CNN.com’s KFILE has outed Merritt Corrigan, President Donald Trump’s new nominee for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) for racist, sexist and homophobic statements in the past.
The aim of the USAID is supposed to be an independent agency from the federal government, but it trains U.S. foreign service workers who run assistance programs dealing with global poverty, disaster relief, and other socioeconomic relief issues in the developing world. It’s for that reason that appointing someone known for racism, sexism and homophobia probably isn’t a good look for the Trump White House.
The 2019 and 2020 tweets from at least 400 previously unreported Tweets in Corrigan’s feed have been deleted, but not before the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine could capture them.
“Mass deportations when?,” Corrigan tweeted in October 2019, with a 2010 article quoting German Chancellor Angela Merkel saying German multiculturalism failed.
“Our homo-empire couldn’t tolerate even one commercial enterprise not in full submission to the tyrannical LGBT agenda,” Corrigan also wrote on Twitter before she was hired by the Hungarian embassy in Washington.
Things got worse when she started talking about women.
“This sick statement by [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren, which glibly mocks a real crisis happening in our society, is exactly why women shouldn’t be in office. They will always advocate for themselves at the expense of men, and revel in it,” Corrigan also tweeted in October 2019.
Corrigan went on to lash out at conservative radio host Michael Knowles when he shared a photo of himself with a drag queen.
“Right wing gatekeepers have made it abundantly clear that their allegiance is to Satan and those who carry out his agenda of appalling sexual perversion over those who question the liberal status quo,” she tweeted.
“Western women are slowly waking up to the lies of feminism and the organized effort to push us toward an empty life of isolation and childlessness,” she also tweeted that month.
She even went so far as to argue that it was cruel and wrong to “empower” girls and tell them that they are “equal” to men, in November 2019 tweets.
First daughter Ivanka Trump has worked to foster women entrepreneurs around the world with a program she calls We-Fi, short for the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative. Corrigan seems to personal oppose such a program.
Ivanka has also appeared at an international conference focusing in Berlin on building leadership among women and girls. She got a warm reception until she tried to claim her father cared about the success of women.
After 2019 reports that conditions have improved in Somalia’s humanitarian crisis, Corrigan went off on immigrants, “Great, can we send the 70,000+ Somalis in Minnesota back then?”
She then said, “Immigration is the hostile governing elite’s preferred agent of chaos,” later that same month.
USAID’s mission statement says that all LGBTQ people have a right “to live with dignity, free from discrimination, persecution, and violence.” USAID’s commitment to women and girls seems to also fly in the face of Corrigan’s tweets.
“Investing in gender equality and women’s empowerment can unlock human potential on a transformational scale,” USAID says. “For societies to thrive, women and girls, men and boys must have equal access to education, healthcare, and technology. They must have equal control of resources, lands, and markets. And they must have equal rights and opportunities as peace-builders and leaders.”