Nate Hochman, National Review staff writer-cum-conservative darling, has been fired from the Ron DeSantis campaign for creating and promoting a video that featured a Sonnenrad. The immediate, and frankly reasonable, assumption after a gaffe like that was these people are trying to appeal to Nazis. Fair enough — they did evoke a Nazi symbol, after all — but the truth is probably a little less sinister, a little more idiotic, and much more embarrassing.

To people in the know, the notion of Hochman as a would-be ambassador to fringes of the Right is, at best, a misunderstanding. This is a claim made in a recent piece by Jonathan Chait, who argued that the National Review writer’s hiring was proof that DeSantis was attempting to court the far-Right. One can only speculate what the campaign was thinking by hiring Hochman, but his appeal to the (tiny) white nationalist demographic is a bit of a stretch. He’s not edgy or dangerous: he’s Alex P. Keaton with a goofy smile, popular podcast guest appearances, and a New York Times byline. 

So what happened? Hochman, who claims not to have known the Sonnenrad was a Nazi symbol, is suffering from Internet Overexposure Syndrome. For the media, and for many people in politics, Twitter is the centre of gravity, which can have a distorting effect  — see all the “trend pieces“ published off the back of viral Twitter stories — and it’s increasingly impacting politicians as well. The DeSantis campaign – which again and again has taken cues from what’s popular online – is by far the most egregious offender. 

Twitter is also, importantly, an online space where more fringe elements of the Right — like, for example, anime-loving young men who enjoy posting “Sonnenrad edits” — have some of the most visibility. More than visibility, they have a very specific-to-Twitter social cachet. Here, they’re the countercultural “bad boys”. Both their approval and disapproval can feel incredibly significant even if, in reality, they aren’t.