"Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth"
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Since October 7, Hinkle has amplified and popularized pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, antisemitic tropes
The newest generation of conspiracy theory influencers are able to move almost effortlessly between far-right and far-left beliefs. Many are openly anti-banking and anti-government, traits of the far-right, while also believing climate change is real and socialism is the key to defeating economic inequality – traits of the far-left. They push a mix of social conservatism, traditional patriotism, and radical environmentalism, and while the particulars of this movement are difficult to pin down, it usually has the same set of heroes and villains. The heroes are Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Russia, and hard working white Americans. The villains are the military industrial complex, Ukraine, Joe Biden, the media, and, of course, the Jewish financiers propping them all up.
No recent influencer has ridden this horseshoe to a more lucrative following than self-proclaimed “MAGA Communist” Jackson Hinkle. The southern California-born Hinkle was once a prominent Bernie Sanders supporter who started to find mainstream fame in 2018 and 2019 as an up-and-coming environmentalist and advocate against climate change. Seemingly passionate about issues related to the oceans and beaches, Hinkle spoke to Congress about the perils of nuclear waste, and campaigned for water reclamation and against plastic pollution. Hinkle even become one of the youngest political candidates in the history of Orange County, CA, when he ran and lost in a special election for the San Clemente City Council at age 20 in 2019, running with the endorsement of the Democratic Socialists of America.
But that version of Hinkle, whose environmentalism was noted in publications like Reader’s Digest and Teen Vogue as part of a group of “kids saving the planet,” exists only in old news stories now. The former Democrat has reinvented himself as a hard right conservative who extols Valdimir Putin as an almost god-like figure, Donald Trump as a genius, a mutant version of Marxist-Leninism as the ideal form of government, and who now views climate change as “green fascism.” Over the last year, Hinkle has amplified and popularized a type of online trolling that claims to be fervently pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and reliant on classic antisemitic tropes to portray both Israeli and Western Jews and greedy, bloodthirsty, and tyrannical. And it has been hugely lucrative for him.
At some point after Joe Biden’s election in 2020, Hinkle pivoted from progressive environmentalism to almost comically far-right devotion. He embraced the genocidal policies of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, and immediately proclaimed his support of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Throughout 2021 and 2022, Hinkle was a minor far-right influencer, known primarily for the sheer amount of disinformation he spread, rather than the size of his following. For several years, he spread conspiracy theories denying the genocide of the Uyghurs by China, claimed Taiwan and Ukraine are not real countries, claimed the LGBT community is full of pedophiles, and denied the Assad regime ever committed war crimes in Syria.
Still, for how prolific Hinkle’s posting was, he was still mostly known as a crank contrarian with a fairly small following compared to figures like Tucker Carlson or Alex Jones. That all changed after the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel. Spewing out a constant stream of conspiracy theories and anti-Zionist attacks, Hinkle gained nearly two million Twitter followers in a matter of months, while getting media facetime with everyone from Carlson and Piers Morgan to a sit-down interview with CNN. Hinkle began his rise to fame as an anti-Zionist by claiming without evidence that the Israeli paper Haaretz reported half the Israeli dead that day were soldiers, that the rest of the victims were armed settlers, that the numbers of dead were inflated, and that no atrocities were carried out against children – all claims that the paper immediately said were bogus.
Moving forward, Hinkle relentlessly praised Hamas and attacked Israel. He misquoted one of the hostages Hamas took and later released, passed off years-old photos from Syria as Israeli atrocities, and praised attacks on Israeli and American forces by Iran and Houthi rebels as heroic resistance against the global cabal controlling all aspects of politics and society.
All the while, Hinkle was pushing classic and well-worn antisemitic tropes that freely conflate the government of Israel with all Jews, confuse Zionism with Judaism, and cast America as a dictatorship and actual dictatorships like China and Russia as heroic and free. He has made countless references to George Soros and other wealthy Jewish bankers as controlling aspects of the conflict. He called Hamas atrocities against Israelis fake with the proof consisting of outdated or fake images, claimed that the US government and military are instruments of the Zionist lobby, and has insinuated that “they” lied about everything from COVID-19 to the Iraq War. More recently, he has promoted the deicide trope, claiming that “they killed Jesus” as part of the “evil lengths they will go to.” He even claimed a New York Times profile of him, including an extensive interview and photo shoot, was a “Zionist hit piece.”
Hinkle is far from alone in promoting his strange blend of “MAGA communism” and antisemitism on social media. Other such figures routinely quote Adolf Hitler and extol the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, promote COVID misinformation, and spread transphobic memes. But Hinkle has become the best known of the group – with both positive and negative aspects for his future as a social media influencer.
Because Hinkle’s embrace of the far-right came so abruptly and completely, many journalists have questioned whether or not he actually believes what he’s saying – or if he simply found a new way to make money online. Hinkle himself once said on an online stream before October 7th that “I do everything for the clout, you will never see me do something not for the clout.”
And “the clout” has been lucrative for Hinkle. Despite losing his YouTube channel and Twitch stream due to promoting conspiracy theories, and at one point being banned from Twitter, Hinkle is now working full time as a disinformation vector. In the days after the attacks, he relentlessly promoted his Twitter account as “fighting Zionist lies” for only $3 a month for a premium subscription. His posts reach a massive audience, to the point where he was making hundreds of dollars per month from Twitter ad revenue. And Hinkle claims to have turned down sponsorship from unnamed foreign governments.
Still, his influence – or at least the profits of it – might be something of an illusion. In the “Zionist hit piece” Times profile, data scientists determined that as many as 40% of Hinkle’s Twitter followers were fake, and that much of his boosting on social media came from Chinese sites. His YouTube channel, which once had 300,000 subscribers, was permanently suspended. And his videos on the conservative YouTube alternative Rumble only receive a few thousand views. He has appeared on conservative outlets like OAN and in internet debates with left-leaning influencers, but has struggled to permanently convert this notoriety into as lucrative a career as many other conspiracy theory purveyors. And given that Hinkle rose to more mainstream fame due to the war in Gaza, it’s not clear what will happen to him once that war ends.
But Hinkle has shown a remarkable ability to shapeshift into whatever the crank universe needs him to be. From radical environmentalism to being proudly pro-fossil fuels, from supporting Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump, and from being profiled alongside school shooting survivor David Hogg to claiming on Twitter that “Gen-Z is pro-gun,” Hinkle’s beliefs appear to be entirely malleable and based on marketability, not resolve.
So there’s no telling what positions his “MAGA Communism” will embrace next.
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