Dirtbag: Essays

by Amber A'Lee Frost

The victories and failures of millennial socialism, as told by the writer who lived it.Amber A'Lee Frost came to New York City from her home state of Indiana as a working class activist (and member of then-unknown Cold War hold-out, Democratic Socialists of America), just before the first major movement for economic justice of the millennium, Occupy Wall Street. Of course, Occupy went bust, then Bernie Sanders went boom, and she threw herself into the campaign with everything she had. Frost has been one of the foremost evangelists of labor and socialist politics ever since, as a writer, activist, former staff and lifetime member of DSA, and cohost of the wildly popular Chapo Trap House podcast.Dirtbag is the much-anticipated debut from one of the most engaging and insightful writers of her generation. This book is more than a political memoir; it is a chapter in the story of the only movement that has a chance to reshape our world into something better. It captures an electric time of thrilling triumphs, stupid decisions, friendships and rivalries new and old, struggle, joy, setbacks, and heartbreak, all with magnetic prose, remarkable candor, and unflappable humor.Throughout it all, Frost burned the candle at both ends, relentlessly campaigning for socialism and the labor movement, from the American Midwest to the British rust belt, and rallying the troops with her brothers-in-arms as a self-described propagandist for the glorious cause of the workers movement (and somehow, always finding moments for plenty of reckless adventuring). The time was a brutal calamity of work and play, with all of the late nights, hard fights, and joyous camaraderie powered by the hope and the faith that maybe, somehow, this time, socialism could actually win.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Essays, Memoir, Audiobook, Biography, Comedy

277 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 5, 2023

Reviews

[Adam McPhee · Rating 3 out of 5]

A snapshot of a certain moment in time on the left.

Seeing some people snicker about this one, but like all socialist memoirs its true value isn't apparent until one of your weirdo friends digs it up twenty or thirty years down the line.

Glory to the Chapos.

[Steffi · Rating 5 out of 5]

How could I not love this debut slash 'political memoir' by Amber A'lee Frost - a central figure in my favorite bubble of people, podcasts, and outlets with whom I all largely agree on (and share my agony over) politics, including my fellow Bernie Bros, DSA, Corbynista, Chapo Traphouse (Amber is a co-host) Jacobin mag and podcast, Verso books and so forth (I have a few other bubbles to cultivate, namely skin care and trash tv, so can't cover the whole extent of this one).

Also the book came out just on time (early December 2023) as a convenient Christmas gift for real-life friends similarly committed to this wonderful dirtbag left bubble. Socialists need money too so happy to support.

Loved the intro - 'it's my fucking book and I write what I want' and also to start off with THE 18th Brumaire quote and how pretentious this is (but also appropriate). Writing a political memoir at age 40 is quite something but as she says in the intro, she's got the résumé to back it up. Needless to say, I connect with her style of writing, language and sense of humor. Sure, there are parts that made me cringe but, gee, I am the most cringe worthy I know so wtf do I care. I don't care about cringe if your politics are right.

This also a great read for anyone else on the left for whom the years in the 2000s (Afghanistan, Iraq, Global Financial Crisis) and 2010s (Occupy, Sanders, DSA and Momentum) were profound, politically speaking. I swear to god, there was a brief moment in time where I thought it possible to have Bernie and Corbyn on the Security Council aka two Socialists taking over the course of history. It was an electrifying time. I went to an event with Bernie in NYC in 2017 and Corbyn at The World Transformed in the UK in 2018 and I don't think I've ever felt as inspired by any other political figure before and after.

So, the book's also a great opportunity to revisit the past 20 years or so of our adult political life (aka the nightmare called global financial capitalism and imperialism), pretty much everything since 9/11.

So what's in it: a collection of essays, chronological as is appropriate for a memoir: Amber's struggling single mom childhood in rural America, Youth DSA organizing, move to NYC (Brooklyn, obviously) in 2011 (Working Families Party job etc) and the whole Occupy Wallstreet protest with its endless infightings between the various political groups in this non-hierarchical movement (the left has already spent too much energy in dissecting the failure of Occupy Wallstreet).

Then came Bernie's 2016 campaign, which made clear that the liberal establishment including the Democrats, would rather have a Republican than a socialist in power (this became crystal clear in the UK and the orchestrated campaign and witch hunt against Corbyn - the the Labour party). The liberal hysteria re: Trump (end of the world!) was hyperbolical to say the least.

Anyway, Trump's win also showed that unlike the liberals mantra, it is possible for an outsider to win the presidency and that, again, created some hope for Bernie 2020. Alas. Identity politics stymied class politics again. In between, and also inspired by both a fling with a British dude and Corbyn, there's Amber's time in the UK ("Manchester is Jerusalem for Socialists").

Side note: there are also some funny reflections re private life "But I must openly refute the nefarious misconception that hedonistic abandon has some sort of radical or liberating political content. There are no radical drugs or “radical ways of fucking,” even if you don’t get in over your head (catting around and hangovers really eat up a lot of your evenings and weekends). Whenever I hear someone extolling promiscuity or nonmonogamy as some sort of political principle, all I can think is, “Jesus, who has the time?” There are only so many hours in the day, only so many days in a life, and “excess ain’t rebellion" - I guess a conclusion many of us reached in their late 30s 🫣

2023: Defeat. What's to be done?

"If you are a fellow traveler, chin up. Find faith when you can, and always be jolly, or at least try. I say this as someone who knows that it is very possible, if not likely, that Bernie Sanders was the only real shot we had at socialism in my lifetime. That does not mean that I am retired, but it does take some of the pressure off, as my practical political responsibilities now consist of telling people what I saw and what I know and keeping a watchful eye out for another chance without bounding at every futile spectacle and wasting everyone’s time and energy in the process."

Pessimism is not an option.

❤️☭

[Will Giardino · Rating 5 out of 5]

Take this straight to the NYT

[Burt · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’ll admit I don’t know who Amber A’Lee Frost is and have never listened to her podcast (which apparently has a loyal following). Maybe it’s good that I don’t know who she is because I didn’t go into this book of essays expecting to love it. I found her writing to be funny and interesting at times, and she had a reasonable and optimistic message in the afterword. But overall it was more like suffering through a party conversation with someone who won’t stop talking but isn’t really saying anything or offering any real solutions, instead just criticizing, complaining, blaming and insulting everyone across the political spectrum as the cause of all the worlds problems. I guess she sees socialism as the solution, yet she never proposes exactly how or why it would solve anything. I was open to learning why Frost thinks living in a socialist system might, at the bare minimum, be better than living in a capitalist democracy. But she doesn’t appear to know herself, seeming more interested in venting her anger and dissatisfaction than proposing concrete solutions.

[Matthew Wilder · Rating 1 out of 5]

Amber A’Lee Frost is all about style choices. Her love of the American working class is a love of a hot grease monkey tinkering under the hood, not, as AOC would have it, some Filipina forty-year-old doing home health care. No, a child of the Middle West, Frost is emotionally committed to “proletarian” meaning Bruce Springsteen hoisting that cute girl onstage in the “Dancing in the Dark” video—not pronoun people, not lived experience people, and definitely not Filipina ladies in scrubs heating up frozen lasagna. This book is about how aesthetic affiliations, among the brainy at least, can lead political affiliations. It’s a lot less Abbie Hoffman’s STEAL THIS BOOK! than Nick Hornby’s HIGH FIDELITY.

It becomes clear from earlier on that Frost is a scenester. She sees Bernie events and later Occupy meetings the way a Minnesota girl might dig a groovy punk show. Combine this with a legit wry humor and a way around wordsmithery and Frost starts to seem very much like a left-wing Diablo Cody. But the not particularly thought through political philosophy quickly begins to grate. Like many a scene chick, Frost’s enemy #1 is the basic, and what could be more basic than a Hillarista? Frost groans at the Oppression Olympics, especially when dirty-knees trustafarians at Occupy meetings confront the moral ambiguities of the “progressive stack”: does gay outweigh black? Does Latinx outweigh straight male? and so on.

Whither the proletariat in an age when ChatGPT and Elon Musk’s droids are going to munch up the job market? Frost never addresses this, banging the drum Trumpianly (it’s more his meme than Bernie’s) that manufacturing jobs don’t really have to go away—to China or to heaven! But, like, how? We don’t get into the weeds, we just get would-be-aspirational glimpses of a youth spend podcasting and activisting. If DIRTBAG captures any crepuscular melancholy of a vanishing world, it’s the publishing universe that at one time thought it was a category killer move to give book deals to girls who were not only too young to write a memoir…they were too young to have read one.

[Andrew]

I had to ask myself at points “who is this for?” I’m still not quite sure.

On the one hand, I’ve been a big fan of Amber A’Lee’s journalism for some time, and, as she demonstrates time and time again in this book, she has the capacity to be a beautiful writer, as humane as she is edgelord.

However, her biggest weakness, and one she cops to after describing her experiences at Occupy, is that she can’t stop being the smuggest, most correct, most unfailingly labor-left person in the discourse, as she deals with foolish horizontalists, easily distracted libs, pie-in-the-sky anarchists, and all the rest. This is grating. It’s punchy and bitchy and fun in a Jacobin article, but over hundreds of pages…

So again, who is this for? Fellow dirtbags? OK, sure, and you’re damn right I cited the “three types of perversion on the left” bit for friends. But other leftists? No, there’s way too much shit talk that verges on ad-hominem insult. Normies? Nah, it’s too concerned with internecine conflict that they are unlikely to care about if they’ve even heard of it. And do dirtbags (a group I’m probably counted with, Oxford shirts and Sperry loafers aside) need more written material of this type? There’s a lot out there…

And yet again, she can fucking write. I just wish she spent more time contemplating and less time re-litigating minor political feuds.

[Jane Blum · Rating 1 out of 5]

“This isn’t a shortcoming artistically or politically.”
–Amber A’Lee Frost, on her own shortcoming.

According to Frost, “if someone voluntarily slogs through an entire book they don’t like or care about, that’s on them.” I totally agree—which is why the following review only covers Dirtbag’s introduction.

The main reason I couldn’t get past the introduction: there’s nothing worse than being inside the head of an insecure writer. She starts off kind of mad at you: “If this is bad, it’s not my fault. Actually, if this is bad, it’s YOUR fault for reading it. Just as you are not obligated to read what I write, I am not obligated to read your opinion of it. And I never do.” (she clearly does). It’s unclear who her intended audience is. She spends ⅔ a page listing basic symptoms of ADHD, while phrases like “anarchist horizontalism” and “Chapo Trap House,” are dropped casually without zero explanation.

She really, really wants us to know that she’s not like other girls. She describes her own neurology as a “frenetic zeitgeist and a resurgent interest in socialism.” She refers to her own career, as her “career.” She uses the word “shrink” instead of “therapist,” because Amber would cringe at the thought of attending therapy—which she does. Wait no, she’s better than everyone else so her therapy is actually called “a hyper managerial approach to mental health.” She’s not like other girls, and she’s not like other leftists.

She spends a lot of time talking about these other leftists who she’s not like. Like, way too much time. She’s not taking jabs at them, so much as brandishing a stick in their general direction, which seems to be her thing. She describes, “a certain type of person who runs rampant on the left to whom politics offers an identity as a beloved archetype—the righteous underdog, the beautiful loser, the brilliant outsider, etc. This group of “righteous underdogs” is left of center, large (see: “rampant”), politically active (and happy about it!), and participating (futilely) in some opaque political process (Frost doesn’t specify what kind). Also, their identities hinge on their political projects and a perception of themself as marginalized or othered. Frost, through her own reasoning, is not like them, namely because she prefers to work on “almost anything other than politics.” Even though her book is about politics? I truly don’t know.

Later, she jacks off “veterans of the movement” who seem happily embroiled in a similarly Sisyphean endeavor (they are “content in the work they knew was unlikely to bear fruit in their own lifetimes”) and describes Bernie Sanders (she worked on his campaign and loves him) as a “righteous underdog.” I’m so confused. If she loves people who contentedly dedicate themselves to political projects that might not come to fruition in their lifetimes (“Odds are I’ll be one of them someday,” Frost muses), if she loves and campaigns for righteous underdogs, then why is she so mad at the rampant losers and cringe libtards? Reeks like a classic case of “It’s easy to hate the mirror.” boring…sad…and I still don’t really get what Chapo Trap House is about.

[Kristofer D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dirtbag is, first and foremost, a meditation on the experience of defeat. Having lived through the defeat of the English Revolution, John Milton was sunk to such despair he was led to question God himself, writing the great epic poem of the English language in the process. Dirtbag isn’t quite as good or profound as Paradise Lost, but I rather liked it all the same.

My own life experience mirrors Frost’s in a few key ways: We both moved to New York from the Midwest around the time of Occupy Wall Street. We were both in Zuccotti Park from the first day to the bitter end. Frost was already a member of the Democratic Socialists of America before arriving in New York; I joined DSA in 2016, after I’d moved back to flyover country.

Though I can relate somewhat to her Midwest upbringing, my own childhood was far more rural. Besides, the cultural distance between Indiana and Minnesota is vast. Thus the true centerpiece of the book, for me, is the middle section on OWS. Frost’s initial reaction was dismissive. Frost’s recap is still truer to the events than most of the literary presentations we got at the time, for example, the rose-tinted and millenarian vision of the editors of n + 1. The academic work that came out in the aftermath, by Judith Butler and others, had even less grounding in reality.

Frost was able to maintain some distance from OWS, having already found a political home as a member of DSA. She was also employed by the Working Families Party, an organization she derides as a combination of cult and vanity project for liberal donors (I was involved with the Working Families Party in Colorado for several years - I didn’t experience it as a cult, but it is certainly no a “party” and certainly doesn’t involve many working people). However, it isn’t always clear just how involved Frost ever was with OWS beyond attending events at the behest of the WFP. As she explains, she went in knowing she would hate it.

Of course, there was a lot to hate about OWS. But anyone who was there, short of the truly deluded true believers and the grifters who parlayed their time into non-profit and consulting jobs, hated it. But we all did more than just hate it. It was hard to say just what, but there was a unified sense that something important was happening. Yes, the nightly general assemblies sometimes had fewer than 100 participants in a city of millions. But those general assemblies would routinely attract participants from Occupations in other cities from around the country, and even from outside of it. It was a source of dialogue and mutual inspiration on an international scale.

So if OWS was at least in part a colossal circle jerk, it was also an undeniably internationalist circle jerk. And an internationalist circle jerk that seeped into the pores of middle America. Cities as small as my own hometown in rural Minnesota organized their own local OWS! The sense of the breadth and depth of OWS - as brief as it was - is not always apparent in Dirtbag. Reading Frost’s account, you’d think OWS was merely an irrelevant sideshow of lower Manhattan bourgeois bohemian douchebags. You would miss that the largest marches of tens of thousands up Broadway would be cheered on in turn by thousands upon thousands of workers along the way, all taking a pause from their jobs at restaurants and clothing stores and food carts.

But we have all already read - and by 2023, perhaps memoryholed entirely - the triumphalist narratives around OWS. Frost does the Lord’s work in setting the record straight for anyone who wasn’t there and only knows the triumphalist narrative. The public meetings really were almost entirely a waste of time - nothing of value was decided. Many marches were instead organized off to the sidelines, by small groups of organizers who simply tied their own work into the OWS brand in some way or other in order to tap into the built-in audience. The public assemblies were often quite numerically small. The daily general assemblies lasted just under two months; I attended most of them when they didn’t conflict with my class schedule at the time.

These assemblies were briefly heralded as the beginning of a new politics altogether by academics like Judith Butler, the duo of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and the editors of anthologies with names like The Anarchist Turn. Anyone who was actually there could’ve told you immediately it was not ushering in the millennium. But this is another aspect where I think Frost only emphasizes one half of the story. While many were still heralding the coming politics of assembly deep into the 2010s (Butler’s book on it came out in 2015; Hardt and Negri’s came out in **2017**), it should’ve been clear that OWS was rather the end of a cycle that began decades earlier. This cycle’s previous peak was the anti-globalization “big summit” protests of 1999-2003, the most significant of which occurred in Seattle and Genoa. But Occupy was the end of horizontalism as we knew it. Less of an “anarchist turn” than a turn away from anarchism altogether. OWS was the moment where any observer of the American left should’ve known to become bearish on anarchism and bullish on two other tendencies: a hodgepodge “Marxism-Leninism” smitten with any and every Third World dictator and “democratic socialism,” whatever that is.

The treatment of the assemblies is something like a general pattern in Frost’s book: it’s easier to tell what she loves by what she hates. The contempt for the inherent goofiness and incoherence of OWS has, as its corollary, her love of “the worker.”

But even her love of the American worker comes out most dramatically by her contempt for Gabriel Winant’s book on deindustrialization, given an oddly extended treatment near the book’s end. Sometimes all the ax grinding is satisfying, although it isn’t always clear why the specific targets were chosen. Aforementioned Gabriel Winant aside, we learn that Gayatri Spivak - who made Derrida’s American reception possible by translating Of Grammatology, a book Frost surely despises - is a bloviating drunk who likes to humblebrag about being friends with Joseph Stiglitz and Angela Davis.

We also get an extended takedown of Malcolm Harris, a bourgeois bohemian from Santa Cruz who secured a series of book contracts after making a name for himself as an OWS participant who could reliably churn out "content." (Frost doesn’t mention this, but some of his writing is actually quite excellent. That he is - or at least was - an obnoxious twerp a decade and a half ago remains indisputable. But it is also worth noting that Harris is also, as of 2023, “midway in the journey of our life,” as Dante put it.)

Of course, Frost revels in her hates and her hating, and who am I to fault her for enjoying a hobby? If this book is to some degree a relentless litany of “I-told-you-so”s in addition to the personal takedowns, there is an upshot to it all, illustrated in an important anecdote that comes at the end of the discussion of OWS. After the collapse of OWS, Frost is eating lunch - a good lunch, she emphasizes - with some friends. In the middle of the conversation, after Frost has mentioned the “failure” of OWS, one of the participants immediately erupts. “It wasn’t a failure at all!” Frost assesses the episode thusly:

I realized that if I didn’t confront failure, I’d end up squatting in the rubble, out of commission, incapable of navigating real politics and totally cut off from the real world, including the good parts… Yes, Occupy failed. But I realized then there are worse things than failing; I had just witnessed a far more tragic defeat.

That “tragic defeat,” of course, being the inability to confront the world as it is, in all its beauty and majesty.

But with that in mind, it isn’t totally clear just what her conception of navigating “real politics” consists of - specifically, it isn’t particularly clear what “socialism” means to her. Bernie Sanders was the herald of socialism - okay, sure, maybe. But if she champions socialism, she is still dismissive of the idea of a socialist party. Here again we see a manifestation of Frost’s workerist contempt for intellectuals and their big goddamn ideas, for good or ill.

There is nothing aspirational within the name “Labor Party” - it denotes a sectoral interest. Socialism, by contrast, minimally connotes something other than capitalism. That “something” is a systematic alternative to capitalism, or, at least, the aspiration to an alternative. And, of course, this is the basic insight of Leninism: the unions left to themselves cannot make the break with capitalism ideologically. For that to occur, a party of some level of theoretical sophistication is necessary. As anyone who has been around organized labor for any period of time can attest, unions can definitely elevate the class consciousness of their membership. But they also have a tendency to quash worker militancy when it risks going feral. The record of classical Leninist parties is itself, to put it mildly, not particularly encouraging - but the underlying problem remains. How do we translate the class struggle into a politics capable of finally remaking society altogether? The struggle of class against class is, after all, a political struggle.

Dirtbag concludes with no dramatic call to arms. Rather, it advises the most straightforward “praxis” (a word the author despises) conceivable: take a break. The paid staff for the 501(c)(3) and (c)(4)s of the world have a duty to constantly remind you that the upcoming election is the most important of all time. The old world is dying and a new one is just around the bend; you just need to attend a rally or cast a ballot or better yet, sign the petition and donate $27 to the “People’s Progressive Movement for Cope and Change” or whatever the fuck. Dirtbag is an important reminder for the Left that sometimes the best hand to play is no hand at all.

[Simon Mee · Rating 3 out of 5]

I know I sound contemptuous of Occupy Wall Street. I am. I resented the idea of hanging out in a corporate office park on a doomed mission to found some new utopian society while the real world went on with business as usual. I wanted everyone in the real world to have healthcare, housing, decent work, and time off to go to the doctor (or just to fucking relax). I believed then, and still believe now, that these things require not a community, or a process, but the democratization of the economy, something that’s historically been advanced by organized labor, not a bunch of downwardly mobile middle-class kids playing revolutionary commune.

Dirtbag is far far better than the previous "dirtbag-left" book but I would fall short of an outright endorsement. I would actually recommend reading this book for a millennial reminisce, but don’t take Frost’s word for what happened.

Be ready to feel old

However . . . if I was perhaps a little more ruthless, perhaps a little more ambitious, or merely the sort to get off on intra-social, pseudo-political BDSM ... well, I could have been a tyrant. I won't say I have never been tempted.
And those piggies would have loved it.

Dirtbag definitely contains the millennial touchstone of trying to enter into an uncertain economic market post 2008. The reflections on Occupy Wall Street are also interesting, if not exactly new, in that reporting at the time picked up that the consensus approach to decision-making had major issues. COVID gets one essay that covers a singular experience at a Californian vaccination station but it is very strong and worth reading on its own. Frost’s writing style can be meandering but I personally find it engaging, even when she is on tangents.

Frost’s politics are clear – she explicitly describes herself as a socialist and believes in reinvigorating American industry. She dislikes identity politics and is dismissive of mutual aid... ...which, whatever, I do not have strong opinions either way. Further, whether the liberal media were jealous of us, or whether Corbyn and Sanders were shanked by their respective establishments is not really a big deal to me – Dirtbag provides a record of how a certain group perceived reality. Maybe they are even the closest to the “truth”!

That Frost’s politics have a psychosexual component to them is least insightful statement I could ever make:

A corpse can't laugh at your soft dick or look at your soft belly with disgust ... or call you a pussy-ass little college boy bitch.

Nonetheless, Frost is cogent enough about her substantive arguments that I can let it slide as a quirk, much like the fake redacting of names and places where the redactions are right by citations that reveal those names and places. The accuracy of Frost’s recollections of “Weird Twitter” is open to debate but it does read as a millennial nostalgia for a time and place that perhaps never existed, which does make it valuable for how a millennial sees the past, regardless of accuracy. It is not the voice if the generation, but worthy of reflecting upon as we approach two decades past it.

Facts matter

That election proved that the future wasn’t written, that anything could happen, that the plans made in the halls of power could still be sabotaged by popular will, or even upended by a little bit of chaos.

Dirtbag does flirt with being an unreliable narrator style, in that its just one person’s experiences and who knows how accurate they are in all things. My tendency initially was to give Frost a pass on most of the political analysis stuff because my critique is from the viewpoint of a mostly uninformed non-American opinion. However Dirtbag does have a (sometimes intentional) looseness with facts that undermines Frost’s points.

Frost’s opinion on Gamergate is an example of an unforced error. I get that she primarily sees it as irrelevant. However, she still weighs in on it and gives a recounting that is so catastrophically wrong that ruins any conclusions she drew from it. The “journalist” (Frost’s choice to put in quotation marks, which is such a microcosm of how Frost tends to provoke conflict in petty ways) did not review Depression Quest, nor did their relationship with the game designer start at the time relevant to it. It is Frost at her near-worst, lazily chucking out opinions without doing the proper reading. Fine if she sees the focus on Gamergate as a waste of time but to have such a bad foundation for that opinion means I will treat it as worthless.

So where is Frost at her worst? Abortion. In terms of her personal experiences, she is good – great even – I believe there is an understandable tendency for both sides to go to extreme examples and her relatively banal (but still unnecessarily complicated for her) incidents seem more authentic to a significant proportion of situations.

The issue is when Frost uses it to neutralise the biggest problem around the “dirtbag-left” continuing to resist Hillary in 2016 after the primaries on the basis it was of limited impact which party won. While "Fascist Trump" might be an easy strawman to knock down by waxing on about how Trump did not go to extremes during his term, his Supreme Court appointments directly led to the overturning of Roe v Wade. Frost baldly pretends that certain positions Clinton and VP nominee Tim Kaine held at different times reflected the totality of where they stood in 2016, leaving the reader to infer that only Bernie would truly have protected abortion. Trump's Supreme Court picks goes unmentioned even though they are critical to where the law went – a clear consequence of Clinton losing. It is just simply not plausible that Clinton would not have picked judges that would have at least upheld the existing law.

I do not believe Frost and her anti-Clinton ilk made a material difference to 2016 (funnily enough there’s a line which you could interpret as her thinking they did!), but I do hold that Frost knows that that group were wrong on the inconsequentiality of the 2016 election and that Frost is willing to create a fantasy world where they are not. I think it would be too much to expect a mea culpa, but the lack of reflection does not sit well with me. I also consider seeing Trump’s success in 2016 as proof that Sanders could succeed as kind of... ...unempathetic to those who were adversely impacted by Trump.

That point on abortion also leads into the issue of Frost's likeability, something that I have previously considered non-essential for a good book. The issue is that is something with Frost's writing and opinions that rubs more raw than with Ratajkowski - that Frost explicitly enjoys bullying. I don't think it necessarily damns Dirtbag, but I would not feel compelled to argue with anyone who disagreed with me.

The math doesn’t lie; we can’t evade class conflict by slicing meagre scraps thinner and thinner. That’s just sharing a boiling pot of stones.

I could have rounded this book up to a four, mainly because Frost does share stimulating points, regardless of whether I agree with them. What holds me back is that I just cannot get past the slackness or straight out deceit on certain facts.

[Claire · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not an interesting read. Self-inflated yet still dull.

[E Money The Cat · Rating 3 out of 5]

A memoir of a political activist written in essay form focusing on her experiences in abortion access activism, medicare for all campaigns, Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Sanders campaign, Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign, the Working Families Party, and the Democratic Socialists of America.

Actually this turned out to be more of a leftist strategy critique, which is funny since I also recently wrapped up Lenin’s Left Wing Communism…

Amber’s critiques are:
1) Occupy sucked because it was unfocused, lacked clear goals, and (at least spiritually) lacked leadership. The leadership that did actually exist were all elite capture.

2) Mutual aid is great but it won’t win your movement.

3) Leftists should stop HR-ing themselves to death. She takes a lot of issue with things like “intersectionality,” “praxis,” “centering” certain kinds of people. Sometimes it’s unclear if she dislikes certain things or just the words themselves.

4) Leftist power lies within the working class.

While I’ve known of Amber for quite some time I’ve never really followed her either. Never got into the Chapo podcast outside of a couple individual segments someone shared with me. So my opinion of her is pretty much solely based on her book here.

She is funny! And I can tell she gives a shit! Cool.

Some of her points are actually really helpful. Others are half-baked. She oftentimes hates a thing because it’s just *annoying* to her or too cliché. But is also introspective enough to then just be like “but it’s just because I’m a bitch” which like okay, cool. Be you!

Respective of my numbering above, I totally agree with point 1. A movement should have goals. A movement cannot also be 100% headless. Lacking leadership as a leftist goal is just a way to have elite and well-connected figures co-opt your movement and push it into just more liberalism. I.e. failure.

Point 2 is kind of connected. Amber is in favor of expropriation and believes redistribution has to occur from above. People with limited resources can’t share their way into power.

Point 3 is a mess. This is where I would challenge her, even though I think her larger point stands. Leftists care a lot about systems of oppression: racism, ableism, sexism, etc. So allegations against X or calls to problematize Y are taken very seriously. But also that person could just be a wrecker! Right? There can only be so many meetings.

But on some of this, Amber is throwing the baby out with the bath water. Intersectional thought is rooted in leftist theory. It’s co-option into liberal praxis and corporate PR crap is moreso the problem. I’d refer to original writings by the CRC and Crenshaw and compare the praxis they espouse to the “annoying” things you have written about. I also have read far better criticisms from books like Elite Capture.

Point 4 is important. Just basic Marx shit within leftist and organizing circles would be great. You can’t win with drum circles and good vibes! Eventually the police will come, bankrolled by billionaires, and kick your shit in. Labor holds the power and class consciousness is the key.

Lastly I will say I enjoyed reading this! She’s humorous and the book actually has decent flow despite being a collection of essays. She is also very candid about her personal life and her own shortcomings as well as some things she is proud of that others might find disagreeable. For example, I think speaking openly about her abortions can help destigmatize healthcare. She’s a proud dirtbag!

3.5 cats for this one out of a total of 5 cats. [No cats were harmed in the rating of this book.]

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ok I started reading this ironically but now I am officially an Amber fan. It was nostalgic looking back at the heady days of the 2020 Bernie campaign, before everything really turned to shit, but even before that looking back at Occupy and remembering how dumb I was politically at the time. (Even better, unlocking the memory of trying to start an Occupy "chapter" at my local community college with 2-3 other people. We met like 3 times before it fell apart)

I may not agree with her on everything, but she's 100% correct that social media rots your brain. And while she doesn't say this explicitly, reading this reminded me that it's ok to care about wanting a better world. Solidarity Forever.

[Kudrat Wadhwa]

i like ambers politics and direct style. much respect to amber and sorry if you’re reading this — you seem like a fun person to hang out with but this book needed some serious editing. also didn’t love the self referential tone.. you can say something without acknowledging that you said it. that annoyed me and made me turn away, as a reader. prolly wouldn’t recommend this to people

[Lucas Mattila · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some powerful moments early on and in the middle, but withholds and distances herself from the more personal nature that the essays set up at the start.

[Benjamin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mostly nonsense but it’s a byproduct of my favorite podcast so I gave it a chance.

[Christopher McQuain · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes harsh, but never cruel; often flippant (in a way I frequently found hilarious) but fights hard to remain honest and self-aware; irreverent to a T but doesn't undermine the stakes it lays out with a gradual, subtle, but hard-won vulnerability. This is a juicy, swift, sharp, and smart exemplar of what Terry Eagleton memorably characterized as "hope without optimism".

[Mustafa Landon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amber was always my favorite member of Chapo

[Brooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

don't know anything about the author. I don't even know what a podcast is. I don't hide my podcast app with the same zeal with which I hid my internet search history as a teenager. I didn't just tear through this in one sitting and find it to be a generally pleasant window inside 1/5 of a podcast I've listened to at least twice a week since 2016, with plenty of cathartic innuendo about failures and defeats of the US left that defined the years of my political nascency. hell no brother I spent today at the fucking gym!!

[Ellie Busch · Rating 2 out of 5]

you can definitely tell this book was written by a podcaster

[Evan · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s so liberating writing a review like this when I know nobody’s going to read it.

I feel like assigning a rating like this (it’s probably really a 3.5) to this particular book is annoyingly fraught, so let me get the throat-clearing out of the way up front: I have never heard the author’s voice before listening to this, and I have basically no relationship whatsoever to Chapo beyond a vague sense of skepticism about their whole deal. I don’t really know what drew me to this in the first place, but I found it moving and charming and I’m very glad to have read it!

I won’t pretend it’s profound by any means - it’s a form of junk food, sure, but Frost proves herself throughout to be insightful and funny and she does actually have interesting things to say about the wax and wane of the millennial Left. There are personal stories in here that I could’ve dispensed with, but others (in particular one that tied the arc of Occupy to the death of a friend) struck me both emotionally and intellectually.

Perhaps most insightful are her reflections on being young and wanting to set the world on fire - specifically the limitations and pitfalls of charging forward without really looking where you’re going. There’s a certain self-awareness that you don’t develop until a little later than you wish you did, and it’s not until then that you realize that the purity and rage you carry within you at 18, 22, 26… it’s not helping you. I found the level of self-analysis in this book to that effect pretty uniformly excellent.

I wouldn’t say I learned anything. But it’s familiar, enriching territory that felt worth my time. Even when Frost is too flippant, or I disagree with her takes on movements or their aftermath, I was never not enjoying myself. Her voice is strong and, while I remain a bit skeptical of a few of her and her compatriots’ bona fides, I think that tying together the memoir and the political commentary was the best way to thread the needle and prevent this from ever really going off the rails.

I dunno. Maybe this isn’t your thing. Maybe romance novels are your junk food and snarky nonfiction about Leftist politics are mine, that’s okay with me. The Moby Dick passage in the afterword kind of sums it all up, but I’m glad she has enough hope for so many of the rest of us who still feel defeated. I’ll certainly keep reading her work with a cocked eyebrow and a smirk on my face from here on out.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

Before reading Dirtbag, I would have said that AAF is a better writer than she is a podcaster. Now, I'm not so sure. Honestly, A'lee Frosts writing is on better display in the archives of Current Affairs, Jacobin etc.

Dirtbag is a collection of not-particularly chronological essays from the author's upbringing through the aftermath of the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign, including some well-thought critique of Occupy Wall Street and DSA activism. In addition to more personal content, some chapters include copy-pasted e-mail correspondence and earlier essays with minimal introduction.

The book is a fairly quick and interesting read, and AAF has no shortage of zingers and quotable lines.
I found the 2nd chapter, "Men with Shovels and Perverts of Interest" both long-winded and mean-spirited. It betrayed the author's preoccupation with the kinds of labor that overlap with Village People personae. If I had skipped this chapter entirely, or perhaps saved it till the end, this may have been a 4 star review.

A'lee Frost has no shortage of axes to grind: Anarchists, horizontalism, "Identity Politics," mutual aid, and those with the audacity to suggest organizing service and care workers. For all of her bonafides as an "organizer," there just seems to be a vanishing number of constituents the Author is interested in working with (save her heroic and saintly "Hard Hats.)

All this being said, I'm not opposed to personal essays, but if you feel like reading a book of personal essays by a Millennial Leftist Podcaster, read "Tacky" by Rax King whose streams of consciousness at least have coherent topics.

[Leif · Rating 5 out of 5]

Direct, unflinching, and really, really good. Frost's style is blessedly clear and her goals are straightforward, namely, to briefly chronicle her personal and political journeys and to mark what seems at least an end to a significant stage in her life, as well as in the possibilities for socialist politics in the USA and, to some degree, England.

What does this all mean? Well, this: Dirtbag is horrifically ambitious, sometimes parochial, and yet to its vast credit also a clear-eyed book that demonstrates Frost's cutting humour and tough dedication. She has evidently refused the empathic sanctities that mark so much of contemporary discourse, for better or for worse, and she ably illustrates in several instances how there is a disjunction between the projects of discourse patrol and state change.

It's a really well done book and, frankly, probably one of the better books that I've read this year, even if one might disagree with her politics.

[Milly · Rating 4 out of 5]

To my surprise, my favorite moments of DIRTBAG were when @amberaleefrost reflected on her personal experiences—growing up with a single mother in Indiana, a friendship with an anxious woman who succumbed to a treatable disease at 26 because she avoided the doctor. The excerpts from Amber's 2019 Baffler/Jacobin article made me so nostalgic for that time...the frenzied optimism that Bernie Sanders might actually win. Reading this book felt like a full circle moment in some ways; during the second Bernie campaign, I wrote a paper on the "dirtbag left," which led me to listening to Chapo Traphouse and eventually this book.

[Selin Büyükcengiz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh my god I am so frustrated!!! I wrote an entire LOOONG ASS review and it disappeared!! Let me try to recreate it:


I love her voice! Literally and literatively. It is so full of care and detail, full of life. It was wonderful to hear her takes. I now understand why she doesn’t want to be back as much on the Chapel Trap House podcast, especially knowing how much of a nutjob the loud minority of the following is. But I really would love to hear her back.

I absolutely loved, like, 85% of the book.

It is wonderful to read when she loves something: her life experiences in general, people she loves and misses, her adventures of moving around. It all reads as a sort of love letter.

And it is so cathartic to read when she hates something. Even when you get called out. Her characterizations of the subcultures of the left, for example, is so accurate and hilarious. It was a good read to compare and contrasts with my experiences in political circles, to have a perspective on what to caution for.

However, when she is in two minds about something, it is very confusing and sometimes frustrating to read. Like when she acknowledges the helpfulness of mutual aid, but makes annoyed remarks at the naming conventions of it.

I understand her point of the temporary nature of these things and her annoyance at people treating it like the end all be all to everything- at the end we do need strong political powers to advocate for, and mutual aid does not produce that despite the mythology around it (hence the Black Panther breakfast program example.)

But I genuinely think that; the way she (to my understanding) believes that people should take the electoral politics more seriously when the time calls (like in the case of Bernie) and take the opportunity for possible socialist steps whenever it presents itself, she also should be able to support the positive efforts EVEN when they’re very local. I agree that these things shouldn’t be insular, but the negativity for the fact that they’re happening is really not needed. ESPECIALLY when you acknowledge that they do some good.

Maybe I should relisten/reread to understand where she is coming from better, but for now I just have to say it feels nitpicky and counter intuitive. And very very depressing! Which is how I ended up giving this a 4 instead of a 5.

I understand where she is coming from, and that she was also not happy with how she ended on such a low note. But I am gonna take up on her word, and take some of that faith. The rest of the book is a delight to read and even in its parts of anger, etched with love.

[Celina · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I tried to listen to Chapo Trap House I lasted about three minutes, but I like what I’ve seen of Amber A’Lee Frost’s writing. In this book I enjoyed her backstory in Indiana and her political insights more than her spilling the tea on Occupy Wall Street or rehashing Twitter beef, but I guess the latter is what most people come for. I will keep looking for her writing.

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Amber is bitingly funny and relatable to millennial socialists and as she puts it "eccentric, unoffendable losers. you know, fun people". Part memoir of a Midwestern moving to the big city, part critique of occupy wall street anarchists and takedown of nyt liberals, part fear and loathing on the Bernie campaign trail.

read if you need a reminder to believe in working people, be optimistic because it's our only choice, and relax because no one is paying attention.

[Terence McGlynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This hits differently after Mamdani’s primary win

[Elena · Rating 1 out of 5]

what a ride. god bless vapidity, this was a very quick read. or as I said on twitter: "I'm not doing Hillbilly Elegy I'm not I'm not" I holler as I slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob: the book.

lost interest around chapter 2 when it became clear the author had neither the intellect nor the skill to write an interesting book; i would describe the rest as a bourgeois memoir of drug-filled, booze-soaked sloth, scrupulously downplayed, disguised, or flat-out lied about, as the author lacks enough self-respect to be honest about her life and motivations.

the observations about the working class are as funny as they ever are from this set. i will say only this: understanding the true working class to be factory workers and others in manufacturing, and understanding the "liberal professional class" as belonging to the petite bourgeoisie, largely reveals that your own milieu is not just middle class but also upper middle class. lots and LOTS of working class people are also college educated and/or working at a desk. when the socialist chattering class, to which amber belongs despite her self-effacing protests to the contrary, seriously, honestly, and humbly grapple with the reorganization of class that dominated the back half of the 20th century, and understand it specifically as corporate capital's most successful union-busting activity of that same century, they will make progress. i would not personally bet a fiver on that happening any time soon; much like the ex-mckinsey DNC staffer, they are paid to maintain their futile incomprehension.

misc notes:

- cringe, pathetic, self-conscious opening
- "took a job" as a chapo. bestie you are a co-owner. you are thee capitalist.
- "I decided to get a shrink. But not just any shrink. I sought and acquired a shrink who specializes in a technique called cognitive behavioral therapy, a hyper-managerial approach to mental health based on eliminating negative thought and behavior “patterns” and supplanting them with “healthier” ones" this is normal therapy. it is the most common type of therapy there is. xoxo, a person who has done other therapies
- one page it's renting a cabin in california "one last time", another page it's "I secured the only therapist in my insurance network who practiced within thirty miles of my apartment"...someone is lying, either about having money or not having it hon
- "Maybe more than the campaign itself, this book is about failure and defeat. Bernie Sanders was the biggest opportunity of my lifetime so far, and he may remain so until the end. What made his campaigns so uncommonly promising was their appeal outside of the “counterculture left” (as in, the niche of people who will read this book). People who don’t care about, or even hate, politics—you know, normal people—love Bernie for his honesty and his indefatigable commitment to them. As a socialist, he was an outsider, but his politics were inclusive yet populist, and his campaigns did not resent, fear, patronize, or hold contempt for squares, normies, or whatever you call them, which is why he had the edge, with a diverse and largely un-edgy electorate." we have seen this is untrue, but it is fascinating to watch a mark pretentiously enumerate all the reasons she is not a mark, and why mr ponzi is the most upstanding man in the city
- "My faith in socialism was also fortified by a number of political failures I personally experienced well before Bernie, even before Occupy, back when I was cutting my teeth on labor, antiausterity, and reproductive freedom in right-wing Indiana. [...]I have never wavered in my belief that socialism can still win. It’s a tall order of course, and one that will require providence, diligence, discipline, dedication, faith, loyalty, vigilance, and, above all, solidarity." fellas you ever self mythologized as the lamest bitch on the block
- chapter one opens with everyone baffled when she says she's from indiana. after literally a page of meandering nonsense on this topic: "But I assure you, dear reader [pauses ominously], Indiana is very real. [mysterious and foreboding eye contact]" indiana is not that unique u are just on the east coast dealing with people who earnestly believe in flyover country. will u learn anything from this vis a vis your socialist goals? of course not. but on top of that you should have been writing more and podcasting on coke less bc this is a CLUUUUNKERRRR
- "My mother remembers the busing program accelerating when she was in high school but not much of the heated political debate or racist tensions, which tend to be more discreet in the Midwest than they are in, say, the Deep South." DISCREET? INDIANA? NORTHERN STRONGHOLD OF THE KKK?
- literally one graf later mentioning the school having more "Black" students with the footnote: "I’ll be capitalizing “Black” throughout this text to conform with current Chicago Manual of Style guidelines, but the following statement from Cedric Johnson’s book Revolutionaries to Race Leaders nicely encapsulates my thoughts on this practice:" now this is astonishing bc cedric johnson is a historically literate black man and you are an historically illiterate white woman who pals around with far-right racists. but that's fine.
- breezy descriptions of a relatively well-off childhood she fights to pretend was abject: classic socialist with rich friends behavior
- "We are appreciative that Indiana continues to be a state where Steel Dynamics can expand our product offering and increase our productivity while further establishing our future in our [REDACTED] home..." plus listing towns by population and order of residency. bizarre attempt to either preserve privacy or conceal her middle class origins from people who are industrious enough to read her bad book but too lazy to google identifying traits, i guess. anyway, the town she's talking about in this section is pittsboro, which took literally 3 minutes to google, and the 'shows' she talks about going to were almost certainly in indianapolis, a mere 30-minute drive away; but this would ruin the hillbilly elegy-esque romance she coyly claims not to be aiming for, so naturally details are obscured
- main character syndrome casting herself as the ONLY person she knew who opposed the iraq war, but ofc if you were driving into indianapolis for shows you already knew OF, at least, many people who opposed it. the naif bit...no self-respect to be found
- "I was gradually coming to the conclusion that politics was about money, money was about power, and my life and future had been and were being shaped by the lack of both." one of the only honest-seeming sentences so far. good job getting that money, amber! self-respect next queen?
- "Our meeting was an ideal romantic interaction for me, as I am a sexual coward who prefers to be pursued (i.e., a woman)." there's that friendship with anna k jumping out
- "members of my podcast and i" the double edged sword...the resentment...the faux coy attitude. lmfao
- "The thing about youth is that, if you’re lucky, you grow out of it (sure beats the alternative)." insecure, redundant paranthetical. editor where
- "Another immediate advantage of most manufacturing, trucking, or building work is that you don’t have to pay to play; you may require training, but it’s usually on the job, and (most importantly) you get paid. You don’t need a college degree to build engines or to be a carpenter. Nursing, however, is a profession requiring years of very costly education and often unbelievable debt. Obviously, this is a barrier to entry for most Americans." mfw no idea how trucking or building works
- "A corpse can’t laugh at your soft dick or look at your soft belly with disgust … or call you a pussy-ass little college-boy bitch. Someone with a paralyzing fear of the living might very well find safe refuge in that.

So maybe the author of “Manufacturing Isn’t Coming Back” doesn’t love the nurses so much as he fears a hard hat with a union card and a pulse, those scary men and their blue collars who remember NAFTA and who might reject him and his ideas.

Maybe he just can’t get it up … metaphorically speaking." yes yes i understand you are so different from a "pussy-ass little college-boy bitch" because you graduated from college but do a podcast now instead of working in an office or being in academia. and nurses are silent, the perfect passive agents, while MANUFACTURING MEN are VIRILE and ACTIVE. groundbreaking. (never mind that frost's own mother is a college graduate/professional whom amber describes as "working class". having it both ways is the bread & butter of this crew; how else to self-mythologize as a working class hero while pulling in millions alongside the son of a *new yorker* staffer?)

chapter 2 is when i got bored and started skimming. american socialism is a joke

- "It’s true that work at a steel mill can be unbearable, but many people disagree that it necessarily has to be, and many would counter Sadlowski’s line that “No man wants to wake up every day and face the blast furnace” with “Well, of course not every day.” Americans work too much, and even if you don’t, sometimes work just sucks." amber you are a podcaster
- "As much as professionals and “creatives” like to imagine their jobs as the envy of the world, the truth is that not everyone wants to be a doctor or a poet or a podcaster (a frankly ridiculous “job” that would most likely be eliminated in any civilized society with any semblance of reasonable economic planning)." maybe so. but you specifically would be sent to the camps till you learned how to use collective nouns, missy miss.
- more cute little redactions in ch 2 regarding Gayarti Spivak, but these are quotes so they are also footnoted. what a goofy affectation (but elena, isn't that the whole book? well you got me there)
-- speaking of: "It’s not that she ever hid her background, but her gifts for euphemism and vague allusion certainly allowed her to gloss over the fact that she was, as she once told The New York Times, “unfortunately, a Brahmin,” before quickly qualifying it with “but from an inferior sect of the Brahmin caste.”28 Ah yes, a humble peasant, then." naruto run away from that mirror, amber!
- she is so mad about angela davis's speaking fee, one must assume because she and angela davis are both professional-class "radicals" whose hypocrisy is clearest at the bank teller's window
- move to nyc treated as a hero's journey which is very funny since actual socialists i know tend to treat the early 10s as a collective sea change in consciousness. tfw you want to be so so so special and so unique but not in the way you actually are (biggest podcast on patreon babey!)
- very funny that she keeps self-consciously self-effacedly mentioning her podunk college. snobbishness lives in her bones and she is in profound denial of it
- similarly: "there were no real career opportunities in Indiana [in 2011]" BE SERIOUS LMAO
- so many pages devoted to hatred of malcom harris. inside baseball from a bitch who cannot admit she is largely concerned with gossip
- "My values are pretty thoroughly compartmentalized, with my moral, spiritual, social, cultural, and political principles operating more or less distinctly. It’s much tidier that way, though certainly more rigid." a rare glimpse of self-awareness, rapidly buried
- towards the end of the ows section she notes she understands her role to be that of a propagandist now. but what are you propagandizing on an unaffiliated podcast? mostly your own right to enrichment. still dodging that mirror.
- "No one is a “member” of the Democratic (or Republican) Party. You can certainly register as a Republican or a Democrat, but unlike, say, the Labour Party of the United Kingdom, there is no way to become a member, i.e., someone who pays dues and chooses both the party leadership and the machinations of its politics." do you know why that is or what mechanisms of influence exist in the party right now...no, of course not. dumbass
- very funny to admit you didn't see clinton's loss coming
- bernie was an outsider, bernie was hated by the democratic machine....sucking old man dick is so bad for your brain man
- "with how much the country suffered during eight years of Obama" girl just say the slur and keep it moving this is taking forever
- "No one was really allowed to admit outright that Trump’s election had a silver lining, but now we knew, without question, that people were ready for an outsider." it was already very obvious that any verso loft gathering was and is populated by the stupidest and most myopic children of privilege imaginable but thank you for confirming that and implicating yourself with them
- "And what we moved on to was Bernie—our indefatigable, unwavering, incorruptible Bernie! And we very nearly won, despite despicable sabotage from the DNC. Bernie was the leader of a movement that fundamentally ended the Cold War of the American mind; he changed the face of American politics, acted as midwife to a nascent insurgent left, and achieved more in a few months of mass political action than Elizabeth Warren did in her whole political life.

It was true then and it’s true now: Bernie Sanders is the best candidate—the only candidate who could be considered anything even close to socialist, and the one to beat Trump." deranged to voluntarily reproduce some of your worst writing in your own book like this. utterly debased and disconnected from reality. monarchists who think they are socialists are SO funny.
- "I still maintain the meanest thing you can do is repeat someone’s own words back at them without comment. When the Hillary diehards began demanding Bernie Bros “take a seat” and start listening to and “signal-boosting” women of color, I complied, retweeting Roxane Gay @ing the Hillary Clinton campaign to request “I’m With Her” shirts in XXXL. She blocked me in record time. I was just impressed she could move so fast. Demands to “signal-boost” women of color never quite turn out the way they want.

I realize how painfully cringeworthy it is to read someone reminiscing about tweets long past." well, no. if you realized how cruel, cringe, and dumb you sound, you'd be a smear on the pavement already. but that's true of all chubby professional fatshamers, which is why reddit had such a profitable exit.
- "absurd and delusional animosities between crazy people" is how she characterizes gamergate. her brain might melt if she acknowledged misogyny was real, to be fair, it's obviously a dorian gray deal
- "I never thought that “owning” liberal shills online ever accomplished anything, but before Trump, it had at least been fun. And if I’m honest with myself, it’s given me a career. But something had gone irreparably sour in the online microculture, and since I didn’t need to tweet to promote anything anymore (thanks, Chapo), why stay at a shitty party?" FRANTIC but ultimately piteous gestures at self-awareness, kayfabe performed by the profoundly ill
- she is so hilariously desperate for the reader to know she has gay friends. an obama-era lib-ass bitch by any other name...
- "Planned Parenthood does have a concrete political agenda; it’s just that women’s health isn’t at the top of the list. As a nonprofit, they require funding, and they have to justify their own existence to receive that funding. Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All program would secure abortion, “on demand, without apology,” and most radically, for free. Think about it from PP’s perspective: sure, Medicare for All would do so much for women, but (and this is the important part) what would Medicare for All do for Planned Parenthood?" hating PP bc they don't care about women bc they endorsed clinton (in favor of late-term bans) over bernie (in favor of on demand without apology) but assuming it's about machiavellian political maneuvering rather than the more prosaic "dumb out of touch rich ppl picking the winning horse" explanation. very funny
- "Put simply, if you don’t think that Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, or yours truly—the Tokyo Rose of the Bernie Bros herself—is in any real danger, it’s unlikely that all those mysterious “marginalized people” everyone is so fond of invoking as progressive shorthand are on the chopping block either." we have got to figure out how to turn this kind of narcissism into an energy source
- 80% into a book is an amazing time to embark on a rambling and imprecise critique of mutual aid
- "There were lovely people in Des Moines of course—Bernie supporters and others—who were a breeze to deal with, even when they were voting for another candidate. But there were also insecure Midwesterners—languishing in the one taste of power they ever get, and even then only every four years—who preen and lead you on, actively cultivating a dithering affect to prolong their moment in the spotlight with a “Gee, I just don’t know who I’m voting for, it’s a really big decision.” If you don’t have Xanax, you will murder these people." indistinguishable from the buttigieg bitch who wouldn't stop hitting me in the head with her purse at pat's tap in 2019 tbh
- amazing ending that highlights the camaraderie of chapo - the very thing missy miss worked so hard not to talk about for a few hundo pages. though she does also cop to believing "our nicest cohost" that nellie fucking bowles was a friendly. prey animal instincts
- aw in her epilogue she wants the socialists to practice self-care and go to brunch. hand in hand we all march into the sunset, to do and change nothing <3
- corny ending aside there is also a lesson here in the utter failure to anticipate multiple successive waves of remarkably effective labor organization occurring contemporaneously with the writing of this book. amber has retirement money now so she's kicking back to indulge in self-congratulation, but don't worry, being a know-nothing bitch with political instincts on par with a bat's eyesight isn't just okay, it's actually virtuous
- acknowledgements also carefully exise virgil from the narrative but do thank anna khachiyan. incredible. her nazi era will be so funny, if she ever scrounges up the self-respect to admit what she already is.

[Olivwvia · Rating 3 out of 5]

mwah

[Jerry · Rating 2 out of 5]

Girl, Amber, I love you and the Chapo boys, but is this a memoir or a depository for all the stuff you couldn't find a magazine to publish in? Please pick one. This is less Fear and Loathing and more...just the loathing part.