Reprinted with permission from Creators.
In May 2012, at a town hall, Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, compared immigrants to dogs.
“You get the pick of the litter and you got yourself a pretty good bird dog. Well, we’ve got the pick of every donor civilization on the planet. … We got the vigor from the planet to come to America.”
This is racist.
King’s Republican colleagues failed to rise in unison to condemn him.
In July 2013, King told Newsmax that there weren’t enough quality children of undocumented immigrants to allow them to stay here under the DREAM Act.
“Some of them are valedictorians — and their parents brought them in,” he said. “For everyone who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds — and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”
This is a racist lie.
King’s Republican colleagues failed to rise in unison to condemn him.
In the summer of 2012, during a video town hall, King dismissed proof of President Barack Obama’s birth in Hawaii. He cited birth announcements in newspapers but said:
“That doesn’t mean that there aren’t some other explanations on how they might’ve announced that” — for example, “by telegram from Kenya.” A few months later, he repeated this to a television anchor, insisting, “I don’t know where he was born.”
This is a racist lie.
King’s Republican colleagues failed to rise in unison to condemn him.
In March 2017, King tweeted, “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” He doubled down on that claim in a CNN interview a few days later.
“I’ve been to Europe and I’ve spoken on this issue, and I’ve said the same thing as far as 10 years ago, to the German people and to any population of people that is a declining population that isn’t willing to have enough babies to reproduce themselves. … ‘You cannot rebuild your civilization with somebody else’s babies. You’ve got to keep your birthrate up, and … you need to teach your children your values.'”
White babies, he means. We have to keep birthing white babies. This is racist.
King’s Republican colleagues failed to rise in unison to condemn him.
Racist David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, was thrilled. “GOD BLESS STEVE KING!!!” he tweeted.
Last week, in an interview with The New York Times, King said, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?”
And there it was. He finally named it.
King said out loud the not-so-secret job title festering inside his head: Rep. White Supremacist.
This happened just weeks after House Republicans lost dozens of seats in in the 2018 midterm elections, so — also finally — King’s Republican colleagues in Congress were suddenly outraged, almost in unison.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell suggested King find “another line of work.” Sen. Mitt Romney said King should quit. House Republicans stripped him of his committee seats.
This fixes nothing.
As Charles Pierce wrote for Esquire, the Republicans have failed to admit that King “was nurtured and produced in the same conservative Republican terrarium as all the rest of them, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy included. King bloomed more lushly and more exotically, but he’s of the same genus. Now, they’re all required to pretend that they never understood how this lethally poisonous plant sprouted in their midst.”
In 2006, on the House floor, Steve King showed off his own design of a 12-foot concrete border wall, topped with electrified wire.
“We need to do a few other things on top of that wall,” he said, “and one of them would be to put a little bit of wire on top here to provide a disincentive for people to climb over the top or put a ladder there.
“We could also electrify this wire. … We do that with livestock all the time.”
His Republican colleagues failed to rise in unison to condemn him.
Now Donald Trump is using federal workers as pawns because he wants to build that wall.
That poisonous plant — look how it spread.
Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and professional in residence at Kent State University’s school of journalism. She is the author of two books, including “…and His Lovely Wife,” which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate. To find out more about Connie Schultz (con.schultz@yahoo.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.
