Chuck Darwin<p>On Donald Trump’s first day in office, the Department of Defense announced a spate of hires, including 26-year-old <br><a href="https://c.im/tags/Kingsley" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Kingsley</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Wilson" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Wilson</span></a>, who will serve as the Pentagon’s deputy press secretary. <br>Wilson is the daughter of <a href="https://c.im/tags/Steve" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Steve</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Cortes" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Cortes</span></a>, a longtime Trump advisor and right-wing commentator who promotes Latinos moving to the political right. <br>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. <br>She’s also an overt internet troll with a long history of bigoted, xenophobic, and deliberately provocative shitposting. </p><p>Wilson in many ways embodies the face of the new Trump administration: <br>she’s worked in the MAGA world for seemingly her entire, very short career; </p><p>besides her roles in the Trump campaign and at the Center for Renewing America, <br>she also served as the national committeewoman for the DC Young Republicans. </p><p>She also briefly worked at Gettr, the social media platform founded by former Trump aide <a href="https://c.im/tags/Jason" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Jason</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Miller" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Miller</span></a> and with deep links to fugitive Chinese mogul <a href="https://c.im/tags/Guo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Guo</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Wengui" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Wengui</span></a>.</p><p>When she wasn’t doing any of that, Wilson was busy reeling off an endless tweets excoriating immigrants and trans people, <br>advocating for what she called “zero immigration and mass deportations,” <br>and bemoaning the “death of the West,” <br>a term popularized by Pat Buchanan and often used by nativist, isolationist, and white nationalist groups to argue that immigration dilutes “Western” culture.</p><p>At least twice, Wilson also repeated long-debunked lies online about the lynching death of Leo Frank, <br>a Jewish man who was kidnapped from a Georgia prison and murdered in 1915, <br>claiming he was guilty of the murder for which most modern historians agree he was wrongly convicted. </p><p>She also claimed the Black Lives Matter movement had an “affinity for race-based violence,” <br>and derided George Floyd, the Black man murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis, <br>a “career criminal,” and scornfully called him “Saint George Floyd.”</p><p>“If you identify as transgender and/or are undergoing hormone therapy<br>—you should NOT be allowed to legally purchase a firearm,” <br>she posted, in one of her many tweets <br>claiming transgender people are abnormal or mentally ill. </p><p>“In a healthy country… transgender people aren’t visible,” she tweeted in 2024 (ellipses hers).</p><p>Wilson also explicitly lent her support to Great Replacement theory,<br> a racist and xenophobic conspiracy theory that holds that non-white immigrants are being lured to the United States to replace white Americans. </p><p>“The Great Replacement isn’t a right-wing conspiracy theory… it’s reality,” <br>she tweeted in 2024, over a screenshot of a Bloomberg article about the growth of the U.S. Hispanic population. </p><p>Wilson also called to “make Kosovo Serbia again,” <br>a particularly weird stance for an American now working in the Pentagon; </p><p>the United States has recognized Kosovo as an independent state since 2008 and maintains troops there as part of peacekeeping efforts.</p><p>Wilson also lent her support for the German far-right party AfD, <br>tweeting in 2024, “Globalist elites hate AfD because they put Germans before foreign migrants and radical Islam. Ausländer Raus!”</p><p>Wilson has tweeted the phrase <br>“Ausländer Raus” at least four times, <br>including the slogan, <br>“Deutschland den Deutschen. Ausländer raus.” </p><p>The phrase, which means, “Germany for Germans, foreigners out,” <br>is explicitly considered to be an extremist slogan in Germany with neo-Nazi roots; </p><p>in fact, a 1992 paper about its use among German skinheads is available on a Department of Justice website. </p><p>At least one German prosecutor has said that using the phrase is a criminal offense. </p><p>Nonetheless, the chant has been adopted by some young AfD supporters. </p><p>A video of the chant being sung at a trendy bar in the holiday island of Sylt sparked an enormous controversy last summer, <br>and again when it was sung a month later at a village festival in Germany. </p><p>(Non-Germans signaling their contempt for immigration, including accused human trafficker Tristan Tate, have also tweeted the phrase.)</p><p>Wilson’s career seems to have followed a dual track, <br>both making the rounds in DC politics and the Trump campaign and flirting with a career as an online provocateur<br>—though those roles that are increasingly blurred in the MAGAfied Republican party. </p><p>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, <br>and has appeared multiple times on the podcast of Tim Pool’s, the once “heterodox” streamer who’s become increasingly far-right.</p><p><a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/03/kingsley-cortes-wilson-defense-department/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">motherjones.com/politics/2025/</span><span class="invisible">03/kingsley-cortes-wilson-defense-department/</span></a></p>