#based on the crackpot theories of marxists

[slug-enthusiast]

I

women have been making fun of men on tiktok for the way they raise their hand in class and i have been having a ball watching men getting all pissy in their response videos, saying, "what do you want us to do???"

like, oh? is it frustrating being made fun of for the smallest of things? is it annoying that something as minor as how you raise your hand is being mocked? god, it must feel like you're being made fun of for just existing.

[mightyflamethrower]

At the nexus of most of America’s current crises, the diversity/equity/inclusion dogma can be found.

The southern border has been destroyed because the Democratic Party wanted the poor of the southern hemisphere to be counted in the census, to vote if possible in poorly audited mail-in elections, and to build upon constituencies that demand government help. Opposition to such cynicism and the de facto destruction of enforcement of U.S. immigration law is written off as “racism,” “nativism,” and “xenophobia.”

The military is short more than 40,000 soldiers. The Pentagon may fault youth gangs, drug use, or a tight labor market. But the real shortfall is mostly due inordinately to reluctant white males who have been smeared by some of the military elite as suspected “white supremacists,” despite dying at twice their demographics in Iraq and Afghanistan. And they are now passing on joining up despite their families’ often multigenerational combat service.

The nexus between critical race theory and critical legal theory has been, inter alia, defunding the police, Soros-funded district attorneys exempting criminals from punishment, the legitimization of mass looting, squatters’ rights, and general lawlessness across big-city America.

The recent epidemic of anti-Semitism was in part birthed by woke/DEI faculty and students on elite campuses, who declared Hamas a victim of “white settler” victimizing Israel and thus contextualized their Jewish hatred by claiming that as “victims,” they cannot be bigots.

There is a historic, malevolent role of states adjudicating political purity, substituting racial, sex, class, and tribal criteria for meritocracy. They define success or failure not based on actual outcomes but on the degree of orthodox zealotry. Once governments enter that realm of the surreal, the result is always an utter disaster.

After a series of disastrous military catastrophes in 1941 and 1942, Soviet strongman and arch-communist Joseph Stalin ended the Soviet commissar system in October 1942. He reversed course to give absolute tactical authority to his ground commanders rather than to the communist overseers, as was customary.

Stalin really had no choice since Marxist-Leninist ideology overriding military logic and efficacy had ensured that the Soviet Union was surprised by a massive Nazi invasion in June 1941. The Russians in the first 12 months of war subsequently lost nearly 5 million in vast encirclements—largely because foolhardy, ideologically driven directives curtailed the generals’ operational control of the army. After the commissars were disbanded and commanders given greater autonomy, the landmark victory at Stalingrad followed, and with it, the rebound of the Red Army.

One reason why the dictator Napoleon ran wild in Europe for nearly 18 years was that his marshals of France were neither selected only by the old Bourbon standards of aristocratic birth and wealth nor by new ideological revolutionary criteria, but by more meritocratic means than those of his rival nations.

Mao’s decade-long cultural revolution (1966–76) ruined China. It was predicated on Maoist revolutionary dogma overruling economic, social, cultural, and military realities. An entire meritocracy was deemed corrupted by the West and reactionary—and thus either liquidated or rendered inert.

In their place, incompetent zealots competed to destroy all prior standards as “bourgeois” and “counter-revolutionary.” It is no surprise that the current “people’s liberation army,” for all its talk of communist dogma, does not function entirely on Mao’s principles.

Muammar Gaddafi wrecked Libya by reordering an once oil-rich nation on Gaddafi’s crackpot rules of his “Green Book.” At times, the unhinged ideologue, in lunatic fashion, required all Libyans to raise chickens or to destroy all the violins in the nation. I once asked a Libyan why the oil-rich country appeared to me utterly wrecked, and he answered, “We first hire our first cousins—and usually the worst.”

There were many reasons why the King-Cotton, slave-owning Old South lagged far behind the North in population, productivity, and infrastructure. But the chief factor was the capital and effort invested in the amoral as well as uneconomic institution of slavery.

After the Civil War, persistent segregationist ideology demanded vast amounts of time, labor, and money in defining race down to the “one drop” rule—while establishing a labyrinth of segregation laws and refusing to draw on the talents of millions of black citizens.

Yet here we are in 2024, ignoring the baleful past as the woke diversity/equity/inclusion commissars war on merit. Institutions from United Airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration to the Pentagon and elite universities have been reformulated in the post-George Floyd woke hysteria. And to the delight of competitors and enemies abroad, they are now using criteria other than merit to hire, promote, evaluate, and retain.

The greatest problem historically with hiring and promoting based on DEI-like dogma is that anti-meritocratic criteria mark the beginning, not the end, of eroding vital standards. If one does not qualify for a position or slot by accepted standards, then a series of further remedial interventions are needed to sustain the woke project, from providing exceptions and exemptions, changing rules and requirements, and misleading the nation that a more “diverse” math, or more “inclusive” engineering, or more “equity” in chemistry can supplant mastery of critical knowledge that transcends gender, race, or ideology.

But planes either fly or crash due to proper operation, not the appearance or politics of the operator. All soldiers either hit or miss targets, and engineers either make bridges that stand or collapse on the basis of mastering ancient scientific canons and acquired skills, training, and aptitude that have nothing to do with superficial appearance, or tribal affinities, or religion, or doctrine.

The common denominator of critical theories, from critical legal theory to critical social theory, is toxic nihilism, which claims there are no absolute standards, only arbitrary rules and regulations set up by a privileged, powerful class to exploit “the other.” Yet, not punishing looting has nothing to do with race or class, but everything with corroding timeless deterrence that always has and always will prevent the bullying strong from preying on the weak and vulnerable.

Defunding the police sent a message to any criminally minded that in a cost-to-benefit risk assessment, the odds were now on the side of the criminal not being caught for his crimes—and so crime soared and the vulnerable of the inner city became easy prey.

Another danger of DEI is the subordination of the individual to the collective. We are currently witnessing an epidemic of DEI racism in which commissars talk nonstop of white supremacy/rage/privilege without any notion of enormous differences among 230 million individual Polish-, Greek-, Dutch-, Basque-, or Armenian-Americans, or the class, political, and cultural abyss that separates those in Martha’s Vineyard from their antitheses in East Palestine, Ohio.

Moreover, what is “whiteness” in an increasingly intermarried and multiracial society? Oddly, something akin to the old one-drop rules of the South is now updated to determine victims and victimizers—to the point of absurdity. Who is white—someone one half-Irish, one half Mexican—who is black—someone one quarter Jamaican, three-quarters German? To find answers, DEI czars must look to paradigms of the racist past for answers.

Moreover, once any group is exempted and not held to collective standards by virtue of its superficial appearance, then the nation naturally witnesses an increase in racism and bigotry—on the theory that it is not racist to racially stigmatize a supposedly “racist” collective. And we are already seeing an uptake in racially motivated interracial violence as criminals interpret the trickle-down theory of reparatory justice as providing exemption for opportunistic violence.

Throughout history, it has always been the most mediocre and opportunistic would-be commissars that appear to come forth when meritocracy vanishes. If there was not a Harvard President and plagiarist like Claudine Gay to trumpet and leverage her DEI credentials, she would have to be invented. If there was not a brilliant, non-DEI economist like Roland Fryer to be hounded and punished by her, he would have to be invented.

The DEI conglomerate has little idea of the landmines it is planting daily by reducing differences in talent, character, and morality into a boring blueprint of racial stereotypes. Punctuality is now “white time” and supposedly pernicious. The SAT, designed to give the less privileged a meritocratic pathway to college admissions, is deemed racist and either discarded or warped.

In its absence, universities are quietly now “reimaging” their curriculum to make it more “relevant to today’s students” and, of course, “more inclusive and more diverse.” Translated from the language of Oceania, that means after admitting tens of thousands to the nation’s elite schools who did not meet the universities’ own prior standards that they themselves once established and apprehensive about terminating such students, higher education is now euphemistically lowering the work load in classes, introducing new less rigorous classes, and inflating grades. In their virtue-signaling, they have little clue that inevitably their once prized and supposedly prestigious degrees will be rendered less valued as employers discover a Harvard, Stanford, or Princeton BA or BS is not a guarantee of academic excellence or mastery of vital skill sets.

Toxic tribalism is also, unfortunately, like nuclear proliferation. Once one group goes full tribal, others may as well, if for no reason than their own self-survival in a balkanized, Hobbesian world of bellum omnium contra omnes. If our popular culture is to be defined by the racist hosts of The View, or the racist anchorwoman Joy Reid, or members of the Congressman “Squad,” or entire studies departments in our universities that constantly bleat out the racialist mantra, then logically one of two developments will follow.

One, so-called whites in minority-majority states like California will copy the tribal affinities of others that transcend their class and cultural differences, again in response to other blocs that do the same for careerist advantage and perceived survival. Or two, racism will be redefined empirically so that any careerist elites who espouse ad nauseam racial chauvinism—on the assurance they cannot be deemed racists—will be discredited and exposed for what they’ve become, and thus the content of our character will triumph over the color of our skin.

Finally, do we ever ask how a country of immigrants like the United States—vastly smaller than India and China, less materially rich than the vast expanse of Russia, without the strategic geography of the Middle East, or without the long investment and infrastructure of Europe—emerged out of nowhere to dominate the world economically, financially, militarily, and educationally for nearly two centuries?

The answer is easy: it was the most meritocratic land of opportunity in the world, where millions emigrated (legally) on the assurance that their class, politics, religion, ethnicity, and yes, race, would be far less a drawback than anywhere else in the world.

The degree to which the U.S. survives DEI depends on either how quickly it is discarded or whether America’s existential enemies in the Middle East, China, Russia, and Iran have even worse DEI-anti-meritocratic criteria of their own in hiring, promotion, and admissions—whether defined by institutionalized hatred of the West, or loyalty oaths to the communist party, or demonstrable obsequiousness to the Putin regime, or lethal religious intolerance.

Unfortunately, our illiberal enemies, China especially, at least in matters of money and arms, are now emulating the meritocracy of the old America. Meanwhile, we are hellbent on following their former destructive habits of using politics instead of merit to staff our universities, government, corporations, and military.

Our future hinges on how quickly we discard DEI orthodoxy and simply make empirical decisions to stop printing money, deter enemies abroad, enforce our laws, punish criminals, secure the border, reboot the military, regain energy independence, and judge citizens on their character and talent and not their appearance and politics—at least if it is not already too late.

[alexsmitposts]

Race Crime Opens Up Third Front in “Never Ending Conflict” The notorious serial killer Charles Manson was a fine salesman, very good at persuading people. According to the prosecutor at his trial, he persuaded his followers that there was going to be a race war between black and white people, which they would escape from by hiding in a hole in the ground. The murders his followers committed were intended to incite this war, which would end with them emerging to rule over what was left This crackpot theory has since been cited as evidence of Manson’s psychopathic nature, and the way he used it to manipulate people has been picked over again and again. It is therefore deeply distressing to see that he was right all along – and this time we cannot accuse a patently disturbed career criminal of manipulating us, because we voted for those who have proved him right, are of legal age, and had a choice. Orwellian Triangle Until the murder of George Floyd at the hands (or rather the knee) of that Minneapolis police officer, there were two highly polarised forces fighting for control of each Western democracy, and therefore the world. On the one side you had the traditional middle class, who run things a certain way, within their own institutions, and make the rules of conduct everyone has to live by. On the other you had the populist movements which have arisen because people feel those institutions and rules have failed them, and they want to be the opposite for the sake of it. One of the rules of conduct which has been imposed upon people is “multiculturalism”. We have all had the official anti-racist rhetoric rammed down our throats by those who rule what have often been institutionally racist countries and agencies, as if spouting it excuses their own crimes. But though we are told that racism is wrong, which it is, we are not given a way to understand the different cultures and their representatives in our midst. Consequently the uninformed are unable to bridge the divide between themselves and their neighbours. They are then excluded on the grounds of being racist or ignorant, with no place and no voice in the world of those who rule us. Obviously this generates a backlash against immigrants, who are perceived to be profiting from the exclusion of others from opportunity and cultural validity. But it also generates a backlash against natives of different racial origins – and in Western democracies–and that means black people. Even if a black person has lived sixty years in their white majority homeland, was born there and has known no other home, they still experience many forms of discrimination for being different. Those who rise above this by achieving success or celebrity are often the first to recognise this, indicating the depth of the problem. So, indigenous black communities are opposed to both the complacent white middle class culture which keeps them down, and the new populism which openly seeks to exclude them forever, as “foreigners”. This has always been a subliminal feature of politics and community relations. Now, thanks to George Floyd’s killing and the inadequate white establishment response to it, the opposition has broken out into open warfare, exactly as Charles Manson predicted. Fighting your future While white people vote for Brexit, attack immigrants and try and destroy parliament and police, black people loot shops, those symbols of discriminatory capitalism, attack white people and try and destroy parliaments and police. Neither side is achieving anything, or ever will, except to get angrier. But both white populists and black activists ultimately blame each other for the sins of the middle class elite, as they see them. Whites think they are too much in the pay of foreigners. And blacks think they are too much in the pockets of white people, Uncle Toms, who are inherently anti-black. As we have already seen with Brexit, winning an argument, or looting a shop, and it doesn’t make the anger go away. On the contrary, the worse things get, the more people look round for someone else to blame for them – the Brexiteers who turned on the EU are now turning on the UK itself, the very thing they said they were fighting for It is a truth is any democracy: the white middle class elite never goes away. In Portugal democracy was overthrown by the conservative military in 1926, and the subsequent dictatorship then overthrown by Marxist military in 1974. When democracy was restored, a key promise of the victorious Armed Forces Movement, the people voted for the middle class parties you find in any democracy, not Marxists. They even altered the post-1974 constitution to remove all the references to making Portugal a socialist state, even though the main political parties claimed to be socialist or social democrat. No amount of revolt against the “liberal elite”, by white or black populations and their sympathisers, will remove that elite or the system it operates. But as Michael Collins found in Ireland, when he was murdered by fellow nationalists for signing the Anglo-Irish Treaty which gave them a watered down version of which they had fought and died for, once you have gone so far it is more dangerous to turn back than to keep going, no matter what the consequences. Eventually white populists and black activists will have to turn on each other, and seek the protection of the elite when they do so. If they do not get that protection, they will accuse the elite of conspiring with the other side. This is precisely what happened within recent memory in Northern Ireland. Extensive collaboration between Protestant paramilitaries, the police and the British Army provoked Catholics, but many Protestants blamed those same police and army for not protecting them and their traditions when attacked by Catholics Charles Manson’s race war is being staged by proxy at present, with both sides attacking “the system” rather than each other. But it didn’t take long for the proxy Nazi-Soviet conflict of the Spanish Civil War to become World War Two, even though The Soviet Union wasn’t initially one of the allies. When “the system” doesn’t go away, the other two points of the triangle will attack each other for allegedly controlling the system, the common enemy. Neither does, so neither will be right, so no negotiated peace will be possible as there is nothing real to negotiate about. The only question is who has provoked this and why. Or perhaps there is a second question – why did we all see them provoking it, but give them the power to do so? Death Valley, D.C. Manson said that he and his followers would escape to a hole in the ground during this war. Groups of his followers went looking for this hole, inspecting various sites in Death Valley, California, to see if they were fit for purpose. So who went down into a hole in the ground when demonstrators were thought to be about to turn violent? Donald J. Trump, no less. He also said he was merely “inspecting” the bunker, not hiding in it. But his own Attorney General has contradicted him, even though he says it wasn’t Trump’s own decision. There have always been underground bunkers for key government officials, which have the same purpose Manson described: those who feel they are entitled to be the rulers hide in them so that when the crisis is over, they will continue ruling over what is left. They are not equipped as last resorts in a crisis but with all the facilities a ruler would need to continue doing their job, and monitoring the situation, from the safety of their impenetrable depth. Duck and Cover During the Cold War, with its ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation, many such bunkers were constructed for defence institutions and also private citizens. Switzerland once made it a state policy to ensure that every citizen would have a place in a nuclear shelter. Since the Iron Curtain fell, many have been sold off to private citizens as accommodation, showing how many facilities they actually had. Trump should know all about the possibility of race wars. Like little brother Boris Johnson, he openly played the white populist card to get elected. He blames “the system” for everything the voters he courts don’t like, so none of them has responsibility for anything. Building the border wall to keep Mexicans out is one of a long litany of actions which demonstrate that he also blames people of colour, of any description, for drugs, crime and terrorism, though his own national statistics don’t bear this out. His message is clear: “the system” should be torn down because it has been hijacked by foreigners and foreign ideas. It needs to be replaced, along with all the people who have corrupted it. Yet he is very well aware that black activists who don’t like him and his voter constituency say exactly the same in reverse: that the system needs to be torn down because it is full of Trump’s voter constituency, who use it to project their cultural dominance and oppress blacks. If you want to get elected, you try and spread your supporter base as far as possible. But if you are in office and are being attacked, as Trump has been from day one, you go back to where you know your core support is. Even starting with Nixon, the War on Drugs was understood to mean a War on Blacks, especially young blacks. When Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate collapsed under his son Richard, it was torn apart by ex-combatants who had run out of steam arguing about who was the true upholder of the “good old cause,” because the ideology was incapable of embracing new ideas. More recently, when Robert Mugabe was threatened in Zimbabwe by the same black populations he claimed to represent, he talked about the guerilla war which had created his power, and relied for support on its veterans rather than attracting new constituencies of support with new policies. Predictably, Trump has used the violence following the death of George Floyd to call for more law and order. This is always a rallying cry for his faithful, who believe only they want it, and that the law enforcement agencies are there to protect them from those they consider different. He is currently being sued by a coalition of civil rights groups over one manifestation of his solution, the violent dispersal of a Black Lives Matter protest opposite the White House which was obstructing a photo opportunity in which he was depicted holding a bible. Using Flag and God as the last resort is a common move for political in deep up to their necks. As a sitting president Trump is in the same position once lamented in the famous quote by the 2nd Earl of Manchester – “If we beat the king 99 times, he is king still, and so will his posterity be after him; but if the king beat us once, we shall be all hanged, and our posterity be made slaves. May say he wants to overthrow the system, but when all this is over, which he hopes will be after he has cancelled the November election under “emergency powers,” only he will rule what is left. Fatal absurdity Since Manson committed his crimes, very few have wanted to live in a world where he really was a prophet, and the person to turn to if you wanted to know the truth. The lunatic has not only taken over the asylum, he has made it the hole in the ground from which he can issue his truth, and everywhere else the asylum. No one wanted to talk to black communities. Whenever they raised their concerns, whether legitimate or not, they were told in effect “you would say that, wouldn’t you?” Neither did anyone want to listen to the politically incorrect, the forcibly unemployed, the homeless or the out of fashion – their views weren’t good enough, they didn’t matter anymore than the life of a black man did. This is precisely what should not happen in liberal democracies, which exist to give power to “the people”, even if you don’t like what they want or think, provided those who disagree don’t face negative consequences. It is also what should never happen in a Christian country, as Christ died for us all, and racism or discrimination are direct contradictions of Christian teaching, strange though that may seem to some. Ballot or the Bullet The white populists and black activists are right: the system has failed them by discriminating against them unfairly. But they will never tear it down, as they will never resolve their problems that way, modern Africa bearing strong testimony to this. It is like Malcolm X, when he spoke of a different view of history for American Blacks, We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock; the rock was landed on us. What is needed is to redefine what is acceptable in public life from within. The anti-racists who look down on those outside their circle will never achieve this. Not only another generation of blacks have been sold down the river, but minorities, and those of the former middle class with skill sets that are no longer needed, as those jobs are now in China and elsewhere. But all the conflict can be stopped by people displaying the basic humanity they do, when pushed, on an everyday basis, instead of expecting others to do it for them. That starts with electing people who represent what we are, not what they have made us into. If we did, we might just take back control – by keeping Mansonism in the asylum permanently, where we all know it really belongs.

[canchewread]

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. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online! You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog Updates available on Twitter, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud. Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

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Neither Left nor Right: Eventually Embracing Ethical Universalism

By Don Hall

“You sound like that guy —Tim Allen—on that TV show. You should go to FOX and see if you could get your own show!”

“I don’t think of you as a Leftie but more like a rational person.”

“What happened to you since you moved to Vegas? Are you wearing a MAGA hat yet?”

“I told him that you were a Chicago Left kind of guy and that saying things like ‘Chinese Virus’ was going to set you off.”

“What? You mean you support the protests? I thought you weren’t a libtard!”

The strange need be a part of one side or the other like political thought is a high school football game has become more pervasive in the past decade or so. Reducing a population of 330 million individuals to the simplistic Red or Blue is no different than the ridiculous notion spawned by Robin DiAngelo and other “anti-racist” proselytizers that the very notion of individualism is a racist myth. Lump everyone into a sub-category, stereotype them, and go with that.

Friends back in Chicago believe I was a full Lefty (which is a bit like the idea from the Ben Stiller comedy Tropic Thunder that an actor should never go “full retard”) until I had my run-in with the Poisonous Latino Storyteller and her gang of Fuckheads. Not true. I was writing about the bizarre hypocrisy of the Extreme Left on my old blog years prior and due almost entirely from my experience of dating and living with a communist and racial activist.

I have never been “full retard” in this ideological gameplay. Perhaps because I’m too contrarian to ever completely follow a dogma or maybe because I’m just in love with having both sides of the coin despise me. Dunno. Don’t much care. I’m Irish, and Freud stated that the Irish cannot be psychoanalyzed so stop trying, already.

I find pretty much every single syllable of the Right Wing position on practically everything to be a bit noxious, so I’d gamble that I’m not conservative. There are conservatives who hate Donald Trump. I appreciate their hatred and that they will do their best to get rid of him but I am not on their side. 

Likewise, I find the Culture of the Woke to be equally obnoxious and hypocritical. I see a coin with White Supremacy on one side and Critical Race Theory on the other. Both equally racist, both equally separatist, two sides of the same racist coin. To posit that rationality, being objective, relying on science, and being on time are vestiges of whiteness is just a flip of the coin to state that black people are irrational, wholly subjective, anti-science, and perpetually late. That shit is flat out racist.

It occurs to me that Twitter has become the FOX News of the Left, an echo chamber, an ideological bubble used to merely spread dogma and one-sided perspective. It’s just as dishonest, just as angry. The battle has devolved in to which side gets to be Big Brother in our Orwellian nightmare.

I suppose I am so much more vocally critical of the Extreme Left because I still consider myself, well, Left. In terms of embracing a label, the most recent one that fits is from Hidden Tribes which, after taking the quiz, indicates that I am a Traditional Liberal:

Traditional Liberals (11 percent of the population) tend to be cautious, rational, and idealistic. They value tolerance and compromise. They place great faith in institutions.

I’m no longer confused at my place on the ideological spectrum. Since Newt Gingrich adopted the politics of obstruction and winning at all cost—his no-compromise solution to power—the GOP has been playing an ugly game, polarizing a base of rigid social conservatives and using those social issues (abortion, gay rights, civil rights, and immigration scares) to do their level best to roll back everything FDR did.

According to most I meet in this camp, I may as well be wearing a Hillary Clinton pantsuit and singing L'Internationale while using my phone to film the police.

The Left was fairly fractured anyway, but the Woke nonsense was at best fringe until we had a nationwide shutdown due to pandemic and everyone spent a lot more time on Twitter. Suddenly, these crackpot extremes of socialist, Marxist, and the wholesale rejection of white people, men, and heterosexuality took hold on a confined population looking for something to do with their pent up frustration.

According to most I know in this camp, I’m a Neo-Nazi, KKK-sympathizer who routinely sexually harasses women while checking up their skirts for a hidden penis.

The core of the far-right's worldview is organicism, the idea that society functions as a complete, organized and homogeneous living being. Adapted to the community they wish to constitute or reconstitute (whether based on ethnicity, nationality, religion or race), the concept leads them to reject every form of universalism.

The core of the far-left's worldview is Identity Marxism, or the idea that society is comprised of two categories, the Oppressor and the Oppressed utilized in the same manner as traditional Marxism’s duality of the Workers and the Capitalists. Adapted to the community they wish to constitute or reconstitute (whether based on ethnicity, nationality, religion or race), the concept leads them to reject every form of universalism.

I, being the Traditional Liberal I am (maybe I should start a bowling league?), favor ethical universalism, that is the position that there is a universal ethic which applies to all people, regardless of culture, race, sex, religion, nationality, sexuality or other distinguishing feature, and all the time.

To quote the late, great John Lewis “We all live in the same house, we all must be part of the effort to hold down our little house. When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just... do something about it. Say something. Have the courage. Have the backbone. Get in the way. Walk with the wind. It's all going to work out.” [Bold is all mine.]

Funny that. That belief used to get me in the Leftie Clubhouse. As the Far Left and the Far Right continue to devolve into warring factions dragging the rest of us into their vortex, it seems that those of us less gullible and more skeptical of cultspeak have no clubhouse to occupy.

It’s okay, though. By the numbers (I know—you Far Right guys think the numbers are FAKE and you Far Left guys think the numbers represent white supremacy) there are far more of we Ethical Universalists than the two of the extremes combined.

I’m alright being in that club.