A pair of former Bernie Sanders backers are using outrage over the Gaza war to promote their incoherent "MAGA communism" ideology, and it's winning over influential fans like Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones.
The movement's two most prominent spokesmen, Haz Al-Din, 27, and Jackson Hinkle, 24, have been repeatedly kicked off social media platforms for spreading disinformation, mainly about Gaza and Ukraine, and they've been mocked as pseudo-intellectual grifters who try to piggyback off other political communities that organize online, reported The Guardian.
“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. “It seems ludicrous, but I would say it’s really a symptom of the erosion of rational political life.”
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Carlson invited Hinkle, a former environmentalist and gun safety advocate, to appear on his show after defending Vladimir Putin's foreign policy, and he and Al-Din have been praised by Russian ultranationalist philosopher Alexander Dugin, who they met at a conference earlier this year in Moscow.
“These individuals are allies of conservative Tucker Carlson but are also Marxists who support Trump and advocate the ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) slogan,” Dugin wrote. “Together, they are committed to dismantling liberal dominance.”
Hinkle told the Russian state broadcaster VGTRK that he believes "Joe Biden is controlled by a satanic cabal of DC deep-state leadership," and while they have included Donald Trump's signature slogan as part of their movement's name, they see him as only a figurehead.
“We have a saying, as MAGA communists, which is that when you go to McDonald’s, you don’t go for the clown, you go for the burger,” Al-Din said. “Trump is the mascot of the movement.”
Hinkle has admitted the name is intended to be provocative to draw attention, and the pair co-opt leftist language and emphasize masculine "honor" to lure vulnerable men seeking affirmation and a sense of belonging.
“I was always sympathetic to MAGA," said one follower, a 19-year-old socially conservative factory worker from Kentucky, "but I’d also liked some of what Bernie Sanders had been saying around the time of his campaign."