marxism

They weren’t always so fatalistic. Menaker started the show in early 2016 with Biederman and fellow “Weird Twitter” poster Matt Christman. After that year’s election, they added Frost and Justin Cass, who goes by Virgil Texas, as cohosts. By then, subscribers were sending more than $20,000 a month on Patreon, according to data collected by Graphtreon. Their live shows started selling out, and in 2018 they published a best-selling book. Their irreverent humor, edging into hyperbolic surrealism, and hyperliterate delivery brought listeners in, but their message kept them coming back. They were sardonic, not cynical. They spoke to a socialist impulse that had been largely repressed in mainstream media since the Cold War.

Chapo rode the wave of a resurgent electoral left in the wake of Bernie Sanders’s first campaign, becoming the flagship media project of his movement. By March 2020, the podcast was the highest-grossing podcast on Patreon and was bringing in $174,000 a month on the site. And their mission sharpened as Sanders prepared to run again. They urged listeners to travel to early primary states to canvas for Sanders. Many in the more than 700-strong audience at their Iowa show on the night of the caucuses had crossed state lines. “What’s scary is that we’re not just tossing out catharsis and jokes into the void,” Biederman told them. “This is part of something real.”

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Even then, they knew Sanders was up against a powerful Democratic Party machine. “Government and big business are coming after our movement, and they’re coming strong, but they won’t win, because we are the biggest and most honest podcast in America!” Menaker shouted to the crowd in Iowa City, mixing facetiousness with a measure of truth and genuine optimism. “Other than Joe Rogan,” corrected Frost. “Looks like Jon Lovett’s just another screenwriter now,” said Biederman, calling out one of the cohosts of Pod Save America, the rival show started by former Barack Obama aides that speaks to the Democratic establishment.

Super Tuesday 2020, when Joe Biden locked up the Democratic nomination, marked a turn for Chapo. “I felt like that was the chance for the left in this country to assert themselves politically through the electoral system, and it didn’t work,” Menaker, who is 41, tells me. “It revealed the actual purpose of the Democratic Party, which is to prevent something like that from happening.” After that March, their Patreon earnings flatlined, not dropping precipitously, but never again rising with the same speed. The locus of the show’s mission had spun out. “During the Bernie years, it was easy to evangelize to the audience,” Frost tells me. “Without that, the second I realize someone is listening, it’s a little more difficult.”

In the Biden years, Chapo’s hosts would confront scandal and tragedy. They’d search for new opportunities in the gloaming of political hope. But the “dirtbag left” community they’d brought together would never entirely dissipate. Though they didn’t have a candidate or a movement to call their own, the show continued to serve a political purpose. “It offers a vocabulary for young dudes that would feel alienated and would maybe fall into the alt-right. It allows them an analysis of the world that doesn’t come down to shitting on women or people of color or people poorer than they are,” says Jason Grote, a screenwriter who has collaborated with the hosts. “It’s about solidarity.”

That wasn’t enough for some liberals after Trump coasted to reelection victory on a series of endorsements from podcasts appealing to young men, most prominent among them Joe Rogan’s. “People all over are being like, ‘Where’s the liberal or the progressive-left thing that speaks to these, kind of, rude young men?’” steamed Chapo’s producer Chris Wade on their first episode after the 2024 election. “I’ve spent 20,000 hours editing it.” Pundits began pining for a Rogan type who could, presumably, sway a young, male electorate into voting Democratic. Menaker tells me that the Democrats’ problem was their message, not its medium. “Joe Rogan was the Joe Rogan of the left back when he endorsed Bernie Sanders,” he points out.

“I’m not giving any campaign advice here,” Menaker adds, “other than to believe different things,” Menaker says.

David Weigel, a Semafor political reporter and frequent guest on the show, doesn’t see Chapo breaking through to Rogan’s audience. “The appeal from right-wing podcasts has been, ‘You need to improve yourself, you need to become an alpha, you need to stop eating seed oils.’ There are a lot of young people who think that—unlike Bernie, who said, ‘I want to fight for somebody I don’t know’—they just want to fight for themselves,” he says. “The Chapo offer is, ‘You can want a better world, you can want socialism, and that will lead to a better life.’ They’re offering something that very successful right-wing media is offering a quicker alternative to, and the quicker alternative is attractive, in part, because Donald Trump wins elections and Bernie Sanders hasn’t.”

Chapo was never going to blindly fall in line behind whoever the Democratic Party anointed in 2024. Their politics aren’t premised on party loyalty like those of, say, Pod Save America, which unsurprisingly was the first stop for the Harris brain trust in discussing their loss. “To the extent that [leftist streamer Hasan Piker] or Joe Rogan have an audience, or a platform, or a large audience that trusts them, it’s because they don’t have the politics of Pod Save America,” Menaker said on that postelection Chapo episode. Biederman, who once appeared on a show hosted by Lovett, articulated the core of Chapo’s critique of the centrist-left podcast in 2018. “All these people have ever done is subscribe to the news and work at a comms department for 30 years and then tell you how to argue with your racist uncle,” he said. “These Obama freaks, they don’t give a shit. They will hang out anyone to dry. They don’t believe in anything.”

The Chapo hosts identified the same problem in their postmortems of Harris’s campaign. “They come up with all these excuses about messaging, the story we tell, the political atmosphere, the political biosphere, and all this hokum to cover the fact that they don’t believe in anything,” said Menaker in one. “Left unsaid in all this about why she didn’t do the shows that appeal to young people, or young men in particular, that Trump did and did so well on, is that if she was going to any nontraditional media forum in which the subject of politics is discussed, and they have an audience that’s politically engaged, she would have had to face questions that she simply cannot answer.”

In May 2020, weeks after Sanders dropped out of the Democratic primary and New York issued a shelter in place order, Chapo too found itself short of answers. “Look, I have to get out of town or I’m going to lose my mind,” Frost texted their group chat. “You’re welcome to come if you want.” So Christman, Menaker, Biederman, and Frost piled into a van and left New York for an Airbnb in the Catskills. “We had invested a lot of our creative energy, our personal time and effort, into making Bernie the Democratic nominee. It didn’t work out. We hit the limits of what our podcast and its effect on the world could possibly be,” Menaker says. “We needed to commune with nature.”

That weekend in the woods was the first time they’d been together since the defeat. “Not to say that we had it any worse than anyone with a real job, but losing like that and then, like, ‘Go sit inside for fucking months’—that really sucked,” Biederman tells me. “But we didn’t talk about any of that when we were there. It just relieved a lot of pressure.” They did acid and watched Scott Adkins’s nonsensical thriller Avengement. “It was a moment to escape thinking about the future,” says Frost, but also, “it was kind of important. Even Felix, the total homebody, he came out. It’s important to maintain your relationships.”

Only one cohost didn’t join them. Cass had been invited, but wasn’t interested. He withdrew after Sanders’s loss, no longer regularly appearing on the show. “It was very obvious that was a breaking point for him,” says David Eisenberg, a longtime friend. “He was a pain in the ass to work with,” says Frost. “I saw our connection to him starting to fray, but Bernie and the mission kept that from completely falling apart. After it was gone, it did. We were staying together for the kids.”