SPOILER

Anti-MAGA Troll Spills How He Derailed Fox Interview

Tom Hoyle said he’s long been committed to standing up to bullies.

A Trump rally attendee who likened the MAGA movement to the Jonestown cult in a viral Fox News interview has spoken out about his long-standing opposition to the president.

The interview was filmed at President Donald Trump’s event in support of Sen. Darline Graham in Rock Hill, South Carolina, where Fox News spoke to a bearded man in a baseball cap assumed to be a Trump fan about his reasons for attending.

The man instead likened the president’s fans to followers of Jim Jones, leader of the infamous cult whose members died in the 1978 Jonestown massacre.

“There’s nothing like seeing a cult right up front, man,” he told Fox News reporter Lucas Tomlinson.

Independent news website The Handbasket spoke to the man in the viral interview, Tom Hoyle, after the Thursday rally, and he explained why he spoke out.

He said that when a rally organizer called him to solicit his attendance, he decided to disrupt the event.

“They solicited us through our phone, and we despise that. Whether it’s a bank or a company or a politician, we despise that. So we always look at ways we can turn the tables and make their day a little less smooth,” Hoyle, 57, said.

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“As much as I despise Donald Trump and his ilk and MAGA and all of that—I despise them. I hate them with every bit of my DNA. That pushed me over the edge and I said, here’s my opportunity. Let’s go do something goofy,” he said.

Hoyle, who owns a custom printing company in Charlotte, North Carolina, told the outlet he’d attended anti-ICE protests in the area and had always been determined to stand up to bullies.

“People will tell you I’ve always been a loudmouth, and I’m such an anti-bully. I become a bully with bullies. So maybe Gandhi wouldn’t approve, but, you know, maybe Malcolm X would,” he said.

Hoyle said he was once a registered Republican but now adamantly opposes what the party has become under Trump.

“I don’t want the stain of what used to be the Republican Party on me anymore. There is no Republican Party. It’s just MAGA, and they’re dead,” he told The Handbasket.

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“I have hated Donald Trump since 1989, as a young man, sophomore in college. What he did with the Central Park Five,” explained Hoyle. (Trump took out ads in major New York City newspapers urging the return of the death penalty after the rape and murder of a jogger in Central Park that year, inflaming public outrage against the five young Black and Latino men who were arrested in the case, and and refused to apologize after they were exonerated. The men became known as the “Central Park Five.”)

Hoyle said he was ejected from the rally by security after the Fox News interview.

He said he thought Fox News decided to interview him because “there’s a certain stereotype of white guys with some sort of facial hair and a ball cap on, and I fell into that. They don’t understand that I’m what you call a daywalker. I look like you, but I’m not like you. I’m the vampire during the day—come talk to me and watch yourself get bitten.”

Republicans are battling against voter discontent about rising prices in Hoyle’s North Carolina, where Democrats are expected to make gains in House races and where the race for the open Senate seat is tight.

The Daily Beast has contacted Fox News for comment.

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