The desperate fascist

It is indeed the 10,000th spoon when all one needs is a knife that the DeSantis campaign has a felt need to portray him as a Nazi ubermensch because his campaign is receding more quickly than Miami’s water supply:

On Tuesday, the Daily Beast published a piece about a Twitter account called @DeSantisCams that is pro–Ron DeSantis and also, even by the standards of the contemporary American right, quite pro-Hitler.

Last weekend, for instance, the account published a video that culminates in an image of soldiers marching in lockstep toward the Florida governor, whose head turns into a rotating Sonnenrad, or sun wheel. The symbol was installed by Heinrich Himmler in the SS’s Wewelsburg castle and has been adopted in recent decades by white supremacists, including the individuals who carried out mass shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and Buffalo, New York. Conservatives often argue that Democrats are being hysterical for saying that right-wing meme phenomena like the “OK” hand gesture have fascist overtones; there would seem to be some difficulty involved in making that claim about a lightning bolt circle that was created by the leader of the SS for his occult Nazi castle.

What’s more, the video came to the Daily Beast’s attention because it had been retweeted by a DeSantis campaign employee named Nate Hochman, an up-and-coming conservative writer and past contributor to the National Review who has appeared in the New York Times as both an author and an interview subject. Later Tuesday, Axios reported that Hochman actually made the video himself before arranging to have it posted online by an outside account.

Might I interrupt to inject: just one heck of a job by the Times on that one.

If any of this sounds familiar, that may be because the exact same thing happened already: At the end of June, the DeSantis campaign retweeted an ostensibly supporter-generated video in which references to DeSantis’ anti-LGBTQ+ “accomplishments” were spliced in with images of hyper-dominant, masculinist-endorsed movie characters like Achilles as played by Brad Pitt. That video opened with clips of Donald Trump making tolerant statements about trans issues, insinuating that Trump was less of a man than DeSantis for being comfortable with gay and trans people. And according to a report in the New York Times that was published this Sunday, that video was also made by a DeSantis campaign employee before being sent to an outside account to post.

The Times doesn’t say whether the staffer who made the other video, which was edited in the same rapid-fire style as the Sonnenrad clip, was Hochman. In any case, Axios also reported that Hochman has been laid off and can now return to writing National Review pieces like his December 2022 complaint that liberals make too many unfair accusations of fascism. (Some 37 other DeSantis staffers have been laid off as well, as the campaign reacts to slower-than-expected fundraising. For the record, the conservative writer Rod Dreher says Hochman has privately denied knowing the Sonnenrad was a Nazi symbol.) It seems unlikely that there will be more red-pilled muscleman videos issued during or after the great DeSantis reset, which, according to various strategy memos that have made their way to the press, has settled on the idea that voters need to learn that the candidate is a family man and veteran. (The alpha posturing is also at odds with the campaign’s strategic conviction that it should avoid directly confronting Trump. Objectively speaking—objectively!—this campaign goes balk balk balk because it is chicken.)

I wonder how all of the people “unfairly ;:))” accused of fascism keep ending up in the DeSantis campaign.