A Eulogy for Chapo
The NYC podcast scene lost a real one
There’s a good chance that, unless you’ve been ensconsed in left wing twitter culture for the last 7 years, you’ve never heard of Chapo Trap House. It’s a New York based podcast featuring several sardonic leftist figures who opine on the state of progressivism in current day America. Which means they basically just excoriate the Democratic establishment for knee-capping Bernie for two election cycles in a row, and accuse upper middle class NIMBYs of being genocidal fascists for enjoying Cheesecake Factory while Africans starve. They are the progenitors of online ironybro culture, every time you see some aloof thirty-something middle manager making excuses for crackheads on public transit and telling MAGA uncles to “have a normal one” you have Chapo to thank.
The other day Matt Christman, one of the Chapo hosts, suffered a medical episode that was determined to be either a stroke or an overdose on fentanyl laced cocaine depending on who you asked. Looking over Matt’s physical appearance and online presence it’s not surprising to see the unrestrained glee the online right experienced upon seeing one of their ideological opponents reduced to a pudding-headed vegetable.
Matt and the Chapo guys wanted to distance themselves from the sects of extremely online leftists who comprised a large part of the anti-fascist movement. They didn’t want to stench of dilators or hammer and sickle pride flags anywhere near their intellectual project. Chapo was just about standing in solidarity with proles, stimulant addiction, trying to meme Bernie into the White House, and dunking on Hillary and her legions of shills, not posting threads about the genocide of queer, disabled, POC womxn. Some rightoids initially looked at Chapo and their aversion to associating with fringe left elements as an indication that a sort of Red/Brown alliance could be formed, after all we all hate guys like Bob Chipman right? But, when push came to shove, the Chapo guys, espescially Matt, revealed themselves as being as compliant with the globohomo agenda as all the redditors and WASPy libs they hated.
Matt, unlike his cohosts, had midwestern roots and it clearly bothered him to come from a place where you had to settle for buying late night taquitos in a 7-11 rather than a piss stained bodega. He could wear a Yankees hat and pound down Manhattans at McSorley’s as much as he wanted but he was a Wisconsin boy through and through. He came from a place where Culver’s butter burgers and Brett Favre were cultural staples and he seemed to compensate for it by lashing out at middle Americans, even his family wasn’t safe from his mediocre White man rage.
Chapo and it’s hosts may exist in relative obscurity, but they have their fans among sects of the terminally online. But what is Chapo’s real affect on the discourse in meatspace? If you were to walk up to someone on the street and ask them if they listened to any podcasts except Rogan’s would Chapo be on the list? Would they even know what you were talking about? As for myself I remember overhearing people talking about Chapo years ago in a hipster bar near Detroit, but that neighborhood was heavily progressive so it wasn’t too surprising the show had a foothold there. As for Matt’s fans many regarded him as a Marxist intellectual in the vein of Richard Wolff or Noam Chomsky, laying praise on him and his rants about capitalist exploitation from his dimly lit apartment. It’s really nauseating to see he/hims fawn over a doped up slob who got rich by podcasting just because he also pays lip service to progressive causes.
Matt hated all the conservative shibboleths and expressed frustration at your average Joe not fully embracing his specific cloistered lib worldview. In Matt’s eyes, If your regular American slob was disillusioned with the country’s liberal power structures it was his own fault for wanting “treats” too much. But it’s always a safe move to shit all over conservative dummies that no one really likes, millions of tweets are posted everyday taking aim at some doofus in his sixties with a Trump sign in his yard and a new truck paid for with his son’s college tuition. But Matt, at least in years past, was brave enough to dunk on someone other than Bob and Tammy from Ohio…
Looks like our boy really needs to touch grass! No, but in all seriousness it’s just another example of a popular leftist figure taking a swipe at someone occupying a higher tier on the victim hierarchy than themselves and angering the activist subset on twitter. Nick Mullen can pull off the disaffected sarcastic leftist routine to a T, Christman? Not so much. And of course twitter progs would never forget such a slight even from a guy who agrees with them on 99% of issues, some even going to far as to post Pikachu memes at a man recovering in a hospital.
It’s eternally funny to me to see a guy who helped build a key progressive brand online that introduced thousands of internet users to leftist thought still get flak from their supposed ideological peers over some throwaway tweet from almost a decade ago. It’s like all those instances where some Antifa douche gets brutalized by a member of one of the oppressed groups they were so desperately advocating for. Matt made plenty of enemies on the right with his snide commentary on Trump and conservatism at large but at the end of the day he and his podcasting cohorts are still part of the same white, male, and stale patriarchy that draws ire from low IQ non-white progs.
Being an irony leftist means riding the line between being a cool and chill dudebro who owns chuds and full libtardation in the face of encroaching “fascism”. Which is defined, in this case, as the phenomenon of more White Americans wondering why exactly they have to sell theirs and their childrens futures down the line to accomodate for an infinite stream of migrants. Matt and Chapo spend a lot of energy telling their fans that said phenomenon is the result of the White man worrying that he’s losing control. They downplay it as if it isn’t a serious concern or exacerbated by an increasingly non white PMC amplifying anti-White rhetoric constantly. Matt could crack jokes about this messaging from the lib establishment as much as he wanted, he’s still an apologist for the regime that wants to overrun this country with undesirables and he fully deserves the hate he gets.
I understand that Matt is about to become a father and his family have to contend with his illness as well as welcome his daughter into the world, but he can still get fucked. I’m not going to have empathy for a guy who, if a right wing figure were in a similar position, would eagerly shit all over them for twitter dopamine. Matt’s situation is a warning for all politically aware Millennial guys that even if you’re a podcasting kingpin you can still get waylaid by an extremely unhealthy lifestyle and get dunked on by not only racists, but your fellow progs as well. At least the racists don’t delude themselves into thinking that there’s some coalition to be built with the ridiculous freaks who occupy the fringe left, Matt will be associated with them until the day he dies which may be sooner rather than later. Press F for the liberal project!
