Steve King Retweets Writer Calling Him a White Nationalist

By
Gavin Aronsen
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Steve King poses with the German nationalist politician Frauke Petry, center, and far-right Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders. Photo: Twitter

Just a week after addressing the Story County GOP’s sixth annual Judge Joseph Story Dinner fundraiser in Ames, where he again called Vladimir Putin a better leader than Barack Obama, Congressman Steve King took to Twitter before the first official debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to offer his analysis of the big event:

Hours later, King struck again, retweeting Dan Brooks, a writer from Missoula, Montana, who tweeted at King that he “embarrasses my home state and its tradition of decency,” adding, “May his grandchildren be brown and educated.” He also quoted an earlier tweet of King’s with a photo of the lawmaker posing next to a pair of far-right European nationalists, Geert Wilders, an anti-Islam Dutch lawmaker who once went on trial for allegedly inciting hatred against Moroccans; and Frauke Petry, a German anti-immigrant politician who’s a fan of Trump and has been given the nickname “Adolfina”:

kingrt It didn’t take long for Brooks to notice:

King, who in recent months has called the decision to replace slaveowner Andrew Jackson with abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill “racist” and “sexist,” suggested at the Republican National Convention that white people had contributed more to the world than any other “subgroup,” drawn criticism for displaying a Confederate flag on his office desk, and said NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s protests against police brutality were “sympathetic to ISIS,” has been embracing his nationalism more than that lately on Twitter. King recently retweeted an image from the anti-European Union Voice of Europe account featuring anti-Clinton quotes from Wilders, right-wing British populist Nigel Farage, anti-migrant Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban, and French nationalist leader Marine Le Pen:

And last month in a tweet, King attacked Clinton for criticizing the racist alt-right movement that has come to prominence during Trump’s bid for the presidency:

Gavin Aronsen
Gavin Aronsen
Gavin Aronsen is an editor and reporter for and founding member of the Iowa Informer. He previously worked as a city reporter for the Ames Tribune, research assistant to investigative journalist Wayne Barrett at the Village Voice, and in various roles at Mother Jones, where his work contributed to a National Magazine Award nomination for the magazine's digital media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Email: garonsen [at] iowainformer [dot] com.

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