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For that you'd need a huge infusion of people from outside of politics. What we found out [with Bernie] is that you can talk until you're blue in the face about all this stuff that regular people want to hear, and stuff that would make their lives better— but they have lived their whole lives in this fucking country and they've never once seen any political promise brought to fruition. So there's no reason for them to believe anything they might hear about something like socialized medicine on a TV that's playing in a bar. But for listeners inclined to view the events of 2016—and Donald Trump’s ensuing reign as shitposter-in-chief—as a massive, tragic and hilarious unforced error on the part of clueless centrists, Chapo was also a balm, not to mention a welcome alternative to the cautious liberal comedy of the post-Jon Stewart era.
Hilarious
Meaning that there's a smaller and smaller group of people who want to hear anything about the government helping them, because their experience is that that's not what the government does. Some people talk about, y'know, Oh, we're gonna eventually see nobody voting in this country. I think voter participation rates are gonna go up in the near future, but it's gonna be because people are voting on who to punish.
Episodes
About six years ago, Menaker and his cohosts Matt Christman and Felix Biederman—Twitter mutuals who shared a scabrous sense of humor and an unapologetically leftist political bent—got together on Google Hangouts, ripped the audio of that conversation, and posted it as the debut episode of a podcast called Chapo Trap House. The show’s angle of approach set it apart from other comedy/politics podcasts almost immediately. Menaker, Christman, and Biederman were political commentators fluent in the argot of Weird Twitter and the more irony-poisoned provinces of Reddit.
"Chapo Guide to Revolution" hints at a burgeoning leftist culture going mainstream - Salon
"Chapo Guide to Revolution" hints at a burgeoning leftist culture going mainstream.
Posted: Mon, 06 Aug 2018 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Felix Biederman
From the beginning, Chapo has been unabashedly partisan; all three hosts pulled hard for Bernie up through 2020. It’s also proudly vulgar, frequently esoteric, and laughably low-budget—many of its early episodes sound like people attempting to communicate via several different non-compatible walkie-talkies. Despite or because of all that, it’s become a lasting hit. The show has never taken advertising, but has been raking in six figures a month on Patreon since 2018; it’s currently the fifth-biggest project on the platform.
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Suddenly regular people had to know who Pepe the Frog was and what he'd come to represent. Matt, there’s a point in that Street Fight conversation where you talk about how mainstream film critics saw 13 Hours as even-handed and surprisingly apolitical. And you point out that it's because they couldn't recognize how many Easter eggs of deeply-online right-wing grievance are threaded through the movie, if you know what to look for. The first time the three of you appeared on a podcast together was back in 2016, when you were the guests on an episode of the podcast Street Fight Radio about the movie 13 Hours.
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They're gonna be voting on who they want the government to hurt in front of them, because they believe—because they've lived in this country their whole lives-- that the government cannot help anyone, but the government can hurt somebody on your behalf, or on the behalf of somebody else, and you better vote to make sure it's not you. That's part of what Chapo brought into political media—in 2016, before things like 4Chan bubbled up into the mainstream, practically no one with a real job in journalism was paying close enough attention to the extremely-online world and extremely niche conservative media to recognize those dog whistles for what they were. The first episode of Chapo Trap House was released on March 13, 2016.
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Listening back to that episode now, what strikes me is that the dynamic you'd hear on a Chapo episode from 2022 was already there, right away—everyone seemed to instinctively know their role. But the idea that the hipsters are going right wing just feels like an apocalyptic harbinger to me. However coarse Chapo was and is, it was ultimately idealistic. Whatever's happening now feels like people just saying, Whatever, let it burn down, LOL. I absolutely understand the people who were like, "Fuck Chapo, I don't care what three white dudes have to say at this moment”—but at the same time, I've always imagined that the show was diverting at least a few white dudes toward progressive thought who might otherwise not have seen a place for themselves in those movements.
Institution so iconically dirtbaggy I felt guilty for suggesting it. And we were sort of laboring under a delusion that our political message could get meaningfully into people who have seen this shit before. Like, OK, an entire aspect of myself that I thought was involved in this project, doing this show, I have to reconsider.
Afternoon tea at Ace Hotel Kyoto
I can no longer realistically convince myself that I'm part of anything that has a political valence in the electoral space. There is hope for action, but it's in the workplace, it's in labor unions, it's in organizing. I haven't spent much time in New York since COVID but my sense from what I read online is that all the hipsters have started tacking right politically. It just sounds dire—like there's no transgressive position left except ironic fascism.
The show has an democratic-socialist perspective, and its co-hosts are affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The hosts are typically extremely critical of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, particularly its centrist wing. Chapo supported Bernie Sanders in his first presidential campaign in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries and his second campaign 2020 Democratic presidential primaries. Chapo Trap House is an American politics and humor podcast hosted by Will Menaker, Matt Christman, Felix Biederman, and Amber A'Lee Frost, and is produced by Chris Wade. The podcast became known for its irreverent leftist commentary in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election. On the Friday night before the Ace show, I sat with producer Wade along with two-thirds of the core Chapo team—Menaker and Christman—in a booth at the Rainbow Bar & Grill on the Sunset Strip, an L.A.
And yet if nobody on the left is talking to young white men and making them think about, for example, socialism, the only people talking to young white men are going to be the Jordan Petersons of the world. But the challenge for us is we're doing a national program that is supposed to be for a national audience whose frame of reference will therefore have to be national. And that means we still have to talk about politics as spectacle, and it means we have to really assimilate-- at least I know I had to—the moral implications of just being an entertainment at this point in history. Like, okay, this is still a political show, but not a show that is politics. And I always said that [about the show.] But that Bernie campaign, man, it gave me a minute where I was like, Maybe I was wrong about it being entertainment. It’s a progression of disillusionment and disenchantment with institutions.
As of March 16, 2023[update], 809 episodes have been released. The fact that you were willing to keep saying that didn’t make you a lot of friends among centrist liberals, especially once Trump got in and people started talking about career politicians as “The Resistance”– but I assume that was a net positive for a show like this. But the weird part is, very soon after you started doing this show, all that extremely online discourse came crashing into the mainstream.
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