Moulitsas: King is not an outlier

On Sunday, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) wrapped himself in his metaphorical white robe and took to Twitter to celebrate his white supremacist thinking.

“Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny,” he tweeted, referring to Dutch nationalist Geert Wilders, who has promised to “de-Islamise” the Netherlands. “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” The nation’s most infamous former KKK imperial wizard, David Duke, tweeted his approval.

{mosads}Lest anyone misconstrue King, he reaffirmed Monday that, yes, he was a white supremacist: “I meant exactly what I said, as is always the case,” adding that he hoped for an America in which we all “look the same.”

While some Republicans professed supposed shock at King’s words, they were nothing new. In 2012, he compared immigration policy to selecting a dog, arguing we should allow only the “pick of the litter” into the U.S. In 2013, he said that for every “Dreamer” — young people brought to the U.S. illegally as children — who was a valedictorian, “there’s another 100 out there that they weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”

In 2016, he told host Chris Hayes: “I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that been made by these other categories of people that you’re talking about. Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?”

“Than white people?” Hayes asked.

“Than Western civilization itself, that’s rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the United States of America, and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world,” King said. “That’s all of Western civilization.”

It’s no surprise racists like King are so emboldened in these times. Remember, the Justice Department sued  Trump for refusing to rent to African-Americans, and he has a long history of making disparaging comments about most nonwhite groups.

Meanwhile, top adviser Stephen Bannon is a racial warrior, proudly touting his Breitbart News website as the “platform for the alt-right”— that confederation of racist, anti-semitic, and xenophobic conservatives — publishing myriad articles railing against “full integration” of racial groups and featuring writers who say things like, “The alt-right believe that some degree of separation between peoples is necessary for a culture to be preserved.” 

It’s no surprise that during Holocaust Remembrance Day, Bannon’s White House released a statement purposefully omitting mention of Jewish victims — a tactic of Holocaust deniers who argue that Jews were never targeted.

With over 80 percent of Republicans approving of Trump and Bannon’s work in opinion polls, it’s clear their brand of overtly racist conservatism is now standard in the GOP.

Yet the nation’s demographic trends continue unabated: The nation will be majority-minority by 2043, according to Census projections, with whites losing majority status. 

“Their effort here is to be celebrating because the United States is moving towards becoming — the whites becoming a minority, be a majority-minority within the country, according to what their plan is,” King said in response to those numbers. “I will predict that Hispanics and the blacks will be fighting each other before that happens.”

It’s less “celebrating” and “planning” than an acknowledgement of reality, and Republican congressmen praying for a race war won’t save the GOP or its racist adherents from themselves.

Moulitsas is the founder and publisher of Daily Kos.

The views expressed by this author are their own and are not the views of The Hill.