IOWA CITY — The people in the crowd were angry, and “Chapo Trap House” wanted them to stay that way. The five hosts of the popular socialist podcast wanted everyone to know they had all been lied to. About everything.
The media they consumed was fake news aimed to distract them from the only war worth fighting: the class war. Politesse, civility, even pleasure — those were tools of the neoliberal oppressor. The right answer is rage.
“That joy,” the Chapo co-host Will Menaker said to the crowd gathered in Iowa City on the eve of the Iowa caucus. “That’s good but it’s not as good a motivator when you’re really going to war as spite.”
“Let the hate feed you,” the co-host Amber A’Lee Frost added as the audience roared.
And it does. Especially toward other Democrats.
Supporters of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. are “gelatinous 100-year-olds.”
Former Mayor Pete Buttigieg is “a bloodless asexual.”
“The gayest thing about him is he descends from an ethnic group that’s like a little toy dog,” Ms. A’Lee Frost said.
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When Senator Elizabeth Warren’s name came up, the crowd made the sound of a snake hissing. She had accused Senator Bernie Sanders of saying that a woman could not beat President Trump, and so she is a snake.
“Yes, my sssssoldiers,” Mr. Menaker said.
Former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s run appalls them. “Beat him so badly that this midget gremlin won’t even have a shot even with a trillion dollars,” Mr. Menaker said.
“Kill him,” someone shouted from the audience. These were jokes, of course. Everyone was laughing.
As Mr. Sanders rises in the polls and claims strong showings in early states, a new set of media stars is on the rise, too. Leading the pack are the hosts of “Chapo Trap House,” the Pied Pipers of the candidate’s online movement.
In their rowdy, vulgar weekly podcast, they are stoking the fires of a political insurgency led by their 78-year-old idol. The man stands for the movement, the movement is the man.
“Our boy Bernie” they call him.
The fivesome of “Chapo Trap House" are not the only bards of the new American left — there is “Red Scare” and another whose name cannot be printed — but they have led the way for a movement that together generates millions of dollars a year. They are on their way to becoming the socialist’s answer to right-wing shock jock radio. Their primary targets, in evidence at that show in Iowa, are not the Republican Party or even Mr. Trump but rather centrist liberals, whom they see as the major obstacle to a workers’ revolution.
In blurring occasionally violent humor, jovial community meetups and radical politics, they are the Tea Party reborn for progressives, and for their fans the appeal is in a bawdy offensive balance to cautious mainstream liberal politics.
They are known collectively as the Dirtbag Left, a shorthand they embrace that winkingly dispenses with any notion of liberal purity or inclusion, a defense mechanism that doubles as a nickname.
Most of the podcast fans would never say out loud what they are listening to onstage or through their AirPods on the commute. It’s offensive, even as a joke.
So why do so many progressives want to hear it?
The anti-establishment establishment
“Chapo Trap House,” which started in 2016, typically runs between 60 and 90 minutes. Two episodes are released every week, one for free and one for the nearly 38,000 people who pay $5 a month through the crowdfunding site Patreon. It leads to a financial windfall for the self-professed socialists who are harnessing this rage: $168,800 a month from those subscribers alone.
The main draw of the show is their banter, the hosts distilling the news of the week and checking in on their favorite and least favorite characters. But they have had major guests, including Mr. Sanders himself.
“These people on top are so powerful that the only way we bring them down, the only way we make the kinds of transformation this country absolutely requires is when millions of people are prepared to stand up and fight back,” Mr. Sanders said during his interview.
And the Sanders campaign maintains a close relationship with the podcast. His senior adviser, David Sirota, and his national press secretary, Briahna Joy Gray, have also been on the podcast. At the Iowa show, a Sanders volunteer stood at the door with fliers and pins to hand out and an email list to gather names.
Their followers — on the night in Iowa City more than 700 strong — come to hear them rage for three hours against the student debt, the high rent, the dead-end creative class jobs, and the feeling of hopelessness fighting against a liberal political establishment that seems polite when they are angry.
They were promised a better life, a more dignified life, and they are done waiting for it.
And for fans, it brings a sense of strength and community during a political era that has only felt like defeat.
“It’s really easy to feel alone in America. It’s the loneliest place in the loneliest time,” the co-host Felix Biederman said, speaking of the early days of their work. “But eventually people started to gather around all these posts into the void.”
The podcast has also morphed into a touring political rally: In addition to the Iowa show, the Chapo crew went to New Hampshire and Nevada, and they have a handful of dates in California leading up to Super Tuesday, filling large venues.
The topic is inequality, raging against the rich.
Progressives who are more concerned with racial equality or gender parity have had to figure out how to either go against the Dirtbag movement or resign themselves to this singular focus, which occasionally runs roughshod over all the rest.
“I’m a news junkie, and it’s good to supplement that with joking especially in America where everyone has to be so careful about what they say,” said Steven Sutro, a 32-year-old lawyer, who attended a comedy show last summer that featured a popular Dirtbag Left podcast host.
Julius Krein, the conservative founder of the new publication American Affairs, has noticed the new allies.
“There is a lot of interesting convergence on some of the anti-woke thinking and many things that, perhaps surprisingly, we agree on, for different reasons,” he said. One of the Chapo hosts contributed a piece to his magazine.
“It’s fairly easy to have fun, pretty exciting dialogue between right-wing anti-neoliberals and left-wing anti-neoliberals.”
But what some call an exciting dialogue can feel exclusionary to others.
“‘Chapo Trap House,’ the entire Dirtbag Left, have tapped that male privilege of intimidating people into assuming you’re cool,” said Amanda Marcotte, a liberal feminist writer for Salon. “It reminds me of when we pretended that ‘Jackass’ was funny back in the day, just so dudes wouldn’t bully you about not liking it.” (Ms. Marcotte has been vocal in her criticism of “Chapo Trap House” and is the subject of mocking attention from the Dirtbag universe.)
As it grows in influence, the Dirtbag Left movement is now running into several challenges.
The movement’s identity is based on being in the wilderness. What happens if its leaders become the establishment? That seems increasingly possible as Mr. Sanders holds on to front-runner status in the 2020 campaign. They want what Mr. Sanders wants: universal health care, canceled student loans, free college, and an overhaul of the tax system. They want to cut the national prison population by half and to install a ban on fracking. And for them anything less than this is nothing at all.
These Sanders supporters eschew the idea of party unity as a scam: “I won’t vote for anyone but Bernie in the general, can’t say what the hundreds of thousands of people who listen to my show will do, but I’m only speaking for myself,” Mr. Menaker wrote on Twitter a day after the Iowa caucuses.
