In early 2019, at the beginning of the 116th Congress, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) announced to the media that Rep. Steve King would not be seated on any committees, limiting his power. The move followed comments the Iowa Republican made to the New York Times a few days before in which he wondered how the terms “white nationalist” and “white supremacist” had become offensive.
“This is not the first time we have heard these comments,” McCarthy told reporters. ‘That is not the party of Lincoln, and it is definitely not America.” With the move, he said, “I think we spoke very loud and clear that we will not tolerate this type of language in the Republican Party.”
Even in 2019, with Donald Trump in the White House, McCarthy’s comments rang a little hollow. But particularly by current standards, McCarthy’s position was laudable. Here, at least, was a Republican leader willing to call out a legislator whose sympathies with White nationalism and anti-immigrant racism were obvious.
If anything, King was simply ahead of the curve within his party. He first rose to national attention with breathless jeremiads against immigration, including, at one point, presenting a model of a wall he suggested should be built on the border with Mexico. This may sound familiar.
In 2018, King expressed support for the “great replacement” theory, a claim advanced by White supremacists suggesting that there’s a plot to subvert countries through immigration. This idea, amplified on Fox News by Tucker Carlson, has now been embraced widely on the right and pops up regularly in rhetoric from prominent officials, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).
That same year, King shared on social media a photo of a group of young immigrants who had been separated from their parents, declaring that they were “old enough to serve in the military.” Describing immigrants as “military-aged males” in an effort to amplify a perceived threat is now commonplace in Republican rhetoric.
King’s punishment (and eventual primary loss) did not curtail the rhetoric he presented. If anything, the trend on the right has been to see how far that rhetoric can go while still being defensible as not explicitly racist. Because the rhetoric has become more commonplace, though, what Republicans view as defensible has steadily crept further to the right. A party that’s centrally powered by White Americans’ perceptions of diminished status has given itself lots of space to lash out at those who aren’t White.
Which brings us at last to Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.).
On Wednesday afternoon, Higgins joined the Republican presidential nominee and his running mate in bashing immigrants from Haiti.
“Lol. These Haitians are wild,” he wrote on X, the social media company formerly known as Twitter that’s become a central vehicle for the aforementioned lashing out. “Eating pets, vudu, nastiest country in the western hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters … but damned if they don’t feel all sophisticated now, filing charges against our President and VP. All these thugs better get their mind right and their ass out of our country before January 20th.”
The “filing charges” comment related to a group in Ohio that is seeking to hold to account Trump and Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) (not “our” president and vice president at the moment) for their rhetoric targeting Haitian immigrants in the city of Springfield. But that’s beside the point, which is that nearly every other word in Higgins’s screed is explicitly racist and/or toxic.
This is not the first time we’ve heard such things from Higgins, to paraphrase McCarthy. Higgins is a former law enforcement officer who faced sanction for his treatment of an unarmed Black man he was detaining. In 2016, The Washington Post covered him after his viral videos calling out criminals drifted into his referring to Black suspects as “animals.”
Oh, and then there was the interview he granted a newspaper in his home state when former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke was seeking election as governor.
“Regardless of the fact that David’s a homeboy and all that, the boy’s a Nazi, and that’s a real problem,” Higgins said of Duke. Nonetheless, the reporter noted, Higgins voted for him.
After Higgins’s post about Haitians created a predictable uproar, Speaker Johnson spoke to reporters about the controversy.
“I just talked to him about it,” Johnson said. “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.” He added that Higgins “probably regrets some of the language he used.”
Higgins didn’t seem to agree. Speaking to CNN, he leaned into his original comments.
“It’s all true,” he said of the post that included overtly false assertions. “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 compared the post to “something stuck to the bottom of my boot: Just scrape it off and move on with my life.”
When Democrats called for Higgins to be censured, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) rose to his colleague’s defense. The post had (by then) been deleted, he insisted, and “if we want to go through everything the other side has said we’ll be happy to do it.”
Whataboutism, another prominent feature of the modern Republican Party. Good luck to Mr. Scalise in finding social media posts from Democrats as aggressively hostile and racist as Higgins’s.
Presumably part of the reason Johnson and Scalise circled the wagons is that they, like Higgins, are Louisianans. Part of it, too, is that their majority is extremely narrow, and aggravating any individual legislator is something they would rather avoid. But part of it, without a doubt, is that holding Higgins to account means holding the party to account and holding its leader, Donald Trump, to account. How do you say that Higgins’s language was unacceptable when Trump and Vance are making similar claims?
This is precisely why it’s important to intercept false, inflammatory and racist rhetoric early on. The more you allow it to seep into the conversation, the more you simply accept it and the further it ends up traveling.
Everyone agrees, at least for now, that the n-word counts as racist. Anything else, it seems, is excusable, if not defensible — at least when political power is on the line.