Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt's Nazi Staffer

According to Congressional monitoring company LegiStorm, Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt hired former DeSantis speechwriter Nate Hochman as a policy adviser in February.

Schmitt’s office and Hochman himself have not responded to repeated requests for comment. But since the start of February, Hochman has retweeted Missouri’s junior senator, posts about the senator, or praised the senator himself almost 100 times on his X account, even when only counting threads as one post each. With the primary exception of Rep. Riley Moore, R-West Virginia, whom Hochman has reposted a few times, Hochman has spent the months since when LegiStorm reports he was hired almost exclusively sharing content from or about Sen. Schmitt.

As I discussed in an article for Liberal Currents at the time, Hochman was unceremoniously fired by Governor DeSantis’ presidential campaign in July 2023 because he’d created and shared a “fancam” of the candidate that heavily featured the Black Sun or Sonnenrad. First designed to adorn the floor of Heinrich Himmler’s castle Wewelsburg, the symbol has been readily adopted by neoNazi groups in recent decades. And Hochman decided it should be in bright red, spinning in front of his boss’ face as the triumphant finale to a propaganda video. I haven’t worked in politics before but I have been told making Nazi propaganda featuring the principal is typically a no-no.

And although I missed this at the time, independent journalist Jonathan M. Katz also reported in early August 2023 that Hochman’s DeSantis fancam was likely based on a pre-existing white supremacist video. Both edits, Katz noted, have an almost identical structure—save for the spinning Sonnenrad at the end of the video which is still almost certainly a Hochman innovation—and were set to the same 2019 cover of a Kate Bush song.

Over the almost two years between Hochman’s firing and his recent return to professional politics, he kept himself busy by writing for a variety of paleoconservative outlets, mainly The American Conservative and The Spectator. More prestigious outlets like National Review and the New York Times that had once gladly lent him their column space were presumably a bit more reluctant to publish his work now that what had once been implicit had become explicit.

In these interregnum columns, Hochman cited Jonathan “L0m3z” Keeperman, who says women in the workplace are the cause of societal decline and proudly publishes antisemitic ravings, in order to second Keeperman’s argument that men have to retake the world from women and “the Longhouse.” He wrote a puff piece about El Salvadorian leader Nayib Bukele, calling the self-described dictator’s mass imprisonment scheme “one of the greatest public policy miracles in modern history.” And, intentionally or unintentionally echoing a twenty-odd year old column by Steve Sailer, he put pen to paper in order to argue Trump calling Kamala Harris not really black really shows Republicans need to focus more on white voters and less on people of color.

In yet other columns, he called Juneteenth and Martin Luther King Jr. Day “part and parcel of the mythology of the New America, which vies to destroy and replace the myths, heroes, and traditions of the old republic,” argued conservatives should join white supremacist website VDARE’s war against NY AG Letitia James, and bemoaned the modern day lack of appreciation for the antebellum South and the good name of Robert E. Lee. These, unfortunately, are just a few of the many, many examples anyone could have picked out of his portfolio.

Now, for the last couple months, Hochman’s race-baiting rhetoric from his time at The Spectator has been rehydrated and reheated as his boss’ new talking points. In May 2024, Hochman wrote that “[America] is not an ‘idea,’ or a ‘universal nation,’ or an economic zone, or a low-tax parking space for global capital—it is our home.” And on April 30, Sen. Schmitt said in a speech on the Senate floor that he “blame[s] the international elite—the so-called ‘citizens of the world’—who see our country as a global economic zone, a giant shopping mall with an airport attached.” The senator had also tweeted a very similar line earlier that month, including the refrain that America is “a nation. It’s a people. It’s our home.” Hochman highlighted and repeatedly shared these lines on his personal account.

On March 12, Hochman tweeted that federal border czar Tom Homan “is the perfect embodiment of the Middle American Radical.” While the term, occasionally abbreviated to “MAR,” was coined by sociologist Donald Warren, it was popularized by paleocon Sam Francis in his 1997 book Revolution From the Middle. Two days later, Schmitt posted that the government “has been at war with Middle America.” (The term is frequently used to refer to the American heartland, but there was no obvious geographical valence to Schmitt’s post.)

Like Hochman, Francis worked for a U.S. senator, John East of South Carolina, in the 1980s. The two men also share another thankfully rare trait, a deep personal sympathy for the perceived plight of white South Africans. John Ganz writes in his book When the Clock Broke that Francis “exploded in a profanity-laden tirade” in 1985 when a church group came to East’s office to ask the senator to oppose apartheid. “If I had my way, I’d stomp people like you into the earth,” Francis reportedly bellowed.

On February 7th, shortly after the Trump administration announced it’d be prioritizing white South African asylum applications while pausing, denying, or limiting all others, Hochman tweeted that “an Afrikaner refugee program is arguably the single coolest thing the US State Department has done in my lifetime.”

“Remember how everyone used to say ‘we’re all gonna make it’? Well we did. We made it. We’re here,” he added in a follow-up post.

But while Hochman has repeatedly referenced and approvingly quoted the racist political theorist in the past, arguing in one article that the modern right has “yet to grasp [Francis’] insight,” more recently he and by extension Sen. Schmitt have been obsessed with onetime MSNBC host and three-time presidential candidate Pat Buchanan.

Hochman has been posting lengthy excerpts from several of the far-right firebrand and antisemite’s nineties speeches since at least December. His good feelings for the failed presidential candidate date back even further though, all the way to when Hochman was still trying at respectability and could be published in National Review. On March 20, days after Hochman shared a selection from Buchanan’s 1996 concession speech, Sen. Schmitt used a Buchanan quote to open a ten tweet thread comparing attacks at Tesla dealerships to the Weather Underground.

In addition to Hochman’s present obsession with dead and soon-to-be-dead racists, he also spends his time on X engaging with the nation’s most promising young race scientists and professional racists. Just in the past few months, he’s shared or replied to posts from “Boer,” a white South African who mainly posts about how horrific he believes the end of apartheid was and promotes the white separatist town Orania, “L0m3z,” who I mentioned above and elaborate on here, and “captive dreamer,” who regularly quotes from Mein Kamf and took his sobriquet from the title of a memoir written by a French member of the Waffen-SS. In one January livestream, Hochman effusively praised captive dreamer for drawing attention to Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, calling the narrative that Haitian refugees were eating cats and dogs a messaging coup for the Trump campaign that ought to be replicated. 

Unfortunately, I have not written this piece in the hope that drawing attention to another Republican staffer with significant ties to and personal affinity for neo-Nazi and fascist movements could result in any meaningful change. When DOGE boy Marko Elez’s tweets endorsing eugenics and bragging about being “racist before it was cool” were dug up by the Wall Street Journal, he barely spent twenty-four hours on the outs with the admin before JD Vance and Elon Musk welcomed him back to his post. And, as Hochman has gloated about on X, Darren Beattie, who was fired during the first Trump administration for attending a white supremacist conference, is now acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. The title of the livestream where Hochman complimented captive dreamer, “Poasters In Control —The Online Right Now Occupies the White House,” was indisputably accurate.

But I do want people to recognize that, as someone more observant than me posted in a now-deleted tweet, “ur average young republican is some groyper with a copy of bronze age pervert.” Maybe it wasn’t futile to hope for a return to normal politics back in 2017, when Republican senators not named Collins or Murkowski might still condemn Trump’s racist remarks on occasion. But it certainly is now.

Making neo-Nazi propaganda, arguing the Confederacy was really a noble endeavor, and palling around with anonymous fascists just isn’t a dealbreaker for the modern right in 2025. God knows what that means for the future of America. 

With every passing day it becomes harder to believe that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. And with every day it becomes more important to remember what Reverend King told striking sanitation workers in his final address: “The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around. … But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.”

Featured image is Eric Schmitt, by Gage Skidmore