For many months on end now, day in and day out, “Team King” has been posting conservative memes on Congressman Steve King’s official Facebook campaign page to own the libs. Here’s our first look at what got the right-wingers ROFLing last week.
ANOTHER CIVIL WAR
On Saturday, King’s page posted a since-deleted meme mocking transgender people and joking about a second Civil War the congressman would apparently wage against his own state. The LOLs went viral: “Rep. Steve King Shares Violent Civil War Meme,” Slate wrote, joining dozens of other prominent news sites drawing attention to the post.
Many of the articles incorrectly suggested that King himself posted the meme, something he reluctantly addressed at a Tuesday town hall in Algona. As with his other recent town halls, reporters weren’t allowed to ask questions, but at this one, CNN did anyway. King claimed he wasn’t aware the meme had been posted until Monday morning, adding that no one except for the national media cared about it. “Do you look at that page?” a constituent challenged him. “I don’t manage that Facebook page,” King explained. “Does your son?” someone asked, referring to the congressman’s campaign manager, Jeff King. He ignored the question.
It wasn’t the first time the page deleted a meme. Last year on April 20 — Hitler’s birthday — Team King mocked America’s youth by comparing a cartoonish selfie of a boy alongside a photo of a Nazi soldier posing on a motorcycle.
TUCKER CARLSON
After the liberal opposition-research group Media Matters unearthed a trove of racist and sexist comments made by Tucker Carlson, King’s Facebook page came to the embattled Fox News host’s defense on March 12 as he was shedding advertisers over the controversy. The post came just days after chat logs leaked by the media collective Unicorn Riot revealed that one of King’s white nationalist supporters suggested he run on a future presidential ticket with Carlson. The rhetoric of both men has borrowed directly from white nationalists.
ENVIRONMENTALISM
King is a longtime climate change denier — a leading thinker on the topic, if you ask Spencer Daily Reporter editor Randy Cauthron. In 2013, the congressman griped that scientists had nothing good to say about a warming climate. “We’d probably grow a little more corn,” he told supporters then.
SUCKS TO BE A DEM
As of this month, there are nearly 190,000 active registered Republican voters in King’s 4th District. But there are also about 120,000 active Democratic voters, a demographic whose intelligence the congressman’s Facebook page routinely insults.
BACK IN ‘NAM
Ever since Bernie Sanders announced his 2020 presidential campaign, King’s page has regularly ridiculed him as a communist (he’s actually a democratic socialist and running for president, like last time, as a Democrat). Team King posted the meme below, apparently unconcerned that the congressman himself evaded the Vietnam draft. He received three deferments, attending Northwest Missouri State University over that period until his senior year in 1970, when he said he left to work on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.
