Racist Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) whined that journalists who have pointed out his white nationalist beliefs have made up the term to smear him.
“[White nationalist] is a weaponized term created by the left to attack conservatives with,” King said on the House floor Friday. “It’s one of their weaponized terms because they wore out the word racist and they needed to make up some new terms to be offended by.”
King, a virulent white supremacist, held up a graph apparently showing that the term “white nationalism” spiked following the 2016 presidential election.
“How did it happen that a terminology that had been virtually unused all of a sudden became used multiple times ― up to 30,000 times a year? 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.”
It’s not an accident. It’s a term that has been used to describe King because it’s accurate. King unsurprisingly claimed billionaire philanthropist George Soros was behind it all ― a common anti-Semitic tactic among racists who need someone to blame ― suggesting Soros backed a meeting of Democratic leaders after the election to find ways to smear racists like King.
“The resistance movement was born in that hotel by Democrat leadership led by George Soros and no doubt funded by George Soros,” King said. “Out of that also came some words to be weaponized: white nationalist, white supremacist, Nazi, fascist.”
In 2018, King went full white nationalist when he traveled to Austria for an extensive interview with far-right Austrian propagandist Caroline Sommerfeld in which he made his beliefs crystal clear. More from HuffPost’s October 2018 story:
The interview, published in September, came to HuffPost’s attention this week. In his conversation with Sommerfeld, King discussed his belief in the superiority of European culture over others. He talked fearfully of falling fertility rates in the West and spoke at length about his belief that Europe and America are threatened by Muslim and Latino immigration.
“If we don’t defend Western civilization, then we will become subjugated by the people who are the enemies of faith, the enemies of justice,” King said.
The interview is remarkable, capturing a sitting U.S. congressman completely fluent in modern white nationalist talking points just weeks before an election he is favored to win.
He also falsely claimed in that interview that Soros is footing the bill for “The Great Replacement,” a paranoid talking point for white supremacists in which they imagine their white European culture being taken over by immigrants.
And last year, King defended being a white supremacist by questioning when the very term “white supremacist” became offensive.
“White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” he told The New York Times. “Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?”
He later posted a tweet clarifying that he sees himself simply as a “Nationalist.” Too bad for him, almost everyone else sees him for the man he is: a white nationalist.