Rep. Steve King retweeted a well-known neo-Nazi earlier this week and has refused to comment since. Last night, King appeared on “Breitbart News Tonight,” where apparently senior editors-at-large Rebecca Mansour or Joel Pollack never thought to mention King’s promotion of a neo-Nazi, nor bothered to ask him to comment on it.
King spent yesterday only speaking with right-wing media, who he knows will not confront him with the national headlines he made retweeting a Nazi sympathizer. Last night, King made an appearance on Breitbart’s Sirius XM evening show, where he said that he had sought out information on DACA recipients from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in order to undermine an amnesty bill Speaker Paul Ryan is currently considering.
“I have been working since last September to get the data on the DACA recipients. And I want to know who they are,” King said. “I continually hear that it’s always the 3-year-old girl that was led across the Rio Grande River by her mother that was escaping from an abusive father with her little sister on her mother’s arm. And they became valedictorians–that is the profile we have seen again and again.”
King claimed that this picture was false, insisting that there was only one DACA recipient with a medical degree and two DACA recipients with a professional degree. Even if this statistic were true, the average age of a DACA program recipient is 24 years old. According to Migration Policy Institute, nearly 40% of DACA recipients are enrolled in secondary school or higher education. After meeting a DACA recipient with a law degree, King said he told the recipient, “Great, another lawless lawyer.”
King said that he “was the only one who had [the data]” he’d acquired, as far as he knew.
When asked if he thought Speaker Ryan should resign early, King replied that it was a tough decision. He told Breitbart, “I have information that there are members–I say that plurally with knowledge–that are considering a motion to vacate the chair.”
