Posted on 01/16/2019 8:58:57 AM PST by Blue House Sue
WASHINGTON — The White House is describing comments by Republican Rep. Steve King about white supremacy as “abhorrent.”
Presidential press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is praising the move by House Republicans to strip the nine-term Iowa lawmaker of his committee assignments.
(Excerpt) Read more at pbs.org ...
By Trip Gabriel Jan. 10, 2019
Update: Steve King was removed from his committee assignments over the comments made in this article.
Years before President Trump forced a government shutdown over a border wall, triggering a momentous test of wills in Washington, Representative Steve King of Iowa took to the House floor to show off a model of a 12-foot border wall he had designed.
And long before Mr. Trump demonized immigrants — accusing Mexico of exporting criminals and calling for an end to birthright citizenship — Mr. King turned those views into talking points, with his use of misleading data about victims of undocumented immigrants and demeaning remarks about Latinos.
Immigration is Mr. Trump’s go-to issue, his surest connection to his most faithful supporters, and his prime-time address on Tuesday night underscored his willingness to use fear and misleading statements to appeal to voters — just as he did with warnings about a migrant caravan before the midterm elections.
The Republican Party hadn’t always intended to go this route: Officials tried for years to come up with broad-based immigration reform that would appeal to growing numbers of Latino voters. But Mr. Trump’s preoccupation with the wall and anti-immigrant politics reflects how he has embraced the once-fringe views of Mr. King, who has used racist language in the past, promotes neo-Nazis on Twitter and was recently denounced by one Republican leader as a white supremacist.
With the federal government in a third week of paralysis over a border wall, Mr. Trump’s positions are a reminder of how Mr. King’s ideology and his language maligning undocumented residents helped shape the Republican message in 2016 and 2018 and define Mr. Trump’s agenda and prospects for re-election. Mr. King may have been ostracized by some Republicans over his racist remarks and extremist ties, but as much of the nation debates immigration, his views now carry substantial influence on the right.
Early in Mr. Trump’s term, the president invited Mr. King — who was long snubbed by establishment Republicans like the former House speaker John A. Boehner — to the Oval Office. There, the president boasted of having raised more money for the congressman’s campaigns than anyone else, including during a 2014 Iowa visit, Mr. King recalled in an interview with The Times.
“Yes, Mr. President,” Mr. King replied. “But I market-tested your immigration policy for 14 years, and that ought to be worth something.”
Mr. King, a 69-year-old former bulldozer operator with a combative manner, who has been elected nine times, helped write the book on white identity politics that are ascendant in Mr. Trump’s Republican Party. That provides both a template for Mr. Trump and a warning.
Mr. King’s full-throated embrace of nativism has long found a supportive constituency in the rural Midwest, the region that was a key to Mr. Trump’s 2016 victory and represents his most likely path to re-election.
But at the same time, Mr. King’s margin of victory in 2018 shrank to its narrowest in 16 years. He made national headlines for endorsing a Toronto mayoral candidate with neo-Nazi ties and for meeting with a far-right Austrian party accused of trivializing the Holocaust. On Twitter, he follows an Australian anti-Semitic activist, who proposed hanging a portrait of Hitler “in every classroom.” And in October, the chairman of the Republican House elections committee, Representative Steve Stivers of Ohio, condemned Mr. King, saying, “We must stand up against white supremacy and hate in all forms.”
Mr. King lost corporate agriculture donors like Purina, Land O’Lakes and Smithfield. He dropped from an 18-point lead over his Democratic opponent in his internal polls to barely squeaking out a three-point win on Election Day. On Wednesday, Mr. King drew a formidable challenger for his Fourth District seat in the 2020 Republican primary: Randy Feenstra, an assistant majority leader in the State Senate, who said Mr. King had left Iowa “without a seat at the table” because of “sideshows” and “distractions.’’
Mr. King, in the interview, said he was not a racist. He pointed to his Twitter timeline showing him greeting Iowans of all races and religions in his Washington office. (The same office once displayed a Confederate flag on his desk.)
At the same time, he said, he supports immigrants who enter the country legally and fully assimilate because what matters more than race is “the culture of America” based on values brought to the United States by whites from Europe.
“White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” Mr. King said. “Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?”
After this article was published Thursday, Mr. King issued a public statement calling himself a “nationalist” and defending his support of “western civilization’s values,” and said he was not an advocate for “white nationalism and white supremacy.” “I want to make one thing abundantly clear: I reject those labels and the evil ideology they define,” he wrote. Sign Up for On Politics With Lisa Lerer
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Mr. King’s influence over national politics derives from his representation of the reddest district in the first presidential nominating state. Nearly all the 2016 Republican presidential contenders sought his blessing at a forum he hosted in Des Moines in January 2015, Mr. Trump included.
“Donald Trump came to Iowa as a real nonideological candidate,” Mr. King recalled. Mr. Trump’s first hire in Iowa, Chuck Laudner, was a former chief of staff to Mr. King. Mr. Trump’s first Iowa rally directly followed a visit to the Mexican border.
The previous year, Mr. Trump had visited to endorse Mr. King’s re-election. As the congressman warned of scenarios like Islamic State terrorists or even Africans with ebola illegally entering the country, Mr. Trump listened and nodded. When he stepped to the microphone, he echoed Mr. King.
“Well, border security is a very big issue,” he said. “People are just flooding across.”
Tom Tancredo, a former Colorado congressman who once held the most conservative views in official Washington on immigration, calling for a moratorium on even legal immigrants, said he “handed the baton to Steve King” when he left the House in 2008.
David Johnson, a former Republican state senator from Mr. King’s district, said he heard in the president’s rhetoric a direct echo of Mr. King. “They belong to the same subset of white nationalists who are afraid of how the country is changing,” he said.
Mr. King was born in Storm Lake, Iowa, and attended high school in nearby Denison, then a nearly all-white rural farming region, where his father managed a state police radio station.
After founding an earth-moving company, Mr. King ran successfully for the State Senate in 1996. His most notable legacy from six years in the Legislature was a law making English the official state language. It was a time when packinghouses and other agricultural employers had dropped wages, and Latino migrants increasingly were taking jobs that no longer attracted native-born Iowans.
Elected to Congress in 2002, Mr. King attracted the attention of hate-watch groups like the Anti-Defamation League as he spoke increasingly about preserving “Western culture” or “Western civilization.” The groups consider those buzzwords that signal support to white nationalists, along with an obsession with birthrates and abortion rates among different ethnic groups.
“He uses the concepts of either ‘culture’ or ‘civilization’ to obfuscate that he’s talking about whiteness and race,” said Lawrence Rosenthal, chairman of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies.
In 2011, Mr. King objected to the Affordable Care Act’s mandate to cover contraception. “That’s not constructive to our culture and our civilization,” he said in a speech in the House. “If we let our birthrate get down below the replacement rate, we’re a dying civilization.”
Mr. King seems further emboldened during the Trump presidency.
In an interview in August with a far-right web publication in Austria, Mr. King displayed a deep familiarity with racist tracts and ideas embraced by white supremacists.
He spoke of “the Great Replacement,” a conspiracy theory on the far right that claims shadowy elites are working behind the scenes to reduce white populations to minorities in their own countries.
“Great replacement, yes,” Mr. King said in the interview. “These people walking into Europe by ethnic migration, 80 percent are young men.”
The accusation that a “great replacement” of whites is underway — which conspiracy theorists often link to prominent Jews like George Soros — animated the torch-carrying white nationalists in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, who chanted, “You will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us.”
Mr. Trump’s refusal to condemn the marchers, and his insistence that there were “very fine people on both sides,” was cheered by neo-Nazi websites.
In Mr. King’s interview with the Austrian website, he repeated his yearslong critique of multiculturalism.
“What does this diversity bring that we don’t already have? Mexican food. Chinese food,” he said. “Those things, well, that’s fine, but what does it bring that we don’t have that is worth the price?”
In recent years, Mr. King has forged alliances with far-right European leaders, including Marine Le Pen of France and Geert Wilders of the Netherlands, one of the most anti-Muslim politicians in Europe, who calls for closing mosques.
Ahead of Dutch elections in March 2017, Mr. King endorsed Mr. Wilders in a tweet, saying, “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”
Amid an ensuing controversy, he claimed the tweet wasn’t about race. Virulent white supremacists, however, heard otherwise.
“Steve King is basically an open white nationalist at this point,” wrote Andrew Anglin, the founder of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer.
Mr. Anglin and others celebrated that Mr. Trump’s election had made once-fringe beliefs about ethnonationalism acceptable to mainstream politicians.
As Republicans have morphed from the party of George W. Bush, who sought legal status for 12 million undocumented immigrants, to the party of Mr. Trump and Mr. King, some party leaders fear for the future in a nation where Hispanic voters are a rapidly growing electorate.
“Great damage has been done,” said Carlos Curbelo, a moderate Republican who lost a South Florida congressional seat in the midterms. “For anyone who cares about having a small-government, free-enterprise party in America that can aspire to win national elections, it’s a real concern.”
Mr. Curbelo, who tried to forge compromise on immigration in the House last year, said Mr. Trump told him privately, including on Air Force One, that he wanted a deal with Democrats.
But the president is paralyzed by the far right, Mr. Curbelo said. “He’s terrified of losing his base and the so-called conservative media.”
Last week, as the new Congress was sworn in, Mr. King sat on his side of a chamber sharply delineated by demographics. The Democratic majority included record numbers of African-Americans and women, including the first Native American and the first Muslim women. Mr. King’s side was mostly people who look like him.
May we wear our chains lightly. The chains the left has placed on most by weaponizing certain words and turning them into daggers that kill. Total control of their minds.
Wow that article is the definition of a hit piece. Everything King does is considered evil, including talking to marine Le pen who could very well become the leader in France.
And I love how he believes in the “conspiracy theory” of replacing white America, when in fact The New York Times and the left tells us every single day that white America is to be replaced and in large part this is to be done with illegal immigrants.
Steve King interviewed with the NYT because he is an influential, senior representative. They take the tough tasks. Refusing the NYT’s request for an interview sounds like the right decision but it isn’t so easy to do that when you are part of the newly diminished R party in the House. The R party leadership needs attention in the NYT at the same time as they dislike King. King has been beaten up by his own party. He is needed by his constituents—any replacement would be weaker and wholly subservient to the party leadership and Wash DC.
Every Republican in the House, except ONE, voted against him yesterday. I don’t know which one refused, but it wasn’t just those we think of as rino or establishment. They all rolled over. The scum.
Why I’m no longer a Republican.
Stop letting people who hate the values of Western Civilization write the story. Labels that automatically conjure up images of goose-stepping cross burners in Nazi regalia bemoaning the end of slavery are being applied to anyone who does not support conquest by those who despise us and want to crush us. By any means.
He was dumb to do a phone interview. But the fact remains- that degrading those values are done by the same people who hurl adjectives such as White Supremacist. He could have been clearer but I think his explanation suffices.
King has been in the sights of the NYT for a long time. They couldn’t give a crap if he was 100% racist ( we know this from their history regarding one of their writers). They just want to shut anyone up who does not go for open borders and masses of illegal immigrants.
No.
They interviewed him -- and posted the article at this specific point in time -- because they want to turn the government closure narrative from an issue of border security to an issue of Republican racism. HE WALKED RIGHT INTO THIS HIT JOB.
I'm sure he's an honorable and decent man.
He also has some awful political instincts.
This whole episode reminds me of one particular incident in the whole Roy Moore debacle back in 2017. Sean Hannity had him on his radio show in the immediate aftermath of the various allegations against him, and Moore proceeded to fumble his way through the most awful and politically damaging response he possibly could have given. His political career ended over the course of about five minutes.
Steve King is the one who is “risking 2020” by running his mouth with the New York Times in a way that can easily be interpreted as an endorsement of white supremacy. He deserves what he got.
In that NYT interview you describe from July 2017, the one thing I'll never forget was how the notoriously hateful Maggie Habermann was clearly astonished that Trump was a normal human being and was not huddled under his desk quaking in fear over the Mueller investigation.
Look at the King situation and see exactly how differently the two approach these things.
King runs around claiming that the NYT quoted him out of context.
Trump would have posted about a half-dozen Twitter messages calling the "failing New York Time" a bunch of "fake news" liars.
And it is all aimed a Trump. King is portrayed as something of a mentor to Trump who has adopted King’s views and policies to win elections.
And they want amnesty.
They have been after King for many years. Yes, they wanted to link King and Trump not only on the wall, but also, on his immigration policies. King has been championing these policies long before Trump ever contemplated running for President. The NYT tried to nail King on his opposition to DACA many times.
He also has some awful political instincts.
Elected nine times and his immigration polices were adopted by Trump who used it to win in 2016. King's political instincts were right on the mark and many more Reps could have been elected if they understood how to use immigration as a winning issue.
This whole episode reminds me of one particular incident in the whole Roy Moore debacle back in 2017. Sean Hannity had him on his radio show in the immediate aftermath of the various allegations against him, and Moore proceeded to fumble his way through the most awful and politically damaging response he possibly could have given. His political career ended over the course of about five minutes.
Don't forget that the interview was in the aftermath of a huge, coordinated effort by the Dems and the media to take Jones down. Investigations are now underway to examine how the Dems used voter harvesting in Alabama to defeat Moore. They used the same tactics in CA.
You are a fool or a troll. King is a good man who did nothing wrong. The GOP is famous for eating its own. This is the formula for defeat.
Mr. Trump’s refusal to condemn the marchers, and his insistence that there were “very fine people on both sides,” was cheered by neo-Nazi websites.
Trump has repeatedly tried to claim that his remarks were out of context. You can expect this to come up again many times in 2020. No amount of tweets will make it go away, especially since the MSM will repeatedly state it all the way thru 2020.
Yes, we all know that “these are the tactics that the Dems will use against Trump in 2020.” All the more reason to avoid making unforced errors of the sort that King did. Trump is a totally different animal.
It is not an unforced error. It is fake news.
I thought all he said was about Western Civilization.????
The RINOpublican Party has just denounced the First Amendment and due process.
“White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” Mr. King said. “Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?”
He did not intend to ask "how did that language become offensive?" Steve King knows about World War II, so he has a good idea of how the phrase "white supremacist" became offensive. He has certainly never taken a history class in which he was lectured on the merits of white supremacy, so the second sentence must not refer to the first, although it appears to. The two sentences together are a garbled mess, that unfortunately can be interpreted in a way King never intended.
A fair interviewer would have read that quote back to Steve King and asked whether or not he really meant to use those words. He would have said no, and the problem would have been solved. However, the New York Times does not conduct fair interviews of conservatives. When handed ammunition they can used against their enemies, the Times will use that ammunition, as they just did.
Some Freepers say that Republicans should stand behind King, but even King himself does not defend those sentences. He just wants them to be interpreted in a larger context. That does not solve the problem of what he actually said, or solve the mystery of why he chose to say it. The best he could have done after the remarks were published would have been to immediately and forcefully retract his own words. AFAIK he did not do that.
King's Republican House colleagues do not relish the prospect of receiving questions from leftist reporters such as, "Do you agree with your Republican colleague Steve King's praise of white supremacy?" How are they supposed to respond? Maybe, "Steve said something that could be interpreted that way, but he did not really mean it." Response: "Then why did he say it?"
I had a lot of respect for Steve King, but he keeps making gaffes. This time he has really stepped in it. Also, for him to not bother to record the interview, trusting in the integrity of the New York Times, amounts to political malpractice.
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