#MAGA communism

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Tess Owen at The Guardian:

In the last few years, a self-styled political movement that sounds like a contradiction in terms has gained ground online: “Maga communism”. Promoted by its two most prominent spokespeople, Haz Al-Din, 27, and Jackson Hinkle, 24, Maga communism comprises a grab bag of ideas that can seem lacking in coherence – ranging from a belief in the power of Donald Trump’s followers to wrest power from “global elites” to an emphasis on masculine “honor”, admiration for Vladimir Putin and support for Palestinian liberation. The two have been repeatedly kicked off social media platforms for spreading disinformation. Hinkle, for example, was booted from Instagram earlier this year – shortly after claiming in a series of posts that Ukraine was behind the terrorist attack on a concert hall in Moscow, despite Islamic State claiming responsibility for the act.

Hinkle and Al-Din have been ridiculed by critics as pseudo-intellectual, cravenly opportunistic grifters who have carved out an intentionally provocative niche designed to siphon followers away from other highly online political communities. “If you look at their policies, like what they actually propose, it’s clear that this is a deranged fringe movement that doesn’t really have a great deal of articulation,” said Alexander Reid Ross, a lecturer at Portland State University and author of Against the Fascist Creep, which explored how rightwing movements co-opt the language of the left. “It seems ludicrous, but I would say it’s really a symptom of the erosion of rational political life.”

[...] Until recently, Al-Din and Hinkle’s reach seemed limited to corners of the internet largely populated by young men attracted to their messages on masculinity and US foreign policy. But with their inflammatory and often misleading posts about the Gaza war, and as they rail with increasing frequency against what they view as American imperialism, their footprint is growing. “Deranged” or not, Hinkle and Al-Din’s “movement” is attracting recognition in increasingly high places on the right. Hinkle’s defense of Putin’s foreign policy has earned him an invitation on to Tucker Carlson’s show and praise from Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Hinkle and Al-Din have also forged international alliances with the likes of the Russian ultranationalist philosopher Alexander Dugin, whom they met at a conference in Moscow earlier this year.

The founder of Maga communism cultivates a militant aesthetic when he addresses his followers via livestream from his home. His beard is carefully coiffed, and he often wears an oversized black blazer and black collared shirt. Behind him, swords are mounted on the wall, “to symbolize the war I am waging to defend the message I believe is true amidst mountains of lies”, Al-Din, 27, who streams on Kick and YouTube under the name “Infrared”, said in a phone interview. Both Haz and Hinkle say they support Trump not out of admiration for the man, but out of the belief that his followers represent the most significant mobilization of the American working class in decades.

They subscribe to social conservatism in a way that appeals to the growing numbers of gen Z males who believe feminism is harmful to men, and cast issues such as transgender rights, the climate crisis and racial justice as neoliberal distractions. “It’s not that we’re against women. We just perceive that the discourse, culture and the political sphere have seen a huge decline in the notion of honor,” Al-Din said. “One of the reasons for that is the decline in basic masculine virtues, the rise of a kind of effeminization, especially of men.” Hinkle has regularly made anti-trans comments on his own social media, making declarations such as: “We need to protect our youth from trans terrorists and propagandists.” “They’re firmly embedded in a corner of social media that is the most vitriolic, terminally online, troll culture,” said Reid Ross.

Hinkle and Al-Din’s links to communism are tenuous at best, but they may be opportunistically emphasizing the label to tap into shifting attitudes. Polling has indicated that members of gen Z, even gen Z Republican voters, are more open to socialist ideas compared with previous generations. In a video debunking Maga communism published last year, the Marxist economist Richard Wolff noted that there’s precedent for nationalist movements co-opting communist rhetoric, particularly during times of social upheaval and economic hardship. “If you’re a political movement and you want to get supporters at a time when socialism is attracting more and more interest, well, you might be tempted to grab hold at least of the name,” Wolff said, noting that this was a strategy most famously used by Adolf Hitler during his rise to power. “It’s provocative,” Hinkle said of his movement’s name, smirking, in a 2022 interview with the comedian Jimmy Dore. “But that’s why it’s trending on Twitter right now.”

According to an infographic regularly recirculated by Hinkle, proposed Maga communist policies include “dismantling big tech”, banning “antifa street terrorism”, ending “woke academia” and subsidizing gyms in every community. They also propose exiting Nato; deporting the Obamas, Bushes and Clintons to the International Criminal Court; ending “open borders”; and “putting banking into the hands of the people”. Hinkle and Al-Din also claim they’re anti-imperialists and cling to the enduring myth of Trump as the more dovish candidate. Their band of online followers see themselves as pitted against “the unipolar world” and “western hegemony”, and they often support authoritarian nations that the US sees as its adversaries, such as Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. Al-Din, for example, told the Guardian that he has a “profound” admiration for North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, in part due to his “resilience in defending the honor and history of Korean civilization”.

[...]

Al-Din and Hinkle’s position on the Israel-Gaza conflict makes them outliers in the broader Maga movement, which has largely rallied behind Israel. Trump and his allies have cast pro-Palestinian protests in the US as another manifestation of “wokeness”. Trump recently described protesting college students as “raging lunatics and Hamas sympathizers”. While some other young leaders on the far right, such as the white nationalist livestreamer Nick Fuentes, oppose Israel for explicitly antisemitic reasons, Al-Din and Hinkle insist that their position on the conflict is grounded in their broader “anti-imperialist” stance, shared by more prominent conservatives such as Tucker Carlson, who has also criticized US support for Israel. Hinkle and Fuentes have been allies in the past; Hinkle and Al-Din have previously streamed on Fuentes’ platform Cozy.tv, and Hinkle said he had gotten dinner with Fuentes last September. They fell out shortly after following an argument about class politics and the country-folk artist Oliver Anthony’s viral song about the working class.

But despite Hinkle and Al-Din’s high-profile support for Gaza, the pair were recently jeered at a pro-Palestine event at Emory University. The event was co-hosted by Cair (Council on American-Islamic Relations) and was to feature the political activist Norman Finkelstein. The Emory law student Grayson Walker, the showrunner for Al-Din’s Infrared show, was a co-organizer, and added Al-Din as a speaker at the last minute.

In his bizarre speech, Al-Din berated members of the audience, saying that they were responsible for spreading “imperialist and Zionist propaganda and slander against my comrade Jackson Hinkle” and were “just as culpable in the crimes of the Zionists as those who give their dollars and money to them”. The audience booed him and shouted “shame on you”, after which Cair abruptly canceled the event and put out a statement. “Today, we unwittingly damaged the movement for Palestinian liberation by allowing a rogue actor to hijack an event intended to highlight the Palestinian genocide,” Cair said in a statement. “A student co-organizer commandeered this platform by inserting hateful and divisive guests into the program,” it continued, adding that the organizer, Walker, had “greenlighted a deeply problematic speech”. (Hinkle and Al-Din later claimed they’d been “canceled” by “the Zionists” and used a homophobic slur to refer to the pro-Palestinian students at Emory.)

The Guardian has an article on MAGA Communism, an ideology that marries communism with MAGA politics (basically right-wing politics with a left-wing aesthetic). Jackson Hinkle and Haz Al-Din are its biggest spokespersons of it.

[strommccallum]

Jackson Hinkle is not a Marxist. He is a socially reactionary welfare capitalist. Period.

[ininterestingtimes]

The Left Opposition: Vanished Without a Trace?

[grandhotelabyss]

And for those addicted to what passes for politics today, i.e., online gossip—gossip is a sin, trads; you should have given it up for Lent!—the promised fistfight may actually transpire between Ulysse Carrière (representing "woke brutalism") and Haz al-Din (representing "MAGA communism"). As a humble aesthete, I don't have a dog in this particular fight; to quote Žižek quoting Stalin, "Both are worse!" But it may be a good day to revisit my Substack essay from a few months ago assessing Haz and MAGA communism. A sample:

In the end, though, MAGA communism is a non-starter, as even Haz seems to recognize when he calls for the formation of a working-class party outside the Democrat-Republican duopoly. This dream dies hard—I dreamed it myself, back in the Nader days—but it misunderstands the push-pull logic of American politics, which as a literary critic I continue to think is best understood through a reading of The Scarlet Letter, a novel perfectly well aware of the red alternative to liberal pluralism it summarily dispatches.

[watercitysurfclub]

"When a Communist Attends a Trump Rally..."

[alanshemper]

[lilithism1848]

[youthofnausea7]

That conservative hyperpartisanship urge to take Nazi Germany, The Confederacy, and other movements that they probably would have supported and just claim that they were actually left wing because they ended up on the wrong side of history. It kind of makes me wonder if the conservatives of the future will revise the whole maga movement the same way. I wanna live to see it, I wanna debate about maga communism.

[my-midlife-crisis]

[sher-ee]

https://leavingmaga.org/

Click here ⬆️

[benjaminallhope-fulltimemind]

Don't let republicans fool you with their national populism cause they do not give a single care for veterans who died and suffered for America. They would hollow out the VA and fill it corporate and political stooges who would blindly follow the GOP's bidding. Our government doesn't care enough for veterans and here we have Republicans confirming it, remember it was Biden who passed the CARE act. So remember a future where our soldiers suffer more than they already do is what the Republicans want.

[kinialohaguy]

America Devoured

Aloha kākou. In a past post, I predicted the sham kangaroo court in New York would convict President Trump. It was a setup. I now believe this corrupt judge Merchan will incarcerate President Trump. What will happen next is unclear. What is clear is that Merchan is being directed by his own hostility towards President Trump and Pedo-Joe Biden and the Marxist democrats. This is blatant election…

[ininterestingtimes]

The true threat posed by malign sovereignties - rogue states - consists not in the fact that they are geopolitical anarchists - but that they are aligned with entirely contrary and different polarities, which serve as the germ of a new global system - one that will, rather than culminate in the ‘opening’ of exchange-value, culminate in the determinate ‘closed’ character, necessities for the development of, and interaction between peoples.

...

While today’s partisanism is associated with the ‘far right,’ that is only since each partisan ideology has thus far culminated in a type of cult, dogma, confusion, or impotence that, taken separately, immobilize partisan political struggle, Not unlike the various forms of socialism outlined in the Communist Manifesto. Political ideologies which seek to return to, or discover true order are contrived in opposition to the ‘Leftist’ one prevailing. Yet taken individually, they fail to pose any challenge. Taken together, they represent only the general form of enmity with the status quo, and are thus, together, represented as the ‘far right’ - the ‘abyss’ which, for liberal consciousness (and, admittedly, some fringe ideologists themselves), ends with Nazism. Yet it is not any general far-right political ideology which defines these partisan ideologies taken together, only the general form of (potentially) malign political sovereignty.

Politics around the world have become globalized, which is to say Americanized. Leftism, even now in Latin America, where left-wing partisans had been the most formidable opponents to American imperialism - has increasingly come to mean the same thing. German leftism today is indistinguishable from the American kind, meanwhile, the ‘far-right’ partisan movements like the AfD attempt to recuperate natively East German Communist traditions. And this tendency is rapidly spreading to every corner of the globe. A decisive confrontation within modern politics is brewing in nearly every country which represents the greatest political realignment of the modern era, not the least including in the United States itself.

...

In the United States, the MAGA Movement has come to be defined by being the exclusive American form of partisanship. As is well known, the distinction between the Republicans and Democrats, in nearly every election cycle, has never amounted to any real political distinction on the basis of Clauswitzean absolute enmity. Partisanship, that is impassioned political partiality, has made its definite return in the United States solely in the MAGA movement, which has again reintroduced real political enmity and distinction to the belly of the globalist beast itself. Having its origins in a rather accidental confluence of circumstances, in Donald Trump’s presidential election in 2016, the movement has become the host of every possible real counter-hegemonic ideological tendency within the Untied States.

...

As easy as it may seem to blame Europeans for some exceptional evil by virtue of a defect unique to them, the truth is that Europe’s evil only reflects the evil of mankind in general, as an inseparable part of its universal world history. The supposedly ‘third worldist’ ‘decolonial’ intellectuals, who are often social-democratic moralizers, are always revealed to be prostitutes of Western globalism anyway. They do not confront the history of the West, they rather leverage moral blackmail in order to benefit from it in some way, not only continuing to take for granted its fundamental evil, but coming to represent this same evil themselves (i.e. moralizing universalism, liquidationism, woke globalism, etc.). MAGA has definitively proven, at the end of the era of Anglo-Saxon hegemony, that there is more to the history of the West. Unipolar globalism (and its forebear in, colonialism, imperialism, slavery, etc.) is only one outcome of the history of the West. Concurrent with this same history is the lost chronology of the genuine development of its civilizations and peoples, found at the point of the historical soil’s tilling at the bottom, rather than at the point of history’s opening at the top.

...

Leftists sneer at MAGA Communists owing to the supposedly unbridgeable rift between Communism and the MAGA movement. But they are themselves the prime cause, and the greatest beneficiaries of such a rift in the first place! It is the betrayal of the revisionists, and the traitors to the working class movement - career climbing through institutional academia, NGOs and ultimately the highest levels of government - that has earned Communism the dirty name that it has now acquired in America. The ‘communists,’ sitting at their posts as the most vicious representatives of the professional managerial class, are themselves chiefly to blame for the unpopularity of Communism. It is thus inevitable that the greatest enemies of the MAGA Communist movement will be leftists, who stand the most to lose from the unity of Marxism with the worker’s movement. It will outmode them into irrelevance, and turn the ideology that has for so long been the sanction of their parasitism and evil into the weapon of social forces disposed with the intention of liquidating them as a class.

[grandhotelabyss]

Thoughts on Maga Comunism? Is it just a grift or is there atleast a kernel of truth?

I wrote about it here last year. Not a grift. I believe there are no grifts; we all have a story we tell ourselves about why what we're doing is right, good, and most of all necessary; even from a maximally cynical perspective, we have all, as Burroughs said, first had to con "the mark inside." And yet: an unworkable synthesis.

[socialjusticeinamerica]

They left out the part about slaughtering herds of wild horses in the western states. The cruelty is the point.

[queerism1969]