The Hochman Affair

Three weeks ago, one-time Know Your Enemy guest and “frenemy” of the show Nate Hochman was fired from Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign for his role in producing a campaign video featuring a Nazi “sonnenrad” symbol. (You may have read about it!) Unsurprisingly, the Hochman affair inspired some soul-searching on the part of your podcast hosts: had we inadvertently exposed our audience to a neo-nazi? Was our original December 2021 interview insufficiently combative — or too credulous (as many of our most vigilant listeners have suggested)? Were we naive about the value of welcoming young conservatives on the show? And, perhaps most illuminatingly, what can Hochman’s trajectory (from Never-Trump conservative and Michael Oakeshott fan to disgraced DeSantis speechwriter) tell us about the young right today? After all, Hochman was not alone. A few weeks before the Hochman affair, DeSantis influencer and Chronicles magazine editor Pedro Gonzalez was exposed for expressing virulent anti-Semitic sentiments in private group chats in 2019. And most recently, Huffington Post reported that Richard Hanania, another young conservative — a darling of Silicon Valley reactionaries and a frequent…