Steve King ... Racist ... White Supremacist ... Congressman

Iowa’s Republican Congressman Steve King is a racist, a homophobe, a transphobe; he’s anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant; he’s every kind of bigot you’ve ever heard of, and probably a few you haven’t.

In 2002, as an Iowa state representative, King filed a bill requiring schools to teach that the United States “is the unchallenged greatest nation in the world and that it has derived its strength from … Christianity, free enterprise capitalism and Western civilization.” Western Civilization is a King code word for white people. He also sponsored a law to make English the official language of Iowa.

In 2005, in the US Congress, King introduced the English Language Unity Act, a bill to make English the official language of the United States, while suing the Iowa Secretary of State for posting voting information in Spanish, Laotian, Bosnian and Vietnamese.

King has called the deaths of Americans at the hands of undocumented immigrants “a slow-motion Holocaust” and claimed, without fact, that 25 Americans die daily because of undocumented immigrants.  He demonstrated a model of a 12-foot concrete border wall topped with electrified wire; both of these ideas became the rallying cry of _____ in 2016.

He has spoken, on the House floor, of ways police officers can spot undocumented immigrants by their clothing, their shoes, their speech. He opposed the Affordable Care Act’s mandate to cover contraception because he thought it would lead to the death of “civilization,” i.e. white folks.

On a 2012 panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference with Peter Brimelow, a white nationalist,  King said multiculturalism was a “tool for the Left to subdivide a culture and civilization into our own little ethnic enclaves and pit us against each other.”

In 2013, King came out against legal status for Dreamers because, “for everyone who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there that weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert. Those people would be legalized with the same act.” That seemed to set the stage for _____’s “some of them, I’m sure, are good people” remarks.

In 2015, King invited far-right, anti-Islam Dutch politician Geert Wilders to DC; Wilders has called Islam “not a religion,” said the Quran was “worse than Mein Kampf,” and called for the closing of mosques. In 2017, King Tweeted his endorsement of Wilders in Dutch elections:

“Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”

Later, defending that Tweet, King said:“We’re watching as Western civilization is shrinking in the face of the massive, epic migration that is pouring into Europe. That’s the core of that tweet. They’re importing a different culture, a different civilization — and that culture and civilization, the imported one, rejects the host culture. And so they are supplanting Western civilization with Middle Eastern civilization and I say, and Geert Wilders says, Western civilization is a superior civilization — it is the first world.”

In 2016, at the Republican national Convention, where _____won the nomination, King claimed that nonwhite groups haven’t contributed as much as whites to civilization:

“This whole business does get a little tired. I would ask you to go back through history and figure out where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people you are talking about. Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?”

On the heels of that lunacy, King told the Washington Post a few days later:

“The idea of multiculturalism, that every culture is equal—that’s not objectively true … We’ve been fed that information for the past 25 years, and we’re not going to become a greater nation if we continue to do that.”

In October, King met Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right party; he was the first elected American official to do so. He also met with leaders of the far-right Freedom Party, founded in 1950 by former Nazis, including Heinz-Christian Strache and Norbert Hofer.

Steve King recommended people read “The Camp of the Saints,” a racist 1973 novel about an invasion of Europe by nonwhite immigrants, and Tweets his agreement with Viktor Orban, Hungary’s authoritarian leader that “mixing cultures will not lead to a higher quality of life but a lower one.”

In 2018, he said he did not want Somali Muslims working in meatpacking plants in Iowa because he didn’t “want people doing my pork that won’t eat it, let alone hope I go to hell for eating pork chops.” He was then asked by a Huffington Post reporter if he is a white nationalist or white supremacist, and he said:

“I don’t answer those questions. I say to people that use those kind of allegations: Use those words a million times, because you’re reducing the value of them every time, and many of the people that use those words and make those allegations and ask those questions can’t even define the words they’re using.”

linked to the far-right Freedom PartyKing also endorsed Toronto mayoral candidate, Faith Goldy, who had recited the Fourteen Words, or 14/88, a Neo-Nazi slogan:

“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

At that time the Anti-Defamation League demanded House Speaker Paul Ryan censure of King for endorsing Goldy, but nothing is done.

And finally, all this leads to 2019, when, in another interview, King says:

“White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive? Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?”

And that, and only that spurred Congress, now with a Democratic majority, to censure Steve King; that, and only that, spurred House Republican leaders to strip Steve King of all his committee assignments, including the powerful Judiciary and Agriculture Committees, and keep him from serving on any committee in this Congress.

Still, with all he’s said and done over the last decade, it took  many top GOP leaders several days before denouncing King's comments, although not his political beliefs or policies. But many House Democrats are acting to rebuke and censure white nationalist, white supremacist, racist Steve King.

Congressman Bobby Rush, the Democrat from Illinois, and a top member of the Congressional Black Caucus, said:

"He has become too comfortable with proudly insulting, disrespecting, and denigrating people of color. As with any animal that is rabid, Steve King should be set aside and isolated.”

And now it appears King is trying to walk back ten years of Hate Speech; he took the floor of the House to say he denounced the "evil ideologies" of white nationalism and white supremacism and called his poor choice of words a "rookie mistake."

Ten years? He’s been saying these things, publicly, for over ten years. But what I find most troubling about the GOP is that, if you go back and listen to some of the things King has said and done over the last decade, you’ll find many of his actions, many of his words, were lifted up and spread anew by _____ as he ran for office, and yet not one Republican denounced him for those words; not one Republican demanded he not be president; they stood by his said and refused to comment when he said Mexicans are drug dealers and rapists and murderers, though some are good people; they stood by and said nothing when he said of the riots in Charlottesville, that there are good people on both sides of that cause.

The GOP can remove King from committee after committee and rebuke him or censure him all they want, but the cancer in that party, that huge seed of racism, is still growing in the White House and they are doing nothing about it. 

Think about this: when asked about King and his racist views the so-called President of the United States said he hadn't heard anything about it. He didn't have an opinion on whether King should be censured, or if he should resign because, as he's often said, "some of them are fine people."

So, it’s up to We The People … get rid of the racist cancer in Congress and then remove it from the White House.

NCRM: Democrats

NCRM: Republicans

NYT