The Chapo book is a wry, satiric look at American political culture, interspersed with asides and factoids that layer over the larger narrative ... True to its title, the book is indeed a 'guide' in the sense that it provides a greater vision of the United States today from the point of the view of a burgeoning left-populist movement largely coalescing online and vis-a-vis DSA. In that sense, the most important subsection is the illustrated guides to conservative and liberal archetypes: Even a casual reader with no Twitter account and no online presence could flip to the center of the book and scan these to get a sense of how disaffected millennial leftists (self included) see the world ... The book’s articulation of U.S. hegemony is more or less what you might find in a Chomsky book or Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, yet it is written in an argot that will be instantly recognizable to any millennial or GenXer who spends time online. This is more revolutionary than it sounds ... a lot of people out there might never read Chomsky or Zinn or Angela Davis—dense, depressing politics books just aren’t everyone’s thing—but would read this book because it’s accessible, funny, and in a language and a culture that they understand. Chapo Trap House are not merely critics, but are also helping to build a culture that is introducing many new people to leftist politics in an accessible way.

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 ... The Chapo Guide follows the same '80/20 rule' as my diet: 80 percent candy and 20 percent meat ... The book is a mapping exercise of contemporary American politics ... The authors don’t shy away from the tangible aspects of our planetary hell, describing an apocalypse wrought by climate change ... Although political books tend to have a short shelf life, especially in the age of Twitter, The Chapo Guide mostly avoids this problem by focusing on history and archetypes. My favorite parts of the book are the 'Taxonomies' of different characters you find online. This is aided by some wonderful illustrations by Eli Valley. His style has a wild Seventies feel ... Though much of this will be familiar to people who have read writers like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, the Chapo fellows put their own unique spin on it. Here the candy/meat ratio comes in handy for people who would never think to crack open Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (or who bought it and only got to page thirty) but are up for a few jokes ... it has a bit of the magic of a Seventies MAD or National Lampoon, or one of The Onion books, the sort of thing I would have enjoyed flipping through for hours as a kid.

...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 ... The Chapo Guide authors glibly pooh-pooh the postwar Communist threat that drove containment. 'Who cares?' if the Soviets won the Cold War, they write. 'Pick your dictatorship: Would you have rather lived in Fidel Castro’s Cuba or in any one of the U.S.’s many military junta police states?' Would they have applied the same logic when the U.S. allied with Stalin to repel Hitler? They were both not just run-of-the-mill dictators, but mass murderers. What’s the diff? ... we get the usual left-wing criticisms of the Barack Obama and Bill Clinton presidencies ... The infomercial socialists of Chapo have exploited the free market expertly, and at least saved themselves from the 9-to-5 prison. There is always a market for easy solutions to complicated problems. The book’s introduction promises to 'offer a vision of a new world—one in which a person can post in the morning, game in the afternoon, and podcast after dinner without ever becoming a poster, gamer or podcaster.' After reading the book, I know of five who can.

...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 ... The book is a satirical barnstorm of the U.S.A. past and present that emphasizes the country’s pathological relationship with capitalism and pours caustic blame on both parties for the present state of the nation ... Some readers, including even hardcore fans of the podcast, will find the book’s style self-indulgent—arcane references and in-jokes riddle every chapter and absurd fictions bookend moments of solid analysis without any shift in tone to tip off casual readers. However, composing a unified style from the voices of five individual authors (Frost is not one of the writers) is a difficult stunt to pull off, and one they manage capably for 300-odd pages. The book is also a rich source for anyone curious about the White House’s ongoing political circus, and the cultural factors influencing an increasing number of young American Leftists.

...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 ... There is certainly no shortage of put-downs and insults throughout this book, a style which may put off readers easily irritated by negativity. Through the snark often comes searing insights ... The Chapo Guide is not a book that wants to be taken too seriously, and readers would be wise to approach it as such. Chapo was never going to offer the cure to all the world’s ills, but that doesn’t mean readers won’t enjoy the raucous romp found within these pages. Fans of Chapo will love this cheeky little text ... But The Chapo Guide will be of the most interest to those uninitiated in 'the Chapo Way.' The book’s broad, sweeping nature makes it a perfect introduction to an important, growing political subculture.

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 ... Unsurprisingly, the strengths of Chapo the Show are the weaknesses of Chapo the Book. If you listen to the podcast at all, you quickly realize the subject matter is unrelentingly grim. Yet Chapo Trap House is delightful listening, because the intensity of healthy hatred is cut with surreal bantz and outlandish bits ... The book reduces the splendid chorus to a single cutting voice. The fireworks and push-pull tone are removed to a knowing, insightful narrator who is resolute in informing you how doomed everything is. The show is vulgar, friendly, human, and hilarious; the book is merely hilarious and informed. There’s hope in the show, little in The Guide. But if you love Chapo—and if you don’t, you should—then by your own logic, you must love The Guide as well.

The book is largely a fast-paced comic retelling of American political history ... The deadpan delivery—mixing puns, rampant sarcasm, inside jokes, references to professional wrestling, and sincere exhortations to pursue reform—is textbook Chapo. The Chapo crew can be polarizing, and the style here risks exhausting even loyal 'Gray Wolves' (as fans are known, in an ironic nod to Turkish nationalists), but they succeed in advocating 'a good-humored, thick-skinned, and maybe even optimistic struggle against the world outside' to readers disillusioned with mainstream politics.