The Chapo Guide to Revolution

by Chapo Trap House

  The highest tier of the Celebrity Dumbass officer corps is, of course, the Political Comedian. More than any other entertainers, they bring the fight straight to the enemy: the Bill Mahers, Sam Bees, and John Olivers of this world use the power of late-night comedy to beat back the hypocrisy, malice, and just plain derp of the American right wing, which is how the Democratic Party managed to soundly defeat a bumbling game show host running for president in 2016.

  With each viral clip of epic evisceration, the Celebrity Dumbass preserves your freedom to consume their latest Pixar rom-com produced for tax purposes. You want them on that Facebook wall; you need them on that Facebook wall.

  SUPERPOWERS: Charisma, remarkably low thetan levels

  ALLIES: William Morris Endeavor, ICM

  LIBERAL HAWK

  The horrors of the world are unavoidable. But while most of us look at those horrors and say “I like that” or “That’s good; keep going,” there are a brave few who boldly declare that things are bad and we must “do something.” And if the evil actor in question happens to oppose America’s imperial goals, there you will find the Liberal Hawk, bravely crying for nonspecific action.

  Don’t confuse the Liberal Hawk with its cousin, the Neocon. Sure, they may advocate the exact same policy goals of vague “American leadership” and push for the same confrontation with Iran and funding for any group from Ukraine’s Hitler Appreciation Club to Syria’s Jabhat al-Cumshit irredentist militias, so long as they “undermine Putin” and “advance democracy,” and yes, their livelihoods are funded by magazines no one reads and think tanks that benefit no one but their murky Gulf sheikh and robber-baron descendants—but they’re completely different. For one, the Liberal Hawk won’t rail against safe spaces and PC culture the way the Neocon will. In one breath, the Liberal Hawk will quote a potential six-figure death toll from a potential intervention as “a price worth paying,” then in the next be moved nearly to tears while describing to you the last book they read, which is invariably called something like The Balls to Be a Woman: Golda Meir’s War against Toxic Masculinity.

  But like all things, this comes down to compensation: while the Neocon is usually a fudge-fingered treat addict who can be bought off by any lobby so long as they bring snacks, the Liberal Hawk requires things like dry Riesling, ski holidays in Gstaad, and tickets for shit like “A Jazz Tribute to NATO.”

  FIGHTING STYLE: LinkedIn posts, cluster bombs

  SEXUAL REPRESSION LEVEL: Offers free foot rubs to IDF soldiers

  APP-HOLE

  The App-hole rose from humble beginnings as a deeply antisocial college freshman to become one of the richest people alive. He earned billions coming up with a fun, cool, and free way for us to share our thoughts, locations, faces, blood types, secrets, lies, and weaknesses with corporate and governmental third parties. He parlayed his hatred and fear of his fellow human beings into a cybernetic work ethic and never-ending drive to leave the “meat-space” behind and become a cloud-based immortal entity.

  The App-hole has ushered in a new and revolutionary form of American corporate culture in which you can dress like a teenager in the office, play Skee-Ball, ride a skateboard, and, most important, never leave the work compound. Following his first IPO, he redesigned his entire biology: installing hair, purchasing a personal trainer, and getting the secret kind of sex-enhancement surgery only rich people know about. After a rough period of bad press for statements like “Women don’t have the proper skill stack to make equal pay” and “We need to modernize our age-of-consent laws,” the App-hole has recently showed stirrings of a social conscience by investing billions into implanting a Fitbit into the neck of every African child. He hopes someday to totally eliminate the obsolete operating systems of unions, education, and public sanitation. The App-hole can currently be found one-upping the Challenger disaster with his private space program.

  FUTURE DISRUPTIONS: Moon colony for breeding pairs, Plasmr: Connecting Blood Pods with the Marketplace, self-succing car, the White House

  SKILL STACK: Wastes no energy by recycling all fecal matter into edible slurry

  WINE MOM

  Wine Mom’s political evolution closely tracks that of her hero and Life Goals Inspiration Board avatar, Hillary Clinton: a baby boomer from a deeply conservative background who ended up in a bad marriage and found liberal politics after her divorce. About two years ago she realized that black people might have some legitimate complaints about the police after a lifetime of rolling up her windows while driving through “urban” neighborhoods. Now woke, she broadcasts her deep feelings of contempt for anyone who “centers whiteness” or “does erasure.” Despite this, Wine Mom can most easily be found anywhere in the center of whiteness, erasing anyone who won’t let her speak to their manager.

  Wine Mom loves her SB (sauvignon blanc) and happy pills (Xanax, Percs, Ativan, etc.) and hates young people of any kind. Wine Mom’s most trenchant critiques of the president come from her precocious children, whom she’s always overhearing saying things like “Doesn’t the pwesident know that the individual mandate shores up the insuwance market?” and “Mommy, Susan Sawandon is a big dumb poopyhead who wants Twump to be her boyfwiend.”

  FIGHTING STYLE: Calling out cultural appropriation via GIFs of black women

  FINISHING MOVE: Shade, side-eye, clapback

  CORPORATE FEMINIST

  The Corporate Feminist is dedicated to ensuring equal representation and equal pay for all women who are C-suite executives at major corporations. Indeed, the boardrooms of companies like Union Carbide, Exxon, Lockheed Martin, and Country-Wide have been boys’ clubs for too long, and it’s long past time for women to get their due. You see, if the corporate culture of the pharmaceutical, defense, health insurance, and tech industries more accurately reflected the gender makeup of the country they rule, they would be softer and more caring, nurturing, and ruthlessly efficient, just like women.

  She’s dedicated to making sure her male groundskeepers do their fair share of the emotional labor she demands of her nannies. All the Sherpas on her Nepalese estate are given copies of Lean In. You can catch a glimpse of the Corporate Feminist as you walk through the first-class cabin of the airplane, but do not make eye contact.

  VEHICLE OF CHOICE: Last surviving African elephant

  LATEST PATENT PENDING: Blood test that determines Myers-Briggs type within five seconds

  MOVIE BLOB

  The Movie Blob is a pop-culture obsessive who filters all his political beliefs and interpersonal behavior through the prism of films, comic books, television shows, and video games. As a result, he is deeply invested in crafting politics from submental drivel created for children. This creates ideological complications when studios end up buying him off with limited-edition action figures, thereby forcing him to drastically revise his past statements about the Batman vs. Superman nineteen-hour director’s cut.

  This man-child-man sees himself as part of a small group of social outcasts imbued with incredibly cool powers who fight to protect the very people who shun and persecute them. The Movie Blob insists that he’s one of the “good” mutants and not the kind that uses their encyclopedic knowledge of pop-culture marginalia for evil. He is constantly on the lookout for ways to distinguish himself from his opposite on the right—YouTube Atheist Logic Guy, the bad kind of nerd who hates women because of his deeply stunted sexuality.

  The Movie Blob instead writes think pieces like “Video: Black Widow OBLITERATES Misogyny” and “Let’s Get Real: Lara Croft’s Boobs are TOO Big.” He has argued that if the members of the Galactic Senate had all been women, the Empire never would have invaded Naboo. But, like any true fan of graphic novels, he understands that the world isn’t as simple as good vs. evil, and the line between hero and villain is sometimes blurred. Therefore, he’s open and honest about the multiple restraining orders filed against him by the patrons and organizers of Dragoncon ’06.

  FAVORITE POLITICAL THINKERS: Bane, the Joker, Rorschach, Spider-Man�
��s uncle

  FAVORITE POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES: The Force, the Assassin’s Creed, that thing Spock does with his hand

  (Intermission)

  THE CALL OF NEOLIBERALISM: A BRIEF HISTORY

  “Neoliberal” is a term that gets thrown around a lot these days without much concern for context or accuracy, much less the hurt it causes. Kids are coming home from school confused and frightened because they were called “neolibs” on the playground. Too many parents are being forced to have “the talk” about what it means to be market-friendly with their Codys and Jennaphers at too young an age.

  On its face, it sounds like something good. “Neo,” meaning the hero of the Matrix films, and “liberal,” meaning someone who wishes things were good instead of bad. Surely the advent of some kind of new and powerful liberal like this would be a cause for celebration, right?

  You’d think so, but in today’s parlance, it’s a term of abuse hurled at respected opinion columnists that the vulgar Marxist “Left” regards as too damn reasonable.

  Broadly speaking, neoliberalism is a political and ideological project that gained traction in the 1970s across the Western world that sought to return to the laissez-faire roots of “classical” or “economic” liberalism; it aimed to curtail the gains made by labor in the twentieth century and to restore upper-class power through “free” markets and unregulated capital.

  But it went even further than the classical gas: traditional, classical liberals might say that one must not interfere with the economy—one could do it, but one shouldn’t, because it’s bad. The neo half of the neoliberal idea insists that one can’t interfere with the economy. As in, it’s not possible; science has proven it. It’s a thing outside of human control, beyond time and the wall of sleep. All we can do is sacrifice in the market’s name.

  We can trace the origins of this ideology to a meeting of economists, philosophers, and business leaders organized by Friedrich Hayek at Colorado’s historic Overlook Hotel in 1947. Seeing a Western world devastated by the horrors of World War II, the labor movement, robust welfare states, and a population with too much free time, Hayek knew he had to do something.

  That something became known simply as the Overlook Society. This group sought to promote a frank and productive exchange of views on how best to preserve market competition and private property in a world full of increasingly willful children in need of harsh correction. This fairly raucous affair was marked by vigorous debate and even more vigorous partying, such as when Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman entertained guests by dressing in an assless bear costume and performing a raunchy version of his famous “Pencil” lecture by making several no. 2’s “disappear.”

  Through their conferences and writings, the Overlook Society laid the groundwork for a reinvigorated philosophy of economic liberalism, as well as a renewed spiritual interest in certain long-forgotten Babylonian deities among American and European elites.

  Later in the 1970s, future Supreme Court justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. laid another cornerstone of the neoliberal revolution with his Powell Memo. One of the all-time great memos, Powell urged politicians and business leaders to become more involved in fighting back against a new “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System.” Powell was responding to a nascent consumer rights movement represented by Ralph Nader and his seminal exposé of General Motors, Murder Mobile: Your Car Will Fucking Decapitate You.

  A former corporate lawyer who sat on the board of Philip Morris, Powell knew better than most the threat to freedom posed by increasing public awareness that people’s lives were incidental to the bottom line. The Powell Memo forcefully argued that capital needed its own collective project to fight back against haters like Ralph Nader and the working class. In a war of ideas, Powell understood that his side needed to tool up, and that think tanks would be the trenches of the front lines.

  Through a huge influx of corporate money, organizations like the Manhattan Institute and the Heritage Foundation were set up to promote this ideology as well as the esoteric rites and rituals of the Overlook Society, and to craft policies designed to nourish the vast and ancient elder gods they worshipped.

  The essential question the neoliberal revolution sought to address was: What are human beings for? And what is the best way to serve man? Are individuals each creative and self-determined beings best served by acting in concert to exercise democratic control over the economic and political systems they live under? Or are they best served by acting as faceless nodes competing against one another in a massive orgone-harvesting project designed to fulfill the Redeemer prophecy as foretold in the works of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, given new and abominable life by the Overlook Society?

  If you’re reading this book in one of the few “free” moments you have, on your way to a job that’s slowly sapping your will to live, you already know that the good side won.

  In other words, neoliberalism is the guiding ideology of economic thought, political management, and occult magik of our times, and as such it is impossible to define. Though it accurately describes the policies pursued by every American president since Jimmy Carter, it’s essentially unnameable and indescribable. No one really knows what it means, and it is precisely because the term is so hard to define that it’s such an effective and poisonous epithet.

  When one uses a term like neoliberal to describe people who support free markets, foreign intervention, and the dismantling of the traditional welfare state, one removes humanity and agency from a diverse group of individuals and the ancient and secret religion they belong to. Think about that the next time you decide to drop the n-bomb.

  Perhaps the single greatest feature of neoliberalism is that it’s entirely compatible with contemporary values of racial and sexual equality, provided they don’t stray too far into income equality. The children of the Overlook Society are overwhelmingly pro–gay rights, pro–women’s rights, pro–civil rights, etc. And why wouldn’t they be? Being tolerant, outwardly friendly, and socially liberal makes waging outright class warfare and pursuing the secret worship of vast and ancient alien races that much easier.

  What’s more, how could a term that applies equally to Democrats and Republicans mean anything? If it accurately describes the horizon of possibility offered by both options available in American politics, then why do the two parties oppose each other so much? Why even have elections?

  Since they’re more efficient and rational than the thin sliver of consciousness that sits atop the abyssal depths of the individual human mind, why not just let markets determine our individual worth? If all our lives are in fact governed by forces that are so essentially inscrutable and beyond our control that they cannot even be named, what hope do we have but a blissful retreat into madness?

  Furthermore, if a word doesn’t really have a meaning, then how can one oppose the concept it represents? The answer is one can’t, and one shouldn’t try! Ph’nglui mglw’nafh R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!

  CHAPTER THREE

  * * *

  CONS

  To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.

  —MICHAEL OAKESHOTT

  In today’s America, being a proud virgin is no easy task.

  —BEN SHAPIRO

  * * *

  The right wing in America is like Dracula: a grotesque avatar of inherited wealth who is unkillable, casts no reflection in mirrors, and lives off the blood of peasants. Ever since the modern conservative movement was birthed from William F. Buckley Jr.’s unholy womb, the American Right has mutated into more and more grotesque forms, reaching its logical apex in the election of Donald Trump. As of this writing, right-wingers control every branch of government with only about 30 percent of the country actually supporting them. After conservatives sat humiliated
on the sidelines for the first half of the twentieth century, the apparition of St. Reagan in 1979 restored ancient conservative rule, standing athwart history yelling “Stop!” at black voters and anyone trying to obtain affordable health care. To be a modern-day conservative means you think golf is fun, cigars are cool, and wearing a suit every day is a fascinating hobby.

  Who are these people? And how can they possibly be defeated?

  Even though the standard American lib might desire many of the same “good” things as you and I, their politics have a congenital defect that makes them easy marks for capital and empire. Their problem is not only their beliefs but also their lack of conviction. Conservatives, on the other hand, have no such void at their core. They know what they want, and they have a political vision for how to get it. The problem is simply that what they want is all bad. To put it another way, America’s liberals are the good cops. They appear in viral videos in which they play basketball with diverse teens, participate in charity bike races, and look the other way only on evidence-planting and extrajudicial murder. Conservatives are the bad cops, right down to their Oakley shades, strained to the breaking point as they wrap around their fat, pink heads.