Did you hear about the guy who had a racist and conspiracy-ridden online life before joining the Trump administration? No, not that guy. The other guy. No, the other, other one.
You’re forgiven for being confused about which Trump administration hire we’re talking about, given that Monday saw two separate stories break about their repulsive online presences.
From the news outlet NOTUS, let’s learn all about Eric Lendrum, a speechwriter for the Department of Homeland Security. Before Lendrum apparently started penning propaganda for Secretary Kristi Noem, he had a rich, grievance-filled online life. NOTUS unearthed a December 2021 piece attributed to Lendrum where he moped extravagantly about Trump supporters’ Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and how:
American conservatives are, right now, on course for being every bit as ostracized and alienated from broader society as Jews were in the years leading up to Nazi Germany. Children are actively indoctrinated in our education system to turn against their own parents, Soviet-style, if they feel their parents’ views are outdated or backwards.
Buddy, your kid having to learn about the mere existence of transgender people or perhaps that slavery was less than great is not the same as being rounded up and put in camps, but sure.
What Lendrum really grooves on, like so much of this administration, is watching people in pain from Trump’s actions. Hence, his incredibly low-rated podcast lovingly dwelling on how much he loved watching members of Congress running for their lives while his cult leader’s followers overran the seat of American government. So fun! He also had the obligatory endorsement of the racist “great replacement theory”—which claims there is an ongoing effort to use immigration to “replace” white Americans—and equated asylum-seekers with “scum.”
When asked for comment by The Independent, DHS shared a link to the First Amendment. Huh. Neat that they occasionally remembered that it exists, what with the Trump administration regularly trying to jail and deport students for the content of their speech.
Also on Monday, Wired reported about a now-deleted Twitter account linked to E.J. Antoni, whom Trump nominated to cook the books at the Bureau of Labor Statistics ever since the job numbers made him sad. It was already known that Antoni was also an insurrection enthusiast.
The deleted account that Wired uncovered is a neatly comprehensive list of conservative fixations: COVID-19 denialism, hating Black Lives Matter, retweeting conspiracy crank Jack Posobiec—you get the picture. Also neat: joshing about how cool it would be to drop a nuclear bomb on China if conspiracy nuts “determined” China “created” COVID:
Antoni’s social media presence was wide-ranging. Think of a renaissance man if “renaissance” means “spewing Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theories, misogyny about Kamala Harris, and violent rhetoric about the 2020 election”:
Of course, both of these accounts fit right in with other high-level Trump administration employees. Perhaps Lendrum and Antoni can get together with Paul Ingrassia, whom Trump nominated to run the Office of Special Counsel after a rich career as a far-right podcaster and fanboy of white supremacist Nick Fuentes. Heck, call Darren Beattie—expelled for being too racist for the first Trump administration but now running the U.S. Institute of Peace—and make it the foursome from hell.
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| Trump's despicable appointees continue to do their business on America. |
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