Iowa Rep. Steve King, well-known for his bigoted views, retweeted a well-known British neo-Nazi on Tuesday.
“Europe is waking up… Will America… in time?” King said in his retweet of the neo-Nazi’s celebration of rising anti-immigrant sentiment in Italy.
The neo-Nazi, Mark Collett, uses his platform as a well-known figure of the far right to spread the message that immigrants, particularly those from Africa and the Middle East, are violent, greedy, ungrateful, and predatory.
According to HuffPost, Collett was once the youth leader of the British National Party, an extreme far-right party, and he once said that AIDS is a “friendly disease because blacks, drug users, and gays have it.” He has also espoused anti-Semitic beliefs and appeared frequently on far-right and white nationalist podcasts. In his Twitter feed, he talks about white genocide, a popular concept among white supremacists, and the “price of multiculturalism.”
King has appeared to endorse white nationalist beliefs before. In 2016, King, tired of “this whole ‘white people’ business,” asserted on MSNBC that of any “subgroup of people,” white people have contributed the most to civilization. In 2017, he tweeted that “we can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” And while he never mentioned race explicitly in his defense of the tweet later on CNN, his argument that “we need to get our birth rates up or Europe will be entirely transformed” certainly smacks of a kind of cultural nationalism rooted in the belief that nonwhite immigrants are inferior.
In his politics, King has been strict on immigration issues, even celebrating the deportation of a Dreamer protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, a group popular even among conservatives.
In the past, King has also promoted birtherism, said the U.S should not have to apologize for slavery, and said most undocumented immigrants were “drug mules” with “calves the size of cantaloupes.”
