Free Republic

Kingsley Wilson, appointed in January to be deputy press secretary at the Pentagon, last year tweeted a neo-Nazi talking point about Jewish lynching victim Leo Frank. The post came amid a flood of far-right social media content by the Trump administration appointee, who previously worked at an organization founded by the architect of Project 2025, the Christian conservative blueprint for a Trump White House. Many of Wilson’s posts, which remain online, reflect antisemitic conspiracy theories. The one about Frank has resurged in recent years. Frank was a factory manager in Georgia who was convicted on thin evidence of killing a...

In 1913, Frank was convicted of murdering 13-year-old Mary Phagan, who worked in his Atlanta factory. The case, charged with race, religion, sex and class, exploded in a national media frenzy. When Georgia's governor commuted Frank's death sentence, citizens took matters in their own hands. The case established the Anti-Defamation League as the country's most outspoken opponent of anti-Semitism. It also fueled the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. Until ADL lawyers pressed officials to posthumously pardon Frank in the 1980s, the case was hushed in Atlanta's synagogues, the homes of Old Marietta, and among Phagan's descendants.