leaving butter out is a cultural thing in that it is easier to spread and cook with, and due to fat content it doesn't spoil

Okay, Felix definitely doesn't know how butter works

the utter silence after Felix describes how the rich leave butter out because their homes are so cold left me breathless

We take a look at The Lincoln Project, a new political ad PAC founded by never-Trumpers taking aim at Donald Trump by bringing their conservativism into the open willing arms of the Democrats.

Chapo Trap House

434 - Project for a New American Lincoln (7/6/20)

R.I.P. Michael Brooks.

Felix casts a protection spell on our sweet abuela Moon. Virgil breaks down Ilhan Omar’s “problem solving” primary challenger. Will administers Trump’s cognitive test on his cohosts. Then, Will and Felix talk to journalist Séamus Malekafzali about escalating tensions in Iran, Israeli training of U.S. cops, and the collapse of Lebanon’s financial sector.

Support Ilhan Omar’s reelection campaign here:
https://www.mobilize.us/ilhanomar/

and find Séamus’ writing here: https://www.seamus-malekafzali.com/

438 - They Moved the Moon feat. Séamus Malekafzali (7/20/20)

The popularity of HGTV house-flipping TV shows can’t be overstated: In the second week of July, HGTV was the fourth highest rated cable network, behind only Fox News, MSNBC and CNN, making it the highest rated entertainment network in the United States. Its most prominent programming: the reliable, risk free formula of home flipping shows. All of these shows—Flip or Flop and its many regional spinoffs, Good Bones, Flipping 101, to name just a few—share a basic formula: house-flippers, usually a family business in the form of a husband and wife team or parent and child with a folksy rapport, buy a neglected house on the cheap—cue zoom-ins on mold, water damage, decaying wood, dust and dead bugs—that’s often in a relatively poor or gentrifying neighborhood.

They then turn it into something they describe as "beautiful", to be sold at a much higher price to, most likely, young white people looking for a "funky" home in an "up-and-coming" neighborhood. But at what cost do these glossy, get-rich-quick reality shows entertain us?  What ideologies do they promote, and how do they erase the working class black and brown families whose housing was condemned, and communities were systemically neglected, before the camera’s even began rolling?

On this episode—our  Season 3 finale—we take a look at these shows to understand how and why HGTV became a glorified commercial for house-flipping and gentrification, examining its indifference to housing instability and its dead-eyed cheerleading of “middle-class” bourgeois aspirationalism, no matter the social cost. 

Our guests are culture writer Ann-Derrick Gaillot and Atlanta-based community organizer Kamau Franklin.

Episode 116: The Pro-Gentrification Aspirationalism of HGTV's House-Flipping Shows

We survey the damage wrought on the COVID economy and take a look at what comes next

https://newmodels.io/proprietary/a-bit-worse-houellebecq-transl-kelsey

Episode 88: Covid Cliff

Dan Boeckner of Wolf Parade, Handsome Furs, and Operators stops by to discuss some of the darker parts of Canadian history, including Mountie Gladio, Nazi connections in Ottawa, and Vancouver Island’s noted concentration of Satanists.

Support Dan’s content over on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/operators

UNLOCKED 439 - Maple Gladio feat. Dan Boeckner (7/23/20)

WE ARE BACK -- and laden with information about Ghislaine Maxwell's post-arrest machinations, and new terrible details about her pre-arrest sprees

Episode 90: Docudump

We review the 1990 Barbet Schroeder film “Reversal of Fortune,” covering Alan Dershowitz’s representation of Danish vampire Claus von Bülow after he is accused of murdering his wife. Needless to say this depiction of Dershowitz raises a few eyebrows 30 years down the line.

Keep your eyes on twitch.tv/chapotraphouse this Tuesday and Wednesday for coverage of the DNC.

446 - Reversal of Alan (8/17/20)

We take a look at the recent hubbub surrounding the USPS, what motivates the drive toward privatization, and the larger ideological underpinnings of the Libertarian revolution.

Episode 94: Koch'd Up (Part I)

Defector’s Patrick Redford stops by to talk the (hopefully likely) fall of JKIII, NBA strikes, and whether robots go to hell. 

Check out defector.com for all your sports blog and media needs: www.defector.com

450 -  In The Bubble feat. Patrick Redford (8/31/20)

Waiting tables. Bartending. Hospitality, food delivery, beauty salons, rideshare driving. The service industry, as anyone who has worked in it knows all too well, is notorious for relying on tipping to undercut employee wages and deputize individual customers to determine how much money a worker should be able to take home. Amid increasing recognition of these injustices, a number of campaigns and new laws surfaced, pre-pandemic, to abolish or meaningfully reduce the practice of tipping.

But despite the best efforts of these campaigns, tipping remains the industry - and American society - standard. Indeed, the perverse logic of tipping has broadened into an ever-present 'snitch economy' - an ecosystem of tactics like mystery shoppers and Uber and Yelp rating systems designed to police the behavior of workers while outsourcing the costs of said supervision to customers and other workers. 

In the process, our snitch economy pits those being surveilled against those doing the watching, and the judging. Through a ubiquitous public-facing network of rating and reviewing other people’s labor - and often the behavioral disposition they exhibit while working - people with otherwise very little power are elevated to temporary positions of authority over others, fostering a culture of surveillance rather than one of solidarity. The snitch economy serves the dual purpose of not only giving working people a false sense of power when they’re the ones being served, but also reducing millions of human interactions to opportunities for not only snap judgments, but subjective rewards and retribution.

In this episode, we detail how businesses in the service industry, bolstered by friendly media, use tactics like tipping, mystery shoppers, and ubiquitous ratings systems in order to turn us all into petty, mean, busybodies carrying out the agenda of capital with nothing to show for it but a fleeting sense of self-satisfaction. 

Our guest is writer, editor and agitator Vicky Osterweil.

Ep. 118 - The Snitch Economy: How Rating Apps and Tipping Pit Working People Against Each Other

By now, it's largely taken for granted that country music is a racialized signifier, interchangeable with right-wing politics. And it’s not such an unreasonable generalization: the political currents of twanged and drawled patriotic paeans like Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA," Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American)," and Brooks & Dunn's "Only In America" leave little to the imagination.

But how, exactly, did this come to be? After all, country music, a descendant of the blues, folk, Tejano, and other genres, with connections to labor organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World and social-justice movements, has historically attracted musicians spanning the political spectrum, and didn’t necessarily emerge from such a staunchly right-wing political tradition.

Rather, popular conceptions of country music have long been deliberately shaped by a series of broader ideological projects. Throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries, conservative politicians and other right-wing forces have exploited the genre to promote illiberalism, racism, revanchist politics, and runaway anti-intellectualism where not giving a shit about the world beyond one’s own cold beer, pickup truck, old lady is not only acceptable, but actively encouraged and flaunted. 

On this episode, we examine how the genre of country music has been wielded as a tool of reactionary politicking in the US, from the machinations of Henry Ford in the 1920s to the Nixon administration’s Southern Strategy in the 1960s and ‘70s to the heady Shock and Y’all days of the Bush years, and how a once working-class tradition became a cultural cul de sac of worn-out tropes and middle-class, white grievance politics.  

Our guest is writer, editor and artist Alexander Billet.

446 - Reversal of Alan (8/17/20)

Chapo Trap House

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