Louisiana Voice

Clay Higgins as Batman’s Bruce Wayne: here to save Gotham City

So, where has Clay Higgins been all this time?

The U.S. representative from Louisiana’s 3^rd Congressional District has been strangely slow to speak out about 44 separate mass shootings in which at least five persons died in the U.S. since he first took office in 2017.

The worst of these, the Paradise, Nevada massacre that left 60 dead and 867 people injured, elicited not a peep from Mr. Law and Order. Nor did the 26 deaths in the Sutherland Springs, Texas, church shootings in November 2017. Crickets.

Or the 23 killed in the El Paso in August 2019. Yawn.

Nor did the 21 killed in the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas in May 2011 prompt the Cajun John Wayne to speak out against gun violence. Not his problem

Neither did the 19 killed in the Lewiston, Maine in October 2023, or the 17 murdered in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida in February 2018. Boring.

All total, in the 8 ½ years Higgins has been ensconced inside the Beltway, no fewer than 433 human beings have lost their lives in those mass shootings. I’ll save you the trouble to calculating the average casualty count: it’s 9.8 deaths per incident, or 51 deaths per year since he’s been in office.

Yet, through all that carnage, we never heard a sound from the former deputy sheriff public information officer.

Until Charlie Kirk was killed last week. Now, as the Louisiana Illuminator so succinctly put it, Higgins is pursuing his “atypical” quest for political relevance by suddenly rising up and proclaiming that anyone who “belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk” should be banded from social media for life, kicked out of school, fired, or have driver’s licenses and/or business permits revoked – which penalty might apply.

Ironically, it was on social media that he posted the message, “There are societal limits to the freedom of speech.”

Apparently, those limits do not apply to Donald Trump who during the 2016 presidential campaign, hinted that the “Second Amendment” might be appropriate solution for Hillary Clinton. It also must have not applied when he urged his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021 to storm the U.S. Capitol or when he told Russia to “do what the hell you want” in regards to Ukraine.

No one is to “belittle” Charlie Kirk but it’s okay for Trump to wistfully dream about making the West Bank into a resort getaway even as Israel obliterates its buildings and murders innocent children.

It was Kirk himself who, when locked out of Twitter, said, “We are seeing right now that Big Tech has become the enforcement and the communication arm of the Biden campaign and the Democrat Party.”

“There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech,” sniffed Attorney General Pam Bondi, as if there existed some sort of clear definitive line that separated the two. After all, free speech to one might well be hate speech to another. Who decides?

I hope not Clay Higgins, who said, “If they ran their mouth with their smartass hatred celebrating the heinous murder of that beautiful young man who dedicated his whole life to delivering respectful conservative truth into the hearts of liberal enclave universities, armed only with a Bible and a microphone and a constitution… those profiles must come down.”

As I said in my first paragraph, where the righteous hell has Clay Higgins been while those 433 men, women and children – especially the children – were being slaughtered?

Okay, students, it’s pop quiz time, so take out your pencils and paper.

Today, I’m going to give you a series of quotations and your job will be to determine if each quote was said by Charlie Kirk or David Duke.

So, put away your iPhones and I don’t want to catch any of you googling your answers. Do your own work and send in your responses.

The answers will be posted tomorrow.

Okay, begin.

• “Racial idealism, or racialism, is the idea that a nation’s greatest resource is the quality of its people. It means examining all questions of government on the basis of whether the proposed measure is good or bad for our race. … Neither Communism, Capitalism, nor any other materialistic doctrine can save our race; our only racial salvation lies in a White racial alliance uniting our people with the common cause of racial idealism.”
• “Are facts racist too? Are white parents racist because they don’t want their children to go to school where their children are ten times more likely to be robbed or abused, intimidated, beaten, or even killed or raped?”
• “We’ve been conditioned to see a video of white people in MAGA hats standing in front of a Native American and assume that the white people are racists.”
• “I don’t want to see this country resemble or look like or become like Mexico.”
• “We have been propagandized by liars and fakers in the media to believe that America is a vicious, racist country and indiscriminate attacks on black people by whites happen all the time. But the numbers tell the truth. Black attacks on white people happen 3X more often than white on black crime, despite blacks being only 13% of the population. Why won’t the media just tell the truth? Why lie when those lies result in innocent people dying?”
• “Americans needs to understand that the election of Donald Trump has forestalled our slide into the abyss of cultural Marxism and the surrendering of our national heritage and identity to that of the global community.”
• “Thank you, President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa,”
• “Well, I have the same vision I think that the Founding Fathers of this country had. My vision would be a nation in concert with its traditions, its values, its heritage, a nation where our children are safe in the streets, where we have decent education, where the vast American majority is not facing racial discrimination.”
• “Marriage and motherhood make women happier, because of course they do.”
• “Jews are filled with more hatred and rage for our race, for our heritage, for our blood than perhaps you can imagine.”
• “The number one funding mechanism of radical, open border, neoliberal, quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions, and nonprofits” is “Jewish donors.”
• “Conservatives are branded bigots and we are falsely accused of hate speech when we express traditional values and ideas that have made America the greatest country on Earth.”
• “Affirmative action is a very nice term for racial discrimination against better-qualified white people in jobs, employment, promotions and scholarships and college admittance.”
• “…[T]hey do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. So, they had to steal a white person’s slot.”
• “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.”
• “We’ve got massive numbers of non-European immigrants coming in, which will change the status in America from an overwhelmingly European-American nation to an overwhelmingly non-European-American nation.”

Professor’s note: If you are gainfully employed or a university student, you run the risk of termination/suspension if you participate in this test despite the guarantees of the First Amendment and Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s insistence that freedom of speech “was not an abstract principle” to Kirk.

This is neither a eulogy or condemnation of Charlie Kirk. I didn’t agree with him the same way I didn’t agree with Rush Limbaugh but he had a right to express his views as guaranteed by the Constitution’s First Amendment. As Voltaire said, I may disapprove of what you say, “but I will defend to the death you right to say it” (so long as you’re not goading a mob into attacking the U.S. Capitol or some other form of violence).

Having said that, it’s interesting and more than a little hypocritical how certain ones have turned this tragedy into an opportunity to vent their rage at the so-called “radical left,” as if one end of the political spectrum is solely responsible for the political vitriol that now characterizes a once-United States.

Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, for example, said the left “owns this,” as if the Jan. 6 incursion of the U.S. Capitol never occurred or the Unite the Right rally never happened in Charlottesville in 2017 or that lynchings of black people was not the number one method of entertainment in the South until football came along, or that a certain right-leaning reality TV star didn’t once utter the complete nonsensical declaration that blacks were happier in the fields picking cotton.

Donald Trump vowed vengeance against the “radical left” for the killing which he said made Kirk a “martyr for truth.”

Exactly what “truth” would that be? Was it Kirk’s calling Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King an “awful” person? Was it his calling Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson an unqualified “diversity hire” while ignoring Trump’s employment of his own kids during his first term? Was it calling the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act a “mistake” and “an anti-white weapon”? Was it his support of the “replacement theory” conspiracy that Jews were trying to replace white Americans with nonwhite immigrants (that subsequently prompted a gunman to kill 11 worshipers at a Pittsburgh synagogue seven years ago)? Was it his lip service to free speech while at the same time promoting his “Professor Watchlist” by urging students to identify professors with leftist positions? Was it his steadfast denial of climate change? Or was it his ironic support of gun rights when he said it was impossible to avoid gun deaths in a society with an armed citizenry but that the benefits of gun rights outweighed the costs of “some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”?

So, please tell me which truth was he martyred for. I really want to know.

A reader of this blog wrote me to say, “They (the MAGHATs) wanted [the shooter to be] a gay, trans, black Muslim, College Democrat, atheist, named José Jabar Abdul Valdez, who hated guns, ate vegan from Massachusetts, with ties to Ukraine, with a PhD in Literature and Women’s Studies from Berkeley. What they got was a young, white male Mormon gun lover from a MAGA family — an uneducated electrician’s apprentice from Utah.”

Gonna be difficult to justify vengeance against the “radical left” with those demographics.

I recently completed the manuscript for what will eventually be about a 400-page book about child sex trafficking.

I suppose it would go without saying that part of the book deals with the Jeffrey Epstein matter, but by no means does it dominate the book; it’s just a small part. There are just too many tenacles to this horrific monster: the Roman Catholic Church, Protestant churches, cops, judges, elected officials and those group homes for so-called problem kids. The child sex trafficker knows no demographic.

The manuscript is currently undergoing final edits and should be available in the next three months or so.

BUT (there’s always a but), out there in the world of in-your-face politics, that Epstein matter just won’t go away and as crude as it may sound, Louisiana’s two U.S. senators have just gone on record as being at least tacitly complicit in the dirty business of child sex trafficking.

John Neely Kennedy and Dr. Bill Cassidy both VOTED TO TABLE Sen. Chuck Schumer’s amendment on Wednesday that would have forced the release of the Epstein files. The vote was 51-49. Had our two senators voted against the motion to table Schumer’s motion, the results would have been reversed.

Instead, both men, devoid of any courage or moral fiber, voted to support child sex trafficking on a grand scale. There’s no other way to say it.

They actually sided with the one person who is most desperate to keep those files hidden despite repeated promises in his campaign of full disclosure. There must be a reason for the secrecy now, and Kennedy and Cassidy voted to keep those records concealed, to abet a convicted felon.

Kennedy I can understand. He’s a coward through and through. At least Cassidy once summoned enough courage to vote to convict in Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial. That instantly cast Cassidy into the political trash bin with the MAGHATS. He’s history anyway now, so why not go out in a blaze of glory? Show some backbone. Be your own man. Don’t be Trump’s patsy when you know he’s not going to endorse you in next year’s election anyway. Why suck up now?

Kennedy, on the other hand, knows no other way to survive than to constantly kiss his master’s ring (mind you, I’m not saying which ring). He is scared to death of staking out his own position for fear of offending TACO Don. It’s that simple. That’s not courage, its cowardice.

But in the meantime, if you’ve ever had a child who was sexually molested or know someone who was, just know where our two U.S. senators stand on the issue.

There was once a Baptist minister who was shipwrecked on a desert island for several years. When the rescue boat finally came ashore, the visitors noticed three grass huts along the shoreline. They asked what they were.

“The one in the middle is my home,” the preacher said. “The one on the left is my church.”

“What about the one on the right?”

“Oh,” the minister replied, “we had a split in the church.”

The Baptist church has more flavors than Baskin-Robbins.

You have your basic, garden-variety Southern Baptist, of course.

But then you have the National Baptist Conventions, the American Baptist Churches USA, the North American Baptist Conference, the reformed, the Particular (Calvinistic), the general/Free Will (non-Calvinistic, the Primitive Baptists, the Seventy Day Baptist, the Missionary Baptist, the Congregational Independence Baptists, the Strict (as opposed to not-so-strict?) the Berean Baptist Church, the Independent Fundamental Baptists, the latter two born because members felt the Southern Baptist were too (ahem) liberal. Speaking of oxymorons, I personally don’t know what a liberal Baptist is, so if any of you know, please enlighten me.

Ministers in the Berean Baptist Church have been credibly accused of the rape of teenage girls being held in church-affiliated group homes, including New Bethany Home in Bienville Parish.

And those wild and crazy Independent Fundamental Baptist! Here’s Jack Schaap, former pastor of First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana, (before his arrest, conviction and SENTENCING to 12 years imprisonment for child sexual exploitation and abuse) as he demonstrates POLISHING THE SHAFT during a church service before his fall from grace. (Two things here: Watch the other men on the stage and how there is absolutely no reaction from them to this spectacle – except for the one on the far left; he’s absolutely mesmerized. Also, don’t go getting your feathers ruffled at me for posting this; Schaap is the one who did the “polishing.”)

And now we have a new player because they don’t think the Baptists have swung far enough to the political right. And it’s a group from BOSSIER CITY’S FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH and closely-aligned with our distinguished Speaker of the U.S. House, one Mike Johnson, he of the covenant marriage and cellphone app to keep him off porn sites.

In 2022, the fledgling Conservative Baptist Network received a $50,000 contribution from the far-right Turning Point USA for the purpose of fostering “awareness of traditional American values.”

Turning Point USA is led by Charlie Kirk, one of the most visible proponents of Christian nationalism and Trumpism and of the merger of church and state. The now defunct Falkirk Center at Liberty University was named by combining the names Falwell and Kirk.

Liberty University was founded by Jerry Falwell Sr. and was more or less inherited by his son, Jerry Falwell, Jr. until Junior got caught with his pants literally down while watching his wife having sex with their pool boy.

It’s certainly curious how all these so-called political conservative preachers end up in sex scandals.

The Conservative Baptist Network is led by BRAD JURKOVICH, pastor of Bossier City’s First Baptist where Johnson was once a member. The church has been ordered by the Louisiana Supreme Court to turn over FINANCIAL RECORDS to a group of members who sued over what call inappropriate expenditures.

Even Johnson’s financial disclosures have come under SCRUTINY.

Stay tuned. We’re going to be following this saga closely as it unfolds in the courts.