As the fallout from Louisiana Republican Congressman Clay Higgins‘s deleted tweet dies down — replaced in the media spotlight by the next outrageous claim to “flood the zone” as the voter distraction strategy is known — many on the Left are unwilling to let racist bygones be bygones, or let the moment pass.
Higgins may have deleted his tweet, after controversially praying for guidance, but just because a flare-up of a disease has been mitigated doesn’t mean the disease isn’t still raging under the skin — ready to trigger further eruptions and damage until the source, not just its symptoms, is eradicated.
Among the lawmakers who don’t want Higgins’s rage forgotten, forgiven, or ignored is Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), who made sure to share Higgins’s ostensibly regretted tweet even after it was deleted — and who challenged journalists to do more than let it lie.
It’s not journalism to post this tweet and report “Democrats are outraged.” Journalism is asking every House Republican if they stand with their racist colleague or will they condemn him. And then reporting what is said. Is the media up for that? pic.twitter.com/FCWWLYKZh4
— Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) September 26, 2024
Swalwell asked the media to survey every GOP lawmaker — to uncover specifically who backed Higgins’s hate speech and who would instead strongly and publicly disavow it, finally drawing a line that the public could see.
House Speaker Mike Johnson‘s “let’s move on” and Higgins is a “good man” response puts him on the wrong side of the line — and history, as Swalwell, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and other see it — but what about the rest of the GOP, Swalwell wants to know?
Ted Cruz? Mitch McConnell, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene — do they approve of Higgins’s rant?
In Swalwell’s next post, he shared an article by the tradcon (traditional conservative) publication The Bulwark, penned by William Kristol and Andrew Egger — two pundits rarely accused of Lefty leanings.
In their article the two tradcon anti-Trumpists assert that the racism of which Higgins’s post was only an overt symptom is being fed from top of the GOP, where “a racist crank sits atop the party as god-emperor.”
Addressing Trump’s alleged pollution of the body politic and Johnson’s insincere and ineffectual clean-up efforts, Kristol and Eggers write “Trump is an industrial plant pumping sewage into a river; Mike Johnson is downstream with a kitchen strainer.”
As even former rival Nikki Haley and Trump’s outcast VP Mike Pence refuse to hold Trump accountable for his conduct, even as the former President mocks the Republican principles they purport to esteem, The Bulwark laments of the two cucks: “Even now, they can’t confront the fact [Trump] has taken a blowtorch to their entire world. From those ashes, people like Higgins blossom.”
Swalwell shared it, trying to keep the story alive. Yet there is ample evidence — in Higgins, in recent statements by Pence and Haley and other insufficiently principled tradcons — that the story doesn’t have legs because it’s just not shocking, or even surprising, to learn how Higgins and Trump and Greene and Johnson think about and use racist and sexist tropes for political gain. They’ve been saying the same thing, some prominent Democrats assert, all along.