There Is No Bottom

But where Rep. Clay Higgins would take us is truly terrifying

Photo of Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA): Kenny Holston/The New York Times

After a Haitian immigrants rights group filed criminal charges against Donald Trump and J.D. Vance for knowingly smearing and targeting their community, Congressman Clay Higgins of Louisiana decided to dial up the racism.

In a since deleted tweet, Higgins called Haitians “wild,” doubled down on the false claim they are “eating pets,” misspelled “voodoo,” called Haiti the “nastiest country in the western hemisphere,” and referred to Haitians collectively as “thugs” and “slapstick gangsters.”

More ominously, he directly threatened them, saying they “better get their mind right and their ass out of our country before January 20th.”

It’s tempting to say, “This doesn’t shock me” because we’ve grown collectively numb to the daily horror show of the GOP. But when a sitting Congressman crosses an important line, we must call it out. And in the process, we should all learn more about the House member who would make such a vile and dangerous statement.

Today, I’ll walk through the immediate condemnation and fallout, as well as the hasty clean up by the GOP, over Higgins’s statement. It’s critical to understand how the current GOP leadership is actively protecting him and how this leaves the door open wide to even more such behavior.

Then I’ll spend some time dragging Higgins for his astonishingly disturbing past, because we all should know whom we’re dealing with here. 

Lastly, I’ll fit Higgins’s hateful and disturbing tweet into the larger context of the Republican party’s decades long embrace of racism and white nationalism. 

A censure censored

It didn’t take long after Higgins tweeted before Democrats caught wind of it and demanded action. According to Rep. Steven Horsford (D-NV), the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus interviewed by CNN, his colleagues confronted Higgins on the House floor following the tweet, trying to get him to understand how his actions were affecting the lives of actual people, “people who contribute to our communities, who are entrepreneurs, nurses and doctors, people who don’t deserve to be targeted.” 

“Just do what is right and stop this hateful rhetoric,” Horsford said he demanded of Higgins. “He told me ‘no.’ And that is when I said, ‘If you refuse, I will take this to the floor, we will move for a resolution to censure you, and that is exactly what we did.”

Cooper noted that Higgins was unrepentant. Higgins told CNN that he stood by his comments, adding, “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. He also said, 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.”

Here is the moment Horsford rose to censure Higgins, with the Congressional Black Caucus adding in a statement, “We stand against hate in all its forms. Hate has no place in the House of Representatives or anywhere in America.”

Democratic House leadership also moved quickly to condemn Higgins. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries issued a statement calling the tweet “vile, racist and beneath the dignity of the House of Representatives” and calling for Higgins to face accountability. Jeffries further tied Higgins to other extremists in the party. “Republicans are the party of Donald Trump, Mark Robinson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Clay Higgins and Project 2025. The extreme MAGA Republicans in the House are unfit to govern,” he said.

On the GOP side, it didn’t take long for Republican leadership to circle the wagons. Speaker Mike Johnson called Higgins a “dear friend” who had “prayed about” his statement before deleting it. “We believe in redemption around here,” Johnson said. 

When Rep. Horsford asked for unanimous consent to censure Higgins, the No. 2 Republican in the House, Steve Scalise, objected. “First of all, the tweet has been deleted already and removed,” Scalise argued, with Democrats erupting in jeers. He then tried to both-sides the moment. “If we want to go through everything the other side has said we will do it!” Scalise declared.

It is notable that all three of the players on the GOP side in this mini-drama—Speaker Johnson, Majority Leader Scalise and Rep. Clay Higgins—hail from Louisiana.

A disturbing history

It was probably a strong clue that Higgins was a low-life white supremacist when, as far back as 1992, he supported former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke for governor of Louisiana. This is an excerpt from a news story at the time, identifying Higgins as an “Army military policy officer” who attended a rally for radical extremist Pat Buchanan, who was running for president that year. Even after conceding that Duke was a Nazi, and “that’s a problem” for his candidacy, Higgins went on to vote for Duke for governor.

Higgins also has a telling, disturbing past in law enforcement, having had to resign twice from different police forces. The first was from the Opelousas police force in 2007 after assaulting an unarmed Black man and lying about it. As Mother Jones reported,

The victim stated that Higgins and another officer, John Chautin, attacked him after he did not consent to a search of his car, according to an internal investigation. “[The victim] stated while on the ground, Officer Higgins grabbed him by the hair and twisted his head and told him to go get his lawyer and called him a pussy,” the report explains. “[He] stated that he was then kicked while still on the ground but could not see who kicked him.” The report also says that Higgins “grabbed [the victim] by the neck and slammed him against his car” and “struck him in the jaw.”

Higgins later falsely claimed that he was the one who was assaulted—something Higgins later admitted was a lie. 

The second incident bears remarkable similarity to his tweet yesterday that created a political storm. As the Washington Post reported, back in 2016 Higgins, the “brash, outspoken captain of the St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s office” in Louisiana, resigned after appearing in a video calling a group of predominantly black gang members “animals,” “thugs” and “heathens.”

“We have felony warrants for your arrest,” Higgins said, looking directly into the camera while holding a semi-automatic assault rifle. “You will be hunted. You will be trapped. And if you raise your weapon to a man like me, we’ll return fire with superior fire.”

The Post noted that Higgins had made a name for himself online with such talk.

Higgins, a God-fearing man of the law with a deep southern drawl, had appeared in a series of widely popular “crime stoppers” videos that drew in millions of viewers. His tough-talking, straight-shooting approach made him a folk hero in Opelousas, La., and earned him a cult following online.

“You can run but you can’t hide,” Higgins said in one video, addressing his quarry with a hand resting on the grip of his pistol. “We will find you.”

The video went viral and attracted the attention of the local ACLU. “We live in a system of laws, and there are legal rights that apply to everyone,” the ACLU wrote in a statement. “It is the job of law enforcement to protect those rights while also keeping our communities safe. Nothing that Mr. Higgins said will make his community safer, but there is much to suggest violations of fundamental rights of all. . .In doing so he must honor the laws of this country, or he is unfit to serve.”

Higgins resigned, but remained defiant. “I will not kneel to violent street gangs,” Higgins said. “I will not kneel to murderers or the parents that raised them. . .I would die rather than sacrifice my principles.”

Higgins’s behavior is part of a long pattern of using his office to promote racism, violence and lies. As local Louisiana media outlet The Gambit recounted, Higgins “continues to insist Trump won the 2020 election and believes violent insurrectionists are heroes.” Further,

In 2020 he threatened to shoot Black civil rights protesters. In 2022 he dismissively referred to Raya Salter, a Black woman lawyer, as “boo” during a Congressional hearing. In 2023 he assaulted a progressive activist during a press event at the U.S. Capitol. In April, he argued for detaining EPA Administrator Michael Regan, who is Black, and sending him to Angola Prison.

From the Southern Strategy to White Minority Rule

The Intellectualist devoted an entire piece today to how Higgins’s in-your-face racism is the part of the transformation of the modern GOP into a party of overt white supremacy, writing:

This transformation, decades in the making, has shifted from covert dog whistles to blatant displays of racial hostility….

What was once subtle and coded has now become an explicit endorsement of white grievance, and figures like Higgins represent the modern face of this ideological shift.

As the article explained, Nixon began the GOP’s transformation by embracing the so-called “Southern Strategy” of winning over angry, racist white voters who were upset about the progress of the Civil Rights Era. Republicans began using coded language, including “states’ rights” and “law and order” to advance white minority rule. As Lee Atwater, who was a political consultant for Nixon explained,

You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘n*****, n*****, n*****.’ By 1968, you can’t say ‘n*****’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. 

Reagan’s “war on drugs” was really a war upon Black communities and a major step toward mass incarceration of the Black populace in the U.S. By the time Trump descended on a golden escalator and declared his candidacy in 2015, he understood that the Republican base was ready for someone unafraid to say what many of them felt. In his first campaign speech, he referred to Mexicans as “rapists” and “criminals” yet still went on to trounce his opponents in the GOP presidential primaries. Anti-immigrant racism was no longer a bug but a feature.

Higgins has styled himself a “Cajun John Wayne,” which again is code for “willing to commit violence in the name of white justice.” The GOP is now openly racist and proud of it, but the hate and violence was always just on simmer, ready to boil over as soon as the heat could be turned back up by a demagogue like Trump.

The United States now finds itself at a critical juncture. In six weeks, voters must decide whether we will be ruled by a white supremacist minority, or whether we will embrace democratic pluralism. The middle ground is now gone, and the hoods are off. If we fail to stop Trump now, the world of Clay Higgins will be our new reality baseline, and the American experiment and dream of a multiracial society, one based on the rule of law and constitutional rights and guarantees, will be imperiled in ways not seen in some 150 years.