Right-wing activist Nate Hochman, who was fired last year by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for using neo-Nazi imagery in a campaign video, is now the face of a think tank with ties to Marco Rubio that is trying to spread anti-immigration panic from Ohio to Pennsylvania.
Videos featuring Hochman, recorded in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, have been promoted on X by a range of right-wing figures, including the platform’s owner, tech billionaire Elon Musk.
In recent days, Hochman, 26, has been on location in Charleroi filming several videos for America 2100, a right-wing think tank where he serves as an advisor, according to his bios on X and on websites where he has published articles. Hochman is also a staff writer and podcaster at the right-wing website American Spectator, where his recent output has consisted largely of anti-immigrant reporting.
Like Springfield in Ohio, Charleroi attracts a community of Haitian migrants.
City Manager Jim Manning told CBS News on Wednesday that immigrants, including Haitians, “have been a benefit to the city.”
He added: “They come here. They buy property. They open businesses. They work here. They pay taxes. So for us, it’s been a benefit in the end.”
So far, Hochman has only recorded interviews with older white residents of the city, who have complained, among other things, that the newcomers don’t speak English and that migrants have taken “American jobs.”
One interviewee seems to admit that the Haitians are legally resident in Charleroi, but he denies the importance of that fact.
“The perception is that it’s not legal,” the interviewee says at one point. “Now you hear a lot of people saying they’re illegal and everyone wants to fight about that term, but it doesn’t really matter.”
Most were not shared widely, though one of the videos was reposted by the far-right account End Wokeness, and in turn reposted by Musk to his nearly 200 million followers, along with a bit of political analysis. “Pennsylvania is a swing state,” Musk wrote. His repost was in turn shared by the America 2100 account.
America 2100 is ostensibly a think tank, launched in June 2023 by Rubio’s chief of staff, Michael Needham, 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 that Rubio helped pioneer.”
In July, however, Needham was also appointed chairman of another think tank, American Compass, which is led by a former Mitt Romney adviser, Oren Cass.
Cass and American Compass have attracted attention by promoting interventionist economic policies. Those policy ideas overlap with those of J.D. Vance: in reporting on Needham’s appointment, Politico called American Compass a “Vance-aligned think tank” and Vance “an ally whose own staff has deep ties to the organization.”
Chris Griswold, policy director at American Compass, is also a former Rubio aide.
After being dubbed “Little Marco” by Trump in a 2016 primary in which he ridiculed the size of Trump’s hands, Rubio spent the next eight years in politics moving closer to Trump, even refusing to accept the results of the upcoming election in May.
Rubio was considered as Trump’s running mate at the time, but was ultimately passed over in favor of JD Vance.
Although America 2100 was reported upon at its launch, the site provides little information about its current staff or the nature of the entity behind its operations.
America 2100 was registered in Virginia as a limited liability company in June 2023.
The officials named in the documents include Needham and another former Rubio aide, Albert Martinez, along with Lisa Lisker, an attorney who reportedly previously ran a solar disinformation organization in 12 states and served as campaign committee secretary for J.D. Vance during his 2022 Senate campaign.
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, “I know this article will be a bad faith political assassination.”
Needham added: “Nate did a fantastic job reporting on the tragic story unfolding in Charleroi.”
By mid-2022, Hochman seemed poised for a high-profile career in conservative media, rewarded with prestigious grants and a tenured position at National Review, the home of mainstream conservative opinion.
His status as a representative of the emerging, hardline “national conservative” movement made him “the left-wing media’s voice for insight into this group,” according to a story about emerging right-wing influencers published at the time by the Dispatch, a conservative “never Trump” website.
However, Hochman’s appearance in that story marked the beginning of his downfall.
The Dispatch reported a recording of Hochman in a Twitter conversation with white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer Nick Fuentes.
In that conversation, Hochman reportedly disagreed with Fuentes on a number of issues, but he also appeared to compliment the far-right “America First” activist, telling Fuentes, “You’ve mobilized a lot of kids, and we certainly respect that,” and “I think Nick is probably a better influence than [the conservative commentator] Ben Shapiro on young men who might otherwise be conservative.”
Amid the ensuing uproar, Hochman was stripped of his fellowships. In March 2023, he left the National Review to work for DeSantis’ failed presidential campaign. However, he was fired by the campaign in July after he retweeted a pro-DeSantis video on his personal account that included memes that embraced the aesthetics of the online far-right.
As The Guardian reported at the time, the video “showed a ‘Wojak’ meme, a sad-looking man popular on the right, against headlines about the failures of Trump’s policies, before showing the meme cheering up against headlines about DeSantis and footage of the governor at work,” all set to the tune of Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill.
Finally, DeSantis was placed on the rows of marching soldiers and a Sonnenrad – a Norwegian symbol often adopted by neo-Nazis.
When Hochman left the campaign, Axios reported that Hochman had created the video but had tried to make it appear as if it had been produced outside.
Since then, Hochman has fully embraced the more extreme actors of the so-called ‘new right’.
A week ago, he published an essay in the far-right magazine IM–1776 in which he appeared to wrap conspiracy theories about the media in a lament against democracy.
Hochman argues at one point in the piece: “The American Constitution was designed to counter tyranny; but it did so in part by restricting mass democracy. Once those restrictions were removed, power was no longer dispersed through a system of checks and balances but centralized in the hands of whoever controlled the machinery of opinion formation.”
Another recent essay, published in 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 alt-right influencer Douglass Mackey space to characterize his prosecution under Ku Klux Klan-era election laws as the government “prosecuting people [for] posting election jokes”.
The Guardian previously reported on IM–1776’s close ties to right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, who has spent the past week trying unsuccessfully to substantiate Donald Trump’s false claims that Haitian immigrants eat “dogs”, “cats” and “pets”.
In his essay, Hochman praises Rufo, saying he has “won an impressive series of victories in the culture war by actively creating news cycles rather than reacting to them.”
In May, Hochman began a glowing review in American Mind of The Unprotected Class, a book by Jeremy Carl of the Claremont Institute, in which he argues that America is plagued by anti-white racism, with the sentence, “Ethnic discrimination is as old as human civilization itself,” and then argues, “Racial revenge is the seed of the ongoing campaign to smear, attack, and disenfranchise white Americans on behalf of their country’s most powerful institutions.”
