For much of 2015 and 2016, Carl Higbie was a very familiar face to anyone following coverage of the presidential campaign. The former Navy SEAL was a very early and very ardent supporter of Donald Trump, and was one of his most prominent surrogates. He was the main spokesman for one of the largest pro-Trump super PACs, Great America PAC.
Higbie was richly rewarded for his efforts. In August, he was appointed as the chief of external affairs for the Corporation for National and Community Service, the agency that oversees efforts to connect volunteers with service opportunities. CNCS’ most visible arm is AmeriCorps.
But that was before CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski discovered Higbie had made a raft of bigoted comments in 2013 while speaking on various Internet radio shows. For instance, in January 2013, Higbie mused that blacks had no business calling themselves “African-American.”
Speaking with a caller on his show, “Sound of Freedom,” Higbie harrumphed that nearly all blacks who call themselves African-American “have never been to Africa”–and “barring dual citizenship,” they had no right to use that label.
A month later, one of Higbie’s guests mentioned that he taught in an urban area. That led Higbie to wonder, “you mean the ghetto?”
Later in 2013, Higbie peddled the longtime urban myth that blacks lack morals.
Higbie recalled that when he gave away some firewood for free, nearly every black person wanted him to either help load the wood into their trucks, cut it for them, or help them in some other manner. He believed it was evidence that blacks had “lax morals.” As further proof, he railed about how taxpayers were paying for black kids being born out of wedlock, and they were getting sick of helping support “people who think breeding is a form of employment.”
Higbie has also outdone Trump as a full-on Islamophobe. Take this exchange from June 2013.
When one of Higbie’s callers related a story about how some Muslims supposedly didn’t want to abide by our Constitution, Higbie went off.
“Go back to your Muslim shithole and go crap in your hands and bang little boys on Thursday nights. I just don’t like Muslim people. People always rip me a new one for that. Carl, you’re racist, you can’t, you’re sexist. I’m like, Jesus Christ! I just don’t like Muslim people because their ideology sucks.”
If you’re wondering where that came from, Higbie was probably referring to anecdotes about rampant pedophilia in Afghanistan. But that was apparently enough for him to tar all Muslims as child molesters.
“Well people are like, ‘well, you can’t hate somebody just for being Muslim.’ It’s like, yeah, I can. Do you hate people who rape little boys? They say, ‘oh, of course. They’re just terrible people.’ Well, yeah, most Muslims believe that to have sex with men is OK, which I don’t like it all. But second off, it’s the ideology of a child molester. The ideology of a Muslim is what I don’t like. They are screwed up in the head and it makes, pisses me off.”
Higbie doesn’t think much of gay people either. When Rhode Island legalized marriage equality in the spring of 2013, Higbie blew a gasket.
Higbie told Rhode Island “congratuf’in’lations” for breaking “the moral fiber of our country.” He then made it clear that “I don’t like gay people,” and claimed he’d been molested by a gay man as a teenager.
There’s a lot more where that came from. He claimed he wanted to smash Dianne Feinstein’s head into that of Nancy Pelosi, and suggested that we ought to be able to go across the Mexican border and shoot undocumented immigrants trying to come into this country.
Within hours of these comments coming to light, Higbie didn’t scream “FAKE NEWS!” He didn’t rail about CNN being out to stop Trump from making America great again. He had the decency to resign.
I’m sorry. I’m not sorry that my words were published, I am sorry that I said them in 2013. Those words do not reflect who I am or what I stand for, I regret saying them. Last night I informed the WH that I was resigning so as not to distract from POTUS’ many success. #noexcuses
— Carl Higbie (@CarlHigbie) January 19, 2018
Later, he told Femi Redwood of WEYI-TV in Saginaw, Michigan that he was trying to be “a controversial radio host” and make a name for himself. In the process, he admitted that he said things that were “completely out of line.” He went further in an interview with The New York Times, saying that many of those remarks sprung from “my own ignorance.”
Higbie is at least the second scalp Kaczynski has claimed in the Trump administration. If you’ll remember, Monica Crowley had her dreams of becoming a deputy national security adviser derailed when Kaczynski and others revealed that her book and dozens of her articles had been plagiarized.
The obvious question–how did Trump’s team not catch this? Higbie himself dismissed any concerns about the Trump administration’s vetting process. But then again, we’re talking about an administration that allowed Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka to get into the West Wing despite ample evidence that Breitbart gave succor to Nazis. If Kaczynski could obtain this audio, why couldn’t the White House?
(featured image courtesy Higbie’s Facebook)
