Rep. Steve King (R-IA) gave vent to his full-on racism in a tweet about Dutch nationalist politician Geert Wilders and it is shocking even by the Republican standards of racism we have become used to:
Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies. https://t.co/4nxLipafWO
— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) March 12, 2017
Gee, whose civilization do you mean, Rep. King? Well, since told the Republican convention that whites “made” Western civilization, you can probably guess.
As The Washington Post‘s Philip Bump writes,
“The formulation of ‘our’ civilization being at risk from ‘somebody else’s babies’ is a deliberate suggestion that American civilization is threatened by unnamed ‘others’ — almost certainly a reference to non-Westerners.”
Never has the conservative ideal of a white Christian America been more blatantly, or appallingly disclosed. Not even by Donald Trump, who, after all, did not invent the ugly conservative disease of white nationalism.
Contrasted with what Thomas Jefferson said in his autobiography about the preamble to his Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which is a forerunner, or precursor to the First Amendment, you don’t find the Founder’s vision in King’s words:
Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed by inserting “Jesus Christ,” so that it would read “A departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;” the insertion was rejected by the great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination.
Thomas Jefferson himself thought it didn’t get better than Anglo-Saxons, but he certainly understood very well that the practitioners of those religions would not be white Anglo-Saxons from the United Kingdom.
He envisioned as the soul of America those very “somebody else’s babies” rejected by King as our babies. America’s babies.
All coequal parts of our civilization.
As Guantanamo prosecutor Col. Morris Davis asked, “Will the media ever stop pretending the hundreds of @GOP racists white nationalist statements aren’t aberrations?”
Probably not. The mainstream media would still rather talk about the problems the Democratic Party is experiencing, just as they preferred to talk about fake Clinton scandals than Donald Trump’s very real ethical problems.
John Fugelsang no doubt speaks for many of us when he says,
I hate it when the white supremacists make me embarrassed to be fucking white. https://t.co/z8EskGW0rc
— John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) March 13, 2017
To be fair, Republican men have not been exemplars of maleness for a long time now, and they are certainly not spokesmen for white males. I am one, after all, and King does not speak for me.
Utterances like this have done little less to destroy our reputation than the Nazis, and King’s attitude is certainly one Hitler often expressed agreement with.
No one should be surprised, however. These are the forces Donald Trump rode to the White House, and King is only saying what many of them are thinking.
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