The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason
Chapo Trap House
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason
Chapo Trap House
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
The Chapo book is a wry, satiric look at American political culture, interspersed with asides and factoids that layer over the larger narrative.
The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason won’t be of much use to anyone running a revolution. This is my central grievance. There isn’t a lot about going to the people, learning from them, concentrating their experiences into a revolutionary outlook, and then formulating a communist leadership.
...by the end of the book, it’s hard to escape the nagging feeling that Chapo—the podcast and the book—is, at bottom, an actual, unironic infomercial scheme. They make bank by selling you a candy-coated version of socialism, one that may offend real socialists even more than liberal gruel-peddlers like myself.
...a foul-mouthed, reference-heavy, kangaroo-court-jester idiom that gives the book’s many short passages verve and sustains a brisk tempo through diverse themes of high and low culture. Although irony is held constant, readers will be kept on their toes tracking the shifting perspective of the narrator’s composite voice.
...an obscene, hysterical and compelling overview of how American politics got here and how we move forward. Presented like an old-school MAD Magazine, thanks in part to the stomach-churning illustrations of Eli Valley, The Chapo Guide largely consists of concise, vitriolic judgments of recent political figures and events.
While The Chapo Guide to Revolution is first a gallows humor overview of the political landscape, somewhere between Mallard Fillmore and Punishment Park (in part thanks to the skin-crawling illustrations by Diaspora Boy author Eli Valley), it also has a white-hot anger for those who have followed the wrong rule and brought us to this. Chapo Trap House is emblematic of the young, socialist 'dirtbag left (a term coined by Chapo co-host Amber A’Lee Frost), sometimes associated with the Democratic Socialists of America, but just as often with Twitter discourse. The Chapo perspective comes preloaded with political vulgarity, a hatred of lanyard wonks who prefer fixes to ideological commitments, and the overwhelming dread that comes with believing capitalism (and the politic processes captured by it), won’t just bring us to environmental ruin, but will also turn the world toward totalitarianism, fascism, genocide—whatever’s most convenient in defense of hoarded capital in a burning world..
In The Guide’s nearly three hundred pages, there are abundances of irony, rage, and deft lancings of every hallowed centrist icon. What you will not find is distance. The Guide is written in the voice of someone who is earnestly offended by the meathook fancies of the twenty-first century. The book is credited to the polyamorous mind-meld of Biederman, Christman, Menaker, Texas, and James, but the overwhelming tone is Matt’s hectoring, erudite, Midwestern anger.
The book is largely a fast-paced comic retelling of American political history.