A desparate shortage of Germans!

Well, now I'm just insulted. By what? you might ask. By this. Iowa Representative Steve King, a, wait for it...Republican, responded to criticism today over his recent super racist tweet. Which racist tweet?

Why this racist tweet of course!

Pictured: Geert Wilders and his hair.
Seriously, what's up with the hair?

Oh shit. If you're wondering what he means by 'our civilization' and you're kind of leaning towards him meaning 'white people' but wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, don't. That's exactly what he's saying. And is it me, but is it particularly unnerving when racists start throwing around words like 'destiny?' Anyway, King was Tweeting his admiration for Geert Wilders as 'Dutch Trump,' the super-right wing racist white nationalist from the Netherlands (yup, they have racists in Europe too), and his anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim platform.

That's right, he like's the cut of Geert's Jib. And in what can only be described as a white supremacist reach around-ok, fine, in what I'm choosing to describe as a white supremacist reach around, King's tweet in turn was given full-throated support from former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke. Oh, and to be clear, he's the racist kind of wizard, not like an actual wizard although I suppose he could be both...

"And don't get me started on the Orcs. If it wasn't for that wall around
Mordor they'd be all over Middle Earth, taking all our jobs..."

-Gandalf, in a deleted scene

I say we put everyone's babies to
 work building our civilization. It's about
time they contributed. Pfft...lazy babies...

Yeah, that bit about 'our civilization' and 'somebody else's babies' can be read as culturally chauvinist at best and straight-up rabid-foam racist at worst. It's the kind of shit you find on a poorly Xerox'ed flyer someone from the Klan shoved under your wiper blade. But given recent GOP indifference towards how terrifyingly white nationalist their party is becoming, it's not super surprising that this horseshit fell out of King's mouth...or tweet-hole I guess. What is surprising and no less offensive is how not sorry he is about it. Like at all. King went on CNN to explain that he meant what he said. No stammering explanation, not tap-dancing just straight up "Well of course I meant exactly what I said...and to exprand on that a little further-" yeah, he said 'exprand.' But he went on to add:

I'm not like an expert or anything,
but maybe if they stopped dressing
like this they'd have more sex?

"I've spoken on this issue...to the German people and to any population of people that is a declining population that doesn't-isn't wiling to have enough babies to reproduce themselves and I've said to them: you can't rebuild your civilization with other people's babies, you've got to keep your birth rate up and that you need to teach your children your values and in doing so, then you can grow your population and you can strengthen your culture, you can strengthen your way of life..."

-Rep. Steve King of Iowa, an actual member of

the U.S. Congress in 2017, can you believe it?

Ok, so he wasn't being a xenophobic shithead, he was just addressing the problem of not enough Germans by offering some friendly, neighborly advice, right?

"Well, my problem isn't that there aren't enough people in Germany so much as it is there
aren't enough white people in Germany. It's a subtle distinction, but an important one."

-Steve King, apparently comfortable in his racism

Pictured: an awkward metaphor he
probably should have backed off from.

You know, it used to be that someone would say something galling and then at least do the rest of us the courtesy of grudgingly apologizing to us about it. Remember after hurricane Katrina when Mayor Ray Nagin called New Orleans a 'chocolate city?' White people, suddenly on the receiving end of the kind of cultural insensitivity everyone else in America encounters every day, got all upset so he backtracked and pointed out that milk chocolate is made with milk so, uh...mumble...mumble...

Did we believe him? Of course not. But at least he acknowledged that it was a weird thing to say and even said 'hey sorry 'bout that.' Not so with Steve King whose tactic is to just lean into it and see how racist he can be before either  the voters or the GOP leadership calls him on it.

"The racist vote is pretty important to us, so...I'm going to see how this plays out."

-Paul Ryan the Speaker of the House

sitting this one out I guess...*

*Naw, I'm just kidding. He actually hasn't commented on this. Like at all.