[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 6 (Friday, January 10, 2020)]
[House]
[Pages H174-H178]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       WEAPONIZATION OF LANGUAGE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2019, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. 
King) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my honor to be recognized to 
address you here on the floor of the United States House of 
Representatives.
  I come to the floor today, Mr. Speaker, because this is the 1-year 
anniversary of the date that a disparaging misquote in The New York 
Times was posted, January 10 of 2019, this being January 10 of 2020.
  I am hopeful that this new year we have, 2020, will bring about some 
clarity of vision on the part of my colleagues, the American people, 
and I don't know that I have as much hope for the press. But this day, 
a year ago today, I was misquoted by The New York Times. The Times 
alleged that I had used three terms and asked, why does that language 
become offensive?
  Well, the truth is that it was a 56-minute telephone interview, a 
call on my cell phone. I didn't have a way to tape it. But I have a 
practice over the years, I have done interviews with any kind of media 
I can think of, and if I don't have a means to tape what I say to them, 
I make it a point not to repeat anything, say anything that I haven't 
already said to the press. That way, there is nothing new out there for 
them to take and manipulate it in the article.

                              {time}  1300

  When that phone rang that morning on the 5th of January, 2019, if 
that is a

[[Page H175]]

Friday morning, about 8:35 in the morning, I took the call. I would 
have preferred to have done it in the office, but sometimes you need to 
get some work done and move on to other things, and that was part of 
the incentive.
  The reporter for The New York Times told me that he had been assigned 
by his chief editor to write an article about how it is that the 
immigration policy that I have advocated for at least since the first 
days I came to this Congress and years before that, so sometime around 
2000 or so, that that immigration policy of build the wall, end 
birthright citizenship, enforce the rule of law, end the sanctuary 
cities, and the list of other things that have been part of what I have 
championed along the way here in this Congress, he was assigned to 
write an article about how it was that our President Donald Trump had 
adopted my immigration positions and gotten elected on those 
immigration positions, and now the national debate was surrounding the 
very topics that I had talked about for so long.
  So we embarked upon a 56-minute interview. He didn't have a tape, and 
I didn't have a tape. I know he didn't have a tape for a couple of 
reasons. One of them was that, on an occasion or two, he asked me to 
carefully repeat the statement I had made so that he could type it down 
and get it accurate. That told me that was one he is going to quote. It 
wasn't the one of controversy, however.
  Then the second piece of it was that we asked him on the telephone 
the following week: Do you have a tape?
  His answer was: Why do you want to know?
  In that phone call, he would not answer the question as to whether he 
had a tape. We found out later on that he had admitted that there was 
no tape. So we asked for his notes. He wouldn't release his notes. We 
asked him for the question that he had posed to me, and he wouldn't 
even speculate as to what the question was that he had posed to me in 
this 56-minute interview.
  He did assert that he can type as fast as anyone can talk, that he is 
highly trained on that and so skilled that the words would be perfect 
and so would the punctuation be perfect.
  Now, I am here on the floor of this House of Representatives. We have 
some of the best stenographers in the world here. They get more 
practice in the House than anywhere else, and they talk slower in the 
Senate. I have asked them: About how fast can you type?
  A lot of them are about 130 words a minute on a conventional 
typewriter, and when they get to what I call the magic keyboard here, 
Mr. Speaker, then those words may go up to as many as 260 words a 
minute.
  Then I asked them: Can you keep up with me when I am on a roll?
  They say: No. We are always glad when you pause and let us catch up.
  These are the best there are anywhere. I can't believe that a 
reporter for The New York Times with a conventional and not a magic 
keyboard can outpace the people on this floor to keep up with these 
fast-talking people in the House of Representatives, the very best 
there are in the world. That is not his skill set anyway.
  So when he asserts that he could type it up accurately with utter 
precision and the punctuation would be correct, even when I asked the 
best in the world what about the punctuation, if that comes out to be 
perfect, too, they will say: No, I have to go back and listen to the 
tape to make sure we get that part of it right. We get the words right, 
but the punctuation may be in question.
  I have great respect for the skill sets here. I do not respect the 
response that he gave in defense because it is not believable that a 
reporter can be on a telephone on the other end typing at a speed with 
the kind of precision necessary to settle the kind of cases that we 
have here.
  Nonetheless, when that story came out on the 10th of January, things 
blew up here in this Congress, and I immediately put out a statement 
that should have shut all that criticism down. I put it out with 
clarity. I clearly rejected more emphatically than anyone in this House 
of Representatives has, including the resolution that passed the 
following week, more clearly than anyone else has the idea of the 
odious ideologies of white nationalism and white supremacy.
  Those are ideologies that didn't exist in my environment anyplace 
that I was in all of my growing up, in my formative years, my adult 
years, and my time here in the Congress.
  When our minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, asked for a meeting with me 
on the following Monday, it was his assertion that it has always meant 
the same thing. I said I don't know how we know, if it is language that 
has not been used or utilized. How do we know what it meant to people? 
You couldn't look up an ideology that is two words, not one, in this 
huge dictionary over here. You won't be able to look up ``white 
nationalism'' or ``white supremacy'' there because that is a phrase. It 
is an ideology that ties two words together with a meaning that perhaps 
could be different.
  So in an interview with  Dave Price of WHO-TV on October 20, 2018, he 
had asked me the question: What is a white nationalist?
  I said it might have meant something different 1 or 2 or 3 years ago, 
but today it implies racist. I knew that because I have been paying 
attention to the weaponization of language. This is what the left has 
been doing. They have been calling people racist for 20, 25 years, and 
they have watched as Republicans--especially Southern conservative 
Republicans--curl up away from that kind of accusation because it shuts 
them down.
  I recall the conversation that I related, actually, to The New York 
Times reporter in that 56-minute interview. In my answer to the 
question, whatever it was that he asked me: What had happened in 
February 2013?
  That was an immigration meeting down the hallway over toward the 
Senate side where we had a discussion about immigration with four or 
five Senators, five or six House Members, and some nongovernment 
representatives who were also there at the table and around the table.

  It was the first time that I had met Senator Ted Cruz. He had made a 
statement that we need to be very careful with the language we use, 
especially on immigration, because if we are not, if we use any 
language that is offensive, they will use it against us.
  I listened to that, and I thought that I had better respond. I said: 
Well, Senator, I agree with what you said, but we also need to keep in 
mind that if we let them define that which is offensive, then whatever 
language is effective will be defined as offensive.
  I waited for his answer, which was essentially a nod, which I took to 
mean an agreement with me, and I believe it was because it was 
certainly a logical statement, and it was objective.
  I set this up this way, Mr. Speaker, so that when I lay out this 
case, it is going to be clearly understood by all who are paying 
attention. It says: I am just going to take the term ``white 
nationalist,'' that is what Kevin McCarthy was so concerned about and 
believing that it confirmed some kind of a hidden ideology in me that 
no one had been able to discover in personal contact with me that had 
been discovered by The New York Times reporter over the telephone. He 
argued that the response I gave, that it might have meant something 
different 1 or 2 or 3 years ago, exposed that I didn't know that it was 
a negative connotation that had to do with white nationalism. And 
somehow or another, he assigned another belief system to me, which is 
generally what the left does.
  I asked for 24 hours to disprove this. He said you have 1 hour and 
walked out of the room--1 hour. Well, it takes a lot of digging. I just 
proved it clearly but not in an hour.
  So what I have here, what I would like to show you, Mr. Speaker, is 
this: What did the term ``white nationalism'' mean in the year 2000, 
when it was virtually unused, or in any year prior to that, when it was 
also virtually unused? What did it mean in 2001, 2002, and 2003? All 
the way up, you can see that it was virtually unused, and it never even 
starts to move until 2016.
  This is a LexisNexis search of the term ``white nationalism'' or 
``white nationalist,'' derivatives of this term. LexisNexis, Mr. 
Speaker, goes into blogs, web postings, newspaper print, and magazine 
print. You name it, if it is in print out there, then LexisNexis is 
very likely to have it all. This is the only objective way you can 
quantify the utilization of this term.

[[Page H176]]

  ``White nationalism'' is virtually unused all the way up until 2016, 
actually. There, it jumped up to 10,000 times a year. It was virtually 
unused, and all of a sudden, in 2016, there it goes to 10,000 times a 
year; in 2017, 30,000 times; and in 2018, it is still up there at 
20,000 times.
  How did it happen that a terminology that had been virtually unused 
all of a sudden becomes used multiple times, up to 30,000 times a year, 
when 1 to 200 times a year is this virtually unused definition down 
here?
  How did it happen that this is the word that gets tagged on me? Is 
that an accident, Mr. Speaker? I don't think so. In fact, any objective 
person looking at the data couldn't come to that conclusion either.
  This is the annual utilization: virtually unused up to 2016, then up 
to 10,000 times a year, and then up to 30,000 times the next year. It 
is still at 20,000 the following year.
  This is a weaponized term created by the left to attack conservatives 
with. It is one of their weaponized terms. They have multiple 
weaponized terms now because they wore out the term ``racist'' and 
needed to make up new terms that they could be offended by.
  How did this happen, that 2016 was the year that the term ``white 
nationalist'' was used 10,000 times in that year? I asked them to break 
this thing down, LexisNexis' utilization of ``white nationalist,'' 
month by month throughout the year 2016. That is the jump year down 
here.
  Here is the data. From November and December, it is down here, used a 
little more, perhaps you could still call it virtually unused, but 
there is a little blip in August. Then it jumps up in November, and it 
is still up there in December.
  What happened in 2016 that brought about the use of the term ``white 
nationalist'' as an almost always pejorative term? It is almost always 
used to attack conservatives. What happened? Well, there is the 
circumstance that Donald Trump was elected President of the United 
States on November 8, 2016.
  When that happened, there was already a gathering for the hierarchy 
of the Democratic Party to gather together at the Mandarin Occidental 
Hotel here in Washington, D.C. Their agenda was to best plan how they 
were going to utilize what they expected would be a Hillary Clinton 
Presidency. They admitted that they had to change their agenda when 
they got the surprise of Donald Trump winning the election as opposed 
to Hillary. They did change their agenda at the Occidental Hotel.
  By the way, it was led by George Soros. His face is on the front 
cover here of Politico's article that tells about this. There are 
several other articles, Mr. Speaker, but George Soros led on this.
  There, they planned how they were going to deal with a Trump 
Presidency and how they were going to try to handcuff, tie down, 
refuse, and resist.
  Mr. Speaker, if we remember what happened, that came into our 
verbiage also. I didn't run the LexisNexis numbers on this, but I am 
certain I am right. ``Resist,'' ``resistance movement'' would be also, 
probably, a little more used than ``white nationalist,'' but we might 
be able to define that as virtually unused until the conference at the 
Mandarin Occidental Hotel in Washington, D.C., that started on Sunday, 
November 13, the Sunday after Trump was elected President.
  There, they planned how they were going to deal with the Trump 
Presidency and how they were going to handcuff him, tie him down, 
resist, resist, and resist. The resistance movement was born in this 
hotel by Democratic leadership led by George Soros and no doubt funded 
by George Soros. The executive director position that was managing over 
all this was a former Soros staff person.

  They planned their resistance movement, and out of that also came 
some words to be weaponized: white nationalist, white supremacist, 
Nazi, and fascist.
  That is what I was talking about in my interview with Trip Gabriel as 
what had happened to weaponize language and how it was being used 
against people. We should never forget that we have the left in this 
country in particular--and I hope it is to a lesser degree, and I 
believe it is, from the other side--that assigns a belief system to 
people and then attacks them for the belief system that they have 
assigned. They use the words that they have been assigned to use to 
assign to people for the belief system that they have assigned.
  So what we have is virtually unused ``white nationalist'' here 
throughout all these years until we come to 2016. Then we have the 
events of November 13, 14, and 15, checking out on the morning of 
Wednesday the 16th of November. That was taking place at the Mandarin 
Occidental Hotel. Clearly, somebody said: We are going to start using 
``white nationalist'' against conservatives. Get to it.
  They were at it while they were in the hotel, and it showed up some 
5,000 times in that little window of time there.
  Now, if you wonder, well, maybe I am not right on the date, Mr. 
Speaker, I had them break down the month of November 2016. Here is the 
month of November. The 1st, 2nd, kind of virtually unused, under 100 
times in any given day. Until you get to they checked in here, the 13th 
of November, and, zing, all the way we go up to here to the top and 
back, this peak right here represents the times that they were in that 
hotel, making the decision and activating the weaponization of a number 
of terms but certainly the term ``white nationalism.''

                              {time}  1315

  So, they all knew what they were doing. They were in that hotel, and 
they knew what they were doing.
  I am just not convinced that the people in the leadership on the 
Republican side knew what was being perpetrated against our ideology, 
Mr. Speaker. And it seemed as though a number of my own leadership 
decided that they were going to jump on the bandwagon, too, with no 
chance for self-defense.
  I would reflect that, even if you go back through all of 
Christianity, if you go back through Judeo-Christianity, if you go back 
through Western civilization, if you go back through the foundation of 
American culture and civilization--you can go back to Jesus; you can go 
back to St. Paul--everybody accused had a right to face their accusers 
and had, also, the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. I can 
find no exceptions in anybody's framework. That is the standard. That 
is the civilizational standard.
  I have listened as our minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, has 
aggressively and effectively, I believe--and I am glad he is doing it--
defended our President of the United States and said that he deserves 
due process and he deserves a fair process and that he is innocent 
until proven guilty. I agree with all of that.
  But Kevin McCarthy doesn't seem to agree that should be in a manner 
that I would be treated. I believe that I deserve due process and I 
deserve innocent until proven guilty.
  And I would point out that there is no evidence to make the case 
against me--no evidence, no real evidence. I have put out the fact-
check document. It is on my website. It went on in March of last year. 
It is about six pages. No one has poked a hole in any of that 
rationale.
  And here is another ``no one,'' Mr. Speaker.
  Even though Brett Kavanaugh had about six or seven or so accusers, 
and I believe Brett Kavanaugh was unjustly accused in every one of 
those cases, but at least he had an opportunity to face his accusers 
and at least one of them came forward to testify and could be examined 
by the panel of the Committee on the Judiciary that was there.
  Brett Kavanaugh, I believe, was exonerated from those charges. He is 
now seated on the United States Supreme Court, and I believe that he 
will go on to be a stellar Justice on our United States Supreme Court. 
But he had a chance to face his accusers, and he had them.
  In my case, Mr. Speaker, not only did I not have a chance to face my 
accusers, neither do I have the presumption of innocence until proven 
guilty. But on top of that, I don't have any accusers--not one. Of the 
tens of thousands of people that I have dealt with face to face in my 
years in public life--roughly, a quarter of a century in public life, 
and we have been in the construction business dealing with people clear 
back

[[Page H177]]

to 1975--there is not one individual who has come forward and said that 
I have treated them in any kind of disrespectful, disparaging, or 
racist way of any kind whatsoever.
  I don't have an accuser to face, not one, unless it might be hearsay. 
And even the hearsay doesn't seem to be out there.
  This is the analysis of the weaponization of language and the eager 
embracement of it by my own leadership who has denied me any due 
process.
  So, here I am, the fourth Member of Congress in all of history to be 
removed from my committees--only the fourth, Mr. Speaker. And the other 
three, fairly modern history: James Traficant, who stood on this floor 
and said, ``Beam me up, Scotty.'' He was convicted of something like 
nine different Federal felonies and he ran for reelection from prison.
  We lost a couple of Republicans in this Congress, one from Buffalo 
and one from California, either convicted or confessed to Federal 
felonies. I regret that. But that is three of four are Federal felons.
  And then there is me. I am treated like a Federal felon by my own 
leadership in this House of Representatives because somebody called the 
hit from up the chain above them, and they decided that they needed to 
do that under the command of the individual or individuals that called 
that hit.
  So only four people removed from all their committees in the history 
of this Congress, three are either convicted or confessed Federal 
felons, and there is me. And there is not even a rule that I violated, 
let alone a law, let alone a Federal violation, a felony, to be treated 
like a Federal felon by my own leadership for a made-up story that 
doesn't hold up, cannot hold up under the scrutiny of history, and it 
must be rectified.
  So, on top of that, I have heard our esteemed minority leader say 
that there is no constitutional charge against Donald Trump for 
impeachment, that they are made-up charges on the part of the 
Democrats, and that it is either treason, bribery, high crimes, or 
misdemeanor, and the President has violated none of those.
  And I agree with him. That is true. None of those reasons for 
impeachment of a President exists in the activities that have been 
examined here in this House of Representatives, even down in the secret 
bunker of Adam Schiff. They don't exist.
  So they made up a couple of charges, and one of them was obstruction 
of Congress, and the other one was about putting our Nation at risk.
  Well, that is a judgment call, and I think the President made the 
right judgment call on Soleimani; he has made a lot of right judgment 
calls up and down the line.
  But because you disagree with the President is not a reason to 
impeach him. There is no statute, no law, no rule that the President is 
guilty of, or at least has been proven to be guilty of. There is no 
substantive information that supports that allegation.
  They impeached the President of the United States in this House of 
Representatives on December 18 because they don't like Donald Trump. 
And then part of what they cooked up in the Mandarin Hotel on the 
following week after he was elected President in 2016, those are some 
of the reasons.

  The biggest reason is they need a shield from prosecution in the 
investigations and prosecutions that are taking place now in the 
Department of Justice and the FBI looking into the weaponization of our 
Federal Government for political purposes, for going in and 
misrepresenting information to the FISA court, for perhaps duping a 
FISA judge or maybe having a FISA judge that should have been a little 
more alert. How many times did James Comey sign a FISA request when he 
knew the information was false? You can go on and on.
  If that comes forward and indictments are brought forward on that, 
that is going to crush the other side. They need this impeachment as a 
shield, and that is the biggest reason why they decided to move 
forward.
  But I believe the foundation was laid in that Mandarin Hotel on that 
weekend starting on Sunday, November 13, 2016, and concluding on 
Wednesday when they checked out that morning. I believe that is when 
much of the strategy was put together.
  And I would go further, Mr. Speaker, and that is that we had the 
Mueller investigation that tied this country up for nearly 2 years. The 
strategy on that, I believe, was discussed in that hotel room. That is 
just too close to the pattern of things that flowed out of there that 
we do know of.
  And we know from the own words of James Comey that he went in to 
interview the President, to brief the President on whether or not there 
was the existence of an investigation that the President was under; 
and, out of that, he typed up his notes and handed them over to a 
professor at Columbia University with the directions or understanding 
that they would be leaked to The New York Times, with the objective of 
the leakage of those notes that were written up by James Comey to bring 
about a special counsel to investigate Donald Trump for alleged 
nefarious activities in Russia and that the special counsel was to be 
Robert Mueller.
  All of that was known before James Comey went in to brief Donald 
Trump. All that was known before to James Comey.
  As that flowed out and Mueller is named as the special counsel, we 
went, then, through 2 years, and we had the investigators that went 
from 13 up to 18, built-in bias in most of them and perhaps all of 
them, and they came up empty. And that was about May 7 of last year.
  Then they had to look for another reason to impeach this President. 
They thought the Mueller report was going to do it, and it didn't. They 
couldn't make the case. They tried. And afterwards, some of them tried 
again. They tried to resurrect it again and again. Finally, the house 
of cards on the Mueller investigation collapsed, and they had to come 
up with something new.
  Well, then there is the phone call of July 25 of last year, which I 
have read through the transcript of that multiple times, Mr. Speaker. 
Never do I see anything in there that troubles me.
  And I believe Professor Jonathan Turley, in his testimony before the 
House Committee on the Judiciary, when he said, to the effect that, if 
you had told George Washington that he could be impeached for a 
conversation he had, that his powdered wig would catch on fire. That is 
what we are dealing with.
  So these very, very thin excuses for impeachment, but the calendar 
was turning pages over and they needed to get this done, so they took 
the thinnest of excuses and turned that into what was a show for the 
American people that I think will live in infamy throughout history.
  In my case, Mr. Speaker, I have clearly proven that these allegations 
are false. There is no rule that I have violated. There is nothing that 
is pointed to. There is nothing in history that says that there is a 
pattern in this Congress that the freedom of speech of a Member of 
Congress, whether he is accurately quoted or not, can be disciplined by 
the will or whim of a leader in this House of Representatives.
  Everyone in this country has to have the First Amendment right, 
freedom of speech, religion, and the press, and all of the rest of the 
rights that we have in the Bill of Rights.
  But the chilling effect of the actions taken by the leader here of 
the minority in the House of Representatives chills the freedom of 
speech of everybody in here--at least on the Republican side--and 
everybody that is either running as a candidate in, potentially, a 
primary or aspires to run for office.
  The most principled people we have in this country will not want to 
submit to censorship by a leader that may or may not have enjoyed their 
support to get elected to that leadership position.
  This is a chilling, chilling effect, and the history of this is not 
going to go down very well as people examine what happened. There is 
much, much more to come out.
  Mr. Speaker, as I watch the clock tick down, I make the point that I 
have introduced a resolution here, and I will have a number early next 
week, but it has just gone in in the last few hours. I have been 
waiting to drop this resolution. I am dropping it and introducing it on 
the anniversary of the misquote that got dropped on me 1 year ago today 
for The New York Times that allegedly launched this firestorm that

[[Page H178]]

has brought about these things that I have talked about.
  This resolution makes the case clearly that The New York Times could 
not be right and that I could not be wrong, and the balance of this was 
people wanting it to be true and so they wrote it up.
  So this disproves The New York Times quote; and, additionally, Mr. 
Speaker, I delivered that quote on the floor of the House of 
Representatives the following Tuesday in the fashion that I would have 
said it if I had actually said it.
  In other words, I would never tie together white nationalism, white 
supremacy, and Western civilization. No, Mr. Speaker, I would never do 
that, because they don't fit at all together.
  The pejorative terms were: Nazi, fascist, white nationalist, white 
supremacy. And I made the point there would be a distinct pause, and I 
would start from the beginning and say, But Western civilization, how 
did that language become pejorative? Why I did sit in classrooms while 
all of that time being taught about the merits of our civilization?
  And this Congressional Record misquoted me exactly the same way that 
The New York Times did. This amendment fixes that.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________