The Congressman Telling Trump Supporters to ‘Buckle Up’

The evening that Donald Trump was indicted, Republican politicians once more swore their allegiance to the person and the bottom for which he stands. Most invoked banana republics, however a bolder faction urged retaliation. “We have now reached a war phase,” wrote Representative Andy Biggs on Twitter. “Eye for an eye.” Speaking in Georgia, Arizona’s failed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake—persevering with her audition for VP on Trump’s ticket—promised that 75 million armed Americans stood between Trump and prosecution. “That’s not a threat,” she smirked. “That’s a public-service announcement.” But Representative Clay Higgins of Louisiana, a former sheriff’s deputy, issued probably the most strident assertion of all. He suggested followers on Twitter:

What? Liberals on Twitter at first delighted in what they noticed as sputtering incoherence and reacted in their very own cinematic vernacular: Monty Python memes, GIFs from Austin Powers and Anchorman. Then there was the ready-made response of the Trumpocene, the fake expression of concern for the speaker’s psychological well being. “Do you need help?”

Such are the means by which some think about the middle nonetheless holds. “Humor,” they hope, is the very best antidote to fascism, a time period that increasingly more historians and political scientists say ultimately applies to a mass American motion, whilst many information organizations nonetheless shrink back from it. But the concept that liberals can or ought to simply snicker off the menace is painfully naive.

Higgins is a savvy digital soldier with real-world paramilitary credibility. He started his profession at 18 as a navy policeman within the Louisiana National Guard and later turned a member of a SWAT staff earlier than gaining fame for viral movies during which he derided the masculinity of wished criminals. “What you fellas are is the Virginia Slim gang,” he drawls in a single. “You’re certainly not Marlboro Men.” Local and nationwide press adored the routine: “We hear things about law enforcement and the excessive force that they use,” a Louisiana information anchor informed The Washington Post in 2015, “but the only weapon Clay Higgins uses are his words.” The Post praised him as “the most irresistibly intimidating man in America.” “His future is certainly bright,” trilled CBS News.

In truth, Higgins had resigned from a police pressure in 2007 to keep away from being demoted after mendacity about hanging a handcuffed prisoner. In 2016, he resigned from the St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s division slightly than be “reigned in” after posting a video declaring his intention to “hunt” the “animals” of an area gang, largely Black males whose faces and names he featured. That fall, he gained his first race for Congress. He doesn’t declare to be a saint. He refers typically to his previous. Last May, he posted a video of himself lifting a protester off his toes at a press convention and heaving him away. His followers know concerning the instances he’s crossed the road; that’s why they like him. A “straight from central casting” kind, as Trump may say, Higgins has cultivated the veneer of a person who’s seen, and executed, darkish issues. Necessary issues.

Which was why, maybe, shortly after getting into Congress, his identify confirmed up on a talking invoice with the white nationalist Richard Spencer. Higgins claimed that it was a mistake, however a month later he took the stage at a Washington, D.C., Oath Keepers rally, organized by Stewart Rhodes, who’s now serving 18 years for seditious conspiracy and proof tampering associated to the January 6 revolt. Gripping a pink Bible he referred to as the “rule book,” Higgins lamented the lack of an America during which “everybody had guns … guns in every vehicle … any child could buy a gun from any seller if Daddy sent them with the money.” This time, the press didn’t listen. “Hunting” younger Black males could make you a media star, however standing with a gaggle that a lot of the press even now insists is fringe didn’t make the information.

But Lamar White Jr., a reporter for the small, unbiased on-line publication Bayou Brief, seen that Higgins spoke in entrance of a flag that includes the ranch model of the militia martyr LaVoy Finicum, who was killed in a standoff with police in 2016. Higgins didn’t win a lot consideration when he informed a gas-industry convention he was a “Three Percenter,” a part of a militia motion that believes the U.S. authorities is tyrannical and have to be confronted within the spirit of the Revolutionary War. In 2020, responding on Facebook to armed Black Lives Matter protesters, Higgins “promised” to shoot them on sight: “I’d drop any 10 of you where you stand.” “1450 fps fast,” he added, one other little bit of numerology some deemed cryptic. It refers to ammunition velocity: 1,450 toes per second.

Let’s revisit the Higgins tweet, then.

Note that Higgins begins with “President Trump,” not “former President Trump.” That Trump continues to be president has been a Higgins declare since at the very least 2021, when he mourned Trump’s Facebook ban in a submit of his personal describing Joe Biden as “iPOTUS” managed by a “cabal.” Cabal is a QAnon time period; iPOTUS seems to be Higgins’s personal coinage, presumably for “imposter POTUS.”

“This is a perimeter probe from the oppressors,” Higgins’s tweet continues. The “oppressors,” after all, are members of the “cabal,” the tyranny decried by Three Percenters. Higgins has additionally referred to them as “Leviathan.” A perimeter probe is reconnaissance meant to find out your pressure’s power.

“Hold,” Higgins writes. Another means of placing that’s “Stand back and stand by.” The time period rPOTUS interprets as “the real president, Trump.” “rPOTUS has this” can be learn by some QAnon adherents—and the numerous extra Trumpists who don’t determine with Q whilst its mythology has seeped into customary GOP rhetoric—as “Trust the plan.” Trump has it beneath management. Everything is occurring for a cause. “God wins.”

“Buckle up”: Get prepared. Remember what rPOTUS stated in January after he stood for the J6 Prison Choir’s hit single “Justice for All”? That “2024 is the final battle.”

Then comes the phrase that mystified those that don’t spend their weekends “training” for revolt or doomsday: “1/50K know your bridges.” 1:50,000 is a scale used on navy maps. It’s additionally used on some U.S. Geological Survey maps, largely in relation to areas surrounding navy installations. Know your bridges isn’t jargon or metaphor. For the militia-minded, it means figuring out the approaches to your location—particularly bridges, which could be seized, a lot the best way Canadian far-right truckers blockaded the Ambassador Bridge to Detroit in 2022.  And it might probably imply greater than that. The liberal nightmare of militias marching on authorities establishments—realized on January 6—doesn’t match the fascist fantasy of retreating to strongholds. That is, of closing off counties beneath the authority of the “Constitutional sheriffs,” a preferred motion that devolves—or escalates—from states’ rights to counties’ rights, with sheriffs empowered to implement or not implement legal guidelines as they see match.

“Rock steady calm,” writes Higgins. The second, he’s saying, isn’t now. Not but. Hold your hearth. Hold the road. Necessary rhetoric, as a result of Higgins and the entire Freedom Caucus put collectively don’t have the standing to truly summon the armed plenty into motion. So Higgins—like Andy Biggs, like Kari Lake, like Trump himself—alludes to the menace that fascism could but pose. It’s a tidy maneuver: They spook liberals into mocking them. That mockery feeds their very own base.

Do they consider what they’re saying? Do they imply their violent implications? Does it matter? Their civil struggle is imaginary, however there actually are males with weapons, extra now than I’ve seen in 20 years of reporting on the precise.

Two days after his bridges tweet, Higgins—who wouldn’t reply to my inquiries—posted this:

Maybe you may translate it your self now. “Deep commo”: psyops. “Do NOT trip the wire”: Don’t take the bait.

There are, after all, “Feds” in every single place, as each militia member is aware of. Since January 6, it’s turn into standard knowledge on the precise that public shows of pressure are more than likely antifa in disguise or FBI trolls, attempting to make patriots merely combating the cabal look loopy. The patriots aren’t. You are. You thought this was humorous. That’s what they wished you to assume. Or in order that they inform themselves, speaking on a frequency that they consider the libs—the demon-crats—the globalists—the cabal—can’t hear. Too typically, they’re proper.