The Iowa Democratic Party is calling on the Gov. Kim Reynolds to remove GOP Rep. Steve King from her campaign staff after he tweeted out a link from a fringe anti-immigrant website with a caption that included the words, “Diversity is not our strength.”
King included in the tweet a quote from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who said, “Mixing cultures will not lead to a higher quality of life but a lower one.”
Diversity is not our strength. Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban, “Mixing cultures will not lead to a higher quality of life but a lower one.” https://t.co/ZlMXzcc87w
— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) December 8, 2017
In a follow-up tweet, King said, “Assimilation has become a dirty word to the multiculturalist Left. Assimilation, not diversity, is our American strength.”
King is no stranger to making inflammatory comments. But the Friday tweet marks a sharp uptick in his nationalist rhetoric. Linking to such a detestable website while espousing principles so antithetical to American ideals shows that King is willing to cross the boundary into European-style nationalism, regurgitating the same rhetoric that emanates from extremist far-right groups that promote Western European identity and anti-immigration.
Governor Reynolds needs to do the right thing for the people of Iowa and immediately remove Steve King from her campaign committee #IApolitics https://t.co/K9olXdDEm2
— Iowa Democrats (@iowademocrats) December 8, 2017
As the Des Moines Register points out, in past tweets King has expressed support for a far-right anti-immigrant Dutch politician, saying, “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”
Mexicans are another favorite target of King’s. In September of this year, he attacked DREAM Act recipients on Breitbart News Radio, suggesting that they’d be better utilized if the U.S. sent them back to their home countries to teach them how a “generally corrupt-free society” works.
“I’m making this point that if we shut off the DACA program, and there are 800,000 of them in the United States today, they would deploy … back to their home territories, most likely,” King said. “And they would go back there with a U.S. taxpayer-funded education, many of them the college education, they will have top-notch English skills, they would understand how a free-enterprise economy works, how a generally corrupt-free society, first world works.”
Featured image via screen grab (YouTube)
