8 times GOP Rep. Steve King has made racist remarks
Steve King, America's most overtly racist Republican representative from Iowa, is at it again.
On Sunday, King tweeted a link to a story about Geert Wilders, the far-right Dutch politician who infamously said, "I don't hate Muslims, I hate Islam."
It's hard to spin King's remarks about "somebody else's babies" as anything but a desire for America to consist of more white, corn-fed Iowans and fewer nonwhite, "icky" others.
That’s how many, including several elected officials in King's own party, interpreted his tweet.
And King isn’t even trying to spin them this time. In an interview with CNN's Chris Cuomo early Monday, King doubled down.
"[I] meant exactly what I said," King told Cuomo. "You cannot rebuild your civilization with somebody else's babies. You've got to keep your birth rate up, and you need to teach your children your values."
These aren't his first bigoted comments
Unsurprisingly, this isn’t the first time King has said something racist.
During the 2016 Republican National Convention, King told MSNBC that white people have contributed more to civilization than "any other sub-group." His statements spawned the popular Twitter hashtag #LessRacistThanSteveKing.
Before that, King came under fire for keeping a Confederate flag on his desk. (Iowa was in the Union during the Civil War.) King later defended the flag, saying only "a small part" of the Civil War was about slavery, while "a big part was about states' rights."
King also opposed putting Harriet Tubman on U.S. currency. After the Obama administration announced it planned to place Tubman on a bill — the $20, which features Andrew Jackson, was thought to be the likeliest contender before the Treasury Department settled on the $10, which features Alexander Hamilton — King introduced legislation barring the Treasury from spending any money to redesign currency.
And, in 2015, King proposed a challenge to the 14th amendment's birthright citizenship provision. In a column on his website, King wrote that the Constitution doesn’t actually guarantee birthright citizenship — a view held by many anti-immigrant hardliners — and argued that undocumented immigrants having "anchor babies" causes undesirable demographic shifts.
"Cultural suicide"
"Cultural suicide by demographic transformation," as King likes to call immigration, is seemingly one of his favorite topics.
Also in 2015, King told a conservative radio host that immigration would change American culture for the worse. "I like the America we had," King said.
In 2014, amid protests in Ferguson following the death of Michael Brown, King told Newsmax TV that racial profiling of the protesters by police wasn't a problem because the protesters were of a single "continental origin." In other words, they were all black.
Cantaloupe calves
In an earlier interview with Newsmax, King argued against the DREAM Act, saying that for every Mexican immigrant "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."
President Donald Trump made eerily similar remarks during his campaign announcement in June 2015. "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."
King also humored Trump’s racist conspiracy theory that former President Barack Obama was born in Kenya.
