Jackson Hinkle: The Gen Z Lord Haw-Haw
If you’re relatively new to the issues related to Kremlin propaganda and how it’s affecting other countries (including the United States), I recommend reading some background posts I wrote that explains things in more detail along with links to other sites where you can read more to educate yourself.
Lord Haw-Haw was the most notorious pro-Nazi propagandist during World War II. He openly taunted the Allied side in English while expressing his admiration for Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime. He relished his notoriety among the British troops.
Lord Haw-Haw’s English language fluency and fascist leanings came naturally to him. He was born William Joyce in the Brooklyn borough of New York City to Irish immigrant parents. Even though young William was a US citizen at birth and his father became a US citizen in 1894, his parents decided to return to Ireland when he was a young child. The family settled in Salthill, County Galway where his parents were active unionists who were hostile to the cause of Irish independence from British rule.
William Joyce later moved to England where he developed an interest in fascism. He joined the British Union of Fascists under Sir Oswald Mosley where he discovered that he had a natural talent in giving speeches. He left that organization when he had a falling out with Mosley and he formed his own organization called the National Socialist League.
In 1939 William Joyce and his wife Margaret fled to Germany when they were tipped off that they were going to be arrested under a new law that allowed the internment of people without trial who were either opposed to Britain going to war against Germany or were Nazi sympathizers. Joyce became a naturalized German citizen the following year. He found a job doing English language radio broadcasts of the latest news from Germany. Eventually he went into German propaganda where he made pro-Nazi English language broadcasts that were aimed at English speaking countries in general and the British military in particular. Radio critic Jonah Barrington of The Daily Express wrote that he spoke English of the “haw-haw, damit-get-out-of-my-way variety.” Barrington dubbed him Lord Haw-Haw and the name stuck. William Joyce accepted that nickname with pride and he was soon introduced on radio as “William Joyce, otherwise known as Lord Haw-Haw.” YouTube has a sample of Lord Haw-Haw’s radio broadcasts that you can check out.
Lord Haw-Haw’s life took a sudden dramatic u-turn when Nazi Germany fell. He was captured by the British troops and taken to England where he was tried, convicted of treason, and sentenced to be executed. He was hanged in 1946 at the age of 39.
With two wars going on at the same time (in Ukraine and Gaza) with the blessing of the Kremlin and with the possibility that it could escalate into World War III, it was inevitable that there would be a new Lord Haw-Haw who would openly promote the Kremlin viewpoint in English. Just as Lord Haw-Haw used radio, which was the prevailing medium of his time, to disseminate his messages, his spiritual successor is using today’s prevailing medium of the Internet and social media to disseminate his messages.
The new Lord Haw-Haw’s name is Jackson Hinkle. Like Lord Haw-Haw, Hinkle was also born in the United States, which makes him a US citizen at birth. He was born in 1999, which definitely makes him a member of Generation Z or Gen Z. I was able to figure out his birth year based on this recent tweet where he admitted that he is 24 years old.
In my last post I wrote about the Horseshoe Theory, which states that people on the far-left and far-right sides of the political spectrum will have more in common with each other than they would with people who are less politically extreme. Sometimes a person will serve as a one-person Horseshoe Theory in action where this person will go from the far-left to the far-right. Jackson Hinkle is such a one-person Horseshoe Theory and I suspect that he knows it himself. He recently posted this tweet on X (the social media site formerly known as Twitter) about the Anti-Jackson Hinkle Horseshoe Theory where he seems to relish the enemies he has made on both the left and the right.
Jackson Hinkle grew up in Southern California where he developed an early interest in surfing. It was through surfing that he received his first bout of fame in 2013 at the age of 13 when the Dana Point Times named him “Grom of the Week”. It was also through surfing that Jackson Hinkle became aware of environmental issues since having a clean beach and a clean ocean affected surfers like himself.
As a student at San Clemente High School he was a writer for his high school newspaper, The Triton Times, as well as getting involved in a variety of environmental causes. At 17 Jackson Hinkle was profiled in this Teen Vogue article as one of the “8 Young Environmentalists Who Are Working to Save the Earth.” Teen Vogue recognized him for his environmental work, including being a Water Ambassador for the Water Effect at The Ecology Center, organizing a march against the Dakota Access Pipeline in Orange County, California, and being the founder and president of an environmental club at his high school known as Team Zissou. Soon afterwards Reader’s Digest listed him as one of “The 17 Most Inspirational Kids of 2017.”
At 18 he was profiled in this Los Angeles Times article for his efforts to decommission a nuclear power plant, which included traveling to Washington, DC to speak at a congressional briefing on that topic. C-SPAN recorded Hinkle’s speech at that congressional briefing and it can still be viewed online.
In 2018, after he graduated from high school, he attended Saddleback Community College in Mission Viejo, California but there is no indication that he ever received any degree from there. He was mentioned in this Los Angeles Times column by David Hansen during his time at Saddleback because he was a college student who was also doing work as a progressive political activist.
It was also during that time that he did something that is unusual for an 18-year-old: He decided to enter electoral politics by running for a spot on the San Clemente City Council. His campaign was mentioned in this article on Salon.com about the increase in the number of progressive Democrats who were running for public office in the onetime hometown of the late former President Richard Nixon.
He lost that election but he decided to run again for the San Clemente City Council the following year in a special election that was held to fill a vacancy that was created by the untimely death of Mayor Steven Swartz. He received the endorsement of Orange County Employees Association. His campaign was also featured in this profile on the Green.org site. His Instagram post had a list of the endorsements he received from various local politicians and organizations.
Despite those endorsements he lost again for the second time in a row.
He even took a shot at acting in 2019 when he appeared in a movie called Concrete Jungle. The movie has a runtime of one minute (which is about the average length of a TikTok video or Instagram Reel or YouTube Short) and was written and directed by Josh Greene. Concrete Jungle is described as “Man must breakout from the confining constraints of city life in order to achieve clarity in the forest.”
Jackson Hinkle was a supporter of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign during the Democratic primary in 2020. He was photographed with Sanders at one point, which he posted on social media.
He also made pro-Sanders tweets like this one.
Joe Biden won the 2020 Democratic primary and ultimately the presidency.
By the end of 2020 Jackson Hinkle was a 21-year-old high school graduate with no college degree or trade school certification who failed at running for public office twice, his preferred candidate Bernie Sanders didn’t become president, and even his brief stint at acting didn’t go anywhere. At that point he could’ve done what other young American adults his age usually do in order to put his life back on track by choosing one of four options:
Return to college and get a degree.
Join the US military and serve for a few years.
Go to a trade school, learn a trade, and find a job working in one of the well paying blue collar trades like plumbing, or auto mechanics, or installing solar panels.
Take a gap year where he travels through the United States or other countries then decide on one of the other three options once the year is over.
But he didn’t because doing any of those options wouldn’t necessarily give him the attention that he obviously craved. Instead he did a political about-face where he went from being a progressive Democrat to becoming something that he called a “MAGA Communist,” a bizarre mix of Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) right-wing movement and Marxist-Leninist principles. He made this Instagram post where he inserted himself holding an assault rifle in this AI generated graphic of Donald Trump and police officers holding assault rifles.
MAGA Communism sounds like an oxymoron when you consider the fact that Donald Trump, who started public life as an upscale real estate developer and celebrity businessman who frequently bragged about being a billionaire, has never been a communist. Vice News did a story about MAGA Communism, which profiled Hinkle and another adherent of that political philosophy known as Haz while also mentioning the critics who call it a dangerous grift.
Hinkle himself have posted this meme outlining his definition of MAGA Communism.
Historically communism has sided with the working class (or they were supposed to side with the working class). Jackson Hinkle made this tweet where he decided who should not be considered working class, which included academics, teachers, social workers, engineers, managers, nurses, and Netflix writers.
He posted this image of himself in a communist outfit against the New York City skyline that was created with AI graphics.
He also took a bizarre stance against Japanese anime cartoons where he called for them to be banned because he claimed that they attract pedophiles.
He started his own online political opinion talk show called The Dive With Jackson Hinkle, which he posted on YouTube and Rumble. He also had a streaming show on Twitch called JacksonHinkleTV, which would later be accused of spreading Russian misinformation.
He even disavowed his own environmentalist past by denouncing environmentalism as “anti-human.”
He made an appearance under his new MAGA Communist identity at this 2021 summit, which was a gathering of far-left and far-right people that was the real-life Horseshoe Theory in action.
At one point he even managed to alienate his own parents. He made this post about the lies he said his parents told him when he was little (which included Santa Claus is real, the Tooth Fairy leaves money under the pillow, and the US military fight wars to defend the country), which led to angry responses from both his father and mother.
A few months later Jackson Hinkle made another tweet about how the US hadn’t been invaded since the War of 1812. Someone mentioned the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Hinkle’s response that Pearl Harbor was just a territory during World War II led to a response from his mother saying that Pearl Harbor seemed to be much more than a territory to his grandfather at the time.
Neither of his parents have made any new posts on Twitter/X since 2021 so it’s unknown whether Jackson Hinkle is still on speaking terms with his parents or not.
Along the way Jackson Hinkle has professed his admiration for former US President Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
He has also expressed admiration for other world leaders as well, such as Kim Jong Un, Bashar al-Assad, and Xi Jingping. The thing they have in common is that they are all authoritarian dictators. In fact, there never seems to be an authoritarian dictator that Jackson Hinkle has never liked.
The most hilarious example of Hinkle simping for authoritarian leaders is when he wrote this letter to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un where he introduced himself as a “Goodwill Ambassador from the United States” and he offered to come to North Korea for a visit. (It’s obvious that Jackson Hinkle doesn’t know anything about what previously happened to another young American visitor to North Korea named Otto Warmbier just a few years earlier.)
He hasn’t received any responses from Kim Jong Un as of this writing.
There are persistent allegations that he gets funding from the Kremlin in exchange for his frequent posts where he praises Putin and his authoritarian allies. Given the way that he constantly simps for those people, there may be some truth to those allegations. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Hinkle tweeted nonstop about how he thinks that Ukraine deserved to be invaded while cheerleading for Russia.
He devoted episodes of The Dive and JacksonHinkleTV to that topic. It led to this interview with Piers Morgan where he channeled his inner Lord Haw-Haw to defend Vladimir Putin.
He even attempted to monetize his admiration for Putin by selling these t-shirts.
Those first efforts turned out to be short-lived because his online stores were closed soon after he opened them due to complaints from online pro-Ukraine activists. But it’s obvious that he hasn’t given up on selling t-shirts to monetize his pro-Russia stance. If you do a Google search on Jackson Hinkle Make Ukraine Russia Again, it’ll bring up a huge number of stores that are selling the same t-shirt featuring Vladimir Putin and the slogan “Make Ukraine Russia Again.” Here are screenshots of just two of the many online stores that are selling them.
With the huge number of online t-shirt shops that are now carrying that shirt, it’s much harder for online activists to try to shut those stores down because of the huge amount of time and people needed for such a project. As a result, Hinkle can make a profit from those shirts indefinitely. (Of course that’s assuming that there is really a huge consumer demand for such a shirt in the West.)
In January of this year Hinkle attempted to go back to college by attending the University of Southern California. That turned out to be a short-lived one-day effort when he claimed that he was thrown out of his first class for saying that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a Nazi with a bigger cocaine addiction than Hunter Biden, the son of the US President Joe Biden.
He doesn’t mention what class he was kicked out of. If it had been a political science class on Eastern Europe, then I think that the teacher was out of line because students should have the right to express their opinions in that class without fear of retribution. But if it had happened during an Introduction to Statistics class or a course that dealt with the literature of William Shakespeare or any other non-political science class, then that teacher was right to throw him out for taking about an off-topic subject matter.
Just a few months later Jackson Hinkle moved across the country from Southern California to Miami, which is where he lives now. There’s something hilarious about a self-described “MAGA Communist” who openly espouses Marxist principles while living in a city that is home to a large Cuban American community, many of whom had fled the communist regime in their native Cuba.
Last summer there was a coup d’etat in Niger, which was the latest coup to have affected the nations that are located in the Sahel region of Africa. Jackson Hinkle suddenly started posting about Niger, Burkina Faso, and the other affected countries in that region.
It can’t be just a coincidence that a white man who grew up in Southern California suddenly becomes concerned about the African Sahel region at the same time that Russia has shown an interest in that region as well. And then a short time later Hinkle suddenly loses interest in the affected African nations and goes back to posting about Ukraine once again.
There are a few other examples of the Jackson Hinkle-Russia connection. He is currently romantically linked to Anna Linnikova, who was Miss Russia 2022. She’s the same Miss Russia who complained about how most of her competitors at this year’s Miss Universe pageant had snubbed and shunned her because she represents a country that has invaded Ukraine. Jackson Hinkle has recently announced that they are now engaged.
Back in September Jackson Hinkle visited Russia where he got a chance to shoot off some weapons and visit the grave of the Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin.
When he returned to the United States he complained about how he was being detained by the US government. He updated his tweet one hour later showing that he was let go.
It’s funny reading his claim in the above tweet that he was in Russia to report on the Ukraine war when the pictures that he posted on his Twitter/X account showed him as being in the Moscow area the entire time. He never traveled anywhere near the Ukrainian border.
Soon after his return Hamas launched its huge October 7 terrorist attack on Israel. Since then Jackson Hinkle has been tweeting nonstop about the Middle East. Since Russia is aligned with Iran, who finances Hamas, it’s not a big shock to see Jackson Hinkle making anti-Israel/pro-Hamas tweets like these.
And all those tweets are just tips of the iceberg. There are literally hundreds of tweets that Jackson Hinkle has posted since the Hamas terrorist attacks. Just because Jackson Hinkle calls himself a “journalist” who claims to be posting the “truth” about Israel and Palestine that “the mainstream media doesn’t want anyone to know about” doesn’t mean that he is actually posting factual stuff about that war. Here’s a story debunking a video that Hinkle has posted claiming that it came from the current war. The Guardian has named Hinkle as being one of the biggest disseminators of false information about the current Israel-Hamas Conflict. At one point Visegrád 24 had offered Jackson Hinkle a free all-expenses paid trip to Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. It would’ve been a golden opportunity for Hinkle to learn about the complexities of Israeli-Palestinian politics. But Hinkle turned down that offer. (Whether he turned it down of his own volition or if someone in the Kremlin told him to turn it down is unknown.)
Jackson Hinkle’s pro-Hamas stance has put him at odds with other right wingers who are siding with Israel in this war. Even though Jackson Hinkle is claiming to be on the Palestinians’ side, some of them are realizing that Hinkle is only siding with them in an effort to make money.
The last few tweets included a screenshot of a Jackson Hinkle tweet where he seems to be a white supremacist. To be fair, Hinkle has denied ever making that tweet.
You can decide for yourself whether Hinkle is telling the truth about that white supremacist tweet or if it’s yet another example of the misinformation that Hinkle has been regularly tweeting since the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year.
In any case one can debate as to how much of this stuff that Hinkle spews online he actually believes in. It’s obvious that Jackson Hinkle is being a troll or edgelord in a desperate attempt at fame and fortune. Why else would he spend so much time making posts admiring authoritarian dictators like Vladimir Putin and terrorist groups like Hamas? In this video, he said this:
“I did it for the clout. I do everything for the clout. You'll never see me doing something not for the clout. That's the only way I operate.”
At least Lord Haw-Haw actually believed in the Nazi cause that he was promoting. God only knows how much of this stuff that Hinkle tweets he actually believes in. In normal peaceful times people like Jackson Hinkle would ultimately end up being laughed at and ignored. But now that there are two wars going on simultaneously and Elon Musk is amplifying him on Twitter/X, it’s much harder to simply write him off as some kind of a weirdo crank troll. We have to look at the possibility that he is working as a propagandist on behalf of Russia and the Kremlin is paying him to do so.
The good news is that Jackson Hinkle’s effort to be a Kremlin propagandist based in the United States isn’t going very smoothly for him. He lost his JacksonHinkleTV streaming show when Twitch banned him. He has lost both his PayPal and Venmo accounts so he now has a harder time with processing online payments.
YouTube pulled the plug on his channel so Rumble is now the only place online where you can view The Dive With Jackson Hinkle.
He was thrown off of TikTok as well.
If all that weren’t enough, he also lost his WhatsApp account.
When Elon Musk took over Twitter last year then renamed it X, he started a creators program where those who pay $8 per month to take part in that program can take part in the advertiser revenue profits based on the amount of attention that a certain post gets. It’s obvious that Jackson Hinkle is being provocative online in the hopes that people will fight with him online or share his tweets to others, which will result in more attention, and he could get ad revenue.
Jackson Hinkle has received a huge amount of followers over the past month or two. It has gotten to the point where his Twitter/X account is the largest accounts on that platform. But if you look at his followers, many of them seem to be bots. I made a quick video showing some of his followers who are probably bots.
It’s obvious that either Hinkle or one of his Kremlin handlers probably purchased those bot followers. On most social media platforms purchasing bot followers tend to be grounds for being banned. But ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter/X last year, there has been less enforcement of such rules as that.
In many ways, Twitter/X is Jackson Hinkle’s last chance to make a living at being an online Kremlin propagandist since he’s been banned from many other platforms. But his efforts to make money from Twitter/X doesn’t always go smoothly for him.
He frequently begs people to become paid subscribers to his X Premium account for only $3 per month.
For all his efforts, as of this writing, Jackson Hinkle has only gotten a total of two paid subscribers. That means that he is only making a total of $6 per month in subscriptions, which isn’t much to live on in the United States. At this point his only hope for making money from Twitter/X is to get enough attention so he can earn some of that ad revenue.
Despite his difficulties with being thrown off various online platforms and trying to make a living through promoting the Kremlin viewpoint in America, he is slowly being legitimized in the mainstream on a level that even Lord Haw-Haw never received. He was recently the subject of this inspirational LinkedIn post as someone to be admired in the business world for having the survival instinct to pivot from YouTube after being banned to Twitter/X. It's a “making lemons into lemonade” story that completely glosses over what could have led YouTube to ban him. To be blunt, Jackson Hinkle does not deserve any kind of mainstream legitimacy at all.
Jackson Hinkle is one of the most viewed and heavily promoted accounts on Twitter/X at the moment. You don’t even have to follow him to have his tweets come into your newsfeed because he’s currently one of Elon Musk’s favorite accounts. Here are a few tips for dealing with Jackson Hinkle on Twitter/X:
Avoid sharing his tweets as much as possible. Sharing his tweets gives him greater exposure, which means a greater share of the ad revenue.
If you must share something he tweeted for any reason, do not hit the Retweet button. That tweet will give him greater exposure, which means he gets a greater chunk of ad revenue if you do that. Instead take a screenshot of his tweet, write your own separate tweet, and attach that screenshot to your message.
On a related issue, if you have a blog or website and need to quote any of Hinkle’s tweets, don’t provide a direct link to any of his tweets. Instead take a screenshot and post it directly in your blog or website (just like I did throughout this Substack post).
Don’t respond to any of his tweets in any way. Don’t hit that heart-shaped Like button. Don’t write a response message to his tweet, no matter how infuriating his message is to you. He thrives on attention, both positive and negative. The more attention he gets, the greater the ad revenue share he will get.
If you are offended by how Jackson Hinkle is trying to become rich and famous or if you’re simply tired of seeing his tweets all of the time, the only thing you can do at this point is to mute and block Hinkle on Twitter/X. In fact I highly recommend doing this to save your own sanity.
Don’t bother with reporting any of his tweets or his entire account. Elon Musk has laid off most of the staff since he took over Twitter last year. Musk has been heavily promoting Hinkle's account so it’s a waste of time reporting him because nothing will get done unless Twitter/X gets a new owner.
The only silver lining is that Jackson Hinkle has ruined his own future. The current wars will eventually end and Putin will die. (After all, he is 71 years old as of this writing.) This situation will fade into the past. The only question is when it will happen. But there will be a day when it does happen. By the time it happens, Hinkle will still be a relatively young man somewhere between the ages of 25-40. He will have to find a new line of work, especially if Russia becomes a fully democratic country that has renounced Putin and his ilk just like how Germany had officially renounced Adolf Hitler and his Nazis.
I seriously doubt that Hinkle will be executed like Lord Haw-Haw. Instead I think that he’s more likely to have a similar fate to Leni Riefenstahl, the talented and successful German film director whose movie career ended after World War II simply because no film studio anywhere in the world wanted to do business with someone who was a friend of Adolf Hitler’s who once made a propaganda film that glorified Adolf Hitler and the Nazis called Triumph of the Will.
It’ll be a shame when it happens because, based on some of the articles I read, Jackson Hinkle once had a lot of potential as an environmental activist and progressive Democrat politician. He could’ve worked for a nonprofit environmental organization or worked for a company that specializes in environmental sustainability (such as making recyclable products or solar panels) or even eventually become an elected official who’s reform-minded. Instead he’ll be in a position where few people will be willing to hire someone who once openly cheered for Ukraine to get invaded by Russia, sided with terrorist groups like Hamas, and posted offensive memes like an Israeli flag stuffed at the bottom of a toilet bowl.
At that point the only jobs that would probably hire him are fast food restaurants and big box retail stores. Oh well. Too bad, so sad.
Related Links
The Dive With Jackson Hinkle on Rumble
Jackson Hinkle’s Wikipedia page
Jackson Hinkle’s RationalWiki page
Jackson Hinkle’s BreadTube Wiki page
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