The Department of Homeland Security is defending the First Amendment rights of a staffer who has come under fire for posts and political commentary related to the Capitol riot. Before joining DHS, Eric Lendrum (pictured right) likened the political fallout conservatives faced from the January 6, 2021 rally to slavery and the Holocaust.
He slammed Democrats for ‘cowering’ under their desks as thousands of angry Americans descended on the Capitol that day. ‘There’s something so gratifying about seeing the images of these members of Congress — especially the Democrats — crouching under their chairs, putting on those stupid, like, bubble masks, those anti-gas bubble masks, and then taking selfies,’ Lendrum said on an episode of his podcast The Right Take just days after the riot.
He also said in a 2021 blog post on the conservative website American Greatness: ‘American conservatives are, right now, on a course for being every bit as ostracized and alienated from broader society as Jews were in the years leading up to Nazi Germany.’ The junior-level speechwriter at DHS also shared anti-immigrant rhetoric on multiple platforms before joining the second Donald Trump administration. In an October 2022 podcast episode, he endorsed the far-right ‘great replacement theory,’ which is a belief that nonwhite immigrants are diminishing the influence of white people across the world.
While a spokesperson for DHS declined to comment on the social media activity of a junior staffer before joining the agency, they instead sent the Daily Mail a link to the text of the First Amendment of the Constitution when asked for comment. Lnedrum did not respond to the Daily Mail’s request for comment on the reports detailing his online activity. Lendrum published on American Greatness until March 2025.
n his post-riot rant in 2021, he said conservative Americans are facing oppression like that faced by enslaved black people in America and Holocaust victims. ‘It has been said that the most surefire way to create an authoritarian regime is to completely dehumanize a significant portion of the population, so that their subsequent enslavement by the state will not face any larger resistance. It was true during slavery, it was true during the Holocaust, and it is true now,’ he wrote.
Lendrum has a relatively low profile, his employer and previous social media activity was first reported by NOTUS on Monday. The last time Lendrum posted to his X account was on the president’s birthday on June 14 this year when he published an image of himself alongside Trump. Lendrum has only 449 followers on X as of time of publication and appears to mostly use it recently to repost messages from Trump cabinet officials and allies. But he has used his X account in the past to share anti-immigrant sentiments.
He expressed lament with a New York Post headline saying that veterans were kicked out of hotels to make way for providing shelter to illegal ‘migrants’ during President Joe Biden’s term. ‘They are not migrants. They are not ‘undocumented.’ They are an invading army. The largest invasion in American history,’ Lendrum wrote on May 13, 2023 in a post to X. He added: ‘And what are you supposed to do with an invading army? Crush it, by any means necessary.’ Lendrum also claimed that asylum seekers are ‘scum.’
Before joining DHS, Lendrum also had a short stint as a press assistant at the Department of the Interior during Trump’s first term. ‘If I could work more closely with him, that is the one case in which I would ever go back into government work. Government work is not fun,’ Lendrum said in December 2022. And now, he’s back in Washington, D.C. for Trump’s second term working for one of the largest and most influential agencies in the federal government. A DHS speechwriter is responsible for preparing a myriad of public content for DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and her deputy. This includes ‘speeches, talking points, editorials, Congressional testimony, video scripts, web content and other written content,’ according to a description of the job.
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