For two years now, you’ve been asking, “Who is Chapo Trap House?” This is Chapo Trap House speaking. We are Chapo, a podcast that loves life, coffee, doggos, bourbon, and intelligent debate. We are the podcast that does not sacrifice our love for those things or our values. We are the ironic pieces of shit who have deprived you of victims and thus destroyed your world with your own logic. If you wish to know why you’re perishing—you who dread knowledge—we are the gang who will now tell you.
If you’re reading these words, you’re likely living in despair and hopelessness. You’re fed a steady diet of thin, flavorless gruel by your leaders, your parents, fake friends who love drama, the fascist mods on Erowid and r/celebritytoes, the lying sheeple news media, and, most especially, all previous works of political satire and comedy. You find yourself in the dumbest of all possible worlds, clowns to the left of you, Re-thug-licans to the right. And the president? How about . . . NO. Like a veal calf, you sit in your crate, every day growing sadder, softer, and more delicious, thinking, There’s got to be a better way!
Friend, we’re here to tell you that there is a better way: the Chapo Way.
This is the beginning of a journey you will never forget. In this book, we’ll survey the blasted landscape of contemporary American politics and culture through our scientific ideology of irony, half-baked Marxism, revolutionary discipline, NoFap November, and posting on the Internet. You’ll become an initiate in the Chapo Mindset and take control of the neurons that govern your weak, fragile emotions. You will experience success, probably for the first time. You will learn to live your life on your terms. By buying this book and all its affiliated content, you’ll improve your health and fitness, have stronger relationships, straighten your posture, purify your brain chemistry, and gain more focus. Your children and ex-wife will respect you.
In addition to desiring to become a Brain-Clear Alpha Silverback Gray Wolf, you’re probably also interested in politics, and in taking a sideways glance at the news through the lens of satire. Maybe you became politically aware one crisp, clear Tuesday morning in September, when you got the day off from school; you noticed your local GameStop clerk had tears in his eyes as he waived your late fee on Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six. Perhaps around the time America decided to invade Afghanistan and then Iraq, you had an inkling that living in the End of History wasn’t going to be as utopian as promised. Maybe after John Kerry reported for duty at the 2004 Democratic Convention, you felt a brief twinge of patriotic embarrassment followed by a bone-deep sense that things will never get better. Or maybe it was when you graduated from college with six figures of debt around the time the economy shit its insides out.
It’s possible you briefly lost that feeling of impending doom in 2008, after the likable, cool presidential candidate defeated the old man who slept through all his flight school classes. But that relief probably vanished in a wave of Wall Street bailouts and drone strikes and a brief Democratic congressional majority that didn’t even bother to pass the card check bill or push for true universal health care. Perhaps once you got a job, you realized that the pay—or, if you were really lucky, the benefits package—was vastly outweighed by what work took out of your soul, as you spent your days white-knuckling it from check to check, feeling like the same idiot failure you were before you had a job. In any case, the last presidential election probably left you completely lost, tossed about in the gaping maw of twenty-first-century America. You’re just another plastic bag adrift in the ocean with no power, no future, and not even a symbolic say in politics.
More bad news: since 2016, the Democratic Party—the standard-bearer of left-of-center policies like replacing unions with low-interest Uber loans and bringing charter-school apps to Haiti—has stopped even pretending to fight for you.
All this leaves a new power vacuum on the left, in which we have taken up residence. The mummies in the Democratic Party are busy trying to rebrand Clintonesque bromides like “entrepreneurship” and “education reform,” while the average, young working person is desperate for health care, free college, and a steady job that pays them in something other than Applebee’s Lunch Combo coupons.
Our case is simple: Capitalism, and the politics it spawns, is not working for anyone under thirty who is not a sociopath. It’s not supposed to. The actual lived experience of the free market feels distinctly un-free. We’ll tell you why, and offer a vision of a new world—one in which a person can post in the morning, game in the afternoon, and podcast after dinner without ever becoming a poster, gamer, or podcaster.
Bernie Sanders’s unexpected victories in the 2016 primaries and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party’s near-upset nearly a year later revealed the false choice between the Democrats’ bloodless liberalism and the lizard-brained right wing. You don’t have to side with either the pear-shaped vampires of the Right or the craven, lanyard-wearing corporate wonks of the center-left. Dark days lie ahead, and many people are finally hungry for a fully ironic ideology for no-good, entitled, downwardly mobile, politically hopeless millennials.
More than anything, though, the current situation demands a huge expansion of what is considered “realistic” or possible.
We are posters. We earn what we get in trade for what we post. We ask for nothing more or less than what we post. That is justice.
What you call Chapo Trap House began as the brainchild of three chums who met on Twitter. In early 2016, Felix Biederman, Matt Christman, and Will Menaker sought a platform to discuss the upcoming election and also bring awareness to the disturbing presence of Dyson Airblades in most public restrooms (did you know they actually spread 1,300 times more bacteria than simple paper towels?). Soon after, Brendan James, Virgil Texas, and Amber A’Lee Frost came aboard, and despite the obvious lack of production value or the faintest tinge of professionalism, Chapo soon became a hit among dog fanciers, garnering profiles in prestigious old media outlets like the New York Gentleman, New York Place, Manhattan Times, the Knickerbocker, and Feet & Stream. Since then, our humble gabfest has become a Lovecraftian language-virus boring tunnels through the brains of all who encounter us.
The important thing to remember is that, no matter who we are or where we came from, we invented leftism in America and are the only real socialists. If you encounter someone claiming otherwise, they’re a Hitlerian-NATO-stalking-horse running dog. Please record their name, address, and any other relevant details and send it c/o Chapo Emergency Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage, PO Box 420-69, Penn Station, New York, NY 10001.
In order to guard against those kinds of revisionists, it’s important to inculcate you, the reader, with the correct manifesto mindset. After you cut ties with your family and all your aforementioned fake friends, you’ll be prepared to properly imbibe the lessons we’re about to teach you. Go do that.
Now, you may be asking yourself, Chapo, once you seize power, what will the country look like? Will all my favorite stories still be on the television? Yes—however, you may notice a few changes when you’re living in Year Zero of our Utopia. The political program exists as follows:
1. Three-day workweek, four-hour workday.
2. Health care, childcare, education, housing, and food are free and paid for by turning all existing billionaires into thousandaires and/or Soylent.
3. The use of logic, facts, and reason is outlawed.
4. Feelings become fiat currency.
5. The police are replaced by robot cops of some kind.
6. Everyone gets a dog.
7. All drugs are legalized and also become safe, healthy, and nonaddictive.
8. Every single person involved in creating, promoting, and planning the Iraq War is pushed into a volcano.
9. Control of all media, newspapers, journalism, etc., is turned over to a mysterious Big Brother–style figure known only as “The Beer Nerd.”
10. Official state religion is Shia Scientology.
In the chapters that follow, we’ll act as Virgil Texas to your Dante on a tour of the hell-realm of politics and culture.
To kick things off in chapter one, we’ll explain in a hasty and tossed-off manner the creation of the modern geopolitical scene. We’ll analyze the nature and motivations of every major player on the global stage, based on only slightly outdated psychological profiles and phrenology. For example, in Russia, we see the incubator of the global right wing, which hacked America’s election by installing Hillary Clinton as the 2016 Democratic nominee. In friendly France, we see a proud Enlightenment tradition that cherishes democracy and free expression, primarily through the medium of obscene, phallus-based political cartoons. The world is indeed complex, and is therefore boring—so we’ll do our best to give you the information you need to craft global solutions for a global world.
In chapter two, we’ll examine the history and personality of the American lib. Everyone loves a liberal, or so they tell themselves. Despite their practical cultural hegemony in movies, TV, and academia, liberals have an uncanny knack for losing elections and being generally loathed. This is in spite of their strong record of liking ethnic food, bombing ethnic countries, privatizing education, and gutting welfare. This collection of punching bags and pratfall artists whose only principle is not being Republican have somehow fallen out of favor, despite being right about everything.
How did this happen? Until the 1950s, the Communist Party had nearly succeeded in infiltrating the top levels of government, before Alger Hiss accidentally announced “I’m a Soviet spy” during his son’s Bring Your Dad to School Day. His unforced error triggered a purge that threw American radicals back into opposition through the 1960s, when they won some important victories for the civil rights and antiwar movements. They also scored several less important victories, like mainstreaming vegetarianism and inventing the blazer-with-jeans look.
The 1970s produced only disappointment, from the breakdown of labor power to the incompetent McGovern campaign to the crypto-conservative-Evangelical presidency of Jimmy Carter. After Reagan primed the pump for the final stage of dystopia (amping up the war on drugs, sanitizing racial resentment, and perforating the last vestige of American union muscle), Bill Clinton rode into office and finished the job by passing welfare reform and a draconian crime bill, eviscerating consumer protections, and transferring huge amounts of political power to the superwealthy—all the while posing as a bleeding-heart pinko. In fact, Clinton would have privatized Social Security and gotten away with it, were it not for a certain meddling intern.
That left us with the current incarnation of the Democratic Party: pro-war, pro–Wall Street, and pro-markets. In other words, despite their tepid and always negotiable commitment to abortion, gay rights, and prestige TV, they’re as right-wing as any political party should be allowed to be in the twenty-first century. The fact that they’re supposed to be decent people’s only form of political representation is proof enough that we’re living in hell.
Is it any wonder that liberalism has become a dirty word, and that the task of bringing socialism back has fallen to goofies like us?
In the ongoing family-court drama that is our politics, true patriots would cast the American lib as the scheming, greedy wife who, with the aid of anti-father laws and unelected judges, takes all the money and runs off with the scuba instructor (Europe) while the children (democracy, freedom, and liberty) suffer from neglect and slide into dissolution and juvenile delinquency (socialism). Who will stand for love, family, and what we once had on our wedding night all the way back in 1776? Who will stand athwart history and scream, “STOP TURNING THE KIDS AGAINST ME!”? That lone hero is the subject of chapter three: the American conservative, or right-winger, who will fight for family and stand for what’s right, even if it’s “uncool,” “unfashionable,” or “chattel slavery.”
In chapter four, we shoot the messenger: the media, who, in this torturous family-court analogy, was friends with both liberals and conservatives in college before getting married and eventually divorced and wants to remain friends with both parties. The media is the guardian of discourse, and in the future, the only media that will exist will, of course, be Chapo and Chapo-approved affiliates. We’ll focus entirely on liquidating the “legitimate news” part of the media, along with its revolting acolytes, known as “journalists.” In this chapter, however, we’ll provide a history of the prerevolutionary news media, from the early days of the printing press to the dawn of the blogosphere and beyond.
Of course, it was once said by the great political satirist and cocaine enthusiast Andrew Breitbart that politics is downstream from culture. We’re peeing in the same gutter: before one can truly understand politics, one has to watch a lot of television shows and movies—especially those aimed at children—and chapter five has you covered. In a broad survey of the dominant strains of contemporary culture, we destroy the fascist and imperialist aesthetic that rules our time. In its place, we offer you the correct cultural opinions and a slate of preapproved films, TV shows, art, and sculpture.
Finally, in chapter six, we roll up our sleeves, bring our lunch pail to the job site, and develop an opioid addiction after destroying our joints writing about how much jobs suck. From the agricultural labor that made the fertile crescent to the dark satanic content mills of today, work has always plagued humanity, sapping our energy and stealing time that could be better spent doing nothing. We’ll dispense with many of the comforting myths about work that permeate our society—namely, that “small” businesses and their owners are good, that hard work is its own reward, and that education, marriage, and “skills” represent a path out of exploitation and poverty.
In addition, chapter six will also touch on the most dynamic and exciting part of our economy and, therefore, our politics: technology. It’s the engine that drives innovation and disrupts all the old ways of being human. The tech industry has changed how we work, date, eat, and not have sex in the few hours between. But as the singularity approaches, we must face certain ethical and political quandaries, such as: What do we do with the surplus population put out of work by robots—and can we fuck those robots, even if they become self-aware?
That’s pretty much it. Once you read this book, you will possess the mindset to participate in the vanguard of the coming revolution. Achieving a Chapo-run society will require revolutionary discipline, but make no mistake: the world will change when you’re ready to pronounce this oath:
I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another political comedy podcast, nor another shitty, neoliberal Democratic Party candidate for fear of whatever right-wing ghoul they’re running against.
One last thing: If you’re a fan of sacred cows, prisoners being taken, and holds being barred, then stop reading immediately. This book is not for you. However, if you feel alienated, dispossessed, and disenfranchised from the political and cultural nightmare that is America, then . . .
Chapo, let’s go.