Chapo Trap House

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About

Chapo Trap House is a humorous political podcast with leftist spin hosted by Will Menaker, Matt Christman and Felix Biederman. They were later joined by journalists Virgil Texas and Amber A'Lee Frost. They are popular Twitter personalities, particularly in the leftist and Weird Twitter communities. The podcast is released weekly and skewers political pundits in the center-left and right, such as Ross Douthat of The New York Times and Dan McLaughlin.^[3]

History

The three men first appeared together on the podcast Street Fight Radio to mock 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. Following the success they had there, they decided to start Chapo Trap House.^[1] They released their first episode on March 12th, 2016.^[2]

Their podcast was met with immediate praise, and it quickly became a cult-favorite among the shows' followers. The AV Club^[4] wrote a favorable review of the podcast's second episode on March 28th, 2016, saying "it feels like an absolutely essential listen." On July 29th, they were interviewed by Paste Magazine,^[1] and described their comedy as an alternative to leftist media which they find dominated by smugness. Christman described it as an alternative to:

"smug above-it-all snark of The Daily Show or the quaver-voiced earnestness of, like Chris Hedges or something. Neither of those models offer the visceral thrill of listening to people who actually give a shit (as opposed to the wan liberalism of people who are mostly interested in showing how much smarter they are than Republicans) but who don't believe that having a sense of humor is counter-revolutionary."

The group also received praise from The Advocate^[5] and Mediaite.^[6] Its critics include Reason^[7] writer Robby Soave who accused the hosts of cheering for revoking freedom of speech for right-wing publications.

Online Presence

The group is most popular on Twitter. Individually, Christensen ( @cushbomb )^[8] has over 15,500 followers, Menaker ( @willmenaker )^[9] has over 13,700, and Felix Biederman ( @ByYourLogic )^[10] has over 21,400. The @ChapoTrapHouse^[11] Twitter has over 12,100 as of November 17th, 2016. The Chapo Trap House Facebook page^[12] has over 2,000 fans, and their subreddit^[13] has 669 readers.

Baseball Crank

Chapo Trap House is responsible for the Baseball Crank meme, in which the Twitter avatar of conservative blogger Dan McLaughlin was photoshopped into hundreds of famous photographs and works of art.