DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus "White nationalist,... how did that language become offensive?” GOP Congressman asks

Before Trump, Steve King Set the Agenda for the Wall and Anti-Immigrant Politics
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Building a border wall, ending birthright citizenship and disparaging undocumented immigrants. Representative Steve King championed anti-immigration views years before President Trump made them a focal point of his administration.Published OnJan. 10, 2019CreditCreditSteve Pope/Associated Press
By Trip Gabriel
Jan. 10, 2019

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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.

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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.

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“Yes, Mr. President,” Mr. King replied. “But I market-tested your immigration policy for 14 years, and that ought to be worth something.”

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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, left, in March 2006. He has denounced immigration reform efforts under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama as “amnesty.”
Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

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Mr. King, left, in March 2006. He has denounced immigration reform efforts under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama as “amnesty.”CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times
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.)

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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?”

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.

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Mr. King graduated from Denison High School in 1967 with an all-white senior class. The school now has a Hispanic majority.
Credit
Mary Mathis for The New York Times

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Mr. King graduated from Denison High School in 1967 with an all-white senior class. The school now has a Hispanic majority.CreditMary Mathis for The New York Times
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.

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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.”

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Mr. King has been elected to nine terms, but his margin of victory shrank to his narrowest ever in November.
Credit
Scott Morgan/Reuters

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Mr. King has been elected to nine terms, but his margin of victory shrank to his narrowest ever in November.CreditScott Morgan/Reuters
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.”

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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.

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While serving in the Iowa Legislature in the 1990s, Mr. King helped pass a law making English the state’s official language.
Credit
Mary Mathis for The New York Times

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While serving in the Iowa Legislature in the 1990s, Mr. King helped pass a law making English the state’s official language.CreditMary Mathis for The New York Times
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.

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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.”

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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.

“You could look over there and think the Democratic Party is no country for white men,” he said.

UPDATE

On January 10, 2019, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) reportedly stated, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” In light of those statements, this article gave far too generous an interpretation of King’s words. As I stated in the article, there were two ways to interpret his statements. His later open embrace of the terms “white nationalist” and “white supremacist” suggest that the first interpretation described below was not as implausible as it seemed at the time.

When did voting for Steve King become racist?

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.

“You could look over there and think the Democratic Party is no country for white men,” he said.

It’s time for this man go to.

It’s time for this man go to.

“You could look over there and think the Democratic Party is no country for white men,” he said.

Yet Dawgtalkers are constantly (and gleefully) reminded by a small group of other Dawgtalkers that the KKK was founded by the Democratic Party.

It would be nice to see both parties do the right thing when there members say stupid things. The Republicans stripped King from all committees when he said what he said. But Rashida Tlaib uses profanity in front of children and make anti antisemitism remark and nothing from the Democrats. They are hypocrites.

When did voting for Steve King become racist?

It would be nice to see both parties do the right thing when there members say stupid things. The Republicans stripped King from all committees when he said what he said. But Rashida Tlaib uses profanity in front of children and make anti antisemitism remark and nothing from the Democrats. They are hypocrites.

When the communist decided on WHITE genocide or cultural genocide ... Take your pick.

The agenda is all about the issue of national pride, which is antithetical to globalism. This extends to "WHITE" Europeans.

Racism is an inane term. There is only one race, the human race.

Ignorant people are nothing more than useful idiots to the elites, perpetuating their own demise as a free society.

The question that remains is; will they wake up, and wise up, before there is no return?

Or will people continue to be lead by their emotions to their own destruction?

If you honestly believe that the current white supremacist movement is about "national pride" you are lost. Racism may be an inane term to you, but those that watched a group of people get ran over by a car would disagree.

Are you a nationalist or a patriot ? There are some small but key differences.

Just because you can't see the forest for the trees doesn't make you a racist. But you certainly come across as an angry white man.

Been white my whole life and never seen an Anti-White trend... ever.

Bpg

I think we see this slightly different. Maybe not a lot, but to some extent.

You see, my race wasn't put in chains and forced to come here. My ancestors weren't slaves. My descendants weren't denied equal opportunities, denied goods and services, quality education, quality housing, loans and other financial opportunities based on race.

Now I'm not trying to use that as an excuse why some groups tend to use what I think you would call, "the race card" in so many cases. And I would tend to agree with you that it has become so commonly used in many cases that it doesn't actually apply, that it has lost a lot of its meaning. I see it used so commonly in many cases that it simply doesn't exist, that now when it does actually exist, many think it sounds more like the boy who cried wolf.

But the fact is, I can't truly imagine how I would feel if those things I mentioned earlier in my post were actually a part of my heritage. If only a couple of generations ago did my family actually have many of the very same opportunities my family has had for many generations. I imagine it would be a huge chip on my shoulder. I imagine I may very well see racism in places others may not.

So what I try to do, even though I'm sure I truly can't, is to try to see things from the point of others. I try to use history to understand how others may feel and why.

Even the Republican party disavowed King. Even they knew he was wrong. Only a small minority of whites even attempted to defend him. And most are only claiming that a small amount of whites are actually the problem. And I would say I agree with that.

Go ask Lebron about it.

Don't confuse speaking up for perceived injustices as anti white rhetoric.

Stop making excuses for bad behavior.