Activist with neo-Nazi ties fronts Marco Rubio-linked anti-immigration effort

The rightwing activist Nate Hochman, who was fired last year by the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, for employing neo-Nazi imagery in a campaign video, is now the face of a Marco Rubio-linked thinktank’s efforts to spread anti-immigrant panic from Ohio to Pennsylvania.

Videos featuring Hochman recorded in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, have been boosted on X by a range of rightwing figures including the platform’s owner, the tech billionaire Elon Musk.

In recent days Hochman, 26, has recorded several videos on location in Charleroi for America 2100, a rightwing thinktank where he is an adviser, according to his biographies on X and at websites where he has published articles. Hochman is also a staff writer and podcaster at the rightwing website the American Spectator, where his recent output has mostly consisted of anti-immigrant messaging.

Like Springfield in Ohio, Charleroi has attracted a community of Haitian migrants.

The borough manager, Jim Manning, told CBS News on Wednesday that immigrants including Haitians “have been a benefit to the town”.

He added: “They come here. They buy property. They open businesses. They work here. They pay taxes. So for us, at the end of the day, it has been a benefit.”

Hochman has so far only recorded interviews with older white residents of the town, who have variously complained that the newcomers do not speak English and that migrants have taken “American jobs”.

One interviewee appears to concede that the Haitians are in Charleroi legally but dismisses the importance of that fact.

“The perception is that it’s not legal,” the interviewee says at one point. “Now, you get a lot of people saying they’re illegals and everyone wants to fight about that term, but it doesn’t really matter.”

Most have not been shared extensively, although one of the videos was reposted by far-right account End Wokeness, and reposted in turn by Musk to his nearly 200 million followers along with a nugget of political analysis. “Pennsylvania is a swing state,” Musk wrote. His repost was shared in turn by the America 2100 account.

America 2100 is ostensibly a thinktank, launched by Rubio’s chief of staff, Michael Needham, in June 2023. Rubio is a Republican senator from Florida. Coverage of the launch presented it as a project with Rubio’s blessing, whose mission was to “begin the work of codifying and institutionalizing the ideas Rubio helped pioneer”.

In July, however, Needham was also appointed as president of another thinktank, American Compass, which is led by a former Mitt Romney aide, Oren Cass.

Cass and American Compass have drawn attention by promoting interventionist economic policies. Those policy ideas overlap with those of JD Vance: in reporting on the Needham hire, Politico called American Compass a “Vance-aligned think tank”, and Vance “an ally whose own staff has deep ties to the organization”.

American Compass’s policy director, Chris Griswold, meanwhile, is another former Rubio staffer.

After being dubbed “Little Marco” by Trump in a 2016 primary in which he, in turn, mocked the size of Trump’s hands, Rubio moved closer to Trump politically over the succeeding eight years, and in May even refused to commit to accepting the results of the upcoming election.

At that time, Rubio was under consideration as Trump’s running mate but was eventually passed over for JD Vance.

Although there was reporting on America 2100 at launch, there is little information on the site about its current personnel or the nature of the entity underlying its activities.

America 2100 was registered as a non-stock corporation in Virginia in June 2023.

Officers listed in filings include Needham and another former Rubio staffer, Albert Martinez, along with Lisa Lisker, a lawyer who was reportedly previously involved in an organization that spread misinformation about solar power in 12 states, and was also secretary for JD Vance’s campaign committee during his run for Senate in the 2022 election.

The Guardian emailed America 2100 for comment via an email address designated for “press”, and emailed Needham and Lisker. The Guardian also contacted Rubio’s office.

Only Needham responded, writing that: “I know this article will be bad-faith political hit job.”

Needham added: “Nate did a great job reporting on the tragic story playing out in Charleroi.”

In mid-2022, Hochman appeared poised for a high-profile career in conservative media, having been rewarded with blue ribbon fellowships and a staff job at the home of mainstream conservative opinion, National Review.

His status as a representative of the emerging, harder-edged “national conservative” movement made him “the leftwing media’s go-to voice for insight into this crowd”, according to a story on rising rightwing influencers published at that time by the Dispatch, a “never Trump” conservative website.

Hochman’s appearance in that story, however, was the start of his undoing.

The Dispatch reported on a recording of Hochman in a Twitter spaces conversation with the white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer Nick Fuentes.

In that conversation, Hochman reportedly disagreed with Fuentes on some topics, but also appeared to compliment the “America First” far-right activist, telling Fuentes: “You’ve gotten a lot of kids based, and we respect that for sure,” and “I think Nick’s probably a better influence than [the conservative commentator] Ben Shapiro on young men who might otherwise be conservatives.”

Amid the furore that followed, Hochman was stripped of his fellowships. In March 2023 he left the National Review to work for DeSantis’s abortive presidential campaign. He was fired by the campaign that July, however, after he retweeted a meme-drenched pro-DeSantis video on his personal account that embraced the aesthetics of the online far right.

As the Guardian reported at the time, 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.

Then 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 that Hochman had made the video, but endeavored to make it “appear as if it was produced externally”.

Since then, Hochman has more fully embraced the more extreme actors of the so-called “new right”.

A week ago, he published an essay at the far-right magazine IM–1776, which appeared to embed conspiratorial claims about the media in a jeremiad against democracy.

Hochman claims at one point in the piece: “The US constitution was conceived to thwart tyranny; but it did so, in part, by limiting mass democracy. Once those limits were removed, power was no longer dispersed across a system of checks and balances, but centralized in the hands of whoever controlled the machinery of opinion formation.”

Another recent essay published at IM–1776 characterized critics of Darryl Cooper – the “Holocaust revisionist” who recently appeared on Tucker Carlson’s webcast – as adherents of “Hitlerian Satanism”.

IM–1776 also gave space for the alt-right influencer Douglass Mackey to characterize his prosecution under Klan-era election laws as the government “prosecuting people [for] posting election jokes”.

The Guardian previously reported on IM–1776’s close links to the rightwing activist Christopher Rufo, who has spent much of the last week trying in vain to substantiate Donald Trump’s false claims that Haitian immigrants are eating “dogs” “cats” and “pets”.

In his essay, Hochman praises Rufo, saying that he “has won an impressive string of culture war victories by actively crafting news cycles rather than responding to them”.

In May, in the American Mind, Hochman began a glowing review of The Unprotected Class, a book by the Claremont Institute’s Jeremy Carl that claims America is racked by anti-white racism, with the line: “Ethnic discrimination is as old as human civilization itself,” and goes on to argue: “Racial revenge is the germ of the sustained campaign to defame, attack, and disenfranchise white Americans on behalf of their country’s most powerful institutions.”