Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, on Monday evening said he wishes he had had more than 140 characters to explain what he meant on Sunday when he tweeted that the U.S. cannot restore its civilization with “someone else’s babies.”
“What I should have done, if I had more characters in that tweet, just added ‘you can’t rebuild our civilization with somebody else’s babies unless we adopt them,'” King told Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
King, sharing an article from the Voice of Europe, wrote over the weekend that the author, Dutch politician Geert Wilders, understood “that culture and demographics are our destiny” and getting back to the nation’s Caucasian roots can only be done by bearing more children who are white.
While the immigration hawk said he stands by his comments in an earlier interview on CNN Monday morning, King additionally told Carlson that it is imperative America address its birth and death rates by adopting foreigners who share values that are intrinsic to American culture.
“If we’re bound together – by the way, language is the most powerful unifying force known throughout all of history,” King said. “If we share those things, then we can communicate with each other, we can do it instinctively. On top of that, language is essentially a carrier of liberty.”
House Speaker Paul Ryan stopped short on Monday from defending King, saying he believed the lawmaker “misspoke.”
King said Ryan’s response was the result of their having two different views on immigration policy
“He is more of an open borders advocate by far than I am. I am the opposite. I think we should restore the respect for the rule of law or we become a third world country. There’s a philosophical difference there, but I think he just misunderstands what I said,” King added.
“It was characterized by the left as having a race component to it. But you can look down through the words and language, and there’s nothing in my statement that references race in any way, but I do reference culture and civilization. That is what we have to restore, Western civilization for the world.”
