I Hate Chapo Trap House
More like Chapo CRAP House
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I’m not going to call Chapo Trap House stupid and dumb in this article. Don’t get me wrong: it is stupid and dumb. The hosts of Chapo Trap House are stupid and dumb, and I am confident that I could easily beat any of them in a fight, despite not knowing what any of them look like or how strong they are. But I’m not going to say any of those things, because I think the problems with Chapo extend far beyond how incredibly stupid and dumb they definitely are. Instead, I’m going to identify the three problems I have with the show that I think overshadow everything else, including their dumbness and their stupidity.
Let’s take a quick step back first. Chapo Trap House is a Brooklyn-based political podcast hosted by Will Menaker, Matt Christman, Felix Biederman, Amber A’Lee Frost, and Virgil Texas. The show is explicitly left-wing, taking jabs at Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives alike with their signature delivery of rapid-fire inside jokes and references to whatever’s currently trending on “Left Twitter.” Chapo began in early 2016, gained a lot of traction during the 2016 Democratic primary between Hilary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, and has since become one of the largest left-wing voices in the online media sphere — at time of publication, the Chapo team has 36,000+ patrons on Patreon, earning them a collective $162,525 a month. Notable guests on the show have included Bernie Sanders, Andrew Yang, Marianne Williamson, Cynthia Nixon, Patton Oswalt, Alan Moore, Natalie Wynn, David Cross, Glenn Greenwald, and Slavoj Žižek.
Now, to give credit where credit is due, I think Chapo has done some good in the world. In an online space that for years was dominated by conservative and far-right discourse, a truly left-wing perspective being voiced from a sizable platform was a breath of fresh air. Chapo gave voice to an anti-establishment, anti-capitalist sentiment that hadn’t had a meaningful outlet before. It’s the same reason Bernie Sanders did so well in 2016, and why AOC and others like her have such overwhelming support from their constituents — disillusionment with the Democratic establishment and mainstream politics as a whole, combined with a climate crisis, unprecedented wealth inequality, and a resurgence of fascism, have caused a whole bunch of people to look for alternative sources of information. It would be disingenuous of me to deny that Chapo has educated and radicalized a lot of people who otherwise might not have gotten that chance. That’s a good thing, and I thank them for it.
That said, the first problem I have with Chapo is that they’re huge fucking assholes. This isn’t an accident. If you’ve ever listened to an episode, you’ll know that part of the appeal of the show is their “edgy” style of humor, which manifests as intentionally vulgar and cruel language at the expense of whoever they happen to be talking about. This style is part of the reason Chapo has become a primary figure of the “dirtbag left,” a term broadly used to describe a faction of leftists who eschew hyper-sensitive civility politics in favor of a more direct, often abrasive method of discourse. Will Menaker has described the dirtbag left, and by extension Chapo, as standing “in marked contrast to the utterly humorless and bloodless path that leads many people with liberal or leftist proclivities into the trap of living in constant fear of offending some group that you’re not a part of, up to and including the ruling class.”
There’s a nugget of truth here, I think, that makes this aspect of Chapo hard to critique. “Woke” progressive spaces, especially online, academic, progressive spaces, can sometimes become stifling in their attempts to avoid offending anyone, ever. Speaking as someone in their final year at an academic institution, it can be more than a little frustrating when worrying about offending someone becomes more important than the conversation about the actual discourse or systemic issues at hand. The conversation about offending people and who gets to have opinions is, in my opinion, absolutely still important, but the valid frustration that Chapo speaks to appears when that conversation starts to eclipse the more systemic one altogether. This is coupled with an annoyance with the liberal, performative, seat-at-the-table version of identity politics (idpol) that’s taken hold of the Democratic Party. However, in responding to performative idpol and hyper-sensitive wokescolding from the Dems, Chapo has overcorrected way too hard, jumping straight into the deep end of being indiscriminately offensive to everybody. Civility, while sometimes a pacifying tool of the ruling class, is also just a big-kid word for being nice to people, and there’s a significant difference between a career politician using the right buzzwords so they can sound “woke” and a person with a disability begging you to please not use the r-slur on your very successful podcast.
When Amber A’Lee Frost describes vulgarity and edginess as a “rhetorical weapon of the politically excluded,” she’s not wrong — but offensive humor, like satire, requires a clarity of purpose and target that Chapo lacks.
What this ends up leading to is an audience that appreciates edgy jokes for their edginess alone, and also thinks that political advocacy = being mean and vulgar and harassing people online. This crystalized in the 2020 Democratic primaries, when online lefties, goaded on by Chapo, began to harass Elizabeth Warren and her supporters en masse in an attempt to browbeat Warren into dropping out and/or endorsing Sanders. Several Chapo hosts have explicitly expressed their approval of harassment as a tactic, though this sentiment, like all their opinions, is so heavily cloaked in multiple layers of irony that it becomes impossible to discern where the edgy jokes end and the real beliefs begin. Not only did the harassment not work — Warren never endorsed Sanders — but it forced Sanders to go on the defensive and condemn harassment, it made Sanders’ supporters look bad during a point in the election when popular support was crucial to victory, and it contributed to a toxic, unproductive environment of political conversation that makes disagreeing on the internet even more unbelievably unpleasant than it already was. A great example of the kind of person this environment produces is Nick Mullen, friend of Chapo and host of their sister show Cum Town. Mullen has an extensive, repulsive history of “ironic” jokes that consistently cross the line into blatant sexism, misogyny, ableism and racism, and Chapo’s continued association with him speaks volumes.
This leads me to my second core issue with Chapo — the political atmosphere and community they foster is, aside from unpleasant and toxic, a repetitive, aggressive, mind-numbingly reductionist one that actively harms the broader left. The Chapo team had their heart set on Bernie Sanders — they got popular advocating for him in 2016, they fought for him again in 2020, and when he conceded in April they refused to move on. When Sanders himself turned toward supporting Biden, Chapo instead dug into the underlying cynical apathy that comes from giving up.
This is not an article about whether or not to vote for Biden, but regardless of how you feel on that particular issue, it seems undeniable that the way Chapo and their fans engage with the conversation has become too irony-shrouded, too obstinate, to be productive in any meaningful way. When Virgil Texas and Briahna Joy Grey (Sanders’ former Press Secretary and another recently cynical leftist) had the chance to interview Noam Chomsky on their Bad Faith podcast, they spent their time asking him why leftists should vote for Biden, ignoring his responses almost entirely, and repeating the same five or six talking points that you could find on literally any post on the r/ChapoTrapHouse subreddit. Noam Chomsky is one of the most brilliant academic minds living today, and to waste his time — not only by repeating the same boring points you’ve already made on Twitter a hundred times, but by ignoring his answers — is a terrible look.
The attitude this engenders is also frustratingly self-sabotaging to any kind of coalition building by the left. The Chapo team and their audience are so angry — at Biden for beating Bernie, at Bernie for losing, at the Democrats for voting for Biden, at Elizabeth Warren, and at the whole system, that they’ve given up entirely, deciding that not only do neolibs suck, they’re exactly the same as fascists and it isn’t worth even trying to work with them because it won’t lead to the End Of Capitalism™. This is framed as a moral, principled stance, when in reality it’s exactly the same kind of purity testing they claim to hate when it’s coming from the uber-sensitive wokescolds, and it comes at the cost of being able to achieve mutual short-term goals with the Democrats, like expanding Medicare or slowing climate change so it doesn’t kill us all in seven years. Refusing to work with people who don’t agree with you 100% isn’t “good praxis,” it’s being a sore loser who won’t pick themselves back up and try again. A side effect of this attitude, especially among people who already like edgy jokes, is that it leads to more extreme, more nihilistic, often more violent, humor. In late June, r/ChapoTrapHouse was banned by Reddit moderation in an effort to crack down on communities that “promote hate.” Before its shutdown, the subreddit was filled with “ironic” jokes about gulags and guillotines and a fair number of honest-to-god tankies to boot.
My third problem with Chapo Trap House is that they’re popular enough to have inspired a host of copy-cats and spinoff podcasts, most notably Cum Town and Red Scare. Cum Town, hosted by the aforementioned Nick Mullen, Stavros Halkias, and Adam Friedland, takes Chapo’s edgy-and-offensive-but-it’s-ok-it’s-ironic style and turns it up to 11 with Mullen’s classic move of just being being shitty to people and laughing about sexual assault. Red Scare steals Chapo’s other style, the adopt-radical-language-and-aesthetics-to-appear-contrarian-but-then-just-be-shitty-to-minorities style. Draped in the veneer of communist rhetoric, hosts Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan use their show to, as Local writer emily villarreal puts it, “spew their apathetic klonopin-fueled ramblings to an audience of upper class white women.”
There is one more crucial piece to the intricate jigsaw puzzle that is my hatred of Chapo. I would not care about any of this, not Chapo’s toxic echo chamber, not Cum Town being the absolute worst, not Red Scare’s dumb LARP-y bullshit, if it were not for the fact that they and I are on the same side. All of these people call themselves leftists to some degree or another (though Cum Town makes it a point to emphasize it is not a political podcast, despite the show’s close ties to Chapo). I also call myself a leftist, and that means we’re fighting for the same things whether I like it or not. More to the point, it means that when they fucking suck at their jobs, it gives me and people like me a bad name, and makes it harder for us to do the things we’re all trying to do. Optics are important, and being associated with a group of creators who are known for being offensive, unpleasant, arguing in bad faith, and hiding behind irony and the facade of revolutionary aesthetics is a pretty bad look, if what you’re going for is outreach. Chapo Trap House and their ilk are not only the worst, they’re on my team, dragging me down with them, and that is why I hate them.
Also they’re stupid. And dumb.
