From the Tweet, it seems academia is slowly backing them up:
"🚨🇺🇸 REPORT: Researcher from University of Connecticut has published a paper on the rise of the American Communist Party.
“What we have found is that MAGA Communism –that is, the progenitor ideology held and reified in the ACP–is a novel contribution to American Marxism, and that in its substance the ACP is working to achieve counter-hegemonic, left-wing goals.”
“Simply put, MAGA Communism is now made relevant, and a mystified understanding, or one that reduces it to opportunism, is insufficient to assess its unprecedented rise.”
“What was once a ‘fringe’ online ideology"has become a rising force out in the open, and must be contended with by scholars of American Marxism and communist organizers alike.”
Follow: @RTSG_News"
These are the same people that say “I can be way more racist than you.”
This guy’s a PhD candidate, not a professor. And this isn’t his thesis either. He’s just doing this for fun.
I wouldn’t say academia is backing them up. He’s just someone who fell for the grift.
If you look at his sources, he cites the ACP themselves for how big their organization is, not third party sources.
He wrote another paper earlier, so you can get an idea of what his writing is like
https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1777&context=honors
I guess we’ll find out, whether he’s granted his PhD or not.
Time will tell.
Damn, he might even be a member.
he is ACP
these guys will never not be cringe, they write their own praise 😭
RTSG for those that aren’t aware is a patsoc front, the guy behind it is on the ACP’s ‘executive committee’ (the founders basically).
The way they write about this report is made-for-social-media. I can’t fault them too much on that, they know the rules of the platform, but they format it in such a way that basically says nothing. Who is the researcher, what’s the name of the paper?
Thankfully some default pfp in the replies had the name, and from there I was able to find the paper: https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/clogic/article/view/201650/193868 (from november 2025, why they would trot this out again in march 2026 is pretty self-explanatory).
So who is Sean Staton? Well, I don’t have instagram anymore but this appears in search results:
A Sean Staton at UConn (University of Connecticut). And right there in the profile as well, the ASCII symbol the ACP uses.
I don’t think I’m going to read the entire paper but it’s completely unserious:
Imagine writing “This is all while following the framework of Haz Al-Din’s “MAGA Communism.”” in a paper for your university lol.
There is of course the question of what this paper is exactly. The parent link for the pdf is this, https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/clogic/article/view/201650, a journal of marxism. This was published in volume 28. So it seems more like a club than a “published paper” from a “researcher” at a university. RSTG’s tweet is trying to make it seem bigger than it is - this is an essay, not a meticulous study.
It’s also pretty funny that they have references for most things except anything to do with what the article calls the achievements of the ACP. That won’t be sourced lol.
But it’s what they do. They lie and embellish every little thing they do, and when you call them out, they will instantly hone in on you and admonish you until you recant.
I ended up skimming through the rest of the article and it’s basically quoting haz directly to justify his vision of the maga segment of the population, and praising the ACP as doing no wrong. Like this:
That’s cool but why these three metrics specifically? Why are these three important specifically? What do they tell us? Or does ‘organizational capacity’ just make your party look cool and competent.
I also love this bit:
The ACP’s steady rate of growth is significantly higher than both other organizations. If the ACP started in 2004, with its current rate of growth it would have roughly 3300 members, likely larger than the PSL
And if we count all the countries on Earth together we would have the biggest GDP in the solar system! lmao. This is not serious research, this is a masturbatory article to get noticed by haz-senpai.
This is hilarious. I think what they’re saying in your last image is basically “we are so much better; you just can’t tell from the work we do”
All I see them do is comparative analyses like this, but never to just look at the facts on the ground and say clearly: here is where we are at, this is why and here’s what it means. They cannot exist without CPUSA to be there to compare themselves to at all times.
Well, they will never reach CPUSA’s level.
They are fascists.
I saw these guys write the N word out by deleting gif letters one at a time in their discord before their signal chat leaked #earlyaccess
As someone who travels the states very often for my job- which exposes me to many “blue collar” folks as well as daily interactions with “white collar” contemporaries, I have never-ever met someone who even knows what maga-communism is.
Even if an actual professor came out with a study purporting this I’d be doubtful, and the whole “movement” just comes off to me as an outlet for western left-adjacents to push for the same kind of reforms soc-dems want but actually being able to admit that they don’t give a damn about who has to pay for our lavish lifestyles (the global south).
I don’t think they’re socdems or “left” lol
What would you say distinguishes them from the rest of the (western) “left”?
For me it’s honesty- if we’re just comparing them to soc dems
Also for me none of them are really “left” which is why I say left-adjacent because they’ve all adjoined themselves with “leftism” someway or another
What would you say distinguishes them from the rest of the (western) “left”?
Lol exactly, nothing, they’re just a run of the mill western leftist group. At the end of the day, none do anything meaningful just a bunch of online discourse. The anticommunist regime of Iran does more for communism than any of these western leftist parties.
How so
SocDems are leftwing, not leftist.
Could you explain the distinction?
I’ve admittedly never heard of these being differentiated
Leftwing is basically anyone, say, in the Democratic party or independent of them that’s on the left. You identify as left but don’t know what you are.
Leftist is more extreme. It means anarchist, socialist, communist, etc.
Imagine being so “main stream” that you have to seed perceptions of your own popularity 🤣
This is posted by the ACP, not anything real. It’s still a fringe online ideology, nothing like the actual leftist groups doing work. And if there were anything academic or substantial backing this up, they would have to justify claims like the one about its “unprecedented rise,” which wouldn’t be possible. This is just an attempt at fooling people who don’t understand how academia or philosophy work, and it doesn’t really matter because, like everything else they do, it’s all happening online.
