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The U.S. Coast Guard is denying reports that it will no longer classify swastikas, nooses, and other extremist images as prohibited hate symbols.
On Thursday (November 20), the Washington Post released a bombshell report outlining the Coast Guard's plans to reclassify swastikas, nooses, and Confederate flags as "potentially divisive" rather than explicitly hateful.
Adm. Kevin Lunday, the acting Coast Guard commandant, later released a statement rejecting the report.
“The claims that the U.S. Coast Guard will no longer classify swastikas, nooses, or other extremist imagery as prohibited symbols are categorically false,” Lunday said. “These symbols have been and remain prohibited in the Coast Guard per policy.”
The Coast Guard’s current guidance, which was last revised in 2019, lists swastikas, nooses, supremacist symbols, Confederate flags, and antisemitic imagery as items that constitute a “potential hate incident,” noting hate groups have co-opted them as markers of “supremacy, racial intolerance, religious intolerance, or other bias.”
Under the new policy, set to take effect on December 15, the term "hate incident" is removed, according to the Post. Conduct that was previously categorized that way will now reportedly be handled as harassment cases when there is an identifiable victim, or addressed under another section of the instruction.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Coast Guard, blasted the report as false.
“This is an absolute ludicrous lie and unequivocally false,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin wrote on X. “The @washingtonpost should be embarrassed it published this fake crap.”
“Y’all are just making things up now,” the department added in a separate post.
However, Coast Guard spokesperson Jennifer Plozai later told the Post that the service “will be reviewing the language” of the updated policy.
Rep. Rick Larsen (D-Wash.), the top Democrat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, condemned the reported policy, saying, “Lynching is a federal hate crime. The world defeated the Nazis in 1945. The debate on these symbols is over. They symbolize hate. Coast Guard: be better.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to resign in the wake of the report.
"Kristi Noem is a corrupt disgrace who is doing grave damage to the integrity and reputation of the Department of Homeland Security and the United States Coast Guard. The recent reporting that the Coast Guard will no longer classify swastikas, nooses, and Confederate flags as hate symbols is shameful. Unfortunately, it is not surprising given that the Trump administration peddles hate and intolerance with malign consistency," Jeffries said in a statement.
"The swastika is a symbol of hate associated with the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust. The Confederate flag is part of a painful history of racial oppression in America that enslaved Africans in this country for hundreds of years. The noose is directly tied to the thousands of horrifying lynching deaths of African Americans during the Jim Crow era," he added. "These are unquestionably hateful symbols that have no place in civilized society."
"The Coast Guard must reverse course immediately and Kristi Noem should resign."
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