The wojak campaigns

RFK Jr. gets in on the Nazi meme action. And that DeSantis campaign video was way worse than previously reported.

Last week, I wrote about the firing of Nate Hochman, a prominent young conservative activist and Ron DeSantis aide who made a campaign video that ended with an explicitly Nazi tableau. I’ve since learned that there was more to the video than I previously realized. And there have been some other related developments — including a clear Nazi dog whistle from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign — that are worth knowing about.

First, let’s talk about that DeSantis video. As previously noted, the ad — often described as merely containing a Nazi symbol — was much more. The video tells a coherent fascist story: the salvation of an everyman cartoon figure — a “doomer wojak,” representing the ad’s intended audience — from the doldrums of a disappointing Trump presidency to a Floridian utopia of Ron DeSantis, complete with bikini blondes, launching rockets, and a series of anti-LGBTQ, anti-immigrant, and anti-diversity policies. Only then does it culminate in the Leni Riefenstahl-style montage of soldiers marching toward a messianic DeSantis, backed by the red and white St. Andrew’s cross of the Florida flag and a spinning neo-Nazi Sonnenrad.

What I didn’t realize was that Hochman’s structure wasn’t accidental. His video is based on a specific meme, unknown to the general public, but very familiar to people in (or who monitor) esoteric online Nazi circles. A reader shared with me one version, uploaded to YouTube over a year ago by a known white supremacist, that matches the DeSantis ad almost beat for beat, including its choice of music: Meg Myers’ 2019 cover of the Kate Bush song “Running Up That Hill.”

Here’s a side-by-side comparison (stills from the DeSantis video are on the bottom; the Nazi template is on top):