The military thing is a huge contradiction that the left needs to solve in the U.S. Troop worship is a huge part of the culture here. Not to mention some of the troops and former troops are radicalizing like that marine who got his hand broken. Turns out he's running for Senate under the Green party.

I mean, again he sabotages his ability to educate even by accident on this subject because he misrepresents Lenin (and the terms of the argument) and also mostly just screams at people that they are unintelligent (I swear he did this for like 20 minutes straight on his stream two days ago) along with fossilized ridiculous ideas about how "meeting people where they are" requires running as a Dem when so many people (many Dems included, but especially independents/non-voters for this purpose) rightfully hate the Dems and being a Dem forces you to follow party discipline or get fucked.

He also doesn't engage with these ideas in their strongest form, just with offhand chatters who are just as likely to be Gonzalite freaks or baby leftists, who he mostly screams at. He hardly talks at all about what it has meant, from a historical perspective, to begin a revolutionary movement or operate a nascent one, he just focuses on the tactics they use when they are bigger (especially the Bolsheviks, of course) while saying that Lenin actually says that to get to that point we need to run candidates in bourgeois parties.

But while he sometimes deflects the third party criticism by pointing to how he boosts PSL, etc. (which is cool and good), he still fails to engage constructively with the people complaining about entryism 98% of the time.

And I think maybe the core issue besides his stubbornness and arrogance is that he is still too taken by harm reduction arguments. He has some resistance to it, but he can't make the leap to understanding what is to be done until he completely discards their validity.