At the first “Save America” rally, held on the Fourth of July outside of the Louisiana Governor’s Mansion in Baton Rouge, environmental investigative journalist Julie Dermansky captured this photo of one of only two people who wore face masks. The unidentified man told Dermansky that his mask was a way of protesting against Dixie Beer, which recently announced plans to drop the name “Dixie” from its brand. (Also note the novelty USS Robert E. Lee baseball cap, which are sold online by print-on-demand vendors. The USS Robert E. Lee was decommissioned nearly 40 years ago). Photo by Julie Dermansky.
Even though he’s just a week shy of his 57th birthday, Jeff Crouere—the pugnacious New Orleans area conservative talk radio host, TV pundit, and columnist—still looks like someone who occasionally gets the question “Can I see some ID?” by no-nonsense bartenders and by-the-book convenience store cashiers.
His style is probably best described as “Young Republican.” He seems most comfortable in a polo and khakis or a suit, which he wears whenever he’s on the air, even when it’s just a taping of He Said, She Said, the weekly radio show he co-hosts with his new girlfriend, Miriam “Mimi” Owens, the race-baiting provocateur who is perhaps best known locally for creating Robert E. Lee-themed Mardi Gras throws, which earned her a lifetime ban from the Krewe of Freret.
Recently, Crouere and Owens announced that they will be hosting their second “Save America” rally in Jefferson Parish on August 14. Around 200 people attended their first rally, which took place outside of the Governor’s Mansion in Baton Rouge on the Fourth of July, right as Louisiana began to confront a sudden surge in COVID-19 cases.
The event included Tony Spell, the breakaway Pentecostal preacher whose defiance of the stay-at-home order earlier in the year encouraged over 1,000 members of his church to undermine the public health, providing Spell with his 15 minutes of fame and a warrant for his arrest.
“Are you a masker or a free breather?” he roared at the rally, though he already knew the answer.
After I asked Crouere and Owens if they’d be willing to respond to a few questions, they were happy to help. Three weeks ago, we spoke for nearly an hour through FaceTime. At some point, I asked whether to expect the opposition to face masks to be a theme in upcoming rallies.
“Our event was not about masks,” Crouere told me. “That was not really the focus of our rallies, and that really won’t be the focus of our upcoming rallies.”
“But we’ll follow the law,” Owens interjected. “I don’t like it. I can’t breathe. I’m hot as heck in it. But we’re lawful people, so if we have to wear it, we’ll wear it.”
While their first event may not have been intended to focus on opposition to mask mandates, that message clearly wasn’t received by those in attendance.
“Out of the less than 200 rally-goers, I saw only two people with face masks,” reported environmental investigative journalist and photographer Julie Dermansky on Desmog. “One was worn by a man that had the words ‘Dixie Beer’ painted on it, which was expressing his disdain over the decision by the owner of the New Orleans beer company to change the beer’s name in response to anti-racism demonstrations. “The other mask I noticed at the rally was worn on a woman’s arm.”
According to Crouere, he and Owens decided to organize “Save America” rallies for four different reasons. “It’s about a response to attacks on police,” he explained. “It’s a response to the fact that our historic monuments are being taken down. It’s a response to a shutdown of the economy, and it’s a response to what a lot of people see as a leftward movement in the political world.”
Two weeks after their Fourth of July rally, Owens encouraged her friends and followers on Facebook to attend the “Take Our Country Back Rally (Say No to the Mask)” near the Lakeside Mall in Metairie, noting the event “is not organized by Jeff or I (sic). It is organized by Clay Taylor. He has filed suit about the mask mandate. All are welcome.”
Crouere told me that he was in attendance but reemphasized that neither he nor Owens had been involved in its planning.
When I decided to write about the purpose and the ultimate aims of their rallies, I had assumed the story would be about the political opposition to restrictions aimed at curtailing the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, but while that certainly is a part of the story, as I quickly came to understand, it should not be confused with what appears to be driving their activism: Anger over the effort to remove monuments that celebrate Confederate leaders and the Lost Cause of white supremacy.
Jeff Crouere at the “Save America Rally outside of the Louisiana Governor’s Mansion on July 4, 2020. Photo by Julie Dermansky.
Yet, despite promoting a debunked conspiracy theory even after President Trump himself gave up on the cause, Jeff Crouere has usually been able to present himself as someone who straddles between the far-right fringe and the more respectable Republican establishment. In addition to the weekly program with Owens, Crouere also hosts a daily morning show, “Ringside Politics,” as well as a bimonthly show in front of a live audience called “Politics with a Punch,” which describes itself as a local version of comedian Bill Maher’s former show “Politically Incorrect.”
He is helped, in part, by the fact that he broadcasts on one of the smallest stations in the New Orleans area, WGSO, which means you’re unlikely to hear his most incendiary commentary unless you’re a loyal listener who lives nearby or if you decide to download an app to listen online (albeit small, Crouere actually does command a national audience online).
Jeff Crouere and Donald Trump. Source: Facebook. Image credit: Bayou Brief
According to a friend of Bruni, their divorce was nasty, and among those in the country club crowd of suburban Jefferson Parish, rumors of a high-priced alimony agreement for Crouere were widespread.
A day after this report was initially published, Jeff Crouere responded to these claims directly. “These nasty and anonymous accusations are absurd and completely inaccurate. It is deeply regrettable that slanderous gossip about my personal life were peddled to the press,” he wrote to the Bayou Brief. “After five years of marriage, I decided to file for divorce in November, and I ask that my family’s privacy please be respected. This has nothing to do with politics. It’s simply about basic human decency.”
Regardless, it seems more than a little ironic that a man who once raged with indignation against former Mayor Mitch Landrieu for ordering the removal of Lost Cause monuments in New Orleans had been married to a woman who made a fortune tearing things down. Perhaps the two were never a good match.
However, the same cannot be said about his co-host and girlfriend Mimi Owens, the Cleopatra to his Marc Antony, the Bonnie to his Clyde.
The “Save America Rallies” began as a Facebook group, which the couple created to recruit and organize for a grand event. The group purported to be about “saving our heritage, culture, security, and prosperity.”
In little over a week, it mustered well over 3,000 members, a menagerie of militant conservatives, fringe conspiracists, and more than a few white supremacists, which proved to generate the wrong kind of attention and complicated their plans.
“Because of impending threats, which happens, that’s part of the silencing,” Owens told WWLTV. “We’re not going to announce a location or time until next week.”
But the aura of mystery and the vague idea of fighting back only encouraged their racist flock to air their grievances. “Next they’ll want to get rid of white people because it upsets them from slavery days, when not one these assholes was ever a slave,” wrote a member named Deborah. “They’re too damn lazy. That’s why they’re on welfare.”
Comments like Deborah’s not only avoided scrutiny from Owens, the group’s moderator, they were usually left unchallenged by everyone else as well.
Indeed, nearly every post in the group was one of outrage: videos of riots, looting, and violence, memes mocking George Floyd’s murder, and Deep State conspiracy theories. On the rare occasion in which the group was infiltrated by someone expressing any opinion that resembled disagreement, then, like a swarm of racist bees, the drones honed in, and the double-agents were quickly outed.
Often, contrarians were shouted down with accusations of antifa, the anti-racist, anti-fascist, far-left political movement that has emerged as the principal boogeyman of President Trump and his supporters on the fringe right.
A dutiful and vigilant overseer, Owens was attentive to questions from her legion and responded with swift action whenever so-callled “antifa” dissidents made an appearance. On a post celebrating Trump’s executive order protecting monuments, a member named Devin simply replied, “Unconstitutional.”
“Antifa alert,” a woman named Susan warned the group. “Devin is antifa,” she asserted, attaching a screenshot of Devin’s comment as evidence.
Owens responded to Susan’s alarm in less than twenty minutes and gave Devin the boot. “He’s been removed.”
Owens is no stranger to the racist sewers of social media. In addition to her role with the “Save America Rallies” group, she is also an admin of “Forever Lee Circle,” a Facebook page with more than 14,000 followers, ostensibly created to focus on fighting the removal of Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s statue in the city.
“Many slave owners, Jefferson and Lee for example, opted to keep their slaves to prevent them from being mistreated by others who might try an [sic] re-enslave them,” she once wrote in a post that is as appalling as it is factually incorrect. The group itself has proposed that the real perpetrators of American slavery were “the Jews, the Muslims, and Africans themselves.”
Mimi Owens self-published two children’s books, Who’s That, Daddy? and Richmond, Lee, and the 1890 Community.
Before she launched a career in talk radio, Mimi Owens wrote a pair of self-published children’s books, including one titled Who’s That, Daddy? meant to “educate” children about various monuments in New Orleans, including those of Confederate soldiers and perpetrators of genocide. (Her other book includes a similar cast of characters but is set in Richmond, Virginia).
In a stilted, simple rhyme scheme, the book, which is illustrated by Sean Gautreaux, tells the story of a white father driving his son around the city to explain the significance of the monuments they see.
Although it is not included in the book, there is one illustration that Owens appears to be particularly fond of and arguably best represents her approach in curating history. She uses it as the banner image for her Forever Lee Circle Facebook page. It’s of a father and a son stumbling into a Mardi Gras parade, where they find three heroes of the Confederacy—Jefferson Davis, P.G.T. Beauregard, and Robert E. Lee—tossing Owens’ “Forever Lee Circle” throws while standing atop a float that’s being hauled by a Black man in a tractor.
The image appears on the banner of the Facebook group Forever Lee Circle. Source: Facebook.
To be sure, both she and Crouere vehemently reject the notion that either of them are racist, claiming that they are animated instead by a patriotic love for their country and the Constitution and concerns about erasing history, which is ironic considering the ways in which both of them routinely distort, exaggerate, and flat-out lie about the history behind these monuments and the reasons people want them taken down.
“I am actually on the Southern Poverty Law’s hate-watch,” Owens boasted at the first “Save America” rally, as if the designation is a badge of honor. (As it turns out, this too was an exaggeration. Owens was referring to this article about her Lee Circle Mardi Gras throws, which referred to her by one of her pseudonyms, “Mikas Earl.”)
But that’s not to say that the couple haven’t faced backlash for their views and their cause célèbre. Since they announced their plans for their first “Save America” rally, they claim they were both been inundated with phone calls, social media posts, emails, and letters from people accusing them of racism.
Some of those people, according to Owens, called themselves “members” of antifa, referring to the anti-fascist, anti-racist, far-left political movement, and following their first rally, she would allege that among the crowd there were five antifa counter-protestors, dressed in black “uniforms.”
When Owens posted a photograph on the rally’s private Facebook group page of the five suspects, all of whom appeared to be either in their late teens or early twenties, languishing a few hundred feet from the event, one of them wrote Owens back. They were not, as it turns out, antifa. The comment was quickly scrubbed from the page, presumably by an administrator.
“And then the doxxing began,” bemoaned Owens.
After receiving an innocuous Black Lives Matter flyer and phone calls to both Owens’ and her ex-husband’s phones from people allegedly claiming to be antifa, the couple say they felt concerned enough to contact local law enforcement as well as the FBI.
“They were boasting about doing it so we had to take action,” Crouere said. “I mean all of this is disturbing beyond belief.”
“That phone call was the scariest one of all,” Owens said. “‘This is antifa looking for Mimi Owens.’ To me, that’s a threat.” So frightened, in fact, that she went on to taunt the caller online.
****
To people like Jeff Crouere and Mimi Owens, taking down monuments to racist or genocidal men is merely a political stunt, a way for white politicians like Mitch Landrieu to erase history while ingratiating themselves among the Black community.
“It’s a feel-good action that does nothing,” said Crouere. “Now we see since the George Floyd incident, I think literally 100 monuments have been taken down across the country. I just think that’s very sad.”
Owens, who calls herself a “historic preservationist,” expressed her disdain as well. “They have no problem putting Black Lives Matter on the street,” she said. “But you can’t put something for your culture. Aren’t we a country of immigrants? But the only immigrants that matter are the ones that were forced here.”
The couple believe that prominent public monuments to figures such as John McDonogh, Andrew Jackson, and Robert E. Lee should remain standing, regardless of the messages those monuments communicate to Black and indigenous Americans, as they each, in their view, contain some sort of ambiguous lesson in “history.”
“You know, we all have our stories. I’m part Irish, what about all the Irish that were considered slaves?” Crouere mused when we spoke. “We’ve got to remember that a lot of people have ancestors who went through a lot of pain and were enslaved. I think the Irish slavery lasted 200 years.”
But this is how both of them frame the discussion. In their version of the story, they are the real victims here, and their online army of supporters have been unfairly maligned simply because they believe in defending American history.
****
Societal pressures have, for the most part, succeeded in driving the bulk of the loud-and-proud, heritage-not-hate, traitorous flag-waving racist neo-revolutionaries into the underbellies of neighborhood bars, Thanksgiving dinners, and online communities. The more careful and prudent among them stick to places of true anonymity, such as the forums of 9gag or 4chan. But the loss of strongholds like r/The_Donald show that they continue to lose a war of attrition.
Those who have remained online—these tech-savvy, young, involuntarily celibate partisans—will likely continue to disrupt supply lines of discussion with their memes and single-sentence debates. You’ll find them mocking trans rights or liberal absurdities, or claiming to “OWN libtard snowflakes with FACTS and LOGIC.” Having been banished to the backseat, they laugh at the speed bumps on the road to progress. But these underground resistance fighters know the internet. They know how to navigate the back channels and remain hidden, striking and retreating like cyber guerrillas.
Such is not the case for the vanguard— that is, the boomer and the internet illiterate divisions of the resistance. They’re out waging war on open and mostly public groups on Facebook. They use their real names. They have profile pictures, some of themselves, some of the president using the flag as a tissue, some as just the flag itself. Though the image can vary from the flag of the United States, a bastardized thin-blue-line version, or the flag of the Confederacy, depending on the season.
They also often list their personal information, including where they work. They don’t know any better. Having never encountered hacker culture outside of red pill metaphors from The Matrix, they’re quickly becoming acquainted with a common term and tactic on the online battlefield: Doxxing.
But they’re only getting a taste of the true nature of the practice. Doxxing has been used to stalk and target abortion providers, expose journalists’ confidential sources, and to identify and punish government dissidents. On the extreme end of the scale, there’s “swatting,” which involves making a false police report of a hostage situation that leads to a raid on an unsuspecting, innocent person’s home. In this country, if the police burst through your door and you try to defend yourself from these unannounced intruders, there’s a good chance you’ll be killed. The tragic murder of Breonna Taylor shows that these intruders may not even be held accountable for it. As of this writing, Breonna Taylor’s murderers have still not been arrested.
These “virtual” bigots are simply having the things they say and post in a public place or send in direct messages documented. Alerting a business to the vile, unacceptable behavior of one of their employees isn’t harassment or targeting. In fact, it’s beneficial to that business, and to the larger community. Broadcasting the racist beliefs of a business owner or a public figure isn’t defamation; it’s a public service. This is especially true when the people spouting racist opinions are teachers, public officials, pastors, or police officers.
Mimi Owens at the Save America rally outside of the Louisiana Governor’s Mansion on July 4, 2020. Photo by Julie Dermansky.
Among their legion of Facebook fans, one in particular stands out: Amanda Jennings (aka Amanda Smith, aka Amanda Hargis, aka Amanda Downhour). Jennings isn’t just one of the most prolific commenters in the Save America Rallies group, she is also a regular presence on Mimi Owens’ personal page.
When I reached out for comment, Jennings, a native of Bastrop, a small town in north Louisiana, told me she was willing to talk “if you are willing to risk your life.” She then added, “I am targeted by these foreign militants that want to destroy our country.” A week ago, she claimed that “the World Health Organization paid Hollywood actors to claim that they had Covin-19 (sic).”
Elaborate, bizarre conspiracies are a part of her brand. So too is virulent white supremacy.
After Heather Heyer was murdered by a white supremacist during the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Jennings defended the white supremacist, arguing that he was merely “fleeing a violent mob.” Two weeks later, she posted a photograph of her and Congressman Clay Higgins (R-LA03), whose own associations with fringe anti-government militia groups have been well-documented.
Congressman Clay Higgins and Amanda Jennings. Source: Facebook.
Jennings does not attempt to hide her incendiary beliefs, nor does she shy away from the spotlight.
Last year, she campaigned as a Republican for Louisiana Secretary of State, finishing last and in a distant fourth against incumbent and fellow Republican Kyle Ardoin, but still managing to garner nearly 80,000 votes.
She reported being the only donor to the campaign, spending slightly more than $2,000, which paid for the qualifying fee and campaign swag, which apparently included stickers that misspelled the word “candidate” and her own last name.
Jennings actively protested the removal of Confederate and white supremacist monuments in New Orleans and, later, in Shreveport as well. In a live-streaming video broadcasted from a counter-protest outside of the Confederate monument in front of the Caddo Parish courthouse, which she shared on the Save America Rallies page, she featured a woman holding a spiked bat. When Jennings asked the woman about the weapon, the woman called it a “N***** Beater.”
“Oh, wow,” responded Jennings, before saying to a nearby counter-protester, “I hope she don’t need to use it.”
Shortly after announcing her campaign for Louisiana Secretary of State, Amanda Jennings shared this mock-up of a campaign sticker. In addition to misspelling the word “candidate,” Jennings’s last name is also misspelled as “Jennnings.” Source: Facebook
Jennings is a great example of the casual form of doxxing facing the vanguard. The live-stream she shared on Crouere and Owens’ group was also posted on her own personal page, which was public and open for all to see.
After a few shares, hundreds flocked to her page to express their outrage on her video. Jennings responded by sending direct messages to some of the Black commenters, saying to one, “You fucking n****** getting real bold!!!!! Little black bitch I will hang you.” (She later claimed, dubiously, that the comment was photoshopped).
Jeff Crouere and Mimi Owens did not denounce or remove the video or any other of her violent or racist posts until I asked them about it, nearly a month after Jennings posted her video.
“That’s not acceptable. It’s not acceptable to have any video that has racial slurs in it,” said Crouere, who, unlike Owens, also noted that he was unfamiliar with Jennings. “That’s against everything that we stand for. That will be removed once we find it.”
“Some things get past us,” Owens asserted. “At some of these protests on the other side, they’re saying nasty words too, so what do we do? Do we not show any protests?”
The video was removed from the group’s page and Amanda Jennings was banned from the Save America Rallies group within minutes of our interview ending.
In response to the public attention, or casual doxxing, that members in the group were receiving, Owens mustered her troops and made an announcement. “Here’s what is happening all over social media,” she wrote. “Be smart and pause before you post.” In the post, she included screenshots of half a dozen groups called things like “Expose Racists+ 2020,” “Expose Racism 2020,” and “YOU ABOUT TO LOSE YO JOB!!!! (Racists exposed 2020).”
Posts and screenshots from the Save America Rally group had been shared and tagged in groups like these, which caused members of the vanguard to have their employers contacted and their racist memes and opinions, which they thought were shared in a safe space, posted on their profiles for their friends to see.
Ever the gallant leader, Owens chose to warn her soldiers of watchful eyes, rather than admonish them, ban them from the group, or remove their posts for blatantly racist language and imagery. Rather than simply not being racist, they chose to become more cautious of what they posted.
“I’ve had a show for 21 years, and I’ve never had anything like this ever before,” Crouere said, while sitting snug on a loveseat next to Owens. “It’s reaching a level of vitriol that is really unprecedented.”
I’m a lucky writer. When I approached Lamar about writing for Bayou Brief in 2017, he told me he’d publish anything I wrote. I’ve kept it Gret Stet based thus far but I’m pushing the boundaries of the artistic freedom my publisher has granted me by reviewing Mary Trump’s book, Too Much and Never Enough, in this space.
Here’s why I’m bending the rules: Hyper-localism during the pandemic has gotten us into the mess we’re in. New Orleanians are attacking Mayor Cantrell on social media for closing bars and banning to-go drinks. They claim that it’s safe to close them in the Quarter and allow bars in other parts of town to remain open. That’s madness.
The virus doesn’t respect human boundaries. It doesn’t care about neighborhoods, parishes, states, or countries. It’s an equal opportunity plague. This bizarre focus on localities has made America an international laughingstock and the center of the pandemic.
The reason for our pitiful state is the grotesque incompetence and focus on the hyper-local of Donald Trump. Mary Trump’s book helps explain how we got here: It’s mostly down to the man I alternately call the Impeached Insult Comedian, the Kaiser of Chaos, and President* Pennwyise. We can also call him a national disaster who’s responsible for the mess we’re in.
Now that I’ve explained the reasoning behind my Gret Stet deviationism, it’s time to quote the opening line of Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina:
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Tolstoi wasn’t writing about the Trumps of Jamaica Queens, New York but he could have been. The source of their power was also the source of their misery:
Mary Trump confirms our worst suspicions about who and what her Uncle Donald is. As a trained psychologist, she confirms the opinion of many shrinks about Donald’s narcissistic personality disorder and other mental maladies.
Too Much and Never Enough is unique in our history as a book by a presidential relative urging their defeat because of unfitness for office. LBJ’s brother Sam Houston Johnson wrote an unflattering book, My Brother Lyndon, but it was published in 1970 after his brother left office.
The central figure of Too Much and Never Enough is Fred Trump Sr. Donald’s father and Mary’s grandfather who she describes as a high-functioning sociopath. Fred was a rigid, humorless, and ruthless man who was an exceptionally competent businessman. He had a gift for making money as well as an uncanny knack for manipulating the levers of political power to line his pockets. Donald learned how to kiss up and kick down from his father.
Fred taught Donald that lying in business is not only expedient but imperative. Fred also taught Donald to prey on the weak including his own brother Fred Jr. (hereinafter Freddy) who was Mary’s father.
Freddy Trump was the oldest son. He was under pressure to work with and eventually succeed his father in the family business. Freddy wanted to blaze his own trail and become an airline pilot, which was a glamorous profession in the Swinging Sixties.
Books by other First Family members: Ron Reagan’s “My Father at 100;” Bill’s brother Roger’s book “Growing Up Clinton;” Sam Houston Johnson’s “My Brother Lyndon;” Barack’s half-brother George Obama’s “Homeland;” Jimmy’s nephew Buddy’s book about Jimmy’s brother and Buddy’s father “Billy Carter.” Image by the Bayou Brief.
Another type of father would been disappointed but proud of his son’s plans. Fred Trump was made of sterner stuff and ridiculed Freddy as a “bus driver in the sky.” Opportunistic second son Donald piled on thereby showing why I call him the Impeached Insult Comedian. Donald used this father-son dispute to his advantage and became Fred’s heir apparent. I’ll skip the hair joke this time around.
Fathers are powerful figures in our imaginations and lives. Freddy Trump cared what his father thought to his own detriment. He developed such a severe drinking problem that he was forced out by TWA after only 10 months as a pilot. He returned to work in the family business, but his role had been usurped by his mouthy and obnoxious kid brother.
Freddy Trump served as a reverse role model for Donald. Since he was a thoughtful, kindly, and intelligent man, Donald became a selfish and boorish lout. Freddy was willing to admit mistakes and apologize for them, which only made things worse with his father. Donald never apologizes for anything. He’s his father’s son.
The saddest thing in Too Much and Never Enough is the story of Freddy Trump’s death in 1981. 16-year-old Mary dropped by The House to see her dad before going off to boarding school. Her grandmother, Mary Anne, who the author calls Gam, told her he was resting, and she should ring him later. Gam was lying like a Trump. Freddy was in the hospital at death’s door. He died alone. His parents stayed home, and Donald and his sister went to the movies. No wonder Donald doesn’t care about people who die of COVID-19. He didn’t care about his own dying brother.
The book is packed with stories of Donald’s incessant bragging and lying. He managed to impress his father by lying his way through life. Fred even backed up Donald’s claim that he’d built $1,000,000 from his father into a mighty real estate empire. In fact, Fred pumped millions into Donald’s ventures; losing everything invested in Atlantic City. It didn’t matter: as one of the biggest slumlords in Queens and Brooklyn, Fred remained filthy rich. Literally, in his case.
Fred’s funeral was a state occasion: politicians both retired and active came to pay tribute. Donald rewarded them by eulogizing himself, instead of his father. There’s said to be loyalty among thieves, not if they’re named Trump.
Mary Trump wisely addresses the elephant in the room and convinces us that she’s not merely a disgruntled relative writing to avenge mistreatment at the hands of her family. She states categorically that that’s why she didn’t speak out during the 2016 campaign. That changed in 2018. She had almost forgotten about the cache of documents left from the dispute over Fred Trump’s estate in which she and her brother were royally screwed. These documents became the source of the 2018 New York Times expose of the Trump family’s financial crimes.
It’s ironic to hear Trump’s allies call his niece vengeful. Revenge is one of the few things that Donald excels at. He has no known skills: when Mary spent some time at his Trump Tower office, he spent his days on the phone gossiping. He never read anything or did any work. Habits that he’s brought to the White House. He brought the lying too, much to the nation’s chagrin.
Fred Trump was an abusive parent. He was not physically violent, but he never praised his children until he fell under Donald’s sway in the early 1970’s. His response to hearing of his children’s problems was sneering sarcasm. Donald’s mother was a non-factor in this misogynistic family. That’s why Mary Trump believes her Uncle Donald is so needy: he’s still looking for the love he never received at home as a child.
Donald Trump is an abusive, sarcastic, stupid, and narcissistic man. He’s the center of his own universe so as president* everything is about him. It can be unintentionally funny, but the humor recedes as thousands of Americans die because of his malign neglect of the pandemic.
President* Pennywise thinks sick people are weak: he even mocked his own father when Fred had dementia. Empathy and fundamental human decency are alien to him. He will never change. He’s incapable of it and those in the mainstream media who think he can change should have their heads examined, then read Mary Trump’s book.
I’d like to thank Mary Trump for writing Too Much and Never Enough. It took gumption to stand up to her extended family. Better yet, it’s a lively, well-written, and entertaining book that richly deserves the sales and acclaim it has received.
Thanks to Mary Trump, I have a deeper understanding of the state of the nation with her uncle as president*. He’s a broken and abusive man. Unfortunately, we’ll all live in the house of this abuser until he leaves office. Make it so, America, make it so.
As I wrote about Freddy Trump and his abusive father, I had a song in my head. Genesis gets the last word:
“Antifa invaders are headed to River Ranch in Lafayette, La. this Saturday July 11th,” a New Orleans man named James warned people on Facebook on Monday afternoon. “Everyone living there keep your heads on a swivel and protect yourselves.”
“Lock and load, patriots!!” a friend replied. A woman named Melanie said she’d been thinking about taking a travel assignment in Lafayette. “I spoke with a friend who lives in New Iberia and asked about the political climate there,” Melanie wrote. “She said at the moment that there was only peaceful protesting, but given your post, I’m not going. (Your post) has solidified my decision to stay put here.”
The next day, July 7, the rumors about antifa coming to town caught the attention of KPEL, the local talk radio station, and Lafayette Mayor-President Josh Guillory, the 37-year-old lawyer and Alexandria native who was elected last year after reinventing himself as a diehard Trump supporter.
“Surprised would not be a word I’d use to describe anything I experienced in this entire debacle,” John Merrifield tells me. It’s been a strange few weeks for the 28-year-old comedian.
An FBI agent from back home in Lafayette had called him— “They were aware of it before anyone complained,” Merrifield says— and even though he was 1,400 miles away in his apartment in Brooklyn, reporters were calling as well. The agent just had to double-check, for the record, that there was not, in fact, an elusive group of uniformed, “card-carrying ANTIFA members” and “large dogs” who intended on gathering in the parking lot of Ruffino’s on the River, an Italian restaurant, at 4:20PM on 7/11 “to begin our complete takeover of the elite neighborhood known as River Ranch.” (KADN would later helpfully inform viewers that “4:20 is internet shorthand for marijuana.”)
Merrifield promoted the phony antifa event on his popular Facebook page, cajUUUn Memes. The page offers an endless stream of slapstick and snark, told in the distinct vernacular of Cajun Country. You’d have to be completely clueless to not recognize the event was obvious satire.
But Mayor-President Guillory sensed a political opportunity. Yes, he understood it was satire, but nonetheless, he wanted residents to know that their local government intended on remaining vigilant.
“Promoting a riot or any disorderly conduct, whether joking or a hoax, is irresponsible and reckless,” Guillory said in a statement released on July 7. “Here in Lafayette Parish, we have absolutely zero tolerance for threats made against our citizens or their property, and we will act accordingly to prevent these situations from happening.”
The next day, the city police issued a separate statement, reading in part (emphasis added):
With the assistance of the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office, investigators have been diligently working and monitoring this event. Through our investigation up to this point, there seems to be no credible evidence that suggests that this event will take place. There is believed to be no organization in the Acadiana area affiliated with this event.
The Lafayette Police Department and Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office are well prepared with a contingency plan in place should this event develop in the upcoming days. Law enforcement takes all threats against citizens and property very seriously, and the safety of the community is our top priority.
According to Merrifield, not a single person from Guillory’s office or from any local or state law enforcement agency ever reached out to him, which make their claims of an investigation seem pretty dubious. But the free publicity they gave the event did result in more than a few threats that should have deserved their attention.
A few hours after Guillory claimed “Lafayette Parish (would) have zero tolerance for threats made against our citizens,” a man named Brandon from Youngsville sent Merrifield a private message.
“It will be a big mistake for antifa to try and rally here because I was destroy all of y’all,” he wrote.
“You found all the infinity stones?” Merrifield joked.
Brandon sent back a black and white cartoon of a Hummer plowing into a crowd, with the caption, “All Lives Splatter. Nobody Cares About Your Protest.”
Merrifield took screenshots of the messages and shared them online, tagging Guillory’s office in his post. He never heard back.
****
During the past two months, similar stories about antifa invasions have captured the imaginations of a sizable number of the MAGA diehards, particularly those living in ruby red parts of the country where rightwing news goes unchallenged. “In Hood River, Oregon, antifa were, according to screenshot of a fake Instagram story, calling on followers to ‘root loot do anything in your power.’ In Spring Hill, Tennessee, there was a ‘busload’ staying at the Holiday Inn, prepping to loot Walgreens at noon,” Buzzfeed News reported last month. “In Wenatchee, Washington, bands of men dressed in black were surveilling potential targets. In Payette, Idaho, a plane full of protesters was circling overhead.” And the list goes on.
President Trump has not only encouraged these conspiracies, he’s invented many of his own. Following the mayhem that erupted in Washington D.C. on May 31, the culmination of a weekend of violent confrontations between police and protestors, Trump claimed the national guard had “shut down” the “ANTIFA led anarchists.” The FBI said otherwise. That day, on his Twitter account, Trump announced, “The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization,” somehow managing to both misunderstand the definition of the word “organization” (antifa is used to describe a political movement, not an organization) and the concept of designations (which are used against foreign entities, not domestic political movements). Five days later, after a 75-year-old man was hospitalized with a brain injury after being violently shoved by police at a protest in Buffalo, New York, Trump speculated that the man “could be an ANTIFA.” For the record, Martin Gugino is not “an ANTIFA,” but Robert McCabe and Aaron Torgalski of the Buffalo Police Department are being charged with second-degree assault.
While it is undeniable that adherents of antifa have been involved in isolated incidents of violence and property damage in a small handful of the countless protests that have erupted since the police killing of George Floyd on May 25, it’s also abundantly clear that the motivation for inflating its numbers (likely to be only in the hundreds) and exaggerating its role and influence in motivating social unrest is to deflect valid criticisms about systemic racism and delegitimize efforts to remove public monuments glorifying white supremacy. Trump first laid the groundwork in 2017, when, following the murder of Heather Heyer at the white supremacist and neo-Nazi “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, he argued that there were “very fine people on both sides” and blamed those on the “far-left” for inciting violence. “I watched (it) very closely, much more closely than you people watched it,” Trump said to a reporter, only a minute after claiming he hadn’t known David Duke was at the event. “And you have — you had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. And nobody wants to say that, but I’ll say it right now. You had a group — you had a group on the other side that came charging in, without a permit, and they were very, very violent,” referring to counter-protestors. The overwhelming evidence, however, suggested the exact opposite.
Video by Linsey Vallot. Courtesy of Dawn Darbonne.
Lafayette may not be the first place in America to fall for the “Antifa Fantasy,” to borrow a term coined by Travis McAdam of the Montana Human Rights Network, but the responses by its top elected official and its police department were unlike anywhere else.
According to a source familiar with the Lafayette Police Department, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, Guillory directed law enforcement to work the case, a claim supported by video footage of around a dozen police SUVs parked outside of Ruffino’s on the River on the day of the “takeover.”
“Guillory paid five officers and one supervisor overtime. That had the effect of diverting patrol units to River Ranch and leaving the rest of the city without manpower,” the source said.
“The marching orders were to arrest ‘antifas’ on sight.”
John Merrifield.
While he may have not been surprised by anything he personally experienced, John Merrifield was outraged when told about the alleged “marching orders.”
Merrifield made his debut as a local activist ten years ago when, as a high school senior, he spoke out against the Lafayette Parish School Board’s decision to outlaw students from bringing cell phones onto school property and to prohibit them from wearing hoodies. To him, both policies were unfair to students from poor and working class families (the cell phone ban, since rescinded, didn’t apply to kids who drove a car, and the hoodie ban was enacted shortly after most families had already bought costly hoodies from school booster clubs). His advocacy led to two front-page news stories and attracted more than 1,000 people to join a Facebook group he set up. Four years later, he’d launch another Facebook group, cajUUUn Memes, which boasts more than 73,000 members and more than 10,000 followers.
He decided to announce the satirical antifa “takeover” not because he wanted to create mass hysteria or panic, he says, but because he thought it would prove a point about how differently both the police and the press respond to a phony event in River Ranch, the city’s wealthiest and whitest enclave, than they treat the everyday realities of those in marginalized or economically disadvantaged communities.
“Instructing officers to arrest antifascist demonstrators ‘on sight’ is textbook fascism. Josh Guillory is a fascist,” argues Merrifield.
Only days after ordering the show of force in River Ranch, Mayor-President Guillory announced the closure of four recreation centers, all of which are in majority Black neighborhoods.
The Bayou Brief reached out to Guillory for comment, and thus far, he has not yet responded.
It’s worth noting that after officers left the parking lot of Ruffino’s on the River that day, at least one of the “antifas” showed up, as Jacob White reported in this segment for AOC (Acadiana Open Channel) Community Media.
Ellie Schilling is a lawyer who litigates in state and federal court to secure the rights of her clients, including the right to abortion services. She also regularly testifies before the Louisiana Legislature regarding laws that impact reproductive health, rights, and justice. She is the co-founder of Lift Louisiana, a statewide non-profit working to educate, advocate, and litigate the policy changes needed to improve the health and wellbeing of people and families in Louisiana. She is a 2003 summa cum laude graduate of Tulane Law School, where she is an adjunct professor teaching reproductive rights and the law.
S. Mandisa Moore-O’Neal is a Black feminist and founder of The Moore-O’Neal Law Group, a Black feminist law and policy practice. She is a civil rights attorney with a focus on reproductive justice, HIV-decriminalization litigation, education and advocacy; family law litigation, education and advocacy; employment and public accommodations, discrimination litigation and education; and police accountability litigation and advocacy.
Louisiana Solicitor General Liz Merrill speaks with Gene Mills, head of the Louisiana Family Forum, outside of the United States Supreme Court following oral arguments in June Medical Services. Screengrab: CNBC.
As Louisiana lawyers, we have a warning: “As goes the South, so goes the Nation.” We weren’t surprised that the State of Louisiana just lost another abortion case at the U.S. Supreme Court. What is surprising is that the State continued to pursue the case at all. The admitting privileges law at issue in June Medical Services vs. Russo is identical to a Texas law that the Supreme Court struck down in 2016.
Like Texas, the law also would have decimated access to abortion care, but unlike Texas, Louisiana has the second highest percentage of people living in poverty.
But Louisiana politicians aren’t trying to fix that problem and provide people with greater economic security, or really trying to solve any of the real life problems facing the people of our State.
After centuries of gender and racial oppression and the scourge of mass incarceration (an area in which Louisiana wins another prize as having the highest rate in the world), there are many problems to be solved.
These systemic oppressions disproportionately impact Black women, Black Gender Non-Conforming people, and other marginalized communities, who also have the most to lose when abortion access is restricted.
Yet, year after year, the Louisiana Legislature fails to raise the minimum wage, which at $7.25 is one of the lowest in the country, and presumably only that high because federal law mandates it.
The Legislature also refuses to engage in any serious effort to ensure equal pay and close the racialized gender wage gap – which is the highest in the country, with white women making 69 cents on the dollar compared to their male counterparts, and women of color faring significantly worse, with Black women making only 52 cents and Latinx women only 48 cents. And forget about paid sick leave or paid family leave.
Louisiana politicians wouldn’t even get behind those equitable, commonsense policies during a global pandemic despite paying lip service to caring about Louisiana families as their reason for pushing an anti-abortion agenda.
Instead, what Louisiana politicians are interested in is taking away people’s rights, and wasting exorbitant amounts of taxpayer dollars in their efforts to do so. Take the COVID-19 pandemic and abortion, for example.
Disingenuous Louisiana politicians, of course, jumped on the bandwagon of trying to shut down abortion clinics under the guise of public health. They could not wait to assert that abortion services are “non-essential” health care. Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry’s Office took things further, not only insisting that Louisiana abortion clinics be shut down, but instituting simultaneous warrantless raids at the State’s three remaining abortion clinics, even though he had no jurisdiction to do so.
As COVID-19 infection and death rates were skyrocketing across Louisiana and thousands more faced unemployment and the inability to pay for basic necessities, elected officials decided to use taxpayer dollars to try to curtail medical services and restrict people’s rights.
It forced Lift Louisiana and the Center for Reproductive Rights to sue the State, yet again, to ensure that access to time-sensitive, essential health care was not dismantled during a global pandemic.
Undeterred, Landry’s office was also running around the country spending Louisiana taxpayer money to try to shut down abortion access in other states – with multiple attorneys from that office enrolling in cases, filing amicus briefs, and participating in telephonic hearings in front of at least five other courts (and that was before we stopped counting).
It’s Landry who insisted on pushing the June Medical Services admitting privileges case all the way to the Supreme Court. And it wasn’t the only cruel and costly case that the state attorney general insisted on litigating all the way to the Supreme Court this term.
Last year, Louisiana voters approved a measure to require unanimous jury verdicts in criminal trials, removing, finally, a stain borne out of explicitly racist politics that allowed people to be sent to jail after a non-unanimous jury vote of 10-2, which was designed to dilute meaningful participation by Black jurors.
But Landry’s office decided they still wanted to be able to convict people without the hassle of a unanimous jury verdict, so they took the position that they should still be able to do so in federal court – even though state and federal courts in 48 states had long ago abandoned the practice – forcing the Promise of Justice Initiative to file Ramos v. Louisiana. The State lost that case at the Supreme Court, too, and the constitutional right to a unanimous jury verdict is now the law of the land, as it always should have been.
All told, Louisiana has wasted millions of dollars on litigation that it lost, and in good conscience, should never have pursued in the first place.
And they are not done yet. The State is currently embroiled in four other lengthy and costly lawsuits, on abortion litigation alone. Incredibly, much of the money the State has spent on those cases is because, rather than relying on government lawyers whose salaries taxpayers are already paying, the State insisted on also hiring outside legal counsel, including the law firm of a recently-appointed judge to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Can Louisiana afford any of this? No.
Our state and local governments are just as broke as its citizens.
State Sen. Katrina Jackson (D-Monroe)
So how about a costly ballot initiative? And one aimed not at ensuring constitutional rights, but at taking them away?
State Sen. Katrina Jackson, the same politician who authored the admitting privileges law when she was a state representative, has authored a proposed constitutional amendment to enshrine in the Louisiana constitution that there is no right to abortion under any circumstances.
There are many things we could be trying to fix in our State, but instead, a constitutional amendment banning all abortion is what Louisiana voters will face when they head to the polls in November.
If we, as lawyers who have fought against these and other dangerous efforts, sound frustrated, we are.
The hardworking people of our State deserve better.
Our State, and our country, is more than capable of rising to the occasion and truly being great if politicians would listen to this simple request: stop wasting our money; stop trying to take away our rights; and start investing in people’s lives.
I’ve always disliked political performance art. The performative long ago replaced the substantive at the heart of our politics. Individuals act as if politics is about them, not the greater good. Politicians parade their ideology as if it’s gospel, not opinion. I prefer politicians who are work horses, not show horses. Hence my undying affection for Senator Professor Elizabeth Warren.
The latest cudgel being used by right-wingers to “own the liberals” are masks. If the so-called culture war is stupid, the mask war is downright imbecilic. Even though the Impeached Insult Comedian, was photographed wearing a mask last weekend, I expect him to flip flop on masking any time now. He’s consistently inconsistent. The mask wars will continue with or without him. They’re having too much fun with it to stop.
In New Orleans, we know how to deal with the mask issue with wit and humor.
That’s what you expect from the people who bring us Nutrias.org.
Speaking of political performance art, one of the mask war battlegrounds is the Louisiana Legislature. It’s a place where term limits have dumbed down discourse to the point where freshmen state reps post videos of themselves wielding chainsaws to make what passes for their point:
I value my sanity, so I usually ignore the antics of the Gret Stet Lege. Danny McCormick’s Leatherface routine is making that impossible and I bitterly resent him for that. I’m not sure why mask mandates take a chainsaw to the constitution but what do I know? I’m one of the liberals, Rep. McChainsaw is trying to own. I’m not for sale, dipshit.
Any time I hear a libertarian wingnut type go on about rights being destroyed during the pandemic, I say aloud: Freedom, man. I said that repeatedly while watching McChainsaw’s bat shit crazy video. I’m not sure how he gets from mask mandates to the Nazi’s murderous oppression of the Jews, but he goes there.
I’m a connoisseur of right-wing hypocrisy. Since McChainsaw goes on about the body as private property. one would think that he’d be pro-choice. Of course not. I’m surprised he isn’t waving a plastic baby around in the video a la Woody Jenkins. That was political performance art circa 1990.
McChainsaw is a standard issue wingnut; a model that’s all too common in the solid Republican South. McChainsaw and his ilk fail to understand that mask mandates are similar to requiring driver’s licenses. Why masks are oppressive and driver’s licenses are not is beyond me. Freedom, man.
“Remember what started all this erosion of our freedoms? It was all about flattening the curve. We don’t hear about that much anymore. We also don’t get the doomsday predictions of the virus overwhelming hospital beds and causing ventilator shortages.
<SNIP>
Our leaders are currently on a freedom-taking binge, when the better course would be to trust sober-minded Louisianans to protect themselves. If they keep changing their tune, don’t look for an end to the madness anytime soon.”
That column has aged about as well as fish left out in the July heat. JP President Cynthia Lee Sheng was looking two weeks ahead to where we are today as the pandemic spikes again. Fagan’s foolishness has obliged me to praise a Republican. I resent him for that.
What the hell is a freedom-taking binge? Is there a right to die unmasked? Is Fagan Dr. Kevorkian all of a sudden? Freedom, man.
And what the hell is a sober-minded Louisianan? The state legislators who want to end the Governor’s common-sense pandemic edicts? Is chainsaw wielding conspiracy theorist Danny McCormick Fagan’s idea of a sober-minded Louisianan? Freedom, man.
Even Governor Tater Tot next door in Mississippi is belatedly warming to the idea of masking. Of course, he’s responsible for something as opposed to McChainsaw and Fagan with an A who are mere bloviators. Freedom, man.
Our final mask warrior is the most dangerous one of all, Gret Stet Attorney General Jeff Landry.
In the early days of the pandemic response, Landry appeared alongside Governor Edwards at some of his press conferences. More recently, Landry has reverted to form and become a mask warrior with very destructive ideas:
“We believe that mandating students to wear masks creates a situation that may cross the line on liberty, and also may become a tremendous distraction with enforcement,” Landry said in his letter, which is dated July 9.
<SNIP>
He said he is concerned that requiring masks would turn teachers and school administrators into “mask-enforcement police rather than educators.”
Mask-enforcement police? I thought that protecting the safety of students *was* the school’s job. Silly me. In Landry World, safety is trumped by performative politics of the deadliest kind. Freedom, man.
Landry usually prefers to perform before the cameras, so I must give him credit for changing things up with this venture into epistolary political performance art. He’s long been a political performance artist of the highest (lowest?) order. He first came to attention as a Tea Party Congressman who pulled this stunt during a speech by President Obama:
Freedom, man.
The mask war is peak 2020 stupidity. I wear glasses and have a big head (literally as well as figuratively) so finding a mask that comfortably covers my nose and mouth is difficult. Most of the masks I’ve worn thus far are uncomfortable BUT when I go out in public, I still wear one to protect myself as well as others. Comfort be damned. It’s the right thing to do.
Adults have to do things we don’t like every day. That’s why we’re called grown-ups. It’s a pity that McCormick, Fagan, and Landry are arrested adolescents with delusions of grandeur. Fortunately, Governor Edwards is a grown ass man determined to protect our safety with his mask mandate. Let the Mask Warriors whine. It’s what they do best.
I recently wrote a post at First Draft about pandemic backsliding by Dan Fagan’s “sober-minded Louisianans” and other Americans. In it, I quoted former Krewe du Vieux king and emergency medicine specialist Dr. Jim Aiken. You’ll have to click on this link to read his thoughts on the latest phase of the pandemic but they’re summed up in the image below by one of Krewe du Vieux’s most talented members, John Valentino.
The last word goes to John, Dr. Jim, and the Goofy Guy:
Image by John Valentino.
UPDATE: I had put this column to bed and tucked it in when I learned that Jeff Landry has tested positive for COVID-19. If there was ever a graphic illustration of the perils of political performance art, this is it. I wish him a speedy recovery and hope that he’ll learn something from his illness. I hope he’s not too upset that he didn’t get to hang out with Mike Liar Liar Pence On Fire.
Clay Higgins rose to political power by telling a story about personal redemption, but his former boss, the sheriff of St. Landry Parish, now claims he would have never given him a second chance in law enforcement if he’d known what really happened before Higgins resigned from the police force in Opelousas.
In this expansive essay, we consider Higgins’s past, his record as a police officer, the persona he contrived for the cameras, and the truth about his self-proclaimed redemption. We also consider complicated and peculiar history and the struggle for civil rights in the parish that he once patrolled.
Ultimately, this is about answering one fundamental question. We know how he got elected. What is less certain is whether someone with his record should have ever been given the job that made him famous and a platform to speak on behalf of a law enforcement agency in the Deep South.
Prologue
In late February of 2016, before he decided to run for Congress, Clay Higgins was still holding out hope that he could land his own reality television show. He’d spent the better part of the past year exchanging emails and phone calls with people from Hollywood. He’d inked a deal with a talent scout, hired an agent, and enlisted the help of a local lawyer and a CPA.
Together, they settled on a working title for the show, “American Justice with Clay Higgins,” despite the fact that “American Justice” was already the name of another television show. He was told it wasn’t a problem.
Glen Clay Higgins, then 53, had suddenly become famous, thanks entirely due to a series of Crime Stoppers segments he’d taped for KATC-TV.
Higgins, who was given the role of Public Information Officer in October of 2014 after the department’s previous spokesperson was cited for reckless operation of a vehicle, played a gruff, no-nonsense, law and order-type who spoke with an intense baritone, reminiscent of Joe Friday except with a crisply starched uniform, not a suit and tie.
His videos quickly went viral. Within the span of only a year, they’d racked up more than 60 million views. The Washington Post called him the “Cajun John Wayne,” even though Higgins isn’t actually Cajun. Higgins, the Post claimed, was “America’s most irresistibly intimidating cop.”
Louisiana native and CBS National News reporter David Begnaud profiled Higgins in September of 2015.
Today, Captain Higgins, as he still prefers to be called (he held the rank of Captain for only seven months, from August 2015 through February 2016), is now Congressman Higgins, a far-right Republican firebrand running for his third consecutive term in Louisiana’s Third Congressional District.
During his four tumultuous years in office, Higgins has become a deeply divisive figure, even in his own largely conservative home base. He’s known to be volatile and occasionally threatening with constituents who criticize him on social media, often responding in the small hours of the morning and sounding more like a bored and belligerent alcoholic than someone who wears the word “honorable” before his name.
Last year, when Higgins appeared as a guest on Chris Cuomo’s primetime cable news show, he arrived on the set clutching a six-pack of Yuengling beer—not as a political statement (Yuengling’s billionaire CEO is a supporter of President Trump) but presumably because he wanted to drink it on air with Cuomo (who politely asked they wait until after the show wrapped for the night). When Louisiana journalist Jeremy Alford spent the day with Higgins at his home a couple of years ago, the congressman didn’t wait for the cameras to stop rolling; he guzzled beer—then, it was Budweiser—the entire time. And a year before that, Higgins posted a late-night video endorsement on Facebook of a local candidate in which Higgins appeared to be slurring his words. By the next day, the video had been quietly deleted. No doubt Higgins imagines his penchant for an ice-cold American domestic lager is a way for him to demonstrate how he’s just a regular, down home Louisiana boy, a self-proclaimed member of the “common class,” but it’s difficult not to wonder whether there’s a connection between his erratic behavior and his blood alcohol level.
Years ago, shortly before he resigned from the police force in Opelousas, Higgins had been under investigation for, among other things, pulling into a convenience store in his squad car and purchasing a case of beer while in uniform; a witness thought it was worth reporting when Higgins set the beer atop his car while fumbling for his keys. He would subsequently claim that it was this investigation—and not the far more serious one involving his attempt to cover up his assault of an unarmed Black man—an innocent bystander—that had convinced him to turn in his badge, an explanation that his former boss, the police chief, considers to be yet another example of Higgins’s dishonesty.
As a congressman, Higgins has used the imprimatur of his office to court the support of anti-government, militia groups like the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers, which traffic in fringe conspiracy theories about the so-called New World Order and promote the adolescent notion of “sovereign citizenship,” a concept that traces its origins back to anti-semitism and racism.
Suffice it to say, his positions on NFL players kneeling during the National Anthem and efforts to remove public monuments to white supremacists are exactly what you’d imagine them to be.
The Southern Poverty Law Center includes Higgins in its list of the nine members of Congress who “traffic in hate and extremism.” He’s second on the list, directly under Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz. Higgins, however, has the distinction of being the only member of Congress to ever film a campaign commercial at Auschwitz, a stunt the Anne Frank Center called a “global disgrace.” The organization’s full name is the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, and they also recommended the congressman either “get sensitivity training or get a new job”—and that was after he issued an apology.
“When you watch Congressman Higgins’ disgraceful infomercial, you hear him use all sorts of euphemisms for those murdered at Auschwitz by the Nazis,” the center’s Executive Director, Steven Goldstein, pointed out in a press statement. “He never refers specifically to the mass murder of Jewish people at Auschwitz, nor uses the words Holocaust or Shoah. And the logo at the end indicates he is using the video as a campaign video for his reelection to Congress. This is disgusting beyond description.”
That’s right: Clay Higgins flew to Poland, visited Auschwitz, and recorded a video of his visit, which included a scene of him inside of the camp’s gas chambers during which he offered the following baffling commentary about the need for an invincible American military: “The cyanide pellets activated when they hit oxygen. After about 20 minutes everyone was dead, and then slave labor would go into the room and drag the bodies of those poor souls out and bring them and incinerate them in these ovens. This is why homeland security must be squared away, why our military must be invincible.”
He then edited it down to five minutes, added music and his campaign’s graphics, and somehow he still neglected to ever use the words “Jews, Jewish, or Holocaust.”
While he has been willing to entertain conspiracy theories, he’s been less than receptive toward science and medicine. His hyperbolic and indignant response, framed as a defense of the Constitution, to Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards’s decision to issue a stay-home order in the early days of the novel Coronavirus pandemic was out of sync with his fellow Republicans, including President Trump, who had praised Edwards for his cooperative leadership. It was also untethered from the facts and the science. Among other things, Higgins argued that face masks were ineffective in preventing the spread of the virus because they didn’t suppress one’s sense of smell.
“Can you smell through that mask?” he asked a CNN reporter in late May. It was a rhetorical question. “Then you’re not stopping any sort of virus,” Higgins thundered. “It’s part of the dehumanization of the children of God. You’re participating in it by wearing a mask.”
Julie Dermansky of Desmog recently published a thorough (and thoroughly terrifying) account of the ways in which an especially pernicious brand of science denialism has festered in Louisiana in response, as it were, to the global pandemic. Her story, titled “As Pandemic Toll Rises, Science Deniers in Louisiana Shun Masks, Comparing Health Measures to Nazi Germany,” includes a series of photographs of the troglodytes gathered in Baton Rouge for a “Save America Rally” on the Fourth of July.
Three days prior, according to reporter Jake Sherman, Higgins and Rep. Mike Johnson (R- LA04) walked onto the House floor without masks. That very day, July 1st, Acadiana “smashed coronavirus records” for both daily cases and hospitalizations.
Higgins meeting with members of the Acadiana Planning Commission on June 24, 2020. Image surce: Facebook. Transformed by the Bayou Brief.
More recently, in the aftermath of the social unrest sparked by the killing of George Floyd on May 25th, Higgins’s record as a police officer has become the subject of renewed scrutiny. Bryn Stole of The Advocate recently reported on Higgins’s decision to hire John Chautin, a former colleague from his days with the Opelousas City Police Department who was found to have “covered for” Higgins during a 2007 investigation into allegations that Higgins had used “unnecessary force” against an unarmed Black man named Andre “Red” Richard (In Acadiana, Richard is pronounced Ree-shard).
“Higgins’s record as a law enforcement officer was glossed over, with the rise of his YouTube videos,” his Democratic opponent Rob Anderson tells the Bayou Brief. “And yet his office has hired Jerod Prunty, who was arrested for pandering in a prostitution sweep, and John Chautin, who was part of the cover-up in Opelousas that was the beginning of Higgins’s less than-illustrious career.”
This account is based on an extensive review of news archives, historical documents, and on these records, some of which I publicly released nearly two years ago via Twitter and others that have still yet to be published in full. (While those documents are indeed public records, the failure of the record custodian in redacting personal information about several individuals pose ethical concerns).
The Bayou Brief proudly presents this provocative, feature-length conversation with Louisiana’s original Ragin’ Cajun, James Carville. From his home in Uptown New Orleans, Carville discusses what he considers to be the three most critical issues in Louisiana—race, water, and oil (with some discussion about LSU football as lagniappe), alongside host Frederick D. Bell, one of his former LSU students and a recent graduate of Tulane University who just so happened to have attended high school near Carville, Louisiana.
I recently and reluctantly declared nuance dead at my other home on the internet. I’m not going to make nuanced arguments in this column even when they’re available. This is the age of the sledgehammer, not the tack hammer. I hope that didn’t sound, well, tacky. It’s a smaller less destructive tool and one of my handier friends suggested the image. Hammers aren’t my thing.
The column title is a play on the 1961 song, The Name Game. It was co-written and recorded by Shirley Ellis. It even has its own lyrics generator site. Here are two relevant examples:
The Rename Game is being played in earnest here in New Orleans. Mayor Cantrell announced the formation of a commission to make recommendations about renaming streets, squares, monuments, and the like. The targets are mostly slave owners, racists, segregationists, and traitors. The latter is, of course, a synonym for Confederates. The Lost Cause has finally lost, y’all.
The Renaming Commission will be in place for a year and make the following recommendations:
A list of streets, parks, and places that should be renamed, accompanied by a detailed explanation.
A proposed list of replacement names for each recommended street, park, or place, accompanied by a detailed explanation.
A process to facilitate both educating residents and receiving public feedback on the proposed changes.
The time frame is too long, there are already many lists out there. Recently, the Picvocate had an article about Lost Cause related names as well as a swell map. I’ve relied on the latter to make my own list.
I’m omitting the Jefferson Davis Parkway except for the tagline because there’s already a strong consensus that the name of the incompetent Confederate president should be replaced with that of beloved retired Xavier University president Norman Francis. It’s an excellent choice, especially as Incompetent Traitor Parkway passes through the Xavier campus.
Here’s my top ten list including comments as to why the names should be changed and, in some cases, with whom. I prefer that name changes involve someone who was associated with the site, street, or neighborhood.
1. Lee Circle: It was originally Tivoli Circle and was renamed in 1884 for the Competent Traitor who commanded the Confederacy’s Army of Virginia. Lee had no ties to New Orleans and never should have been honored in the first place. The monument’s only purpose was to promote white supremacy. I cheered when the statue came down.
I think a Civil Rights figure should be honored in place of the ultimate Lost Causer. Homer Plessy, the litigant in the Plessy v. Ferguson case comes to mind but there are others who deserve to be honored including Avery Alexander, A.P. Tureaud or even New Orleans native Andrew Young.
2. Robert E. Lee Boulevard: It’s named for the same traitorous Virginian. One suggestion that’s come my way is Allen Toussaint who apparently lived on the street at some point.
3. Jackson Square: I mentioned nuanced arguments at the top of the column because they’re available for the Jackson statue, which was erected to honor his role in the Battle Of New Orleans. The weight of the evidence cuts against General/President Jackson, so I expect the equestrian statue to come down.
There’s an obvious choice to replace the Impeached Insult Comedian’s favorite Oval One: Mahalia Jackson. That way it remains Jackson Square.
4. Gov. Nicholls Street: This has gotten less attention than it deserves. Francis T. Nicholls was a Confederate General, then the “redeemer” Governor of Louisiana who helped sweep away the last vestiges of Reconstruction. He’s gotta go. Renaming the street after a prominent local musician with ties to the Quarter would be appealing: Louis Prima? Danny Barker?
An even more appetizing possibility is Chef Leah Chase since Gov. Nicholls Street runs through her beloved Treme.
5. Palmer Park & Avenue: The site of a popular local arts market is currently named for a fire and brimstone pro-Confederate preacher, Benjamin Palmer. At least he was honest about the cause of the War of the Rebellion: Slavery. His name has gotta go. How about Dr. John Park? Art Neville Park?
6. General Ogden Street: It’s named for a Confederate General who was later the head of the Crescent City White League, a KKK-like group. He’s gotta go.
7. Calhoun Street: Named for Senator/Veep John C, Calhoun who was the original exponent of secession and nullification. This is one even his arch-enemy General/President Jackson would agree with. This street name should be nullified.
8. Beauregard Avenue: P.G.T. Beauregard’s statute was removed from the entrance of City Park in 2017 so it’s time for this street to be renamed. He’s already on the City’s shit list so it’s time to flush him.
9. Polk Street: Named for the so-called Fighting Bishop of Louisiana. Leonidas Polk. He fought for the wrong side and became a Confederate General. That makes him a loser:
10. Lusher School: This is up to the school’s board, not the city government. It’s named for Robert Mills Lusher a white supremacist state superintendent of education who emphatically believed that separate was equal. I included this because I have so many friends who either teach at or have kids attending Lusher. I fear their wrath, especially when they’re right.
In addition to the streets, the Gret Stet’s richest person, Saints owner Gail Benson, has decided to rename the Bensonized Dixie Beer. If they follow the Dixie Chicks model, it will be renamed Beer.
It’s a hoary cliché that the victors write the history of wars. That was never the case with the War of the Rebellion aka the Civil War aka the War Between The States. The losers wrote the history. It was accepted by the rest of the country because of war fatigue and racism. I’m pleased that those days are gone. Thanks, BLM.
Finally, I had a TFC (This Fucking City) moment because of this Tweet:
I'm looking to name two people to the Street Renaming Commission which will make recommendations to rename streets, parks, and places in New Orleans that honor white supremacists. Text me at (504) 370-8052 for the application. I'll make my decision tomorrow morning.
Holy fake transparency, Batman. It appears that there was no process. The whole thing wrapped up within 20-some hours so unless you spend all day on social media, you were not only out of the loop, you were SOL: Shit Out Of Luck. Apparently, I’m in the mood for acronyms.
How could it be a genuine process without a stated deadline? Additionally, why was this sent from the Mayor’s campaign account?
There’s only one answer to those questions: This Fucking City. TFC all the way. Perhaps we should play the Name Game with the Mayor’s first name:
More than 40 years ago, I served my country, in the Army.
After that, I married, had and raised three kids who now have their own families. Don and I stayed together through richer, poorer, in sickness and in health until his death parted us last year.
I’ve worked at whatever jobs were necessary to support my household: as a nursing assistant, making beds and emptying bedpans; tending bar, waiting tables or painting houses; as a bill collector or tax preparer.
And for the past 25 years, I’ve brought you the news – in one form or another. I’ve done radio newscasts, sportscasts, weathercasts, and voiced your weekend lineup of community events. I researched, shot, wrote, and presented TV stories on education issues for LPB. After that, I updated you five days a week on Louisiana political issues via the state’s various NPR-affiliate stations. And for the past couple of years, I’ve been bringing you in-depth coverage of the state Legislature, along with environmental issues through the long-form journalism we do here at the Bayou Brief.
Yes, I know I dropped the ball during the session last year, and you all were most kind and understanding of why I did so, and my need to grieve. I thought things would return to “near-normal” this year, and so began coverage of the legislative session with much of my usual, albeit cynical, enthusiasm.
The unrelenting bullying exhibited by our duly-elected legislators changed that.
The Republican legislative leadership had no compunctions about bullying the Democratic governor over his orders to protect the people of this state (including those lawmakers’ constituents) from the worst effects of a viral epidemic. They didn’t hesitate to declare “locals know better than the state” when it came to decisions on whether, when, and how to reopen businesses. Just days later, they turned around and passed a law to prohibit those same local officials from banning firearms in places like schools and parks.
They held public testimony on the budget during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, when there wasn’t even a budget bill filed yet.
They’ve forced the longtime head of the Legislative Fiscal Office, John Carpenter, to retire because they didn’t like the feel of the numbers his staff of accountants were providing, regarding the costs of some of those lawmakers’ schemes.
“I do not think that means what you think it means.” – Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride
Perhaps they simply misunderstand the meaning of the political phrase “the bully pulpit.”
Coined by Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, and U.S. President from 1901-1909, the change in perception of the meaning has come about because of a change in usage of the word “bully.” At the turn of the 20th Century, “bully” meant “jolly good,” and Roosevelt was saying his office provided a magnificent platform to speak out upon high-minded ideals. In Safire’sPolitical Dictionary (first published in 1968, last revised in 1993), “bully pulpit” is defined as “the active use of the president’s prestige and high visibility to inspire or moralize.”
But now, “bully” means “a person who habitually seeks to harm or intimidate those whom they perceive as vulnerable,” or as “action of seeking to harm, intimidate or coerce someone perceived as vulnerable.”
Bullies aren’t just schoolyard phenomena. As adults, they manifest as office managers, law enforcement personnel, and state legislators.
Clinical psychologist Dr. Albert J. Bernstein explains why this is so, saying, “Bullies are hooked on excitement. Their drug of choice is anger. Anger is an addiction with bullies. They don’t stop because they’re always getting caught up in the rush of chemicals to their brains. They like power, but they don’t understand it. They aren’t interested in the sedate ways of real power. Bullies are angry people who have discovered, to their delight, that anger – which they would engage in anyway for its thrill value – also gets them power and control, at least in the short run.”
Sound like anyone you know?
Bernstein adds, “Bullies don’t know that anger is something they’re doing; they think it’s being done to them. They say they’re not looking for an altercation; it’s just that they can’t allow people to push them around. Actually, when they’re angry – which is most of the time – they don’t see other people as people at all, but as obstacles.”
We, the people, are obstacles to the growth of power and control being exerted by certain politicians, including those legislators we elected. And in the case of state lawmakers, we’re stuck with this crew of bully-boys for another three and a half years.
When I would see something fundamentally unfair or wrong proposed or enacted by our officials, I would point it out, and try to offer one or more ways to repair the damage being done. Yet as we see our state revenues fall off due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic while business and industry lobbyists froth at the mouth for more tax cuts for them, and as we watch oil and gas prices plummet with lawmakers and industry doing everything possible to salvage our identity as a petro-colonial state, I realize I have no solutions to offer.
I’ve looked at the recommended ways for dealing with bullying: (1) Stay calm, (2) Ask the bully to stop – if it seems safe to do so, (3) Walk away, toward other people, (4) Tell someone so the bully will stop.
That last option is basically appealing to someone with more power who can bully the bully into stopping.
But what do you do when the person at the top is the biggest bully of all, and revels in it?
I can’t stand to watch the legislative committee or floor debates any longer.
I haven’t wanted to watch or listen to the local news.
I’m unplugging from social media.
I’m retiring from the political arena entirely.
I’ve done my part.
I’m choosing to walk away.
Actually, I’ll be rolling away, in this.
I’m renovating it now (the beige and brown hues of the interior are not my “signature colors”), and will begin my adventures in the next couple of months, or as soon as a steady decline in virus infection rates makes it seem safe to do so.
I will be sharing tales of my travels, my reflections from the road, here – as time, your interest, and the Bayou Brief’s illustrious publisher Lamar White, Jr., will permit.
During the past three years, we have featured dozens of stories about the enduring legacies of slavery and Jim Crow in Louisiana.
Today, as the nation grapples with a long overdue reckoning on the issues of systemic and institutional racism, we offer this compendium in an effort to contribute to the discourse and to shed additional light on the pervasive and pernicious impact that America’s “original sin” continues to have on the lives of Louisianians.
In 1719, a year after Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville officially founded the City of New Orleans, the first two ships carrying captive Africans arrived in Louisiana. Bienville had petitioned King Louis XIV to authorize the importation of enslaved Africans more than twenty years prior. Before the ships arrived, a total of only ten Africans lived in the region; and while the numbers are difficult to know precisely, by the end of the 18th century, Louisiana was home to thousands and thousands of enslaved Africans, the overwhelming majority of whom were forced to participate in a system that considered human beings as chattel.
Nearly every aspect of Louisiana culture has either been indelibly altered or entirely defined by the horrors of slavery and the trauma imprinted in its aftermath—the stories we tell, the food we cook, the songs we sing, the music we play, the homes we build, the government we elect.
Consider the following: 155 years since the end of the Civil War, Louisiana has never elected an African American to a statewide office, an astonishing embarrassment for a state with a population that is 32.4% black, second only to Mississippi. (A black man named P.B.S. Pinchback briefly served as governor during Reconstruction, but he was appointed, not elected). Until only two years ago, Louisiana was the world’s prison capital, and even more recently, it had allowed nonunanimous jury convictions for serious capital offenses, meaning that it was possible for a criminal defendant to be sent away for life even if two members of their jury believed they were not guilty.
Today, there continues to be enormous racial disparities in educational outcomes, access to health care, employment opportunities, and incarceration rates, and we already know that the negative effects of climate change disproportionally harm communities of color.
At the same time, Louisiana is still littered with obsequious tributes to Confederate leaders. State government continues to be controlled almost entirely by conservative white men, and in the majority Republican legislature, there is, far too often, a cavalier dismissal for the concerns of the working poor and the marginalized.
These are the issues that I have been writing for my entire career, and before we get to the “compendium” part of this compendium, I hope you won’t mind indulging me for a minute. There’s a story I want to tell.
Prologue
Fourteen years ago, when I launched my first online publication, CenLamar (which focused almost exclusively on the politics and the political shenanigans of my hometown, Alexandria, Louisiana), I quickly earned the ire of a man named Greg Aymond (not to be confused with the New Orleans Archbishop of the same name).
A semi-retired conservative attorney who practiced law out of his brother’s plumbing business, Aymond was the town’s other well-known “blogger.” He also happened to have once been a prominent member of the local chapter of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the hate group David Duke founded in 1975.
His former association with the klan—Commander of Den 40, Giant of the Province of Rapides— was not much of a secret.
When a serial rapist terrorized the neighborhoods near Downtown Alexandria in the late spring and early summer of 1979, Aymond threatened to corral a dozen or so of his fellow klansmen to go out on “patrol” to find the suspect (who, incidentally, was a black teenager). The police chief publicly excoriated his vigilante justice fantasy, and Aymond relented.
Later that year, he was arrested at City Hall, in full costume, for disturbing the peace after getting into an altercation with a member of a rival klan group.
Gregory R. Aymond (left) of Alexandria appears in his klan outfit at a 1979 event featuring David Duke at the convention room inside of Alexandria City Hall. He is seated directly behind legendary civil rights attorney Louis Berry. Credit: Leandro Huebner, The Town Talk.
By the time he began writing online, Duke’s KKK had dissolved back into irrelevance, but the racist beliefs that constituted its organizing principles hadn’t gone anywhere.
Although Aymond later claimed that his association with the klan was merely a mistake he’d made in his youth (he was 23 years old and a recent college graduate when he joined Duke’s organization), he remained a virulent racist throughout his life. Arguably, he was even more pernicious because by the time he turned 30, he had armed himself with a law degree, which he used to pester, intimidate, and bully anyone he perceived as a political adversary.
In the wake of the Jena Six protests, he struck up a friendship with Richard Barrett, head of the Nationalist Movement, a Mississippi-based hate group, and ended up representing Barrett in court, a fact that would be noted in national coverage and an association that would later humiliate Aymond (not because Barrett was a racist, mind you, but that’s a whole other story).
For me, though, the most troubling thing about Greg Aymond wasn’t his unrestrained hate; it was the ways in which others in the community—news reporters, prominent business owners, and public officials—provided him with a kind of respectability. After graduating law school (and somehow satisfying the Bar Association’s fitness and character requirements), he went into private practice with Phillip Terrell, who now serves as Rapides Parish District Attorney, and he earned a steady paycheck, courtesy of the government, as the attorney for a local levee board.
Frankly, I was astonished by how many people took this man seriously. On his blog, he employed racist epithets against African American community leaders. I distinctly remember an article he published under the headline, “The N***a Street Thugs of Alexandria.” It created a bit of a controversy for about a week, but it didn’t dissuade the local news media or some of his peers in the local bar association to shun him.
When he died in 2012, it was front-page news. A local attorney, Thomas Davenport, praised him to a Town Talk reporter as being “passionate about exposing wrongdoing and wrongdoers,” though not before prefacing his comments by claiming he and Aymond “weren’t exceptionally close.” They spoke on the phone, he said, only “once or twice a week.” Oh, just once or twice a week? That’s all?
Look, it would be one thing if this man had truly disavowed the racist beliefs he had held in his twenties. People can change, and we should afford kids who get caught up in hate groups an opportunity for rehabilitation and redemption, especially if the worst crime they ever had committed was related to yelling at another klansmen. But like many others who were (bafflingly) swept into the cult of personality around David Ernest Duke, Aymond never really disavowed his core racist beliefs; they merely had a falling out with Duke.
I mention all of this for a reason. None of this is ancient history. Much of it occurred only a decade ago. And David Duke, as a political force, may have finally been relegated to the dustbin. But the truth is that the messengers may have changed, but the message hasn’t.
This report appeared in the March 10, 1992 edition of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
If you’re having trouble reading the highlighted passage, let me transcribe it for you:
But Louisianians who voted for Mr. Duke for governor say it will be a lot easier to cast ballots for Mr. Buchanan for president.
“Duke won’t get the vote; Pat will. Pat represents much of the same positions,” said Clay Higgins, 30, an Army military policy officer attending a Buchanan rally in Baton Rouge last week.
“Regardless of the fact that David’s a homeboy and all that, the boy’s a Nazi, and that’s a real problem,” said Mr. Higgins who, nevertheless voted for Mr. Duke in the governor’s race.
Clay Higgins, the 30-year-old fellow who said “David’s a homeboy” and supported him for governor but not for president because “the boy’s a Nazi,” is currently representing Louisiana’s Third Congressional District in our nation’s Capitol.
The first “big story” of my career was when I uncovered that U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise, then the powerful House Majority Whip, had once attended a white supremacist organization’s annual conference, back when he was a member of the Louisiana state legislature. Years later, I reported another “big story,” sharing a pair of videos in which U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi spoke nostalgically about “public hangings” and flippantly discussed the benefits of voter suppression on college campuses.
There were other stories: The district attorney who invited and paid a known anti-Muslim extremist to conduct a training seminar for local law enforcement in Rapides Parish (I mentioned him by name earlier. Bonus points if you remember); a klan-sponsored mailer that surfaced in Sabine Parish during the 2012 presidential election; a white Caddo Parish Sheriff’s racially-offensive portrait of Shreveport’s first black mayor, and, of course, the removal of the white supremacist lawn ornaments (i.e. monuments) in my adopted hometown of New Orleans.
This is not to suggest that I am an expert on these subjects, insofar as a white man can ever be an expert in a discourse that is heavily informed by the experiential. Although, as someone who has lived with a physical disability for my entire life, I know a thing or two about what it’s like to confront discrimination, I also know that my experience is not even remotely comparable to those who experience discrimination due to the color of their skin.
If anything, at least in my opinion, my focus on these issues is a reflection of how they continue to inform nearly every aspect of Louisiana politics, government, and culture.
You cannot claim to chronicle life in Louisiana without writing about race and racism. To paraphrase my friend James Carville, it’d be like hosting a fire safety convention and refusing to talk about water.
In the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the powerful reckoning his death has inspired, we have noticed a fairly substantial increase in the readership of some of the Bayou Brief‘s previous reports, stories, and commentary on the legacy and the reality of systemic racism in Louisiana.
I thought it would be helpful to readers if I provided a compendium of what I consider to be the “best of” these stories, along with some additional commentary about why each story continues to be important and relevant. Importantly, many of these stories were not written by me, though I am proud to have had the honor of publishing them.
So, without further delay:
The Beginning of Hell
by Lamar White, Jr.
As the United States prepared to enter WWII, more than 500,000 men temporarily relocated to rural Central Louisiana to participate in the nation’s largest-ever training exercise, the Louisiana Maneuvers.
More than 70 years later, the names of the young men killed in the so-called “Lee Street Riots” have never been disclosed, and the government has still yet to provide the full story.
Graham—the scion of two of America’s most prominent families—spent much of his career toiling away in obscurity at his plantation home outside of Alexandria, Louisiana, but an unlikely friendship with an out-of-work military man named William Tecumseh Sherman resulted in the establishment of a new military academy in Pineville.
However, the two men took different sides in the Civil War, and Graham’s incendiary racism cost him his fortune, his health, and eventually his reputation.
In Louisiana, Confederate Monuments Have No Place In Front of a Courthouse. Remove All of Them. Now.
Doxxieland: Unmasking the Racist Resistance
Even though he’s just a week shy of his 57th birthday, Jeff Crouere—the pugnacious New Orleans area conservative talk radio host, TV pundit, and columnist—still looks like someone who occasionally gets the question “Can I see some ID?” by no-nonsense bartenders and by-the-book convenience store cashiers.
His style is probably best described as “Young Republican.” He seems most comfortable in a polo and khakis or a suit, which he wears whenever he’s on the air, even when it’s just a taping of He Said, She Said, the weekly radio show he co-hosts with his new girlfriend, Miriam “Mimi” Owens, the race-baiting provocateur who is perhaps best known locally for creating Robert E. Lee-themed Mardi Gras throws, which earned her a lifetime ban from the Krewe of Freret.
Recently, Crouere and Owens announced that they will be hosting their second “Save America” rally in Jefferson Parish on August 14. Around 200 people attended their first rally, which took place outside of the Governor’s Mansion in Baton Rouge on the Fourth of July, right as Louisiana began to confront a sudden surge in COVID-19 cases.
The event included Tony Spell, the breakaway Pentecostal preacher whose defiance of the stay-at-home order earlier in the year encouraged over 1,000 members of his church to undermine the public health, providing Spell with his 15 minutes of fame and a warrant for his arrest.
“Are you a masker or a free breather?” he roared at the rally, though he already knew the answer.
After I asked Crouere and Owens if they’d be willing to respond to a few questions, they were happy to help. Three weeks ago, we spoke for nearly an hour through FaceTime. At some point, I asked whether to expect the opposition to face masks to be a theme in upcoming rallies.
“Our event was not about masks,” Crouere told me. “That was not really the focus of our rallies, and that really won’t be the focus of our upcoming rallies.”
“But we’ll follow the law,” Owens interjected. “I don’t like it. I can’t breathe. I’m hot as heck in it. But we’re lawful people, so if we have to wear it, we’ll wear it.”
While their first event may not have been intended to focus on opposition to mask mandates, that message clearly wasn’t received by those in attendance.
“Out of the less than 200 rally-goers, I saw only two people with face masks,” reported environmental investigative journalist and photographer Julie Dermansky on Desmog. “One was worn by a man that had the words ‘Dixie Beer’ painted on it, which was expressing his disdain over the decision by the owner of the New Orleans beer company to change the beer’s name in response to anti-racism demonstrations. “The other mask I noticed at the rally was worn on a woman’s arm.”
According to Crouere, he and Owens decided to organize “Save America” rallies for four different reasons. “It’s about a response to attacks on police,” he explained. “It’s a response to the fact that our historic monuments are being taken down. It’s a response to a shutdown of the economy, and it’s a response to what a lot of people see as a leftward movement in the political world.”
Two weeks after their Fourth of July rally, Owens encouraged her friends and followers on Facebook to attend the “Take Our Country Back Rally (Say No to the Mask)” near the Lakeside Mall in Metairie, noting the event “is not organized by Jeff or I (sic). It is organized by Clay Taylor. He has filed suit about the mask mandate. All are welcome.”
Crouere told me that he was in attendance but reemphasized that neither he nor Owens had been involved in its planning.
When I decided to write about the purpose and the ultimate aims of their rallies, I had assumed the story would be about the political opposition to restrictions aimed at curtailing the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, but while that certainly is a part of the story, as I quickly came to understand, it should not be confused with what appears to be driving their activism: Anger over the effort to remove monuments that celebrate Confederate leaders and the Lost Cause of white supremacy.
Nearly a year after Donald Trump took office, Jeff Crouere continued to question whether former President Obama was born in the United States, peddling an article by the bigoted conspiracist Jerome Corsi on Alex Jones’ fringe propaganda website InfoWars. Corsi claimed the CIA hacked into Hawaii’s database to manufacture Barack Obama’s long-form birth certificate.
“I’ve said from the beginning that the birth certificate (Obama) released was a fraud,” said Crouere, who also told listeners that he thought “the whole thing about (Obama) being Christian was a masquerade” as well.
Yet, despite promoting a debunked conspiracy theory even after President Trump himself gave up on the cause, Jeff Crouere has usually been able to present himself as someone who straddles between the far-right fringe and the more respectable Republican establishment. In addition to the weekly program with Owens, Crouere also hosts a daily morning show, “Ringside Politics,” as well as a bimonthly show in front of a live audience called “Politics with a Punch,” which describes itself as a local version of comedian Bill Maher’s former show “Politically Incorrect.”
He is helped, in part, by the fact that he broadcasts on one of the smallest stations in the New Orleans area, WGSO, which means you’re unlikely to hear his most incendiary commentary unless you’re a loyal listener who lives nearby or if you decide to download an app to listen online (albeit small, Crouere actually does command a national audience online).
Crouere also benefitted from his brief marriage to Simone Bruni, a well-respected entrepreneur who became a local celebrity and a self-made multimillionaire after launching the demolition company “Demo Diva” in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. A year before they married, Bruni threw him a lavish party for his 50th birthday, which managed to earn coverage in The Times-Picayune.
According to a friend of Bruni, their divorce was nasty, and among those in the country club crowd of suburban Jefferson Parish, rumors of a high-priced alimony agreement for Crouere were widespread.
A day after this report was initially published, Jeff Crouere responded to these claims directly. “These nasty and anonymous accusations are absurd and completely inaccurate. It is deeply regrettable that slanderous gossip about my personal life were peddled to the press,” he wrote to the Bayou Brief. “After five years of marriage, I decided to file for divorce in November, and I ask that my family’s privacy please be respected. This has nothing to do with politics. It’s simply about basic human decency.”
Regardless, it seems more than a little ironic that a man who once raged with indignation against former Mayor Mitch Landrieu for ordering the removal of Lost Cause monuments in New Orleans had been married to a woman who made a fortune tearing things down. Perhaps the two were never a good match.
However, the same cannot be said about his co-host and girlfriend Mimi Owens, the Cleopatra to his Marc Antony, the Bonnie to his Clyde.
The “Save America Rallies” began as a Facebook group, which the couple created to recruit and organize for a grand event. The group purported to be about “saving our heritage, culture, security, and prosperity.”
In little over a week, it mustered well over 3,000 members, a menagerie of militant conservatives, fringe conspiracists, and more than a few white supremacists, which proved to generate the wrong kind of attention and complicated their plans.
“Because of impending threats, which happens, that’s part of the silencing,” Owens told WWLTV. “We’re not going to announce a location or time until next week.”
But the aura of mystery and the vague idea of fighting back only encouraged their racist flock to air their grievances. “Next they’ll want to get rid of white people because it upsets them from slavery days, when not one these assholes was ever a slave,” wrote a member named Deborah. “They’re too damn lazy. That’s why they’re on welfare.”
Comments like Deborah’s not only avoided scrutiny from Owens, the group’s moderator, they were usually left unchallenged by everyone else as well.
Indeed, nearly every post in the group was one of outrage: videos of riots, looting, and violence, memes mocking George Floyd’s murder, and Deep State conspiracy theories. On the rare occasion in which the group was infiltrated by someone expressing any opinion that resembled disagreement, then, like a swarm of racist bees, the drones honed in, and the double-agents were quickly outed.
Often, contrarians were shouted down with accusations of antifa, the anti-racist, anti-fascist, far-left political movement that has emerged as the principal boogeyman of President Trump and his supporters on the fringe right.
A dutiful and vigilant overseer, Owens was attentive to questions from her legion and responded with swift action whenever so-callled “antifa” dissidents made an appearance. On a post celebrating Trump’s executive order protecting monuments, a member named Devin simply replied, “Unconstitutional.”
“Antifa alert,” a woman named Susan warned the group. “Devin is antifa,” she asserted, attaching a screenshot of Devin’s comment as evidence.
Owens responded to Susan’s alarm in less than twenty minutes and gave Devin the boot. “He’s been removed.”
Owens is no stranger to the racist sewers of social media. In addition to her role with the “Save America Rallies” group, she is also an admin of “Forever Lee Circle,” a Facebook page with more than 14,000 followers, ostensibly created to focus on fighting the removal of Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s statue in the city.
“Many slave owners, Jefferson and Lee for example, opted to keep their slaves to prevent them from being mistreated by others who might try an [sic] re-enslave them,” she once wrote in a post that is as appalling as it is factually incorrect. The group itself has proposed that the real perpetrators of American slavery were “the Jews, the Muslims, and Africans themselves.”
Before she launched a career in talk radio, Mimi Owens wrote a pair of self-published children’s books, including one titled Who’s That, Daddy? meant to “educate” children about various monuments in New Orleans, including those of Confederate soldiers and perpetrators of genocide. (Her other book includes a similar cast of characters but is set in Richmond, Virginia).
In a stilted, simple rhyme scheme, the book, which is illustrated by Sean Gautreaux, tells the story of a white father driving his son around the city to explain the significance of the monuments they see.
Although it is not included in the book, there is one illustration that Owens appears to be particularly fond of and arguably best represents her approach in curating history. She uses it as the banner image for her Forever Lee Circle Facebook page. It’s of a father and a son stumbling into a Mardi Gras parade, where they find three heroes of the Confederacy—Jefferson Davis, P.G.T. Beauregard, and Robert E. Lee—tossing Owens’ “Forever Lee Circle” throws while standing atop a float that’s being hauled by a Black man in a tractor.
To be sure, both she and Crouere vehemently reject the notion that either of them are racist, claiming that they are animated instead by a patriotic love for their country and the Constitution and concerns about erasing history, which is ironic considering the ways in which both of them routinely distort, exaggerate, and flat-out lie about the history behind these monuments and the reasons people want them taken down.
“I am actually on the Southern Poverty Law’s hate-watch,” Owens boasted at the first “Save America” rally, as if the designation is a badge of honor. (As it turns out, this too was an exaggeration. Owens was referring to this article about her Lee Circle Mardi Gras throws, which referred to her by one of her pseudonyms, “Mikas Earl.”)
But that’s not to say that the couple haven’t faced backlash for their views and their cause célèbre. Since they announced their plans for their first “Save America” rally, they claim they were both been inundated with phone calls, social media posts, emails, and letters from people accusing them of racism.
Some of those people, according to Owens, called themselves “members” of antifa, referring to the anti-fascist, anti-racist, far-left political movement, and following their first rally, she would allege that among the crowd there were five antifa counter-protestors, dressed in black “uniforms.”
When Owens posted a photograph on the rally’s private Facebook group page of the five suspects, all of whom appeared to be either in their late teens or early twenties, languishing a few hundred feet from the event, one of them wrote Owens back. They were not, as it turns out, antifa. The comment was quickly scrubbed from the page, presumably by an administrator.
“And then the doxxing began,” bemoaned Owens.
After receiving an innocuous Black Lives Matter flyer and phone calls to both Owens’ and her ex-husband’s phones from people allegedly claiming to be antifa, the couple say they felt concerned enough to contact local law enforcement as well as the FBI.
“They were boasting about doing it so we had to take action,” Crouere said. “I mean all of this is disturbing beyond belief.”
“That phone call was the scariest one of all,” Owens said. “‘This is antifa looking for Mimi Owens.’ To me, that’s a threat.” So frightened, in fact, that she went on to taunt the caller online.
****
To people like Jeff Crouere and Mimi Owens, taking down monuments to racist or genocidal men is merely a political stunt, a way for white politicians like Mitch Landrieu to erase history while ingratiating themselves among the Black community.
“It’s a feel-good action that does nothing,” said Crouere. “Now we see since the George Floyd incident, I think literally 100 monuments have been taken down across the country. I just think that’s very sad.”
Owens, who calls herself a “historic preservationist,” expressed her disdain as well. “They have no problem putting Black Lives Matter on the street,” she said. “But you can’t put something for your culture. Aren’t we a country of immigrants? But the only immigrants that matter are the ones that were forced here.”
The couple believe that prominent public monuments to figures such as John McDonogh, Andrew Jackson, and Robert E. Lee should remain standing, regardless of the messages those monuments communicate to Black and indigenous Americans, as they each, in their view, contain some sort of ambiguous lesson in “history.”
“You know, we all have our stories. I’m part Irish, what about all the Irish that were considered slaves?” Crouere mused when we spoke. “We’ve got to remember that a lot of people have ancestors who went through a lot of pain and were enslaved. I think the Irish slavery lasted 200 years.”
The trope about Irish slavery is a widely-discredited, specious argument that traces its origin in the recent discourse of white supremacy.
But this is how both of them frame the discussion. In their version of the story, they are the real victims here, and their online army of supporters have been unfairly maligned simply because they believe in defending American history.
****
Societal pressures have, for the most part, succeeded in driving the bulk of the loud-and-proud, heritage-not-hate, traitorous flag-waving racist neo-revolutionaries into the underbellies of neighborhood bars, Thanksgiving dinners, and online communities. The more careful and prudent among them stick to places of true anonymity, such as the forums of 9gag or 4chan. But the loss of strongholds like r/The_Donald show that they continue to lose a war of attrition.
Those who have remained online—these tech-savvy, young, involuntarily celibate partisans—will likely continue to disrupt supply lines of discussion with their memes and single-sentence debates. You’ll find them mocking trans rights or liberal absurdities, or claiming to “OWN libtard snowflakes with FACTS and LOGIC.” Having been banished to the backseat, they laugh at the speed bumps on the road to progress. But these underground resistance fighters know the internet. They know how to navigate the back channels and remain hidden, striking and retreating like cyber guerrillas.
Such is not the case for the vanguard— that is, the boomer and the internet illiterate divisions of the resistance. They’re out waging war on open and mostly public groups on Facebook. They use their real names. They have profile pictures, some of themselves, some of the president using the flag as a tissue, some as just the flag itself. Though the image can vary from the flag of the United States, a bastardized thin-blue-line version, or the flag of the Confederacy, depending on the season.
They also often list their personal information, including where they work. They don’t know any better. Having never encountered hacker culture outside of red pill metaphors from The Matrix, they’re quickly becoming acquainted with a common term and tactic on the online battlefield: Doxxing.
But they’re only getting a taste of the true nature of the practice. Doxxing has been used to stalk and target abortion providers, expose journalists’ confidential sources, and to identify and punish government dissidents. On the extreme end of the scale, there’s “swatting,” which involves making a false police report of a hostage situation that leads to a raid on an unsuspecting, innocent person’s home. In this country, if the police burst through your door and you try to defend yourself from these unannounced intruders, there’s a good chance you’ll be killed. The tragic murder of Breonna Taylor shows that these intruders may not even be held accountable for it. As of this writing, Breonna Taylor’s murderers have still not been arrested.
These “virtual” bigots are simply having the things they say and post in a public place or send in direct messages documented. Alerting a business to the vile, unacceptable behavior of one of their employees isn’t harassment or targeting. In fact, it’s beneficial to that business, and to the larger community. Broadcasting the racist beliefs of a business owner or a public figure isn’t defamation; it’s a public service. This is especially true when the people spouting racist opinions are teachers, public officials, pastors, or police officers.
Among their legion of Facebook fans, one in particular stands out: Amanda Jennings (aka Amanda Smith, aka Amanda Hargis, aka Amanda Downhour). Jennings isn’t just one of the most prolific commenters in the Save America Rallies group, she is also a regular presence on Mimi Owens’ personal page.
When I reached out for comment, Jennings, a native of Bastrop, a small town in north Louisiana, told me she was willing to talk “if you are willing to risk your life.” She then added, “I am targeted by these foreign militants that want to destroy our country.” A week ago, she claimed that “the World Health Organization paid Hollywood actors to claim that they had Covin-19 (sic).”
Elaborate, bizarre conspiracies are a part of her brand. So too is virulent white supremacy.
After Heather Heyer was murdered by a white supremacist during the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Jennings defended the white supremacist, arguing that he was merely “fleeing a violent mob.” Two weeks later, she posted a photograph of her and Congressman Clay Higgins (R-LA03), whose own associations with fringe anti-government militia groups have been well-documented.
Jennings does not attempt to hide her incendiary beliefs, nor does she shy away from the spotlight.
Last year, she campaigned as a Republican for Louisiana Secretary of State, finishing last and in a distant fourth against incumbent and fellow Republican Kyle Ardoin, but still managing to garner nearly 80,000 votes.
She reported being the only donor to the campaign, spending slightly more than $2,000, which paid for the qualifying fee and campaign swag, which apparently included stickers that misspelled the word “candidate” and her own last name.
Jennings actively protested the removal of Confederate and white supremacist monuments in New Orleans and, later, in Shreveport as well. In a live-streaming video broadcasted from a counter-protest outside of the Confederate monument in front of the Caddo Parish courthouse, which she shared on the Save America Rallies page, she featured a woman holding a spiked bat. When Jennings asked the woman about the weapon, the woman called it a “N***** Beater.”
“Oh, wow,” responded Jennings, before saying to a nearby counter-protester, “I hope she don’t need to use it.”
Jennings is a great example of the casual form of doxxing facing the vanguard. The live-stream she shared on Crouere and Owens’ group was also posted on her own personal page, which was public and open for all to see.
After a few shares, hundreds flocked to her page to express their outrage on her video. Jennings responded by sending direct messages to some of the Black commenters, saying to one, “You fucking n****** getting real bold!!!!! Little black bitch I will hang you.” (She later claimed, dubiously, that the comment was photoshopped).
Jeff Crouere and Mimi Owens did not denounce or remove the video or any other of her violent or racist posts until I asked them about it, nearly a month after Jennings posted her video.
“That’s not acceptable. It’s not acceptable to have any video that has racial slurs in it,” said Crouere, who, unlike Owens, also noted that he was unfamiliar with Jennings. “That’s against everything that we stand for. That will be removed once we find it.”
“Some things get past us,” Owens asserted. “At some of these protests on the other side, they’re saying nasty words too, so what do we do? Do we not show any protests?”
The video was removed from the group’s page and Amanda Jennings was banned from the Save America Rallies group within minutes of our interview ending.
In response to the public attention, or casual doxxing, that members in the group were receiving, Owens mustered her troops and made an announcement. “Here’s what is happening all over social media,” she wrote. “Be smart and pause before you post.” In the post, she included screenshots of half a dozen groups called things like “Expose Racists+ 2020,” “Expose Racism 2020,” and “YOU ABOUT TO LOSE YO JOB!!!! (Racists exposed 2020).”
Posts and screenshots from the Save America Rally group had been shared and tagged in groups like these, which caused members of the vanguard to have their employers contacted and their racist memes and opinions, which they thought were shared in a safe space, posted on their profiles for their friends to see.
Ever the gallant leader, Owens chose to warn her soldiers of watchful eyes, rather than admonish them, ban them from the group, or remove their posts for blatantly racist language and imagery. Rather than simply not being racist, they chose to become more cautious of what they posted.
“I’ve had a show for 21 years, and I’ve never had anything like this ever before,” Crouere said, while sitting snug on a loveseat next to Owens. “It’s reaching a level of vitriol that is really unprecedented.”
Contributing writer: Lamar White, Jr.