Rep. Steve King and other hypocrites should be the ones “deported”

The early Seventies saw many songs that promoted peace, harmony and understanding. For some of you that might as well have been one thousand years go, but for me the memories cling like it was just yesterday: “Everything is Beautiful,” “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother,” “Imagine,” “United We Stand,” “Black and White,” “Love Train” and Joe South’s “Walk a Mile in My Shoes”:

If I could be you
And you could be me
For just one hour
If we could find a way
To get inside
Each other's mind,
If you could see you
Through my eyes
Instead of your ego
I believe you'd be
Surprised to see
That you'd been blind

We don’t see much of that anymore in the music scene, because that requires another thing we don’t see much of anymore: Artists looking beyond their own petty concerns and seeing the world without illusions, and hoping for something better, rather than to merely “get even” with an “ex.” Of course, some musicians were more pessimistic than others—The Clash, for example. In “Clampdown”—the title refers to the “clampdown” of anyone or anything viewed as a “threat” to the “traditional” order as defined by an oppressive “establishment”—fascism is seen as the chief political and social construct:

What are we gonna do now?
Taking off his turban, they said, is this man a Jew?
'Cause they're working for the clampdown
They put up a poster saying we earn more than you!
When we're working for the clampdown
We will teach our twisted speech
To the young believers
We will train our blue-eyed men
To be young believers

The pessimism of Kenny Rogers and the First Edition’s “Tell it All” could also be seen as more prophetic for what was to come (beginning with the Reagan administration) than a plea for “change.”

How much you're holding back on me
When you say you're giving all?
And in the dungeons of your mind

Who you got chained to the wall?

Did you plant your feet on higher ground
To avoid life's mud and stone?
Did you ever kick a good man
When he was down, just to make yourself feel strong?

Did you ever walk for a crippled man
Pretending you were lame?
And what made you think one feeble hand to God
Was gonna make him call your name?

Speaking of prophetic pessimism, as mentioned a couple posts ago Rep. Steve King of Iowa reacted to the acquittal of a Hispanic immigrant in a homicide case that was one of the “pillars” that held up Donald Trump’s race-based candidacy by expectorating "The illegal alien who, no one disagrees, killed Kate Steinle is found NOT guilty in sanctuary city, San Francisco. Sickening! I will spare no effort to do my own killing-of all amnesty in every form!” This kind of talk is bred from race hate and serves only hate. King neither “hates” nor even acknowledges the existence of a quarter of all illegal immigrants who are from Asia, India and Europe—a percentage that is only growing—but when one spews their filth on just one group (Hispanics), that is still all that is required to be a bonfide racist.

King’s constituents, naturally, claim that he is not a “racist,” that he just “speaks his mind.” The problem here is that it is white people (because they are the “majority”) making that judgment to appease themselves, not minorities who have to suffer the base ignorance of prejudice and stereotype. I mentioned a few times an incident at a work place where I challenged a white man who was telling ugly “jokes” about “Mexicans,” who asserted that the “jokes” were not “racist,” and that none of the other people present, either white or black,” thought they were either. I had to tell him that all that mattered was that I thought his “jokes” were racist, and he stopped telling them, at least for as long I was present.

King has a history of making ugly, dehumanizing comments about minorities, but mainly Hispanics, and they are not “jokes” to him or his constituency. Yet it is only a white supremacist or neo-Nazi would proclaim, as King did on MSNBC, that the Republican Party’s image as the “white people’s party” was getting “old” because “I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you are talking about? Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?” King, of course, failed to mention civilizations that either pre-dated “Western” civilization, or those that existed in isolation from the West that were doing just fine without the intrusion of the West (sub-Sahara Africa is an example of how uninvited European colonial “contributions” destroyed carefully-created balances in the political, economic and environmental realm). 

King has absolutely no self-consciousness in expanding on his white supremacist ideology:  “Culture and demographics are our destiny. We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies”—the obvious “dog whistle” being non-white immigrants, and Hispanics in particular. When asked to “clarify” this statement on CNN, King merely doubled-down, insisting that he “meant exactly” what he said, and then made the bizarre remark that “If you go down the road a few generations or maybe centuries with the intermarriage, I’d like to see an America that's just so homogenous that we look a lot the same.” What could he possibly have meant by that, especially given the fact that the racism he espouses would make such a result unlikely? I again point to the incident in college where a white female insisted she wasn’t a “racist” even though she would “never” marry a “black man.”

It seems that King is “tolerated” by Republicans because he is a “reliable” vote on conservative issues (albeit an extreme one), and by the media, because he is “newsworthy.” While TIME magazine’s “Person of the Year” is a gaggle of self-important women called the “silence breakers,” the real “silence” is aided and abetted by the media and women just like this, for whom the vast majority of incidents they claim to have suffered are nothing compared to the lifetime of abuse many minorities—especially Hispanics—suffer at the hands of white society. I recall on The McLaughlin Group some years ago that even the “liberal” Eleanor Clift remained in “awed” silence as Pat Buchanan spewed out “Hispanics are out to destroy America!” It is also highly “ironic”—or rather, hypocritical—that Taylor Swift is one of the “silence breakers” on the TIME cover. More on this fraud later.

Meanwhile, a rundown of King’s verbal escapades that have gone unpunished include his opposition to DACA: “For every one who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds — and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’ve been hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” On why white America shouldn’t feel “guilty” about centuries of what Mark Twain sarcastically called the “blessings of civilization”: “We’re the vigor of the planet and there’s nothing for us to apologize for until they come and thank us for the things we’ve done.” On why it is “dangerous” to allow non-white immigrants into the country: “And changing the demographics changes the politics, they’re going to have Democrat voters at least two-to-one, some numbers go all the way to five-to-one, and I’m not speaking only of Muslims, I’m speaking of the Central American immigrants that come into America too. So if it turns into a few hundred thousand every year, how long is it before the culture of America is changed?”

No one in the Republican Party is denouncing him, because many privately agree with him. For all the criticism he came under as Speaker of the House, John Boehner was at least not a bigot, more than once speaking out against King and reportedly referred to him as an “asshole.” But that is not what you are hearing from the current Republican leadership. While Senators and House members are under assault and forced to resign for moments of sexual impropriety, blatant racists like King go unmolested and the lives of millions are being hurt simply because they don’t have the political and media support that (mainly white) women do.

What do his own constituents think, who keep reelecting him? While a few state Republicans consider him “coarse” and “weird,” the more common belief was enunciated thus by one voter “There isn’t a racist bone in King’s body. We are a nation based on Western values. I think Steve King is courageous to do it. Some cultures are better than others.” No, this is plainly the very definition of racism. When racists claim that their beliefs have nothing to do with racism, then you know this country has a “problem.” As I wrote about previously, “culture” in this country is only a racial construct in the minds of racists.

Who is going to save us from ourselves? A “silence breaker” like Taylor Swift and her anthem to white animus and fascist imagery in her petty self-obsession, “Look What You Made Me Do”?

I don't like your little games
Don't like your tilted stage
The role you made me play
Of the fool, no, I don't like you
I don't like your perfect crime
How you laugh when you lie
You said the gun was mine
Isn't cool, no, I don't like you

There is a reason why some nut from the now “underground” neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer claims that "The entire alt-right patiently awaits the day when we can lay down our swords and kneel before her (Swift’s) throne as she commands us to go forth and slaughter the subhuman enemies of the Aryan race." Of course it is “ridiculous,” but it is also true that the blonde, blue-eyed Swift has been too busy maintaining a feud with a black musician (Kanye West) than to take the time to repudiate her vast white supremacist following. Even Trump has made (largely disingenuous) efforts to do so. Why TIME didn’t take this into consideration before selecting her for its cover or question her about her racist following and her apparent embrace of it (the law says that “silence” construes consent), is of course, part of the reason why TIME magazine continues to lose credibility as an objective publication.

Tell it all, brothers and sisters, before we fall.