Yesterday, Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, tweeted his support for far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders with an overtly white nationalist statement:
Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies. https://t.co/4nxLipafWO
— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) March 12, 2017
Despite the swift backlash against his racist claim, King stood by it, telling CNN host Chris Cuomo in an interview today that liberals are the real haters. Unsurprisingly, he was cheered on by white nationalists like David Duke and Richard Spencer.
This is far from the first bigoted statement made by the Iowa Republican, who appears to not even be trying to hide his white nationalist views anymore.
Here are five other times King used his post as a congressman to promote bigotry:
- White People Best For Civilization
During an interview with MSNBC host Chris Hayes at the 2016 Republican National Convention, King expressed outrage when another guest, Charlie Pierce of Esquire, suggested that the GOP was the party of “old white people.”
White people, King contended, are the greatest contributors to human civilization:
King: This ‘old white people’ business does get a little tired, Charlie. I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you’re talking about, where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?
Hayes: Than white people?
King: Than, than Western civilization itself. It’s rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world. That’s all of Western civilization.
- Immigration Is Demographic Suicide
Rep. King’s tweet yesterday wasn’t the first time he sounded the alarm about white birth rates.
In 2015, King told Iowa radio host Steve Deace that Europe and the U.S. are committing “cultural suicide” through immigration, as we reported at the time:
“I see Europe,” he said, “it’s almost past tense, you can almost say they have committed cultural suicide. And Barack Obama has been feeding us the medication that will bring about cultural suicide in the United States. And we need a president who sees that whole picture and knows that it has to be restored and has an understanding of how to restore the American exceptionalism, constitutional underpinnings and the core of our faith.”
King added that he saw such a “transformation of Western Christendom” in recent visits to immigrant communities in Minneapolis and Dearborn, Michigan, which, he said, highlighted the “demographics” that he hoped a President Ted Cruz could reverse in America.
“By the way, I went up to Minnesota, to Little Mogadishu, to see what that’s like up there,” he said, “and I spent a weekend in Dearborn to see what, again, went to a couple of mosques in there to see the transformation of the United States. And I’ve gone into a number of the major cities in Europe and walked into those no-go zones and walked down through the Muslim neighborhoods and I see the transformation of Western Christendom, and it’s very troubling. And when you look at the demographics, we must do something to reverse this, and [Ted Cruz] is the candidate that I believe [can do it].”
The same month King also criticized the resettlement of Syrian refugees in America in an interview with Stephen Bannon—then editor of Breitbart and now the White House chief strategist—where King likened Syrian refugees to poisonous grapes: “We should not be a suicidal nation. My wife said this morning, ‘If you had 100 grapes and you knew that two of them were fatally poisonous, would you sit there and eat the grapes until one of them killed you? Or would you decide, I’m not going to take that bunch of grapes at all?’ That’s what we’re dealing with here with the Syrian refugees.”
He claimed that European countries are “committing cultural suicide” by accepting Syrian refugees and warned that “the mass migration is the end of their culture and civilization.”
Contraception and abortion, King said, are similarly doing their parts to destroy European culture: “If they abort their babies and decide by contraceptives and abortion not to have enough babies to reproduce themselves, they’re a dying civilization.” King warned that instead, Europeans “are replacing themselves with people who do not share their values.”
In a 2015 interview with Jan Mickelson, King accused Democrats of using immigration from Latin America and predominantly Muslim countries to weaken the GOP and destroy American culture: “Tell me how you want America to look, because America’s being transformed because of immigration policy and I’m like Ann Coulter, I like the America we had.”
While speaking at a 2015 House hearing, the congressman criticized the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship by warning: “What happens to the demographics of America if this policy is not reversed?”
- Most DREAMers Are Drug Smugglers, Violent People
King, who has urged the U.S. to build an electrified fence along the southern border because it works well “with livestock,” said in a 2013 interview with the conservative outlet Newsmax that DREAMers—or young undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children—are mostly drug smugglers who have “calves the size of cantaloupes because they’ve been hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert” and who “have been undermining our culture and civilization and profiting from criminal acts.”
He later insisted that he was actually complimenting DREAMers with his comments, insisting that he only meant that “they’re in physical shape for” hauling drugs across the border, just like “an Olympic athlete.”
The same year, King told a “Stop Amnesty” rally in Virginia that Latin American immigrants come “from a violent civilization” and will likely bring “more violence” to America: “It’s like pouring hot water into cold water, does it raise the temperature or not?”
King has contended that DREAMers who sign up for service in the U.S. military should instead be deported: “As soon as they raise their hand and say ‘I’m unlawfully present in the United States,’ we’re not going take your oath into the military, but we’re going to take your deposition and we have a bus for you to Tijuana.”
While speaking alongside then-candidate Donald Trump in 2014, King argued that immigration is responsible for transforming the U.S. into a “Third World country” and bringing in ills such as drugs, gangs, beheadings and diseases such as Ebola and Enterovirus 68.
King has praised Trump by saying that a “good amount” of the immigration policies featured on Trump’s campaign website are “a copy-and-paste from things that I’ve done.”
- Anti-Black Racism
In 2014, King reacted to the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting of Michael Brown by criticizing the Justice Department for investigating whether the town’s police department engaged in racial profiling and targeted black residents.
According to King, police “don’t need to bother with that” because the people who committed crimes during the unrest in Ferguson “all appear to be of a single origin, I should say, a continental origin.”
He also attacked the Black Lives Matter movement, saying that “the rest of these lives that matter too are not demonstrating in the streets” and that “statistically the greatest danger to a black man in America is another black man.”
King, who displays a Confederate flag on his office desk, has argued that people who know the “real people of the Civil War” know that only “a small part of it was about slavery” and people defending “their homeland”:
I’d encourage people to go back and read the real history of the Civil War and find out what it was about. A small part of it was about slavery, but there was a big part of it that was about states’ rights, it was about people that defended their homeland and fought next to their neighbors and their family.
“You see this flag? Come and take it,” he added.
King, who has flirted with the birther conspiracy theory, once attacked Barack Obama because, according to King, “he apologized to Africa for slavery” when “there’s nothing for us to apologize for.”
Unsurprisingly, he was outraged when the U.S. Treasury announced that a portrait of Harriet Tubman will appear on the twenty dollar bill, attempting to defund the move because it is supposedly “racist” to replace Andrew Jackson on the currency with an image of Tubman.
- Ties To Alt-Right
At the 2012 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), King joined a panel criticizing multiculturalism featuring Peter Brimelow, the Alt-Right figure who founded the white nationalist outlet VDARE; John Derbyshire, a VDARE contributor who was fired by the National Review for his racist writings; and white nationalist Bob Vandervoort.
King praised Brimelow, who most recently was seen attending an Alt-Right summit in Washington where attendees cheered on Trump with the Hitler salute, telling him: “I’ve read all your books!”
As Rosie Gray pointed out:
Brimelow operates on the line between the mainstream conservative movement and an openly racist fringe. His book “Alien Nation,” for instance, advanced the thesis that “Race is destiny in American politics,” and that policies altering the American complexion are both wrong and against what voters desire. His website, VDare, regularly hosts more openly racist work, like Kevin MacDonald’s claim that “Jewish activity collectively, throughout history, is best understood as an elaborate and highly successful group competitive strategy directed against neighboring peoples and host societies.”
Last year, King tweeted his support for German far-right politician Frauke Petry, who received the nickname “Adolfina” after claiming that the police should shoot people unlawfully crossing the border and trying to rehabilitate a term associated with Nazism. King wrote: “Cultural suicide by demographic transformation must end.”
@FraukePetry Wishing you successful vote. Cultural suicide by demographic transformation must end. @geertwilderspvv pic.twitter.com/Kp6uieaMDG
— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) September 18, 2016
