Unbelievable.
Axios broke this nauseating story, writing,
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ 2024 campaign fired an aide this week who secretly created and shared a pro-DeSantis video that featured the candidate at the center of a Sonnenrad, an ancient symbol appropriated by the Nazis and still used by some white supremacists.
… Nate Hochman, a speechwriter on the DeSantis campaign and a former writer for National Review, created the video on his own and shared it through a pro-DeSantis Twitter account, according to a person familiar with the matter. Hochman then retweeted the video, but it was deleted shortly afterward.
“Nate Hochman is no longer with the campaign. And we will not be commenting on him further,” a DeSantis campaign official told Axios….
Observations:
1. KABOOM! There goes my head.
2. So much for vain hopes that Gov. DeSantis would be capable of hiring more competent and trustworthy staff than his competition for the GOP Presidential nomination.
3. The video is so outrageous that it raises the suspicion of deliberate sabotage.
4. The President and the Democrats have been smearing Republicans as crypto-fascists (while behaving like fascists themselves), and the DiSantis campaign’s brain trust circulates a video using Third Reich symbolism. Good plan! Who ARE these people?
5. The episode directly implicates DeSantis’s competence, the kinds of people who advise him, and the degree to which the metaphorical bottom dwellers and cockroaches of the Far Right have infested his campaign.
6. Personally, I had never heard of the Sonnenrad. I have now, thanks to the helpful DeSantis campaign! It’s great learning things, isn’t it? Now I’m waiting for the excuse that Hochman never heard of it either, that the use of the symbol was just an innocent mistake. He thought it was just a cool design element! You know, like former Virginia Governor Ralph Northam didn’t know that wearing blackface was offensive to blacks…
7. Oh! About the quote in the headline: In 1962, the National League expansion New York Mets were spectacularly bad to the extent of being hilarious. After one particularly horrible play on the way to losing 120 games, a modern record for ineptitude, their manager, Casey Stengel, was heard to exclaim, “Can’t anyone here play this game?”
The answer, sadly, was “No.”
Ethics Alarms 
I’m convinced that DeSantis’ campaign is being deliberately sabotaged. The Dems, MSM, and most establishment GOP do not want him to win, and would rather have Biden (or whomever is the last minute substitute—Newsome or Michelle O) win in ‘24, which is why they’re propping Trump.
Nate Hochman isn’t a Dem or establishment Republican. He’s a far-right weirdo. There are a lot of them. You can’t blame the left for everything; the right has agency too.
Why not? The left blames the right for everything.
That argument would be very persuasive if I were nine years old.
(Substance rather than snark, please, as often as possible…)
Null Pointer’s argument had no substance. That is as my point. “They started it!” is not a substantive rebuttal to “Stop blaming them for everything;” in fact, it only proves my point.
The preferred response is a reference to the various items on the Rationalizations list, like #2. Ethics Estoppel, or “They’re Just as Bad”, #2 A. Sicilian Ethics, or “They had it coming,” #7. The “Tit for Tat” Excuse and others.
“(Substance rather than snark, please, as often as possible…)”
Sheesh, there goes half MY schtick…
It was not meant to be persuasive, it was meant to be flippant.
My vote is deliberate sabotage. The video itself is such a mess that it would boggle my mind if anyone working on a supposedly professional political campaign would think it was an acceptable advertisement for DeSantis. Further, the video was made in secret and posted surreptitiously, appearing to bypass normal publicity channels that would’ve hopefully squashed it. Even an extreme right winger, who supposedly wants DeSantis to be elected, would/should recognize Nazi symbology/imagery and KNOW it would immediately be recognized by the Left and used to smear the candidate. Hochman is either a plant or so egregiously incompetent he should’ve never been allowed within 100 yards of a political candidate.
You’re leaving out the third possibility: that Nate Hochman likes Nazis and thinks they are good, and that he was trying to appeal to others who think the same. You acknowledge that he could be an extreme right-winger; what do you think Nazis are?
Nazi meant National Socialist. You interpret it left or right as you think appropriate.
right, not tight.
Fixed. I thought you were alluding to John Wayne, who frequently said (like in “The Alamo”), “listen tight.”
Thanks, but no, actually I wasn’t thinking of that, although yes, that’s the Duke’s catchline.
Along with “Pilgrim,” made famous by Rich Little in his John Wayne impression. That one was most prominently used in “Liberty Valance.”
Reminds me of the Z morning Zu on Z100 here in the 80s when they sometimes had “the Rapping Duke,” who used to rap things like “Hey there, pilgrim, get up outa bed, if ya stay there any longer, you could pass for dead…”
Sabotage
One of the clips is from the movie Scarface. The goal was to smear both Trump and DeSantis.
Both candidates threaten the status quo in DC which threatens the gravy train.
You clearly don’t know who Nate Hochman is.
Even aside from the Nazi symbolism, which can’t really be anything else because there’s no other reason for that symbol to be there… If you pause the video on the headlines that flash briefly on the screen after the point where the video becomes optimistic and the meme-face is smiling in relief and approval… they appear to be headlines from the Left that are harshly critical of DeSantis and his actions. Most creators of political ads would have instead used conservative headlines describing what DeSantis does in the most positive and wholesome way possible.
So… either the video is supposed to leave a lingering bad feeling about DeSantis while ostensibly praising him, making this indeed a cheap false flag operation… or we’re supposed to like that people hate him and don’t trust him, because those are the people we ourselves are supposed to hate. Because that’s how a healthy democracy works.
Nate Hochman, you don’t want to make political ads. You want to go home and rethink your life.
…And make some real life friends while you’re at it.
Maybe I should give him the old Southeast Asian geography lesson.
The entire GOP establishment is incompetent. Actually, the entire government is incompetent. They are to busy taking bribes, committing crimes, silencing opposition and colluding with rich donors to redistribute middle class wealth to wherever the donors currently want it to pay attention to the nation crumbling around them.
The good news, in my mind, is the immediate firing of this guy and the deletion of the video. I do not think Desantis or anybody can be blamed for the infiltration of successful moles. The campaign did the right thing at the right time. Recall that no one on the Left criticized that awful totalitarian speech milieu of Biden’s Philadelphia speech.
Milieu AND content. Never mind though—a whack job with an unhealthy Nazi fetish shouldn’t slip though all vetting in a competent campaign organization.
It looks like some on the right tried to warn people about Hochman’s extremism, but the far right protected him and lashed out at the criticism. A strike against the “mole” theory many here are promoting.
https://www.threads.net/@davidfrenchjag/post/CvK213NOFfK/?igshid=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==
Yeah, useful reference and perspective. French’s analysis in spot on. Also glad to have more data to figure out what “based” means.