In January, a Trump administration official named Carl Higbie resigned after CNN reported on a rich tapestry of insulting statements he’d made about various demographic groups during past radio appearances. Among them:

• “The black race as a whole … is lazier than the white race.”

• “I just don’t like Muslim people.”

• “[Islam] is the ideology of a child molester.”

• “75 percent of [veterans] with PTSD don’t actually have it, and they’re either milking something for a little extra money in disability or they’re just, they honestly are just lying.”

• “I don’t like gay people.”

Higbie landed on his feet as the advocacy director of a pro-Trump PAC called America First Policies. Mike Pence is appearing at a Phoenix event hosted by the group on Tuesday; Higbie, meanwhile, defended his comments about relative racial industriousness in a radio appearance last Friday. “Because I made a statistical observation, they think that’s racist,” Higbie said to a Virginia-based host named John Fredericks, complaining that CNN had taken his remarks “completely out of context.” (Fredericks, incidentally, advertises himself as “America’s Godzilla of the Truth.”)

There you have it, then—Carl Higbie wasn’t being racist, he was just outlining the results of statistical research! Editors at the Journal of Retroactively Justifying Random Racist Stuff You Said on the Radio by Pretending It Was Science no doubt eagerly await the submission of his finished paper.