Chapo Trap House, a “dirtbag left” podcast hosted by Will Menaker, Matt Christman and Felix Biederman, has emerged as a political and cultural mainstay, performing live at a 1,500-person venue in Times Square — and highlighting how far conservatives have to go to compete for cultural influence.
The show — which saw upward of a thousand attendants last week — was opened by an alt rock musical performance, followed by a standup set, before the main event, a chat with Chapo featuring a cold open of an anime cartoon of Hunter Biden hitting a crack pipe.
Referred to as a “cult podcast” shortly after its 2016 launch, Chapo Trap House exists to comment on politics and mock beltway figures, named after El Chapo, but meant to sound like the title of a rap mixtape.
Attendants, paying $60 for a ticket and $30 for a plastic cup of wine, were not what an observer through media of the millennial progressive left would imagine; the crowd was mostly young professionals, looking like they just stepped out from their office on Sixth Avenue or Wall Street.
$200 jeans, $400 jacket, $1,000 iPhone, $0 in real assets — there is a new proletariat: well put together, earning decent money, but also acutely aware of the hurdles they face that their parents never did — social and economic leftism is their gospel.
These champagne revolutionaries are similar to their predecessors in that they are certainly resentful of the circumstances, of who they view as the elites with real influence, corporate masters and corrupt politicians, and the show expressed that disdain in perhaps the most devastating way — scathing mocking.
The theme of the talk was heckling corporate media, from Fox News’ Tucker Carlson to the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman.
Tucker had recently called out Chapo for allegedly not pushing back on blind support and escalation for Ukraine — to which the guys accused Fox’s producers of not listening to the show, dryly reminding the audience, “We said the war between Russia and Ukraine is a war between the two worst countries.”
In front of an unflatteringly lit and unforgiving projection of an image of the star Times reporter, Maggie Haberman’s new Trump book, Confidence Man, got trashed for sensationalizing boring details about the former president as some sort of journalistic accomplishment, as the Times does.
Chapo Trap House trashed star Times reporter, Maggie Haberman’s new Trump book, Confidence Man (Emma-Jo Morris/Breitbart News)
The Chapo guys also took shots at characters outside of legacy media — “data guru” boy wonder David Shor (who has a rose emoji in his Twitter bio) got hit for a hosting a cringe “Burning Man” themed party; and The American Conservative’s Rod Dreher got hit for writing a piece that, to be fair, comes off unintentionally but obviously gay, which led the entertainers into speculation about his sexuality for a portion of the night.
The audience exploded as Trap House tore Dreher apart, reading a passage out loud:
I think back to the all-male dorm I lived in during my last two years of high school. Think of a dorm full of 100 high school juniors and seniors, in the early 1980s. Imagine the pent-up sexual desire. There were a handful of guys who were out, or semi-out, as gay, and nobody thought anything of it. I remember a couple of them took advantage of the dorm administration’s inability to recognize what was happening to get themselves assigned a room together, even though they were quietly a couple. A bunch of us envied them, and all the sex they must be having. The thing is, the only thing preventing any of the rest of us from doing the same thing was the internalized taboo against gay sex.
The “dirtbag” “Bernie Bro” progressive left is broadly anti-establishment, anti-capitalist, and anti-war. That opposition culminates in a fervency for social issues and what it sees as “structural injustices” in society along race, gender and sexuality lines — similar to the obsession with abortion in the left-wing generation before it. It’s most prominent observation though is that economic prospects for younger generations are bleak, especially in comparison with those of the generations before them, and is acutely aware of the gaping income inequality and shrinking middle class that characterizes the American economic landscape.
For readers new to this subculture, the dirtbag left isn’t Joy Reid with a sense of humor. Their ideology is thoughtful and often well-informed, despite being misguided in the opinion of this website’s editorial perspective. These people don’t own anything and pay, in some cases depending on where they live, around 50% of their income to taxes — they don’t understand why they shouldn’t get healthcare and tuition paid, and why they pay for weapons for foreign nations instead.
It doesn’t totally come as a surprise that bourgeois millennials living virtually in serfdom want socialized healthcare and education — based on their circumstance, and the fact that they have never lived under socialist systems, it makes sense — especially after the 2008 bailouts when they watched Wall Street get better hookers while their parents lost their home. And their sentiments and economic ideas are worth watching, because millennials happen to be the largest generation group in the U.S.
Like the populist right, they often have equal or more disdain for the establishment of their own side — who they see as an obstacle to creating a party in their image — as they have for their ideological counterparts.
Despite the Democrat party currently being in control of the White House and Congress, in a text message to Breitbart News, Biederman said he believed “the left” is “not just out of power, but very far away from it.”
“I can’t see Democrats nationalizing the medical system, nor meaningfully penalizing any other industry that’s taking advantage of now pliant and beaten down people in this country,” he said.
The Times wrote a piece on Chapo during the 2020 election that quoted them calling Biden supporters “gelatinous 100-year-olds,” Buttigieg “a bloodless asexual,” and Bloomberg a “midget gremlin.”
At the event there was barely, if any, talk of policy, issues, or elections. There was no data presented, no statistics, no wonk. The event was cool, the presenters were punk — it was in typical Chapo form, the message was clear and no explanation was necessary: we’re laughing at you, and fuck off.
“Its weird to me to think about the fact that the show not only still exists, but is doing as well as it is 6 years later,” Biederman told Breitbart News of his show that launched in 2016 — at the peak of the anti-establishment sentiment sweeping America and much of the West. “We started in the exact perfect time and place for a show like ours, but the fact that things are still going as strongly even after the collapse of Bernie 2020, which was one of our reasons to exist, is insane.”
As a right-wing populist media observer in the live audience, the rise and staying power of Chapo does not seem insane at all.
The trio has evidently come to understand that populism, on the left and the right, is a bigger movement than any one politician — it has a broader message, a sentiment, a philosophy, sometimes even an aesthetic — it’s a rebel culture.
The show earns over $160,000 per month from almost 37,000 subscribers on Patreon, according to public data, seeing a massive spike in earnings since 2020 that has held since.
“We’ve been really lucky to have the listenership we have in that sense, they’ve been incredibly faithful,” Biederman continued. “But I think part of that is because the show is made primarily to entertain and be a funny, enjoyable part of a listener’s commute, before pretty much anything else.”
In that humble statement lies a quite profound clue as to how Chapo has found its place as a cultural leader alongside a political megaphone — they’re not lecturing, they’re not hectoring, preaching or politicking, they’re being people who are just…likable. And their humor, although political, is really rooted in making statements of observations that are true.
Whether the listener agrees with their message doesn’t matter. All of a sudden you feel like you’re hanging out with friends, and if you’re a young populist yourself, you identify with them — any disagreeing somehow falls to the wayside — just like that, you’re Chapo pilled.
Emma-Jo Morris is the Politics Editor at Breitbart News. Email her at ejmorris@breitbart.com or follow her on Twitter.