Rage Against the Rage Against the War Machine Rally
“We drop care packages on their heads from the sky, but it's not full of food. And the money we have left over, we’re going to spend shooting down hobby balloons. Can you imagine if Independence Day was about balloons?” Jimmy Dore jokes to the crowd at the Rage Against the War Machine Rally. Dore, a 57 year old failed comedian turned reactionary vlogger, is speaking into a microphone that isn’t working, but the gathering is small enough that I can hear him just fine.
“At least Macy's figured out how to make a balloon look like somebody. They can attack us with Superman or something. Would Mickey Mouse's adorable ears eavesdropping on our cell phone conversations be so much worse than the NSA?”
I have been here for two hours. I am hungover, and I am suffering.
Finally, perhaps prompted by the lackluster chuckles his jokes are receiving, Dore yells for someone to fix his mic. Horror washes over me as I realize he is going to start his set from the beginning. As Dore repeats his rehearsed lines verbatim, pausing for the audience in the exact same places, I close my eyes and chug the last bit of my Gatorade.
I am sure I am in hell.
Every rally has a hiccup or two — a microphone goes out (a bonus, in Dore’s case), or maybe organizers don’t do a great job staging the event. Other times, everyone in the audience hates each others guts, a convicted pedophile gets scheduled to speak, Nazis are given free reign to do some marketing in the crowd, and every speaker rants about their own individual grievances without any cohesive messaging at all.
The Rage Against the War Machine rally had all of those problems. And while the organizers feebly attempted to portray the rally as pro-peace, the speaker line up included Miss Russia’s boyfriend, a journalist for Sputnik (a Russian state owned media agency), a former UN weapons inspector turned convicted pedophile, and a current lieutenant colonel in the US Army.
RATWM speaker Jackson Hinkle has made his pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine stance very public. His social media is full of thoughts like “Zelensky is responsible for every death in the Ukraine war, not Putin,” and “standing with Putin is anti-war.” But something that has not been publicly disclosed is his relationship with Anna Linnikova, who won the title of Miss Russia in 2022.
An anonymous source alerted me to posts from Hinkle’s Discord and Twitter, as well as Instagram posts from Anna Linnikova, that indicate the two are a couple. Further work from researcher Ernie Piper helped confirm the connection, and details on the couple’s recent vacation spot.
In early January, Hinkle tweeted a photo of Linnikova. When someone replied that Linnikova would not have sex with Hinkle, Hinkle wrote, “You’re right, Anna is just flying out to LA to see what my apartment looks like.” No one appeared to take him seriously on Twitter, but a few weeks later, Linnikova came up in Hinkle’s Discord.
One Discord user asked, “Miss Universe Russia in Florida?” On January 24, Hinkle replied, “she spent last week w me in LA now we’re going to Miami.” Linnikova’s Instagram stories show she was in Los Angeles, and then Miami. Her stories from Miami line up with Hinkle’s tweets from his trip; they both posted photos from Vizcaya Museum and of breakfast at the Four Seasons Hotel at The Surf Club in Surfside. In another photo, Hinkle is holding hands with an unidentified woman whose manicure matches Linnikova’s.
Hinkle told a Twitter follower he would be staying at the Four Seasons Surfside. Depending on the dates selected, the cheapest guest room at Four Seasons Surfside currently runs from $2,000 to $4,600 a night. Hinkle’s first post in Miami was on January 26, and on February 2 he posted on Telegram he was on a flight, giving the couple a full 7 nights in Miami. Even if they selected the cheapest option available, their hotel stay likely cost them at least $14,000.
It is possible that Hinkle, who brags about his “hot girlfriend” on Twitter and spends his time desperately seeking attention on the social media platform, hasn’t tweeted a photo of himself with Linnikova because he does not feel the need to prove that she knows he exists. Perhaps Hinkle simply overlooked the significance of his personal relationship with someone whose job is to represent Russia (Hinkle did not respond to requests for comment). But it’s also possible that their relationship has been intentionally kept quiet (well, as quiet as someone like Hinkle is capable of) because of the questions it brings (it is unlikely RATWM organizers themselves would have cared - at no point was it disclosed to the crowd that speaker Wyatt Reed’s current employer, Sputnik, is a Kremlin-funded propaganda outlet).
Even without this knowledge, Hinkle’s presence at the rally was controversial. A few days he after returned home from Miami, Code Pink withdrew from the RATWM rally. The organization stated that Hinkle’s stances on the LGBTQ community and women were the reason they did not want to be involved (Hinkle has said gay people should not be allowed to adopt children, that trans people suffer from a mental illness, and proudly acknowledges being anti-feminism). Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin was forced to drop out as a speaker, though she attended as a participant.
Update 3/2/23: while both Hinkle and Linnikova blocked me when I reached out for comment, Hinkle did take to his Telegram to issue the following statement:
NEWSFLASH: If you are an unemployed pro-Ukraine nazi liberal stalking my entire personal life and publishing private details of my loved ones to your creeper substack — I will not be giving you “comment” for any “story.”
My haters have become stalkers and don’t realize how deranged their obsession has become. Hating me is ok, being a creep will result in a permanent block 😂
Considering I only asked Hinkle himself and Linnikova for comment, he does seem to be implying Linnikova is one of his “loved ones.”
It might seem like a weird choice to schedule a twice convicted pedophile who used to work as a weapons inspector for the UN to speak at a pro-peace rally, but that is exactly what RATWM chose to do. Scott Ritter has a history of seeking sex from minors online. Ritter has been caught several times trying to meet minors in person (in 2001 alone he was caught twice in sting operations, though those cases were both dismissed). Ritter spent March 2012 to September 2014 in a state prison due to his attempted sex crimes against minors.
Ritter’s legal defense tried to blame his pedophilia on his depression over the handling of the Iraq War, though I am not sure I would personally want my peace rally’s message to be “if we don’t have peace right now, many people will be forced to become pedophiles to deal with how upsetting war is.” Ultimately, the backlash against Ritter was enough that he was removed as a speaker.
While many people would consider Ritter’s removal from the lineup a solid W for non-pedophiles everywhere, Grayzone propagandist Anya Parampil brought up an alternative perspective during her speech at the rally. Parampil complained that leftist groups had issued unfair ultimatums which kept her from sharing the stage with people she really wanted to. She could have left it unclear, and hidden behind the idea she meant Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin. Instead, Parampil bravely looked out into the crowd and asked, “Is Scott Ritter here?” (I do not know if he was at the rally, but he was definitely at the afterparty!)
Because the crowd consisted of people who couldn’t come to an agreement on things like pedophiles, Universal Basic Income, whether trans people should be 5150’d, Medicare for All, and the pros/cons of a Racial Holy War, the speeches were all disconnected from each other.
Jimmy Dore made strange jokes about using the money currently allotted for Ukraine to buy every homeless person in the US 7,000 fleece Ukrainian flag blankets (??). But what else could he do? Suggesting that the money be used for housing would have been rejected as an equally bad idea by at least half the attendees. Dore also brought up the KKK and Black Panthers marching together to get welfare payments in Vegas (a bizarre claim that seems to trace back to one YouTube video and no other source), which got him some of the loudest cheers he heard all day.
I would have to imagine that tourists who were walking by were very confused by the idea of trading in Ukraine’s sovereignty for fleece blankets, or by the crowd cheering on working with the KKK.
Lt. Col. Tulsi Gabbard’s speech largely centered around the 2018 Hawaii false missile alert. She claimed the alert was the driving force in her decision to enter the 2020 race. The alert wasn’t real, she explained, but it felt like it could be real. And what does that say about society today? (After failing to obtain the nomination, pro-peace spokeswoman Tulsi Gabbard left the Hawaii National Guard for the US Army Reserves in October 2020.)
In many ways, it felt similar to when Gabbard spoke at Christians United for Israel’s annual summit in 2015. Then, Gabbard was introduced as a token democrat to the crowd, one of the few they could trust and like (CUFI strongly supported the Iraq War during the invasion, and continues to do so — in fact, CUFI and its founder/director, John Hagee, endorse many policies that are extremely hawkish). RATWM felt like a fitting step in her “centrist” journey.
So what actually happens when you lack a cohesive message and ask that people of all political backgrounds join together? Well, you get fascists. Matthew Heimbach, a neo-Nazi and organizer of the 2017 Unite the Rally, showed up to wave around a communist flag. Another man in his group carried around the Russian imperial flag. Members of a completely different organization handed me a brochure promoting their third position populist group (their Twitter account goes beyond dog whistling and directly into defending Third Position).
Of course, Max Blumenthal wants you to know that fascists and pedophiles are not to blame for the event’s low turn out. Instead, it is actually the left’s fault. So please, next time — the left needs to take one for the team. Put aside your feelings about pedophilia and Nazism, and go on down to the National Mall to applaud the idea of working with the KKK and Jimmy Dore.
ICYMI - I did a Twitter Space on the rally with Zach Roberts, Ogel, and Goad Gatsby, which you can listen to here.
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Thanks for this report. Seems like the shindig drew all the people most responsible for the fact that the US does not have a peace movement. (Hint: A peace movement does not work with fascists and does not support fascist regimes or wars of aggression.)
Max Blumenthal & Anya Parampil, Jimmy Dore, Tulsi Gabbard, Chris Hedges; Jackson Hinkle, Matt Heimbach, Scott Ritter, AND a very special appearance by the LaRouche-ites! A brand new reality series brought to you by “ALL THAT IS AWFUL IN THE WORLD Productions”, (in partnership with Konstantin Ernst) Starting Last February 24th