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The year was 2016. Donald Trump had just stunned the world by getting elected despite the entire media establishment being against him. The only support Trump had during his campaign was on the Internet, particularly the Alt Right, which was spreading across social media like a virus and pied-pipering the youth into White Nationalism.

On the Left, there was an increasing demand that they produce their own version of the Alt Right — some kind of Internet-based scene that was edgy, ironic, and intelligent with a veneer of anti-establishment cool as well as fluency in meme culture. And so it was that around this time, rumblings began in the Lefty media about something called “the Dirtbag Left.” The Dirtbag Left was going to be a bizarro version of the Alt Right.

Centered on the flagship podcast Chapo Trap House and its associated personalities, the Dirtbag Left was Bernie Broism on steroids in the same way that the Alt Right had taken Trumpism to the next level. They carved out a difference between themselves and mainstream Democrat politics similar to how the Alt Right defined themselves against cuckservatives. The Dirtbag Left fetishized Marxism in a way guaranteed to fluster your conservative parents similar to the way the Alt Right dalliance with Nazi imagery triggered your liberal parents. The Dirtbag Left also offered its own, more politically-correct criticisms of woke culture. And whereas the Alt Right’s problem with woke was that it was anti-white, the Dirtbag Left’s gripe was that it obscured class struggle and undermined worker solidarity. Comparisons between Chapo Trap House and The Daily Shoah abounded.

For a time, the Dirtbag Left was a significant force in Internet politics, and one of the dissident Right’s main rivals given that the two movements had very similar target audiences: young, middle-class whites of above average intelligence. At their peak, the hosts of Chapo Trap House would boast of the countless thousands whom they had “saved from going down the Nazi rabbit hole.”

The Dirtbag Left had several structural advantages over the dissident Right. For one, they had a slew of outspoken celebrity fans who were happy to promote their content as well as a degree of mainstream media support. Chapo Trap House had puff pieces written about them in major outlets such as The Guardian, The New Republic, Spiked, Salon, GQ, and countless others.

Yet, the Dirtbag Left’s star has dimmed considerably of late. I can’t remember the last time I heard the name of TrueAnon. Whatever happened to them? The reasons for its decline are complex and manifold, but I will offer what I think are the five main causes of their fall from grace.

1. Elon Musk’s Takeover of Twitter

The Dirtbag Left was one of the primary beneficiaries of social media censorship. It was during the era of post-Trump, pre-Elon Twitter that the Dirtbag Left reached its peak. After all the main influencers of the dissident Right were scrubbed from social media, the Dirtbag Left (and to a lesser extent, NRx) had a virtual monopoly on high-IQ, unwoke political discourse. As a result, the remaining dissident Rightists on the platform ended up engaging with content by figures such as Aimee Terese, Anna Khachian, and Sean McCarthy for no other reason than because that was the closest thing to the dissident Right which you could find on social media at the time. For all its flaws, it was at least anti-Zionist, and those who propagated such anti-capitalist and materialist critiques of power — the Dirtbag Left’s bread and butter — were inoffensive people of identitarian sensibilities. To put it in meme language, they were “the dissident Right at home.”

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter opened up the free market of ideas, and the Dirtbag Left has had to compete with the dissident Right for an audience on a level playing field for the first time since 2016 — and have been largely been swept away in the far-Right revolution in that is in progress on Elon’s app. As anti-Zionists, the Bernie Left has been able to make some hay out of the post-October 7 zeitgeist, but their non-racist, anti-Zionist critiques of Israel (“Jews are fine. It’s the ideology of Zionism!”) appear tepid and incomplete when presented side-by-side with the fuller content on the Jewish Question coming from the Right.

2. The Loss of Bernie Sanders and Lack of a Clear Successor

The Dirtbag Left’s honeymoon with the media came to a crashing halt in 2020. After Bernie Sanders pulled off some surprise upset victories early in the primaries, the entire Democrat establishment sharpened its knives and descended on the Sanders movement, including his supporters in the Dirtbag Left. After years of being championed as the great Alt Right deradicalizers of the Internet, hit pieces started coming hot and heavy that accused Chapo Trap House and other Dirtbag Left personalities of being misogynistic crypto-Nazis. With the dissident Right already purged from social media, it appeared that the Dirtbag Left had outlived its usefulness to the establishment.

After his failure in the 2020 primaries, Bernie Sanders was now too old to be socialism’s next great hope. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was supposed to be Bernie Sanders’ successor, proved to be a disappointment to the true believers. Shortly after arriving in Washington, AOC started dabbling in the sort of alienating identity politics that Sanders — at least initially — tried to avoid. At one infamous Sanders campaign event, AOC even gave a speech wherein she advocated for the abolition of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Some blame AOC for Sanders’ 2020 campaign becoming a bastardized, woke version of his 2016 effort.

The loss of Bernie Sanders had a crippling effect on the socialist movement in America. For one, it was demoralizing. Ordinary people are more likely to engage with a movement that looks like it is winning or at least making progress toward an eventual win. Without Sanders, there appeared to be no more hope on the horizon.

Sanders had also been useful as a rallying point for a movement whose history has been plagued with infighting. As bad as infighting is on the Right, it is far worse on the Marxist Left, where squabbles will break out over the minutest differences in the interpretation of dogma Take the case of the Socialist Party, which was on the rise in America at the time of the First World War. Then, in 1919, the party split between pro- and anti-Bolsheviks, causing the pro-Bolsheviks to break away and form their own group — and then that group started infighting and split in two.

The Israel-Gaza War may temporarily offer the Left a new rallying point, but when that war winds down, you can expect infighting and acrimony to return to the Left.

3. Scandals and Setbacks at Chapo Trap House

As the flagship podcast of the Dirtbag Left, it is up to Chapo Trap House to generate much of the movement energy, but it has found itself taking some hits in recent years. In 2021, they hosted Virgil Texas, an Oriental guy who is arguably the show’s most explicitly anti-white host. Texas then announced that he was leaving the show to start a new podcast called Bad Faith with former Bernie Sanders Press Secretary Brianha Joy Gray, who was also a writer for The Hill. Shortly after this was announced, one Jennifer Seberg emerged and accused Virgil Texas of grooming her when she still underage, claiming that he had asked her for nude photos of herself.

Virgil Texas vanished from social media, never to be seen again, shortly after these accusations emerged. This was a black stain on Chapo Trap House that was made even worse by their refusal to address the issue after it came to light. I’ve heard that rumors of Virgil Texas’ bad behavior with underage girls had been floating around for a while — which, if true, means that Chapo Trap House had been shielding a predator.

To make matters worse, in 2023 host Matt Christman — in my opinion, the most talented member of their team — suffered a stroke, and it is unknown if or when he will ever return to the show.

4. The Rise of the Anti-Capitalist Right

When the Dirtbag Left first started gaining attention in 2016, the Alt Right’s main influencers were overwhelmingly ex-libertarians who had turned White Nationalist after learning that brown people overwhelmingly vote for big government. In libertarianism, economics is the be-all and end-all, and after black-pilling on it, some went all the way to the other end of the spectrum and began claiming that economics is irrelevant when compared to race and culture. Many came to believe that economic issues are a red herring that the establishment uses to distract people from white genocide. Some common refrains at the time were that an all-white society could make even a bad economic system work, or that Communist East Germany was still preferable to any Sub-Saharan country.

This was an area that, for a time, gave the Dirtbag Left something of an edge in that they delved deeply into materialist analyses and structural critiques. Then Keith Woods came along. In his early days in the scene, he made several videos making the case for socialism and against capitalism from a Right-wing perspective. This was possibly the first Keith Woods controversy: the accusation that he was a crypto-commie. Now, I understand that Keith Woods was not the first anti-capitalist White Nationalist, nor was he even the first anti-capitalist on the dissident Right. Eric Striker and Matt Heimbach were likewise avowed anti-capitalists, for example. But from my own observations, it was only after Woods came along that it became fashionable on the dissident Right to be anti-capitalist and/or identify as a Third Positionist.

Capitalism vs Socialism

In the end, the dissident Right developing their own critiques of capitalism and economic structural analyses made us more competitive with the Dirtbag Left.

5. Defections to the Right

Several figures associated with the Dirtbag Left movement now identify as Right-wing, or are de facto Right-wing. The most notable examples of this are Aimee Terese, who fell in with Bronze Age Pervert’s (BAP) sphere and the Red Scare podcast who, despite their name, now promote race realism and hobnob with Right-wing personalities lsuch as Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, and Mr. Race Realism himself: Steve Sailer. There are so many ex-Leftists turned Right-wingers nowadays that they formed their own scene in New York known as the Dimes Square scene.

I had predicted that many of the Dirtbag Left would defect to the Right, but unfortunately, few defected to the dissident Right (the real one). Rather, the BAP sphere seems to be the main destination for ex-Dirtbag Lefties. That said, many of them have started coopting the term “dissident Right,” which creates a lot of confusion and annoyance. I occasionally see tweets where people discuss how the Dissident Right is being flooded with transsexuals and such. These people aren’t talking about us; rather, they are talking about this Dimes Square scene, where ex-Leftists abound.

This is an annoying development, as I would bet that 99% of these people have no idea where the term comes from and couldn’t even name the person who coined it (it was John Derbyshire). “Dissident Right” was a rebranding of “Alt Right”, which was a rebranding of “White Nationalist.” But some of these new converts use it as a catch-all term meaning “not your daddy’s conservatism.”

I expect this trend to continue, and hopefully the BAP sphere proves to be a gateway to White Nationalism. Certainly on Elon Twitter/X, the Right is now undeniably where “the action” is.