Auschwitz video latest flap for 'Cajun John Wayne'

As a pugnacious sheriff's deputy, Clay Higgins developed a loyal social media following with thumbs-hooked-in-gun-belt anti-crime videos in which he leaned menacingly toward the camera in his Mountie-style hat and warned the criminals of Louisiana's Acadiana region that they'd best just turn themselves in.

His trash-talking style — in one video he donned body armor and wielded a long gun while calling suspects "thugs" and "animals" — wasn't appreciated by all and it led to his resignation by the time he had risen to the rank of captain in the St. Landry Parish Sheriff's Office.

That was followed by his election to Congress.

"He comes across to people as straightforward," Joel Stelly, owner of a Cajun country restaurant and grocery, said Thursday. "I guess that's kind of what got him in trouble this time."

"This time" is a reference to Higgins' now-retracted video of a trip he made in May to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and death camps in Poland, where more than a million Jews were killed in the Nazi genocide.

Read more: http://www.theadvocate.com/acadiana/news/politics/article_1644b246-6365-11e7-a3ee-83925a957897.html