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It's the party, the GOP. McConnell gave America Trump's SCOTUS. The Heritage Foundation gave America political
Trump. Trump's lie of being an outsider has been one of his most disingenuous, dangerous and successful lies.
"SPECULATION: The horrible thing is the scrotus is cherry picking cases and it is obvious."
Project 2025: How Trump Win Would Imperil Worker Organizing Gains Under Biden's NLRB
""B402, H/t sortagreen -- Project 2025 poses threat to democracy
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174633177"
It's an evolutionary process. Erosion .. to six years ago ..
Meet the American congressman who’s a champion of European neo-Nazis
Steve King of Iowa shows that the Republican racism problem didn’t start with Donald Trump.
By Mehdi Hasan
(Photo By Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Did you know that neo-Nazis have a champion in the United States Congress? Meet the eight-term Republican congressman Steve King of Iowa. In June, King retweeted self-described “Nazi sympathiser” Mark Collett, a former British National Party official, who had said: “65 per cent of Italians under the age of 35 now oppose mass immigration. Europe is waking up…” The congressman, in his retweet, added an ominous question of his own: “Europe is waking up… Will America… in time?”
King later claimed that he had been unaware of Collett’s neo-Nazi views but refused to apologise for the retweet – and has yet to delete it. Then again, why would he? The congressman has repeatedly declined to deny he is a white nationalist or white supremacist – despite being lauded both by the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, which described the Iowa representative as “King Steve”; as “basically an open white nationalist” and “our guy”.
King also has a long history of jaw-dropping remarks. In June, he told Breitbart Radio that Somali-American Muslims should be prevented from working in meat-packing plants in Iowa because, he claimed, they want pork eaters to “go to hell”. Three months earlier, he told CNN he wanted “an America that’s just so homogeneous that we look a lot the same”. And, in 2016, King told MSNBC that white people have contributed more to civilisation than “any other subgroup of people”.
These are not so much dog whistles as sirens. The modern Republican Party does not lack for xenophobes or Islamophobes, but what makes King stand out is his refusal to mask his bigotry. In recent years, the leaders of Europe’s far-right parties have been able to count on the public support of this high-profile, outspoken member of the US Congress. In September 2016, when the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party was standing in the German regional elections, King tweeted a picture of himself with then AfD leader Frauke Petry – who has called for the shooting of “illegal” immigrants – with the message: “Wishing you successful vote. Cultural suicide by demographic transformation must end.” In February 2017, ahead of the French presidential election, King tweeted a picture of himself with the National Front leader, Marine Le Pen, hailing their “shared values”.
In March 2017, three days before the Dutch parliamentary elections, King endorsed the anti-Muslim Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who has called Moroccan migrants “scum”. “Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny,” tweeted the congressman. “We can’t restore our civilisation with somebody else’s babies.”
[Insert: Att: B402 - Understanding Today’s Populism as Ethnic Nationalism
"Far-Right Extremism Is a Global Problem
[...]We are in a populist moment .. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01419870.2017.1294700?scroll=top&needAccess=true . Populists are making startling gains in support and access to power across the West. The election of Donald Trump and the vote for Brexit in 2016 signalled the arrival of this new reality. The success of Trump and his European compatriots is particularly striking because they bucked the trend: while Europe has long had populist radical-right parties, they were largely relegated to the margins .. https://ejpr.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1475-6765.2012.02065.x?casa_token=wohmx4o6qxIAAAAA%3Ay-qbYbF1lHPNyHHQLxKRsZOzZODniKT0WKhAp7YBIb3vCuGO7RmuvVsZbdaKa330fOXQn47G4z6zm0U .. and kept far from government. Today, one in four Europeans vote for a populist party and more than 170 million Europeans .. https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2018/nov/20/revealed-one-in-four-europeans-vote-populist ll are governed by a cabinet that has a populist member.
P - It is almost becoming rote to note and lament this trend. If it weren’t such a serious problem, it would be tempting to turn our attention to other pressing matters. But the reality is that today’s populism represents an existential threat to our liberal democracy. This is because, in most cases, populism is underpinned by a virulent ethnic nationalism.
[...] What is more surprising is that a close reading of all of Trump’s tweets over the 2016 campaign shows that these are not mere utterances or occasional slips: ethnic nationalism is the foundation of Donald Trump’s political strategy. It was by far the most common theme in his 2016 Twitter campaign (see Figure one).
[...] Throughout his campaign, Trump presented himself as the protector of the majority group in America – his so-called silent majority – against the threat of outsiders. He followed a long-used practice of identifying those that do not fit the mould of “true” Americans. His main targets were Mexican migrants, Muslims and political elites, presenting these groups as threats to the survival and interests of the white majority. Indeed, his entire campaign was set up as an argument that America needed to rid itself of these groups to return to glory – to make America great again. The centrality of this idea to his campaign strategy is clear when looking at his favoured topics: about 2000 tweets contained overt ethno-nationalist messages, whereas he tweeted about core policy issues like healthcare, taxes and the Supreme Court only 59, 32 and 12 times, respectively.
P - Trump did regularly rail against the elites and the establishment (over 500 times on Twitter). He also liked to attack people, something he continued throughout his presidency. Interestingly, though, he often combined populist and ethnic nationalist themes. He would say that the establishment needed to be overthrown to return power to the majority, and that elites were soft on threats like illegal immigration and terrorism. In short: Trump’s populism was underpinned by ethnic nationalism. His tweets show that his “real” America is white, European and Christian.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174490843]
Somebody else’s babies? This is the narrative of white nationalism, plain and simple. It is a core component of the “white genocide” conspiracy theory popularised on far-right blogs and online forums, which says a combination of mass immigration, inter-marriage, low fertility rates and abortion are destroying the West.
So, why hasn’t King been drummed out of the Republican Party? Which other mainstream conservative political party in the West would tolerate this kind of noxious rhetoric and bigoted behaviour from one of its elected members? In July, HuffPost reporter Christopher Mathias asked the National Republican Congressional Committee, the Republican National Committee, the Republican governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, and the Republican senator Ted Cruz – whose presidential campaign King co-chaired in 2016 – to comment on the Iowa congressman retweeting a neo-Nazi.
Their response? Radio silence. Mathias also reminded readers of the speaker Paul Ryan’s craven statement on King’s earlier racist tweet about “somebody else’s babies” in 2017: “I’d like to think he misspoke.”
The GOP’s refusal to condemn or censure King, who chairs the House’s judiciary committee’s subcommittee on the constitution and civil justice, poses a real danger to minority communities in the US. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of US hate groups has soared by 20 per cent since 2014, with neo-Nazi groups seeing the biggest increase of all. The words of King, like Trump, encourage and embolden such groups.
Yet King, unlike Trump, has been a fixture both in the conservative movement and in national politics since his election to Congress 16 years ago. He was vice-chair of the House judiciary committee’s immigration subcommittee back when Trump was hosting beauty pageants and reality TV shows. He is, therefore, a stark and toxic reminder that the Republican Party’s white nationalism problem did not begin with Trump. His presidency is a symptom, not a cause, of the GOP’s decades-long normalisation of racism and bigotry.
There may, however, be a bright spot on the horizon: five weeks out from the November midterms, King is facing a stiff challenge from his Democratic opponent, JD Scholten, a former professional baseball player. A recent poll showed the Republican incumbent with only a 6 point lead in a state where Trump trounced Hillary Clinton in 2016 by more than 10 points.
So will Iowa Republican voters turn a blind eye to King’s far-right, neo-Nazi-aligned views and send him back to Congress for a ninth term? Will his Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill continue to shrug their shoulders and allow him to continue chairing House subcommittees? If so, Steve King will be undeniable evidence that the modern Republican Party has much, much more than Donald Trump to answer for. l
Mehdi Hasan is a writer and broadcaster based in Washington, DC and a New Statesman contributing editor
https://www.newstatesman.com/world/2018/10/meet-american-congressman-who-s-champion-european-neo-nazis
One glimmer of hope.
Steve King, House Republican With a History of Racist Remarks, Loses Primary
Mr. King, one of the nation’s most divisive elected officials, saw his power in Congress curtailed last year after he questioned why white supremacy was considered offensive.
Representative Steve King of Iowa has long made racist remarks about immigrants, and Republicans had worried before the primary election on Tuesday that he was an electoral liability. Hilary Swift for The New York Times
By Trip Gabriel
June 3, 2020
Representative Steve King of Iowa, the nine-term Republican with a history of racist comments who only recently became a party pariah, lost his bid for renomination early Wednesday, one of the biggest defeats of the 2020 primary season in any state.
Mr. King was defeated by Randy Feenstra, a state senator, who had the backing of mainstream state and national Republicans who found Mr. King an embarrassment and, crucially, a threat to a safe Republican seat if he were on the ballot in November.
[...]
In interviews over the years, voters in Iowa’s most conservative region downplayed Mr. King’s incendiary comments. His loss after 18 years in office was mainly because opponents painted him as ineffective after party leaders in Congress stripped him of his committee assignments last year.
That move came after comments that Mr. King made in an interview with The New York Times in 2019, in which he asked, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?”
The remarks caused an uproar. Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader, told Mr. King to “find another line of work.”
Instead, Mr. King clung to his seat, claiming to be the victim of Republican insiders and of the news media.
Now Mr. Feenstra, a political and social conservative in a deep-red district in northwest Iowa, is the odds-on favorite to hold the seat against J.D. Scholten, who nearly defeated Mr. King two years ago and ran unopposed in the Democratic primary.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/us/politics/steve-king-iowa-primary.html
IPR News
Feenstra Defeats Scholten In Iowa's 4th Congressional District
Iowa Public Radio | By Katie Peikes
Published November 4, 2020 at 2:17 AM CST
Sen. Randy Feenstra will be headed to the U.S. Capitol in January to represent Iowa's 4th District. John Pemble /IPR file
https://www.iowapublicradio.org/ipr-news/2020-11-04/feenstra-defeats-scholten-in-iowas-4th-congressional-district
Trump. Trump's lie of being an outsider has been one of his most disingenuous, dangerous and successful lies.
"SPECULATION: The horrible thing is the scrotus is cherry picking cases and it is obvious."
Project 2025: How Trump Win Would Imperil Worker Organizing Gains Under Biden's NLRB
""B402, H/t sortagreen -- Project 2025 poses threat to democracy
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174633177"
It's an evolutionary process. Erosion .. to six years ago ..
Meet the American congressman who’s a champion of European neo-Nazis
Steve King of Iowa shows that the Republican racism problem didn’t start with Donald Trump.
By Mehdi Hasan
(Photo By Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Did you know that neo-Nazis have a champion in the United States Congress? Meet the eight-term Republican congressman Steve King of Iowa. In June, King retweeted self-described “Nazi sympathiser” Mark Collett, a former British National Party official, who had said: “65 per cent of Italians under the age of 35 now oppose mass immigration. Europe is waking up…” The congressman, in his retweet, added an ominous question of his own: “Europe is waking up… Will America… in time?”
King later claimed that he had been unaware of Collett’s neo-Nazi views but refused to apologise for the retweet – and has yet to delete it. Then again, why would he? The congressman has repeatedly declined to deny he is a white nationalist or white supremacist – despite being lauded both by the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, which described the Iowa representative as “King Steve”; as “basically an open white nationalist” and “our guy”.
King also has a long history of jaw-dropping remarks. In June, he told Breitbart Radio that Somali-American Muslims should be prevented from working in meat-packing plants in Iowa because, he claimed, they want pork eaters to “go to hell”. Three months earlier, he told CNN he wanted “an America that’s just so homogeneous that we look a lot the same”. And, in 2016, King told MSNBC that white people have contributed more to civilisation than “any other subgroup of people”.
These are not so much dog whistles as sirens. The modern Republican Party does not lack for xenophobes or Islamophobes, but what makes King stand out is his refusal to mask his bigotry. In recent years, the leaders of Europe’s far-right parties have been able to count on the public support of this high-profile, outspoken member of the US Congress. In September 2016, when the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party was standing in the German regional elections, King tweeted a picture of himself with then AfD leader Frauke Petry – who has called for the shooting of “illegal” immigrants – with the message: “Wishing you successful vote. Cultural suicide by demographic transformation must end.” In February 2017, ahead of the French presidential election, King tweeted a picture of himself with the National Front leader, Marine Le Pen, hailing their “shared values”.
In March 2017, three days before the Dutch parliamentary elections, King endorsed the anti-Muslim Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who has called Moroccan migrants “scum”. “Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny,” tweeted the congressman. “We can’t restore our civilisation with somebody else’s babies.”
[Insert: Att: B402 - Understanding Today’s Populism as Ethnic Nationalism
"Far-Right Extremism Is a Global Problem
[...]We are in a populist moment .. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01419870.2017.1294700?scroll=top&needAccess=true . Populists are making startling gains in support and access to power across the West. The election of Donald Trump and the vote for Brexit in 2016 signalled the arrival of this new reality. The success of Trump and his European compatriots is particularly striking because they bucked the trend: while Europe has long had populist radical-right parties, they were largely relegated to the margins .. https://ejpr.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1475-6765.2012.02065.x?casa_token=wohmx4o6qxIAAAAA%3Ay-qbYbF1lHPNyHHQLxKRsZOzZODniKT0WKhAp7YBIb3vCuGO7RmuvVsZbdaKa330fOXQn47G4z6zm0U .. and kept far from government. Today, one in four Europeans vote for a populist party and more than 170 million Europeans .. https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2018/nov/20/revealed-one-in-four-europeans-vote-populist ll are governed by a cabinet that has a populist member.
P - It is almost becoming rote to note and lament this trend. If it weren’t such a serious problem, it would be tempting to turn our attention to other pressing matters. But the reality is that today’s populism represents an existential threat to our liberal democracy. This is because, in most cases, populism is underpinned by a virulent ethnic nationalism.
[...] What is more surprising is that a close reading of all of Trump’s tweets over the 2016 campaign shows that these are not mere utterances or occasional slips: ethnic nationalism is the foundation of Donald Trump’s political strategy. It was by far the most common theme in his 2016 Twitter campaign (see Figure one).
[...] Throughout his campaign, Trump presented himself as the protector of the majority group in America – his so-called silent majority – against the threat of outsiders. He followed a long-used practice of identifying those that do not fit the mould of “true” Americans. His main targets were Mexican migrants, Muslims and political elites, presenting these groups as threats to the survival and interests of the white majority. Indeed, his entire campaign was set up as an argument that America needed to rid itself of these groups to return to glory – to make America great again. The centrality of this idea to his campaign strategy is clear when looking at his favoured topics: about 2000 tweets contained overt ethno-nationalist messages, whereas he tweeted about core policy issues like healthcare, taxes and the Supreme Court only 59, 32 and 12 times, respectively.
P - Trump did regularly rail against the elites and the establishment (over 500 times on Twitter). He also liked to attack people, something he continued throughout his presidency. Interestingly, though, he often combined populist and ethnic nationalist themes. He would say that the establishment needed to be overthrown to return power to the majority, and that elites were soft on threats like illegal immigration and terrorism. In short: Trump’s populism was underpinned by ethnic nationalism. His tweets show that his “real” America is white, European and Christian.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174490843]
Somebody else’s babies? This is the narrative of white nationalism, plain and simple. It is a core component of the “white genocide” conspiracy theory popularised on far-right blogs and online forums, which says a combination of mass immigration, inter-marriage, low fertility rates and abortion are destroying the West.
So, why hasn’t King been drummed out of the Republican Party? Which other mainstream conservative political party in the West would tolerate this kind of noxious rhetoric and bigoted behaviour from one of its elected members? In July, HuffPost reporter Christopher Mathias asked the National Republican Congressional Committee, the Republican National Committee, the Republican governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, and the Republican senator Ted Cruz – whose presidential campaign King co-chaired in 2016 – to comment on the Iowa congressman retweeting a neo-Nazi.
Their response? Radio silence. Mathias also reminded readers of the speaker Paul Ryan’s craven statement on King’s earlier racist tweet about “somebody else’s babies” in 2017: “I’d like to think he misspoke.”
The GOP’s refusal to condemn or censure King, who chairs the House’s judiciary committee’s subcommittee on the constitution and civil justice, poses a real danger to minority communities in the US. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of US hate groups has soared by 20 per cent since 2014, with neo-Nazi groups seeing the biggest increase of all. The words of King, like Trump, encourage and embolden such groups.
Yet King, unlike Trump, has been a fixture both in the conservative movement and in national politics since his election to Congress 16 years ago. He was vice-chair of the House judiciary committee’s immigration subcommittee back when Trump was hosting beauty pageants and reality TV shows. He is, therefore, a stark and toxic reminder that the Republican Party’s white nationalism problem did not begin with Trump. His presidency is a symptom, not a cause, of the GOP’s decades-long normalisation of racism and bigotry.
There may, however, be a bright spot on the horizon: five weeks out from the November midterms, King is facing a stiff challenge from his Democratic opponent, JD Scholten, a former professional baseball player. A recent poll showed the Republican incumbent with only a 6 point lead in a state where Trump trounced Hillary Clinton in 2016 by more than 10 points.
So will Iowa Republican voters turn a blind eye to King’s far-right, neo-Nazi-aligned views and send him back to Congress for a ninth term? Will his Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill continue to shrug their shoulders and allow him to continue chairing House subcommittees? If so, Steve King will be undeniable evidence that the modern Republican Party has much, much more than Donald Trump to answer for. l
Mehdi Hasan is a writer and broadcaster based in Washington, DC and a New Statesman contributing editor
https://www.newstatesman.com/world/2018/10/meet-american-congressman-who-s-champion-european-neo-nazis
One glimmer of hope.
Steve King, House Republican With a History of Racist Remarks, Loses Primary
Mr. King, one of the nation’s most divisive elected officials, saw his power in Congress curtailed last year after he questioned why white supremacy was considered offensive.
Representative Steve King of Iowa has long made racist remarks about immigrants, and Republicans had worried before the primary election on Tuesday that he was an electoral liability. Hilary Swift for The New York Times
By Trip Gabriel
June 3, 2020
Representative Steve King of Iowa, the nine-term Republican with a history of racist comments who only recently became a party pariah, lost his bid for renomination early Wednesday, one of the biggest defeats of the 2020 primary season in any state.
Mr. King was defeated by Randy Feenstra, a state senator, who had the backing of mainstream state and national Republicans who found Mr. King an embarrassment and, crucially, a threat to a safe Republican seat if he were on the ballot in November.
[...]
In interviews over the years, voters in Iowa’s most conservative region downplayed Mr. King’s incendiary comments. His loss after 18 years in office was mainly because opponents painted him as ineffective after party leaders in Congress stripped him of his committee assignments last year.
That move came after comments that Mr. King made in an interview with The New York Times in 2019, in which he asked, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?”
The remarks caused an uproar. Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader, told Mr. King to “find another line of work.”
Instead, Mr. King clung to his seat, claiming to be the victim of Republican insiders and of the news media.
Now Mr. Feenstra, a political and social conservative in a deep-red district in northwest Iowa, is the odds-on favorite to hold the seat against J.D. Scholten, who nearly defeated Mr. King two years ago and ran unopposed in the Democratic primary.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/us/politics/steve-king-iowa-primary.html
IPR News
Feenstra Defeats Scholten In Iowa's 4th Congressional District
Iowa Public Radio | By Katie Peikes
Published November 4, 2020 at 2:17 AM CST
Sen. Randy Feenstra will be headed to the U.S. Capitol in January to represent Iowa's 4th District. John Pemble /IPR file
https://www.iowapublicradio.org/ipr-news/2020-11-04/feenstra-defeats-scholten-in-iowas-4th-congressional-district
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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