Watch: Project 2025 adviser admits he thinks Haitians should have been enslaved longer

Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) managed to corner Mark Krikorian, the longtime director of the right-wing Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and an adviser to the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, during a congressional hearing — where he forced Krikorian to admit that he thinks Haiti would have been better off socioeconomically if slavery had continued for a few more decades.

Haiti, which is famous for being founded in one of history's only successful mass slave revolts against French colonists, has become a heated topic as former President Donald Trump and his associates have spread a racist, viral internet hoax that Haitian migrants working in Springfield, Ohio have been abducting and eating people's cats and dogs.

Casar, a progressive Democrat who identifies with the informal caucus known as the Squad, first identified for Krikorian multiple cases of CIS promoting op-eds by white supremacists and Holocaust deniers including Kevin MacDonald, John Friend, and Jared Taylor — which Krikorian admitted to even while denying that they expressed those sentiments in any of the specific op-eds CIS promoted.

But then Casar turned the subject to something Krikorian himself had written in 2010, for the conservative National Review.

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"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,'" said Casar. "Is that correct, did you say that?"

"I'm happy to talk about that all you want," said Krikorian.

"You did say that, that's right?" said Casar. "Haiti was colonized as a slave plantation country, colony. 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."

"In the long run—" Krikorian said.

"In the long run?" repeated Casar. "People shouldn't have been enslaved a single day."

"And they had every right to throw the French out," said Krikorian. "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," said Casar.

"No, I did not. I did not — I do not want that," said Krikorian.

"You said they would have benefited from the French influence," said Casar.

"Like the people in Martinique and Guadeloupe, who were also enslaved in sugar colonies," said Krikorian. "They are much better off now than Haiti was."

"This all starts to add up," said Casar. "You continue to do this, disseminate writings of white nationalists, try to rationalize, for example, Haiti being colonized for 30 more years. You're a Project 2025 board member. In Project 2025 I couldn't figure out why, on page 583, it advocates for not allowing racial disparity or gender disparity to be considered discrimination legally anymore. In Project 2025, it eliminates a 50-year-old executive order that prohibits discrimination in federal jobs. On page 586, Project 2025 advocates for Donald Trump to allow businesses to discriminate based on religious beliefs. Before today, I couldn't understand why Trump's Project 2025 could advocate for ending civil rights protections ... but now I understand."

Watch the video below or at the link here.