HIS MASTER'S VOICE:

There is no role in which the old maxim "personnel is policy" is more apt than that of presidential speechwriter. And there is good reason for that role to hold its exalted place in the mythos of the office.

Trump's "American Carnage" was no doubt shaped by the dark, nativist views of his Gollum-like muse. Obama's West Wing-era hopey-changey optimism was colored by the earnest and youthful pod-bros who wrote for him. And Bush's Chesterton-infused evangelizing was sculpted by the faith of Michael Gerson and Matthew Scully. To say nothing of the last century's legendary scribes for Reagan, JFK, and FDR (whose speechwriters included a multi-Pulitzer-winning playwright).

So I perked up when I heard scuttlebutt a few weeks ago that Ron DeSantis had chosen a speechwriter not from the ranks of the GOP's classically liberal old order, but from the brash online "new right" that is more animated by culture wars and MAGA identity politics than by free markets and free people. [...]

As first reported by the Dispatch last year, Hochman participated in a Twitter Space with white nationalist virgin Nick Fuentes--and lavishly praised him. "We were just talking about your influence and we were saying, like, you've gotten a lot of kids 'based' and we respect that for sure," Hochman said. "I literally said, I think Nick's probably a better influence than Ben Shapiro on young men who might otherwise be conservative."

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