Carl Higbie and the Bizarre Theatrics of Late-Stage Patriotism
Faced with ascendant militarism from Democrats, Republicans have embraced an evermore extreme cadre of veterans
America is now officially in the midst of a patriotism crisis. According to polling data released on the Fourth of July, the number of Americans who self-describe as “very patriotic” has dropped five points over the last two years. While this slump was particularly pronounced among Republicans, the right remains more than twice as likely as the left to love the U.S.A.
Democrats have long been scolded for what the National Review last year described as their “evanescent and conditional” affection for America. Ben Shapiro chalked up this long-standing patriotism gap to the left’s unhealthy obsession with the country’s flaws. “When [Democrats] think of America,” he argued, “they think of John C. Calhoun and Jim Crow, of Harvey Weinstein and Rodney King.” Many Democrats have acquiesced to the Republican definition of patriotism, and now urge party leaders to “rediscover the radical potential of the American flag.”
In the not-too-distant past, patriotism wasn’t visualized on charts or debated in the press. Citizens weren’t expected to publicly prove their love of country. Instead, most demonstrated their patriotism through simple and quiet acts, like volunteering in the community, voting, or showing support to those who served.
Veterans have always shouldered the most dangerous acts of patriotism i.e. risking their lives to keep the big American machine running. Many were conscripted into this work, while others joined up for the economic benefits, or out of a sense of civic duty. After returning home, a solid percentage go into politics or other forms of public service.
Twenty-six of America’s 45 presidents were veterans. Scores more have served in legislative seats, federal cabinet roles, and as reporters, commentators, and activists. Consequently, veterans have become the most powerful representatives of the American spirit, and today are the only constituency outside of the NFL routinely called “Patriots.”
While veterans were historically seen as positive vectors of national pride, some are now responsible for polarizing this country. Many of these antagonistic vets have been recruited into the ongoing political arms race for the most Patriotism Points. Republicans have long dominated Democrats in this competition, largely by recruiting the veterans with the sharpest tongues. This more combative cohort is unafraid to cast opponents as turncoats, tell black and white war stories, and demand this country “Make Machine Guns Great Again.”
Because the military is now the last trusted institution in government, veterans can effectively set the tone on many issues, especially those relating to the red, white, and blue. Using these powers, they’ve politicized patriotism, which has torn deeply at the national fabric.
They’ve also had more luck in laundering inflammatory rhetoric into the political mainstream. Take, for instance, Dan Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL and Texas Representative who has defended alleged war criminals. Or Tom Cotton, an Army veteran and Senator from Arkansas who penned a New York Times op-ed supporting the violent deployment of troops across American cities. Perhaps the right’s most reliable veteran surrogate is Fox News’ Pete Hegseth, an Army National Guardsman who supported these preceding positions and also hailed this year’s assassination of Iranian leader Qasem Soleimani.
While it can be easy to cast these individuals as radical outliers, many are simply reflections of the wars they fought, and the leaders they followed. One should therefore not castigate these veterans without first screaming up the ladder at the Joint Chiefs and the Generals, who’ve not faced a deep reputational hit from their more diplomatic but still deeply violent orthodoxy.
One of the few veterans whose hardcore rhetoric resulted in his downfall is Carlton “Carl” M. Higbie IV, a former Navy Seal, Fox News pundit, and trusted Trump advisor who resigned from government in 2018 after CNN surfaced a series of vile remarks he’d made years earlier that disparaged blacks, gays, Muslims, and even veterans.
Higbie’s now mounting a political comeback from his hometown of Greenwich, Connecticut, where he was recently elected a District 8 member of the city council. While he’s offered qualified remorse for some of his remarks, he’s defended others as “factual observations,” and remains a committed Trumpist.
Higbie typifies the new archetypal veteran of the right. He provides an interesting case study in that despite some major blows, he hasn’t gone down. (Neither, we learned this week, has Eric Grietens.) Moreover, it’s also darkly entertaining to watch Higbie’s strain of reactionary politics play out over municipal zoning decisions.
In a recent interview, Higbie said this local work is likely the first step on a path to higher office, perhaps with a run for Congress, or to be Connecticut’s governor. To his credit, Higbie was willing to speak with me despite knowing the resulting piece wouldn’t be too pretty. He was also game to reflect on the perverse incentives for conservative veterans in politics today. “I said what I said because I knew it would make people angry,” he said. Then he continued:
Look, veterans are not perfect people by any stretch of the imagination. When I got out of the military I said some really stupid shit. I thought it would get me ratings.
But to be honest, that’s how people talk in the military, and no one gets offended. The big thing drilled into your head when you enlist is that there is an extreme ideology of Islam, and it’s trying to kill you. In order for a kid to go overseas and kill on behalf of country there has to be some psychological reckoning.
Higbie said the military taught him to compartmentalize, a psychological skill that comes in handy in his current line of work. For example, while he claims to be close to people who are gay, black, and liberal, he will, in the blink of an eye, abandon these close friendships for the sake of identifying broader political enemies. “I generally believe Democrats are weaker people,” he told me. “And I think veterans gravitate towards the strong.”
World War II produced the largest and most trumpeted class of veterans in politics. And while Republicans are today seen as the party of patriotism, many of the visionaries from this group were on the left. They included famed civil rights activists like Medgar Evers and Harry Belafonte, Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and titans of Congress like John Dingell, a Michigan Representative and early advocate for a national healthcare system, and Daniel Inouye, a Senator from Hawaii who established a federal reparations fund for victims of Japanese-American internment camps.
Many decent Republican veterans of the war served alongside them. They included Richard Schweiker, a Pennsylvania Senator and proponent of voting rights, Medicare, and organized labor, and Robert Stafford, a Vermont Senator and staunch environmentalist who championed college access for lower and middle class families.
An outlier at the time was Joseph McCarthy, a World War II Marine who later adopted fascist tendencies in his conspiratorial rooting-out of political opponents he deemed traitors and Communists.
Still, the cumulative political accomplishments from the World War II generation were positive. This work forged in the American imagination an idea of veterans as hardworking, fundamentally decent, and prone to bipartisanship.
But as this generation died off, and politics came to more closely resemble a battlefield, Republicans took inspiration from McCarthy, and launched a campaign that weaponized good will towards veterans to increase polarization and radicalize politics.
The right moved swiftly to define themselves as the true American party in the wake of the September 11th attacks. This was accomplished by many things, including beating the war drum loudest and picking shallow fights over flag pins and freedom fries.
Democrats were flummoxed by these plays, and generally fumbled their response. Many on the left supported the invasion of Iraq, only to backtrack when the war became unpopular with timid and unimaginative campaigns for peace. This bungled work re-enforced the stereotype of the party as weak-kneed, unpatriotic, and unprepared for when the big, red, War Phone rings.
In 2004, Democrats forfeited the election to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney — two draftdodgers — despite running a bonafide war hero in John Kerry. This embarrassing loss caused the party to largely sweep anti-war work off the table and recast themselves in the Republican’s patriotic mold.
Barack Obama broke out of it in 2008 by running against the War on Terror. He was rewarded with a healthy margin of veteran supporters, a big slice of whom he later lost after failing to clean up the quagmire in the Middle East. Still, Obama generally supported the veteran community in office, and, whenever possible, projected a love of country. This work included cutting the veteran homelessness rate in half, shrinking the VA’s claims backlog, and allocating more resources for veteran mental health programs. In addition, Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden launched education, wellness, and employment initiatives for military and veteran families.
Any goodwill gleaned from this work was severely blunted on the airwaves, where veterans like Fox’s Hegseth smeared Obama as an “ambivalent American” who was afraid of ISIS.Higbie, then a cub pundit on Fox, attacked Obama for having “absolutely no idea about foreign policy whatsoever” and re-enforced Donald Trump’s racist birther conspiracy by claiming that the first black president was a “Muslim who was born in Kenya.”
In hopes of protecting themselves from bombs lobbed by the likes of Higbie, Democrats began recruiting their own class of conservative, pro-war veterans. They include Amy McGrath, whose main claims to fame in her race against Mitch McConnell are her murderous combat missions for the Marine Corps, and Jason Crow, a retired Army Ranger elected to the House in 2018 who recently partnered with Liz Cheney to stymie efforts to end the Forever Wars. (Ted Lieu, a retired Air Force Officer and resistance liberal, similarly opposed three recentHouse resolutions that called for reducing Pentagon power and withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.)
The Democrat’s hawkish turn seems to have pushed Republicans to deploy ever-more extreme veterans, some of whom resemble action figures and identify every “Other” as an enemy. This collectible set includes alleged war criminals like Clint Lorance and Eddie Gallagher, war profiteers like Erik Prince, and war conspiracists like the Benghazi Annex Security Team. Then there’s Higbie, who spun off his proximity to an alleged war crime into a book deal and lucrative political career marked by incendiary comments.
With his shiny black hair and barrel-sized muscles, Higbie could pass for Chris Cuomo in the smudgy reflection of a Gold’s Gym mirror.
Higbie worked as a personal trainer at the Equinox gym in Greenwich before he mounted his first political bid in 2014, to oust Democrat Jim Himes in Connecticut’s 4th Congressional district. In a wide-ranging interview with a local newspaper at the time, Higbie accurately boasted that he was not "bound by the same conformist rules that most Republicans are bound by.” He blasted the Obama administration for what he described as a cautious and over-bureaucratic waging of war, chiefly through his administration’s controversial decision to limit the rules of engagement. "I compare the military to the DMV, and it gets people killed," he said. In the interview, Higbie also ticked off a number of quotes from Thomas Jefferson, or “T.J.” as he likes to call him.
Higbie lost that race, but soon-after saw a new opportunity in Donald Trump. He told me that he was speaking live on Fox News when Trump rode down his golden elevator, and announced his candidacy.
From that point on, Higbie was a true Trump believer. He quickly became a Trump surrogate and chief spokesperson for the Great America PAC, which spent more than $25 million in 2016 to boost the reality TV star. (The PAC’s biggest donor was Isaac Perlmutter, the chairman of Marvel Comics, whom Trump subsequently brought in as a shadow advisor for the Department of Veterans Affairs.)
Shortly before the 2016 South Carolina primary, Higbie bet the Fox & Friends team that Trump would win big in the Palmetto State. After he did, Higbie recorded a celebratory video of himself pulling out a clean, 330-pound power lift followed by a backflip, and sent it to Brian Kilmeade.
Higbie weathered each and every Trump storm without wavering, including the Access Hollywood tape. He also offered cover to Trump on controversial military and veteran matters. In one appearance, he excused Trump’s attacks on the Gold Star Khan family by arguing that, under Trump’s proposed Muslim ban, “the son of Mr. Khan would not have been allowed to serve.” Days after Trump was elected, Higbie took to Megyn Kelly’s Fox News show to defend the idea of a national Muslim registry. “We’ve done it based on race, we’ve done it based on religion, we’ve done it based on region,” Higbie reasoned.
Higbie is far warmer and more measured on the phone than he is on the airwaves. On his old radio show, for instance, Higbie once railed against Islam and told Muslims to go back to their “shithole and go crap in your hands and bang little boys on Thursday nights.” But on the phone, Higbie told me he befriended Iraqi colleagues that he’d take bullets for, including a Muslim interpreter he still speaks to on the phone every week.
Asked about his big swings between kindness and hate, Higbie answered frankly. “I respond to the environment I’m in,” he said. As further evidence of his own incongruities, Higbie offered another example: “I’m a 250-pound guy who works out all the time for competitive powerlifting competitions,” he said. “But I often listen to Cher in the gym, and sing her songs out loud.”
Like anyone, Higbie is certainly a complex man capable of holding contradictory beliefs. It’s unclear, however, whether he is truly radicalizing himself on air for the sake of the viewers, or now simply understands that he can no longer say the quiet parts of his politics out loud. (Only the Cher classic, “Believe,” is for belting out in public, he might reason.)
Since his cancellation, Higbie has continued to promote fringe ideas on a number of topics, immigration and Islam. He also recently interviewed Fraser Anning, the far-right Australian politician who was egged last year after suggesting that Muslim immigration was to blame for a mass shooting inside two Aussie mosques that left more than 50 dead. (Fanning has also called for a “final solution” to the country’s “immigration problem.”)
While Higbie’s still able to send out his national commentary through a series of big venues — Twitter, Newsmax, his “Liberty and Cocktails” podcast — much of his time these days is focused on Making Greenwich Great Again.
In a newspaper interview last year, Higbie said he was inspired to run for the Greenwich city council — known formally as Representative Town Meeting —in part, because a proposed performing arts center at the town’s high school was “grossly managed and grossly over budget.”
In office, Higbie’s gone agressive on everything from town trash fees to the education budget. In February, Higbie waded into a contentious debate over whether to bring natural grass or astroturf to athletic fields at the local middle school. Naturally, Higbie, a former spokesperson for a Super PAC, came down in favor of the turf.
Some community members expressed worries about the chemical compounds used in the fake grass. Higbie derided these voices in a speech as “incredibly disingenuous.” He ended on a biting line: “You don’t care about the kids.”
At a video town meeting in June, members couldn’t even get through their roll call before Higbie derailed the meeting. According to a transcript, Higbie Zoomed in from the gun room in his basement, where he sat cleaning a firearm ominously. One member called the sight “pretty scary,” and Higbie’s video was disabled, which pissed him off.
“I want to get this on record: Did I break a rule?” he asked incredulously. “I can mute you completely if you’d like,” one of Higbie’s colleagues, Cheryl Moss, responded tersely.
“I know you will, because you’re a mini fascist,” Higbie shot back.
Even though many Greenwich residents have learned to love Trump, Higbie’s faced intense pushback throughout the town for his work. Shortly after his win to the council, he filed a complaint with the Greenwich Police Department alleging someone had scratched a swastika on his pickup truck. Later, a fellow selectman, Sandy Litvack, compared him to David Duke. In our conversation, Higbie relayed another recent story involving a community member splashing what looked like blood at the bottom of his driveway. He said his young children have also received death threats.
Higbie is clearly put off by this behavior, and it may (or may not) be causing him to think a bit more deeply about his words and actions. As I see it, local politics may actually be the best rehabilitation for someone like Higbie, as it requires debate with neighbors, who are harder to demonize.
Near the end of our conversation, Higbie volunteered that’d he recently helped change the tire of a “raging liberal.” He also said he’s offered a small olive branch in an effort to to de-escalate by proposing an open invitation speak one-on-one in respectful dialogue with any of his community detractors.
“If you want to hit me on something, lets debate it,” he said. “I’ve created an open invite for anyone to have a cup of coffee, a glass of whiskey, and talk through things.” Yet it seems like everyone in town expects to face Television Higbie, who would dress them down and call them names.
“So far, no one’s taken me up on the offer,” Higbie told me, somewhat dejectedly. “They’d rather just get hysterical in public.”
Related reading:
Matt Farwell: The War Criminals I’ve Known
Evan Osnos: How Greenwich Republicans Learned to Love Trump
Danny Sjursen: Patriotic Dissent