Editor’s note: while I’ve certainly been away from Can’t You Read for quite a while, anyone who follows my work at ninaillingworth.com or my Patreon blog already knows that I’ve been writing (and podcasting) again. You can check out some of my latest essays here, here and here; to listen to the podcast I co-host with Nick Galea (No Fugazi) just click here.

Today however I’m back on my bookworm bullsh*t with another curiously dated review of left wing literature from my extensive library of pinko pontification. In today’s review, we’re going to be taking a look at “The Chapo Guide to Revolution: a Manifesto Against Logic, Facts and Reason” written by five members of the popular left wing podcast “Chapo Trap House” - specifically, Felix Beiderman, Matt Christman, Brendan James, Will Menaker and Virgil Texas.





Baby Steps up the Ramparts

It is I will theorize, utterly impossible to write a review about the Chapo Trap House book without engaging in the extremely online, three-sided culture war that has sprung up around both “the Chapos” themselves and the enormously popular podcast they host. In light of the fact that seemingly everyone on the internet who detests the show regard the Chapos as slovenly crackpot losers born on third base and podcasting from mom’s basement, it really is alarming how much digital ink has been spilled about the various types of “threat” to all that is good and holy this simple irony-infused podcast supposedly represents. While I intend to largely sidestep that discussion by focusing entirely on the book and not the podcast (which I don’t listen to regularly, to be honest with you), I accept that virtually nobody reading this is going to be happy unless I do something to address the elephant in the room, so here goes:

Neera Tanden and her winged neoliberal monkeys can eat sh*t, but extremely online leftists have a point that the Chapos themselves occasionally skirt the line between mockingly ironic reactionary thought and just plain old reactionary thought; although this is not particularly alarming to me because they’re Americans and America itself is a breeding ground for reactionary ideas – decolonizing your mind is a process and I’m pretty sure it’s one I myself am also engaging in still every single day of my life at this point. Importantly, in my opinion this failing does not make them cryptofascists so much as the product of American affluence; I’m having a hard time understanding how teaching Marx and Zinn to Twitter reply guys serves the fascist agenda in any meaningful way.



While I obviously can’t pretend to know another person’s heart, in my opinion the Chapo boys are definitely leftists but they’re obviously not labor class and yes it’s a little hard to explain away the group’s loose affiliation with the (objectively strasserist) Red Scare podcast through co-host Amber A'Lee Frost - but I’m not going to waste a couple thousand words trying to untangle Brooklyn independent media drama from half a country away and besides, Amber didn’t write this book. Despite these critiques however, I think it’s important to note that under no circumstances am I prepared to accept the argument that with fascists to the right of me, and lanyards, um also to the right, the real problem here is… Chapo Trap House.

Ok, with that out of the way let’s dive right in and talk about the question I think most folks who’ve written about The Chapo Guide to Revolution have largely failed to grasp – namely, what kind of book is it precisely? Combining elements of comedy, playful online trolling, historical analysis, political theory and good old-fashioned cross platform promotional marketing, the book has often lead critics to compare it to catch-all comedic efforts like Joe Stewart’s “America” or even humorous men’s lifestyle advice texts like “Max Headroom’s Guide to Life.” This is I think an essential misreading of the fundamentally earnest and direct tone the book actually takes in its efforts to reach a fledgling audience growing more receptive to left wing ideas. The Chapo Guide to Revolution is, as the cover says, a manifesto; but rather than serving as the mission statement for a particular formed political ideology, the Chapos have written an extremely effective, entry-level argument for why labor-class millennials should be leftists – and, of course, why they should listen to Chapo Trap House; this is still a cross-promotional work after all.

Naturally as befits a book about a comedy podcast, albeit a very political one, the Chapo Guide to Revolution is an extremely funny book that does a remarkable job translating the type of caustic online humor previously only found in left wing Twitter circles, onto the written page. While its certainly true that this quirky style of comedy can be a little difficult to grasp for the uninitiated, and typically a cross-promotional work of this type will get bogged down in self-referential humor and inside jokes, the book mostly avoids this trap by sticking with the basics and assuming that the reader has literally never heard an episode of Chapo Trap House, which in turn makes the humor fairly universal and extremely accessible – at least for anyone under the age of fifty. This endeavor is greatly aided by the dark and dystopian, yet hilariously eviscerating art of Eli Valley; a man who himself has since become one of the leading left wing critics of establishment power online through his extremely provocative sketches and ink work.

The truth however is that if the Chapo Guide to Revolution was merely just a funny book, I wouldn’t be reviewing it here today. No, the reason this book is worth writing about at all lies in the fact that underneath all the jokes, taunts and “half-baked Marxism” lies an objectively brilliant work of historical analysis, cultural critique and left wing political theory – albeit an unfocused theory that borrows heavily from half a dozen functionally incompatible left wing thinkers and literary giants, but a fundamentally serious work of political philosophy nonetheless.

Yes, that’s correct; I said brilliant. Where think-tank minions and neoliberal swine in the corporate media see a petulant pinko tantrum, and online leftist academics see privileged dudebros appropriating Marx (poorly), I see a brilliant and yet stealthy synthesis of political theories, historical analysis and organizational ideas originally presented by writers like Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and Thomas Frank. Drawing on historical theories from Marx, Gramsci and Rocker, the Chapos have cobbled together a rudimentary political philosophy that represents a crude and yet promising welding of anarchist concepts about labor, Marxist concepts about economics and democratic socialist concepts about politics, collected together under the generic banner of “socialism.”

At this point some of you are undoubtedly snickering, but please bear with me for a moment here because what the Chapos (or their ghostwriter) have done in this book is truly a marvelous thing to behold precisely because you can’t see it unless you’re paying close attention. By positioning The Chapo Guide to Revolution as both a comedic work and an introductory level text, the authors have created a sort of unique crash course in left wing history, geopolitics, philosophy and political theory for a newly awakened generation of Americans who find themselves increasingly politicized whether they like it or not.

Underneath the acerbic millennial humor, “extremely online” diction and unrelenting waves of sarcasm, The Chapo Guide to Revolution is also a surprisingly accurate “CliffsNotes” style textbook presentation of multiple broad-based social science subjects – here are just a few examples:





In “Chapter One: World” the book presents a rudimentary and yet deliciously insightful history of post-World War II American empire that draws on authors like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, with a touch of contemporary writers like Greg Grandin and Naomi Klein. In particular the attention devoted to condensing the target audience’s formative experiences with empire like the War on Terror, the invasion of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, into a short and coherent narrative that can be easily shared with other novice political observers makes this book an invaluable resource for budding millennial leftists Additionally, while it certainly might have been an accident, the Chapos’ choice to wrap this “Pig Empire geopolitics for newbs” lesson in a protracted joke about America as an extremely ruthless corporate startup at least touches on ideas presented by writers like Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Sheldon Wollin (or Chris Hedges repeating Sheldon Wolin), Joel Bakan, Rosa Luxemburg and others.

In Chapters Two and Three, entitled “Libs” and “Cons” respectively, the authors conduct a remarkably thorough political science lesson on the two major mainstream political “ideologies” in American culture, including both a rough outline of their history and their modern calcification inside the Democratic and Republican parties. Of course both of these sections rely heavily on the personal experiences of the authors growing up in a politicized America, but these discussions also dip into the works of Thomas Frank and Cory Robin to explore and critique the liberal and conservative political mindset respectively; in particular the Chapos summary of Robin’s work on the conservative worship of hierarchies is an inspired distillation. More importantly however, the Chapos also expose the way in which these two ideologies represent a false dichotomy within the greater confines of a larger capitalist socioeconomic order; which is of course a (still absolutely correct) idea straight out of the works of Karl Marx.

In Chapter Six, appropriately entitled “work” the authors engaged in a disarmingly earnest discussion about wage slavery, the false promises of the protestant work ethic and the history of terrible jobs available to the labor class under various iterations of the capitalist project. This is followed by a humorous, but dystopian review of what future jobs might look like if the neoliberal socioeconomic order continues on as it has so far, and an extremely brief but sincerely argued pitch for completely transforming the role of work in society through some from of technologically assisted anarcho-communism. This last idea is admittedly a little half-baked but you have to admire their balls when the Chapo boys flatly call for a three hour workday; a position that will undoubtedly be popular with the labor class who’re currently engaged in all those sh*tty jobs the book describes earlier in the chapter. Once again this synthesis of left wing ideas about work does represent a new and unique formulation, but despite the humorous and original content you can also clearly see the influence of anarchist writers like Kropotkin, Rocker and Goldman in this chapter, as well as contemporary authors like David Graeber and Mark Blyth.







Unfortunately, if there is a downside to writing a brilliantly subversive comedy book that functions as a “my little lefty politics primer” for politically awakening millennials, it’s that you simply don’t have the space for an intellectually rigorous examination of all the ideas you’re sharing – there is after all a big difference between reading the Cliff Notes version of Zinn, Chomsky or Marx, and reading the original theories in their full form. Furthermore, the individual life experiences, idiosyncrasies and humor styles of the authors do at times bleed into the text in a way that I personally suspect was detrimental to the overall analysis. Here’s a short list of “sour notes” I found in this otherwise remarkable book:





From what I have listened to of the Chapo Trap House podcast, it has always been my impression that the Chapos were particularly effective critics of American corporate media, so I was a little disappointed that the chapter on media in The Chapo Guide to Revolution was a fairly tepid and narrow discussion about (admittedly vapid) bloggers turned celebrated pundits. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure power dunking on the likes of Matty Yglesias, Meagan McArdell and Andrew Sullivan was viscerally satisfying for the book’s target audience, but there’s really not much of a broader critique of the media’s ideological role in American capitalism and culture here like one would find in Herman & Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent”, Matt Taibbi’s “Hate Inc” or Michael Parenti’s “Inventing Reality.” This absence I fear has the tragic side effect of reinforcing the idea the American corporate media sucks because egg-shaped moron bougie pundits are bad at their job and not because of the inherent failings of the for-profit media model and the institution’s true role as an ideological shepherd keeping the masses aligned with the goals of elite capital and the ruling classes – almost exclusively against the bests interests of the labor class.

The introduction is written in what I can only assume is a sarcastic imitation of right-leaning self improvement books with a touch of Tyler Durden’s Fight Club ethos thrown in; this might have been a better choice in a completely different book but it’s largely out of place with the rest of this book. At this point I should also say that the best part about the Kidzone intermission is that it was only two pages long. Needless to say, neither one of these sections did anything for me whatsoever.

While it’s entirely possible that at forty-three years of age, I’m simply too old to really get the “millenialness” of the chapter on Culture, the simple truth is that I found most of it to be a fairly useless examination of pop culture influences the Chapos hold in reasonably high esteem. As someone who isn’t particularly engaged in watching lengthy television series or regularly playing video games, I really couldn’t dig into most of the material presented and the less said about the art jokes and the bizarre absurdist discussion of elevator brands, the better. There is however one rather notable exception here in the brief essay on The Sorkin Mindset, which is an objectively brilliant evisceration of the liberal obsession with the West Wing and the tragic effect that obsession has had on Democratic Party politics – this really could have gone in the chapter on “Libs” because it’s that valuable of a tool for understanding and critiquing the modern liberal lanyard worldview. Finally I guess I should note that while the Chapo boys’ insightful critique of the vapid “prestige TV” phenomenon is both interesting and correct, it really only “matters” if you’re a consumer of these types of series – and I’m not.

While I certainly understand the authors’ decision to use their notes section to preemptively debunk bullsh*t complaints about the more outrageous accusations they level against the American establishment, I would have liked to see a “recommended reading” section. It is very clear that the Chapos have a reasonably strong background in imperial history, political science and labor theory and I feel like pointing readers towards writers who expand on the theories they summarize in The Chapo Guide to Revolution might have been a better use of space than printing links to old internet articles bad faith actors will never type into a search engine anyway.







Although it might seem like there was more about the book I didn’t like, than I did, this is a little misleading – the first three chapters of The Chapo Guide to Revolution are pure fire and comprise over half of the volume. If you throw in the brilliant chapter about work and labor theory, the overall package is far more substance than style, despite the fact that it remains humorous and a little bit edgy throughout the book. While it’s certainly fair to say that an introductory primer on why you should be a leftist for newly-politicized millennials isn’t a must-read for everyone, the simple truth is that the vast majority of online leftists I know could learn a thing or two from this rudimentary synthesis of various left wing ideas into the seeds of a working, modern political ideology compatible with a uniquely Americanized, millennial left.

While no three hundred page comedy book written by five podcasters from Brooklyn is going to teach you everything there is to know about socialism and left wing ideology, there’s something to be said for offering an accessible, entry-level alternative tailor-made for a target demographic already being heavily recruited by the fascists. As a starting point for exploring left wing political thought, you could do a lot worse than The Chapo Guide to Revolution and for a generation of kids who’ve mostly been encouraged to be passive accomplices to their own subjugation while blaming their misery on anyone even more powerless than they are, there is perhaps nothing more valuable than a condensed narrative that explores how to even think about another way to live.

Remarkably, this book finds a way to deliver on that monumental task while simultaneously failing to grasp one single relevant thing about the cherished American novel Moby Dick. Despite this infuriating literary myopia and insolence, this still might literally be the best book ever written for young American leftists who simply aren’t going to spend ten years reading academic literature written by dead white guys from Germany and Russia.



- nina illingworth







Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus.



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