Carl Higbie, a former Trump administration appointee and campaign surrogate, defended his past racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic comments, saying they were taken “out of context” and were “a statistical observation.”
“They dig up a couple things, a couple. Look, I had a radio show,” Higbie told “The John Fredericks Show” radio program Friday, according to CNN.
“How many times have you said something on radio that could possibly be construed as very controversial when taken completely out of context? What, daily?” he continued.
Higbie, who is director of advocacy at Trump-aligned America First Policies, then detailed his experience working with “low-income, urban minority communities.”
“I’m also on the board of the Urban Revitalization Coalition, which is run by the National Diversity Coalition,” he said, referring to two diversity groups linked to Trump.
“You could not have been more far off base by putting that headline out there. However, it fit their narrative, and because I made a statistical observation, they think that’s racist,” Higbie added.
Higbie in January resigned as chief of external affairs for the Corporation for National and Community Service, a federal agency, after CNN unearthed a series of controversial remarks he made on his Internet talk show, “The Sound of Freedom.”
Subjects of his statements included African-Americans, Muslims, gay people, and senior California Democrats House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.
In 2013 and 2014 episodes of his show, Higbie said “the black race” has “a lax of morality” and that black women “think that breeding is a form of employment.”
“I believe wholeheartedly, wholeheartedly, that the black race as a whole, not totally, is lazier than the white race, period,” he was also recorded saying.
