Rep. Clay Higgins’ extremely racist tweet is just the tip of the iceberg – Mother Jones

Rep. Clay Higgins in Washington, DC, in 2022. (Tom Williams/Getty)

On Wednesday afternoon Republican Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana posted a derisive, racist tweet about “savage” Haitians practicing “vudu” and streaming into the U.S. from the “vilest country in the Western Hemisphere.” Such rhetoric would surprise most members of Congress. In Higgins’ case, it serves as an excellent introduction.

The post from Higgins, which he soon deleted, focused on the legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, whom Republicans continue to vilify for fun and possible electoral gains.

The tweet is racist. There’s not much more to say about it. But there is much more to say about Higgins, a member of Congress whose disturbing personal story has not attracted much attention.

One of Higgins’ first public appearances came in 1992 in a newspaper article unearthed by Bayou Lettera Louisiana publication that investigated the congressman. Higgins, then 30, was commenting on Pat Buchanan’s run for president, which came a year after former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard and neo-Nazi David Duke was elected governor of Louisiana.

“Duke is not going to get the vote. Pat is. Pat holds many of the same positions,” Higgins told a reporter when he attended a Buchanan rally – correctly recognizing Buchanan’s white nationalism. “Regardless of the fact that David is a homeboy and so on, the kid is a Nazi, and that’s a real problem.”

Yet Higgins admitted that he recently voted for David Duke for governor of Louisiana (a man who once decorated his college dorm room with a Nazi flag and a picture of Adolf Hitler).

Higgins’ missteps were reportedly not limited to rhetoric. The first of his three ex-wives wrote in 1991, when she filed for a restraining order against him, that Higgins had “put a gun to my head” during an argument. She stated that he had “threatened that if I ever came near the house he would shoot me.” (Higgins denied ever being violent toward her.)

In 2007, Higgins resigned from the Opelousas Police Department in Louisiana after reportedly attacked an unarmed black man and then lied about it. 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 that while he was on the ground, Officer Higgins grabbed him by the hair, twisted his head and told him to get his lawyer and called him a wimp,” the report states. “(He) stated that he was then kicked while he was still on the ground, but he could not see who kicked him.” The report also states that Higgins “grabbed (the victim) by the neck and slammed him against his car” and “punched him in the jaw.”

Higgins continued to lie about the incident, falsely claiming he was the one who was attacked. The now-congressman later called the police investigator back to admit he had not been telling the truth, claiming his decision to be honest again was due to him confessing his sins to a Las Vegas consultant. The report reached another conclusion: Higgins learned that a third officer on the scene during the incident had failed to cover for him and Chautin.

Higgins resigned to avoid disciplinary action and then hired Chautin to work in his congressional office.

There may be other incidents that we don’t know about. Higgins himself admits that he has skeletons in his closet.

“I didn’t just do things wrong. If you want to dig into my past and find out everything I did wrong, you should get up early, pack a lunch and bring batteries for your flashlight,” he warned in a 2015 interview. “Bring a shovel. You might need a backhoe.”

If you have any information about Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), please contact Noah Lanard at [email protected].