Louisiana's third Congressional District.
It's home to over 770,000 people.
It's comprised of a geographically large portion of the southern
half of the state, including the city of Lafayette.
The folks who live there have sent this man, Republican
Clay Higgins, to be their representative in the United States
Congress 4 terms in a row.
Before he was a congressman, he was a Louisiana police
deputy who got himself in a bit of trouble with
the following video.
Street gang is responsible for hundreds of violent crimes.
We've arrested ten of these thugs and have warrants on
7 more.
Every one of these animals is most definitely armed and
dangerous.
You will be haunted, you will be trapped, and if
you raise your weapon to a man like me, we'll
return fire with superior fire.
Darren Carter, you think men like these are afraid of
an uneducated 125 LB punk like you that's never won
a fair fight in your life and holds your gun
sideways now?
In 2016, Higgins was forced to resign in disgrace after
publishing that video.
So of course he immediately ran for Congress and won
with 56% of the vote.
He hasn't changed a bit.
Yesterday Higgins posted this racist rant about Haitian migrants in
Ohio.
Quote.
Lol.
These Haitians are wild eating pets, voodoo, nastiest country in
the Western Hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters.
But damned if they don't all feel sophisticated now filing
charges against our present VP.
All these thugs better get their mind right and their
ass out of our country before January 20th.
After widespread outrage and condemnation, including some objections from Republicans,
Higgins ended up deleting the tweet.
And Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson tried to
turn the whole thing into sort of Kumbaya moment about
the healing powers of redemption.
Clay Higgins is a dear friend of mine and a
colleague from Louisiana and a very frank and outspoken person.
I just talked to him about it.
He said he went to the back and he prayed
about it and he regretted it and he pulled the
post down.
That's what you want the gentleman to do.
I'm sure he probably regrets some of the language he
used.
But you know, we move forward.
We believe in redemption around here.
He prayed about it, he regretted it, and he pulled
the post down South.
Guess what?
After Congress officially left town for six weeks, Higgins then
turned around and said I'll do it again.
If I want to quote.
It's all true.
I can put up another controversial post tomorrow if you
want me to.
I mean, we do have freedom of speech.
I'll say what I want.
It's not a big deal to me.
It's like something stuck to the bottom of my boot.
Just scrape it off and move on with my life.
Charlotte has covered the far right for two decades.
He's author of the Undertow Scenes from the Slows of
a War, which is a great book.
And last year he wrote a fantastic and unnerving profile
of Clay Higgins entitled The Congressman Telling Trump Supporters to
Buckle Up.
Jeff, I thought of you immediately when I saw what
Higgins posted.
Let's start with the post, which is genuinely shocking and
vile even by the degraded standards of modern political right
wing rhetoric.
I'm sure you weren't surprised.
What was your reaction when you saw this develop yesterday?
I think Clay Higgins is the the latest member of
the GOP to sort of carry the wall forward on
an escalation of violent political rhetoric using immigrants, using Haitian
Americans who are here legally working hard in Springfield.
OH, and, you know, he's he he's not a bright
man, but he has a long history of playing a
media game.
And this is one more sort of notch for him
in escalating the rhetoric and moving it closer to violence,
closer to the Civil war that he has, in fact,
fantasized about in the past.
Yeah, Talk a little more about that because not only
is this a person who who I think is, you
know, clearly racist, certainly expresses racist views.
He, he's, he really is obsessed with this sort of
idea of like in incipient violence, threatening violence, violence sort
of haunting everything, the politics of violence.
And you you talk about this in the piece.
Yeah, I think there's there's sort of two dates that
you can look at in Representative Higgins life and that
goes back 1/2 when Trump was first indicted and a
number of Freedom Caucus members, I think I think it
was Representative Andy Biggs who talked about it's time for
war.
But Clay Higgins went further.
He said know your bridges, buckle up 150K, know your
bridges, Rocksteady calm.
And it was this sort of bizarre language that a
lot of people thought was funny.
They made a lot of they thought, here's another Republican
who's incoherent.
What he was referring to there, though, was 1 to
50,000, which is a ratio of military grade maps.
Hold your bridges.
This is speaking to a kind of fascist fantasy, which
is not so much militias marching on cities, but as
in taking strongholds.
Know the bridges.
Know the means of approach to your stronghold and seize
it you.
You also cite a few other things he said in
the piece, and this one really leapt out to me,
he said.
You say Higgins didn't win much attention when he told
the gas industry conference he was a three percenter, part
of a militia movement that believes the US government is
tyrannical and must be confronted in the spirit of Revolutionary
War.
There are three percenters have been indicted and were were
involved in in some of the stuff on January 6th
in 2020.
Responding on Facebook this while he's a sitting member of
Congress on Facebook to armed Black Lives Matter protesters.
Higgins promised to shoot them on site.
I drop any 10 of you where you stand.
Yeah.
And he added 1450 FPS, which, again, was sort of
derided as what is this guy Speaking of?
He's Speaking of ammunition speed, 1450 feet per second.
The Three Percenters is part of a long history going
back to 1992 when he was voting for David Duke.
He's been connected to Richard Spencer, to the Oath Keepers.
The Three Percenters he was talking about, he was talking
to a gas industry meeting and he was telling them
you are the Three percenters imagining them as a militia
against people who are trying to fight climate change.
You know, he also just this is someone I think
is fairly consistent.
In 2007 when he was a police officer, he was
accused of striking a handcuffed suspect.
He then and then lying about it.
He quit rather than being demoted.
So there's there are some actual actions in his past
that suggest a kind of intimacy with violence.
He goes back to 2018 when he first trained as
a military policeman.
He is an incompetent cop.
I mean, two forces at least that he's been forced
to resign from and he's incompetent even by the standards
of his own kind of idea about the blue line.
But where that really comes to bear is when you
talk about when you look at what he's been doing,
he's he gets to write it as a congressman who
doesn't achieve much.
He's not trying to do legislation.
You're showing a picture there of him with Ashley Babbitt's
mother, Mickey Witthoff.
He's the leading member of Congress in terms of pushing
the conspiracy theory that January 6 was what they call
a fed surrection, that it was the FBI, that the
FBI are the enemy.
He speaks of the deep state.
He constantly is going on podcasts and saying that he
and other members of the Freedom Caucus have gathered all
this secret information that they're going to reveal at a
certain point coming soon.
Rock steady, calm, Hold on.
He's always promising an apocalypse just around the corner.
Jeff Charlotte, who wrote that great profile of Clay Higgins,
The Atlantic, and a fantastic book about similar themes.
Thank you so much for your time tonight.
I appreciate it.
Thanks, Chris.