Racist Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) fumbled during a town hall event after being asked a question about “white society” in the wake of the New Zealand mass shooting committed by a white nationalist.
The attack killed 49 people and wounded at least 20 at a mosque in Christchurch. The manifesto left behind by the terrorist cited President Donald Trump as inspiration for his actions as Trump has also referred to immigrants as “invaders” and routinely demonizes the Muslim community.
King, who recently called for a new civil war in the United States, appeared at a town hall event where the New York Times reports he fielded a question from a constituent who demanded to know if he believes “white society is superior to a nonwhite society”.
“Do you think a white society is superior to a nonwhite society?” Mary Lavelle, 63, asked, testing his reputation for white supremacist sympathies.
“I don’t have an answer for that. That’s so hypothetical,” Mr. King, Republican of Iowa, told her. “I’ll say this, America is not a white society — it has never been a completely white society. We came here and joined the Native Americans.”
He continued: “I’ve long said that a baby can be lifted out of a cradle anywhere in the world and brought into any home in America, whatever the color of the folks in that household, and they can be raised to be American as any other. And I believe that every one of us, every one of us, is created in God’s image.”
King has been under fire since he whined about “white nationalist” and “white supremacist” being bad words in the United States, remarks that resulted in him being condemned by Republicans in Congress and stripped of his committee assignments. They stopped short of censuring him or expelling him, basically giving him just a slap on the wrist.
Of course, early Americans did not migrate here to “join” the Native Americans. Instead, they committed one of the worst genocides against an indigenous people in recorded history. So, King failed if he was trying to soften his racist beliefs.
And as The Hill pointed out, King complained just two years ago in 2017 that “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”
So, can this country lift babies “out of a cradle anywhere in the world” and raise them to be Americans, or does doing that destroy civilization? King really put himself in a rhetorical pickle there.
Again, current history even sabotages his response because the Trump administration is literally kidnapping children and babies at the border from their migrant parents and placing them in internment camps or giving them to parents around the country even though those kids are not orphans.
The government appears to be forcing these kids to be raised to be what they consider Americans instead of allowing them to be raised by their real parents in this country so they can write their own unique American story like millions of other immigrants.
Steve King can pretend that he’s not a racist anymore all he wants, it’s not enough to wash away what he has said in the past and present. Besides, he didn’t even bother to condemn white nationalism after the New Zealand shooting. That failure alone answers Lavelle’s question.
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