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 recommended retaliation. “Now we have now reached a warfare part,” wrote Consultant Andy Biggs on Twitter. “Eye for an eye fixed.” Talking in Georgia, Arizona’s failed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake—persevering with her audition for VP on Trump’s ticket—promised that 75 million armed Individuals stood between Trump and prosecution. “That’s not a menace,” she smirked. “That’s a public-service announcement.” However Consultant Clay Higgins of Louisiana, a former sheriff’s deputy, issued essentially 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 want assist?”

Such are the means by which some think about the middle nonetheless holds. “Humor,” they hope, is the most effective antidote to fascism, a time period that increasingly more historians and political scientists say finally applies to a mass American motion, at the same time as many information organizations nonetheless shrink back from it. However the concept that liberals can or ought to simply snigger 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 Nationwide Guard and later grew to become a member of a SWAT workforce earlier than gaining fame for viral movies by which he derided the masculinity of wished criminals. “What you fellas are is the Virginia Slim gang,” he drawls in a single. “You’re actually not Marlboro Males.” Native and nationwide press adored the routine: “We hear issues about regulation enforcement and the extreme power that they use,” a Louisiana information anchor advised The Washington Put up in 2015, “however the one weapon Clay Higgins makes use of are his phrases.” The Put up praised him as “essentially the most irresistibly intimidating man in America.” “His future is actually brilliant,” trilled CBS Information.

Actually, Higgins had resigned from a police power 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 relatively than be “reigned in” after posting a video declaring his intention to “hunt” the “animals” of an area gang, principally Black males whose faces and names he featured. That fall, he received his first race for Congress. He doesn’t declare to be a saint. He refers typically to his previous. Final Could, he posted a video of himself lifting a protester off his toes at a press convention and heaving him away. His followers know in regards to the occasions he’s crossed the road; that’s why they like him. A “straight from central casting” sort, as Trump would possibly say, Higgins has cultivated the veneer of a person who’s seen, and completed, darkish issues. Essential issues.

Which was why, maybe, shortly after coming 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 rebellion. Gripping a pink Bible he known as the “rule e book,” Higgins lamented the lack of an America by which “everyone had weapons … weapons in each car … any baby may purchase a gun from any vendor if Daddy despatched them with the cash.” This time, the press didn’t listen. “Looking” younger Black males might 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.

However Lamar White Jr., a reporter for the small, impartial on-line publication Bayou Transient, 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 advised 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 Conflict. In 2020, responding on Fb to armed Black Lives Matter protesters, Higgins “promised” to shoot them on sight: “I’d drop any 10 of you the place you stand.” “1450 fps quick,” 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.

Word that Higgins begins with “President Trump,” not “former President Trump.” That Trump remains to be president has been a Higgins declare since a minimum of 2021, when he mourned Trump’s Fb 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 can be 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 power’s power.

“Maintain,” Higgins writes. One other manner of placing that’s “Stand again and stand by.” The time period rPOTUS interprets as “the actual president, Trump.” “rPOTUS has this” can be learn by some QAnon adherents—and the numerous extra Trumpists who don’t establish with Q at the same time as its mythology has seeped into commonplace GOP rhetoric—as “Belief the plan.” Trump has it below management. Every part is occurring for a purpose. “God wins.”

“Buckle up”: Prepare. Bear in mind what rPOTUS mentioned in January after he stood for the J6 Jail Choir’s hit single “Justice for All”? That “2024 is the ultimate battle.”

Then comes the phrase that mystified those that don’t spend their weekends “coaching” for rebellion 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 way in which Canadian far-right truckers blockaded the Ambassador Bridge to Detroit in 2022.  And it could actually 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’s, of closing off counties below the authority of the “Constitutional sheriffs,” a well-liked 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 regular calm,” writes Higgins. The second, he’s saying, just isn’t now. Not but. Maintain your fireplace. Maintain the road. Essential rhetoric, as a result of Higgins and the entire Freedom Caucus put collectively don’t have the standing to truly summon the armed lots into motion. So Higgins—like Andy Biggs, like Kari Lake, like Trump himself—alludes to the menace that fascism might but pose. It’s a tidy maneuver: They spook liberals into mocking them. That mockery feeds their very own base.

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

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

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