Chapo Trap House

United States narc patch repurposed by Chapo as a logo, an example of their half-ironic sense of humor.

Chapo Trap House (sometimes shortened to Chapo) is a popular US American left-wing podcast currently hosted by Will Menaker and Felix Biederman and formerly including Matt Christman, Amber A'Lee Frost and Virgil Texas. The podcast originated the term "dirtbag left" as a description of its rhetorical style, and others have used this label to describe a broader trend, especially in the United States.

History

Menaker, Christman, and Biederman decided to begin a podcast during the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries as an outlet to express support for Bernie Sanders and harsh critique of Hillary Clinton which the hosts felt was lacking in political discourse at the time. Later in 2016, Frost and Texas were added to the program as regular hosts. The show took off in popularity and came to represent a broader progressive "insurgency" among American young people, along with the rapid growth of groups like the Democratic Socialists of America and the Justice Democrats. The podcast became so associated with open mockery of centrist, "respectable" Democrats such as Barack Obama that, when Republican Donald Trump was elected in 2016, the hosts were unsure whether the show could continue to be relevant.

During the 2020 election, Chapo expressed extreme confidence, based on polling data and the discord within the Democratic Party, that Bernie Sanders had a serious chance of winning both the primary and election to become president. The podcast was hugely popular during the election season and helped to galvanize support as Sanders's campaign reached a record number of donations and volunteers. The hosts personally traveled to key states, including Iowa (a key state in the US's byzantine electoral process) in order to canvass and hold live shows. The show remained optimistic through Sanders's early primaries and even through his disastrous Super Tuesday showing, but went on to bitterly accept defeat. Christman processed a sense of jadedness and resignation after his intense investment in electoral politics, which he called "taking the grillpill", arguing that leftists should focus on fulfillment in their own lives before absorbing themselves in electoral politics.

Subreddit

By 2018, the program's large following generated a subreddit, /r/ChapoTrapHouse, which became a major source of leftist, anti-centrist discussion on the site. However, as the community grew, its politics and sense of humor came to diverge from that of Chapo itself, who would eventually begn to mock the subreddit's users and consider them to be a source of embarrassment. As the community became more popular and controversial on the site, administrators began accusing the moderators of breaking various sitewide rules, including "incitement to violence". In mid-2020, /r/ChapoTrapHouse was finally banned.

Leftist criticism

Just like any other news and media podcast, /r/ChapoTrapHouse has expressed some positions which do not comport with the tendencies and views of some leftists.

Politics

From the beginning, Chapo Trap House was an electoralist podcast which openly supported Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. The show continued to support him and other Democrats with similar policies, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, through the 2018 and 2020 elections. This has earned them broad criticism from leftists skeptical of electoralism, the Democratic Party, or the US progressive movement in particular. However, the show's hosts, especially Christman, have expressed open support for communism, Marxism, and Leninism and have expressed critical support for the legacy of the USSR on more than one occasion. The show has since come to criticize both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez for their conduct in and out of Congress.

Style and tone

The podcast's deliberately aggressive and ironic "dirtbag" style has been called distasteful or even problematic.