Republican congressman's racist rant generates immediate backlash

[LetMyPeopleVote]

Rep. Clay Higgins' racist online message probably won't help the Republican Party's pre-election outreach to Black voters.

Link to tweet

I don’t know whether Republicans will make gains with Black voters in the 2024 elections, but it looks like the GOP is asking Black voters to overlook an astonishing amount of recent, overt Republican racism.

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/republican-congressmans-racist-rant-generates-immediate-backlash-rcna172830

As my MSNBC colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim explained, a national non-profit organization called the Haitian Bridge Alliance announced this week that it’s seeking criminal charges against the former president and the Ohio senator, accusing the Republicans of making false alarms, aggravated menacing and telecommunications harassment.

Republican Rep. Clay Higgins saw the news and responded in an overtly racist way. NBC News reported:

Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La., called Haiti the “nastiest country in the western hemisphere” in a post on social media Wednesday, saying migrants from the Caribbean country, the majority of whom are in the U.S. legally, should “get their ass out of our country.”

Even by contemporary standards, the GOP congressman’s rant was unusually ugly. “These Haitians are wild,” Higgins wrote in the since-deleted tweet. “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.”.....

For those unfamiliar with the far-right congressman Higgins, in his capacity as a local sheriff, appeared in a video in 2016 in which he described several Black criminal suspects as “animals” and “heathens,” adding, “You will be hunted, you will be trapped, and if you raise a weapon to a man like me, we’ll return fire with superior fire.”

After the video surfaced, Higgins resigned — which cleared the way for his election to Congress, where he’s best known for concocting deeply weird conspiracy theories about the Jan. 6 attack. This, of course, didn’t stop GOP leaders from assigning him to a task force investigating the Trump rally shooting......

A couple of years ago, Republican officials expressed some confidence that the party’s strategic outreach to Black voters was starting to pay off. The Hill reported that the GOP believed its messaging was starting to “resonate with the crucial voting bloc.” The New York Times reported soon after that Republicans saw “a fresh opening” to “peel away some Black voters.”

I don’t know whether Republicans will make gains with Black voters in the 2024 elections, but I do know that the GOP is asking Black voters to overlook an astonishing amount of recent, overt Republican racism.

[rickford66]

1. Haitians helped the colonies secure our freedom from England.

They have paid a terrible price for their own freedom. I'm trying to think of a few words about the importance of the knowledge of history. Any suggestions ?