Whenever you see a headline reporting that a House Republican proudly retweeted a European neo-Nazi, the odds are nine in ten it will be Iowa Rep. Steve King. This time, King urgently retweeted the anti-immigrant panic of British neo-Nazi Mark Collett, adding his own two cents: “Europe is waking up...Will America...in time?”
To repeat, Mark Collett is a notorious British neo-Nazi. Not just a racist or a white supremacist, but an actual Hitler-praising Nazi admirer. And why exactly Collett is cropping up in Steve King's Twitter feed is, at this point, barely a mystery. King has a long, long history of racist statements and of endorsing the talking points of white nationalists, and he is not shy about publicizing their opinions and their efforts. The day before his retweet of the neo-Nazi he alarmingly linked to a far-right website complaining that the organizers of a Swedish soccer tournament were not serving pork, bleating "Sweden has capitulated to halal :-(" In a tweet before that one, he admiringly directed his constituents to the ravings of infamous Dutch white nationalist Geert Wilders—one penned by the ultra-radical extremist Robert Spencer, no less.
"Free Tommy Robinson!", King demanded in that tweet, referring to yet another British extremist currently serving prison time for violating a British court order. Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, has been arrested repeatedly for violence and, just to cap things off, pleaded guilty in 2012 to illegally entering the United States by using somebody else's passport. Why did he have to sneak into the US illegally? He had been barred from the US because of drug charges.
That's right. Steve King interrupted his tirades against criminal "illegal immigrants" to demand that a criminal illegal immigrant who entered our country with fake paperwork and had a bevy of prior convictions be released from a British prison—and then he blasted his fellow Republicans for ignoring the "Rule of Law" in offering “amnesty” to immigrants in the very next tweet. The man's as dumb as a post; two posts side-by side could probably best him in a game of checkers.
King flatly refuses to say whether he considers himself to be a white nationalist, and the Huffington Post notes this at length, but that's irrelevant. If a man tirelessly promotes to his constituents links to and praise for white nationalists, neo-Nazis and hate group leaders, that makes Rep. Steve King a white nationalist. There's no goddamn debate to be had over that, the man promotes these figures incessantly.
It's bizarre to think that we may be getting to the point where the Southern Poverty Law Center may need to designate individual Republican congressional offices as extremist hate groups, but we are there. Steve King is that guy. In his capacity as congressman and using the tools of his office, the man endorses swastika-wavers, rails against immigrants as melon-calved drug mules, keeps a symbol of white nationalism prominently featured on his desk and demands the rule of law be waived when it comes to his fellow conspiracy-minded racist dimwits.
Rep. Steve King, hate group leader. Location: Iowa. Ideology: Neo-Nazi, apparently.