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 you’re the only dude at a function not wearing a pocket square in a linen blazer and adulting like a boss, then you’re in the dirtbag left!” People who belong to the Dirtbag Left, Christman said, aren’t afraid “to offend the sensibilities of ‘leftist’ language police whose only goal is sabotaging social solidarity in order to maintain their brands as arbiters of good taste and acceptable speech.”

The “Chapo” guys loathe the unctuous sanctimony that can descend on liberal politics—a tone they associate with Clinton and certain corners of the mainstream media. According to “Chapo,” liberals humiliated themselves when they urged Trump protesters in Chicago to behave. Liberals were fools for piously donating to the fire-bombed North Carolina G.O.P. office in October, putting their desire to project civility over the ongoing reality of voter suppression in the state. On the podcast and on Twitter, they have made the case, over and over, that the way the Democratic Party leans on celebrity and pop culture is misguided and embarrassing.

“Chapo Trap House” refuses to provide the kind of “Daily Show”-style catharsis that dissipates frustration en masse. “It was useful at the time,” Menaker told me, referring to the style of right-ridiculing political comedy that was defined by Jon Stewart. “But the Obama years really revealed the limits of that type of humor.” Smarm, not evil, was the new target.

I went to meet the “Chapo” guys at the headquarters of the annotation platform Genius, in Gowanus, Brooklyn. I found them outside smoking cigarettes in the sun. It was Election Day. We walked upstairs and sat on couches overlooking a white industrial event space where, a few hours later, they’d put on a show. Menaker, who is thirty-three, told me that fans are drawn to the podcast because the hosts have “no special obligation to be nice to anyone, or get a pat on the head, or”—and here he briefly affected the voice of an aristocrat—“have a fine debate with mon conservative frère.” He rolled his eyes and mimed masturbation. “My reaction to that is a jack-off motion so hard it opens a portal into another dimension.”

Their argument is inextricable from the way in which they make it. But when an ethos of vulgarity is enthusiastically practiced by a group of white men, this will sometimes translate as chauvinism. Particular strains of “Chapo” invective can be hard to take—people are “pussies,” or they’re “retarded.” Botanical gardens are “gay,” Hillary Clinton is “a freak.” The caricature of the “Bernie bro”—an aggressively disaffected white guy who hates Clinton ostensibly because of her neoliberal incrementalism but deep down because of her gender—occasionally seems to apply. The very name of the podcast—as well as its theme song, a vaporwave remix of Gucci Mane—suggests a dismissive attitude toward identity politics. They are, after all, three white guys.

“Four_ _white guys,” James, the producer, said.

“Politifact rates this claim as ‘mostly true,’ ” Menaker added.

“It depends on how you classify the Scots-Irish,” Christman said. Then he became serious. Representation in the media is a real issue, he said, but one that mostly applies to large institutions like the Times or CNN, where barriers to entry preserve gender and racial hierarchies. By contrast, Christman said, “we are literally just dudes who just do this.” In any case, on the Monday following the election, “Chapo Trap House” announced that Frost and another frequent guest, the comedian Virgil Texas, would officially join as co-hosts. (After meeting Texas, I had assumed that he had some Asian heritage. When I texted him to ask if I could describe him as Asian-American, he explained that he didn’t “self-ID” as such, but that he “wouldn’t be offended” if I did.)