British Neo-Nazi Sam Melia was recently sentenced to two years in prison after being found guilty of inciting racial hatred. The 34-year-old led an online group called the “Hundred-Handers,” and distributed stickers with white supremacist slogans. But on an episode of BlazeTV’s The Auron MacIntyre Show, ex-National Review columnist Nate Hochman defended Melia.

Hochman — who once praised white nationalist Nick Fuentes and was fired from Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign for posting a video with Nazi symbols — referred to Melia as an “anti-immigration activist.” He also claimed that Melia was simply distributing stickers with slogans like “End mass immigration.”

“It was sort of a — within the American Overton Window, it was stuff like ‘Will native British people be replaced in their homeland?’, something like that,” he added. This slogan is a clear reference to the white supremacist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, although Hochman did not mention this fact.

And his brief explanation of Melia and his activities omitted other key context as well.

For example, Melia once marched with the (now proscribed) Neo-Nazi terrorist group National Action, and is a member of the white supremacist organization Patriotic Alternative. Melia also displayed a picture of Adolf Hitler in his home, along with “Third Reich posters.”

Hochman similarly glossed over the white supremacist rhetoric espoused by Melia and his Hundred-Handers group. The group’s now-defunct Telegram channel is replete with photos of stickers with racist and antisemitic messages, including:

• “‘Diversity’ Means No White Countries” and “‘Diversity’ Means No White People” (05/22/2019)
• “Ask not what Jews can do for your country. Ask what your country can do for Jews.” (08/13/2019)
• “WE will be a minority in OUR homeland by 2066” (12/11/2019)
• “Third World Over Breeding Destroys the Planet” (01/06/2020)
• “We’re More Than a Passport. BLOOD & SOIL,” referencing a Nazi Party slogan (02/01/2020)
• “Make America White Again” (02/01/2020)
• “Capitalism + Communism, Two faces of the same shekel” (02/23/2020)
• “Multi-culturalism KILLS” (03/23/2020)
• “Are You Woke to the JQ?”, referring to the so-called “Jewish Question” (04/25/2020)
• “ANTI-RACIST is code for ANTI-WHITE” (01/30/2021)
• “Warning! Anti-White Propaganda” (01/15/2021)

Hochman compared Melia’s arrest over these white supremacist stickers, which were posted not just in the U.K. but also Germany, Australia, and the U.S., to being arrested for drug possession. “It’s like he had like a kilo of crack cocaine or something,” he joked.

“But that is what the U.K. is at now,” Hochman said.

“And again, just to reiterate, this under a quote-unquote ‘conservative’ government. You know, capital ‘C’, capital ‘P’ Conservative Party. And if you look at like the headlines in the U.K., like the Conservative Party with a few notable exceptions is all for this. Just like they’re all for mass immigration.”

Auron MacIntyre defended another embattled white supremacist as well — Douglass Mackey.

Mackey, who created racist memes under the pseudonym “Ricky Vaughn,” was convicted over his role in an illegal voter suppression scheme after he shared a fake Clinton campaign ad which falsely said that Clinton supporters could text their vote to a number he provided.

After Mackey was found guilty of conspiracy against rights under the Ku Klux Klan Act, he was sentenced to seven months in prison. Mackey is currently appealing this verdict.

MacIntyre, like other far-right figures, obfuscated the facts about Mackey’s case, and claimed that Mackey was convicted for being “too good of a poster.”

“I mean, at least in our — at least in the United States they have to pretend its something else,” MacIntyre said. “It’s like, [Mackey] stopped people from voting or some garbage, when it’s like no he made fun of Hillary Clinton too effectively. Ricky Vaughn was too good of a poster. That’s why he had to be sentenced [to jail]. That’s really all there is to it.”

“Too powerful,” Hochman interjected.

MacIntyre agreed, saying Mackey’s “power level’s too high.”

Hochman connected the subject of freedom of speech to what he perceives as the threat of “mass immigration,” calling these issues “inextricably linked.” He explained that “you aren’t even going to be able to make the case against mass immigration — or even show people what mass immigration looks like in practice — if you can’t post.”

MacIntyre agreed with Hochman’s assessment that these issues are “linked together” and “symbiotic.” But he offered another reason as to why.

“The reason mass immigration is important is because democracy — popular sovereignty — is the legitimating force in the United States,” he said. MacIntyre dismissed the fact that undocumented immigrants cannot vote, especially in federal elections, by simply claiming that they, somehow, will.

And he stated that these immigrants will, in turn, vote to eradicate First Amendment protections.

“This is absolutely about changing the voter base, making sure that the people who provide the legitimacy, provide popular sovereignty, are different,” he alleged. “And make sure that they’ll vote the way that the Left wants to. And so they have to bring people in to shut down the free speech.”

“If you get a critical amount of people who don’t care about free speech — because they’re not from this tradition, they don’t have that connection and that value — they will eventually just go ahead and give it up because it doesn’t matter to them so they can get free stuff,” he concluded.