In July 2024 the American Communist Party (ACP) was formed. It is unique in that it is a party led by online streamers who believe that the vanguard of the US working class is located among Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) Coalition. They are also unique among communists in that they believe that the primary enemy of working people is not the capitalist class but rather leftists. Their activity mostly consists of online aggression against those who they perceive to be leftists and they aim to dominate the social media space and win the information war, which for them would constitute the victory of American Communism over the hearts and minds of the people in the United States. How did this party come to be? What lessons does it hold? This article is an attempt to answer these questions.

Parasociality and the American Communist Party

The main framework to understand the American Communist Party (ACP) is the phenomenon of parasociality, a phenomenon that first arose in the 1950s-1960s when television was being used by millions of people in the United States for the first time. With the TV a staple household commodity and source of leisure, the American people began their addictive relationship with the screen. TV shows, talk shows, movies, news channels, and outright propaganda flooded the air waves, allowing the ruling class to shape the minds and hearts of the US and global working class to an unprecedented degree.

During 1956, as this process of addiction to the screen was just beginning, a landmark study by sociologists Donald Horton and Richard R. Wohl was published titled “Mass Communication and Para-social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance.” The study introduced the concept of ‘parasocial interaction’ between the actors on the screen and the viewers. It is worth quoting their insights in full:

One of the striking characteristics of the new mass media - radio, television, and the movies - is that they give the illusion of face-to-face relationship with the performer. The conditions of response to the performer are analogous to those in a primary group. The most remote and illustrious men are met as if they were in the circle of one's peers; the same is true of a character in a story who comes to life in these media in an especially vivid and arresting way. We propose to call this seeming face-to-face relationship between spectator and performer a para-social relationship.

In television, especially, the image which is presented makes available nuances of appearance and gesture to which ordinary social perception is attentive and to which interaction is cued. Sometimes the 'actor' - whether he is playing himself or performing in a fictional role - is seen engaged with others; but often he faces the spectator, uses the mode of direct address, talks as if he were conversing personally and privately.^[1]

Whereas previously mediums, like live theater, were fixed in time and space:

Radio and television, however - and in what follows we shall speak primarily of television - are hospitable to both these worlds in continuous interplay. They are alternately public platforms and theatres, extending the para-social relationship now to leading people of the world of affairs, now to fictional characters, sometimes even to puppets anthropomorphically transformed into 'personalities', and, finally, to theatrical stars who appear in their capacities as real celebrities. But of particular interest is the creation by these media of a new type of performer: quizmasters, announcers, 'interviewers' in a new 'show-business' world - in brief, a special category of 'personalities' whose existence is a function of the media themselves. These 'personalities,' usually, are not prominent in any of the social spheres beyond the media.They exist for their audiences only in the para-social relation. Lacking an appropriate name for these performers, we shall call them personae.

The spectacular fact about such personae is that they can claim and achieve an intimacy with what are literally crowds of strangers, and this intimacy, even if it is an imitation and a shadow of what is ordinarily meant by that word, is extremely influential with, and satisfying for, the great numbers who willingly receive it and share in it. They 'know' such a persona in somewhat the same way they know their chosen friends: through direct observation and interpretation of his appearance, his gestures and voice, his conversation and conduct in a variety of situations. Indeed, those who make up his audience are invited, by designed informality, to make precisely these evaluations - to consider that they are involved in a face-to-face exchange rather than in passive observation.

The personae is nothing without the spectators, their audience who:

…should play the role of the loved one to the persona's lover; the admiring dependent to his father-surrogate; the earnest citizen to his fearless opponent of political evils. It is expected to benefit by his wisdom, reflect on his advice, sympathize with him in his difficulties, forgive his mistakes, buy the products that he recommends, and keep his sponsor informed of the esteem in which he is held.

The audience further contributes to the persona's illusion:

…by believing in it, and by rewarding the persona's 'sincerity' with loyalty.' The audience is entreated to assume a sense of personal obligation to the performer, to help him in his struggle for 'success' if he is 'on the way up,' or to maintain his success if he has already won it. 'Success' in show business is itself a theme which is prominently exploited in this kind of propaganda. It forms the basis of many movies; it appears often in the patter of the leading comedians and in the exhortations of MC's; it dominates the so-called amateur hours and talent shows; and it is subject to frequent comment in interviews with 'show people.

It is this core dynamic, between the personae and the audience that has led to the development of the ACP and all of its excesses, abuse, and aggression. Furthermore, with the rapid advancements of technology and the 6+ decades of accumulated habituation for media and celebrity culture in the US population, the tendencies that Horton and Wohl observed have been amplified several times in today’s era of the smartphone, social media, and development of the attention economy, in which an entire population has been molded that is addicted to the illusory world of the screen, a world that is seemingly everywhere and constantly demands of us our time and energy. The ruling class feeds the US, and much of the world population, false and evil information at all times, creates a variety of insecurities which they say can be fixed with money, and has also created the means by which one can create fake personas on social media platforms that are far away from their real lives on the ground.

As Horton and Wohl note, “para-social relationships create a one-sided dynamic where audiences idolize media figures, reinforcing the narcissistic tendencies of those figures."

The narcissism Horton and Wohl identified way back then has also been ramped up quite a few times in the figures of Ali Hammoud, a.k.a. Haz Al-Din, and Jackson Hinkle, the two primary faces and figures behind the ACP. Born in the internet age, their political activity has been almost entirely through developing their particular personae through which they have gained online followers, some of whom have gone further to join and form the bulk of the ACP.

In order to understand the ACP, we must delve into its history and its ideological roots. Our starting point however is not the life story of Haz or Hinkle, but their big brother figure, Caleb Maupin, who paved the way for the ACP’s development.

Ground Zero of the ACP: Caleb Maupin

Born 1988, Maupin is now roughly 37 years old, and in the internet age he was the first to spearhead the idea of “patriotic socialism” or “conservative communism” to a relatively broad audience within the context of the United States. He grew up in the small city of Orrville in Ohio, where his family was one of the very few liberal families in the area. He was an avid reader, first reading the Communist Manifesto in the fifth grade and eventually joined the Workers World Party (WWP) when he was 19. He took up political science in college but was disappointed by what he perceived to be the apathetic and alcohol-obsessed culture of the student body. He dropped out to focus full time on his activism, which was organizing and attending protests, gathering news of injustices in the area such as police violence, through his political home at the time, the WWP. The WWP was founded by the Trotskyist turned lite-Stalinist Sam Marcy, who oriented his political practice, emphasising that the principal global threat in the world was US imperialism and therefore socialists in the US should unequivocally defend socialist states such as the USSR, China, North Korea, and Cuba; arguing that there was a global class war between socialism and capitalism with the socialist states at the forefront. He extended his analysis to support countries he viewed as waging national liberation struggles, thus the duty of socialists in the US was to also defend states fighting against US imperialism including Iraq, Libya, and Iran.^[2]

WWP remained a small organization for the entirety of its existence. Like much of the socialist left, it was only able to sustain itself through a small base of college students, professionals, and downwardly mobile middle classes. Maupin likely encountered them on college campus. WWP had a major split in 2004 due to organizing differences between leading personalities in the party, and another organization called the Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL) formed as a result.

Back to Maupin; in a September 2013 interview in The Nation titled “Occupy Celebrates Two Years of Resistance” he was identified as a member of the “International Action Center,” the international solidarity organization of WWP. He split from the WWP sometime after this, likely around 2015, though both the WWP and Maupin have not given details as to why. From 2013 to 2016, he worked for the Iranian state-owned media outlet Press TV, before moving on to the Russian-owned RT.

After leaving the WWP, Maupin’s political ideology changed significantly. He began identifying as a “Lincolnist” and a “Rooseveltist” in 2017 during a debate against the white nationalist Augustus Sol Invictus. In 2018, we begin to see a clear link between the ideas of Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin and Maupin, such as during their talk at the Anti-Globalization Conference. The conference was also attended by several members of the European New Right. The ideas of the European New Right have their origins in the thought of Alain de Benoist of France, and are generally opposed to multiculturalism, instead advocating for what they call ethnopluralism, which essentially means preserving separate and bordered ethno-cultural regions. The European New Right view this as a revolt against modernity and the ideas of liberalism, which they believe creates a universalizing tendency that destroys cultures, traditions, and all things sacred, i.e. modernity and liberalism go against the very essence of humanity.^[3]

Benoist’s ideas are the cornerstone of Dugin’s views, which he discusses in depth in The Fourth Political Theory. Dugin defines the Fourth Political Theory as “strongly rejecting anti-Communism as well as anti-Fascism,” with its three fundamental principles being “Social justice, national sovereignty, and traditional values.” In the discussion with Dugin, Maupin stated that he mostly agrees with him. Maupin painted in a positive light the social conservatism that Stalin pushed forward in the USSR and said that he considers himself a populist, supporting many of Donald Trump’s ideas, and also considering Trump a populist as well. He goes on to say that the modern left in the US pushes forward a culture that fetishsizes weakness, and that anyone who pushes for strength and family values is viewed as a fascist by the left. Maupin’s only point of disagreement with Dugin was his belief that history is inherently moving towards progress, that the capitalist class is actually holding back the productive forces, and that “the modern left is very much opposed to the notion of raising the world out of poverty.”

At this point the following can be deduced about Maupin’s political philosophy:

1. It is progressive to further raise world production of goods and commodities.
2. The world must be pushed away from the dominance of US Imperialism towards multipolarity, with sovereignty for different nations which themselves are organized around distinct traditions and cultures.
3. Liberalism is inherently corrosive to humanity and in the United States there should be a revival of social conservatism, moving towards the “traditional values” of the country.

These ideas are not anything new in the US, but actually overlap with the political ideology of Lyndon LaRouche. LaRouche’s story is particularly significant because the basic tendencies of his movement have been carried on by Maupin and the ACP.

The LaRouche Movement

LaRouche was a former Trotskyist. Originally a member of the Socialist Workers Party in the 50’s and 60’s, having joined a faction associated with British Trotskyist Gerry Healy, LaRouche would eventually go on to start his own study group during the late 60’s, organizing his supporters under the name National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC).

The NCLC was a democratic-centralist cadre organization, recruiting generally from the middle classes and as such had a significant amount of money to fund their operations, as well as a high level of discipline to punch above their weight. Their first major activity as an organization was to distance themselves from and physically attack the rest of the existing left such as the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in what they would call “Operation Mop Up.”

They created the US Labor Party in 1973, which was used to run LaRouche for President several times. This was the start of the LaRouche movement’s entrance into the electoral arena, which actually had a good degree of success at the local level. The LaRoucheites ran as Democrats but were generally softer against candidates in the Republican Party. LaRouche’s first run was in 1976, during which his campaign bought a 30 minute advertisement on NBC to share his platform to the public.

The advertisement began on a catastrophic note, with Larouche saying:

The election of Jimmy Carter to President of the United States on November 2 would mean that the United States was, to all intents and purposes, irreversibly committed to thermonuclear war, no later than the summer of 1977,” and adding that Carter would institute proposals that would “ reduce the population of Mexico, our neighbor, from 58 million to 28 million…by the methods used by Hitler in eliminating six million Jews and Slavs and others in Eastern Europe during the war: by a forced labor-in tensive slave labor system, in which those who are no longer suitable for this process in slave labor, will be allowed to die…

Carter did indeed become President, but fortunately thermonuclear war, as well the genocide of Mexicans, did not materialize. Through LaRouche’s campaign we can clearly see that the NCLC had long ceased to be a Marxist organization, as there was no appeal to the working class, no mention of inequality, imperialism, or even the sham of bourgeois democracy. Instead LaRouche’s main proposal was on starting a new banking system that would finance large-scale infrastructure projects.

LaRouche’s views would develop and the NCLC would shift all of its activity towards the realization of its main goal, which was called the “American System.”

As opposed to Marxism, which viewed history through the lens of class struggle, LaRouche developed a world-view that contemporary history was a global struggle between the good “American System,” represented by figures such as Plato, Alexander Hamilton, and Franklin D. Roosevelt and the bad “British System” represented by Aristotle, Thomas Malthus, and Queen Elizabeth II. According to LaRouche in his 2002 article “The American System of Political-Economy”:

The great division between patriots and those whom President Franklin Roosevelt later denounced as "American Tories" of his time, was defined, philosophically, as a division between the followers of Gottfried Leibniz's anti-Locke "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," the patriots, on the one side, and the followers of the pro-slavery dogma, "life, liberty, and property," of John Locke, on the opposing side.

The proponents of the British System wanted a world economy based on private-financial speculation, global free trade, and population control. This system, in LaRouche’s view, led to the evils of imperialism and suppressed the potential of humanity.

The American System, alternately, was thought to liberate human potential and usher in a world of peace, and is based on two pillars:

1. Economic Nationalism: A centralized national bank to oversee state directed industrial development and monetary policy, alongside protectionist trade policies such as protective tariffs to shield domestic industries from foreign competition.
2. Limitless Development of Productive Forces: Constant large scale investment in production and scientific advancement.

LaRouche, till his death in 2019, focused on courting the support of sections of the ruling class and the middle classes who could make this vision a reality, and his movement found allies among a wide array of groups, with the NCLC developing ties to the Ku Klux Klan, the Fusion Energy Foundation (which promoted nuclear power and beam weapons), and even the inner circle of Republican President Ronald Reagan.

In 1974 the LaRouche network began an active campaign to establish links with conservative groups. The memorandum at the time stated “Right wing organizations offer four opportunities”:

1. Sources of fund raising related to our organizing.
2. Political contacts to circulate our perspectives in anti-Rocky political financial military circles.
3. Opportunity to expose and discredit Rocky's Buckley-FBI-CIA penetration of' the right.
4. Potential USLP members and periphery.

The "Rocky" refers to the late Nelson Rockefeller, who the LaRouchities believed to be a leader of the oligarchic British System, while the Buckley is William F. Buckley, editor of National Review. This initiative was largely successful, as it turned out that LaRouche’s ideas found congruence with significant elements of the Republican Party. He managed to get on the invitation list to a 1981 meeting with Interior Secretary James Watt. The two shared a deep aversion to environmentalism, with Watt calling himself an “anti-environmentalist” and the LaRouchites regarding man-made climate change as a hoax, a “World Federalist Plot” orchestrated by the British royal family to undermine the US.^[4]

Between 1981 and 1984, the LaRouchites held a series of meetings with Reagan’s national security adviser, as well as the National Security Council’s director of defense programs. There was common ground with LaRouche’s drug enforcement policies and his support for Reagan's laser weapons programs. For the Republicans, the LaRouchites were an intelligence organization that were useful for them. According to journalists Dennis King and Ronald Radosh:

The usefulness of such LaRouchian intelligence has been confirmed not only by N.S.C aides but also by intelligence professionals such as Lieutenant General Daniel Graham, retired, former Chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency (and a strong opponent of LaRouche in conservative circles) Graham recalled in a telephone interview an instance in which the LaRouchians managed to gain information about Angola and Mozambique which had been unavailable from other sources…

Part of their effectiveness was due to the fact that LaRouche actively recruited former CIA operatives and sought to bring them into his organization.

Ultimately the LaRouche movement ended up declining, with its leader sentenced to 15 years in prison in 1989 for soliciting millions of dollars in loans from elderly supporters and never paying them back, evading millions in federal taxes, and using intimidation tactics against witnesses and law enforcement officials. LaRouche spent 5 years in jail, but he was never again a prominent figure in the public eye. LaRouche’s ideas survived, however, and after his death in 2019, the Schiller Institute, a think tank established by his widow Helga Zepp-LaRouche, and the Executive Intelligence Review (EIR), a publication established by the LaRouche movement in 1984, are still active and spreading his ideas.

While LaRouchism has stayed dormant for years, its ideas have found resurgence through a new crop of socialists who have oriented themselves towards the Republican Party and the MAGA Coalition. History has repeated itself somewhat, with Maupin, himself a former Trotskyist who had years prior denounced LaRouche, writing that “Larouche and his tactics of bigoted fear-mongering and senseless violence are the opposite of what communists, socialists and leftists stand for,” becoming a host of his spirit.

Maupin Abandons Marxism

Like LaRouche, Maupin would abandon Marxism and class struggle, step by step. After leaving the WWP, he helped create in 2019 Students and Youth for a New America, which was barely active besides a few Facebook posts with a few likes here and there. Maupin also published a book in 2019 titled City Builders and Vandals in Our Age, where he redefined history as the struggle between “innovators, scientists, unifiers, [and others] who push civilization toward a higher state of being” and “vandals: hate-mongers, ignorance-celebrators, lynch-mob leaders, persecutors, snake-oil salesmen, bullies, [etc]” who serve as the forces of profit and the oligarchy. This was his theoretical break from Marxism, thus going into the camp of LaRouche, who viewed history through essentially the same lens but dressed up a bit differently. Maupin’s practice was almost never on the ground, instead being solely online and in the airwaves, primarily consisting of uploading videos on Youtube, going on various Youtube programs, posting on Twitter, having niche debates, and continuing his job on RT.

It was through his online activity that he first came into contact with Ali Hammoud in 2021, when he appeared on Hammoud’s Twitch stream, Infrared. One of the primary topics that they discussed was what Maupin called the “synthetic left,” defined as leftists on Youtube and other online spaces that were ideologically influenced by the CIA’s Congress of Cultural Freedom, serving to protect US imperialism. For Maupin and Hammoud, it is clear from their video that they view their field of struggle not in the real world but in cyberspace, battling it out with other content creators.

A few months afterwards Maupin would release his first video with Jackson Hinkle, “Why challenge BreadTube social-imperialists? Jackson Hinkle talks with Caleb,” in which they talk about essentially the same topic; how most of the left in the US are tainted with social imperialism, while patting themselves on the back for being the “real” anti-imperialists.

Around this time, though the specific date is not clear, Maupin founded the Center for Political Innovation (CPI), which described itself as an “educational think tank focused on the construction of American Socialism,” The earliest written work published by the CPI was We Are City Builders, from February 7th, 2021, which expanded on Maupin’s earlier anti-class struggle ideas, but stressed that it was indeed Marxist and Socialist by including some select Marxists, such as Lenin. The CPI would champion “patriotic socialism” or “Socialism with American characters,” buzzwords that would later be utilized by the ACP.

The CPI was the culmination of Maupin’s development as a parasocial political personae. The members and the periphery of the organization were not gathered as a result of Maupin organizing in any communities or aiding working people in any significant way, but rather as a result of the clout that he gathered through his numerous Youtube videos and his job as correspondent for RT.

The CPI would quickly associate with the LaRouchite Schiller Institute, participating in their 2021 online conference “The Moral Collapse of the Trans-Atlantic World the Quest for a New Paradigm.” The most significant action that the CPI took was the “Unite Against the Imperialists” conference, which brought together many of those who’d go on to be leading figures of the ACP. This took place on August 8th, 2022 near Chicago. The conference started off with two folks wearing red berets, one carrying the US flag and the other the Soviet victory banner, while the “Internationale” played in the background, followed by the Star-Spangled Banner. Three more people joined them, one carrying the flag of China, the other the Moscow-based Donetsk People’s Republic in Eastern Ukraine, and a woman in the center holding up the letter “Z,” which is associated with President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Participants to the conference included Chris Helali of the PCUSA (later a member of the executive board of the ACP), Tara Reade (who accused President Joe Biden of sexual assault in 1993), and Nick Brana of the Movement for a People’s Party.

The aesthetics and politics of this event, blending US patriotism with “Socialism,” and the defense of states perceived to be spearheading the multi-polar world of “civilizational states” dreamed of by Benoist and Dugin, was to be later adopted by the ACP.

Less than three weeks after this spectacle however, Maupin was expelled from the CPI executive board, and the organization voted to disband. Another article goes into depth on the matter, but in short CPI was revealed to have been a highly abusive organization, where Maupin sexually coerced “comrades” that he had known since the forming of the short lived Students and Youth for a New America.

Maupin kept low for a few months, but in a twist to the story, it turned out that the CPI was registered as a business, thus all along its democratic centralism was simply an illusion. For whatever reason, he also said “now spanking isn’t just my deep dark personal secret, it’s America’s deep dark secret.” However, the damage was done, and the horrible optics of this whole implosion led to Hinkle and Hammoud scrubbing their affiliation with Maupin altogether.

CPI now operates almost in the same way that LaRouche’s NCLC did, abandoning even the pretense of organizing in localities and communities alongside even the aesthetics of communism/socialism (Maupin now denounces communism and calls himself an “innovationist”), but instead pressuring the Trump administration and other elites to make reality their political vision, which is itself a 1-to-1 copy of LaRouche’s “American System.”

Ali Hammoud, Jackson Hinkle, and the American Communist Party

Caleb Maupin paved the way for a politics that allowed people who called themselves socialists and communists to align with the Republican Party, and push forward a “patriotic socialism,” However, he himself decided to fully integrate himself with the Republicans and honestly give up the veneer of socialism.

The two primary leaders of ACP, Hammoud and Hinkle, however, decided instead to maintain independence while retaining the aesthetics of communism and of class struggle. Furthermore, Hinkle and Ali are both a generation younger than Maupin, having grown up with social media and gaining notoriety through streaming platforms like Twitch and Rumble, thus having taken social media warfare to a much higher level than Maupin ever could.

The ACP is somewhat of a “bro-mance” between Hinkle and Hammoud, who began their relationship around 2021, when they met as a result of common careers in streaming. As an example of their deep friendship and shared values, here we can see them harassing people for, among other things, wearing masks at TwitchCon in 2022.

Hammoud is a 28 year old child of Shia Lebanese immigrants, who raised him in a suburb of Dearborn, Michigan. According to his interview with the Platypus Affiliated Society, he began studying Marxism at the age of 13 and identifies as a Marxist-Leninist, however his Marxism had always been of an individualist character, disconnected from living reality, and has developed almost entirely online.

Jackson Hinkle is 26 years old and was born to an affluent family in San Clemente, California. His first political activity was environmentalism in high school, where he focused on local issues such as beach and water cleanliness. In 2018, at the age of 19 he ran for a seat on the San Clemente City Council as a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidate, but lost. Due to his class background, he was able to get experience in lobbying and during the period of 2017-2019, he would visit Washington DC and Sacramento several times, making important political connections. In 2019, he can be seen together with the now Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.

While Hinkle was on the ground, moving around the country, Ali was at home, reading and posting. According to Donald Parkinson, Hammoud is most likely the poster Rafiq from the RevLeft forums, as his writing style matches almost 1-to-1 with the forum poster, saying that ideologically at the time Ali was “more of a heterodox leftcom who flirted with the ideas of Mike Macnair and Lars Lih.” Macnair and Lih are communists who reject Stalinism as a failure and call for learning from Karl Kautsky’s Second International. Whereas Parkinson continued on this neo-kautskyist path, and accordingly helped form the Marxist Unity Group, a DSA caucus which aims to transform the organization into a mass socialist party, Ali turned towards attempting to reconcile Duginism with Mao Zedong Thought. As Hammoud writes in his article “The Brahmins of Democracy”:

However, what if this ‘Fourth Political Theory’ is none other than Marxism-Leninism itself? What if it is precisely and only Marxism-Leninism, and its specifically dialectic materialism, which enables the possibility for reconciling its own ideology with its real material premises? Dugin was only ever exclusively familiar with Marxism-Leninism in its officiated, stagnant late Soviet form, but never did he - and other Russian thinkers of the late Soviet period - absorb the brilliance of Mao Zedong Thought’s contribution to Marxism-Leninism, the same brilliance to which Chinese Communism’s vitality and success owes itself to. The overwhelming majority of Soviet thinkers ignored Mao’s re-invigoration of Marxism-Leninism entirely, insisting that the choice lied only between stagnant, official Soviet Marxism-Leninism or Western liberalism. Yet given the way in which China was able to avoid the fate of the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong Thought is self-evidently at the very least worthy of examination.

…

In a sense, Mao was a ‘Duginist’ before Dugin was ever even born. Mao was already well-acquainted and deeply immersed in the geopolitical, literary, civilizational, traditional, unconscious, demotic, national, even mystical etc. realities that had to be scandalously exhumed by Dugin. The overwhelming majority of Mao’s literary education, for example, came not from the modern West, but from the classics of Chinese literature.

With the friends he made online, the teenage Hammoud formed a private study group called Infrared in 2015, which was essentially a Discord server for discussing Marxist theory, philosophy, and geopolitics. Ali’s activity was, much like Maupin, solely online. He spent his time debating different content creators and publishing Youtube videos. In 2021, during winter break of law school, he launched what would soon become his full time job and career, streaming. Soon he dropped out of law school entirely.

A year prior to the launch of Ali’s streaming career, Hinkle also shifted full time towards a career as an online persona, with the launch of his YouTube show, The Dive with Jackson Hinkle, broadcasted daily from Orange County, California. He had a Twitter account a year prior and he also began streaming on Twitch.

Through his online activity, Ali gained a sizable online following of a few thousand accounts, becoming a bonafide social media influencer. Soon, with his online followers and growing clout, he decided to launch what would be called the CPUSA 2036 Initiative. He encouraged his online followers to join the Communist Party USA and “stay in the party and follow its rules and procedures, and conceal their views” in order to realign the party’s direction towards a break with supporting the Democratic Party candidates for office before taking control of the organization entirely. The Infrared’s wouldn’t do much for the next few years in the CPUSA, besides posting a lot online, though Hammoud would attend a CPUSA Zoom meeting in October 2022 to harass the people there for a few seconds.

The most significant activity of the Infrared milieu, however, was the ideological development of MAGACommunism.

On September 22nd, 2021, Infrared published a video titled “Communist Patriotism,” which featured Hammoud, Hinkle, and Maupin. There they expounded on their views, starting off (as always) by attacking the rest of the socialist and communist movement in the US, again using the blanket term “synthetic left” to demonize them. They stated that “leftism has descended into an identity that people can buy into.” Their concrete example of the “Left” was the streamer Vaush, itself a reflection of their terminally online practice. They also hurled the accusation that “anti-populism is the essence of neocon philosophy, and that’s what the synthetic left believes, it's essentially just politicized anti-populism.”

The trio stated that they believed the US working class to be inherently socially conservative, with Hammoud saying “the conservative instincts of the American working class and working people I don’t think are in any way incompatible with a general kind of revolutionary or anti-establishment rejection of the Vietnam war.”

Maupin expanded on his hatred of all leftists, saying:

I remember way back when I was like 19 years old and I went to the US social forum, a big left wing gathering. I went to the US social forum and all the different communists, maoists, Trotskyist, anarchist groups are there, there were a lot of young folks there in the US social forum who had piercings, body piercings, and they worked at planned parenthood or the ACLU or students against sweatshops, and they were talking this ideology that didn’t sound anything like I’ve ever read in communist theory and it was about white skin privilege and it was about gender oppression and it was about you know intersectionality, and they were talking this totally different language, and you know they were making quite a bit of money at their you know NGO liberal jobs, and a lot of them went to Ivy league schools, like Yale and Stanford, and places like that…and I was thinking who are these people, this isn’t the same thing as communism, this isn’t what I’ve read in William Z Foster, this isn’t what I’ve read in Mao’s Little Red Book, this is something different and what that ideology is, the NGOsocialists, this stuff started in the elite ivy league schools and this is for the business class.

Hammoud makes it clear that their idea of the US working class is not based on real on the ground practice, but rather social media analysis. He says:

If you expound the insights of Marxism into a concrete analysis, specifically from the perspective of media and information theory, a concrete understanding of what the real content of America’s working class interests are, you will be able to scientifically arrive at a message that does resonate with America’s working people and which does allow communists to really lead as a popular force and not a force confined to institutions.

Thus we can arrive at these main principles which led to the development of MAGACommunism

1. All leftist organizations and individuals are compromised and are anti-working class.
2. The US working class is inherently socially conservative.
3. The way to truly understand the US working class’s interests is through a “concrete understanding” of social media which will allow communists to truly lead as a popular force.

Hammoud would expand these principles in his article “The Rise of MAGACommunism,” published on September 18th, 2022. This piece was written after #MAGACommunism started to trend on Twitter. It is here that we can clearly see that the foundations of MAGACommunism were developed by the Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt, the LaRouche movement, Alexander Dugin, and Caleb Maupin.

The foundation of MAGACommunism is the theory of the partisan as developed by Schmitt. In an article collectively written by the Infrared milieu, they writes:

Enter Carl Schmitt’s theory of the partisan. Partisanship is itself a political alignment, regardless of where internet retards try to situate it on their stupid little ‘political spectrum.’ Partisanship entails an actual political position - which means actual contestation for political power. The partisan goes down to the people, repeating the origin of modern statehood by returning it to its real (rather than formal) premises.

…

And so already with the partisan arises a most fundamental disruption of the political spectrum of bourgeois modernity. The partisan comes from below, resolving the apparent contradiction between left-and-right by introducing an entirely new dimension of political alignment. It does not ‘unite’ or ‘synthesize’ left and right, it rather displaces the contradiction between them into a radically new form. It displaces the ‘left and right’ distinction by articulating that distinction into an entirely new continuum of counter-hegemonic political space.

The partisan is thus genuinely and radically revolutionary, representing something destructive with regard to modern bourgeois politics. The partisan embodies change, is change, but change in the form of the sublation, or resolution of the existing order, accelerating its development toward its real conclusion. It is the political agent at the end of history for which change is a moment in the development of an order more eternal than can be given form by modern statehood.

Thus, this so-called partisan is the hero of history, so who is the villain? Leftists. As Infrared writes:

The leftist is in fact the greatest enemy of the partisan, not simply because they have contrary values, but contrary subjectivities. Leftism represents the highest development of the bourgeois political ideology, which is based on what is supposed to be the ultimate form of change. Leftism is the ideology of American unipolar imperialism, the highest stage of bourgeois political modernity, which seeks to formalize not only all politics, but all culture, society, etc. under the principle of universal formal equality.

…

Leftism is an ideology of leveling and standardization, flattening out stratified socio-political terrain into conventional smooth-space. The leftist, being therefore an agent of universal surveillance, raising every point of political contention, antagonism, and contradiction to the status of striation on the topography of universal political form (to be smoothed over, i.e. #BLM!). The partisan irregular, by nature, occupies points of antagonistic contradiction, and thus situates its position toward content rather than form. The partisan has no regard for any ‘political spectrum’ or representation of politics, it embodies political antagonism itself.

The class struggle within political alignment can thus be understood as between leftism and partisanship. In the contradiction between universal statehood and civil society stand two opposing reconciliations: Standing on the side of the bourgeoisie lies the expansion of universal statehood, articulating the contradiction in the terms of the inexhaustive universality of the state (the state is not ‘big’ enough). Standing on the side of the proletariat lies the transformation of civil society into a site of guerrilla warfare, articulating the contradiction in the terms of the outmoding of the bourgeois state (i.e. as condemned to the dustbin of history).

…

Today’s LGBT pride parades, or the 2020 BLM protests thus have more in common with the ‘mass politics’ of Fascism than today’s MAGA movement.

Thus, according to Infrared, it doesn’t really matter if “Leftists” are part of the working class and are fighting for things like a higher minimum wage or increased labor protections, things that most labor organizers and unionists fight for. In fact, this actually means that they are part of the enemy camp and on the side of the ruling class because that would mean increasing the power of the state. On the other hand, if capitalists are fighting for the destruction of the formal state, by destroying things like the Department of Education, Social Security, etc, things that the Koch brothers have been fighting for, they would actually be on the side of the proletariat, because it would make everyday life a site of “civil war” for the masses of people.

Further struggles for social equality and an end to police brutality such as the 2020 BLM protests, which were the largest protests in US history and primarily composed of working class participants, or celebrations of one’s sexuality, like LGBT pride parades are actually reactionary and counter to the interests of working people. This idea is based on a delusionary outlook of what the US working class is, and is ultimately based solely on aesthetics derived from the culture wars between the Republican and Democratic Party as played out on the internet and TV.

The real class content of struggles ceases to matter. Instead it is simply enough to say that the partisan stands for the proletariat (even if they actually don’t). As Infrared admits, this is based off of Schmitt’s theory, which substituted the working classes with the partisan as a revolutionary driving force of modern history. Based on my reading of Schmitt’s “The Theory of the Partisan,” the partisan has three fundamental characteristics:

1. Engages in unconventional and asymmetric warfare.
2. Motivated by strong ideological or political cause.
3. Deeply rooted in their land.

Schmitt considered communist revolutionaries like Lenin, Mao, and Guevara to be exemplars of partisans, stripping these figures and the movements they led out of their class character and out of their ultimate aims, which was to create a world where all of humanity could live in common prosperity and peace.

Furthermore Schmitt pushed forward this theory of the partisan as an expansion of his original theory of the “Friend-Enemy” distinction as being the essence of politics. Schmitt viewed politics not as a means for people to come to terms with one another and live in common prosperity and peace, but rather as a means for groups of people to distinguish each other as friends and enemies, and enter into struggle to gain dominance. For Schmitt, the partisan was the most radical expression of the friend-enemy distinction, because for the partisan the goal was not simply to beat the enemy militarily but to defeat them ideologically and culturally, in that every aspect of life must be converted towards the standpoint and perspective of the beliefs held by the party of the partisan.

Thus Schmitt believed that the partisan started from a standpoint of absolute enmity and would stop at nothing to “win.” It is this cartoonish viewpoint of revolutionaries like Lenin, Mao, and Guevara, who in reality had to often shift their views and accommodate/learn from a wide variety of peoples with wildly differing ideologies, that Infrared heralds as a groundbreaking ideological foundation for the type of movement that they wish to see succeed.

To Infrared, whereas the partisan of a few decades ago would go to the people and hear their concerns, materially change communities, and gain the active support of the masses, the partisan of today is a keyboard warrior:

Information has become the most important battlespace of modern warfare. Having been rooted out of its position in both armed combat and civil society, the partisan revolutionary has retreated into information warfare. Information warfare is the final form of modern war, because it is the site within which universal modern form itself undergoes immanent contestation. In all hitherto spaces of warfare, the modern state could take for granted a basic distinction between the sphere of its own exercise of will, operational capabilities, and identity - and the sphere of criminality outside of it.

Who exactly is this Partisan? Infrared answers:

In the United States, the MAGA Movement has come to be defined by being the exclusive American form of partisanship…

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 United States…

MAGA has come to be defined by terrestrial America, bizarro America, alternative timeline America, other America, flyover America, etc. - and has arisen as a kind of malignant tulpa of the globalist United States. A terrestrial version, one that is somehow not aligned with the American-led global system itself, and which carries the germ of a type of sovereignty that can definitively break out of the unipolar global system, and deliver it its final nail in the coffin…And the basis of this lies in none other than the American working class, upon whose backs the globalists came to power in the first place, and which therefore have unfinished business with them…

Infrared completely disregards concrete class analysis and labels the basis of the pro-Trump coalition as “the American working class” ignoring tens of millions of US workers who voted for the Democratic Party and the tens of millions who did not vote at all. In fact 94 million people, mainly from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, and far surpassing the Trump total vote count, did not vote. This, of course, does not at all account for the fact that the central, leading elements of the Trump camp, have zero representation of the working class, but are rather led by oligarchs like Elon Musk and the Zionist Miriam Adelson; the working class are mere playthings to be used and disregarded by these people, so in no way can any rational analyst conclude that the MAGA movement is a working class movement.

Infrared’s conclusion that MAGA is a working class movement is ultimately based upon vibes and an aesthetic, developed by social media on what a “real American worker” is supposed to be like. To add on to this delusion, Infrared argues that the real goal of the MAGA movement, which no significant voice in the coalition has ever expressed, is:

…the most immediate and general aspirations of labor, the MAGA movement is at the outset characterized by the demand for the return of manufacturing and a revival of industrial production…The true aspiration of the MAGA movement is a new sun, a red sun, whose dawn retrochronically establishes its prior occlusion into the night sky.

The logic is that because a demand of MAGA is to bring back manufacturing, what they really desire is nothing but communism. Thus the MAGA movement is the incipient communist movement in America, but in order for it to realize itself, Infrared believes it must form its own political party:

We plainly believe that the MAGA movement requires its own political party. While we remain sympathetic to Republican candidates genuinely aligned against the establishment, the majority of the Republican Party remains firmly entrenched and in the hands of the same globalist ruling class. We hope the great leaders and figures of the MAGA movement will endure the coming re-alignment, and join forces with all genuine partisan forces into forming a real working class third party. Trump, for his part, while having been a real political outsider, is being blackmailed, is embroiled in politically-motivated lawsuits and is being targeted by the FBI. Whatever happens to Trump, the spirit of the MAGA movement must survive, because 2016 was only the beginning. We believe the MAGA movement has the potential to be turbo-charged into a revolutionary movement by, of, and for the American working class. There is no other choice for us American MAGA Communists.

Right here in this article, the main foundational principles of the ACPwould be established:

1. The ideological foundation is the theory of the Partisan and the Friend-Enemy Distinction developed by Carl Schimitt. In the US context, the Partisan revolutionary force (the Friend) is the incipient MAGA movement which is to be concretely realized in the American Communist Party. The enemy is “Leftism”, anyone who stands to develop the capacity of the US State and anyone who pushes for inclusivity of all peoples.
2. The primary battleground for the Partisan is the internet, and their primary task is engaging in internet battles.
3. Drawing from La Rouche, the goal of US Communism is to fully realize the productive capacity of the United States

After the publication of this piece, Infrared attempted to exert their influence on the CPUSA during their 2024 National Convention but they ended up failing to change the organization in any significant way.

During this time Infrared would become close with the Midwestern Marx (MWM) Institute, a small website started by Carlos Garrido, Eddie L Smith, and a few other folks. Both Garrido and Smith would serve on the Executive Board of the ACP, alongside Kyle Pettis, another person associated with Midwestern Marx who was also active in Infrared. Carlos and Eddie were “bernie-bros” and briefly door-knocked with the DSA together for Bernie’s 2020 campaign. However, they felt alienated by the anti-American and anti-patriotic attitude that they felt prevailed among the left. They also felt that Trump’s MAGA Movement represented a working class force. No longer sharing a common ideology with the DSA, they left the organization and did their own thing, which was for the most part just a book and study club. After Eddie's TikTok account blew up, they decided to capitalize on this, founding the MWM Institute. They posted articles on the website alongside books which they encouraged their followers to purchase.

Meanwhile, Jackson Hinkle’s media career was blossoming. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the deep divisions among the US ruling class over proper geopolitical strategy to maintain US hegemony in the face of a rising China, with the Republican wing favoring peace with Russia and the Democratic wing favoring Russia’s defeat, were further exposed. This split was reflected in the online media sphere, with outspoken supporters of Russia associated with the Republican Party being banned from platforms like Twitch and Youtube (both owned by corporations more aligned with the Democratic Party). This included Jackson Hinkle’s Youtube show The Dive, as well as his account on Twitch, the Infrared stream on Twitch, and Tenet Media. Hinkle and Infrared were banned shortly after the start of the war, around April 2022. Hinkle and Infrared’s Youtube account was reinstated, with the former’s account being permanently banned on October 9th, 2023, though details are unclear as to why.

Tenet Media on the other hand is a conservative channel with commentators like Laura Southern, Tim Pool, and Dave Reuben, that focuses on standard Republican talking points such as attacking LGBTQ folks, perceived racism against white people in video games, challenging climate change, etc. They hosted powerful figures like Lara Trump, Kash Patel, Vivek Ramaswamy, who are all very influential in the current Trump administration. They were banned in September 2024 after a Department of Justice investigation alleged that the organization received $10 million from Russian state-controlled RT to produce their content, as their narrative on Ukraine aligned with the goals of Russia. This is significant because it is real proof of concentrated Russian involvement with the Republican Party and its aligned content creators. This is not to pass moral judgement; in my eyes it’s neither a good or a bad thing, it is just the reality of what is.

Following his bans due to the Russia-Ukraine war, Hinkle was invited to Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News in September 2022. Around this time he made his allegiance with the LaRouche movement clear. On October 22 of that year, Hinkle gave a speech at the Schiller Institute’s Conference “Defeating Green Fascism, Building The New Paradigm,” held in New York City. Here he announced his agreement with LaRouche’s main ideas and went on to make a strawman out of the degrowth movement, accusing it to be representative of a new emerging fascism. We will further discuss this point later.

In February 2023, due to his significant social media presence, Hinkle would be invited as one of the speakers of the “Rage Against the War Machine” rally, which was organized by the Movement for a People’s Party and the Libertarian Party, which included the now Director of Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Green Party’s Jill Stein, Congressman Ron Paul, Grayzone editor in chief Max Blumenthal, Youtube comedian Jimmy Dore, and the LaRouche movement’s Diane Sare. The rally called for the admirable goals of stopping the military funding of Ukraine, negotiate peace, Disband NATO, Global Nuclear De-Escalation, Slash the Pentagon Budget, Abolish the CIA and Military-Industrial Deep State, Abolish War and Empire, Restore Civil Liberties, and Pardon Julian Assange. Leftists more associated with the Democratic Party, like the DSA, were invited but declined because many viewed the event as legitimizing fascists.

In September 2023, Hinkle was also invited to speak on RT on the Ukraine war, thus marking a clear start to his deep relationship with Russia.

Hinkle’s popularity boomed as the Republican Party-aligned Elon Musk took control of Twitter, rebranding it X. After October 7th and the ensuing rampage on the Palestinian people by Israel and the US empire, Hinkle’s followers on social media skyrocketed. Since October 2023, his following has grown from about half a million followers to 2.6 million. Due to his large X following, he started to get interviews and meetings with powerful world figures, such as in early 2024 when he met with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

This was when Hinkle, alongside Infrared, would begin to be associated with Guancha, a Chinese media platform led by CCP member Zhang Weiwei, a leader of an ultranationalist current within the Party and whose views align closely with that of Dugin. Invited by Russia, Hinkle, alongside Christopher Helali (soon to be executive committee member of ACP), even gave a press briefing at the United Nations in July 2024.

At this stage, Hinkle and Hammoud had collected enough social media presence to form their own party, following the call set by Infrared in their article two years prior. Through their Telegram chats, discord servers, patreon accounts, and other means, the two had developed a way to stay engaged 24/7 with their most hardcore supporters, and it was them who they tapped into to launch the American Communist Party. Thus the bulk of the cadre of the ACP were actually the audience that the personae of Haz, Hinkle, and some of the Midwestern Marx figures were able to pull.

The Launch of the American Communist Party

To understand the inner workings of the ACP and its launch, I have compiled the details of the Party through interviews with anonymous former party members.

The members of the Infrared discord server were, prior to the launch, supposed to have been organizing on the ground level at CPUSA local chapters and clubs. The ACP launch came out of nowhere. They listed well over a dozen CPUSA chapters as breaking away from the CPUSA and joining the ACP, but in actual fact only 2 or 3 clubs defected.

After the party launched in July, it would take them 4 months before finally getting their people together for an official party conference, where important matters such as organizational structure and the party constitution would be decided. During this initial time, the party was very disorganized, with chapters mostly left to themselves to figure out what needed to be done, and with very little communication among local chapters.

The party convention was held in Chicago and the people attending had only a few minutes to look over the proposed party constitution. According to John Molera, a lawyer and former leading member of the ACP, the party constitution was completed mere hours before the convention took place, due in large part to Hammoud’s negligence in chiming in, and when he finally did it was at the last minute, the day before the convention. Thus they had to get to work quickly to make sure the constitution was ready in time. There wasn’t much of a process of deliberation or discussion. Hammoud looked around the room, asked if it was good, and seeing no dissent, they adopted it. The attendees would spend the time drinking a lot of alcohol like frat boys, doing a community service action mainly for likes and retweets on social media, hanging out, and then leaving.

The party developed a three pronged strategy:

1. Chapters build their own businesses.
2. Do community service work.
3. Post a lot on social media and beat the leftists.

Signing up to join the ACP is a quick and easy process. You go to their website, create a passkey, sign up for Telegram, verify email, and you get called up for an onboarding process which lasts about 30 minutes. If approved, one becomes a provisional member and gains access to the party chats, which are also held on telegram. Most party members have no experience organizing and are drawn almost entirely from online spaces.

The ACP is organized in chapters based on states and if the states have enough members they are further subdivided by regions. The NY chapter for example has around 50 or so people, at least on the telegram chat. The party “organizing” was mostly debating obscure topics, discussing the latest drama on X and “boosting” posts, all on Telegram. According to members, the telegram chats are an endless void with countless messages sent a day.

The party businesses tend to be very small scale, things like 3d printing Marx dolls and the sort. It can be considered an almost irrelevant aspect of the party.

The on-the-ground practice of the party is primarily organizing acts of charity such as trash cleanup or food and clothing distribution. These acts are very irregular and the main intention is not to develop a strong presence in the community but rather to garner likes and retweets on social media, in order for ACP to win the “information war.” This approach extends to the ACP’s “labor organizing,” which is not at all about building unions or building for a strike against a boss, but rather about taking pictures and signaling the appearance of on-the-ground activity to their online audience.

The first major action the ACP attempted to involve themselves in was the Teamsters Amazon strike that took place in December 2024. ACP’ers did their best to show up to the strikes to take pictures and give food here and there. Judging by the ACP’s social media posts, it would seem as if the Party were a huge force, but they were merely a few members showing up to take pictures with striking workers and donate some food. Within the ACP there was no reflection of the fact that members of the DSA, who Hammoud labels a “social-fascist” organization, were actually some of the core organizers behind the Amazon strike, the strengths and weaknesses of the strike, and the fact that the strike revealed that most of ACP members were inactive. For example, only 9 people out of the 54 in the NY Telegram group showed up on the picket over the five day strike period. The NY ACP chapter is one of the biggest chapters. This signals that the entirety of the ACP consists only of a few dozen active members at most.

The organization structure of the party reflected the parasocial relationship that Haz and Hinkle developed with their audience. The weak leadership and human material of the organization was made worse by the horrible inner party structure that replicated the same parasocial dynamics that party leaders Ali Hammoud, Jackson Hinkle, and Eddie Smith are so used to fostering through their activities on social media platforms like X, Twitch, Kick, TikTok, etc. Power is centralized in a 6 person Executive Board who all follow almost 1-to-1 the thoughts, feelings, and inclinations of Hammoud. There is a politburo with no real power but ostensibly serves as an advisory body. The Party is divided up into state chapters with chapter leadership voted on by members, but the executive holding the authority to fire at will. The Party is an unelected dictatorship. Essentially, there is 0% democracy and 100% centralism, all revolving around Hammoud and co.–it’s like a Kick stream translated into a political organization, where members just hold on to each and every one of Hammoud’s words and give him their time and money.

The leadership argues that because they have just started they would out of necessity be unelected. However, it’s naive to take this in good faith because few to no steps have been taken to gather feedback from the rank and file or encourage critical reflection. There is no ACP national forum, for example. or even a public facing newsite, where rank and file members can reflect on their local practice and bring up deficiencies in the organization. There is eventually supposed to be an elected central committee, but it's difficult to take this in good faith, either, because the leadership is implementing a “social credit system” where they can reward their loyal lackeys and promote them to the fabled central committee were it to ever materialize.

The lack of democracy is why the “hero of the party,” Bree, who organized a fund drive that raised thousands of dollars for Hurricane Helene victims, felt compelled to quit and voice her criticisms publicly. She was frustrated at the numerous clickbaity and hateful comments by Jackson Hinkle on social media, alongside his full support for the “pimp” and alleged rapist/human trafficker Andrew Tate. She felt that it hampered on-the-ground organizing and people who were most willing to do the work at that level were alienated by his comments. Since there were no means for internal democracy, the “hero of the party” was left with no choice but to quit via the only space where ACP members congregated on a national basis, Elon Musk’s X. This is a fact that many rank and file within the ACP recognize.

The Party existed for months without making much inroads with their communities and developed a stagnant membership. Soon enough, after the departure of Bree, the contradictions and weaknesses within the organization would further express themselves with the resignations of Politburo Members Danny Shaw and John Molera.

The full account of this saga can be accessed on Shaw’s website, but the gist of it was this: Shaw left the organization, fed up with what he felt was a culture of incompetence and narcissism that stemmed from the top. The breaking point was a conversation held between himself, Hammoud, Kyle Pettis, and the journalists Dan Cohen and Kim Ives. Hammoud was allegedly nonchalantly entertaining some very risky and adventurist ideas related to supporting the Haitian warlord Barbeque. Danny felt that this was highly irresponsible and nothing more than a means to bully him for his anti-Barbeque stance. This whole saga is revealing for the fact that it shows how totally disconnected the ACP leadership was from their lackluster on-the-ground efforts. One of Shaw’s key complaints was also how Hammoud was more interested in his overseas trips than working within the US for the development of his own party.

As a result of the Shaw-Molera-Cohen-Ives-ACP affair, the party has had somewhat of a breakdown, which has unleashed purges on the membership, with members even comparing themselves to Stalinists during the Great Purges. Accusations of FBI and CIA involvement were thrown around rampantly without any proof whatsoever.

Things have since settled down and the Party’s main practice can be seen through their social media posts. The ACP executive team have made further trips overseas and taken pictures to boost on social media. ACP members are hard at work on social media to boost each other’s posts and attack those they perceive to be leftists. There are occasionally volunteer pictures thrown here and there.

The primary party leaders, Hinkle and Hammoud, continue on with their primary activities which are to post incessantly on social media (engaging in low effort bait or attacking their perceived enemies), and continue their streams and podcasts. Hinkle makes an effort to retweet and share ACP posts.

Social Media is Social Engineering

The point of the ACP is not to serve the people, but to win the information war that takes place on social media. Following the theory of the Partisan, the masses of people are irrelevant, it is ultimately the stature and victory of the ACP on the plane of information that is important. Communism is simply an aesthetic for the ACP to wear, and “Socialism with American Characteristics” is also part of this aesthetic, meant to appeal to the MAGA coalition, which the ACP believes to be representative of the US working class.

In order to win this information war, the ACP must operate online, but here, in my view, is the fatal flaw of their whole strategy. Even following Schmitt’s theory, the partisan must be based on the earth, forming deep organic ties with local communities, but the American Communist Party is based in cyberspace, a space owned and totally controlled by the capitalist class.

It is a space filled with bots and other means of advertiser influence. For example, a study revealed that close to 40 percent of Hinkle’s X followers are fake. A former CIA cyber-operations officer who studies bot traffic even makes the point that it is plausible that more than 80% of Twitter’s accounts are actually fake. There are even services that people can employ, where for less than $1000, you can have an account with nearly 100K followers. Furthermore there is a deep history of social media companies cooperating with federal surveillance agencies. The Twitter Files, a select series of internal documents that Elon Musk released to select journalists in late 2022, showed that there was regular interaction between various US government agencies, including the FBI and the Department of Homeland security. The Pentagon had even used Twitter to run misinformation campaigns in the Middle East. These are only the select files that Musk revealed to the US public, and certainly the US Government and social media companies are/have been collaborating to psychologically manipulate the US population to the priorities that they desire.

The ruling class totally controls these platforms, they can choose which accounts to suppress and which to boost. From this point of view, the political connections that Jackson Hinkle developed early on in his political career, through an early connection with now Director of Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, his time lobbying in Capitol Hill and the California State House, might very well have placed him in an ideal position to launch his social media career.

Speculation aside, there are numerous other tools that the ruling class uses within social media to conceal the truth and to break the unity of the masses. According to the article, “The Echo Chamber Effect on Social Media,” social media algorithms prioritize content that aligns with a user's past behavior, likes, and beliefs. This creates a filter bubble where users are mostly exposed to opinions that reinforce their own views, which in turn creates echo chambers, in which dissenting viewpoints are rarely encountered and, if so, in a very biased way. This skews the perception of what is “normal,” making wild positions seem more prevalent and legitimate than they actually are. People then may begin to feel pressure to adopt or defend polarized stances. Thus discourse on social media becomes more about dehumanizing and infantilizing the opposing viewpoint, rather than having a collaborative discussion and learning from each other. In working class political life it has created deep enmity among the people, especially among the younger, terminally online generation, despite the fact that the people have common interests and must unite on that basis.

It is precisely this divide and conquer ruling class game that the ACP plays into. Their day to day lives are spent scrolling X, Telegram chats, or Ali’s Kick streams, constantly consuming polarized information and reinforcing their own set beliefs. Members are more concerned with “winning,” ratioing and outperforming their perceived enemies on the distorted online sphere, than actually getting things done in the real world. The real world is filled with people that have good hearts, but wildly different opinions, yet find a way to understand each other and work together without enmity. It is only through building solidarity and friendship among the people that we can change our rotten world for the better.

Furthermore, social media networks create a means for personae and influencers to become the centers of thought. Those with large followerships will dictate to their periphery that which is right and that which is wrong. This sort of relationship will put certain figures like Hammoud and Hinkle in messianic status to their audience and periphery who reward them with viewership, likes, and money.

As the researcher Russell W. Belk says in “Extended Self in a Digital World,” “digital environments allow individuals to curate idealized versions of themselves, which can amplify narcissistic tendencies by encouraging self-enhancement and self-presentation.”^[5] His research shows how the online world allows people to maintain an “extended self” that is more polished and self-centered than their real life identity. One is struck by the frequency of images that Hammoud and Hinkle are able to post of themselves, shooting guns, making a strong pose over the death site of the late Hezbollah secretary-general Nasrallah, pretending to be targeted by Israel tanks, etc, etc. Hinkle has even admitted that “everything I do is for clout.” Lying and self-aggrandizement, traits of the ruling class are replicated here organically through the form of social media in the personalities of people leading political organizations that are supposed to stand for the toiling masses.

The practical effects of this theater is a shift of the leadership towards building one’s own personal profile and brand over fighting on the ground to change reality for the people. Thus, through their reliance on social media, the ACP is allowing the ruling class to marionette them and shape how they view reality.

The primary points of struggle for the ACP online are geared towards the culture war that has been promoted by the ruling class to break working class unity. The ACP’ers imagine transgender people to be a form of new Nazism, as per the Infrared MAGACommunism article, whereas in reality transgender and cisgender people get along well the vast majority of the time. In fact, gender issues are not even on the list for the most important issues facing Americans. The fact that ACP believes it is so important is solely due to the fact that their political consciousness has been shaped entirely online, divorced from the lived reality of the masses. As such, in many instances they function as socially engineered tools of the ruling class, polluting the social media space with hateful and divisive discourse, attacking all who they perceive as rivals, and contributing to an online environment that increases paranoia and mental illness among the general population.

“The True Revolutionary is Guided by Great Feelings of Love”

The ACP praxis of engaging almost exclusively in social media activity fits in well with the essence of Schmitt’s theory of the Partisan, which is the Friend-Enemy distinction, as social media platforms are designed to create in and out groups. The Friend-Enemy distinction was utilized by the Nazis to justify their exclusionary policies. Schmitt used it to justify the burnings of books by Jewish authors and the purging of Jews, communists, and other undesirables in general from German society. This further morphed into decisionism, as the ultimate “Friend” was the supposed political party of the German People, the Nazis, thus the leaders of the Nazis had ultimate authority in deciding who are the friends and who are the enemies.

The ACP is not a Nazi party nor do its members carry that level of ruthlessness, but philosophically it bases its political practice on ideas that are fundamental to Nazism. To the ACP, the “friend” is the MAGA Coalition and itself, and the “enemy” are “Leftists.” Leftists are never defined by the ACP in concrete objective terms but rather by a broad subjectivity which makes the label applicable to anyone deemed an enemy by the party leaders.

Thus all of the people in organizations like the DSA, PSL non-profits, environmental groups, and broad groups of identities such as LGBTQ people, etc can be blindly labeled as the enemy, stripped of their sensuousness and their humanity. I have been around all of these sorts of people and on the ground the reality is that most leftists are people rooted in their soil and drawn from the working and middle classes. Most of these people are devoting their activism on top of paying their bills and struggling to get by. How destructive is a worldview which labels teachers, students, nurses, etc as enemies?

However, this kind of friend-enemy distinction is not limited to the ACP but can be observed in almost all political organizations in the US to various degrees. In my eyes, it was indeed a shame that leftist groups declined to attend the “Rage Against the War Machine” rally solely because right wing groups attended it. So what? Are those people not human and themselves not motivated by what they view to be good for humanity? If opportunities present themselves to make friends, all lovers of peace and freedom should join hands and work together, even if it means shaking hands with the “enemy.”

The friend-enemy distinction is a foundational political philosophy of the ACP which exists alongside their acceptance of LaRouche’s “American System” and the fundamental premises of Benoist/Dugin’s core ideas.

The ACP, like LaRouche, are dualists, believing humanity to be independent and distinct from nature, and capable of limitless development unconstrained by the resource capacity of the Earth. Thus, there is nothing in their party program dealing with ecological collapse, and, furthermore, there is a demonization within the party of environmental scientists as “fascists.” This stands in stark contrast to a scientific understanding of humanity as being dependent on nature and a crucial part of world ecology. This is what leads to a Marxist understanding and acceptance of degrowth, which has been wonderfully explained through the works of John Bellamy Foster, such as “Planned Degrowth: Ecosocialism and Sustainable Human Development.” Marx himself recognized the necessity of planned degrowth in the later stage of his life through his theory of the metabolic rift, which posits that capitalism alienates humanity from the natural world, causing the whole ecology, including us, immense suffering. The ACP accepts the capitalist model of prosperity as being the endless development of GDP and the plunder of Earth’s natural resources, and has yet to understand that the goal of communism is to end the alienation that humanity faces from the natural world under capitalism, and utilize democratic ecological planning to build a resilient steady-state world economy where it is the general health and happiness of all beings that is prioritized, where humanity respects Earth for what she is, our beautiful, divine, and all-giving mother.

The ACP, like Benoist/Dugin, believe that there are intrinsic and immutable characteristics of a specific land that warrants a return to traditionalism and the rise of “civilizational states.” They believe that there is a concrete American tradition and culture that needs to be revived, as they write in their program:

The Communist Party stands for the cultivation and discovery of a national-continental American culture on the basis of the unique history, geography, and ethnic makeup of the American peoples.

The Communist Party stands for the promotion of language, autonomy, economic development and culture of American tribes.

The Communist Party stands for the construction of a unified American historical, national, and cultural identity to overcome all racial and social antagonisms.

I believe that the fundamental issue with Benoist/Dugin and the ACP’s ideas on this is that humanity has already moved far beyond the need for totally distinct and culturally separate civilizational states with the development of a hyper-globalized world economy and a global high-data information network that has connected people instantly throughout the globe. This fact is especially prevalent in the US, also known as a world “melting pot,” which has a foreign born population of over 14 percent, and a history that is only about 250 years old, which means most people in this country have ancestry that is from somewhere else not too long ago. There's also a huge population of multinationals, and people of mixed cultural heritage.

Benoist/Dugin also choose the time and distinct cultures which they feel represent huge blocks of the Earth’s land. Their idea of what a land’s culture truly is, is based on the times of feudalism, such as Dugin’s identification of Russian land with Orthodox Christianity. This view of what the real culture of a land is then to be imposed on people through the state. It is a view of society that ignores the nature of what culture even is. Cultures are human belief systems that are ever fluid and under constant, and oftentimes rapidly change, through interactions with other peoples and the passage of time. In effect, their worldview and the ACP’s worldview creates a mythologized culture and imposes it on the far more permanent fixtures of land. It is inherently an idealist and divisive worldview.

Furthermore it goes against the most fundamental idea of communism, which is that our Earth is interconnected, and that we can only live in genuine peace when all “workers of the world unite,” a world where cultures are shared and treasured as a part of humanity’s common history.

The return to tradition concept is, of course, viewed as a way to confront liberalism, which is thought of by the ACP and their ideological forerunners to be pushing “Universalism” forcibly on humanity, dissolving all cultural differences, traditions, and communities, in favor of a “One World Order” of unipolar finance capital. I believe that the use of the term “Universalism” is incorrect for what liberalism actually does, which is “Individualization.”

Liberalism is the political philosophy that falls under the general philosophical outlook of Individualism. Individualism believes the individual human being to be fundamentally distinct and separate from the universe, that the center of existence is only the “I”, and that life’s express purpose is to satisfy the desires of the “I”, in separation from the outside world, it is the philosophy of Egoism. This Egoism is spread like a virus through capital and the consumer culture it generates wherever it lands, dissolving communities, traditions, family ties, etc, to create a cult of the individual, that is never satisfied and is constantly seeking to increase their individual capacity to consume commodities.

Individualism stands in direct opposition to Universalism. While there are many different ways that the term “Universalism” is utilized, I would like to posit Universalism as the belief that really, there is no “I”, that all of us are part of One Great Whole. It is the philosophy that recognizes the Self in all things. It is the philosophy of universal love, which has deep ancient roots developed during humanity’s era of primitive communism under the belief system of animism, which arose in different forms all over the Earth. In my view, this philosophical breakthrough of a collective transcendence of the Ego is humanity’s greatest discovery, which has yet to but will someday be realized through the total transformation of our modes of life in harmony with the Earth’s natural processes.

Where individualism and its political arm, Liberalism, seek to destroy all community and atomize all peoples of the world into individual and competing consumers and producers, universalism and its political arm, communism, seeks to unite all peoples of the world, breaking down all walls of enmity, and creating a united world community, where all are friends.

This philosophical point needs much deeper elaboration but that is far beyond the scope of this article.

Che Guevara once said “at the risk of seeming ridiculous, the true revolutionary must be guided by great feelings of love," and I wish to repeat this sentiment. What is love? It is the opposite of seeing enmity, it is the bliss gained through recognition of the Self beyond one's ego.

The ACP’s whole praxis is based on the opposite of love. It is based completely on enmity. They view the world through a lens of separation, and an us vs them dynamic. Thus nature is separate from humanity. Humanity itself is not interconnected, and the peoples of the world must further separate into their distinct civilizational states rather than unite. Thus to them, transforming society is not a process of developing allies and a United Front of the people, but rather “destroying Leftists,” despite the fact that most leftists are just regular working people that are trying to do good in this world.

However, I believe that most of the people in the ACP are good at heart and are themselves trying to do their best to create a world where humanity can prosper. I have no intention of “beating” or “exposing” them but rather write this article in an effort to understand where this group is coming from and what we can learn from them. I believe that there is no need for people to “beat” the ACP, because that would just mean trying to outperform them on social media. And what’s the point of that?

In fact I feel nothing but pity and empathy for the ACP, because these are all good people who have been manipulated by the ruling class through social media to attack those who are in reality their friends. A look at the lives of the Hinkle, Haz, Maupin, and other similar figures shows people with hearts filled with compassion, that were drawn into the struggle for liberation with the best of intentions, it is just that a praxis based on enmity corrupts good hearted people with wrath and lust, and goes completely against the spirit of what must be done, which is to find points of common agreement and friendship. It is not just the ACP that is being manipulated, to various degrees it is most Left organizations who refuse to work together, and individuals whose primary form of activism is in the illusory online sphere.

The main lesson I’ve learned from the ACP is that we must dig deep into real on the ground activity, understanding that social media is a center of ruling class manipulation, and focusing the vast majority of our time in town halls, community centers, etc, figuring out ways to build genuine solidarity among the masses of people by fighting for real material changes rooted in the Earth, not in cyberspace. It is the Earth that is the real territory of the world’s working class, where people work together despite their differences to ensure common survival and it is there where individuals should concentrate their focus, not on trying to beat people online which does nothing to alleviate the suffering that the working peoples of the world are facing.

I wish the best for the ACP and I hope that they focus more on on-the-ground activity, and that we might even get a chance to work together to help our communities. The key task is through our own activity, to inspire people where we are, and build a loving inclusive movement that can unite all working people, whatever their perceived political orientation. I wish everyone who’s reading this love and solidarity, and together I hope that we all do our part in saving the Earth by collectively developing the Praxis of Universal Love, i.e. the Praxis of Communism.

1. D. Horton and R.R. Wohl, “Mass communication and para-social interaction,” Psychiatry 19, no. 3 (1956): 215-229.

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2. Marcy’s works can be viewed here: https://www.workers.org/marcy/.

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3. As Benoist is a very important thinker he deserves to be quoted in length: “I think that the decay began very early, quite probably at the end of the Middle Ages or even earlier. Of course you can always go back to some earlier roots. But it is the birth of modernity. Modernity was also the beginning of individualism; the rejection of traditions; the ideology of progress; the idea that tomorrow will be better than yesterday just because it is tomorrow; that is, something that is new is better just because it is new; and then the ideal of a finalized history; that all humankind is doomed to go in the same direction… Along with this is the theory of ‘steps’: that some people are a bit advanced while others are a bit late, so that the people who are advanced have to help those who are not. The ‘backward’ people are supposed to be ‘lifted up’ in order to arrive at the same step. This is the Rostows’ theory of development… With this comes an ever more materialistic attitude, with the goal of all people becoming affluent. This in turn means failure to build a socially organic relationship, of losing the more natural links between people, and mass anonymity, with everyone in the big cities, where nobody helps anybody; where you have to go back in your home to know the world, because the world comes through the TV. So this is the situation of decay. Political, economic and technological forces try to make a ‘One World’ today in much the same way that the French state was built on the ruins of the local regional cultures. This ‘One World’ civilization is being built on the ruins of the local peoples’ cultures. So it is that, in the wake of the fall of Communism, the so-called ‘Free World’ realizes this, and that it is not so ‘free’ after all. We seemed free when compared to the Communist system, but with the disappearance of that system, we no longer have a basis by which to compare ourselves… We have to organize the world, not on the basis of a ‘One World’ logic, but in very large zones or areas, each more or less ‘self-centered’ or self-sufficient. The United States has already understood this, I think, in creating a free trade zone with Canada and Mexico. Japan already has zones of influence in Southeast Asia. Here in Europe we must have our own way of life, which is not the way of life of the Japanese or the Americans, but is rather the European ways of life. I don’t think that these ways of life have to be hostile towards others. Hopefully not. But it has to be aggressive against those who intend to keep Europeans from living their own way of life.”

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4. Rogelio Maduro, The "Greenhouse Effect" Hoax: A World Federalist Plot (Executive Intelligence Review, 1989).

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5. R. W. Belk, “Extended Self in a Digital World. Journal of Consumer Research,” 40 no. 3 (2013): 477–500.

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