Do you think there’s some sort of competition? Among Republicans? Right now? To see how far they can go, how insufferable and cruel and sort of ruthlessly, face-stabbingly insulting to as many intelligent humans as possible in a single blurt, tweet, senate confirmation hearing? Are they all testing just how much they can get away with before the devil himself says “Hey, you know what? I think that’s just about enough from you”?
Behold, Rep. Steve King, (R-IA), one of the more grotesque, embarrassing characters in a GOP packed to the rafters with them, a man who frequently sidles up to the nastiest, weirdest hardline extremists all over Europe (he’s also a big fan of the Orange Goblin, naturally) emitting what might be a new baseball-hat slogan for Trump, Steve Bannon and their neo-Nazi brethren (former KKK ogre David Duke loves King, so you know he’s all class):
On Sunday, King blurted out a tweet in support of extremist European politician Geert “the Trump of the Netherlands” Wilders, thusly: “Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”
Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies. https://t.co/4nxLipafWO
— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) March 12, 2017
Who is Geert Wilders? He is one of those creepy, deeply unsavory types currently spreading anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim demagoguery across the European continent, part of the same toxic hatecloud that’s poisoned the minds of so many terrified, mal-educated Trump supporters. As Russell Shorto put it in the New Yorker last week:
The issue at hand is the possibility of Geert Wilders winning the Dutch national election, on March 15th. Wilders is sometimes called the Dutch Donald Trump. His anti-Muslim stridency is explicit and extreme. (He wants to ban the Koran and close mosques.) He tweets with abandon. His rhetoric—“left wing elitist losers,” “Moroccan scum”—is positively Trumpian. He even matches Trump in having a wacky hairdo and a wife of Eastern European origin.
It takes very little unpacking to understand King’s meaning. He appears to be suggesting the only way to a truly strong nation is, well, making sure all the babies are sourced from a single nationality, breedstock, creed, one single, tiny-brained dogma – in short, from one very shriveled, archaic ideology, the very same type that lies at the root of all humanity’s ills, woes and wars since man invented paranoia.
Here is the curious factor. King, like all old white nationalists, Trump supporter and anti-Muslim fanatics across the planet, is done for. For one thing, America has already tipped. Immigrants already outnumber whites. Women are fast surpassing men in number of college degrees, voting power, cultural impact. Mixed-race, mixed-gender, church-rejecting families are taking over. You can even argue that this is exactly why we see such a terrified, violent pushback around the country and the world. Epic socio-spiritual change is afoot. The forces of hate and corrosion cannot have that. And hence, they are having a moment.
A very loud, extremely dangerous, deadly moment, far nastier than anyone predicted.
But the truth remains: As loud and dumbly savage as King and his ilk appear, they are not long for this world. They are old and cruel, and the ideology they so violently embody has no inherent stability, no true core. It is rooted only in chaos, in sneering fakery and mad lurches for power. It finds home only in the darkest regions of the poisoned human heart, from which nothing can grow and everything, eventually, dies.
Dear @SteveKingIA: You know what makes America great? You get to make obscene comments and I get to call you a stark, raving racist. https://t.co/bnpApSaZnF
— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) March 13, 2017
Put another way: Those who voted for Trump, for Brexit, for trolls like Geert and France’s Marine Le Pen, they are not merely on the wrong side of history, they are taunting history, flaunting their ignorance of it, slapping it across the face, making overt pacts with the devil right there on Twitter for all of the gods to witness. This shall not last.
The face you make after saying something so racist, you wonder if those around you can hear your soul literally dying
Problem is, history isn’t nearly as linear, or as predictable, as we long to believe. Despite all prognostications and theoretical patterns, it follows no inherent logic. It’s loopy, it’s paroxysmal, it’s got a mean streak a generation wide and a blind spot as big as the Dark Ages. History might indeed bend toward justice, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t frequently detour into savagery, whiplash back on itself, eat its young and scare the horses.
Justice will, eventually, prevail. The devil will indeed usher King, Trump, Ryan, the vast majority of the modern GOP, Wilson, et al into his personal bathhouse. The cancerous cloud of nationalism, of anti-intellectualism, of unprecedented moral contraction currently enveloping the planet will blow over.
Question is, will there be any sufficiently healthy soil left, when the smoke finally clears.
Read more here:: Eating “somebody else’s babies”: How racist will Trump’s GOP get?
