This Pentagon Press Secretary Has a Long History of Bigoted and Xenophobic Posts
DOD; Getty
On Donald Trump’s first day in office, the Department of Defense announced a spate of hires, including 26-year-old Kingsley Wilson, who will serve as the Pentagon’s deputy press secretary. Wilson is the daughter of Steve Cortes, a longtime Trump advisor and right-wing commentator who promotes Latinos moving to the political right. Wilson is also a Trump 2020 campaign alum, and until taking the job at the DoD, ran digital media and communications for the Center for Renewing America, a pro-Trump think tank founded by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought.
She’s also an overt internet troll with a long history of bigoted, xenophobic, and deliberately provocative shitposting.
Wilson in many ways embodies the face of the new Trump administration: she’s worked in the MAGA world for seemingly her entire, very short career; besides her roles in the Trump campaign and at the Center for Renewing America, she also served as the national committeewoman for the DC Young Republicans. She also briefly worked at Gettr, the social media platform founded by former Trump aide Jason Miller and with deep links to fugitive Chinese mogul Guo Wengui.
When she wasn’t doing any of that, Wilson was busy reeling off an endless tweets excoriating immigrants and trans people, advocating for what she called “zero immigration and mass deportations,” and bemoaning the “death of the West,” a term popularized by Pat Buchanan and often used by nativist, isolationist, and white nationalist groups to argue that immigration dilutes “Western” culture.
At least twice, Wilson also repeated long-debunked lies online about the lynching death of Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was kidnapped from a Georgia prison and murdered in 1913, claiming he was guilty of the murder for which most modern historians agree he was wrongly convicted. She also claimed the Black Lives Matter movement had an “affinity for race-based violence,” and derided George Floyd, the Black man murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis, a “career criminal,” and scornfully called him “Saint George Floyd.”
“If you identify as transgender and/or are undergoing hormone therapy—you should NOT be allowed to legally purchase a firearm,” she posted, in one of her many tweets claiming transgender people are abnormal or mentally ill. “In a healthy country… transgender people aren’t visible,” she tweeted in 2024 (ellipses hers).
Wilson also explicitly lent her support to Great Replacement theory, a racist and xenophobic conspiracy theory that holds that non-white immigrants are being lured to the United States to replace white Americans.
“The Great Replacement isn’t a right-wing conspiracy theory… it’s reality,” she tweeted in 2024, over a screenshot of a Bloomberg article about the growth of the U.S. Hispanic population.
Wilson also called to “make Kosovo Serbia again,” a particularly weird stance for an American now working in the Pentagon; the United States has recognized Kosovo as an independent state since 2008 and maintains troops there as part of peacekeeping efforts.
Wilson also lent her support for the German far-right party AfD, tweeting in 2024, “Globalist elites hate AfD because they put Germans before foreign migrants and radical Islam. Ausländer Raus!”
Wilson has tweeted the phrase “Ausländer Raus” at least four times, including the slogan, “Deutschland den Deutschen. Ausländer raus.” The phrase, which means, “Germany for Germans, foreigners out,” is explicitly considered to be an extremist slogan in Germany with neo-Nazi roots; in fact, a 1992 paper about its use among German skinheads is available on a Department of Justice website. At least one German prosecutor has said that using the phrase is a criminal offense. Nonetheless, the chant has been adopted by some young AfD supporters. A video of the chant being sung at a trendy bar in the holiday island of Sylt sparked an enormous controversy last summer, and again when it was sung a month later at a village festival in Germany. (Non-Germans signaling their contempt for immigration, including accused human trafficker Tristan Tate, have also tweeted the phrase.)
Wilson’s career seems to have followed a dual track, both making the rounds in DC politics and the Trump campaign and flirting with a career as an online provocateur—though those roles that are increasingly blurred in the MAGAfied Republican party. During her time at the Center for Renewing America, the Vought-founded think tank, she appeared as a talking head on conservative news sites like The Blaze, and has appeared multiple times on the podcast of Tim Pool’s, the once “heterodox” streamer who’s become increasingly far-right.
While Wilson deleted some of her tweets before beginning her DOD job, in the Trump Administration, they’re unlikely to be seen as a liability. While DOGE staffer Marko Elez resigned after the Wall Street Journal reported on his history of racist posts (“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” one read), Musk said almost immediately on Twitter/X that he would be reinstated.
On social media, Wilson has made it clear that she brings her online stances into her personal life. “3 years ago today I went to a Halloween party dressed as Border Patrol and met my husband,” she tweeted on October 31, 2024 over a photo of herself wearing a green Border Patrol hat. “Be unapologetically right-wing. It will pay off.”
The Department of Defense didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about Wilson’s tweets and her hiring.