An aide to Ron DeSantis who created and shared a video featuring a symbol used by Nazis and white supremacists was fired from the Florida governor’s Republican presidential campaign.
The firing of Nate Hochman, a former staff writer at the conservative National Review, was first reported by Semafor.
A DeSantis official told reporters: “Nate Hochman is no longer with the campaign. And we will not be commenting on him further.”
Hochman, whose Twitter account is headed with a quote from the British philosopher Roger Scruton – “Good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created” – did not comment.
Like another controversial video, which attacked Donald Trump for being too supportive of LGBTQ+ rights, the video containing the Nazi symbol used internet memes popular on the far right and was retweeted from the account @desantiscams.
Luke Thompson, a Republican operative, first noted the retweet and said: “The @desantiscams account just deleted this video after at least one campaign staffer RT’d it. I wonder if this was also made in-house.”
Scored to Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) by Kate Bush, the minute-long video showed 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.
The video ended with two files of soldiers marching towards a Florida flag, the centre of which turned into a revolving red and yellow disc.
The disc resembled a sonnenrad or sunwheel, which the Anti-Defamation League defines as an “ancient European symbol appropriated by the Nazis in their attempt to invent an idealised ‘Aryan/Norse’ heritage” and which has “countless variations [including] the swastika”.
Describing a close match to the image in the pro-DeSantis video, the ADL adds: “One sonnenrad version in particular is popular among white supremacists: two concentric circles with crooked rays emanating from the inner circle to the outer circle.”
The ADL also notes that “because sonnenrad imagery is used by many cultures around the world, one should not assume that most sonnenrad-like images necessarily denote racism or white supremacy; rather, they should be analysed carefully in the context in which they appear”.
The sonnenrad in the pro-DeSantis video appeared – and was deleted – in the context of a campaign that has relentlessly tacked right while being dogged by negative headlines and sluggish poll numbers.
On Tuesday, before news of Hochman’s firing, DeSantis escaped unscathed when his motorcade crashed into itself in Tennessee and confirmed that more than a third of campaign staff had been cut.
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DeSantis remains about 30 points behind Donald Trump, despite the former president facing 71 criminal indictments, the prospect of more, a $5m fine after being found liable for sexual abuse and defamation, and multiple lawsuits concerning his business affairs.
To DeSantis observers, the discovery of the sonnenrad video and the firing of Hochman were indicative of a campaign trying to run to the right even of Trump but failing to find fertile ground.
Asked if Hochman’s firing for using a Nazi symbol suggested DeSantis might finally have found a limit to his rightward march, the former Republican operative turned anti-Trump campaigner Rick Wilson said it did not.
“DeSantis having limits would’ve meant he never heard of him in the first place,” the Lincoln Project co-founder said. “The only reason he got fired was that he got caught.
“DeSantis is perfectly happy having this kind of person on the staff but doesn’t want people to know it. He still employs, Christina Pushaw [his press secretary] and other alt-right, white nationalist and anti-LGBTQ+ activists.”