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[1] 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.
"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.
"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.
If Wilson follows her predecessors in the deputy position, she would be one of two officials responsible for holding regular briefings to the press and acting as the public face of the Pentagon. However, the Pentagon under Trump has yet to begin public briefings.
Military.com reached out to the defense secretary's office on Wednesday with a lengthy list of more than a dozen of Wilson's posts for comment or context. By publication, there was no response, and the posts remain up on her X profile.
Baumgartner noted that, while much of Wilson's rhetoric may seem modern, its roots go back generations.
"She's simultaneously appealing to the new generation of far-right white nationalists, and she's pulling out a lot of the old cards that people from a generation or two ago might resonate with, too," he said.
On Thursday, Politico reported[26] that her comments have not only angered lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle but led to questions about whether appropriate vetting was done ahead of her appointment on Jan. 21[27] -- the day of President Donald Trump's inauguration.
Some of Wilson's comments seem to also put her at odds with current policies of the Trump administration.
The move prompted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to call Trump[37] "the greatest friend that Israel has ever had in the White House."
The American Jewish Committee, a Jewish advocacy group, called for Wilson's firing in a social media post Wednesday.
"Anyone who posts antisemitic conspiracy theories lifted right out of the neo-Nazi playbook should not be in public office," the group wrote.
However, the current Trump administration has already shown that it is willing to ignore such calls and stand by staffers who make inflammatory and even blatantly racist remarks.
In February, The Wall Street Journal reported that 25-year-old Marko Elez, a staffer with Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, had a long history of posts that advocated racism and eugenics, the study of how to breed humans for desirable traits.
According to the Journal[38], Elez's social media posts included comments like: "You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity," "Normalize Indian hate," and "Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool."
