The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason

by Chapo Trap House

Like many of the Catholic Church’s most ardent defenders, Chesterton was a convert, which made him directly opposed to the Church’s fiercest critics and those heretics who actually had to grow up in it.

Unfortunately, his body of work and reputation as a beloved doddering fatso were undone when it came out that his writing inspired C. S. Lewis to believe in God and write a stilted and punishing fantasy series that ruined the tender minds of a generation of children.

In addition to incessantly coining acerbic phrases, Chesterton also enjoyed other pastimes beloved by contemporary conservatives, such as civil debate, anti-Semitism, and sweating while he ate.

One of the many ways in which libertarianism is like Scientology is that both organizations try to ease new recruits in. Scientologists don’t bring up Xenu and volcanoes full of dead aliens until one has already signed the trillion-year contract; they start with e-meters and diet tips. Similarly, when libertarians make their pitch to skeptical youth, they tend to emphasize the commonsense, “economics 101” writings of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek.

Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe took the fuzzy, freedom-loving logic of libertarianism to its logical endpoint, a place that most of the uninitiated would consider a nightmare of inhumanity.

Hoppe’s biggest idea was that because democracy is majoritarian by nature, the majority of people will choose to be protected from oppression and discrimination. This, to Hoppe, was why democracy is a terrible evil that must be abolished and replaced with a system of unfettered private tyrannies.

According to Hoppe: There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society. Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They—the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism—will have to be physically removed from society too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order.III

If any intellectual has laid the groundwork for where the Right is headed now, it’s Hoppe: scorched-earth libertarianism fueled by atavistic hatred of minorities, queers, and Communists.

Then, once again, big-government pencil-pushers, jealous of the robber barons’ #successwin lifestyles, destroyed their freedom with the so-called New Deal, all just because unfettered capitalist speculation had destroyed the world’s economy. This is how freedom dies—to thunderous applause.

The Right hated Bill Clinton less for his policies (most of which were borrowed from the GOP, much as Nixon’s were borrowed from his New Deal Congress) than for his status as an avatar of 1960s licentiousness.

The 9/11 attacks finally gave the ambient cultural grievances of grassroots conservatism direction, focus, and energy. The global War on Terror became a fighting faith for the twenty-first century. This particular American combination of protestant wrath and militarized nationalism unleashed itself on the world, and woe betide any Arab or Frenchman who got in its way. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were blood rituals, sacrifices to a God who embodied a pure, retro vision of America in which the cultural pollutants of feminism, secularism, and multiculturalism were purged with fire. And no petty class grievances could ever disunify the GOP base, so engaged were they in the holy quest that gave new meaning to their lives.

White suburban boomers were aging and getting ornerier, growing ever more concerned about the proximity of millennials to their lawn.

Sarah Palin, a certified brain genius who has read every newspaper, awakened a primal urge in the populist Right. She proved that one of their own could stand on the national stage spewing verbal diarrhea and, quite possibly (if not for the machinations of the biased lib media), end up a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Almost as soon as Obama was inaugurated, the country’s reserve population of cranks, gun-fuckers, and Revolutionary War cosplayers strapped teabags to their tricorne hats and staged armed occupations of JCPenney parking lots from coast to coast. They watched Fox News with the reverent intensity of an astronomer witnessing the explosion of a supernova. They forwarded e-mails about secret mosques in the White House basement and Facebook memes demanding to see Obama’s birth certificate. Such an awful and alien being simply could not be a real American. He had to have hatched from a glistening black egg in a sun-cursed Kenyan village, then slouched toward Washington, DC, in the dark of night.

Remember—and remember well—that anyone who tries to feed you a line about how Donald Trump is not a “real” conservative is absolutely full of shit or is trying to sell you the next big lie. Trump represents everything that this vicious and corrupt project has valorized and promoted for the last forty years, and what’s more, the disasters of right-wing governance have created a country exactly as stupid and desperate as the one that actually elected a buffoon like him. The problem Trump now presents for the conservative intelligentsia is that he’s simply too much like the hogs who’ve been lapping up the slop of conservative ideology for decades and not enough like the undead ghouls who’ve been ladling it out. Since he has absolutely no intellectual foundation, he lacks initiation in the rites, rituals, and codes that have allowed previous conservatives to present themselves as thoughtful.

His plan for doing so involves sprinkling dark money over every perverse reactionary media project and politician he can find while he cosplays as a salt-of-the-earth cowboy who definitely knows how to ride a horse.

Most Oligarch Monopoly Men achieve immortality the old-fashioned way: by leaving a vast financial empire to their half-wit children,

She’s conservative, she’s traditional—and she’s hot! Awoooga! It’s Liberty Babe—a conservative media personality who appeals to an audience of mostly Social Security–age men hungry for books that reinforce their cosseted worldview and whose jackets give their lonely trouser worms a jolt of life.

We hesitate to generalize our audience, much less all Americans, but this is literally your grandparents. They come from an era when people had the common decency to say “Sir,” “Ma’am,” and “Boy, that’s not the water fountain you’re supposed to use.”

The nascent twenty-four-seven cable news channel CNN put frowzy pundits in front of cameras, increasing their celebrity and vanity. Meanwhile, America elected a Hollywood actor president, and unflinching, heroic newsmen got to the bottom of Iran-Contra, the S&L crisis, and AIDS denialism by demanding that Reagan tell them folksy stories about being friends with Tip O’Neill.

Conservative talk radio gave voice to the millions of reactionary white men who couldn’t speak for themselves due to their mouths being stuffed with hoagies.

Best of all, there was absolutely, positively no way for average people to talk back to journalists and pundits, to publicly call out hacks for their career failures and physical deficiencies, or to publish journalists’ private correspondences with women twenty years their junior replete with winky faces and ambiguous complaints about their wife. But that was all about to change.

But back in the 1990s, before social media and shitposting, everyone running the newspaper and TV industries thought like Krugman. There was no real preparation for a massive shift in technology that would destabilize and ultimately destroy the print media’s business model and leave them selling themselves even harder than they did in the old days when they hawked reverse mortgages and Doctor Haines’ Golden Specific.

These companies started to panic when readers understandably decided to get more and more of their news from the free Internet rather than paying for subscriptions. And so began the death spiral: newspapers underestimated the Internet, posted their shit for free, then realized they would go broke unless they started charging for it. Problem was, readers had already tasted free and didn’t feel like suddenly shelling out for Gerald Fletch-Queefen’s latest column in the Wall Street Journal.

Journalism isn’t the stuffy career path it used to be: instead of covering a beat at your local paper, working your way up the totem pole to a national outlet, and enjoying comfy union benefits all the while, the contemporary journalist can now embrace the life of the common deer tick, jumping from host to host until being plucked off and left to die in a pile of shit.

of course being in control of what is “cool” in our culture is a kind of power, but it’s one that liberals increasingly rely on in lieu of actual politics, to the detriment of politics—and culture, and cool people.

In fact, The West Wing is the Rosetta Stone of every stupid thing that contemporary liberals have come to believe.

And sure enough, the show telegraphed every single failure, error, and misapplication of power in the Obama years. Why? Because the people in charge finally got their chance to play out their fantasies of being characters on The West Wing! In so doing, they ran straight into the maw of real politics, power, and ideology.

As soon as they slipped out of power, their ideology—their mythology, really—left nothing in the toolbox that would get them back in. They were equipped only to keep inheriting power; as soon as they lost it, they had no tools or vision for getting it back.

The explosion of Web traffic in the early 2000s led to a huge demand for content, and media reviews were the cheapest, easiest content to crank out. This created a recap economy, in which poorly paid content creators put out instant reviews of television shows hours after they aired, and gave the people who’d just watched those shows space in the comments section to have the conversations about those shows they weren’t having with their nonexistent real-life friends.

And more enervating than the cynicism and relentless sameness of Prestige TV is the way the concept serves as a brainlessly proud monument to techno-capitalist exhaustion. Viewers, worn down by draining and unfulfilling work lives, socially and emotionally isolated, priced out of expensive movie theaters, attention spans and reading ability obliterated by the informational overload of the Internet, reach for any available confirmation that zoning out on the couch counts as cultural enrichment. Poorly paid content-mill providers are charged with providing that confirmation, treating every new show with decent production values and an angsty protagonist as an Important Commentary on Our Times. This is ice cream for dinner. Television is an inherently middlebrow medium, and dressing up shows with blockbuster production values and Big Social Themes won’t change that.

Most Americans despise their jobs, yet suffer from a species of brain worm that makes them believe work is inherently virtuous.

And, for some reason, we take for granted that for the majority of the precious handful of decades we’re alive, we’ll be making money for someone else, doing something we’d rather not do. Not only do we resign ourselves to this fate, we want nothing more than to make sure everyone else is roped into the assembly line as well. At the bottom of our stomachs we hate our bosses, but we dream of someday becoming them. Political theorists call this “fake consciousness,” and there is no faker friend than your boss, no faker crew than your workplace.

So why do we put up with it? The answer lies in a shared set of national beliefs about work and how it sets us free. The first key myth in this psychology is a timeless classic you’ll hear from warehouse managers, boomer dads, and Joe Biden: “Work builds character.”

Usually when people invoke “character,” it means some combination of grit, patience, determination, ingenuity, focus, self-discipline, and empathy. And sure, these are all good things that make for self-confident and healthy individuals. But now ask yourself: Does your job bring out these traits in you, your colleagues, or your boss? Or is it much more likely to bring out things like anxiety, impatience, petulance, authoritarianism, and a pent-up sense of homicidal rage?

In fact, most jobs chip away at those things until they’ve been completely annihilated. Jobs destroy character, day after miserable day. They drain all the time and energy you would otherwise have for fun, sex, hobbies, and anything other than staring blankly at a computer in the couple of hours you have to yourself after 7:00 p.m.

So when old people tell you that work builds character, what they really mean is that it trains you to slog through hopelessness and alcoholism and to redirect your unexpressed rage toward your family and your loved ones. It doesn’t build character, but it sure does build a tolerance to the antidepressants, mood stabilizers, five-hour energy diarrhea drinks, and “focus”-enhancing drugs coursing through your bloodstream.

Another uniquely American lie meant to cover all this up is the idea that “the rich work hardest of all.” The premise that the wealthy got that way from working harder than you do—or, at the very least, that they’re justly compensated—is a central myth of a country that let a hundred assholes on Wall Street get away with deleting $10 trillion in 2008 and (afte...

The factor of their income over that of a regular person is so astronomical that to be “equal” they would have to work hundreds of times harder and give 10,000 percent all the time.

there’s no one in a position of power to call bullshit on it.

The ugly truth is that no employer hires anyone unless they can extract more value from them than they have to pay out in wages and benefits.

Small-business owners are, generally speaking, insane egomaniacs who believe enough in their “pizza restaurant with a night club atmosphere” to borrow $250,000 and lord it over a workforce of desperate people. And you know what? Even if the boss is a nice person (it can happen), they still deny their employees an equal share in the profits of the business and continue to prop up the completely arbitrary social order that lifts up people with access to a bank loan and makes everyone else dependent on their personal generosity.

The simple fact is, bosses aren’t your friends, they’re not your parents, and they’re not your benefactors. They want to turn your sweat and anxiety and mounting desperation into a second Jet Ski. Asking nicely has never gotten workers anywhere, but that’s what people tend to do when they think their boss hired them out of the goodness of his heart. Don’t fall for it. The next time you hear “job creator,” just imagine your boss sitting on his ass eating a foie gras burrito while you pull a fist-sized ball of pubic hair out of the break room sink.

To understand how mind-numbingly stupid your job is now, you must first understand the history of the labor economy.

backward. But remember that medieval rulers didn’t have the benefit of the scientific field of economics that we enjoy today and were thus forced to rely on the augury of court wizards, whose analyses of entrails led them to recommend that a lower tithe rate would spur job growth and ward off the birth of two-headed cattle.

Knights were the Special-Ops guys of this time, in that they loved gear and functioned as tools for moneyed carriers of syphilis.

As the major nations began expanding their colonial properties, trade between states and continents grew immeasurably. It wasn’t a rising tide that lifted all boats, but it was a chance to get ahead for people who would do absolutely anything to anybody for a quick buck.

The average peasant may have been illiterate and convinced that his erections controlled the tides, but he knew enough to understand that toiling away in a Dark Satanic Mill sucked ass, so he avoided it. Luckily, the budding capitalist and landowning classes had a foolproof method for creating a motivated, agile workforce: enclosure. That’s where you go to a piece of land that had been used for common grazing and foraging for generations, throw a fence around it, and say, “This is mine now.” Deprived of their means of subsistence, peasants flocked to cities and filled factory floors, working endlessly to pay for food and lodging that just a few years earlier had been theirs by birthright. This process of dispossession and exploitation was repeated much more brutally for slaves in North America. The lower you were in the labor economy, the more your bosses could squeeze out of you and suck the marrow.

So, the petite bourgeoisie started eating curiously wet cheeses, seeing plays to make sure they were bad, and babbling endlessly about university wait lists. These things remain the cornerstones of the global upper middle class to this day. Trends such as dog therapy and making one’s own bead jewelry may come and go, but the most boring people you know today can trace their intellectual lineage to these middle managers of yore.

The less wanderlust-filled of this type could also slot into occupations like flagpole dancer, iron-lung feces remover, and child catcher. Only the last job is recognizable in today’s economy, as it merged with plantation overseer to become what is now known as “police officer.”