I Listened to Chapo Trap House So You Don’t Have To

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No other form of media better encapsulates the socialist backlash in the English-speaking world against 21st century neoliberalism than the bizarre Marxist podcast Chapo Trap House, hosted by “large adult sons” Will Menaker, Felix Biederman, Matt Christman, Virgil Texas (I don’t know or really care what his real name is), and token female pundit Amber A’Lee Frost.

Soaked in biting condescension, bitter irony, millennial fatalism, and cartoonish intellectual self-confidence, these “failson” podcasts will cause you to lose all hope in the world around you, eager to either burn it all down — or just become another pontificating podcaster. Much of Chapo has a seductive quality. But there’s a lot of high-strung neuroticism that’s bound to activate your lizard brain, backwards masked beneath the mellow, calming, almost banal rhythm of chill conversation. Their moral and intellectual certainty does not stop them from occasional proud self-deprecation, beginning thoughts with “to continue further discussing this book I haven’t read.”

The meandering banter is sprinkled with middle-brow esoteric references, recognizable only to the well-read or well informed, at least about Leftist politics and The Simpsons. Judge Holden from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is a common trope to illustrate the barbaric, psychopathic evil of Chapo’s opponents. When Menaker references ^[2] “the Satanic mills,” any student of Marx and Engels or Blake will feel his ears perk up. But this pomposity on parade uses knowledge to signal belonging to a defined in-group — in this case, young, angst-ridden Leftist millennials. The nationalist Right, especially those who are “extremely online,” are certainly familiar with this documented psychological phenomenon.

The Chapo podcast is an ensemble of unique voices, where pretty much any topic is covered with an unabashedly Marxist perspective. You will hear Menaker’s fast, biting, nasally voice whine about every vaguely right-of-center Republican as a neo-Nazi constituting an existential threat to humanity. Felix Biederman’s deep baritone will opine nostalgically ^[3] on doing absolutely nothing of productive value, watching TV, and getting wasted at his friend’s house. In his nasally twang (yes, he’s also nasally), Christman will breathlessly insinuate ^[4] that what happened in Charlottesville was about Nazis preparing to make genocide morally acceptable in the face of impending Third-World mass migration triggered by ecological collapse.

Oh, and class consciousness is hyper woke when you tune into Chapo. They have done videogame twitch streams to raise money for transgender people. They proudly embrace racial diversity in the media — as long as it does not affect their own podcast. Of course, that doesn’t mean there is a double standard there, because ^[5] “we are literally just dudes who just do this,” as opposed to the media institutions, those propaganda bullhorns of capital. They see any vague notions of immigration restriction as aberrations of reactionary fascist white supremacy, especially when espoused by liberals whose stated goal ^[6] is to prevent such a fascist backlash from occurring in the first place. They waste no time in railing against “white suburban culture ^[7]” for its savage racism as they broadcast from an ivory tower loft in gentrified Brooklyn.

The hosts of Chapo deserve some credit for their commentary. They forcefully argue that the Iraq War was perhaps the greatest crime of the twenty-first century. (Of course, we here at Counter-Currents are some of the biggest opponents of wars for regime change engineered by a deep-state political establishment which serve no national security goals. The post-9/11 conflicts in the Middle East have dispensed death and destruction, with an endgame of refugee resettlement in Western societies.) The hosts further argue ^[8] that powerful elites exalted as “rational, reasonable adults in the room” are in fact anything but, and oftentimes have significant blood on their hands from managing the neoliberal American empire’s distant wars. Ryan Faulk, of all people, brought up ^[9] a similar point in the aftermath of the Christchurch mosque shootings, arguing that disaffected whites were responsible for far less death than their bipartisan ruling class, notwithstanding their assumed moral legitimacy in condemning any peaceful expression of pro-white sentiment as inherently violent.

I mentioned how these millennial podcasters see their opponents as evil. That is not an understatement, and this mindset is the engine that keeps their anger-laden rants going. I am further convinced that their burning, visceral hatred of anyone slightly to the right of Bernie Sanders (that’s not an exaggeration) animates much of their existence. I have heard there is an intrinsic value in having some form of self-doubt, and that you should keep your mind open to other perspectives, knowing you might be wrong. This way of thinking has led many of us to accept pro-white advocacy as morally legitimate despite living in a society that brands such feelings as the epitome of moral repugnance. Racist is perhaps the worst thing one can be called in 2019 America, a word that can effectively lead to one’s unpersoning in polite society. Even while I see pro-white metapolitics as morally legitimate, I still question my own beliefs from time to time, and I always listen to liberal and Leftist voices in the media to improve my arguments and those of my friends. Given our environment, we do not have the option of avoiding this hegemonic narrative.

Being of the Left does not lead to self-doubt, because you are told from childhood by the ruling class, elite institutions, politicians, schools, and the media that liberalism is morally righteous. Any deviation from the hegemonic liberal orthodoxy will put you on “the wrong side of history,” you are warned, and turn you into the ultimate emblem of heresy in our self-obsessed culture where what others think of us is held as sacrosanct. This lack of self-doubt has led to the rise of these podcasters and their ilk, who are so convinced of their perverted moral convictions, which have attempted to justify the most grotesque acts to which we are now, unfortunately, accustomed. Remember Andrew Dodson? He was a young man who attended a legal public protest, specifically Unite the Right in Charlottesville, and subsequently committed suicide after being doxxed and harassed by antifa and assorted Leftist social media mobs. These groups and individuals demanded that Dodson no longer have any access to a source of income merely for having the wrong opinions. Rather than disavow or disassociate, the gargoyles on Chapo’s Reddit page (which is still online) gleefully attacked Dodson’s funeral page online to the point where it had to be taken down. Is it really that wrong to hope that Hell exists for such soulless beings?

Menaker and his ilk are not offended by what their listeners do. They would most assuredly be offended by the notion that they are merely a symptom of neoliberal hegemony. In that case, they would immediately retort that they are not liberals, but rather explicitly anti-liberal Leftists. However, as Jack Buchanan at The American Sun ^[10] argues, both Chapo Marxism and liberalism are inherently cut from the same cloth:

Liberals are animated by the same basic impetus that Chapo is capitalizing upon: the belief in Egalitarianism. More precisely, both camps are driven by a feverish desire to escape the gnawing pangs and relentless cognitive dissonance caused by subscribing to a view so plagued by easily observable and fundamentally unresolvable contradictions. Liberals think that a bureaucratic Neoliberal welfare state is the best way to advance their Egalitarian ambitions, whereas Chapo thinks that it’s the abolition of wage labor. Their foundational impetus is the same.

The shared moral framework of egalitarianism, which manifests in open borders, transgenderism, abolishing law enforcement, and other Left-wing projects, has led to the very same neoliberal establishment they claim to be fighting against warmly embracing Chapo Trap House. They have received a flattering profile from the elite media organ The New Yorker ^[5]. They have written and published a New York Times bestseller. They are permitted to have a Patreon page which rakes in $124,000 per month. Does any of this sound like a cutting-edge workers’ revolution on the verge of taking down the bourgeois state? They will storm the gates for show, but they already have the keys. This is similar to when Lenin remarked that the German Social Democrats would not storm a train platform before first buying tickets. (See, I can make esoteric Marxist references, too.)

Contrast this state of affairs with the Dissident Right. Every day, Left-wing activists and so-called journalists, fight tooth and nail ^[11] to erase us from the Internet. Our enemies are convinced that there is not one iota of difference between white supremacy and white separatism, even though the latter’s adherents simply want to live in their own homelands — a right they recognize for every ethnic group across the globe. While indigenous Europeans and those of the European diaspora strive for self-determination, which is guaranteed in the United Nations Charter ^[12], those who do not believe European peoples are entitled to such a right frame our desire for separation and self-government as being somehow oppressive of other races. This logic makes absolutely no sense — unless you hate people of European descent who value their heritage.

Such logic means that one of the primary purposes of media gatekeepers ranging from Republican Trump supporters at FOX News to Chapo Trap House is to ensure that our ideas never gain a platform. We are at the point where so-called journalists are attempting to ban ^[13] AirBNB users from the platform simply for attending the upcoming American Renaissance conference. Global capital “is trying to build a world where people can belong anywhere and there are no strangers.” You can thank former Attorney General Eric Holder for establishing AirBNB as “woke” corporate citizens whose utmost goal is to weed out and destroy anything they deem “racism.” Silicon Valley, the former United States Attorney General, and the news media are just some of the forces aligned with the Marxist Left — who are very close to overthrowing the old established order and building their socialist utopia. They might even have some corporate sponsorship from McDonald’s and Goldman Sachs along the way. Although if you are even slightly to the right of center, you are not even allowed to have a bank account ^[14].

We on the Dissident Right are the only true opponents of the neoliberal corporate managerial class, given the magnitude of the establishment’s resources that have been unleashed against us. It is a weighty realization, one that is hard to come to terms with even in light of increasing pressure through censorship, deplatforming, and social ostracization. A close analogy in today’s world is the financial terror of the sanctions the US imposes on so-called rogue states which do not bend to American power. Chapo Trap House and its listeners will never come to such a realization, because they will never face significant opposition from the entrenched institutions that matter in America. In a way, that strengthens us on the Dissident Right, to the far Left’s detriment. We are still here, on the Internet and changing minds, nearly two years after the mass deplatforming and censorship post-Charlottesville. Of course, the growth of our movement is not as much due to our own messages, as figures like Greg Johnson have pointed out. Rather, our growth is more directly due to the simple realities of forced multiculturalism, replacement migration ^[15], the worship of diversity above all else, and increasing hatred ^[16] expressed toward whites.

Chapo Trap House can get all the adulation they want from the entrenched establishment they only superficially oppose. In the end, it will not matter, because like every other iteration of neoliberalism over the last few decades, Chapo Trap House does not have the truth on its side in fervently opposing pro-white advocacy and all other forms of nationalism. Though I must admit that I agreed with Menaker’s resolve when he stated that after attending CPAC (yes, Chapo was allowed to attend CPAC), “these people need to be defeated.” Let’s adopt that resolve in confronting our opposition from the neoliberal corporate state in its latest “counter-cultural” manifestation.