Infrared is absolutely a grifter. But i don't think the ACP are feds. Feds would be more subtle and less cringe. Feds would infiltrate and sabotage existing orgs instead of making their own LARP club. It would be a huge waste of resources considering how tiny the target demographic of the ACP is. The vast majority of reactionaries aren't going to be drawn to an openly communist org. And the vast majority of progressive minded people who sympathize with socialist and communist ideas are too repelled by the conservative brainworms of the ACP. The ACP is literally filling a political niche that practically no one wants to be in. That is not worth the feds' time. In my opinion.

[–] CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Feds don't directly infiltrate anymore, or at least most of the time they don't. They get informants to do it, see Beau of the Fifth Column (his name is not Beau and he fakes a southern accent). Usually as the result of a plea deal. Then after that I assume the snitch has sort of free reign in how they carry out their operation as long as they submit results.

The thing that everyone should be looking at is how Hinkle, who is based in the US, gets to meet with Putin, Dugin, Ansarallah, Hamas, goes to Iran -- basically does everything the US state hates, BUT never gets in any trouble for it. There's a man (Mahmoud Khalil) who is currently MIA after being adbucted from his home in New York by the police for talking about Palestine, but Hinkle gets to talk to an audience of 2 million + on twitter, he gets to travel around the world meeting heads of state that sponsor terrorism (according to US State Department of course), he gets to meet current war enemies of the US, and he gets to talk about that on social media openly, and he doesn't even get questioned when he comes back? Even Blumenthal, who is the son of an aide to Bill Clinton, got detained and questioned when he came back to the US.

[–] cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

That is indeed very suspicious. But how do the feds benefit from that? In the case of Beau it was clear, he was being used to propagate imperialist views under a progressive guise. What are they achieving with Hinkle? Are they using him as a spy? Or do they think that by associating someone as off-putting as Hinkle, who gives off massive grifter vibes, with anti-imperialist causes they can discredit those causes? Is it all about turning liberals off from anti-imperialism?

Because if so, i think they didn't need to put in all that effort. Liberals are already conditioned to go along with virtually every imperialist narrative. Whereas principled anti-imperialists are going to stick by their position regardless. So what's it all for? That's what i can't figure out. If he is an asset why aren't they using him to push pro-Zionist and pro-NATO talking points?

And how does someone like Tucker Carlson fit into the picture? He's also gotten to meet with some very prominent Russians, including Putin, as well as other world leaders like Viktor Orban, who at least outwardly plays the role of an opposition to the EU Atlanticists. Tucker has also been saying some things that you'd think, at least at first glance, wouldn't be in the interest of the Washington-Langley crowd. Isn't it possible that this is just genuine reactionary infighting rather than all part of some nefarious master plan?

I'm trying to understand this but it seems too convoluted and too risky. I wouldn't sign off on this OP if i was managing the CIA psyops division. What if instead of achieving what they want to achieve they instead inadvertently increase the popularity of anti-imperialist views? The only way this makes sense to me is if they are still waiting to "flip the switch" and have Hinkle do a 180 on his position once he's amassed enough of a following. I could totally see that happening.

[–] CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Hinkle makes anti Zionism unpalatable and directly leads to the arrest of people like Mahmoud. He got retweeted twice by the state of "Israel" which each time gave him a ton of publicity.

By making his unhinged takes (he's outright an antisemite, ACP is doing damage control every time he tweets something lol) he associates antizionism with people like him and with antisemitism so that people won't call themselves anti zionist and if you do, you'll look like a nutjob.

Hinkle worked with Tulsi Gabbard when he was younger (so 5 years ago), Gabbard being head of the psyop division in the US military or something like that (edit: she's literally Director of National Intelligence). The info is super easy to find if you Google her name plus military but I forget the exact job title. He interviewed her last year again for some reason and never mentioned this past relationship.

Tucker Carlson's father, Richard, was the director of Voice of America, close to Reagan, and US ambassador to the Seychelles. He was deeply embedded in US politics at the foreign affairs level, so Tucker is more of an untouchable. And tucker is far from doing any anti imperialism, moreso the appearance of doing anti imperialism

[–] cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I guess that makes sense. So do you think the ACP are in on this, or are they just useful idiots? You said they do damage control when he tweets something that reflects particularly poorly on them (i don't follow any of these people so i didn't know that), would they do that if they were in on the whole grift?

[–] CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 2 hours ago

Everything from this point on is hypothesizing because short of an actual signed document, we can't know anything for sure. There's precedent for this, for example we've known about CIA operations for years before they come out and admit it. See e.g. founding and training of Al Qaeda.

From my observations ACP basically slaps a coat of fresh paint on top of the edifice. It's the same old streamer bro club and their fans, but this time they try to make it official. At the top of ACP, in its commissions or departments or whatever they call it, is the streamers club - MWM, Infrared, Hinkle, a few other that I never bothered to learn about. These guys are the public face of the ACP and also the hereditary cadres of the central committee. Note that none of them were elected into these positions when the "party" was founded, or if they were they never officially said. Normally when you make an actual party, you also elect people with the membership that signed off on the party. They did things the other way around: they made a party between themselves and then the people "flocked" (I'm still not convinced it's not just 5 people in a trench coat).

Then you have the "officers" or commissars who are sort of thought leaders with some of their own audience, but to a lesser extent. Some actually are relativey famous on social media, e.g. RTSG and DD Geopolitics -- yes, they're patsocs, but what makes them commissars is that everything they do, beyond their own grift that seems to make them money, is to promote infrared and the ACP, now that it exists. They're like the recruiters in an MLM scheme (not the maoist kind).

At the third rung you have the fools being taken in by this obvious farce. No pity for them though, they bite into it hook line and sinker. They want to be nazis so bad without actually being nazis, they're not our friends any more than the leaders are. Some have actually been able to leave it, with varying results. Some of those ex-patsocs still have very concerning ideas (if they're going to say they're communists), and some seem to have become very based. But it's something they have to do on their own time, we can't deprogram them if they don't want to. Anyway. It's the same five people you see on Twitter doing "charity drives" (giving away some old clothes) and "cleaning up" 2 trash bags worth of detritus along a bougie avenue. It's always the same (white) people in these pictures. That's the extent of what ACP organizes because that's the extent of what it requires to do. Also, they mostly stopped posting pictures after the first few months of their founding, leading me to believe they also just stopped being active at doing anything lol.

If ACP is anything, it's to concentrate the infrared brand of patsocism into one, and get its leading figures to formally recognize each other as being part of the same movement. You'll note that Maupin, who started the whole patsoc thing in the US, is nowhere in the picture. They had a falling out at the same time infrared promoted "Mecha tankie" (lol), and now Maupin is running with the moonies and doesn't even call himself a communist anymore lol.

So, is it a grift or is it a psyop? Well, why not both? It's kind of a cop out but it's the best I can tell you at this time. I have no idea about the politics of being an informant for the FBI (but would love to find a book about it), usually people do it as part of a plea deal to avoid a harsher prison sentence or outright charges, but I don't know what happens after that, if you have to deliver results, if they give you orders, or what. I assume you kinda have to make money though and might not be able to get a conventional job. Or if you don't do a good enough job they throw you back in the prison pipeline so you're incentivized to commit to it full time.

DD Geopolitics is an ex-US army officer, if that gives you any ideas. She pretended to be from the Donbass (hence the DD part) and then got found out and basically carries on as normal since then. People like MWM and Infrared are obviously doing it for the money -- one of the MWM goons was selling a fucking 80$-a-pop zoom course on marxism last year. Infrared makes donation money. We've already mentioned Hinkle.

If they're feds, their job is basically to kill communism off for good in the US. Is it likely that this is what's happening? I don't know. Is it possible? yes. Especially as the empire is entering its death phase, they might want to prevent class consciousness from happening. I mean, the US is becoming more fascist by the day since 2016, is it any question it would reach "communists" too.

I mean it's not riveting theory. Just earlier they quoted Jefferson, a noted slaver who raped enslaved women and enslaved his own child resulting from the rape. That's the kind of people these "communists" look up to. It's basically Strasserism, take the symbols, apply the theory loosely because you don't understand it, and then synthesize a weird ideological mix out of it. Were the Strasser brothers feds? Yes.