Oh, New York Times. After failing to capture the level of offense contained in Rep. Steve King’s white nationalist tweet that “We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies” (“we” being white people) in its initial coverage on Sunday, the Times took another crack at it Monday—and didn’t do much better. This time around, though, there was a goal: separate King from the Republican Party. So some of the wiggle-wording on King himself was gone:
Against the backdrop of an emboldened white nationalist movement in the United States, his Twitter post over the weekend — “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies” — suggested that Mr. King was sliding from his typical messages to something far darker. It was praised by both the white supremacist David Duke and The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website.
References to “an emboldened white nationalist movement” and David Duke and The Daily Stormer—good start. But “sliding from his typical messages to something far darker” implies that King’s “typical messages” are not something dark and evil. They are.
But the real point of the article is to argue that King is out of the Republican mainstream and drawing serious Republican criticism. Paul Ryan disagrees! (Except he isn’t willing to really condemn King, opting instead to hope that King “misspoke” when he definitely did not.) One or two other Republicans disagree! Wowzers, aren’t you blown away?
King may be out in front of other Republicans in his willingness to be nakedly racist, but it’s simply wrong to claim, as the Times does, that “Republicans have largely written off Mr. King as a fringe player in legitimate policy debates.” Look at what King wants, look at House Republican policy on immigration—shoot, look at King's 2013 attack on Dreamers, which got the support of all but six House Republicans—and look at who’s in the White House, and then come back and tell me with a straight face that King is a fringe anything in today’s Republican Party. Republican leaders like Paul Ryan might know how to put a friendly face on their ugliness, but publications like the Times should know better than to buy into it.