So, before we begin, a full disclosure.
I'm a leftist Podcaster. My podcast, hosted along with my husband and a friend is an LGBTQ+ comedy podcast that mostly focuses on pop culture, sex jokes, and dumb games and sketches. You can find us here.
In the course of my travels online I've worn a lot of hats. If any of y'all recall the podcast Hopping Mad with Alissa and Will, I joined them as their "alt-right watch" correspondent towards the end of that show's run. I spent a lot of time listening to podcasts, researching podcasts, and eventually, creating my own.
Around 2015 I was turned on to this new, hip young podcast called Chapo Trap House. The hosts were all in for Bernie, seemed to have a pretty fun sarcastic style, and overall (at least at first) seemed to be a part of a new wave of rough and tumble leftists who weren't afraid to get their hands dirty.
I subscribed to their show, and later to their patreon. But as the primaries ended and the general election neared I started feeling a little uncomfortable about the direction the show was heading.
Instead of gritting their teeth and focusing on the clear and present danger that Trump presented, the hosts seemed more interested in harping on the foils of "libs". Instead of decrying blatant racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia, they transitioned into whining about what they called "idpol" (identity politics).
Eventually I bailed on my subscription and moved on, none the worse for wear, or so I thought. But the Chapo gang had become a bona-fide phenom.
Thanks to a combination of money (they're all trust fund kids) and connections (parents who worked in media) these "hipsters from Brooklyn" became the face of what seemed to be a new force on the left. The "dirtbag left". Supposedly made up of grizzled truth tellers who weren't afraid to get down in the mud with the GOP and weren't constrained by the namby pamby "Political Correctness" of mainstream Dems.
There was only one problem with this. When you're being ironically racist, or sexist, or homophobic just to show that you can "make those jokes too" it doesn't matter that you're being ironic.
Ironic racism is still racism.
Then more came out about these so called "leftists" and who they associated themselves with.
Virgil Texas turned out to be buddies with neo nazi Sam Hyde
Amber A'Lee Frost was on Red Scare, basically an alt right podcast. The Chapo official Twitter account gave it's endorsement to the Cumtown podcast hosted by Nick Mullen (the above link about Sam Hyde gets into that a bit as well, trust me, it's fuckin ugly).
Then, the dam broke. Chapo had Matt Taibbi on their show, and nodded along as he argued during the summer of BLM protests that cops were the real working class (here is a live tweet of that disaster of an episode by opinion writer Noah Berlatsky) and that opposing cops means you're anti worker!
Now, I've given a lot of words to Chapo specifically here, just because they're the most egregious example, but they're far from the only one. The entirety of the "dirtbag left" during the last election went as follows:
"LOL u support the blue rapist instead of the red rapist"
"LOL Trump is no worse than Biden and maybe better because Obama started the kids in cages so you can't blame Trump"
And so on.
Basically they were DESPERATE for Trump to win so that they'd have four more years sitting in their penthouse tsk tsking and sneering that "Bernie woulda won" (not that they ever actually cared about Bernie, he was just a convenient bludgeon to attack "libs" who they hate far more than they hate actual nazis).
So now that Trump has lost they are determined to shit on every Biden accomplishment, foment division, mock any attempts at "diversity" (because as cis-het upper middle class white dudes they hate 'idpol' solely because it means they can't hide their mediocrity behind their cis-het whiteness anymore).
And as time has gone on their "ironic" racism, sexism, and homo/transphobia has become far less ironic and far more "mask off"
So, as the title says, 'ware the dirtbag "left". They might hate capitalism, but they hate progressives and liberals so much that they'll happily team up with fascists to "own" you.
-fin