Leftist ideas need to become acceptable first before we can even start thinking in terms if “social fascist”. Someone like bernie was important so that we can now have a mamdani so that we can have some actual moderate-radical socialist in the future. The next one after that, we can start talking about marxist-leninist and revolution again once we built up an actual base that can be convinced to stand behind socialist ideals.
I don’t think this is true at all. In Brazil, you have figures like Jones Manoel with 600k and Ian Neves with 500k subscribers on YouTube. They constantly emphasize how they’re Marxist-Leninists and how a revolution is needed in Brazil. Constantly. Jones has written multiple books, is currently in the academia, and he’s also an activist and constantly going around to agitate and give lectures. He has also run for governor in his state before (didn’t win), and he has contacts with federal representatives in the congress, as well. He’s completely unapologetic about his convictions and doesn’t hide them at all. In fact, he even said that he noticed that it’s better when working with non-communist politicians to just stick to your convictions rather than compromising them and pandering to others. That apparently that gets a better response. This is a guy that is actually changing things in Brazil. His follower count has seen dramatic rises on various platforms, and he’s also injecting actual Marxist-Leninist arguments into the general political debate there.
Meanwhile, here you’re trying to convince everyone how Hasan “The Pipeline” Piker needs to do things slowly and “hide his power levels”. Oh, he can’t have any strong convictions, because that might scare off the liberals, but the guy in a country that had a right-wing military dictatorship not too long ago can. Bro, he’s not doing shit for the left. He hasn’t done anything other than being an entertainer. If you find his stuff cool, I’m not trying to discourage you from consuming it, but he hasn’t introduced socialist thought into the mainstream, and everyone just knows him for him as a personality rather than a force of the left/communism. You’ll learn a bunch from every single Ian and Jones video, what has one ever learned by watching Hasan? What theoretical contributions has he made?
You don’t need to introduce things slowly. How long has Bernie been around? If he was a “Trojan horse into the mind of the liberal”, you’d expect some changes in the American society by now, but the latter has moved even further right over the past decades. There’s no historical evidence to suggest that entertaining liberals by pandering to their positions is anything but something you can tap yourself on the back for and tell yourself “well, I did what I could”.
And look, I’m not hating on Hasan as such. I don’t think he’s going around claiming he’s a leftist revolutionary, right? He’s doing whatever makes him money, and that’s cool, but let’s stop pretending he’s playing some long game for the ultimately victory of communism.
It’s the opposite. They have much more of an “acceptable left” with Lula and PT than the US has. The reason people in Brazil are more ready to hear socialists out is because the latter actually exist. Socialism gets normalized by people proudly claiming and explaining it, not by pretending people first need to be “primed” with vague “leftist” thought or whatever for such things. Which communist revolution in history needed or even benefited from such a pipeline? Literally none of them, because stuff like that isn’t what pushes people left. People aren’t pushed leftwards, they’re pulled leftwards.
But you’re right that Hasan is the first part of the pipeline, though. It’s just too bad that that pipeline leads from himself to himself.