John Jefferson
A Marco Rubio-linked thinktank stoking fears about Haitian migrants in Pennsylvania has also produced a sequence of videos in recent months that promote conspiracy theories about LGBTQ+ people, human rights organizations and even the corporate consultancy McKinsey & Company.
The editor hired to produce those videos also produces for the media organization founded by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief and prominent election-denier who is a close ally of the former US president Donald Trump.
The videos and the ongoing campaign against Haitians – which follows a similar effort in Springfield, Ohio, that has caused chaos in the midwestern city – raise questions about the increasingly extreme political rhetoric used in Republican circles. Two experts told the Guardian that the ads contained elements of fascist rhetoric.
The producers
The videos are voiced by the rightwing political operative Nate Hochman.
The Guardian reported last month that Hochman has been the face of a campaign to establish Charleroi, Pennsylvania, as a new focus for the racist fear campaign about Haitian migrants. That campaign intensified after Trump made false claims about Haitians eating their neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio.
Previously, Hochman has weathered scandals over his proximity to the far right.
In mid-2022 he lost a fellowship after a conservative website revealed that he had recorded a friendly conversation on Twitter with the white nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes, who has openly praised nazism.
In July 2023 Hochman was fired from Ron DeSantis’s abortive presidential campaign over a campaign video he reportedly produced that featured neo-Nazi imagery.
Mason Prickett, meanwhile, claims credit on his website for the videos’ production, describing them as a “collection of videos I’ve produced for America 2100”. Prickett also claims credit for “motion assets made for FrankSpeech Properties”. FrankSpeech is a video streaming site founded by Lindell, the pillow entrepreneur, Trump supporter and one of the most prominent public deniers of the 2020 election result.
In a story published last month, the Guardian revealed America 2100 was launched in June 2023 by Mike Needham, Rubio’s former chief of staff.
A Real Clear Politics report on the launch said the thinktank had “Rubio’s blessing”, and would prioritize “the work of codifying and institutionalizing the ideas Rubio helped pioneer”.
The book Rubio launched at the same time was reported as a milestone in the senator’s transformation “from a darling of the Republican establishment into a populist gadfly armed with policy”, which was “aided, in large part” by Needham.
The Guardian emailed Hochman, Prickett and Needham for comment. Needham responded: “Your reporting is dishonest, pathetic, and aimed at intimidating people you disagree with from participating in the public sphere.”
Pride month
Several of the videos embed anti-LGBTQ+ messaging in conspiracy theory narratives.
One, published to YouTube on 12 June – the month many celebrate as LGBTQ+ Pride month – is titled How Pride Month Is Destroying and Replacing American Symbols and Identity. In the video, Hochman says the “customs and symbols of the LGBT movement”, including “half naked men, gyrating suggestively in front of young children”, are “viscerally offensive” to many Americans.
He claims that this is part of an “ongoing attack on the traditional symbols of America”, which also includes “a push to replace Thanksgiving with an Indigenous day of mourning”.
These “new symbols and new traditions”, Hochman claims, are an attempt “to shape a new moral, cultural and political order”. Pride month, he says, is a “symbolic tool of an ongoing revolution meant to undermine and replace the symbols of American history and identity”.
Human rights campaign
Six days later, still during Pride month, another Hochman-voiced video was published to YouTube, which directly accused the LGBTQ+ rights organization Human Rights Campaign (HRC) of leveraging the annual celebration to sinister ends.
The video was titled How the “Human Rights Campaign” Forces Companies to Bend the Knee to the Radical LGBTQ Agenda, and a caption on YouTube asks: “Do you ever wonder how everything got so … gay?”
In the recording, Hochman says: “Even just a few decades ago, Pride month meant a few parades and a handful of carefully worded statements.”
He continues: “Now, every major business, brand and institution is all in on LGBT.”
Hochman then claims: “The roots of a lot of this lie with a group called the Human Rights Campaign, a powerful LGBT activist group.”
An HRC spokesperson, Sam Lau, said: “Fascists and authoritarian sympathizers target the Human Rights Campaign and the LGBTQ+ community for the same reason they target people of color, women, immigrants and anyone who doesn’t think and look like them – because they are desperate to cling to power.”
Lau added: “They know we are the majority and that the American people believe in equality”, and they use “inflammatory, false rhetoric to try to demonize our communities and scare us out of public view”.
Lau also pointed to what he called “dangerous consequences”, adding: “Reports of hate crime incidents targeting people for their sexual orientation or gender identity are rising.”
Lau cited a media report about FBI data released in August that showed anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes in 2023 rose 8.6% from 2022 numbers.
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The McKinsey conspiracy theories
One video titled How the Deep State Infiltrates Presidential Administrations Using McKinsey & Company accuses the consultancy of being “a key player in the globalist network that is working to subvert the American nation”.
Hochman also claims in the video, published to YouTube on 16 August: “For nearly a century, the firm has infiltrated every successive presidential administration.”
This includes the Trump administration, according to Hochman, who says in the video, “When Donald Trump came to power, McKinsey didn’t go away, they went to work,” and placed “allies and partners in key positions in his administration”.
The video provides little evidence for these claims, or for the idea that McKinsey has “deep state ties”.
The Guardian contacted McKinsey, and its spokesperson declined to comment.
The video concludes with a warning: “If Donald Trump defeats Kamala Harris, McKinsey will waste no time trying to infiltrate the Trump transition again.”
Rubio links
The YouTube channel also features several shorts, including one showcasing Marco Rubio’s shift on immigration issues.
A decade ago the Republican Florida senator was part of a bipartisan effort to pass immigration reforms that would have given undocumented residents a path to citizenship. In the video he draws an unfavorable comparison between the established Cuban American community and recent refugees, who he says receive overly generous welfare from the federal government.
R Michael Alvarez, a professor of political science at Caltech who has published on topics including political campaigns, voter behavior and conspiracy theory thinking, said the videos as a whole were “very dark”, with a focus on “hidden forces, hidden agents”.
Alvarez added: “I worry about these materials being microtargeted at people with those beliefs,” and called that possibility “dangerous”.
Fascist rhetoric?
The Guardian also contacted two professors of rhetoric, each with published research on fascist rhetorical tactics, to see how Hochman’s political appeals compared to those made during the darkest periods of 20th-century mass politics.
Nathan Crick of Texas A&M University published a book-length analysis of fascist rhetoric in 2022. Ryan Skinnell of San Jose State University, meanwhile, has a range of published research on the rhetoric of fascism, Hitler and Donald Trump.
Both said that the materials did not contain all the elements of fascist rhetoric, and so could not be unambiguously described as such. However, Crick said they had “fascist overtones”, and Skinnell wrote that the videos contained “very fascist themes and key rhetorical commonplaces that are unmistakably associated with fascist rhetoric”.
Crick wrote that the fascist overtones came in the videos’ reliance “on conspiracy theory motifs, most consistently the theme of dark, hidden forces at work behind the scenes”. He also noted a “fixation on sexual perversity and demasculinization”, the “delegitimization of the current state as hopelessly corrupt”, and the “consistent ‘dark’ tone of the videos, the atmosphere of present ‘carnage’ that requires major overhaul”.
Skinnell wrote that the fascist themes included the “invention of a glorious, mythic past” and the “utopian vision of a future cleansed of infiltrators and corrupters”. He also cited “narratives of crisis and decline” and “the complementary narrative of victimization at the hands of degenerates and ‘globalists’”.
Both qualified these claims, saying the videos lacked some elements of full-blown fascist rhetoric.
Noting that “it’s important to distinguish generally ‘conservative’ views from fascism proper”, Crick said that the material on foreign policy, even when touting the “America first” slogan, was “boilerplate political realism”.
Skinnell pointed to the videos being “ambiguous about the ‘one true leader’”, which is central to fascist rhetoric, adding that while Trump was presented positively, “in fascist rhetoric, the leader is the embodiment of the nation’s fundamental values”.
He also said the videos “don’t lean into the violence or domination narratives that power fascist rhetoric”.
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