‘Don’t Give These Freaks an Inch’: Accounts Linked to a DHS Speechwriter Include Anti-Trans and Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric

Blogs, podcasts and X posts that appear under Eric Lendrum’s name reveal an extensive history of hateful rhetoric.

Department of Homeland Security seal

Alex Brandon/AP

A blog post attributed to the person listed as the Department of Homeland Security’s speechwriter celebrated the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and likened the resulting political fallout for conservatives to slavery and the Holocaust.

“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,” said a 2021 blog post by Eric Lendrum about the riot on a conservative opinion and news website called American Greatness, where the author published until March 2025.

On an episode of his podcast, “The Right Take,” which is listed as Lendrum’s on his author blurb for the conservative site, he said he enjoyed watching videos of scared lawmakers.

“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 while laughing, days after the insurrection.

In another podcast episode posted in October 2022, Lendrum said immigrants put Europe in peril. He also endorsed the “great replacement theory,” a far-right belief that nonwhite immigrants are diminishing the influence of white people, and said it “is real, by the way, folks.”

“Given the direction of Europe right now, we could use a far-right government at this point,” he lamented.

Despite his vast digital footprint, Lendrum has a low profile. NOTUS is the first to report the online history associated with his name, as well as Lendrum’s current employment at DHS.

Most of the podcast episodes have no more than a few dozen views. The same low viewership is true for nearly all of the around 16,700 posts on the X account @realEricLendrum, which has called for the eradication of transgender people’s “ideology” and likened asylum seekers to “scum.” The account follows Lendrum’s DHS colleagues and White House staffers, and its bio links to Lendrum’s author page on the American Greatness website.

Lendrum appeared on video for another podcast in an episode called “WEAK Republicans Are An Existential Threat To America,” in December 2022. There, he claimed ownership of the content on American Greatness as well as his podcast, and said he would only ever work for the government under President Donald Trump.

“If I could work more closely with him, that is the one case in which I would ever go back into government work,” Lendrum said, referring to his brief stint as a Department of the Interior press assistant during the first Trump administration. “Government work is not fun.”

Thanks to the second Trump administration, he’s now back to work at the federal government — and he’s stepped onto a much larger platform.

According to a job description from the DHS Office of Public Affairs’ website, a DHS speechwriter’s duties include preparing “speeches, talking points, editorials, Congressional testimony, video scripts, web content and other written content for the Secretary and Deputy Secretary.” DHS is the third-largest Cabinet agency and the largest federal law enforcement agency.

The agency has recently attracted news coverage for posting materials some hate speech experts say are calls to white supremacists to join immigration enforcement officers’ ranks.

The blog post about Jan. 6 from December 2021 lauded Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force veteran who was fatally shot while at the riot, as “an actual hero” who gave “her life for her country.” The post accused the U.S. Capitol Police officer who shot her of being “a trigger-happy gunman,” though he shot her after she tried to climb through a broken glass door into one of the most restricted areas of the U.S. Capitol, according to the Department of Justice.

The blog posted under Lendrum’s byline argued that conservatives were facing political oppression akin to enslaved Black Americans 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,” the post said.

In response to detailed questions from NOTUS, DHS responded only with a link to the text of the First Amendment.

Lendrum did not respond to requests for comment.

All of Lendrum’s comments were easily accessible through keyword searches on Google and social media platforms. DHS did not answer questions from NOTUS about its vetting of potential employees.

“They’re all illegal scum,” a post on X by @realEricLendrum said of asylum seekers in September 2023.

The account also called for the U.S. to treat immigrants as if they were enemy combatants, or an “invading army.”

“They are not migrants. They are not ‘undocumented.’ They are an invading army. The largest invasion in American history,” said another post from the same account in May 2023. “And what are you supposed to do with an invading army? Crush it, by any means necessary. That’s the #AmericaFirst way.”

His podcast’s Telegram channel, linked on both the podcast’s YouTube channel and Facebook profiles, posted separate tirades on race as well. The YouTube channel includes various thumbnails that include pictures of Lendrum that match the appearance of a DHS headshot on a LinkedIn profile with his name, which says he started working at DHS in March 2025.

“It is not racist for White Americans to prefer their ethnicity. It’s natural,” his podcast’s Telegram account posted on June 11, 2021, though it’s unclear who controlled the account.

Nearly all of the 90-something podcast episodes are accessible across various social media platforms, including Rumble, Gab and Telegram.

Later on in that nearly 2,000-word American Greatness post about Jan. 6, the author accused Democrats of weaponizing the riots against conservatives in order to suppress them.

“The Democrats were absolutely terrified — literally cowering under their seats, horrified at the prospect of mere peasants walking through the halls of their castle,” the blog post said of lawmakers who, alongside their Republican colleagues, were shepherded by Capitol Police throughout the Capitol complex, trying to seek shelter from rioters.

“The truth is that they are grateful the events of that day unfolded as they did,” the post said of Democrats.

That same post also claims that George Floyd died of “a fentanyl overdose (or perhaps the coronavirus?)”.

The Minneapolis police officer who killed Floyd in May 2020 was convicted of his murder months before those comments were published.

Another post under Lendrum’s byline eulogizes the account of a self-proclaimed “nationalist, fascist” internet bodybuilding personality known as Bronze Age Pervert that was banned from X.

The post argued that the influencer’s masculinity served “in direct contrast to the Left’s ‘body-positivity’ movement that encourages men and women alike to be as unhealthy and unattractive as possible, ostensibly out of protest of ‘patriarchal’ or ‘White’ ideas of attractiveness.”

In April 2023, a post on X by @realEricLendrum equated “trannies” to “child molesters.”

And in one podcast episode posted the same month, Lendrum said his platform has a policy to “always properly deadname these tranny freaks.” He repeatedly used that slur, alongside the term “freaks,” to refer to transgender people.

“I will keep calling them trannies because I know it’s derogatory, and I know they freakin’ hate it. That’s why I deadname them. That’s why I use their original pronouns,” he said. “You control the language. Don’t give these freaks an inch on the language.”

“We need to eradicate transgenderism. Wipe it off the face of the Earth. Destroy it. Get rid of it,” he went on. “As a disclaimer, I’m not saying to wipe the people out. I’m not saying get rid of the people. I’m saying eliminate the ideology. Cure these people.”

Though, in November 2024, a post on the @realEricLendrum account didn’t include the same “disclaimer.”

“The evil ideology of transgenderism must be ERADICATED from the face of the earth, once and for all. Nothing of it must remain,” the post said. “Real justice must be done.”


Have tips? You can reach Emily on Signal at emilykennard.24.