Republican senator employs aide fired by DeSantis over neo-Nazi imagery

The Guardian

13 hours ago

A staffer for Missouri Republican senator Eric Schmitt was previously fired from Ron DeSantis's unsuccessful presidential campaign after making a video containing neo-Nazi imagery, and later peddled far-right conspiracy theories in a Marco Rubio-linked thinktank.
Nate Hochman's job in the hard-right senator's office, along with earlier Trump appointments to executive agencies, suggest to some experts there are few barriers to far-right activists making a career in Republican party politics.
The Guardian contacted Eric Schmitt's office for comment.
Heidi Beirich, the co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told the Guardian: 'Hochman's position shows once again that there are no guardrails against extremists in the GOP nowadays.'
She added: 'Racism, antisemitism and other abhorrent beliefs don't seem to stop extremists from appointments with far-right politicians, including in the highest office of the presidency.'
Hochman, 26, has worked for Schmitt since February, according to congressional information website LegiStorm, a development that was first noted on political newsletter Liberal Currents.
He has also posted dozens of times to X to publicize Schmitt's initiatives, media appearances, and speeches.
The Guardian reported last September on Hochman's previous job at America 2100, an organization founded in 2023 as a thinktank. The organization was founded by Mike Needham, who served as Marco Rubio's chief of staff from 2018 to 2023 when Rubio was a senator and who is once again his chief of staff at the state department.
In that and subsequent reporting, it was revealed that Hochman's work for America 2100 was focused on producing videos, some of which targeted Haitian migrants in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, and others that rehearsed conspiracy theories about LGBTQ people and human rights organizations.
This was the latest in a string of scandals in the young operative's political career.
In July 2023 he was fired from the presidential campaign of Florida governor Ron DeSantis after retweeting a pro-DeSantis, anti-Trump video.
As the Guardian reported, the video portrayed a ''Wojak' meme, a sad-looking man popular on the right, against headlines about Trump policy failures before showing the meme cheering up to headlines about DeSantis and images of the governor at work', all to the tune of Kate Bush's Running Up That Hill.
Finally, it superimposed DeSantis on to ranks of marching soldiers and a Sonnenrad – a Norse symbol frequently appropriated by neo-Nazis.
As Hochman departed the campaign, Axios reported he had made the video but endeavored to make it 'appear as if it was produced externally'.
Just a year earlier, Hochman seemed a rising conservative star, with a clutch of prestigious fellowships, a staff position at National Review, and a growing media profile as a key spokesman of the national conservative movement.
That trajectory shifted after never-Trump conservative outlet the Dispatch revealed details of a Twitter spaces recording of a 2022 conversation between Hochman and white supremacist Nick Fuentes.
In that exchange, Hochman complimented Fuentes, saying, 'You've gotten a lot of kids based' and calling him 'probably a better influence than Ben Shapiro on young men'.
Following his DeSantis exit, beyond America 2100, Hochman's writing at a paleoconservative and other far-right outlets embraced the extreme positions characteristic of the so-called new right.
In the American Spectator during 2024, he heaped praise on Salvadorian dictator Nayib Bukele; endorsed far-right publisher Jonathan 'L0m3z' Keeperman arguing that masculinity is under feminist attack; and echoed the 'Sailer strategy' first coined by neo-eugenicist writer Steve Sailer, proposing that Republicans should ignore minority voters and 'go where the ducks are' by maximizing white turnout.
Another column entitled 'Was it Worth the Empanadas?' portrayed immigration in the terms of the 'Great Replacement' style conspiracy theory, asserting that it would 'dismantle and replace both America and the civilization that gave birth to it, affecting (sic) perhaps the first transfer of power from one people and civilization to another'.
Liberal Currents first noted rhetorical parallels between Hochman and his new boss since he joined Schmitt's staff.
For example, while Hochman wrote in May last year that America 'is not an 'idea', or a 'universal nation', or an economic zone, or a low-tax parking space for global capital – it is our home', on 30 April Schmitt delivered a Senate floor speech decrying 'the international elite – the so-called 'citizens of the world' – who see our country as a global economic zone, a giant shopping mall with an airport attached', and deployed similar rhetoric in an X post earlier that month.
And after Hochman tweeted about federal border czar Tom Homan as 'the perfect embodiment of the middle American radical' – a term popularized by white nationalist writer Sam Francis – Schmitt began posting about how the government 'has been at war with middle America'.
On the other hand, Schmitt – as a US senator, and previously as Missouri attorney-general – occupied hard-right positions long before Hochman joined his team.
In a 2022 interview with Glenn Beck, Schmitt echoed the 'Great Replacement' conspiracy theory, claiming that Democrats and the Biden administration were 'fundamentally trying to change this country through their illegal immigration policy'. He later dismissed reporting on the comments as 'woke journalism'.
Hochman is just one activist with far-right links who has found employment in the second Trump administration.
Darren Beattie, for example, served as a speechwriter in the first Trump administration but was fired in 2018 after CNN revealed he had spoken at a 2016 HL Mencken Club meeting also attended by white nationalists including Richard Spencer and Peter Brimelow.
Despite this dismissal, Trump appointed him in late 2020 to the US Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad, though Biden dismissed him from the commission in early 2022.
After leaving the White House, Beattie launched the rightwing media outlet Revolver News, raising funds by selling pro-Trump merchandise including shirts that read 'It's OK to deny 2020' and promoting conspiracy theories that January 6th was an 'FBI setup'.
Then in February, Beattie was appointed to the state department's top public diplomacy role as acting under-secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs.
Beirich, the extremism expert, said 'It's a sad, shameful fact that the GOP now mainstreams extremist ideas – and harbors those that proliferate them.'