‘I have descended into the belly of the beast!’ GOP’s Clay Higgins delivers eye-popping rant against impeachment

A Louisiana Republican stoked violent paranoia with his House speech defending President Donald Trump from impeachment.

Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA), a reserve law enforcement officer and former car dealer, darkly warned in religious language that the impeachment process as an attack on conservative values and a personal insult to millions of Americans.

"I have descended into the belly of the beast," Higgins began. "I have witnessed the terror within and I raise committed to oppose the insidious forces, but this unjust and weaponized impeachment brought upon us by the same socialist who threatened unborn life in the womb, who threatened Second Amendment protections of every American patriot and who have long ago determined that they would organize and conspire to overthrow President Trump."

"We don't face this horror because the Democrats have all of a sudden become constitutionalists," he continued. "We're not being devoured from within because of some surreal assertion of the socialists' newfound love of the very flag they trod upon. We face this horror because of this map."

He displayed a highly misleading map showing the sparsely populated but often geographically large counties that went for Trump and the more densely populated counties that backed Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million more votes.

"This is what the Democrats fear," Higgins said. "They fear the true will of we the people. They are deep establishment D.C. They fear. They call this Republican map flyover country. They call us deplorables. They fear our faith, they fear out strength, they fear our unity, they fear our vote and they fear our president. We will never surrender our nation to career establishment D.C. politicians and bureaucrats."

"Our republic shall survive this threat from within," he added. "American patriots shall prevail."