“Congressman Steve King’s recent comments, actions, and retweets are completely inappropriate. We must stand up against white supremacy and hate in all forms, and I strongly condemn this behavior.” So states Ohio Rep. Steve Stivers, head of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), via Twitter. He’s referring to King’s endorsement of Canadian white nationalist Faith Goldy for Toronto mayor, and also, perhaps, to nasty and indefensible remarks the Iowa congressman made in an interview with the neo-fascist Austrian publication Unzensuriert.
That interview took place, it bears pointing out again, while King was in Austria visiting officials from the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ), an anti-immigration group with close ties to European race-nationalism movements. King was at the time on a foundation-funded trip to Poland to view “Jewish and Holocaust historical sites,” but he took a side jaunt to Austria (paying his own way) specifically in order to meet FPÖ officials. In his interview with Unzensuriert, as Adam Rubenstein pointed out in this space on October 25, King grumbled about the horrors of immigrants—“somebody else’s babies”—replacing hardworking Americans’ children (“we add to our population approximately 1.8 million of ‘somebody else’s babies’ who are raised in another culture before they get to us”).
King is increasingly comfortable expressing fringe views publicly. Maybe it’s the political environment created by a president who launched his campaign with a vow to go after the “rapists” sent to the United States by Mexico and suggested in a bizarre non-sequitur this week that ending birthright citizenship would rid the country of immigrant criminality. “Birthright citizenship, you know all about it—we will keep the criminals, the drug dealers, we will keep them all out of our country. We will get rid of all of this. We will end, finally, birthright citizenship.”
But King has a long history of bigoted comments. During the debate over the DREAM Act in 2013, King pushed back against the argument that the bulk of young immigrants were the hardworking would-be citizens. “Some of them are valedictorians, and their parents brought them in,” King allowed. “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.”
It ought to go without saying that there is no statistical evidence that comes close to supporting King’s claim. And comments like this go far beyond a legitimate concern over immigration levels. King’s is the twisted ideology of nativism.
The NRCC will no longer direct funds to King’s reelection effort. That’s a principled move just days before midterm elections, and Stivers deserves enormous credit for it. King tells Bloomberg that the NRCC’s move is a “[score] that can be settled after the election”—a threat that reminds us, as if we needed reminding, of the man’s thuggish personality.
“These attacks are orchestrated by nasty, desperate, and dishonest fake news,” King tweeted on October 30. “Their ultimate goal is to flip the House and impeach Donald Trump.” Yes, dishonest fake-news types fixated on impeachment—you know, like the people at the National Republican Congressional Committee.
There have been times over the past few years when GOP reluctance to condemn even the most outrageous comments from their own had us wondering if there were party leaders willing to defend any norms. Stivers shows the way.
