Chapo Trap House and the rise of the dirtbag left

Matt Christman is the least funny member of a comedy podcast.

one thing I like about chapo is that while they are primarily a comedy podcast, they can take detours like the literally nightmare-inducing one from last night going over Elliott Abrams' crimes against humanity (and related atrocities)

for any lurkers/haters, the worst is all collated in Jon Schwarz's piece https://theintercept.com/2019/01/30/elliott-abrams-venezuela-coup/

yeah that was... upsetting

It's hard to feel anything other than despair listening to that one.

btw fun fact: my brother went to elementary school with Elliot Abrams' kid. He got made fun of a lot because his "dad went to jail." But he was also kind of a little shit.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/fashion/weddings/hannah-meyers-joseph-abrams-weddings.html

Matt gives a far more revealing/human interview here than I've seen any of them give, lots about personal experiences in life and activism.

Lucy: Speaking of self-branding and celebrity, do you feel like there’s a danger with Chapo Trap House in that sense of spawning an endless feedback loop of people who just exist online to discuss the episodes?

Matt: Yeah, definitely. I’ve seen our subreddit. And…uhhh…at a certain point, I think about this a lot, because even when we started we thought about the danger of this. Our initial episode, when no one listened to us, we were talking about the danger of people substituting consumption for politics. A sort of, “I listen to this, and that makes me this and this.” Even to yourself: “I’ve done my politics because I listen to this thing I like.” And I’d say that probably does happen with fans of the show. I don’t know how it couldn’t because the ground is just so…the terrain is just so bad for these kids. I look at the subreddit and a lot of them are very young, with minimal prospects. And most of them don’t really have a lot of social network of any kind or friend networks or even family. And a lot of them have bad jobs or no jobs. I don’t know how you can tell someone in that situation “you need to be out in the world.” [They might think] “I’m out there, it sucks. What do you want me to do? I live in my parents’ basement in an exurb. You want me to go to Trivia Night at TGI Fridays and start talking about Capital?” And that’s the thing. If the objective reality is the way it is, and so hostile to people making any kind of real connection in real life, and it’s so much easier to do it online, that’s an impossible choice to ask people to make.

And I guess the hope is that, like with DSA, that’s an example of the feedback loop breaking. I went to the convention in August and there were all these people there. They’re all out there, doing actual things, and they wouldn’t have done that without the internet. And it’s just a question of when we reach the inflection point, when the ground is such that people are willing enough to talk about it, there are enough opportunities to meet and make connections and be activists and organize, that they are then not as tempted to go online. No individual can make that happen. It has to me the cumulative choices and the cumulative responses to changing conditions. And that’s why I think that even though I’m very skeptical of electoralism—I think the record is pretty clear that electoral efforts on the Left basically exist to be coopted because of a lack of institutional leverage and power by workers, that in this moment of total disorganization and hopelessness in a country where politics is filtered through a lens of electoralism instinctively, and that’s how people that aren’t extremely online process politics—that the campaign this next two years, this mobilization of people who are going to try and beat trump, is the best opportunity the Left has since honestly I can’t remember. To build capacity on the ground. More people are going to be paying attention, more people are going to be open. More people are going to be pissed than ever. Which means that maybe you don’t have to dump it all onto a subreddit, maybe you can talk to a coworker or a classmate, because you have a common language now.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/08/forward-left-an-interview-with-matt-christman-of-chap-trap-house/

Between my high school years and my college, I owned, either separately or all at once, a sword, a fedora, well, not a fedora, a Hamburg with a little feather in it, a trench coat, a Goodfellas poster on my wall, the Edward Hopper “Nighthawks” poster because I was existential, and a shirt that I fucking ordered online, early internet, a black shirt with white print that said some people are only alive because it’s against the law to kill them.

How on earth did Matt ever get married?

lol

in all seriousness I agree w/ pretty much everything he has to say about the difficulties and the promise of the current moment, politically speaking

a shirt that I fucking ordered online, early internet, a black shirt with white print that said some people are only alive because it’s against the law to kill them

saw this exact bumper sticker on the way to work just now

i like when Matt rants I think he clearly cares the most, keeps the show from getting too meta

he needs to stop saying "Mr. To Damn [fill in the blank]"

tOO damn

that is simultaneously terrible and hilarious

i like when Matt rants I think he clearly cares the most, keeps the show from getting too meta

he needs to stop saying "Mr. To Damn [fill in the blank]"

weird Zing error there, plz disregard

"Felix is obviously the most consistently funny one, but most of the absolute sharpest/smartest jokes are Virgil. Felix has the best batting average but Virgil’s hitting the grand slams."

This is my experience of the show. But for me the episodes without Felix are almost unbearable (aside from their readings) at this point because he's the best at pulling the others away from the rant and into the riff. Without him Matt's given just a little too much leeway for his tirades and Virgil feels more onus to fill air time and goes into wonk-mode and forgets to make jokes. Felix is also good enough at extended solo riffing that it gives the others enough time to formulate their top-shelf zings.

Amber's on the new Red Scare, I'll leave it to someone else to give us the highlights

Still baffled that anyone can stand let alone enjoy red scare tbh

the chapo / cum town / red scare universe lost a big one today

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bt9V9-KloYj/

RIP Ernest

23! a helluva run, rip big man

I'm expecting to hear some screaming over this soon.

Pod Save America host and former Obama Admin flack Dan Pfeiffer was a VP of GoFundMe until 2017, and continues to have significant financial interest in the company, which gets a third of its revenue from medical funding campaigns. https://t.co/lqXH2rWwuG

— Chico DSA 🍞🌹🍺 (@dsachico) February 17, 2019

lol these fuckin guys

Common People

lmao

omg Bernie NO!!!! pic.twitter.com/663WUYC0Xo

— GhostTrace (@owenrumney) February 18, 2019

haha he would know I guess...? ...more than Aaron Sorkin at least?

loved Adomian's Larouche

American politics is totally diseased but we must never forget that British politics, media, discourse, people etc are somehow even dumber and more excruciating pic.twitter.com/sVC4ikO7Mg

— Will🦕Menaker (@willmenaker) February 19, 2019

lmbo

Just a little bit of today's lovely compliments. pic.twitter.com/RNYtlELcaz

— Jack Deakin (@JackEDeakin) February 19, 2019

who is 'Jack Deakin'

some full nobody who has stuck his head above the parapet in UK politics world

I forget who found this, but it sums up every single person in British politics/media pic.twitter.com/yvq5RGT7JJ

— Will🦕Menaker (@willmenaker) February 20, 2019

don't make me explain who all the ppl in that thread are

is who they are important? because it's plenty funny enough knowing they're just a bunch of journalists with no life experience

oh god I'm choking laughing from that

had to look to see if it was real, but I'd forgotten that these people are insane caricatures so of course it is

are those people not taking the piss?

nope

welcome to every day in UK politics journalism

that’s not even tom peck’s best tweet

"how many layers of STEMlord are you on, bro?"
"like five or six"
"you are like a little baby. watch this" pic.twitter.com/ao3Ye1kdFk

— eturtle witness (@wehpudicabok) August 6, 2017

"I've never eaten cereal."
"I've never petted a dog."
"I've never kissed another human being on the mouth."

that’s the least benign ‘benign opinion’ i’ve ever heard

feeling mild embarrassment for not having done something most people have done

versus

proudly having never done anything normal

lolling at the fact theyre at CPAC

it’s funny to see you talking shit when I’m at CPAC meeting Chuck Baldwin. pathetic pic.twitter.com/8Xe37d1IUm

— incredibly weak, demure irl but uses bear jew avi (@ByYourLogic) February 28, 2019

Matt was on fire in the Larry Charles ep

i listened to an episode of the red scare podcast on someone's rec yesterday, and those women are insufferable, aren't they?

a dangerous drinking game would be to take a shot every time they use the term "neoliberal" in a pejorative way (which is the only way they, or probably anyone else, uses it). i don't think there's a definition of that term that could be plausibly stretched to cover every of the ways they invoke it. it basically serves the same function that terms like "bourgeois" once served in marxist-leninist discourse, as a kind of secular substitute for xian demonology or something.

i don't doubt their commitment to bernie or whatever but the main impression i get is of a narcissism of small differences where distinguishing themselves from liberal normies is the driving force.

anyway. back to my podcasts on the history of the subcontinent. "personality" podcasts are, in my experience, uniformly awful.

Got called a “judeo-communist.” #stillgotit

— Matt Christman (@cushbomb) February 28, 2019

FetLife Expo ‘19 is lit! pic.twitter.com/fylAtom4dh

— Matt Christman (@cushbomb) February 28, 2019

Larry Charles ep better than expected, with the side benefit that they went through so much of the series' subjects that I don't feel the slightest temptation to actually watch any of it

lol @ Large Sons Productions

I admire and relate to the lengths to which they will poison their own brains in service of content

Love to have a normal, regular conversation with the guy who personally protected Jeffrey Epstein’s child rape ring. pic.twitter.com/8Y4cpte0T3

— Matt Christman (@cushbomb) February 28, 2019

podcasts on the history of the subcontinent.

Recs?