The Chapo Trap House project was started by three friends—Will Menaker, Matt Christman and Felix Biederman—who met on Twitter and founded a low-budget podcast that offered a hard-left take on the run-up to the 2016 U.S. election. A flurry of early media attention suggested that their loose mix of satire and sincerity resonated with young progressives. Paste magazine anointed the trio as “Vulgar, Brilliant Demigods of the New Progressive Left”, and profiles in publications like the New Yorker and the Guardian soon followed. In the years since the election, Chapo Trap House has taken on three more members (Brendan James, Amber A’Lee Frost, Virgil Texas), and amassed around 23,000 Patreon subscribers, who collectively donate over $100,000 every month. Now, perhaps in an attempt to prove that their esoteric brand of irony-clad analysis lends itself to more than off-the-cuff cultural critique and incessant online posting, Chapo Trap House have written a book.

The introduction to The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts and Reason promises readers a “survey [of] the blasted landscape of contemporary American politics and culture through our scientific ideology of irony, half-baked Marxism, revolutionary discipline… and posting on the internet.” The grandiose title is certainly tongue-in-cheek, but the book is a manifesto, of sorts, for anyone sick of having to marshal a sane response to an increasingly weird and scary political moment. As far as Chapo Trap House is concerned, sanity died back in 2015, when well-intentioned woke types drowned out the traditional Marxist Left with an identity-focused call-out culture and alt-right avatars nudged each other towards fascism, one frog meme at a time. The authors spent these dark days of the internet honing their ironic voice. The product is a foul-mouthed, reference-heavy, kangaroo-court-jester idiom that gives the book’s many short passages verve and sustains a brisk tempo through diverse themes of high and low culture. Although irony is held constant, readers will be kept on their toes tracking the shifting perspective of the narrator’s composite voice. A passage on the dissolution of Obama’s legacy, for example, refers to Tea Party members as “cranks, gun-fuckers, and Revolutionary War cosplayers,” before unhinging into a satirical schizo-racist rant as the typeface mutates into bathroom-cubicle scrawl that asks the reader “ARE YOU TRIGGERED?” several dozen times too many.

Political decorum and respect for one’s opponents are anathema to Chapo Trap House praxis. The book is a satirical barnstorm of the U.S.A. past and present that emphasizes the country’s pathological relationship with capitalism and pours caustic blame on both parties for the present state of the nation. “Lizard-brained” Republicans are hit with the kind of churlish bile that can chill conservative blood while the “bloodless liberals” of the Democratic Party are exposed as ineffectual wonks, equipped only to “keep inheriting power” and having, once they lost it, “no tools or vision for getting [it] back”. Any Left-of-Centre or Centrist Democrat readers still loyal to the leaders that failed them may learn a thing or two about liberalism as they’re dragged by the lanyards through a wars-and-all history of their political tradition. The intention is to dispel a prevailing myth that liberals have forever been the emissaries of progress and social justice and draw attention to their “strong record of liking ethnic food, bombing ethnic countries, privatizing education, and gutting welfare”. The current administration takes a mandatory hammering, but the book’s tendency to bring up the war crimes and civil-rights failures of past presidents embarrasses the ascendant idea that pre-Trump politics was a paragon of decency (as does their recent podcast on the late Senator John McCain).

Some readers, including even hardcore fans of the podcast, will find the book’s style self-indulgent—arcane references and in-jokes riddle every chapter and absurd fictions bookend moments of solid analysis without any shift in tone to tip off casual readers. However, composing a unified style from the voices of five individual authors (Frost is not one of the writers) is a difficult stunt to pull off, and one they manage capably for 300-odd pages. The book is also a rich source for anyone curious about the White House’s ongoing political circus, and the cultural factors influencing an increasing number of young American Leftists. As growing membership of the Democratic Socialists of America and electoral victories for candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez show, they are not going away any time soon.