Chapo Trap House and the rise of the dirtbag left

the Weiss/Peyser piece is so rough. Some of it - if it were satire, it would be brilliant. Like this:

EVE: In these divisive times, the increasingly moralistic left has adopted this idea that those who don’t agree with you politically are the enemy. (And vice versa.) I think it’s a self-defeating way of looking at things. If we dismiss the almost 63 million people who voted for Trump as irredeemably evil, where does that leave us as a society? You voted for Clinton, and yet, when we became friends, I worried I’d get “canceled” if Twitter found out.

WE LIVE IN A SOCIETY

Such stunning insight:

VE: We also connected over our Jewish upbringings, being women writers, and finding common ground over the absurd aspects of internet outrage culture. Social media has the tendency to flatten people. It gives us the ability to immediately post any passing thought, which doesn’t lend itself to thoughtfulness or nuance. Not only can someone become a caricature of her stupidest tweet, but it creates an environment in which the most bombastic, aggressive takes about the hot topic of the day get the most engagement. Feuds flourish; offering the benefit of the doubt to another person is a sign of cowardice, or of not being sufficiently moral.

Seems like the most appropriate thread for this:

How is this real pic.twitter.com/yC6BggOcnE

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) December 7, 2018

Princeton episode is so bad.

They went to a bunch of Princeton debate enthusiasts to roast both Princeton and debating. It doesn’t sound like the crowd was into it! Def not as rowdy as the irony enthusiasts in the Harvard and Yale episodes. It was like Dice’s The Day the Laughter Died in spots.

I couldn't tell if no one was laughing or if the mixing was off tbh

Yeah, apparently some kid in the debate society kinda booked them with no one else really knowing who they were and showed up expecting Standard Debate.

mahmoud ahmadinejad, go on chapo

― himalayan mountain hole (bizarro gazzara), Tuesday, 16 October 2018 17:00 (one month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I have visited @CHAPOTRAPHOUSE

— Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (@Ahmadinejad1956) December 11, 2018

Of course. Of course this happened.

what the hell is going on

we've finally tunnelled through hellworld and into something stranger

You tell me, Krassenstein

Greenberg, iceberg, whatever

he didn't show up at the Starship Troopers screening, did he?

so funny they are internet buds with a literal monster! so cool XD

I'm reserving judgment until the actual ep comes out (if it even exists), but yeah way more ways for this to go wrong than right

I'm reserving judgment until the actual ep comes out (if it even exists), but yeah way more ways for this to go wrong than right

ha ha I'm sure their questions will not be sycophantic at all

so we’re just assuming that notorious shitposter ahmadinejad is on the up-and-up here huh

#Twitter pic.twitter.com/MVKQT8TuSe

— Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (@Ahmadinejad1956) November 28, 2018

i'm assuming he meant he visited twitter dot com slash chapotraphouse, not that he went on the show

yeah i just mean the larger thing of this tee-hee-hee isn't this funny from the same people who are frothing at the mouth when the media does hagiographies of hw bush or mccain

imo this is all only happening because they missed out on bringing on gaddafi

i... don’t think anyone is under any illusions that the former president of iran is an irl bad person, or that the humour around this comes from anything other than the extreme unlikeliness of him making virgil texas one of the only 36 people he follows on twitter

i... don’t think anyone is under any illusions that the former president of iran is an irl bad person

????

?!?

did you mean isn't a bad person?

well, yeah

lol

yeah i just mean the larger thing of this tee-hee-hee isn't this funny from the same people who are frothing at the mouth when the media does hagiographies of hw bush or mccain

I hope you can see how these aren't equivalent situations if you think about it for, like, two seconds

if i was smart enough to figure out how to pull the trigger i'd shoot myself in the fuckin head simon

the MMA episode was good but i don't know if i can watch that much on MMA

lol the MMA stuff is the most interesting/best-executed part, it's the political angle that's suspect (I also do not care about MMA)

I guess he's not going on chapo

Ahmadinejhad is probably one of the worst accounts here. it’s just like a self serious screenwriter who’s in the Funny Accounts tab but run through a Borat filter

— soon theyll be calling me “MR BRIGHTSIDE” (@ByYourLogic) December 11, 2018

Sometimes I wonder if they get tired of having to do their schtick twice a week every week, like do they actually feel that exasperated by the political culture all the time or do they have to work themselves into a sort of in-character exasperation? Like how do they keep that up for two plus years?

That’s Showbizz

$109,695 per month iirc

They were all doing it on Twitter for a long time unpaid, most of it's probably natural.

shitposting is a vocation

They need more group movie viewing and right-wing novel reading series eps.

I did enjoy them toasting the death of the Weekly Standard

that tweet is fucked

the MMA episode was good but i don't know if i can watch that much on MMA

― No Smockin' (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, December 11, 2018 6:37 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol the MMA stuff is the most interesting/best-executed part, it's the political angle that's suspect (I also do not care about MMA)

― resident hack (Simon H.), Tuesday, December 11, 2018 6:45 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

agree with simon here & i even legitimately dislike MMA

the MMA doc is pretty good, i learned quite a bit. i'm sympathetic to biederman's thesis that it allowed for something legitimately strange and unarguably direct in a time when life got ever more managerial, duplicitous and unforgiving. but that seems to be *his* point of attachment to the sport.

i was a little disappointed he didn't at least take on the idea that it provided a spectacle of masculine violence in a time that has been, little by little, more feminized. i mean that just seems obvious, and a clear link to its trumpiness.

^^^^^^otm

I remember him talking about fighting and bringing up that point in an interview shortly after the 2016 election, I forget the podcast name but the logo was a cassette tape. pretty sure Matt went on earlier as well.

They need more group movie viewing and right-wing novel reading series eps.

― louise ck (milo z)

agreed 100%. they should do Green Book

the nostalgia trap

Can’t decide which thread to put this in so here goes:

“Let Me Make You Famous”: How Hollywood Invented Ben Shapiro
With the shaping of producer Jeremy Boreing, Brand Shapiro has made owning the libs a lucrative business, and the Daily Wire a rising power in conservative media. But can they survive Trump?

TINA NGUYEN
DECEMBER 9, 2018 5:30 PM

...Before Shapiro, Boreing was a fairly obscure Hollywood figure, perhaps best known for helping to produce Etienne!, a buddy movie about a dying dwarf hamster. His primary political affiliation was as the managing director of Friends of Abe, a quasi-secretive salon of conservative entertainment-industry professionals, which he had taken over from Forrest Gump actor Gary Sinise. Years earlier, Andrew Breitbart, a celebrity in his own right within Friends of Abe, had introduced him to Shapiro, and they became fast friends, both serving time at Truth Revolt, a now-defunct Web site, started as the right’s answer to David Brock’s Media Matters, which churned out reliable content attacking the mainstream media and their secret funders. Truth Revolt placated its ancient donors at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a nonprofit condemned by the Southern Poverty Law Center, but it was far too earnest, and barely made a ripple.

Gary Sinise AND Andrew Breetbort!

Breet your friends and bort them back

'jeremy boreing'