that will require a significant period of recovery.” His wife was scheduled to deliver their first child a few days later. Baby arrived in good health. Christman is as of this moment still hospitalized, but making some progress.
Matthew reflects on the hard left passions and despondent ecstasies of a beloved and sometimes hated dirtbag charismatic—and sends him peace and love in the silence, wherever it leads.
Show Notes
Forward Left: An Interview with Matt Christman of Chapo Trap House - CounterPunch.org
CushVlogs - YouTube
The Chapo Dilemma – Souciant
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Hello everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence, to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And today, I should add to that tagline something about, and in the end, we suspect the only empirically verifiable problem is capitalism, and it's killing us all, and yet we're hopeful.
I'm Matthew Rebski.
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This piece is called Matt Christman and the Silence.
On September 19th, Matt Christman was hospitalized with, in the words of his colleagues on the podcast Chapo Trap House, quote, a sudden severe medical emergency that will require a significant period of recovery.
They go on, quote, he is currently in the hospital in stable condition.
We are trying very hard to be optimistic, but there's no easy way to say that he will be out of commission for the indefinite future.
As many of you are aware, Matt and his wife, Amber Rolo, are also expecting their first child, a daughter, and her delivery is scheduled this Sunday as well.
We are all so, so excited and happy to welcome a new little Christman into the world, and we were looking forward to announcing this under better circumstances, but this situation is obviously drastically complicated by Matt's medical emergency.
Now on the Sunday in question, Crispin's partner, Amber Rolo, posted this to Twitter a few hours before delivering the baby.
As I know a lot of you have heard by now, Matt had a medical emergency on Tuesday morning.
He is still in the hospital and though the road is long and hard, he is making strides forward.
I'm forever in awe of his strength and big, beautiful brain.
In classic, balanced Libra fashion, we're also welcoming our first daughter into the world today at 7.30am.
On top of that, today is our one-year wedding anniversary.
No idea what I'm going to give him next year to top a baby.
This last week has been the hardest and paradoxically most beautiful week of our lives.
The day after Amber gave birth, the Chappo team posted to Patreon, quote, Matt is improving a little every day.
Still a long road to go, but we can at least tell you he's been making all of us laugh every time we see him.
So that's hopeful.
And I'm recording this before Chappo will have released their first episode following these events.
And maybe there will be some more positive news to buoy up this little essay.
Some of you will know who Chrisman is, and you'll have a sense of what I'm going to say, but for those of you who don't know him, he has been the beating heart of the Chapo Trap House team since its start in 2016.
He's about 40 years old, or thereabouts, his age isn't published.
And he's been an organizer for the Democratic Socialists of America.
He's from the Rust Belt Farm and Shipbuilding Town of Manitowoc, Wisconsin, where the Manitowoc River flows into the western edge of Lake Michigan.
Now, why do I say he's the beating heart of CHAPO?
It's because alongside his colleagues Will Meniker, Felix Biederman, Amber Frost, and Chris Wade, but also within the broader circle of what's known as the dirtbag left content creator crowd, he, I think more than anyone, goes beyond the ruthless hard left ecstasy of skewering liberal indolence and hypocrisy.
Presiding over a burning world.
He turns leftist despondency into, I would say, a spiritual path.
And so my reflection here will be about how his invective becomes sublime, how I really love it, but also how it raises some questions for me.
Chrisman has a kind of Midwest hobo vaudeville Dadaism that's pitch perfect for dirtbag discourse.
He's a pro at excoriating the professional managerial class democratic establishment that torpedoed Bernie Sanders twice.
He helped dub Obama the Obungler for the suave narcissism that consistently outshines any ethics he performs, and he giddily lambastes the Jon Stewart's of half-assed liberal comedy for upholding the illusion that everything in the world would be better if only the right oligarchs were in power.
So he has all of those bits down in an absurdist register that seems to draw on multiple eras of comedy at once, fueled by a rage and despair that's so relatable and high caloric that he's helped the show draw over 42,000 Patreons and $180,000 per month in support, which is like an unlikely windfall for a far left podcast.
And it's an irony that they never really obscure or back away from.
And for all of the money, they do pull their collective weight with Will and Amber consistently hosting timely, frontline episodes with union organizers from Walmart, UPS, Starbucks, rail workers, the WGA, people who are on the ground during labor actions.
And instead of just criticizing Israel's right-wing arc, Felix does a lot of fundraising for various Palestinian aid organizations.
For his service, Christman puts out hundreds, if not thousands of hours of additional free programming through solo monologues on his Kush vlog, which he tapes on Instagram or the now, I think it's now dead, Periscope?
I don't know.
And then they get posted to YouTube.
And these are late night sermons.
Sometimes it appears he's been drinking.
He often opens the ritual with an improvised song like some weird brother or uncle streaming in from a hobo camp.
And what does he say in all of that content?
Can it be summarized?
I don't think so, and I don't think I'm the best to do it, but I think I have to take a shot at it to justify spending this time, so here it goes.
Crisman's galaxy-brained historical imaginarium reads the march of time through a Marxist dialectic that pits the force of capital, at once abstract and deadly, against human desires for love and connection and meaning.
Those desires are suppressed or hidden or sublimated into violence by layers of false consciousness that have only compounded through the ultimate alienation of the digital age, which is far worse than typical benightedness.
Online life, Crispin notes, gives the oppressed the illusion of organizational capacity, and only a taste of the creative breakthroughs that might lead to a liberatory politics.
But these flashes are always themselves folded back into the endless commodification stream.
Now, I'm no Marxist scholar, but I think these are all pretty standard ideas.
What Crisman adds is a skill for summarizing whole chapters of Das Kapital into metaphor-laden anecdotes.
He has a voracious appetite for applying this framework to digestible historical arcs, like the U.S.
succession of presidents, or the Thirty Years' War in 17th century Europe, or the as-yet-unreleased series on the Spanish Civil War.
But he can also squeeze it down into the micro-moments of daily exchange and social relations.
Like what it means to crave a certain type of soda.
What it means to swipe left on Tinder or to post on Twitter.
To spend hours immersed in gaming.
What are our movies and shows telling us?
And why did CIA agents in Havana suddenly start getting tummy aches?
So he combs through the granular detail of the news cycle and alienated life in general to answer the question, where are all of these spasms of grief and despondency coming from?
How can they be relieved?
And between these levels of the micro moment and then the macro story, Crisman caught a very important hinge point in history when, along with his Chappell colleagues, he hit a deep nerve in leftist consciousness in the excitement over the Bernie Sanders moment and the possibility that politics might work.
Before the Iowa caucuses in 2020 when it looked like the Sanders campaign might just break through, he said, Caring about politics is a mental illness, kind of.
It's a mad and desperate search for a sense of control, to feel like you have some sort of say in what's going to happen, even though deep down in your darkest heart you know that's not true.
You know that you are totally at the whim of history and fate and machinations of man and beast and that you have very little to say about where you end up and politics is a way to feel like maybe I can influence it.
It's a sick displacement of one's sense of helplessness.
It really is an illusion.
Politics really is beyond us for the most part.
It's huge forces like capitalism that shape things beyond a scale that we could never even comprehend because we're so small.
But I've been trying to fight against this for a year now because I don't want to lose my way.
I don't want to get stars in my eyes.
But I cannot get over this feeling, even when I'm feeling at my darkest and most pessimistic, that this is a moment, that this is the beginning of a chance to actually get closer to putting your hands somewhere close to the levers of destiny.
Not with this election.
Not with this primary.
Not even with Bernie getting in.
That's just the opening of the door.
You have to step through and you have to walk.
But I really feel like, if we have an ability as a species to come together in a common recognition of humanity, that this is maybe our last chance to do it.
But we might actually be able to.
Of course Sanders, torpedoed by the DNC and the self-protective apathy of the lumpen middle class, lost.
And that loss grew the Chappell audience as they pivoted to dancing on the grave of the sclerotic Democratic Party that shows no sign of wanting to win.
A party that's far too comfortable to risk anything.
And that dance is at times a black-pilled dirge, but sometimes it accelerates into a frantic skank, hoping, it seems, that the dance alone will attract a band and then an orchestra, and that maybe a music hall will be built around it, and that will begin to organize something new.
But with Christman, the acrimony and despair is never the punchline.
Despite the endless catalogue of liberal failure, the litany of proofs that the Dems will not save anyone in their quest to be the more moral tycoons and climate destroyers, Crispin refuses to leave his listeners chewing on that black pill.
His capacity for rage is instrumental.
It's a slingshot for a moral arc that bends towards a sublime appraisal of the human capacity for love and solidarity.
And surprisingly for the milieu, but maybe inevitably in terms of how he feels things, Crispin often finds that light in religious history and literature.
He does not use the defense of irony against the call to remember Marx's premise that religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of our soulless conditions.
Now I could update that with a bit.
The Chrisman is kind of like the Psy of the Rust Belt Radical, the heart of a heartless podcast and the soul of a melted discourse.
He works the emotional dialectic hard.
The brokenness and immiseration and meaninglessness of just running out the clock in the neoliberal age, flitting from consolation to consolation on our phones, and from treat to treat in our consumer lives, is a continual paradox of possibility for Christman.
He can never quite believe that we won't all wake up from this nightmare.
But then deeper than that, he'll also sermonize about the shared existential condition of being pulled out of nothing without our consent, and then somehow concocting a belief in meritocracy that allows us to be smug.
And this is, he says, the gateway to moral hell.
And he describes that pathway in such granular detail.
It seems inevitable that in time we will and must realize it en masse and somehow reintegrate and cut each other some slack.
Okay, so maybe that's enough?
I'm sure that hardcore Crispin Stans will argue over these points, but hopefully the picture is mostly clear.
Now in response to the news of his hospitalization, left-wing Twitter is boiling over with thousands of accolades, and I've chosen two here.
Quote, Matt Crisman is the perfect archetype of man who seems to be bursting with rage, but is actually breaking from empathy.
That account was anonymous.
And then journalist Seth Harp tweeted out, Fans of Matt Crisman know he's not just a comedian.
He delivers spellbinding harangues on history and philosophy that culminate in wholly original religious epiphanies.
