New Jersey GOP congressional nominee says welfare has harmed blacks far more than '230 years of slavery'

The Republican nominee for New Jersey's 2nd Congressional district has a long history of making inflammatory statements about black Americans and Muslims, a Media Matters investigation has revealed.

As the website documents, New Jersey Republican candidate Seth Grossman once wrote that welfare programs had done more harm to black Americans than even "230 years of slavery."

In fact, Grossman has even denied that white Americans were responsible for slavery in the United States at all.

"Blacks were not enslaved by whites," he wrote in a 2017 Facebook post. "They were enslaved by other blacks and then sold to whites... I do know of many Africans who wish their ancestors had been taken to America as slaves."

In addition to his racist comments against black people, Grossman has also attacked Muslims on a regular basis.

Among other things, he's written that "Islam has nothing in common with other modern world religions like Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, or Hinduism" and that Islam is "a cancer" that has "already infected a billion people."

Grossman took his feelings about Muslims even farther in a 2015 Facebook post in which he said we are "at war with Islam" and asked, "Why are we inviting thousands of Muslim immigrants to our towns and neighborhoods?"

Read the entire Media Matters report here.