Pentagon’s newly promoted press secretary seen as an ‘unabashed white nationalist’

Pentagon’s newly promoted press secretary seen as an ‘unabashed white nationalist’


In March, Military.com reported:

Kingsley Wilson, the Pentagon’s new deputy press secretary, has a yearslong history of making social media posts that traffic in a variety of extremist rhetoric, ranging from antisemitic conspiracy theories to white nationalist talking points.

In August, Wilson posted a decades-old antisemitic trope questioning the facts behind the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was wrongly convicted of raping and murdering a child more than a hundred years ago in Atlanta.

However, her history of posting xenophobic comments and echoing racist talking points goes as far back as 2021, and she has repeated some ideas — for example, that colonialism was a “humanitarian venture” — many times over the last several years.

Wilson’s posts on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, include her parroting white supremacist rhetoric almost verbatim. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a Trump adviser who is firing thousands of federal employees and slashing agencies, owns the X platform.

The 26-year-old spokeswoman has called “The Great Replacement Theory,” a long-standing and false conspiracy theory claiming there is an active effort to replace white populations with immigrants of color, a “reality.”

Wilson also repeatedly argued that American lands were not stolen but “conquered” from the Native Americans. That slogan has been used by the white supremacist group Patriot Front in its propaganda and messaging.

She also referred to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee as “one of the greatest Americans to ever live,” has repeatedly argued that America is rife with “anti-white racism,” and made numerous posts that claimed colonization of African, majority Black and Central American countries was a “humanitarian venture.”

“If you look at those tweets in totality, what it comes down to is that she is an unabashed white nationalist,” Luke Baumgartner, a researcher at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, told Military.com on Thursday.

Wilson also heaped praise on the German far-right political party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, which itself has a history of Holocaust denial.

She has repeatedly used the phrase “Ausländer Raus” — “foreigners out” in German — and once posted the slogan “Deutschland den Deutschen. Ausländer raus.” The phrase, which means “Germany for Germans, foreigners out,” is considered to be an extremist slogan with neo-Nazi roots.

“If anybody knows anything about the AfD, it’s a bunch of Nazis,” Baumgartner said. “It’s a German political party that uses repackaged Nazi phrasing and advertising.”

“A lot of what she says would be right at home in any of the neo-Nazi Telegram chats that I see every day,” he said. [Continue reading…]

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