Recently, the Grey Lady published an article by Nellie Bowles attacking the popular leftist podcast Chapo Trap House as heralding some kind of brocialist mob, I guess? Congrats boys, ya made it. The podcast has reached a level of popularity that they get called sellouts for creating a show people actually like and actually daring to influence the public conversation with it. They also get knocked for not participating in the ” hire👏more👏female👏guards ” brand of liberalism. They also get knocked from the left for not being a 18 hour bone-dry theory lecture series buried on archive.org. They’re just wanna grill for God’s sake!
This is the latest salvo in the liberal and corporate histrionics over Bernie Sanders, whose candidacy the podcast has enthusiastically supported. This mind-melt will reach a screeching fever pitch especially if he sweeps Super Tuesday tonight and exits with a commanding delegate lead. After the sudden departures of Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar in favor of Uncle Joe, I hate to say it, because it sounds like a reactionary shit tier meme, but the MSNBC libs are genuinely triggered. They are freaking the fuck out because they might have to let some of the grubby, uncombed, loud regular people into the spotlight.
The “crimes” of Chapo Trap House have been to create an independent media platform that doesn’t depend on publications like the New York Times for validation, and in fact openly despises the paper’s cheerleading for American empire, snooty neoliberal ideology, and giving voice to the worst unindicted war criminals on Earth. Most importantly, and most dangerous to writers like Bowles, podcasts and independent media sites create an accessible, popular narrative they can’t control. This is an article written by someone who expects nothing from politics because they already have everything.
“It leads to a financial windfall for the self-professed socialists who are harnessing this rage: $168,800 a month from those subscribers alone.”
– This shitty article
Socialism is not a philosophy of poverty. A podcast crowdfunding its success, rather than through advertisers or venture capital, is very socialist-friendly. How can the gang be jealous of the ruling class while simultaneously being a part of it? Wouldn’t they be creating a prole army to destroy themselves? If so, LOL. There’s also the bogus charge of class reductionism, that only class matters, as opposed to liberalism, which ignores it entirely in favor of the SuccessWin Instagram philosophy. Class is one of the largest categories that we can belong to, and so much of our misery is caught up in this identity that so many other identities, you know, intersect with it in what is commonly called intersectionality. That’s a word libs should recognize, because they use it typically to mean “queer defense contractor CEOs”.
As I lay my head down on the softest MyPillow, I can hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth just outside my window:
“Don’t these dirtbag leftists know that socialism is supposed to be grim, depressing, and exclusionary to a fault?! What is the world coming to when political commentary is *entertaining*?! Where are the dusty 700 page books of incomprehensible run-on sentences?! This podcast doesn’t rise to my vaguely defined and impossible-to-achieve superficial liberal identity politics! WHERE’S THE BITTER SECTARIAN INFIGHTING?!! THE PETTY WIFE EMAILING?! ALSO, MAKING MONEY, FOLKS. CANCELLED! DOUBLE CANCELLED!!!”
I would call myself a fan, the show makes me laugh and gives me a lot of solace that my disgust with the Democratic Party isn’t insane. It’s not approval without serious criticisms, though. A lack of non-electoral praxis, obsession with media dork punching bags, repetitive content, and an overabundance of irony that sometimes causes me to doubt they actually like anything at all. Dropping the c-bomb while being dismissive of idpol is not helping their case. I just poked fun at the liberals’ annoyance that their attitude doesn’t resemble the safe progressivism of a FreeForm TV show, but that critique isn’t 100% wholly without merit. I also don’t believe in the politics of spite, it’s shortsighted and childish. They’ve said some stupid shit, but mostly smart, meaningful stuff with heartfelt earnestness, and holding them to account for saying stupid shit is their fanbase not being a hivemind. But despite these callouts, I see the value in the show providing a comprehensive vocabulary for why neoliberalism and the Democratic Party have utterly failed us, why we need a humanist movement and class consciousness, why we feel so shitty all the time. It’s a refreshing rinsing off of the grimy film of hypocritical liberal piety.
(I also would like to acknowledge that the Cum Town podcast was referenced in the article, even if not by name, in the New York Times. What a world.)
The bizarre aspect here is insinuating that Chapo Trap House specifically is some sort of hypnotic device that captures young, squishy brains and turns them into Socialist Morlocks. Its influence is way overplayed in these people’s minds, most normies would recognize Joe Rogan long before the Twitter-soaked hyper inside speed boat dope of Baseball Crank lore. It’s a comedy podcast, and even though comedy can be used to provide insight or ideology, good or bad, calling them the pied pipers of a millions-strong movement is a little above their station. I’m sure they’d like to be, but they’re not. It also negates the actual genuine appeal Sanders’ social policies have on marginalized and exhausted people.
“Progressives who are more concerned with racial equality or gender parity have had to figure out how to either go against the Dirtbag movement or resign themselves to this singular focus, which occasionally runs roughshod over all the rest.”
This shitty article not understanding you can care about more than one thing at a time.
This article’s main argument, along with so many other pundits, is that being angry is bad because reactionaries are angry too! The Chapo guys are stoking violence by… being mad at people ruining their listeners’ lives and telling people to vote for a centrist social democrat. That’s it. Therefore for these tiny shriveled brains, those are the same thing as the Tea Party, a famously astroturfed group of incoherent white resentment against a black president bankrolled by billionaire cretins who swept Congress and dominated the political dialogue for the better part of a decade. You know, the exact same!
Not what they are angry about specifically, just that this harnessed anger is being directed at *GASP* liberal elites who have been fucking us all by collaborating with corporate power to put a socially progressive face on serfdom. This rage is correctly aimed at a Democratic establishment who dildoed their ass with their thumbs while the industrial center of America was hollowed out, Walmart and Amazon grew like tumors, and Silicon Valley robots created an undead economy where everything was shared except the wealth.
These bogus charges of Trumpian rancor won’t just be levelled at just the CTH gang, but soon at everyone who dares to be mad about anything that’s destructive. The status quo depends on you being quiet and subservient, to protest in a way that can be easily ignored, eat your room temperature porridge like a good little drone, and to vote for the safest, most risk-averse candidates who talk good and offer nothing. That or just stay home and watch shows and buy products that make you feel like you are a good person by doing just that. Did you buy toilet wipes with a green leaf on them? Did you learn your toxic masculinity lesson from Gillette? Did you buy your fancy clothes from the prison labor shop? Then you probably are woke! You’re all done! Congrats!
When we talk about the neolib shills, let’s get down to defining what we really mean. It’s too easy to slap this label on your political enemies without really understand what it signifies. The neoliberal consensus is the agreement that capitalism is not only natural, but inevitable, and that all forms of interaction should operate based on a market system. Education, media, healthcare, government, social progress. Education must be “competitive” in charter schools, the media must be flashy and overproduced in replicating sports entertainment, healthcare must be a consumer choice, government is for the highest bidder, and social progress is only truly accepted when a corporation posts a rainbow flag. This ideology is so ingrained in our culture from top to bottom, it’s like trying to describe why you need to breath air.
This is why the Sanders campaign and what he represents is so problematic for them: because having a worker-led, multiracial, multigenerational movement is completely antithetical to politics as spectator sport or television show. It decimates the idea that everything has to have an entry fee and be sold on a marketplace like Crocs or sex lube. There’s no product you can buy for solidarity, not even a sweet-ass Bernie and Public Enemy poster, and no amount of purchased ads can stop an idea whose time has finally come. The real kicker here is that the neoliberal consensus is so normalized that even modest centrist reforms like universal healthcare, a $15 minimum wage, tuition-free college are seen as radical, even dangerous. To a corporate elite used to dominating everything with no pushback, they are. The tragic mistake these turds are making is that nobody likes a pile of shit telling them to they’re going to pile on more shit. People want the system to work for them for a change, to offer something tangible without a bunch of goddamn strings attached.
When you’re beaten down, told that you can’t do something because of who you are, when your entire life is determined by the whims of insurance companies, it’s easy to feel trapped and that you don’t have any agency. It’s safer to just go for someone inoffensive and pleasant, someone patriarchal or maternal in their condescension, their self-imposed smartness. We want to have big leaps forward in diversity: a woman president, a gay president, a Jewish president (who’s not Sanders). These candidates have a plan for that, despite the plan being terrible and unworkable. We’re tired of being yelled at by our boss, our President, our families, so a grumpy Vermont democratic socialist yelling for change is just more yelling, but only if you’re not listening. He’s not yelling at you, he’s yelling for you. If you want change so bad, you better be prepared to fight for it; the powers that be are not going to give it up freely. Life is a constant battle where anxiety and fear are the only allowed responses to the chaos that surrounds us.
Notice who is telling you that they are the electable one, the safe bet to get rid of the nasty Cheeto Drumpf, the “common sense” so you don’t get too much benefit from society without breaking your back and your spirit. The same people who made Trump a national political phenomenon with ad-sponsored coverage and fake hand-wringing concern, those making mad bank on Trump’s tumultuous shit tornado that’s lasted a century. The same people who went on to rubber stamp his defense bills and expanded funding of ICE. Those that sell you every war, every drone strike, every climate change disaster without connecting the dots, who parade murderers like they’re on MTV Cribs, who tell you that you don’t deserve a civilized society that provides things. You exist to provide them with all your money and your obedience, and I, for one, am sick and fucking tired of it. Enough is enough.
At the end of the article, Bowles adds a snippet of the banger Solidarity Forever:
In our hands is placed a power
Greater than their hoarded gold
We can bring to birth a new world
From the ashes of the old.
The framing of this is simpering, quivering pearl-clutching. She means this as a warning that this mob will burn the house down, due to an irrational fear and jealously of the ruling class, just to spite the success of others. You wouldn’t read it in the article, but Bowles herself is happily part of that class, diligently arguing for her own class interests. The daughter of a rancher fortune who privatized water in California, who had a debutante ball and is dating Bari Weiss, and is now arguing the peasants are getting too dang rowdy. Ask those living on the street or shoved into a jail or humiliated in poverty or bankrupted by medical bills if they are assaulted or not. Ask the people of color harassed and beaten by the cops. Ask the indigenous people who have to scrape and fight for every square centimeter of their land to not turn into a coal slurry puddle. Does she honestly think a group of schlubby Brooklyn podcasters are going to shoot her and her non-existent kids in a basement like Tsar Nicholas II? Delusions of grandeur, even when they’re falsely feeling persecuted. Abloo-bloo-bloo.
This selection lacks context in the song; which is about learning who the actual owners of this world are and that only together can we build something new. Considering the world is actually on fire, complaining that a social movement who seeks to dismantle the forces making that happen as creating “ashes” seems a tad misdirected. Solidarity must appear so alien when you’re trying to promote a vision of the world that is all about transactions and isolated competition, when your family has pistachio orchards to expand. But to the shrieking elites, the podcasters and the rose emojis are at the gate, ready to knock it down and… charge them a modest wealth tax for universal social amenities. The horror, the horror!
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.