Jackson Hinkle has cultivated an online persona so incendiary that he’s been kicked off YouTube, Twitch and Instagram.
He rages undaunted, even full of energy. He produces a regular podcast on Rumble, a site popular with many prominent conservatives. He writes dozens of posts a day on X, where his followers have grown to 2.5 million from 417,000 in the six months since Oct. 7 — the day Hamas militants attacked Israel.
Along the way, he has used false or misleading content, promoted falsified images and made comments that watchdogs have denounced as anti-Semitic. He calls himself an American patriot, even as he praises America’s adversaries, including Vladimir V. Putin, Xi Jinping and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“Make a LIKE if you stand with Iran against ISRAELI TERRORISM!” wrote last week in X after an Israeli airstrike in Syria killed several Iranian military officials. A day later, he spoke to Yemen’s Houthi leadership via video, praising the group for its attacks on shipping in the Red Sea.
All of which made Mr. Hinkle an Internet celebrity at 24, a Gen Z icon of the modern internet: a place where authenticity is no longer a necessity and outrage offers attention and even some financial reward.
“It was a godsend for me at the time,” he said in an interview about his rise in X popularity amid the Gaza war. “I was very lucky.”
His sudden rise may be due to more than just good luck.
Two Israeli research firms specializing in online threats, which have focused on what they say is disinformation related to the war in Gaza, said they had identified coordinated and possibly state-sponsored networks of bots or inauthentic accounts fueling Mr. Hinkle’s provocative line-up. . political views. China, Russia and other foreign actors are known to use such tactics to achieve their geopolitical goals — including efforts to influence this fall’s presidential election.
Mr. Hinkle has also benefited from X owner Elon Musk’s changes, including the reversal of policies that once restricted toxic content. With the addition of a premium subscription feature, he now charges some followers $3 a month for what he calls “super cool stuff,” including behind-the-scenes videos and “random musings.” X allows him to earn up to 97 percent of revenue – money that Mr. Hinkle told subscribers helps him “continue to expose the Deep State.”
Imran Ahmed, head of the Center to Combat Digital Hate, a research organisation, said Mr Hinkle was part of “a kind of new breed of people who are exploiting the algorithms’ insatiable desire for highly controversial content to profit financially”.
In a new report, the center documented a surprising increase in followers for 10 prominent accounts on X that spread anti-Semitic content since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas.
Mr. Hinkle was on top, by far.
“This is a sick industry of creators and platforms profiting from controversy,” Mr. Ahmed said, “the kind of car crash of how people react to hate.”
Mr. Hinkle, for his part, seems to be enjoying the limelight.
To illustrate a post about the conflict in Gaza, he used a stylized cartoon of himself dressed in military gear with a rifle in front of a fireball. His profile on X and other platforms includes a stylized image of his bloody face surrounded by a ring of pistols.
Mr. Hinkle solicits donations and sells merchandise to support his “independent journalism” on platforms like Patreon, which is already banned from PayPal and Venmo.
In the interview, Mr. Hinkle stressed that he did not accept any payments from foreign governments, but spoke unapologetically about his support for — and from — often hostile foreign powers. He visited Russia and China this year at the invitation of organizations close to the governments, dining with Russia’s foreign minister and appearing on state television networks.
“I think they appreciate the support where they can get it,” he said.
From Bernie bro to MAGA fan
From an early age, Mr. Hinkle understood that ardent support of a cause could gain public attention. He grew up in San Clemente, Southern California, a surfer who became heavily involved in environmental activism, gun control measures and progressive politics.
As a teenager, he helped start an environmental cleanup organization and another to encourage young people to run for political office. Teen Vogue recognized him as a top young environmentalist. Reader’s Digest included him in a list of inspirational children. She posed in an Instagram photo with actor Will Smith, whose son Jaden Smith has worked with Mr Hinkle to cut down on plastic water bottles in schools.
Perry Meade, a progressive organizer who worked with Mr. Hinkle on campaigns as teenagers, said “his general understanding of Jackson was that he always wanted to be famous,” adding, sure, he cared about things, but he was first .
His activities soon became political. At his high school graduation in 2018, he knelt during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial injustice. He ran twice unsuccessfully for the San Clemente City Council, when he was 19 and 20 years old. A local conservative blog called him a “far-left ideologue.”
He said in the interview that, after his political losses, he “decided to continue to pursue the issues I was interested in — but on the national stage.”
Mr. Hinkle found that stage on YouTube, where one of his big coups, he says, was an interview with Tulsi Gabbard, the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate. At its peak, his channel had 300,000 subscribers. .
Like Ms. Gabbard, who once surfed after him, his views have changed. The Sierra Club, one of the largest environmental organizations in the world, included Mr. Hinkle in a video shot in 2018. By 2022, he was on social media describing environmentalism as “inhumane.”
Today, he says he is a Stalinist and Maoist who was kicked out of the Communist Party of the United States. (Roberta Wood, a Chicago party leader, said she subscribed to the newsletter but had never joined the party and did not reflect its values.) She once supported Bernie Sanders but now praises Donald Trump.
He is, he wrote last year, an “American PATRIOT, THEOPHOBIC, pro-FAMILY, Marxist-Leninist, pro-PALESTIN, RUSSIA & CHINA, ANTI-DEEP STATE, ANTI-IMPERIALIST, ANTI-WOKE, pro-GROWTH, ANTI-MONOPOLY, Pro- GUN, Pro-FOSSIL FUEL.”
An international axis
As Mr. Hinkle focused on international affairs, his audience grew. He supported authoritarian leaders such as Bashar al-Assad of Syria, whom he called “hero.” When Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it embraced Mr. Putin’s rationale for the conflict.
Mr Hinkle has become a “monger of rage”, said Pekka Kallioniemi, who researches social media and disinformation at the University of Tampere in Finland.
“The way he jumps from one thing to another seems very opportunistic to me,” Mr Callionemi said.
He called attention to critics of the frequent spread of Russian propaganda about Ukraine, including disinformation linked to secret Kremlin campaigns. His love for Russia was also personal.
He traveled there for the first time in September 2023 with Anna Linnikova, a model who was crowned Miss Russia 2022. For a time they were engaged to be married. Mr Hinkle posted a photo of the pair posing in front of Moscow’s Red Square last year and said they would move to Miami together. (By the end of 2023, they seemed to have split acrimoniously.)
He visited Russia again recently to attend a conference organized by Konstantin Malofeyev and Aleksandr Dugin, both prominent nationalists facing sanctions in the United States. He said he had been drawn to Mr Dugin’s writings, which glorify Russian culture, as an antidote to corrupt values in the West.
YouTube suspended his channel in October for “repeated violations” of the company’s policy that prohibits the denial or trivialization of major violent events, including the war in Ukraine, according to a company spokesperson.
It wasn’t until Hamas invaded Israel that month, though — when Mr. Hinkle began posting constant criticism of Israel and Russian support for the Palestinians — that his X-bill reached the stratosphere.
Various organized networks of inauthentic accounts boosted his posts, according to Next Dim, an Israeli firm that studies inauthentic activity online and which had previously found evidence of an effort to boost pro-Beijing messaging on X.
One of the organized networks had previously boosted unrelated content — in Chinese — that criticized the Japanese government over the release of radioactive waste from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in August, investigators found. As soon as the fighting in Gaza began, the same network, which had at least 20,000 accounts, began reposting Mr Hinkle’s content.
Another research firm in Israel, Cyabra, found that Mr. Hinkle’s account gained 1.2 million followers in the first 19 days of the war. A sample of 12,510 of them showed that about 40 percent were fake.
In the interview, Mr. Hinkle denied findings of authentic support for his account. “There will always be bots on social media,” he said. He acknowledged that he had made mistakes in some posts, but said they were not intentional and argued that the scale of Israel’s retaliation in Gaza vindicated his view of the conflict.
“I think if we’re going to focus on people posting false information, a false photo on Twitter isn’t the biggest deal compared to lies being used to sell a war,” he said.
Losing his YouTube subscribers, he said, cost him three-quarters of his salary. He suggested that he has recouped the loss with his X business, mostly through subscribers. “I’m doing well, I guess,” he said.
He declined to say how much his posts earned or how many paid subscribers he had. In October, he noted that he had earned $550 in the previous month from X’s ad revenue sharing model. His profile recently featured ads for a major Emirates airline, a major shoe brand and a popular travel blog, but he said the revenue was limited because his posts were too controversial for some advertisers.
Mr. Hinkle spoke admiringly of Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who has promoted pro-Russian narratives, and Candace Owens, a conservative columnist who left The Daily Wire website last month. Mr. Hinkle, who said he turned down a job offer from a foreign media outlet he declined to identify, compared himself to Mr. Carlson and Ms. Owens: “We’re all independent — not by choice.”
“You know, of course, I’d be happy if there was a media outlet in the United States that wanted to hire someone like me,” he said, “but our values don’t align, so I don’t think it’s in my future.”
