Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, had to have some idea what he was doing when he endorsed Faith Goldy on Oct. 16, a controversial Canadian political candidate running for mayor of Toronto. Goldy believes Canada is undergoing a white genocide, and last year she attended the now-infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. King’s support for her campaign is exactly what it looks like: a shameful endorsement of white nationalism.
King is no stranger to racially charged controversy. The Iowa congressman once displayed a Confederate flag on his desk and has made too many comments denigrating immigrants to count. In March 2017, King tweeted, “Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” The tweet references Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician with blatant anti-Muslim views, who believes in the “Great Replacement.” The Great Replacement is a far-right conspiracy theory originating in Europe. It portends that the white European population is systematically being replaced with non-Europeans, primarily from Africa and the Middle East.
King showed his interest in this conspiracy theory in an interview with Caroline Sommerfeld of Unzensuriert, a far-right Austrian publication. In this interview, the Iowa congressman expressed concern that the Great Replacement could be happening in the U.S. too. “The U.S. subtracts from its population a million of our babies in the form of abortion,” King told Sommerfeld. “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’s Oct. 16 endorsement of Goldy is just the latest in a growing track record of nationalistic sentiments. King described the far-right candidate as “pro Rule of Law, pro Make Canada Safe Again, pro balanced budget, &…BEST of all, Pro Western Civilization and a fighter for our values. [Faith Goldy] will not be silenced.”
This latest development, coupled with his past of controversial statements, should be enough for Republicans to finally reject Steve King and call for his resignation.
People like King and Goldy try to hide their racial animosity behind nationalistic pride — but make no mistake, their concern for Western civilization extends only to its white populous and not to the other ethnic groups that make up our society. Goldy made that clear when she attended the Unite the Right rally, where tiki torch-carrying white supremacists chanted the Nazi slogan, “Blood and soil.” The phrase refers to the Nazi philosophy that argues one’s ethnicity is intrinsically linked to their blood and the land they hold. She then went on the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer’s podcast, prompting her former employer, Rebel Media, to fire her. It says a lot when even a far-right publication thinks you’ve gone too far.
By endorsing Goldy, King endorses her views. But even if the congressman hadn’t endorsed Goldy, it’s apparent from his repeated flirtation with far-right ideologies that he isn’t the kind of person the Republican Party or conservatives should associate with. His thinly veiled white nationalism is one of the worst forms of collectivism. It’s incompatible with a free society, and should be rejected by a party that purports to pride itself as advancing personal liberty.
Luckily, some on the Right are doing just that. “Rep. Steve King is an embarrassment to the Republican Party,” Adam Rubenstein wrote in The Weekly Standard, a sister publication to the Washington Examiner. “He has been for some time.”
Despite these stains on King’s reputation, the Republican Party hasn’t fully disavowed him. While the congressman has been rebuked in the past, Republican leaders have been largely silent on King’s recent transgressions. As the Washington Post reports, the top three House Republicans: Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, R-Wis., Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., haven’t responded to requests for comment on King’s endorsement of Goldy.
It’s far past time for the Republican party to find their backbone and denounce this sort of pandering to white nationalism. For too long the party has allowed fringe members to sympathize with this gross form of collectivism. King is running for re-election in Iowa’s 4th Congressional District, which Cook’s Political Report ranks as likely Republican. Yet his recent controversy may prove to be a gift for his Democratic opponent, J.D. Scholten, who is catching up to him in the polls. The question Republicans face now is whether they’re ready to disavow his nationalistic views once and for all.
Lindsay Marchello (@LynnMarch007) is a Young Voices contributor.
