Scroll down for a list of past examples of the words “fucking” and “bitch” in the Congressional Record.
Since his humiliating primary defeat to state Senator Randy Feenstra in early June, ostracized Congressman Steve King has remained true to himself, reminding his followers that George Soros is the puppet master, comparing Black Lives Matter protesters to Nazis, boosting Diamond and Silk to remind us that he’s got Black friends, defending the Confederate flag against the woke mob, and lashing out at former allies including Liz Cheney and Joni Ernst for abandoning him over the #FakeNews hit piece that ruined him.
King, however, switched his focus from white nationalism to men’s rights activism Saturday night in a tweet criticizing New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s powerful floor speech Thursday in which she condemned her colleague Ted Yoho, a Florida Republican, for calling her a “fucking bitch” within earshot of reporters. “A.O.C. Unleashes a Viral Condemnation of Sexism in Congress,” a New York Times headline proclaimed.
It was no surprise that King saw things differently than the newspaper that did him in by quoting his own words defending white supremacy in January 2019. “Two very offensive words(f…b…), spoken by @AOC on the floor of the U.S. House, had NEVER before been uttered into the now soiled Congressional record,” he sneered, adding an imprecise reference to The Squad, a collective nickname for Ocasio-Cortez and three other women from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party elected to Congress in 2018. “AOC did not hear @TedYoho say them but it took an Act of Congress to vent the QuadSquad’s misandry.”
In October 2018, amid escalating local and national scrutiny over his longtime associations with white nationalism and repeated promotion of its adherents, King announced, “I will retweet the devil if the devil tweets, ‘I Love Jesus.’ It’s the message, not the messenger.”
Only now, the message was AOC’s vulgar quotation, employed for the purpose of smearing a conservative rival as a misogynist — never mind the messengers: Yoho, the source of the vulgarity, and the reporters who heard him utter it. Like King before him, Yoho was on his way to getting canceled (although instead of comparing himself to Jesus after losing his committee assignments, Yoho was booted from his position on the board of a Christian charity).
Much like the “fact-check document” his staffers prepared in a feeble attempt to exonerate him on charges of white nationalism, though, King’s tweet was not well-researched. In fact, the word “fucking” has previously been entered in the Congressional Record three times, according to a quick search of its online database. Here’s a look:
July 21, 1998: “Free Live Fucking, Now With Sound.”
Speaking in favor of an “Internet filtering amendment” intended to protect children against obscene content online, Senator Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat, submitted several letters she’d received from concerned citizens who supported her efforts. One of the letters recounted a harrowing incident in which the author’s 15-year-old daughter mistakenly visited the wrong website while working on a school assignment:
She was shocked, stunned, and nauseated at the vile explicit pictures that instantly were presented on the screen. Enclosed are black and white print outs. As you can see the first shows anal intercourse with the text, “Free Live Fucking, Now With Sound.” The second is a gynecological close-up with the text, “hot hole, enter free.” This brought our traumatized daughter running out of the room in tears.
June 9, 2015: “Don’t make me fucking run around here with thirty pounds of goddamn gear in the sun because you want to screw around out here.”
This language was added to the Congressional Record thanks to the Atlantic article by journalist Yoni Appelbaum in which it appears. Writing about the country’s history of racially segregated public swimming pools, Appelbaum had quoted the words a police corporal from McKinley, Texas, barked at onlookers before he violently apprehended a 15-year-old Black girl wearing a swimsuit in a viral video that sparked widespread outrage. The article was submitted to the Congressional Record by Sheila Jackson Lee, an African-American representative from Texas.
October 5, 2018: “die, you fucking cunt.”
This quote appeared in an eyewitness statement made by Keith Koegler, a friend of Christine Blasey Ford’s, in support of her testimony against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Koegler was citing an example of the “social media attacks” Ford had endured since speaking out. His statement was submitted to the Congressional Record by Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, in part to protest the lack of a more thorough FBI investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct leveled against Kavanaugh, on the day before his nomination was confirmed.
With 93 hits dating back to 1989, the word “bitch” appears far more frequently than “fucking” in the Congressional Record. Here’s a sampling:
June 21, 1989: “If anybody who knows anything about this ever opens his mouth to any Outsider about it, then the rest of us are going to kill him just as dead as we killed those three sons of bitches tonight.”
The earliest example available from the record’s online database comes via an excerpt from Alabama journalist William Bradfore Huie’s book Three Lives for Mississippi, which is about the abduction and murder of three civil rights activists in the mid-1960s. The above quote was attributed to one of their killers. Federal authorities intervened after the state of Mississippi refused to prosecute the case, but it wasn’t until four decades later that a former Klansman was convicted of manslaughter over it. The book excerpt was submitted by the late New York Democrat Major Owens.
December 8, 2006: “White men (and women, and some Black men) on and off Capitol Hill are eager to vilify and diminish McKinney, to call her a ‘bitch,’ a ‘racist,’ ‘crazy’ and all manner of epithets.”
Cynthia McKinney, a Black woman and Democrat who at the time represented Georgia in the lower chamber, submitted an article about herself that was published by the online news magazine Black Commentator and included this line. Titled “The McKinney Affair: Rampaging Racism and a Cowardly Caucus,” the article criticized her party’s leadership for failing to adequately address the racist and sexist vitriol directed at her and other Black women in similar positions.
May 2, 2017: “Who has this bitch’s pictures, I want to blast them all over.”
This comment, from a private Facebook group called Marines United, was cited in testimony given by Lance Corporal Marisa Woytek about sexism she faced in the Marine Corps. The testimony was submitted to the Congressional Record by Annie Kuster, a Democratic representative from New Hampshire, as part of a related probe of the widespread and longstanding misogyny within the military branch.
In King’s defense, the exact phrase “fucking bitch” had never been entered into the record before AOC dared to record her hatred of men for the ages by quoting verbatim the sexist outburst directed at her by a male colleague in front of reporters. Keep speaking your truth, sir.
