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Felix Biederman, Matt Christman, and Will Menaker befriended
each other on Twitter several years ago. They had common interests—international politics, making fun of journalists—and
a shared comic sensibility that borders on nihilism but stops
just short of it. Christman, stout and Midwestern, had been
unemployed for years, moving around the country with his wife,
an academic librarian. Biederman was a freelance writer and
mixed-martial-arts hobbyist in New York City. Menaker was an
assistant editor at Liveright, an imprint of W. W. Norton. (His
father, Daniel Menaker, is a former executive editor-in-chief of
Random House, and was also a fiction editor at The New Yorker
for twenty years.) He is slight and bearded, the unofficial dad
of the trio.

In February, they appeared together on “Street Fight Radio,” an
“anarcho-comedy show,” to mock the Michael Bay war movie “13
Hours” for its bathetic moral kitsch. (Christman: “If you watch
these screaming, turbaned jihadis machine-gun the American flag
while it’s on the end of the flagpole, and you’re weeping, then
you’re a fucking rube, and I want to sell you a reverse
mortgage.”) Then they decided to branch out on their own. They
taped a ninety-minute freeform conversation using Google Hangout
and broadcast it, unedited, over YouTube. A tossed-off joke from
that recording, which combined the name of a famous Mexican drug
lord and the slang term for a crack kitchen, gave them a title
for the new project, a gleefully eccentric podcast dedicated to
vulgar leftist commentary on politics and media: “Chapo Trap
House.”

From the beginning, the “Chapo” guys lambasted Republicans as

well as Democrats, but it was their critique of liberal
thinking, and the assumed Hillary Clinton ascendancy, that
generated energy and attention. After the journalist Brendan
James appeared on their third episode to discuss a profile he’d
written about Sean Hannity, he came on board as their producer.
In the first episode, Menaker said that the “Bernie and Hillary
divide is a profound and deeply instructive one—I can’t see it
going away.” And as Bernie Sanders’s prospects dwindled during
the primary, “Chapo” assured people who were frustrated by the
Democratic Party that they weren’t alone. Their audience numbers
climbed.

In June, the same month that Clinton became the presumptive
Democratic nominee, Christman created a page for the podcast on
the crowd-funding platform Patreon, offering exclusive episodes
for a five-dollar monthly contribution. “Chapo” now receives
nearly twenty-two thousand dollars a month, and, by their own
estimates, has forty thousand listeners. They sell out live
shows; a page on the popular Web site TV Tropes tracks their
inside jokes about phrenology and anti-Irish racism, among other
subjects. (Their most diehard fans call themselves Grey Wolves,
after the fringe nationalist group in Turkey—another tossed-off
joke that stuck.) Menaker quit his publishing job in July. That
same month, Paste magazine labelled “Chapo Trap House” the
“vulgar, brilliant demigods of the new progressive left.”

A more precise label might be the Dirtbag Left, a term coined by
the writer Amber A’Lee Frost, who is Biederman’s roommate, and
who, this week, officially joined the “Chapo” roster. In an
essay for Current Affairs, Frost argued that while vulgarity
isn’t “inherently subversive,” it can help tarnish the unearned
prestige of the powerful—something that many Democrats, as well
as Republicans, hunger to do. We can either “reclaim vulgarity
from the Trumps of the world,” she wrote, or “find ourselves
handicapped by civility.”

“Chapo Trap House” has embraced this mission. “If you sleep on a
mattress on the floor and fuck in a sleeping bag, then you just
might be the dirtbag left!” Menaker told Paste. “If you’re the
only dude at a function not wearing a pocket square in a linen
blazer and adulting like a boss, then you’re in the dirtbag
left!” People who belong to the Dirtbag Left, Christman said,
aren’t afraid “to offend the sensibilities of ‘leftist’ language
police whose only goal is sabotaging social solidarity in order
to maintain their brands as arbiters of good taste and
acceptable speech.”

The “Chapo” guys loathe the unctuous sanctimony that can descend
on liberal politics—a tone they associate with Clinton and
certain corners of the mainstream media. According to “Chapo,”
liberals humiliated themselves when they urged Trump protesters
in Chicago to behave. Liberals were fools for piously donating
to the fire-bombed North Carolina G.O.P. office in October,
putting their desire to project civility over the ongoing
reality of voter suppression in the state. On the podcast and on
Twitter, they have made the case, over and over, that the way
the Democratic Party leans on celebrity and pop culture is
misguided and embarrassing.

“Chapo Trap House” refuses to provide the kind of “Daily Show”-
style catharsis that dissipates frustration en masse. “It was
useful at the time,” Menaker told me, referring to the style of right-ridiculing political comedy that was defined by Jon
Stewart. “But the Obama years really revealed the limits of that
type of humor.” Smarm, not evil, was the new target.

I went to meet the “Chapo” guys at the headquarters of the
annotation platform Genius, in Gowanus, Brooklyn. I found them
outside smoking cigarettes in the sun. It was Election Day. We
walked upstairs and sat on couches overlooking a white
industrial event space where, a few hours later, they’d put on a
show. Menaker, who is thirty-three, told me that fans are drawn
to the podcast because the hosts have “no special obligation to
be nice to anyone, or get a pat on the head, or”—and here he
briefly affected the voice of an aristocrat—“have a fine debate
with mon conservative frère.” He rolled his eyes and mimed
masturbation. “My reaction to that is a jack-off motion so hard
it opens a portal into another dimension.”

Their argument is inextricable from the way in which they make
it. But when an ethos of vulgarity is enthusiastically practiced
by a group of white men, this will sometimes translate as
chauvinism. Particular strains of “Chapo” invective can be hard
to take—people are “pussies,” or they’re “retarded.” Botanical
gardens are “gay,” Hillary Clinton is “a freak.” The caricature
of the “Bernie bro”—an aggressively disaffected white guy who
hates Clinton ostensibly because of her neoliberal
incrementalism but deep down because of her gender—occasionally
seems to apply. The very name of the podcast—as well as its
theme song, a vaporwave remix of Gucci Mane—suggests a
dismissive attitude toward identity politics. They are, after
all, three white guys.

“Four_ _white guys,” James, the producer, said.

“Politifact rates this claim as ‘mostly true,’ ” Menaker added.

“It depends on how you classify the Scots-Irish,” Christman
said. Then he became serious. Representation in the media is a
real issue, he said, but one that mostly applies to large
institutions like the Times or CNN, where barriers to entry
preserve gender and racial hierarchies. By contrast, Christman
said, “we are literally just dudes who just do this.” In any
case, on the Monday following the election, “Chapo Trap House”
announced that Frost and another frequent guest, the comedian
Virgil Texas, would officially join as co-hosts. (After meeting
Texas, I had assumed that he had some Asian heritage. When I
texted him to ask if I could describe him as Asian-American, he
explained that he didn’t “self-ID” as such, but that he
“wouldn’t be offended” if I did.)

At the Genius office, as people set up chairs on the floor below
us, Menaker described the generic Chapo fan as a “failson”—which
Biederman, who is twenty-six, defined as the guy that “goes
downstairs at Thanksgiving, briefly mumbles, ‘Hi,’ everyone asks
him how community college is going, he mumbles something about a
2.0 average, goes back upstairs with a loaf of bread and some
peanut butter, and gets back to gaming and masturbating.” As for
the women fans—who make up maybe twenty to thirty per cent of
the audience, they guessed—“they all seem to be success-
daughters,” Menaker said. “They’re astrophysicists or novelists,
extremely on-point and competent people.”

Christman saw a political lesson in the show’s fan base. “The
twenty-first century is basically defined by nonessential human
beings, who do not fit into the market as consumers or producers
or as laborers,” he said. “That manifests itself differently in
different classes and geographic areas. For white, middle-class,
male, useless people—who have just enough family context to not
be crushed by poverty—they become failsons.” The “Chapo Trap
House” guys are sincerely concerned with American inequality; at
the same time, their most instinctive sympathies seem to fall
with people whose worst-case scenario is a feeling of
purposelessness. “Some of them turn into Nazis,” Christman
continued. “Others become aware of the consequences of
capitalism.”

The guys have gotten e-mails, they told me, from listeners who
have started organizing, and who told them that they had started
to think of their lives politically for the first time. You
wouldn’t necessarily expect jokes about Antonin Scalia getting
horseradish in his neck folds to spur people toward activism.
But Biederman compared “Chapo” ’s style to the recessed
cardboard filter on Parliament cigarettes, which, according to
an apocryphal story, were designed so that soldiers could bite
down on something during battle. “Irony is what allows you to
keep your bearings when you’re looking at the horrors of the
world,” he said.

As their big Election Night show approached, the “Chapo” guys
told me about their plans. They want to set up a Web site,
publish essays, bring in more history and international
coverage, and produce sketches and short films. The Hillary
Clinton Administration would set them up as the dedicated
opposition. “The show would suck under a Trump Presidency,”
Menaker noted. “We’d end up getting into that John Oliver thing.
The emperor has no clothes, ladies and gentlemen! Trump outrage
of the week!”

“Every episode would end with an open letter,” Biederman said.
“It would be like—listen, you orange ignoramus, how dare you
call Seth Meyers a kike on Twitter.”

“A few weeks ago, Virgil was trying to convince me that Trump
would win,” Christman said. “I was like, we would be so fucked.”

On Saturday morning, I biked to James’s apartment, in Clinton
Hill, where the guys were taping their first post-election
podcast. James set up his laptop on a coffee table and dialled
Christman in from Cincinnati. The room was cozy, with liquor
bottles decorating one corner and audio cables coiled on a beat-
up Persian rug. Texas buzzed the door, walked in, and sat down
between Menaker and Biederman on the couch. “We ate shit,”
Menaker said. “And the fact that we’re not alone doesn’t make it
less acute.”

“It makes me feel worse,” Biederman said. “I’m lumped in with
these idiots. We’re exactly as stupid as them.”
The live show on Election Night had been planned around a
sequence of states going blue. The loose theme was “Dr.
Strangelove,” and Biederman, in character as General Jack D.
Ripper, was going to end the evening by committing suicide in
the bathroom after Clinton’s victory was announced. Instead, as
Trump took Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, the
Chapo guys improvised, and the air in the room curdled. “Look,
it’s Bernie’s fault,” Biederman said at one point. “Second of
all, if voters are too immature to vote for someone that
collapses and vomits all the time, the joke’s on them.”

In James’s apartment, they talked about the bad tweets and
smarmy posts that they’d seen about President-elect Trump. The
mood was perky. Not for the first time that week, I was jealous
of their freedom from the paralyzing personal investment that I
felt in the election.

“We have a duty to our fans to keep up the show, to provide some
sense of community or solace,” Menaker said. “Strategically and
politically, I think we must declare eternal, holy war on the
Democratic Party, because they’re the ones that let this happen.”

“Yeah,” Biederman said. “The Democratic leadership has to be
purged. Our mission statement, for the time being, is to paint
these targets.”

I asked them if they blamed the Party exclusively. Didn’t it
make sense to attribute some of the fault with the people who
chose Trump despite his racism and sexism? They scoffed.

“Even if you do blame the electorate, where do you go from
there?” Biederman asked. “Do we shame these people into liking
us?” This debate, pitting the economic concerns of the white
working class against a focus on minority and women’s rights, as
though it were a zero-sum game, will go surely on for years. We
weren’t going to resolve it that morning.

James pressed record, and Biederman launched into an impression
of Hillary Clinton in the cheesy rhetorical pattern the “Chapo”
guys call “Democrat voice.” “I may not be David Carradine, but I
fucking choked,” he said. “I may not be Johnny Knoxville, but I
ate shit on live TV. I may not be Dale Earnhardt”—he paused—“but
I smashed into the fucking wall because I couldn’t turn left.”

And then they were off, discussing Clinton’s loss. Clinton was
too focussed on rich suburbs; she didn’t visit Wisconsin; she
brought Jay Z to Ohio like a chump. She gave her base no reason
to vote for her apart from the fact that she wasn’t Trump. The
barrier between entertainment and politics is now nonexistent,
they argued, and people voted against the political class.
Clinton—“the Supreme Lady Clinton, the nice girl who just
doesn’t know why minorities won’t give her votes that she’s
entitled to”—wasn’t capable of getting the Obama coalition.
People simply did not come out.

But minorities, I thought, did vote for Clinton. The “Chapo”
guys elided the role that bigotry played in the election. “Be on
the lookout for everybody who’s trying to play it off like this
was inevitable, saying that America is this irredeemably
racist,” Menaker said. “I’m sorry, but that’s as ignorant as the
most baying moron that voted for Trump.”

James snuck into the center of the room to adjust the mic levels
on his laptop, stepping around piles of books and an electric
guitar. Biederman ranted about Clinton’s behavior at the Javits
Center. “This entitled fucking slob,” he said. “This fucking
asshole brought all her donors to have a big party about how
great they were. She’s never been a fucking leader, ever, in her
life. She just has these fans who are psychologically weak,
tormented, élite freaks.”

This was their mission now—to rail on Clinton, the liberals who
had supported her, the Party that hadn’t demanded enough of her,
the media that cheered her on. They say their primary goal is to
entertain, but their ethos—radically anti-élite, anti-
capitalist, redistributive—may have been validated by the
results of the election. I wondered if “Chapo” could eventually
attract some of the liberals they hate, if they would continue
to target, exclusively, the disaffected. The affected deserve
better than what they’ve been given, too.

“We are in a new era,” Texas said, at the close of the show,
addressing his comrades. “Politics is now an endless thing in
our lives. It will transform our culture top to bottom. One
thing that everyone should keep in mind is that fascism seeks to
destroy nuance and irony. For the next four years, people are
going to need you guys to know that they’re not alone.”
“Well, that’s the plan,” Menaker said.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/what-will- become-of-the-dirtbag-
left?mbid=gnep&intcid=gnep&google_editors_picks=true

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All Clinton voters are ignorant uneducated retards.
 

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