The U.S. Coast Guard has opened an internal investigation after a swastika was drawn on a bathroom wall of its recruit training station in New Jersey.
An instructor spotted the Nazi symbol on Thursday night in a men’s room at the Coast Guard’s primary training center in Cape May, sources familiar with the incident told The Washington Post.
Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Kevin Lunday was reportedly made aware of the finding on Saturday while he was in Washington, D.C. He then immediately traveled to New Jersey to address the incident with roughly 900 recruits and staff members.
Lundy confirmed the discovery to the Post on Monday, while encouraging “anyone who adheres to or advances hate or extremist ideology” to quit the Coast Guard.
“We reject you,” Lunday said in a statement. “We will not allow anyone to put a stain of hate on our United States Coast Guard.”
Lunday’s strong condemnation of the symbol appeared to be at odds with new guidelines issued late last year that recharacterized swastikas and nooses as being “potentially divisive” as opposed to hateful.
At the time, Lunday, then the Coast Guard’s acting commandant, responded by declaring those symbols prohibited, though the language somehow still found its way into a new workplace harassment manual.
The controversial wording was later removed after two Democratic lawmakers put a hold on Lunday’s nomination for commandant until the manual was changed.
In the months since, Coast Guard leadership, including Lunday, have worked to reaffirm that they take such issues seriously, saying incidents like the one at Cape May violate their core values and will not be tolerated.
Even still, many U.S. institutions under the Trump administration have worked to become less “woke.”
“This administration has done a great deal from day one to remove the social justice, politically correct and toxic ideological garbage that had infected our department, to rip out the politics,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in September while sharing that vision with military brass.
The swastika came to represent Germany’s genocidal right-wing fascist movement under Adolf Hitler in the 1930s and ’40s. Today, the U.S. State Department forbids American travelers from bringing into or taking out of Germany “any literature, music or items that glorify fascism, the Nazi past or the Third Reich.” Displaying the swastika in Germany is unillegal, punishable by fines or up to three years in prison.
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