Hamilton, the Revolutionary (and How I Knew Him)
In Loving Memory of Jason Lee Hamilton (09.15.1994–08.27.2020)
On the evening of August 27, 2020, I had just finished virtually contributing at a meeting of the newly-formed Young Democratic Socialists of America chapter at the University of Central Florida [1]. This meeting was our chapter’s Constitutional convention, and was the pixelated culmination of months of our Discord server. Around 11:30 p.m., after the convention ended, I took a moment to check the notifications from my personalized Twitter feed. One particular notification would provoke my own personal transition towards determining the kind of leader I would like to become.
When I first read the Socialist Rifle Association’s announcement that their co-founder, Records Keeper, web developer and beloved comrade, Jason L. Hamilton, had passed away, an unusually calm sensation came over me. Perhaps this calmness was due to my prior being informed, earlier that August, by a mutual Twitter follower who has since chosen to ‘unfollow’ me. This sense of calm dissipated from my brain through my fingers, which remained frozen on my keyboard, ebbing back and forth from shock. I had entered the first stage of fresh grief with a premonition seemingly confirmed, and a week of tears yet to drop. Although we mostly communicated through private messages, no words (of mine) could suffice to describe the precise and profound impact Comrade Hamilton left upon us living for the eventual liberation of all oppressed peoples.
Nonetheless, I must utilize words in order to share with you my impressions of the magnitude of his work, my gratitude for the many memorable interactions we made together, and my hope that you, too, will be inspired and touched by his legacy.
Comrade Hamilton will undoubtedly be best known for his talented and tireless work in building the Socialist Rifle Association (SRA). But the bond Comrade Hamilton and I more or less maintained actually extends quite beyond the SRA, for I was fortunate to have received insight on technological advances from him, and moments where we became confidants regarding our own personal struggles. I was fortunate to have known him, simply, as J.L.
Despite having only known J.L. through tele-presence since May 2, 2017, I (will continue to) feel that our friendship was stronger than most connections I have made with friends off-keyboard. On the day we first cyber-interacted, he appeared on my Twitter timeline in discourse regarding the Alt-Right. Done with my 2nd spring semester of college, I had extra time to hop in on such conversations. My gut instinct from our dialogue was telling me me that this cool-looking geek was someone I needed to network with.
J.L. agreed, wanting to continue our discussion (regarding the Alt-Right) on a then-unfamiliar and encrypted messaging app called Signal. Once we followed each other back on Twitter that day, we immediately expressed interest in understanding each other’s political perspectives further. We exchanged our phone numbers that same day & began initiating discussions via Signal. Excitement subsequently became my reaction every single time J.L. would text me.
Following that initial cyber-interaction, he and I would initiate a nearly equal amount of conversations, for a period of months leading up to the end of March 2018. Sometimes, he would send me links to further investigate, or read for (future) reference. When it came to sending these links, they would frequently result in mutually engaged praxis. In June of 2017, J.L. had already placed enough trust in me to help him stop white supremacists from receiving donations via PayPal. Knowing about my Californian upbringing, we identified a street in Long Beach that led to cutting off their payment flow. If I remember correctly, it was a member of Atomwaffen Division (and/or a “Sudetenland” group) who we stopped.
Comrade Hamilton would also send me links to his research-conducted (polling) tweets and his website’s blog posts [2]. One night, in the midst of my struggling to learn how to code in C, we even interacted through a social media platform he created; waxx.chat was its name. We anonymously typed out our thoughts, and J.L. would respond (in real time) with pictures to go with his thoughts!
Other times, he would send me media files of original content. Few people I’ve known can match the creative versatility that Comrade Hamilton channeled in his graphic and web development designs. In particular, I feel (and will remain) honored that he sought my advice on both the design and production logistics of what became known as the minimalist SRA patch. He pushed through, in spite of having been ridiculed by anonymous Twitter profiles, for having tweeted that he wanted to do “uniform designs” and handle logistics for what he called “a new Red army”.
Around late September and early October of 2017, in the formative days of the SRA, I was sent vector files for the minimalist SRA patch by J.L. over Signal. Alongside these files were drafts and prototypes of early SRA (info-)graphics. He asked me for advice on the material he should use for the creation of this patch, as well as the logistics for finding a distributor and the pricing. Meanwhile, J.L. explained to me every detail of the logo he designed. In his own words, text-messaged to me,
The three bullets represents comrades in solidarity as they are next to each other and equal in size. [The] wheat…represents abundance for everyone.
Regarding the pricing, he told me how he wanted to price these patches
…for $7.62 (as a nod to the AK round, which is 7.62x39mm)
The three depicted bullets are also the exact kind shown in all of the SRA logos since.
If I remember correctly, I helped him decide on using Velcro, and he found a union-backed patch maker. When the first orders went up for these patches on the SRA subreddit he also helped design, I gave him my home address, but also told him I couldn’t pay for it (or for SRA membership) with a VISA gift card. At the time, I was honestly afraid to explain the SRA to my parents and ask them for permission to use their credit/debit card. J.L. simply responded to me by saying “Don’t worry; your gift will be coming soon enough 😉”.
He even backed that statement up by sending me a photo of the envelope he’d send the minimalist patch with to me, an envelope I’ve still kept to this day under my study/writing desk. In mid-February of 2018, only a couple of days after the horrific Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, his envelope came in the mail with the patch I suppose I helped him produce!
However, it was soon after I received his patch that J.L. had removed my contact over Signal. He had become increasingly more involved with the SRA’s “Central Committee”, in accomplishing foundational work, whereas I had become mired in academic and personal frustrations which necessitated access to therapy that I lacked at that time. Our 5-month long falling out began on the evening of March 23, when he set boundaries for our correspondence that I had previously crossed. J.L. told me we would remain comrades, but that I had exerted too much of what I now know as emotional labor upon him; and thus, he also blocked me on Twitter. My profile was in the company of several verified accounts belonging to corporations. Coincidentally, the very next day was the March For Our Lives, where the students who survived the Parkland shooting courageously spoke out against gun violence & for structural changes to gun laws/gun lobbies. [3]
During those 5 months, I managed to gradually re-assess my desires, habits, and tendencies, both on & offline, among math tutors and mental health counselors behind phone hotlines. Yet even as my intense admiration for J.L. waned, and I began to align myself with a higher purpose on my terms, he remained comradely. Sometime in mid-April 2018, after rapper Killer Mike praised the burgeoning SRA on MSNBC anchor Joy Reid’s program, I gave some personal advice on the SRA’s subreddit. J.L., in the midst of stressors unknown to me, nonetheless messaged me through Reddit, telling me “I appreciate your posts on the subreddit in this trying time”. As soon as my thoughts were collected & my hesitation subsided, I replied to him, accurately stating “We’ll get through the organizational growing pains together. Thank you.”
And thank J.L. I did! During a transformative week in August of 2018, where I switched my major from Civil Engineering to English, I saw J.L.’s Twitter profile on my timeline again. He had unblocked me! Our cyber-friendship was further strengthened as we re-followed each other and asked each other how our lives were going. Throughout 2017, we both happened to ideologically transition from holding primarily anarchist beliefs to Marxist-Leninist ones. Throughout the remaining quarter of 2018, we both happened to transfer our academic pursuits as well. Following a life-changing psychedelic trip he previously professed to me & a move with his girlfriend from Georgia to Ohio, J.L. had decided to continue higher education. He was now determined to become a mycologist, and ultimately help de-stigmatize the use of psychedelics for medical purposes.
In the many months that followed, J.L. and I kept our cyber-distance, but we sporadically came back to connect on further current events. While the non-profit he co-founded continued growing exponentially over 2019, I donated to SRA mutual aid disaster relief efforts, and even sent him and his girlfriend a little money. When President Trump formally launched his 2020 campaign in Orlando, J.L. also confidentially gave me several tactical tips my off-keyboard comrades & I could use (though I wound up not making it to the Amway Center, which Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos owns). And, of course, we shared an optimistic outlook as we outwardly supported Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign.
Then, Super Tuesday eviscerated the prospective chances of that campaign, with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic transforming life days after. The “political revolution” which radicalized college students like us in the U.S. lay dazed and confused, despite our material conditions being so appropriate for precisely that. But even as J.L. began suffering from migraines, in the most uncertain moments of the pandemic, he didn’t back down from organizing Black Lives Matter protests and maintaining records for the SRA. From behind his laptop screen and under the Party of Socialism and Liberation’s chapter in Columbus, Ohio, J.L. continued this activism, constantly providing any intrigued comrades his undivided attention and instruction.
Our final couple of cyber-interactions remained both personal and political, with he & I expressing mutual respect for each other. In late April, J.L. went viral on Twitter for having pointed out a since-corrected issue that involved Tara Reade’s mother calling Larry King Live about her daughter. He messaged me at 11:30 p.m. on April 28, asking for help with something time-sensitive; but due to a glitch across Twitter that evening, I didn’t see his messages until hours later. J.L.’s final direct message to me was “Anyways, have a nice day” the morning after. Then, on July 12, he announced that he was engaged! When I saw this announcement three days later, with photos of a ring on his fiancée, Alex Poth, and both of them wearing matching white shoes, I replied “I’m so happy for you two! May y’all continue to live happy together!” Him liking my tweet reply would mark the last time we ever communicated in cyberspace or physically living.
Jason & I weren’t able to meet up in the flesh, although we talked about the possibility twice: once as I was leaving Walt Disney World (on the same day as the Parkland school shooting), and the other instance leading up to the inaugural SRA convention. Comrade Hamilton’s untimely passing stemmed from the diffuse midline glioma mutation H1 K27M. This mutation rarely inflicts patients under 70 to the point of fatality. Unfortunately, once its ambiguous shape is detected in the brain, patients lose control of their basic motor functions rapidly as the mutation compresses brain matter to the brain stem and cranium. Doctors diagnose such patients with less than one month to live, due to its exceptionally aggressive nature. [4]
Between the night I received the private message that informed me of his deteriorating condition and the night of August 27, I experienced a peculiar dream involving J.L., one that I think can be interpreted as a premonition. Within my own brain on the morning of Wednesday, August 19, I had a dream where I met a bed-ridden J.L. near the top of the University of Central Florida’s Student Union. His hospital bed and belongings were facing windows which faced the university’s renovated library (with automated retrieval center). A poster with an ecology report was to his left, his belongings were on a table, and his mattress was situated upon a column. While I stood nervously by this poster and he was being attended to by nurses, (the apparition of) J.L. came to me, his hospital garments stripped to reveal a beige outfit ((with SRA patch)). We walked over to the elevators and hugged. Before the (apparitions of) nurses escorted his pallid body down an elevator, J.L. snuck a yellowed-out note in my left hand, with a message I couldn’t decipher and a sketch of utopian-looking buildings. Then, I took a separate elevator and inexplicably went through a video game simulation with a close off-keyboard comrade named Kevin, another co-founder of the YDSA@UCF. [5]
Since J.L.’s untimely passing, I’ve found myself writing profusely. (J.L. himself suggested I should someday become a professional writer) [6]. I’ve also found myself in the throes of learning how to guide my self day-by-day, while also maintaining my academic and career-related responsibilities that have compelled me to plan for an uncertain future. Like any other who loses a friend, I’ve sought to understand how I can find closure while learning to honor their legacy and live the life they can’t any further. Our technologic bond and digital selves now persist, even in death; I confirmed that for myself when I found a webcast video of J.L.’s funeral, which took place just two days after his death on August 29th, following a quick online search for his obituary. Sobbing tears streamed down my similarly-shaped face as I heard how amazing he was to those he knew in the flesh, speaking at a distance from attendees, but beside his open casket.
Minutes before the webcast (and the ceremony within it) concluded, however, my jaw dropped. The funeral celebrant, a man who looked thrice J.L.’s age, played a touching song aloud: “When I’m Gone” by the radical folk singer and activist Phil Ochs [7]. As Ochs began strumming, I immediately recalled a Signal conversation where I sent J.L. a link to another Ochs song: “Love Me, I’m A Liberal”. During our next conversation, he thanked me for introducing him to Ochs’s music. Soon after sending me that comment, J.L. gleefully admitted that he enjoyed hearing Ochs’s audio-political commentary so much, he listened to a 4 & ½ hour long playlist of Ochs tracks while working!
During his tragically truncated lifetime, Comrade Hamilton understood, better than anyone else I’ve known, that “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”. In my humble opinion, his character was like that of a modern John Brown. It was J.L.’s revolutionary zeal which propelled the Marxist vision of an armed proletariat into an American reality, uniting thousands of like-minded comrades across all 50 states. Having been ‘there’ around the SRA’s inception, before their membership dues existed & when only a few dozen followed its Twitter account, I always knew this group J.L. co-founded would be successful. It’s by his design & Destiny’s that he got to bring 7000 dues-paying members, 23.4k Instagram followers, and 50,000 Twitter followers together before his body expired.
Comrade Hamilton additionally exemplified the kind of true revolutionary that Che Guevara defined as being guided by “a great feeling of love”, and by “a love of living humanity…transformed into actual deeds…”. Looking back at our conversations (some of which I admit I’ve saved), one Signal message he sent to me in December 2017 affirms how strong our bond was. Stressed out by finals week and a then-unmatched increase in the price of Bitcoin [8], J.L. calmed doubts I fixated on by telling me:
“You’re too worried. My love and compassion for others doesn’t cease once I know that they are my comrades. I always appreciate you and your input.”
To me, these words corroborate how much he loved uplifting the human race beyond our current late stage capitalism, how much I loved learning with him, and how much I loved (and will continue to love) him back. Our conversations throughout the last 3 years & 2 months have helped me grow into a better and wiser man.
Those of us venturing deeper into this already-turbulent decade must become as prepared as possible to extend our arms to those most in need. As proletarians, we must learn how to bear arms to protect our most vulnerable, amidst the rising atrocities inflicted upon us all by the elites and made complicit by those elected. Too many Americans continue to put off seeing a doctor until their condition(s) threaten their very livelihood, because of a healthcare system based on profiting off our suffering bodies. This was the case for J.L., as the migraines that preceded the brain cancer that took him coincided with the lockdowns that began upon the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic in mid-March of 2020. For all our loved ones (like J.L.) who couldn’t get diagnoses and treatment soon enough, even the ones that result in terminal illness, we who are healthy must continue aggressively advocating for socialized medicine and a universal healthcare system that won’t neglect taking care of patients because they couldn’t pony up exorbitant funds.
Jason Lee Hamilton was a true friend and comrade to everyone he interacted with, in any way or any time he could. The uniquely special cyber-connection we shared truly touched my soul (alongside the souls of many others), and he inspired me unlike any other person I have primarily known from a distance.
J.L. wouldn’t want me (or any of us) to be worried about these existential struggles we must defeat & political struggles we shall overcome. He & his work will live on through me and all of his comrades, on and off the Internet. I am so proud of J.L. for all the incredible achievements he accomplished and for the incredible legacy he has since left with us. I will continue to promote his legacy (& advocate for the same humanitarian causes he championed) as best as I can, for as long as I live. My condolences to his fiancée, family members, friends he knew in-person, and all who will miss our dearly beloved brother, of & for humanity, who now rests in power. [9]
Endnotes from May 18, 2021:
[1] Since this virtual meeting, and in small part due to my being a co-founder, the YDSA@UCF is now the 2nd-largest of all Young Democratic Socialists of America chapters. Only the University of Virginia contains more members in their chapter.
[2] Since passing, his online portfolio, www.jason.sx, and Tumblr blog, www.jason.sx, have both been taken down. You can view an archived version of his portfolio here, and an archived version of his personal blog (via a Wayback Machine capture from June 2016) here .
[3] While reeling from the sting of being cut off, I wound up gifting J.L.’s patch to a Communist math tutor who graduated that Spring 2018. This off-keyboard comrade would move to Colorado with the patch. It is still not in my possession, as it remains misplaced somewhere in this comrade’s apartment.
[4] This information was communicated to me through a neuroscience-studying colleague, Eric Singh, and clarified further by J.L.’s fiancée, Alex Poth, when she reached out to me (via Reddit) in January 2021.
[5] The entirety of this paragraph was written on May 18, based off of my journal entry for August 19, 2020. In January 2021, Kevin would become the Secretary for the YDSA@UCF, a fact that reminds me of J.L.’s previously served time as co-founder & Secretary of the SRA.
[6] I have since graduated from the University of Central Florida with a Bachelor’s degree in English (with a concentration in technical communications), as well as a Minor from that university’s Writing & Rhetoric department.
[7] According to Poth, who planned J.L.’s August 29th funeral in advance, “A mutual friend of our (sic) had reminded me that Jason once said he wanted that Phil Ochs song played at his funeral”.
[8] When I originally published this eulogy piece, the record for highest price of 1 Bitcoin was around $19,000 in USD. Due to high-profile investors like Elon Musk, the highest price of 1 Bitcoin has nearly tripled to $63,195 in USD. Compared to the price of 1 Bitcoin in July 2020, it has sextupled. At the time of this edit, 1 Bitcoin costs $40,770.18 in USD.
[9] When I originally published this, I also included the following link to a GoFundMe page set up for covering funeral expenses. Thanks to several comrades’ contributions (including $40 from myself), J.L.’s funeral expenses were fully covered, with remaining funds being donated to brain cancer research.
