[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 9 (Wednesday, January 16, 2019)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E56-E57]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




     A TIMELINE OF STEVE KING'S RACIST REMARKS AND DIVISIVE ACTIONS

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. BOBBY L. RUSH

                              of illinois

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, January 16, 2019

  Mr. RUSH. Madam Speaker, I would like to include in the Record, an 
article by Trip Gabriel that was published in the New York Times on 
January 15, 2019 detailing racist remarks and divisive actions made by 
Rep. Steve King.

                [From the New York Times, Jan. 15, 2019]

     A Timeline of Steve King's Racist Remarks and Divisive Actions

                           (By Trip Gabriel)

       While some Republicans suggested the Iowa congressman's 
     views were new to them, Mr. King has a long and documented 
     history of denigrating racial minorities.
       Representative Steve King of Iowa, who was stripped of his 
     House committee seats on Monday night after making remarks 
     defending white supremacy, has a long history of racist 
     comments and insults about immigrants.
       Republicans rarely rebuked him until recently, with some 
     suggesting that Mr. King's language and views were new to 
     them.
       ``This just popped up on Friday,'' Representative Steve 
     Scalise, the second-ranking House Republican, said on Sunday, 
     when asked if the party would penalize Mr. King for saying, 
     in an interview with The Times, ``White nationalist, white 
     supremacist, Western civilization--how did that language 
     become offensive?''
       National Republicans courted his political support in Iowa: 
     He was a national co-chairman of Ted Cruz's 2016 presidential 
     effort and of Gov. Kim Reynolds' 2018 election. House 
     leadership appointed him chairman of the subcommittee on the 
     Constitution and civil justice. And President Trump boasted 
     in the Oval Office that he raised more money for Mr. King 
     than for anyone else. Yet Mr. King, who won a ninth term in 
     November, has publicly promoted white nationalists and neo-
     Nazis on Twitter and disparaged nonwhite groups for years.


                                  2002

       Mr. King, in the Iowa State Senate, files a bill requiring 
     schools teach that the United States ``is the unchallenged 
     greatest nation in the world and that it has derived its 
     strength from . . . Christianity, free enterprise capitalism 
     and Western civilization.''
       Mr. King is the chief sponsor of a law making English the 
     official language of Iowa.


                                  2005

       Now in Congress, Mr. King introduces the English Language 
     Unity Act, a bill to make English the official language of 
     the United States.
       Mr. King sues the Iowa Secretary of State for posting 
     voting information on an official website in Spanish, 
     Laotian, Bosnian and Vietnamese.


                                  2006

       At a rally in Las Vegas, Mr. King calls the deaths of 
     Americans at the hands of undocumented immigrants ``a slow-
     motion Holocaust.'' He claims that 25 Americans die daily 
     because of undocumented immigrants, an unsupported and 
     illogical leap from government statistics, which years later 
     influences talking points by President Trump.
       On the House floor, Mr. King demonstrates a model of a 12-
     foot concrete border wall topped with electrified wire that 
     he designed: ``We need to do a few other things on top of 
     that wall, and one of them being to put a little bit of wire 
     on top here to provide a disincentive for people to climb 
     over the top or put a ladder there. We could also electrify 
     this wire . . . We do that with livestock all the time.''


                                  2010

       Mr. King on the House floor, speaking of how law 
     enforcement officers can spot undocumented immigrants:
       What kind of clothes people wear . . . what kind of shoes 
     people wear, what kind of accent they have . . . sometimes 
     it's just a sixth sense they can't put their finger on.


                                  2011

       Mr. King in a speech opposing the Affordable Care Act's 
     mandate to cover contraception:
       Preventing babies being born is not medicine. That's not 
     constructive to our culture and our civilization. If we let 
     our birthrate get down below the replacement rate, we're a 
     dying civilization.


                                  2012

       On a panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference 
     with Peter Brimelow, an open white nationalist, Mr. King 
     referred to multiculturalism as:
       A tool for the Left to subdivide a culture and civilization 
     into our own little ethnic enclaves and pit us against each 
     other.


                                  2013

       Mr. King on why he opposes legal status for Dreamers, who 
     were brought into the country as children:
       For everyone who's a valedictorian, there's another 100 out 
     there that weigh 130 pounds and they've got calves the size 
     of cantaloupes because they're hauling 75 pounds of marijuana 
     across the desert. Those people would be legalized with the 
     same act.


                                  2015

       Mr. King invites the far-right, anti-Islam Dutch politician 
     Geert Wilders to Washington and appears with him at the 
     Capitol. Mr. Wilders has called Islam ``not a religion,'' 
     said the Quran was ``worse than Mein Kampf,'' and called for 
     the closing of mosques.
       Mr. King tweets a selfie with Mr. Wilders in front of a 
     portrait of Winston Churchill.

[[Page E57]]

     Mr. Wilders praises Mr. King for having ``the guts to speak 
     out.''


                                  2016

       At the Republican National Convention in July, Mr. King 
     claims that nonwhite groups haven't contributed as much as 
     whites to civilization: ``This whole business does get a 
     little tired. I would ask you to go back through history and 
     figure out where are these contributions that have been made 
     by these other categories of people you are talking about. 
     Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to 
     civilization?''
       Mr. King to The Washington Post days later: ``The idea of 
     multiculturalism, that every culture is equal--that's not 
     objectively true . . . We've been fed that information for 
     the past 25 years, and we're not going to become a greater 
     nation if we continue to do that.''
       In a tweet during a meeting in Amsterdam with Mr. Wilders 
     and Frauke Petry, the leader of Germany's far-right 
     Alternative for Germany party, Mr. King says, ``Cultural 
     suicide by demographic transformation must end.''
       In October, Marine Le Pen, the leader of France's far-right 
     party, tweets a picture of her meeting with Mr. King, the 
     first elected American official to meet her.
       Also in October, Mr. King meets in Austria with leaders of 
     the far-right Freedom Party, including Heinz-Christian 
     Strache and Norbert Hofer. The party was founded in the 1950s 
     by former Nazis.


                                  2017

       ``Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our 
     destiny. We can't restore our civilization with somebody 
     else's babies,'' Mr. King tweets in his endorsement of Mr. 
     Wilders in Dutch elections.
       On March 14, Mr. King defends the tweet on Breitbart radio: 
     ``We're watching as Western civilization is shrinking in the 
     face of the massive, epic migration that is pouring into 
     Europe. That's the core of that tweet. They're importing a 
     different culture, a different civilization--and that culture 
     and civilization, the imported one, rejects the host culture. 
     And so they are supplanting Western civilization with Middle 
     Eastern civilization and I say, and Geert Wilders says, 
     Western civilization is a superior civilization--it is the 
     first world.''
       On Iowa talk radio, Mr. King recommends ``The Camp of the 
     Saints,'' a racist 1973 novel about an invasion of Europe by 
     nonwhite immigrants.
       Mr. King tweets agreement with Viktor Orban, Hungary's 
     authoritarian leader: ``Mixing cultures will not lead to a 
     higher quality of life but a lower one.''


                                  2018

       Mr. King says he does not want Somali Muslims working in 
     meatpacking plants in Iowa: ``I don't want people doing my 
     pork that won't eat it, let alone hope I go to hell for 
     eating pork chops.''
       Asked by a reporter for HuffPost if he is a white 
     nationalist or white supremacist, Mr. King responds: ``I 
     don't answer those questions. I say to people that use those 
     kind of allegations: Use those words a million times, because 
     you're reducing the value of them every time, and many of the 
     people that use those words and make those allegations and 
     ask those questions can't even define the words they're 
     using.''
       In an interview with a web publication in Austria, 
     unzensuriert.at, which is linked to the far-right Freedom 
     Party, Mr. King again praises the novel ``Camp of the 
     Saints'': ``This narrative should be imprinted into 
     everyone's brain. When you are importing people, even 
     importing one single person, you are importing their 
     culture.''
       In the same interview, Mr. King demonstrates familiarity 
     with the ``Great Replacement'' conspiracy theory, also known 
     as ``white genocide,'' which posits that an international 
     elite, including prominent Jews like George Soros, are 
     plotting to make white populations minorities in Europe and 
     North America. ``Great replacement, yes,'' Mr. King says. 
     ``These people walking into Europe by ethnic migration, 80 
     percent are young men. They are somebody else's babies.''
       Mr. King endorses a Toronto mayoral candidate, Faith Goldy, 
     who had recited the ``14 words'' used by neo-Nazis and gave 
     an interview to a podcast for the neo-Nazi website The Daily 
     Stormer.
       The Anti-Defamation League writes to Speaker Paul D. Ryan 
     calling for the censure of Mr. King for endorsing Ms. Goldy. 
     The group also notes that the Austrian Freedom Party is 
     ``riddled with anti-Semitism and Holocaust trivialization.''
       Representative Steve Stivers, chairman of the Republican 
     House election committee, condemns Mr. King in a tweet: ``We 
     must stand up against white supremacy and hate in all forms, 
     and I strongly condemn this behavior.''
       Asked on Oct. 21 on WHO-TV in Iowa, ``What is a white 
     nationalist?'' Mr. King answers: ``First of all, I think you 
     have to be white, but then we've got Rachel Dolezal who 
     didn't have to be black to be black. It is a derogatory term 
     today. I wouldn't have thought so maybe a year or two or 
     three ago. But today they use it as a derogatory term and 
     they imply you are a racist. That's the bottom line for 
     that.''


                                  2019

       ``White nationalist, white supremacist, Western 
     civilization--how did that language become offensive? Why did 
     I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history 
     and our civilization?'' Mr. King said in an interview with 
     The New York Times published last week.

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