Hinkle was recently featured by the NYT as the face of the rising anti-imperialist and pro-Palestinian movements.
Today, he says he is a Stalinist and a Maoist who was expelled from the Communist Party of the United States. (Roberta Wood, a party leader in Chicago, said he subscribed to the newsletter but had never joined the party and did not reflect its values.) He once supported Bernie Sanders, but now praises Donald Trump.
He is, he wrote last year, an “American PATRIOT, GOD fearing, Pro-FAMILY, Marxist Leninist, Pro-PALESTINE, RUSSIA & CHINA, Anti-DEEP STATE, Anti-IMPERIALIST, Anti-WOKE, Pro-GROWTH, ANTI-MONOPOLY, Pro-GUN, Pro-FOSSIL FUEL.”
Now liberals everywhere will continue to associate those ideologies with uncritical support for Putin and anti-LGBT views. 
It does make their job easier if they pick a guy that is organically annoying. So that would probably be part of it. Less chance of him messing up and breaking character as well.
they used to find people already saying what they wanted in zines or whatever and then backing them rather than directly commissioning propaganda, no reason to think they wouldn’t find indoctrinated jackasses to prop up doing the current thing.
He was hanging out with Russian soldiers and talked in a video conference in Iran. It seems like this dude is either the most annoying, successful modern day spy, or he’s useful to every agency in the world because he might give you something valuable if you treat him right lol