A Project 2025 Adviser Just Defended Slavery in Haiti

A Project 2025 adviser was exposed Thursday in a congressional hearing for defending slavery in Haiti. 

Mark Krikorian, an adviser for the right-wing manifesto, is the director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a right-wing organization described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group with a history of promoting eugenics. Representative Greg Casar, a progressive Democrat, pointed out that in 2010, Kirkorian wrote an article for the conservative National Review magazine defending French colonization in the country. 

“I’ll ask you, Mr. Krikorian, and I know you’re a Project 2025 board member, your recent quote from a few years ago, where you said, quote, ‘Haiti is so screwed up because it wasn’t colonized long enough.’ Is that correct, did you say that?” Casar said to Krikorian.  

“I’m happy to talk about that all you want,” Krikorian replied. Casar responded by noting Haiti’s history as a French slave plantation until the slaves revolted in 1791, ultimately winning independence in 1804.

“The French colonized Haiti so that slaves would work on plantations. The end of colonization in Haiti was so that the people there would no longer be slaves. So what you’re saying, and I read your quote, and anybody watching this online should go read it—what you’re saying is it would have been good if they’d stayed colonized, which means it would’ve been good if they had stayed enslaved by the French,” Casar said.

Krikorian stumbled in his response, trying to explain that Haiti wasn’t better off for having gained independence earlier.  

“They had every right to throw the French out,” Krikorian said. “My point is, they would have been free 30 years later, they would have been in the same situation as—”

“You’re saying you wanted 30 more years of slavery in Haiti,” Casar said. 

The hearing from the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability was ironically titled “A Legacy of Incompetence: Consequences of the Biden-Harris Administration’s Policy Failures.” Krikorian was ostensibly called as a witness by Republicans to show Democratic failures on immigration. Instead, he was called out for his organization’s history of promoting white supremacists and Holocaust deniers.

Republicans have been criticized in the past several weeks for promoting a disproven, racist conspiracy that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are capturing and eating pets, ducks, and geese. As Casar pointed out Thursday, those conspiracy theories have their roots in the writings of extremist right-wing ideologues, whose old racist beliefs are influencing Republican policy today.  

The Trump-endorsed candidate in North Carolina’s gubernatorial race could soon lose his spot on the ticket due to an in-house ouster.

North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson is a Hitler-quoting, gay-bashing, conspiracy-touting antisemite, and has drawn immediate comparisons to Donald Trump for his bombastic orations and loyal GOP following, along with his own laundry list of controversies.

On Thursday, a bombshell CNN report revealed that Robinson had written on a pornography website’s message board about his desire to own slaves, his peeping in women’s locker rooms, and his enjoyment of transgender porn.

The comments were made long before Robinson entered electoral politics. CNN connected the account to Robinson via a “litany” of common biographical details and a shared email address. He also used his full name on his site account.

“I like watching tranny on girl porn! That’s f*cking hot! It takes the man out while leaving the man in!” Robinson wrote in one comment on the site, Nude Africa. “And yeah I’m a ‘perv’ too!”

Robinson repeatedly denied any connection to the account, instead telling CNN in an interview that the story amounted to “salacious tabloid lies.”

The story was initially leaked to CNN, as well as local Raleigh news outlet WRAL, by Robinson’s opponent, Attorney General Josh Stein, the Carolina Journal reported.

In light of the story, the Trump campaign reportedly told Robinson that he was no longer welcome to attend rallies for either candidate on the Republican presidential ticket, according to an anonymous source that spoke with the Journal. Robinson had been scheduled to appear at a rally for J.D. Vance on Wednesday but backed out after his office announced Robinson had fallen ill.

But despite growing pressure to back out—which included calls from local Republican strategists for Robinson to exit in order to save Trump’s chances in the battleground state—Robinson released a video statement ahead of the CNN report announcing his intention to stay in the critical race.

“Let me reassure you the things that you will see in that story are not the words of Mark Robinson,” Robinson said. “You know my words, you know my character, and you know that I have been completely transparent in this race and before.”

That butts Robinson up against the deadline to withdraw from the race: Thursday evening. If he does exit, the North Carolina Republican Party Executive Committee would be required to choose a replacement candidate—less than 50 days before the election.

The scandal is an unusual test of mettle for the exceedingly controversial politico. Robinson has shared a host of his disturbing positions online, including posts in which he minimized the horrors of the Holocaust, claimed a “satanic marxist” had made the movie Black Panther to pull “shekels” out of Black audiences, likened women getting abortions to murderers, and derided gay people as “filth” and “maggots.” Robinson has also expressed archaic views about women’s role in society, telling a Charlotte-area church in 2022 that Christians are “called to be led by men.”

Robinson has also suggested that “schools wouldn’t be getting shot up” if Christian teachings were forced into the classroom, and told a congregation at Asbury Baptist Church that public schools had taken a “nosedive” since mandatory prayer had been excised from curriculums.

Elon Musk’s since-deleted “joke” suggesting that there should be more assassination attempts on the president and vice president’s lives has suddenly landed him in trouble with the feds.

Following a second assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life Sunday, Musk posted an alarming tweet questioning why the MAGA conservative had been targeted several times while there had been no such attempt to attack Vice President Kamala Harris.

“And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” Musk wrote.

Musk deleted the tweet after it received widespread backlash, with X users torching him for “inciting violence,” but not before the Secret Service caught wind of the dangerously phrased message.

Secret Service documents related to Musk’s comments could not be accessed by Bloomberg’s FOIA Files newsletter, with the federal agency responding that the records about the post were “compiled for law enforcement purposes” and withheld on the basis that “disclosure could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings.”

Nate Herring, a spokesperson for the Secret Service, told Bloomberg that the agency “is aware of the social media post made by Elon Musk.”

“As a matter of practice, we do not comment on matters involving protective intelligence. We can say, however, that the Secret Service investigates all threats related to our protectees,” Herring added.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the records will translate into a full-throttle investigation, but it does highlight how seriously Musk’s offhand remarks are being taken by federal authorities that have thwarted two assassination plots in recent months.

By Monday, Musk had issued a couple of new tweets to explain away the atrocious comment. According to the tech billionaire, the violent invitation was just a bad retelling of a “hilarious” joke.

“Well, one lesson I’ve learned is that just because I say something to a group and they laugh doesn’t mean it’s going to be all that hilarious as a post on 𝕏,” Musk wrote in a post on X. “Turns out that jokes are WAY less funny if people don’t know the context and the delivery is plain text.”

Teamsters President Sean O’Brien isn’t happy that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized the union for refusing to endorse Kamala Harris for president. On Thursday, in response to her comments, he made the spurious claim that the Teamsters in AOC’s district overwhelmingly support Donald Trump. 

Speaking to CNN’s Dana Bash, O’Brien said, “[Ocasio-Cortez] should maybe get into her district, where it voted far-right Republican, and maybe find out what the problem is.” 

Bash asked the union president what he meant, to which O’Brien responded, “In our polling, New York, her district, voted overwhelmingly Republican to support former President Trump, so she may want to focus on her job instead of mine.” 

While that sound bite was highlighted by the Trump campaign on X (formerly Twitter), O’Brien’s statement was quickly disproven by the fact that Teamsters Local 202 in New York’s 14th District in the Bronx endorsed Ocasio-Cortez Thursday, which the congresswoman was happy to post on X herself. 

O’Brien’s decision to withhold a presidential endorsement has been met with disapproval from Teamsters local chapters across the country, with several in key battleground states subsequently endorsing the Harris-Walz ticket. After the Teamsters president spoke at the Republican National Convention in July, rank-and-file members spoke from the Democratic National Convention stage to voice their support for Harris. The union’s National Black Caucus also voted unanimously to endorse the vice president.  

O’Brien signaled a possible endorsement for Harris after he criticized Donald Trump last month, calling the convicted felon’s remarks to Elon Musk about firing workers for striking and organizing “economic terrorism.” In the end, the Teamsters president has been left embarrassed not only by organized labor’s traditional allies in the Democratic Party but also by his own members.  

Senator Lindsey Graham hit the road this week, hoping to secure Nebraska’s five electoral votes for Donald Trump.

The South Carolina Republican met with Governor Jim Pillen and more than a dozen Republican lawmakers Wednesday with the hopes of shoring up support for a bill that would make all five of Nebraska’s electoral votes go to whoever wins the state, according to KOLN. 

Nebraska splits its five votes, granting two of them to the winner of the state’s popular vote, while the other three are given to the winner of the three congressional districts. 

Nebraska’s Republican congressional delegation wrote a letter to Pillen Wednesday urging the state to return to a model where all the votes would be granted to the winner of the whole state. Such a bill would transform Nebraska’s presidential election into a winner-take-all system—at the very last minute. 

This change has the potential to hurt Harris in the increasingly tight presidential race. Currently, she has a chance to pick up an electoral vote in Nebraska’s second congressional district, which includes the Democratic-leaning Omaha–Council Bluffs metropolitan area. If the law changes, then the state’s five votes will likely go to Trump. 

Graham’s concerted efforts to pick up extra votes for Trump on the path to 270 shows just how desperate the former president’s campaign has become, as Harris closes the gap in key battleground states. 

The longtime Trump ally seems perfectly aware of how badly things are going for the Republican nominee. He recently criticized Trump’s debate performance, calling it a “disaster,” and practically begged Trump to stop hanging out with right-wing conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer.