This election cycle appears to be bringing out the absolute worst in people who weren’t very good humans to begin with. There’s a white supremacist openly running for office, racism and xenophobia have become okay again (being totally honest, they never stopped being okay in America) — so much so that even sitting congresscritters are advocating it on national TV.
What congress creature could be so bold as to openly advocate for white supremacism? Why, none other than the representative for the 4th Congressional District of Iowa, Rep. Steve King, who announced on an MSNBC panel that white people have made more “contributions” to civilization than any other “subgroup.”
You remember him, right? He’s the guy that had a hissy fit and walked out of the State of the Union address, who announced the Mexican immigrants had massive cantaloupe calves loaded with drugs and defended Trump’s comment that they were all rapists, and claimed that gay marriage would lead to people marrying their lawnmower.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone, then, that this is the guy floating white supremacism on live TV.
Contributions to Civilization
If you want a relatively consistent rule for world history, almost anything that was invented in Europe up to about 1600 was invented in China, India, or the Middle East 200 to 300 years earlier.
Nobody tell this to Representative Steve King of Iowa, though. I’m not sure he’d be interested in hearing it. Especially not considering that he sincerely suggested today that the west has done more for “civilization” than any other “subgroup” on the planet.
King made the claim today while sitting in on an MSNBC panel, awaiting Trump’s speech at the Republican convention in Cleveland. Specifically, he said that:
I’d ask you go back through history and figure out where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you’re talking about? Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?
When asked by the host if he meant white people, King stammered and answered:
Than Western Civilization. It’s rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the United States of America, and every place where the footprint of Christianity has settled the world. That’s all of Western Civilization.
That’s a funny definition of “Western Civilization,” since many people didn’t consider Eastern Europe and the Slavs to be westerners until just recently. Germany, in particular, didn’t even see them as human and drafted a plan to remove them and give their land to ethnic Germans. This was called Lebensraum. You might have heard of it, and if you haven’t heard of it, I can guarantee you’re familiar with it’s most vocal fan base.
Western civilization doesn’t really exist as a uniform concept; it’s a synonym for “European.” And European isn’t even a cohesive identity — just look at the slow motion collapse of the European Union. Nationalists are tearing it apart at the seams, destroying it like they do everything else.
Besides, I guess the Persian Empire doesn’t exist in his world.
King, like the rest of the mouth-breathers who make this claim, have the intellectual curiosity of a potted plant. They’re a product of our ghastly Euro-centric education system, no doubt, but the willful ignorance is what makes them so damn frustrating to listen to — and what makes jaw-dropping stuff like this possible.
Watch Rep. King make the claim below:
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