A State Department official now serving as Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s chief speechwriter was previously fired from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) presidential campaign after sharing a video featuring a symbol associated with white supremacy, according to a Sunday report from The New York Times.<\/p>\n
Nate Hochman, who joined the State Department this year, currently serves as deputy director of its policy planning office and identifies himself as Rubio’s chief speechwriter in his email signature, the Times reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n His rise within the department comes three years after his abrupt exit from DeSantis’s 2024 presidential campaign<\/a>.<\/p>\n Hochman was working on the Florida governor’s campaign communications team in July 2023 when he shared a pro-DeSantis video<\/a> on X that featured a Sonnenrad \u2014 a circular symbol made popular in Nazi Germany that has since been adopted by white supremacist movements.<\/p>\n The video concluded with DeSantis’s face placed over the symbol as soldiers marched in the background. Hochman was fired amid the controversy.<\/p>\n Hochman later maintained that he had not made the video.<\/p>\n The Times noted that\u00a0in a 2024 essay<\/a>, Hochman rejected claims that an “ethnically Jewish kid with no prior video editing experience was cranking out neo-Nazi videos under the cover of night.”<\/p>\n He added that he removed his repost and alerted campaign supervisors after discovering the meaning of the symbol, but declined to identify who created the clip, citing the “risk of throwing friends under the bus.”<\/p>\n Following his stint with DeSantis, Hochman worked for the conservative advocacy organization America 2100 and later served as a policy adviser to Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) before joining the State Department.<\/p>\n State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott praised Hochman to the Times.<\/p>\n “Nate Hochman is a trusted and key member of the department who has worked tirelessly to advance the president’s foreign policy agenda,” Pigott told the paper in a statement.<\/p>\n The post Top Rubio Aide Was Reportedly Fired by DeSantis Campaign After Sharing Nazi Symbol Video<\/a> first appeared on Mediaite<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A State Department official now serving as Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s chief speechwriter was previously fired from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":217935,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[121],"tags":[91984,97470,26636,97469,186,6626,885,5458,2591,8649],"class_list":["post-217934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-marco-rubio","tag-ap-photo","tag-ap-photo-chris","tag-desantis","tag-hochman","tag-marco-rubio","tag-rubio","tag-state","tag-state-department","tag-the-new-york-times","tag-times"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/117227064034960940","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217934\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}