Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) is still mad that Republican leaders stripped his House committee assignments after he defended white nationalism in a January New York Times interview.
“It was a political lynch mob. I had to let the blood cool,” King, who has made a string of racist and white supremacist comments in recent years, told Politico in an interview Tuesday. “And the blood has now cooled, and now they don’t want to be faced with the reality of what they’ve done.”
Some fellow conservatives, including Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) are defending King and are petitioning House GOP leaders to reinstate his committee posts, to little avail, according to Politico. Gohmert said King was punished unfairly and his comments to the Times were taken out of context.
“Each day that goes by, my patience gets thinner and thinner. And that means, then, that I have to turn this up,” King said. “I don’t want this to be the only thing I do in this Congress, but it is something I will not let go of.”
Republican leaders finally took action against King after he told the Times: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” It’s still unclear why those comments sparked GOP action. King has repeatedly made racist and bigoted comments, and he promotes white nationalists on Twitter.
At a town hall last week, a constituent called his racist remarks “dehumanizing.”
In response, King said he does not “deal in race” — but he also suggested that not every culture is equal.
“If we presume that every culture is equal and has an equal amount to contribute to our civilization, then we’re devaluing the contributions of the people that laid the foundation for America, and that’s our Founding Fathers,” King said at the town hall.