Why does he need to be defended? Does he actually contribute to the issues he is concerned with in any way that doesn’t also benefit his brand? How would any streamer, regardless of their professed politics, be worth anything to a revolutionary process? Why is he not a mere spectacle?
He wouldn’t need to be defended if he wasn’t consistently attacked. The real question is why does he need to be attacked?
In terms of being a pipeline, he’s definitely not pushing his audience to the right. He’s not pushing them toward the dead-end false-left Democrats either. He actively speaks against both of those groups. And then he makes his viewers aware of efforts like The Deprogram.
It’s literally the definition of the mouth of a pipeline. His content is mild enough for the the capitalists who control all the modern public fora to allow him to draw in huge viewership numbers, and that viewership has its overton window shifted left enough for them to discover further-left materia that they otherwise would never have known existed.
At worst he’s inconsequential, at best he’s feeding left. To the real left. There’s no opportunity cost to him doing his thing. His chat is a cavalcade of lumpenproles and kids spamming ‘top kek’ and ‘goated’ and pepe emojis. They’re certainly not moving left on their own.
The opportunity cost is that we waste time on streamers, corporate discourses, and it often centers imperial actions instead of the futures we actually need to figure out how to make. But I agree that if we are going to basically give people pacifiers that they should had least not be laced with poison.
If Hasan were “Thanos snapped” out of the equation, it would be a reach to think that the people watching his stream aren’t going to up and read Lenin or find their way here or join their local Marxist org.
We’re not giving people pacifiers that are/aren’t laced with poison. Bezos is giving people pacifiers, and one of them is significantly more left than the others. If we had the means to stop Hasan from speaking, his audience are not going to get up off their couches. They would just tune into other (likely further-right) influencers. Don’t interrupt your enemy while he’s making a mistake.