MAGA Communism: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

If you use Twitter for politics, you may have encountered an odd faction styling themselves as “MAGA Communists”. While parsing out a coherent worldview from these people can be difficult, the simplest explanation is that they are followers of livestreamer Haz, whose combination of Marxist theoryceldom, brash and aggressive debate style — often against leftists and liberals — and advocacy for geopolitical rivals of the United States has won him a dedicated following online of leftists who felt alienated by the direction of leftist discourse online toward what might be described as “wokeism”.

The most famous follower of this worldview is Jackson Hinkle, who, since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war has seen his star rise due to his popular advocacy for Palestine on X/Twitter, making his account one of the most widely circulated on the whole site. Trying to make sense of his rise to prominence, journalists and pundits have described him as “far-right” and “fascist”, yet he regularly affirms his commitment to communism.

The “MAGA Communist” label seems to only cause confusion to those outside their circle, but this is typical of their approach: they enjoy challenging the assumptions of the audience, smashing together seemingly contradictory aesthetics and ideas, and welcoming the ensuing controversy it creates. If you push for an understanding of what they really believe, at the end of the line is “Haz Al-Din”, with his lengthy livestreams in which he carelessly draws on a smorgasboard of ideas from Lenin and Marx to Hegel and Dugin to justify his seemingly counterintuitive positions. Here is a passage, from the Infrared Substack, where he explains the “defining force” of modern politics:

Such a force is rather an immanent contradiction. An immanent contradiction is an antagonism, a paradox, a contradiction, etc. not between two discrete things, or two discrete elements, but a type of pure difference itself. The story of modernity is the story of pure difference, and the paradoxical attempts by which it is given form thereof, from German idealist philosophy, French revolutionary politics to English industrial capitalism. Kant’s transcendental aesthetic, or the a priori pure forms of intuition are divided into space and time because the singular object they have in common is pure discontinuity, difference, or contradiction. Capital has as its object and its basis pure discontinuity, or the alienation between the worker and his means of production. Finally, modern politics has as its object pure discontinuity - between revolutionary change and order.

This is a rather poor piece of writing, and it gives the impression of intending to obscure rather than elucidate, which is always a concerning sign with someone claiming to have a new political formula. Yet despite this movement being downstream of the confusing, sometimes apparently contradictory musings of a live streamer, it has had undoubted success in influencing the discourse online. To what should we attribute their success?

Haz

The Good

I am not writing this as an attack on the MAGA Communists. Although I have fundamental disagreements with them, I think they have done a lot right, and there is a lot to recommend them over other leftists. There are lessons to be learned for a nationalist movement from their success.

Their success has come, entirely, from the online space. It is now being translated into some real world influence, with Hinkle and Haz being invited to conferences in Russia, hobnobbing with Sergei Lavrov, receiving the praises of Alexander Dugin, and being accepted as serious political analysts on more mainstream platforms. Hinkle in particular is very skilled at his use of social media, and understands how to leverage current events to boost his own message. They are also very organised. I can tell when a post of mine has been dropped into one of their groupchats, as I notice my replies fill up with the Stalin avatars and people with American flags in their bio telling me I don’t understand Marxism-Leninism.

The online space is such that a dedicated and coordinated minority with a shared message can punch way above their weight and increase their numbers drastically. This is something I have pointed out and argued should be used by nationalists to drive online activism. The online space is where the culture war is happening, where the narratives of tomorrow are being shaped. Our enemies devote huge resources and energy to controlling it, and we owe it to the future we want to build to put some energy into learning how to succeed in it and maximise our influence. In that area, MAGA Communists have succeeded as well as any group.

What we can also learn from MAGA Communists is the power of a simple nationalist message on the international stage. I have always felt like I was in the minority expressing the belief that we could win over more people defending a vision of nationalism that is moral, universalist, and offers a viable international order which does not put us integrally at odds with other races. A simple principle of “self-determination for all peoples”, if delivered on consistently, would necessitate giving Europeans sovereignty over their homelands again, against the oligarchic push for denationalisation and demographic transformation.

The wave that MAGA Communists have ridden to success is an anti-imperial, nationalist case for self-determination. When they put their communist ideology front and center, interest rapidly wanes. The problem, though, is that this is a case for self-determination which peculiarly excludes one group, a contradiction present in all popular ideologies today which nationalists can use to demonstrate how this political order prioritises the oppression of European identitarianism and nationalism, a priority extending out to the most obscure and most illiberal ideologies.

Nationalists have been all too keen to insist that nationalism is an entirely particularist sentiment, which can offer nothing but hostility and a promise of future conflict with other races. Our people are very concerned about having an ethically defensible position, and I don’t think this is necessarily a weakness. I believe nationalists have better answers than globalists to many problems that plague the world. Some hear this and think what is being suggested is some kind of political alliance with non-Whites, but that misses the point. The point is that winning hearts and minds requires presenting a better vision for the world's future than the liberal or leftist ones, either in their original form or their barely disguised neoliberal and maga communist optics updates.

I do think it’s somewhat of a welcome break to see the emergence of an “anti-woke” faction of leftists who want to debate economics and history rather than trans rights. If the entire political left subscribed to this, it would certainly be an improvement. I maintain a degree of respect for Haz simply for being willing to civilly engage with people like myself and Nick Fuentes, keep it to a discussion of ideas and allow our respective audiences to make up their own minds.

The Bad

The obvious problem with MAGA Communists is that they are Marxists, and Marxism is a failed ideology which is wrong on many questions. Marxism holds a materialist ontology, which, based on his interaction with Jay Dyer, Haz seems unable to justify. Being a materialist worldview, Marxist ethics is groundless, and so the claims it makes about the evils of capitalism, the good of emancipating workers, or the preferability of a communist order are empty.

The Labour Theory of Value, on which stands Marx’s whole theory of economics, is also false, which goes some way to explaining why Marx’s key predictions about how capitalism would develop turned out to be wrong, and why so many abandoned classical Marxism as it proved a bad way of making sense of 20th century developments.

MAGA Communists look to China and Russia as their inspiration, but both abandoned communism long ago. Putin’s economic policy is quite conservative, and the blend of developmental nationalism, class cooperation and centralised corporatism embraced by China since Deng is closer to classical fascism than communism.

But putting aside their bad ideology, the actual policy proposals of MAGA Communism look like a fine populist, civic nationalist platform. A statement of their policy preferences includes shutting down Antifa and the Open Society Foundation, pardoning January 6 protestors, extending free speech protections to social media, closing the border and lowering taxes. For the most part, these have the makings of a decent platform for a candidate like Donald Trump to run on.

Pretty good on the MAGA front, but what does any of this have to do with communism? Obviously, not a lot. And this is the whole problem with MAGA Communism, they like the provocation of bringing these seemingly contradictory ideas together, but few minds are changed by labelling a civic nationalist policy platform “Marxist-Leninist”. This is supposed to make the ideas of Marxism-Leninism appealing for the populist base that Trump appealed to, but this will never happen (if you want to see how it goes down with conservatives, just look at the comments under Haz’s appearance on Tim Pool).

If you want Trump-loving American patriots to support land reform and economic nationalism, why not just bring it to them as an America-first economic policy? MAGA Communism is a true “meme ideology”, that can’t survive outside the internet. And since they believe that revolutionary potential lies in the base of Trump-supporting conservatives, there are a lot of cringe attempts to appeal to conservatives in the most low-brow way possible. They are also happy to lean into Boomer political debate tropes about “the real Nazis”. NATO, the UN, the LGBT movement, various liberal institutions and the state of Israel are all Nazi fascists.

Haz is able to recognise the metaphysical force the of the spectre of Nazism in the liberal conception of things, he writes

For liberals and leftists, only Nazism is real. Politics, left to its own devices, flows and bends in the direction of Nazism. The political spectrum, for them, is defined by gradations of resistance toward this fatal, primal, and vital conclusion. If we suspend the liberal-democratic institutions, and the consciousness corresponding to them (political correctness, formalism, moralism, etc.), we fall into the ‘Nazbol vortex,’ sucked in by the gravitational force of Nazism.

How disappointing then, to see MAGA Communists engage in the exact same thought-terminating “all my enemies are Hitler trying to do another Holocaust” moralising about politics, which only reinforces the basis for legitimacy of the post-war “democratic institutions”.

Advocates of MAGA Communism start to sound indistinguishable from Alex Jones as they explain how Wehrmacht generals serving in NATO after the Second World War, or Nazi scientists being adopted by the United States, demonstrates some kind of ideological continuity between National Socialism and post-war liberalism. It’s difficult to tell how much they actually believe it and how much they think it’s just a handy way to discredit liberalism to stupid people, but all it accomplishes is making everything stupider.

Then there is the question of their advocacy for multipolarity and sovereignty, which is highly selective. Jackson Hinkle regularly posts updates from all corners of the world on resistance to globalism and the unipolar world order. Yet Ireland has been home to some of the strongest organic resistance to the globalist agenda in recent times, and you wouldn’t know it exists from surveying the feeds of MAGA Communists. When Dublin erupted into rioting over anger at the government’s mass-immigration agenda, it was trending worldwide, but Hinkle and co. ignored it. Is this because they consider it illegitimate for working class Irish people to protest their demographic replacement? Do they not want to alienate their non-white followers by standing up for the sovereignty of European nations against the onslaught of the mass-immigration agenda?

The issue on which MAGA Communists have found their largest audience is the Israel/Palestine conflict. Hinkle claims his advocacy on this issue is motivated by his desire for isolationism as an American patriot — in his words, he is “not America First”, but “America ONLY” — but looking at how he posts about this topic, it is not really plausible that this is primarily a case intended to reach and encourage Americans to take their own side, so again, the superficial appeal to Trumpist sentiment rings quite hollow. And if the issue with Zionism were really the fact that the US is dragged into these conflicts through aid and military support for Israel, why are MAGA Communists silent about the highly influential Zionist lobby within America?

That American foreign policy is captured by the Zionist lobby has been laid out well in Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby, and in James Pertas’s The Power of Israel in the United States. The recent DEI controversy sparked by pro-Palestinian advocacy in US colleges showed the enormous influence Jewish Zionist billionaires like Bill Ackman can wield over the education system, and US media is dominated by Jewish Zionist ownership. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel after the events of October 7th, he told them “I come before you as a Jew”. Chuck Schumer told the Zionist lobby he is on a mission from God to be a guardian for Israel. This all seems relevant to an “America only” discussion of why the US supports Israel.

Yet MAGA Communists have rushed to shut down any discussion of Jewish overrepresentation and its influence. Their criticism of Israel is limited to the abstract critique of them as a colonial enterprise, and they repeat the Chomskyite tropes of Israel being an extension of American imperialism, despite the US suffering in many material ways for its slavish commitment to Israel, and despite Jewish Zionists like Wolfowitz, Perl and Feith dragging the US into wars like Iraq purely in aid of the Zionist project.

Raising awareness of the inhumane treatment of Palestinians by Israel is successful at reaching a large audience of people, mostly non-White, who already support Palestine, but what of the MAGA Communist base of patriots who love America? If the priority is American sovereignty, wouldn’t demonstrating the many ways that sovereignty is lost to a foreign lobby be more appealing to nativists than solely moral condemnations of Israel’s behaviour? Either the MAGA Communists are lying when they say their priority is American sovereignty, or they are simply unwilling to discuss the Jewish lobby due to the censorship and persecution they may face as a result. It’s not like this topic is avoided out of a principled refusal to dicuss the influence of ethnic lobbies — Haz and his followers are happy to identify nepotistic Anglo elites as heading up the financial empire and geopolitical order responsible for the world’s ills.

The Ugly

My biggest issue with the people who subscribe to MAGA Communism is that so many of them are anti-White. It does not take much prodding to get them to reveal that they make the same negative exception for White people that every other anti-White leftist does when it comes to sovereignty and self-determination. They make the same kinds of statements deconstructing Whiteness and the legitimacy of European nationalisms that you will hear in any Critical Race Theory seminar. In my experience, many followers of this ideology are immigrants and non-Whites living in the West, such as Haz himself, and one could speculate this is why they are drawn to this odd syncretic ideology rather than just advocating the same populist policies through their more natural political vehicle of nationalism.

Followers of this ideology will typically refer to me as a “Nazi” and a “white supremacist”, the same labels Antifa use to try and discredit people like me. Despite their intellectual writings critiquing liberals for constructing a world order focused on a simplistic, negative theology where everything other than the regime is some form of “Nazism”, they are themselves happy to deploy this on any White person who advocates for his own people.

All the same excuses are deployed, and some novel ones, for why White people are excluded: nationalism is a creation of the CIA/FBI/capitalist class (but only when it’s done by Europeans), America was always a nation of immigrants, the desire to maintain the ethnic character of your nation is “incestuous” and perverted (Haz used this argument in my debate with him), White people who advocate nationalism for their people are gay, closeted self-hating non-Whites, unpopular with their own people etc. etc. — we have heard all these excuses before, but what it comes down to is a denial that Europeans, uniquely, can have their own spaces, their own nations, and determine their own destinies.

This exception is also demonstrated in how passionately the MAGA Communists defend South Africa’s Julius Malema, and his “Kill the Boer” chants, despite his repeated refusal to rule out a mass slaughter of White people in the future.

In debates around this, Haz went so far as to theorise that “white genocide” is a conspiracy promoted by the US Security State as a means of diminishing the success of communist movements like Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters. Whatever else MAGA Communism is about, one thing that is expressly off limits is White people organising to defend their interests and secure their heritage in any context.

How disappointing to find that for all the promises of a complete repudiation of the post-war liberal morality, for all its rejection of wokeism and political correctness, the Hegel, Heidegger and Lacan, lift the veil of abstractions and you find the same resentment and racial enmity that animates other factions of the left.