Diminutive conservative opinion-haver Ben Shapiro is shocked—shocked, I tell you!—to discover that avowed white nationalist Rep. Steve King (R-Berlin, 1939) is, in fact, extremely racist after all.
In an update on Thursday to a nearly two year old blog post on his Daily Wire website, Shapiro admits that his 600+ word defense of King’s extremely racist 2017 tweet about being unable to “restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies” was, perhaps, a little too generous to the extraordinarily bigoted congressman. The mea culpa comes the same day King—who proudly displayed a Confederate flag on his desk, even though he’s from fucking Iowa—publicly mused about how gosh darned unfair it is that terms like “white nationalist” and “white supremacist” are suddenly “offensive.”
The update reads:
On January 10, 2019, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) reportedly stated, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” In light of those statements, this article gave far too generous an interpretation of King’s words. As I stated in the article, there were two ways to interpret his statements. His later open embrace of the terms “white nationalist” and “white supremacist” suggest that the first interpretation described below was not as implausible as it seemed at the time.
In his original defense of King, Shapiro–who is inexplicably treated as a serious political thinker, despite seemingly spending most of his time arguing with teens on YouTube—claimed that the original tweet was simply “badly phrased but not racist.”
“The deep desire to paint Republicans as racists rather than defenders of Western cultural superiority leads the media to lie,” Shapiro wrote at the time. “People should read and listen to King’s actual words before jumping on the bandwagon.”
The two even chummed it up as recently as last spring, when Shapiro spoke at the Conservative Opportunity Society.
It truly speaks wonders for Shapiro’s keen intellectual prowess that it took King wondering aloud about what makes white supremacy so bad in the nation’s premier newspaper for Shapiro to step back and consider whether things were on the level after all.
Here are some of things Steve King has also done recently that did not seem to trouble Shapiro all that much:
- Gave an interview to Austria’s anti-Semitic unzensuriert publication, immediately after going on a tour of Auschwitz.
- Emphatically endorsed a Canadian white nationalist who appeared on a Nazi podcast for mayor of Toronto.
- Argued that Eastern European neo-Nazis would be Republicans if they were in America.
And that was just in October!
Shapiro has since urged Congress to censure King, which seems unlikely given that they’ve pretty much given him a pass on a lifetime of racism so far. But King—who barely held onto his seat in November after a tough challenge from lefty Democrat J.D. Scholten—is getting a Republican primary challenger the next time around, so maybe that problem will take care of itself.