And if they haven't, this would prove their audience to be such sheeple, such tattoo-my-Hasan-Piker-streamer-on-my-leg kinds of guys, that nothing can sway them. Today, I ask that you eat green eggs and ham, so you eat green eggs and ham. Tomorrow, I ask that you eat nothing, so you eat nothing.
It's funny when someone like Zoe Alexandra, who spends most of her time on social movements in Latin America (i.e. real things), has heard of Hasan Piker's fuckeries.
10% reduction will have the empire shaking in its boots
Meanwhile Trump is persuading Europe, Saudi Arabia, Japan etc to pay the US more for weapons from their own pockets, so her plans and his line up nicely
What you (if you are such a person recruiting for the DSA) must do in order not to be completely disingenuous is to
Acknowledge that Lenin said that you were wrong on this, that WWI proved what Lenin had been saying
Explain what is so different about today's material conditions vs Lenin's, that you can discard his analysis
It would be different if you were to openly say, I don't care about Marx, I don't care about Lenin, I don't care about communism. But this is not that context.
In case you don't know, the guy on the left was Vladimir Lenin. Lenin was the leader of the Bolsheviks and then the first leader of the Soviet Union.
In case you don't know, the guy on the right is Jack Doherty. Doherty is well-known among the influencer drama world for his pranks, filmed live for his audience and designed to aggravate random passers-by, as well as for his many high-profile and turbulent romantic relationships.
For people who hypothesise that the younger generations of Americans are getting revolutionised and being pushed towards socialism,
I want someone to do a social experiment in Los Angeles or whatever other city is representative of young America, wherein you hold up this flyer in public and a passer-by must try to answer both parts to this quiz. Let's see how many points Lenin and Doherty obtain at the end of the experiment.
https://www.youtube.com/@BadEmpanadaLive/posts
Because it isn't driven by instantaneous reactions to other people, you can genuinely hear him think.
Other videos made by him were more accurate.
In this later video, he blatantly contradicts his earlier stance. I am telling you, his earlier stance was more correct.
If you think that the DSA Twitter warrior doesn't actually want to form a third party and is only making excuses (and I agree), that is even more true of the average US voter.
If you are afraid to say the second part, that is because you have been duped by idealistic portrayals of the US population as being "somehow moving slightly in the direction that the Marxist left wants", because of a surge in internet activity. (Even someone like Madeline Pendleton makes these erroneous suggestions.) Nobody with any grounding among the majority of first-world people would ever detect that.
The main feature of Marxism, which I know people in these small Reddit communities care about, is a rejection of idealistic political analysis as having no basis in reality.
Here's the easiest piece of evidence for people to grasp, because this issue got so much attention. Why did the Movement to Defund the Police lose all steam? Because when those protests happened during lockdown, the cops in the US backpedalled in a very clever manner by simply refusing to work. What ensued was a rise in visible crime. I remember Hasan Piker's uncle arguing with him about it, and Hasan's uncle was taking the popular position.
In the face of this, the US population had two options. One, completely upend the social relations - including salaries, 401Ks, private property and the nuclear family - so as to remove the conditions of alienation leading to crime. Two, hide behind the four walls of their suburban house and revert back to the status quo ante (fascism). Guess which one they chose. This was not limited to the "right-wing" half of the country.
(The third option, just letting the crime rip while vaguely gesturing towards the first option, was for Rich Liberals like Sam Seder and Emma Vigeland and Hasan Piker only, and it wasn't going to last.)
They didn't need any party, mainstream or anti-duopoly, to tell them what to do. They were acting out their short-term material interest.
[Edit:] Here's a very interesting statistic. NBC did a big exit poll for the New York mayoral election. The link is here. The percentage of people for whom "the candidate's position on Israel was a major factor" AND voted for Mamdani rather than Cuomo, is 38% x 46% = 17.5% of the voters. That's not even accounting for the fact that buried among the 17.5% are probably a lot of liberal imperialists: what about the other 82.5%?
Dialectics is key. On the one hand, the people pushing the line "you can't form a third party in the USA" are simply looking for an excuse to do nothing - I don't doubt that for one second. On the other hand, the line is technically correct.
What the US left should do, therefore, is to organise with people who have the same aims (which is less than 5% of the population) and prepare for the day when more people will be forced by worsening material circumstances to change their political aims. But it is fantasy to think of oneself in the USA as the next Bolsheviks. You can't compare a poor US person lining up in front of a soup kitchen with a Russian peasant in 1910.
To all the people criticizing karl marx without any basis, without reading his theories, without understanding historical materialism and without reading hegel.
Platner is a Nazy. (Misspelling it in order not to trigger Reddit ToS or whatever.) The difference this time is that even the aesthetic is Nazy (tat).
The kinds of scandals which have come up about his past aren't too different from the ones from which the media made hay in 2016 regarding Trump. For people inside the Turtle Island political world, this is not a small detail.
It's clear to me anyway that Platner was chosen to appeal to Nazy voters. It's also fair to surmise that in the calculus of those who have chosen Platner for this job, a Trump-like publicity drive would bring benefits.
See, the US leftists going to bat for him, whether the left-of-centre podcasters or the zombies in the Hasan Piker subreddit... They know both facts. They talk to each other comfortably because on a deep level they know both these facts.
However, they cannot say it out loud to themselves and others. They want to think that they and their country are better than Nazys. As long as nobody tries to point this contradiction out, they can keep this game up.
But here is where BadEmpanada comes in. BadEmpanada goes out of his way to poke holes and play the court jester in order to rile up said US leftists, because they don't have an answer. They can't even construct plausible deniability by saying, "Well I hate Platner because I'm not a Nazy, but you have to appeal to the crowd in Maine and that crowd is Nazy." They can't even say that to save themselves. This is fodder for BadEmpanada.
I've been listening to Forgiato Blow, it's a laugh factory
Anyway this latest track's refrain is "Car Full Of White Boys"
If you're not plugged into BadEmpanada drama enough to know why I'm referencing Ryan Grim, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85HzC5UBN3c&t=330s
This is an article that has just come out on Utopia, China's premier left-leaning website. It's very interesting, and revealing.
Test yourself. If you don't understand what's going on here, you may not fully understand the political direction that China is going in.
On most socialist subreddits, I can't post this - they would do mental gymnastics to pretend not to get the point.
https://m.wyzxwk.com/Article/zatan/2026/06/527767.html
I'm gonna use an AI translation, because there are some linguistic nuances that Google Translate doesn't render well.
------------------------------------------------------
Author: Cheng Gong
Source: Author's Submission
Date: June 18, 2026
During National Day in 2019, my whole family gathered for a meal to celebrate the motherland's birthday.
I raised my glass and said happily, "Everyone, let's raise our glasses together to wish our great motherland a happy birthday! Cheers!"
My daughter said to me, "Dad, this is a family dinner, so you can say 'happy birthday to the motherland' at home. But outside, in formal settings, you'd better not say that!"
I was incredibly surprised.
"Why can't I say it? Are we living in enemy-occupied territory? Are we the underground Party?"
My daughter replied,
"A while ago, our workplace held a meeting to relay a document from the Central Propaganda Department. The document requires that from now on, the language used to celebrate National Day must be standardized.
In publications, promotional materials, media networks, artistic performances, celebratory rallies, and various other formal occasions, it is forbidden to use phrases like: 'Celebrating the Motherland's Birthday' [庆祝祖国生日], 'Wishing the Motherland a Happy Birthday' [祝福祖国生日快乐], 'Celebrating the 70th Anniversary of the National-Founding of the People's Republic of China' [庆祝中华人民共和国建国70周年], 'Celebrating the 70th Anniversary of the Founding of the Country' [庆祝建国70周年], or 'Celebrating the Motherland's 70th Glorious Birthday' [庆贺祖国70华诞].
Only standardized terms are allowed, such as: 'Celebrating the 70th Anniversary of the Founding of New China' [庆祝新中国成立70周年] or 'Celebrating the 70th Anniversary of the Establishment of the People's Republic of China' [庆祝中华人民共和国成立70周年]."
I couldn't understand this, so I quickly asked,
"I don't get it. What is wrong with celebrating the motherland's birthday? Don't 'Celebrating the 70th Anniversary of the Founding of the Country' [庆祝建国70周年] and 'Celebrating the 70th Anniversary of the Founding of New China' [庆祝新中国成立70周年] mean the exact same thing? As long as we express the people's joy in welcoming National Day, why must we split hairs and nitpick words like this?"
My daughter explained,
"Our boss said that China already has 5,000 years of history. The 'Motherland' [祖国], 'New China' [新中国], and the 'People's Republic of China' [中华人民共和国] are not the same thing. The Motherland includes the past 5,000 years of successive dynasties—from the Xia, Shang, and Zhou, to the Qin, Han, and Jin, the Northern and Southern Dynasties, the Sui, Tang, and Song, the Yuan, Ming, and Qing, all the way up to the Republic of China [中华民国]. All of these are the motherland. October 1st is not the birthday of the Motherland; it is merely the anniversary of the establishment of the People's Republic of China.
That's why we cannot say 'Celebrating the 70th Anniversary of the Founding of the Country' [建国70周年]; we can only say 'Celebrating the 70th Anniversary of the Establishment of the People's Republic of China' [中华人民共和国成立70周年], or 'Celebrating the 70th Anniversary of the Establishment of New China' [新中国成立70周年]."
"Ask your boss another question," I continued.
"There is also the song My Motherland [《我的祖国》]. 'A great river flows wide, the wind blows, and the scent of paddy flowers lines both banks.' Is my motherland the Communist Party's People's Republic of China, or the Nationalist Party's Republic of China?
Go ask your boss again: On October 1, 1949, the Grand Founding Ceremony was held in Beijing. Exactly which country was being founded? Wasn't it the People's Republic of China? The movie The Founding of a Republic [a famous state-sponsored film]—which country’s founding was it depicting? Wasn't it the People's Republic of China? If his answer is yes, then why can't we say 'the 70th anniversary of the founding of the country' [建国70周年]? He claims the Republic of China is also the motherland—then ask him if he is still a Communist Party member! Is he a Nationalist Party (KMT) member instead? If he truly believes the Republic of China is his motherland, then he can pack his bags and get out to Taiwan!"
"'Motherland' [祖国] and 'State' [国家] are different," I argued. "'Motherland' is a term overflowing with emotional color. Whomever you call your 'Motherland' signifies that you respect her and love her from the bottom of your heart. That is why people often say 'Motherland Motherland' [祖国母亲]. We were born in the People's Republic of China, and we grew up in the People's Republic of China. My motherland is the People's Republic of China! My motherland is absolutely not the corrupt Great Qing Empire, and it is absolutely not the deeply wicked Republic of China! Therefore, I will insist on saying 'celebrating the motherland's birthday,' and I will insist on saying 'celebrating the 70th anniversary of the founding of the country'!"
My daughter said, "Well, I certainly wouldn't dare speak to my boss that way. If the boss gets angry, he'll smash my rice bowl (fire me). Besides, this is what the Central Propaganda Department requires. Do you dare to say the Central authorities are wrong? Do you dare to fail to maintain alignment with the Center?"
I replied firmly, "I only maintain alignment with the truth!"
Even if you don't "blame" Sheinbaum, that's not the point I'm making.
What I'm saying is, this IS what Bernie's presidency would have been like.
Carlos Slim is the richest billionaire in LatAm and number 16 in the world as per Forbes.