WATCH: Steve King Celebrates Anniversary of White Nationalist Remark with Bonkers Truther Speech… and Charts
Iowa Republican Congressman Steve King commemorated the anniversary of the comments about white nationalism that earned him universal condemnation by delivering an epic speech — complete with charts — in which he argued, among other things, that the term wasn’t considered racist until 2015, and the real culprit is a cabal led by George Soros.
It was, in fact, a year ago that King came under fire when The New York Times quoted him as saying “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?”
In the same interview, King also said, of his House colleagues, that “You could look over there and think the Democratic Party is no country for white men.”
On Friday afternoon, King availed himself of the “General Speeches” time to deliver a bonkers 30-minute forensic dissection of the controversy that included some pretty wild arguments, and a series of charts.
He began by arguing, at length, that the reporter who interviewed him didn’t have a tape, and King didn’t have a tape, but King knew that because he wasn’t taping, he never would have said something that he hadn’t already said before, and the reporter couldn’t possibly have accurately typed out what King said accurately.
The congressman then related a conversation with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy in which King says he asserted that “white nationalism” didn’t mean anything racist “one or two or three years ago,” which would have meant before 2015. But it certainly did here at Mediaite.
This seemed to form the basis of the bulk of King’s speech, in which he produced chats showing the number of “Articles About White Nationalism” over time, and cracked the case wide open by explaining what caused a sudden spike in those articles in 2016.
“What happened? Well, there was a circumstance that Donald Trump was elected president of the United States,” King said.
He then described the timing and location of a conference at which a Soros-led cabal decided to make white nationalist into a “pejorative term” to be used against conservatives. This riff went on for some time, and included a chunk devoted to Trump’s impeachment and the Mueller investigation, which King argued were products of the same conspiracy that had felled him, who had only wondered, apparently is his argument, how the term “white nationalist” suddenly became pejorative and synonymous with racism in 2015.
King did not offer the pre-2015 non-pejorative definition that he claims to have been raised with.
King wound up his presentation by introducing a resolution which he claimed proves “The New York Times could not be right, and I could not be wrong” about the comments that got him in trouble.
Watch the entire riveting speech above via C-Span.
