Bill Scher is a contributing editor to Politico Magazine, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ.”

Have you lived through the past three presidents and managed to still believe that Republicans and Democrats share a single corporatist overlord? Do you casually use “neoliberal” as an insult, even though nobody has spotted a neoliberal in the wild since Gary Hart’s 1984 presidential campaign? Do you enjoy history lectures, but only when they are delivered by sarcastic, self-righteous people who conveniently omit anything that conflicts with their ideological worldview? Well then do I have the book for you!

The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts and Reason lives up to its ironic title. The freshly published polemic is co-authored by the hosts—Felix Biederman, Matt Christman, Brendan James, Will Menaker and Virgil Texas—of the socialist, satirical podcast Chapo Trap House. The podcast rakes in six figures a month from more than 20,000 Patreon subscribers. It built its following on withering takedowns of insufficiently leftist liberals who serve up “thin, flavorless gruel” in the dying news media.


The book, which aims to expand the reach of “the Chapo Way,” begins with a self-consciously over-the-top sales pitch. By imbibing the authors’ words, “you’ll become an initiate in the Chapo Mindset and take control of the neurons that govern your weak, fragile emotions.” Apparently, we should take our “Ironic Left” cult leaders seriously, but not always literally.

Yet by the end of the book, it’s hard to escape the nagging feeling that Chapo—the podcast and the book—is, at bottom, an actual, unironic infomercial scheme. They make bank by selling you a candy-coated version of socialism, one that may offend real socialists even more than liberal gruel-peddlers like myself.

The indoctrination begins with a condemnation of America’s containment of Soviet communism. The Chapo hosts act as if they are dropping truth bombs on the not-yet-woke. “People tend to forget,” offer our omniscient tour guides through history, that “South Korea was governed by a series of alternating military and civilian dictators” in the aftermath of World War II. Therefore, the Korean War, just like the entire Cold War, “was emphatically not about democracy versus totalitarianism.” It was “about capitalism versus threat to capitalism.”

Reading this, I was reminded of George F. Will (a quintessential “Bow-Tie Dipshit” according to Chapo’s pundit taxonomy) when he came across the 1992 Libertarian Party platform: “One’s spirit sags at the prospect of plowing all the over-plowed intellectual ground from late-night college arguments, long ago when we smoked French cigarettes and thought Italian movies were deep. But plow we must.”

Left out of Chapo’s two-paragraph summation of the Korean War was the small matter that it was the North that invaded the South, with Joseph Stalin’s assent, raising a real concern about the Soviet Union’s imperialist designs. Failing to check Stalin’s aggression would have had global implications for the democratic world, even though South Korea wasn’t there yet.

Also left out of the book was that the Korean War was the first test of the United Nations, which approved the military action to repel the North. While the United States bore much of the war’s burden, it was not a unilateral action out of strict national interest. In fact, United States involvement with the United Nations has much to do with the spread of democracy after World War II. During the drafting of the United Nations Charter, it was the U.S. secretary of state who overcame resistance from the British and the French to include “independence” as a goal for former colonial possessions. That seemingly symbolic gesture helped generate, in the words of one former U.N. official, “a momentum and a legitimacy to decolonization which allowed the process to be completed within 30 years” of the United Nations’ creation.

The Chapo Guide authors glibly pooh-pooh the postwar Communist threat that drove containment. “Who cares?” if the Soviets won the Cold War, they write. “Pick your dictatorship: Would you have rather lived in Fidel Castro’s Cuba or in any one of the U.S.’s many military junta police states?” Would they have applied the same logic when the U.S. allied with Stalin to repel Hitler? They were both not just run-of-the-mill dictators, but mass murderers. What’s the diff?

The answer, of course, is that geopolitics is complicated and often lacks clear-cut moral choices. Containment of the Soviet Union made sense overall even if it didn’t justify intervention in certain places, like Vietnam. Ever since America’s birth, we have grappled with the tension between our stated ideals of freedom and our government’s sometimes illiberal actions—some justifiable, some horrific—taken out of self-interest. Cherry-picking the bad data points, oversimplifying the complex and ignoring the good is a great way to slap together what the authors themselves label “potted history.” At least, when others do it.

After blaming American-led capitalism for the world’s ills, the authors take aim at their favorite target: liberals. “Why … do we hate the lib?” they ask. Because “there is a giant sucking void at the core of their being.” They add, “In place of real beliefs, liberals have guilty consciences.” Therefore, liberal reformers succeed only “when pressured—sometimes terrorized—by militant and/or popular left-wing movements.”

In their evisceration of liberals and establishment Democrats, we get the usual left-wing criticisms of the Barack Obama and Bill Clinton presidencies: The $800 billion stimulus had too many tax cuts, the Affordable Care Act is little more than a Heritage Foundation scheme, the crime bill sparked a wave of mass incarceration. Even if all of that were true, we don’t hear about how the Recovery Act stopped a Great Depression or how the increasingly popular health reform law vastly expanded coverage. We don’t learn about how the Clinton-era crime bill dramatically reduced domestic violence and banned assault weapons, and how increased incarceration was driven far more by state than by federal policies. Also unmentioned is how the Obama administration later helped liberalize criminal justice and reduce incarceration, including by enacting bipartisan (gasp) legislation to reduce racially discriminatory disparities in crack versus powder cocaine sentencing—the kind of “fucking consensus” the authors mock Obama and other liberal pragmatists for pursuing in the name of getting things done.

The Chapo crew’s romp through the history of feckless liberalism doesn’t stop with Obama and Clinton. Jimmy Carter is slammed for his deregulatory policies, while ignoring his creation of the Energy and Education departments and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, not to mention the Camp David Accords and the relinquishing of the imperialist Panama Canal Zone. Lyndon Johnson is excoriated for not just the Vietnam War, but also for the Great Society—an “oh-so-enlightened social project” that is bizarrely described as “part of the same mission” as his militaristic foreign policy and amounted only to “tepid reforms” at home.

Not even Franklin Delano Roosevelt escapes. According to the Chapo hosts, the seed of the “downfall of the liberal era was contained in its original triumph, the New Deal,” which foolishly tried to “alleviate the pain of the Depression while retaining the basic structure of capitalism—its racial caste system included.” They claim that “black people were excluded from pretty much all” of the New Deal.

This is just wrong. The New Deal was limited by the racism of the time, and it’s true that it extended segregationist policies in some areas. But it also provided ample job opportunities for African-Americans. According to Roosevelt Institute historian David Woolner, approximately 15 percent of the Works Progress Administration workforce was African-American, amounting to 350,000 jobs. The Public Works Administration implemented a quota for African-American workers in government construction contracts. Education programs ended illiteracy for more than 1 million African-Americans. By doing as much as it did for racial equality, the New Deal elevated racism as an issue for America to confront, and began the Democratic Party’s evolution into the party of civil rights and the preferred political home for most African-Americans.

But since the New Deal’s permanent expansion of government in the name of reducing poverty and expanding the middle class is not good enough and fundamentally flawed, the Chapo Way is here to give us a rigorously researched and fine-tuned alternative for not only ending wealth inequality and racism, but also ending the scourge of soul-deadening work. After slogging through 276 of the book’s 282 pages of bad history and, I hate to tell you, “tepid” jokes, the authors finally get around to their grand plan. Spoiler alert! This is literally it, in its entirety:

“After setting everyone on equal footing (by seizing the billionaires’ money, socializing their wealth, and handing the keys of production over to workers), you’re looking at an economy that requires something like a three-hour workday, with machines taking care of most of the drudgery; and—as our public fund pays for things like health care, education, scientific research, and infrastructure—all this technology actually makes work quicker, easier, and more enjoyable.”

The notion that socialism is going to slough off all that annoying labor to our forthcoming legion of robot slaves may come as a surprise to many socialists. Sen. Bernie Sanders is in the midst of popularizing among the left the idea of a “federal job guarantee” to ensure full employment, and I think it’s a safe bet those jobs will require more than three hours of daily work. It’s the Silicon Valley set (dubbed “App-Holes” by the Chapo Guide) that has been trying to promote a “universal basic income” in part to compensate for all the jobs that may be lost to automation technology. While there are some socialists who concur, and wish to separate work from pay, others have criticized universal basic income as an inefficient use of resources that undermines the deeper value of work.

The Chapo hosts’ aversion to hard work extends to this book. Why suffer the details of how this nonworkers’ paradise, free of paper pushing and ditch digging, is going to be realized, when you can take in more than $1 million a year by dressing up stale arguments and thin policy ideas with inside jokes?

The infomercial socialists of Chapo have exploited the free market expertly, and at least saved themselves from the 9-to-5 prison. There is always a market for easy solutions to complicated problems. The book’s introduction promises to “offer a vision of a new world—one in which a person can post in the morning, game in the afternoon, and podcast after dinner without ever becoming a poster, gamer or podcaster.” After reading the book, I know of five who can.