Samuel Fisher, an Upper East Side man who has been posing online as a pickup artist named “Brad Holiday,” was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison on Monday after pleading guilty to a gun possession charge in Manhattan Supreme Court. The charge resulted from a search warrant related to his apparent participation in the riot at the U.S. Capitol last Jan. 6.
Fisher was arrested two weeks after the riot, and federal agents found a veritable arsenal of weaponry in his New York City apartment, according to The New York Times. He was charged with 17 counts related to the haul of ammo, rifles, machetes, and more found in his apartment. He could be looking at even more time for the charges he still faces related to his alleged role in the riot of the Capitol, to which he has pleaded not guilty.
“The fact remains that the defendant chose to arm himself to the teeth with a large variety of firearms,” Judge Robert Mandelbaum said in handing down Fisher’s sentence on Monday. “That he didn’t act on any of his many disturbing threats does not take away from the seriousness of the offense.”
It’s unclear whether Fisher’s weapons were concealed in his apartment, or if he had them on display to show off to the women he claims he was so adept at picking up.
“Brad Holiday,” as Fisher is known online, is a dating and life coach who charges $150 (or $250 for a lifetime subscription) for an extensive package of pointers he dubs the “Attraction Accelerator.” The videos and documents in the download feature advice on everything from skincare and workout routines, to hand-to-hand combat techniques, to recommendations for height-boosting shoes. He writes at one point that a particular pair of underwear he recommends are “pretty interesting” because they “separate your penis from your balls.”
The section on picking up women is wildly misogynistic, and it includes detailed walkthroughs of things like “cold-approach pickups” and “physical escalation.” He even includes tutorials on drills people can do at home to train themselves to maintain eye contact and speak with a more attractive voice. There are flow charts. There are pie charts. There are screenshots of text exchanges. “Another powerful way to deal with non-compliance is preemptive flaking,” he writes on one slide, referring to . “This means that you flake on her before she flakes on you.”
“Non-compliance” is a popular, extremely creepy term in the pickup artist community to describe when a woman doesn’t succumb a pickup artist’s mind games. It appears several times throughout “Attraction Accelerator,” which also includes a document titled “Steamroll Her Objections.”
The guide gets more expansive from there. “Learning traditional forms of Psychiatric thought will help you understand the human condition script and program from several different frame Freudiasm, Jungian, Transactional Analysis, NLP/Hypnosis, and ultimately freedom through higher levels of consciousness,” the description above a batch of slides reads.
“This is about how to grow your dick length,” he writes on the next one.
The slides then start to delve into QAnon, which he says exposes “the hidden influences of our world.” QAnon also shows up in posts elsewhere on his website, as do what he claims are cures for Covid-19, which he describes as a “chimera man-made viral bioweapon released into the world by the CCP as an act of economic, psychological, and biological warfare.” Trump and guns are also common. “Tomorrow, Trump and We The People will be betrayed again by every so called representative who said they’d fight for us,” he wrote on the day of the riot, according to the Times, which reported last year on Fisher’s far-right radicalization.
Fisher posted about his trip to Washington, D.C., on social media, which reportedly led to his arrest. “Seeing cops literally run … was the coolest thing ive ever seen in my life,” he wrote of the riot.
Fisher’s lawyer argued during his sentencing that Fisher has been in therapy and working to better himself since his arrest. So did Fisher. “I have done and will continue to do that hard work; that work does not end today, and does not end when I get out of jail,” he said on Monday. “I just hope that day is as soon as possible.”
Source: RollingStone
