Well, as a Chapo fan who also spends a lot of time studying and writing about far-right online culture, I can say the answer is definitively “no.” Anyone making this case has clearly not spent a considerable amount of time actually listening to the show and engaging with the content substantively or trying to understand it on any more than a superficial level as a pop culture phenomenon.
It’s a comedy podcast, but underneath the sarcasm there’s a deep core of sincerity, humanism and concern for the plight of working people that’s common to most people who identify as socialists. They focus most of their fire on people who do genuinely evil things in the world but hide behind a mask of “civility.” A common target is the “Never Trump” Republicans — Bill Kristol, David Frum, etc. These “neocon ghouls,” as they’re constantly referred to on the show, helped sell the Iraq War, which brought untold misery to the Middle East and killed half a million people.
In the mainstream media, these people have been lifted up and rehabilitated as heroes of the “Anti-Trump resistance.” You should listen to their episode about John McCain. Every liberal was eulogizing him as an “elder statesman” and a paragon of “decency” and “civility,” like all of history didn’t exist before Trump. This is the same guy who sang “Bomb, bomb Iran” and called his own wife a “cunt.” They were all getting misty eyed about Bush giving Michelle Obama a candy, as if he weren’t a literal war criminal who lied to start a disastrous war that drained the treasury and funneled billions to his crooked contractor buddies.
One insightful observation Chapo makes over and over is that liberals are like dogs in that they recognize tone but not content. Most of them would be a lot more accepting of Trump if he just acted more “presidential” — if he did the exact same policies but said nice words. I come back to this over and over again, but immigrant children were being brutalized and sexually assaulted by a militarized fascist border patrol before Trump. Liberals didn’t care because they had a nice, articulate black man in office who said all the things a president should say.
At a societal level, the real “gateway to fascism” is milquetoast liberalism, which is incapable of effectively resisting the rightward push. The “dirtbag left” isn’t an ideology but a style of politics — an aesthetic. It’s a rejection of that scoldy, faux civility and feigned outrage that has come to characterize centrists. To the extent that it resembles the far-right, it’s only on the surface level. The problem with the far-right isn’t that they’re mean or that they use slang like “cuck” or whatever. At the heart of what they do is a reactionary racist ideology of hatred and white supremacy.
Chapo might make some “edgy” jokes but they do it in the service of an entirely different, more noble political project aimed at creating a just, more equal world. Anyone saying that it’s a “gateway to fascism” either (1) Doesn’t understand what fascism is (2) Has never heard the show or (3) Is making the argument in total bad faith to advance their own ideological goals.
If anything, Chapo is diverting people away from the far-right — in particular young people who are ideologically malleable and are turned off by the aforementioned sanctimonious, morally bankrupt style of centrist liberals.
