Chapo Trap House

Below, you will find a list of vendors processing your data and the purposes or features of processing they declare. You may exercise your rights for each vendor based on the legal basis they assert. Felix Biederman, Matt Christman, and Will Menaker befriended each other on Twitter several years ago. They had common interests—international politics, making fun of journalists—and a shared comic sensibility that borders on nihilism but stops just short of it. Christman, stout and Midwestern, had been unemployed for years, moving around the country with his wife, an academic librarian. Biederman was a freelance writer and mixed-martial-arts hobbyist in New York City. Menaker was an assistant editor at Liveright, an imprint of W. W. Norton. (His father, Daniel Menaker, is a former executive editor-in-chief of Random House, and was also a fiction editor at The New Yorker for twenty years.) He is slight and bearded, the unofficial dad of the trio. In February, they appeared together on “Street Fight Radio,” an “anarcho-comedy show,” to mock the Michael Bay war movie “13 Hours” for its bathetic moral kitsch. (Christman: “If you watch these screaming, turbaned jihadis machine-gun the American flag while it’s on the end of the flagpole, and you’re weeping, then you’re a fucking rube, and I want to sell you a reverse mortgage.”) Then they decided to branch out on their own. They taped a ninety-minute freeform conversation using Google Hangout and broadcast it, unedited, over YouTube. A tossed-off joke from that recording, which combined the name of a famous Mexican drug lord and the slang term for a crack kitchen, gave them a title for the new project, a gleefully eccentric podcast dedicated to vulgar leftist commentary on politics and media: “Chapo Trap House.” From the beginning, the “Chapo” guys lambasted Republicans as well as Democrats, but it was their critique of liberal thinking, and the assumed Hillary Clinton ascendancy, that generated energy and attention. After the journalist Brendan James appeared on their third episode to discuss a profile he’d written about Sean Hannity, he came on board as their producer. In the first episode, Menaker said that the “Bernie and Hillary divide is a profound and deeply instructive one—I can’t see it going away.” And as Bernie Sanders’s prospects dwindled during the primary, “Chapo” assured people who were frustrated by the Democratic Party that they weren’t alone. Their audience numbers climbed. In June, the same month that Clinton became the presumptive Democratic nominee, Christman created a page for the podcast on the crowd-funding platform Patreon, offering exclusive episodes for a five-dollar monthly contribution. “Chapo” now receives nearly twenty-two thousand dollars a month, and, by their own estimates, has forty thousand listeners. They sell out live shows; a page on the popular Web site TV Tropes tracks their inside jokes about phrenology and anti-Irish racism, among other subjects. (Their most diehard fans call themselves Grey Wolves, after the fringe nationalist group in Turkey—another tossed-off joke that stuck.) Menaker quit his publishing job in July. That same month, Paste magazine labelled “Chapo Trap House” the “vulgar, brilliant demigods of the new progressive left .” A more precise label might be the Dirtbag Left, a term coined by the writer Amber A’Lee Frost, who is Biederman’s roommate, and who, this week, officially joined the “Chapo” roster. In an essay for Current Affairs , Frost argued that while vulgarity isn’t “inherently subversive ,” it can help tarnish the unearned prestige of the powerful—something that many Democrats, as well as Republicans, hunger to do. We can either “reclaim vulgarity from the Trumps of the world,” she wrote, or “find ourselves handicapped by civility.” “Chapo Trap House” has embraced this mission. “If you sleep on a mattress on the floor and fuck in a sleeping bag, then you just might be the dirtbag left!” Menaker told Paste . “If