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

by Chapo Trap House

Korea was the first serious PowerPoint presentation of the Cold War, a showdown between us and the oppressive regulatory apparatus known as the Soviet Union. It was where we first proved our commitment to the two principles of our company philosophy: a) Kill civilians to maintain US hegemony, and b) Prop up dictators to maintain control of valuable territory.

So straight out of the gate, the Cold War was emphatically not about democracy versus totalitarianism. In Korea and in every subsequent proxy war, it was about capitalism versus threat to capitalism.

How much safer would both America and the rest of the world be right now if our government’s response to 9/11 was to pretend it didn’t happen and do absolutely nothing?

Clay understood that at the end of the day, everyone—Whig or Democrat, slave owner or abolitionist, Irishman or human—was a white male landowner and ought to put their differences aside and come together over a cup of switchel to hash out pragmatic policies that would work for every member of the ruling class.

For all liberalism’s bragging about “getting things done,” the only person who really got anything done during the Kennedy years was a young Marxist go-getter named Lee Harvey Oswald.

But the whole idea that the working class was uniformly pro-war and middle-class hippies were all against it is bullshit: polls and surveys at the time showed that proles were more antiwar than smug, college-educated elites.II This was the birth of a fake debate still raging today, with upper- and middle-class liberals slamming the dumb slugs of the working class as stupid, racist rubes—which is true to a point, but also covers up the enormous complicity of America’s bourgeoisie in supporting awful wars, draconian conservative economics, and reactionary presidents like Nixon and Trump.

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.

In the right-wing vernacular, freedom means the freedom to exercise one’s God-given right to dominate anyone deemed lower than you.

Along the way, Falwell sued Larry Flynt for writing that he fucked his sister, resulting in a landmark Supreme Court decision that has freed trolls to own the shit out of public figures with no consequences ever since.

Because Trump does to liberals and minorities exactly what they thought Obama did to conservatives. Politics has become a realm of purely spiteful grievance.

Along with him, wide swaths of the liberal and left spectrum have become the video word made flesh, the evil wavelengths of the TV eating away at their brains until they believe not only that culture is the way to achieve social justice but that Game of Thrones or Harry Potter itself is social justice.

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.

It turned out that with state control of production and jobs for all, a nation could spend its way out of misery. Of course, this proof of concept of planned economies was instead interpreted as a reason to constantly go to war.

You receive the privileges of e-mailing people who have sublimated their personality disorders into “management styles” and playing the pawn in bizarre office power plays between proud MBAs.

John Maynard Keynes was predicting that we would have a twenty-hour workweek by now.

So don’t believe the tech lizards, the reactionary billionaires, or the Democratic paypigs who tell you that work is actually cool. It won’t be cool until their bank accounts are emptied into everyone else’s and “work” becomes something you squeeze in between posting, gaming, and having a nice, big wank.