What makes this interview of Rep. Steve King (R-IA) by MSNBC's Chris Hayes so fascinating is King's complete compartmentalization of his beliefs and his obvious bigotry. Steve King believes Muslims are violent and bad; Steve King believes Christians like himself are peaceful and good. There's no bit of reality you can throw at him that will shake these beliefs. You could put him in the center of a Planned Parenthood during a shooting or task him with evacuating the crowd after the Atlanta Olympics bombing and you wouldn't get any different response.
He is the perfect example of this new flavor of conservative that deems material fact to be entirely irrelevant to the ideology. Whether a particular videotape is true or false is unimportant; it is only valued on whether it furthers the desired message. If the collective evidence gathered from the entire rational world proves that the sitting president is indeed an American citizen, it is evidence only of the depth of the conspiratorial attempt to cover up the still-held belief that he is not. Rep. Steve King has the mind of a not very bright dog. He knows what he knows, and to hell with the rest of it.
Steve King has declared that Muslims are bad and a threat. Christians are not. And so, according to Rep. Steve King, that is that.
HAYES: Congressman, let me just stop you right there. Congressman, there was a man named Robert Dear who in court today said he was a warrior for the babies, whose ex-wife talked about his Christian beliefs motivating his desire to attack and murder three people, including a police officer, in Colorado. That man is a Christian, he’s an avowed Christian. He appears to have acted on those Christian beliefs to undertake that act of violence.
KING: I don't think that he's following Jesus' teachings --
HAYES: But who are you to say? He says he's a Christian.
KING: That's what he says, all right. But that's not Jesus' teachings. Jesus didn’t teach people to kill.
HAYES: But you’re doing the exact same thing that every Muslim I’ve seen on air says do in the wake of what happened in San Bernardino. They say they weren’t following actual Islam. Islam does not preach hatred and violence and destruction, right?
I mean, why is this any different? You understandably as a Christian are someone of the faith, right? You look at what happened at Planned Parenthood, you said that's not the faith that I believe in. Millions and billions --
KING: What Planned Parenthood is doing is not the faith that I believe in, but Jesus never ordered anyone to be killed and he never raised his hand to injure anyone specifically. But Mohammed did, and there is a big difference in this. And so they’re carrying on the traditions that are centuries old --
In one ear, out the other. Of course the Christian terrorist is not Christian, because he was violent. Of course the Muslim terrorist is Muslim, because Muslims are violent. (We could yet-a-freaking-gain go through all the Biblical quotes that Christian advocates of violence have used to justify violence, both in centuries old traditions and in present-day incarnations like the Klan and the virulently pro-violence anti-abortion group Army of God, but there's no point. Steve King can invite those advocates to his office and hear them quote Scripture directly, if he cares to.)
So I'm uninterested in mounting another debate over Steve King's premise that the latest in a long string of anti-abortion murders isn't a Christian act because he says-so while declaring ISIS to be the true and only face of Islam. I'm more interested in the way Rep. Steve King's mind works, or doesn't, as he cleanly dismisses all physical reality in order to keep repeating the belief he prefers to have. And it just. Keeps. Going.
Rep. King, previous incarnations of anti-immigrant racists demonized Catholic immigrants using similar if not identical arguments of your own—that the olive-skins don't assimilate. That they're part of conspiracy to take over the nation and put it under Papal law. Were they right?
KING: No, they turned out to be wrong. And me being a Catholic sitting here you couldn't get me to say they were right.
No, they were not right about the Catholics because I am a Catholic. But I'm right about the Muslims because they are Muslims. Pronouncement done.
We have in Steve King, I think, a perfect example of bigotry predicated on stupidity. Steve King could not argue his points worse if he was recovering from thirty consecutive concussions while sniffing from a flask of paint thinner, but by gum he knows he's right. And he knows that America doesn't face a problem from Christians murdering people because they're not Christians so problem solved.
And, as the campaigns of both Steve King and Donald Trump show, that stupidity-based bigotry is a movement. His insistence on what things are true and what are not—all real-world happenings be damned, all contrary evidence a plot against him—is the movement.
And again, it just. Keeps. Going.
He had previously muttered to another reporter that not even his Muslim colleague Keith Ellison would renounce "Sharia law"—that Rep. Ellison was, therefore, just another bit of evidence that the entire Muslim religion was "incompatible" with Americanism and needs to be winnowed out. He says so again here. He is sure of it.
KING: Well, when Congressman Ellison takes an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, and also -- you'll get to ask him. I'm glad he is going to be there to answer this question. And it is, which is superior? The Constitution or Sharia law? And in Sharia law, by their teachings, is superior to everything else. It replaces everything else. It replaces the Constitution itself.
So you can't be assimilated into the American civilization and accept Sharia law as being superior to our Constitution. It’s antithetical to Americanism.
HAYES: OK. I'm going to talk to him about that. Congressman Steve King, thank you for coming on.
KING: Please ask him. Thank you, Chris.
As an exercise, ask Rep. Steve King which he believes to be more important: American law, or God's law. His God's law, the Christian one. Ask Mike Huckabee. Ask Ted Cruz. Ask every conservative Christian Republican in the House, for that matter, just to get a proper tally.
Almost to a person, I expect, they will tell you that the Christian law comes first. At least two of those names up there flew to Kentucky not too many weeks ago to honor and celebrate a Christian in a minor county position who declared it directly. They will tell you that American law must not be enforced when it conflicts with Christianity—their particular Christianity, and no other. They will bring it to the Supreme Court. They will pass laws insisting upon it.
And Steve King will not see the slightest conflict in that—he will say, in fact, that insisting on his version of Christianity above all other religions makes him more American than anyone else, not less. And he will curl his lip in that special sneer of his and again opine that Rep. Keith Ellison and his fellow violent religious zealots are up to something.
You cannot reason with radical Christian extremists. There is no evidence you can present to them, no headstone or history you can show them to deflect them from their beliefs.
Also they are as dumb as a can of peas.