Ron DeSantis’ implosion has been well documented here and elsewhere. It’s real and it’s spectacular. This is just frosting on the cake:
“Ron DeSantis fires staffer who retweeted video with Nazi imagery.”
The staffer, Nate Hochman, had retweeted the video over the weekend before he deleted the post, a screenshot shared with NBC News showed. Hochman, a communications staffer who has written for The New York Times, National Review and other outlets, is considered by some to be an up-and-coming thinker on the right.
“Nate Hochman is no longer with the campaign,” a campaign official said. “And we will not be commenting on him further.”
He’s also an up and coming Nazi but the NY Times and National Review don’t have a problem with that. Maybe they should have read the Tim Miller profile of this fine young man from last March:
Hochman, a conservative writer who has earned more ink by the age of 25 than anyone this side of Justin Bieber, has garnered a reputation as a young MAGA whisperer. The New Republic tagged him as one of “the radical young intellectuals who want to take over the American right.” He’s written for the Dispatch, National Review (where he was on staff), the Claremont Institute’s American Mind (where he interned), and more. Heck, even the Gray Lady turned to Hochman for a think piece about the secular culture war.
But like every MAGA intellectual (or “intellectual”) before him, Hochman, has found it necessary to cozy up to the movement’s gutter-dwelling racists in order to climb the ladder of influence.
As first reported by the Dispatch last year, Hochman participated in a Twitter Space with white nationalist virgin Nick Fuentes—and lavishly praised him. “We were just talking about your influence and we were saying, like, you’ve gotten a lot of kids ‘based’ and we respect that for sure,” Hochman said. “I literally said, I think Nick’s probably a better influence than Ben Shapiro on young men who might otherwise be conservative.”
The film captures the race against the Nazis to develop the first atomic bomb, and…
He went on to discuss the merits and demerits of one of America’s most vile humans, saying the fact that he has said “super edgy things means that there’s a pretty strong ceiling to what you can actually accomplish in politics.”
“Edgy” is definitely one way to describe Holocaust denial!
When the Dispatch asked him about his Fuentes remarks, Hochman acknowledged that he said some “really stupid things, which I don’t actually believe”—but did not apologize.
In the intervening time The Bulwark was provided with the audio from the Twitter space—and it turns out that complimenting a white nationalist was not the only stupid thing Hochman uttered that day.
During his naked attempt to get Fuentes to think he was also based, Hochman says “when the man’s right, he’s right” in response to Fuentes’s claim that “women are goofy, okay, they should have no authority, they should have no authority over men.” Then, after Fuentes says that women “just really have no business in politics,” Hochman repeats his response: “When the man’s right, he’s right.”
Hochman later asked Fuentes how he plans to deal with the fact that “50 percent of American whites are, like, shitlibs now” if he wants to be successful in advancing white identity politics.
Women are goofy and shouldn’t be allowed in politics.
Half of white people are shitlibs.
Ron 2024.
As Miller wrote: “Nate Hochman’s hiring sends a signal of what the Florida governor wants for his campaign.” He knew what he had. He liked it.