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Iowa Congressman Steve King isn’t just a giant fucking racist, he’s also a giant fucking idiot, taking a break from spewing white supremacist tropes to boast that he drank from a toilet-fountain hybrid during a recent visit to a Customs and Border Protection detention facility.
“I took a drink out of there,” King told the “small crowd” at his Eagle Grove town hall on Wednesday, saying it was “actually pretty good,” adding that he “smacked” his thin, pasty lips. Then, like a totally normal human being, Steve tweeted a video of himself drinking from the toilet fountain, throwing a thumbs up and saying, “Not bad” in response to taking a sip of water.
Of course, King, in his moronic defense of deplorable conditions inside detention centers, ignores that the toilet fountain was working for his propaganda video, but we’re talking about toilet fountains because they weren’t working for actual detainees, who in July said that officials told them to drink water out of the bowl. Not the fountain part, because that was broken, but the bowl, where they also relieve themselves.
While Democratic legislators get their phones confiscated during visits—if they even get a visit at all—at least one Republican House member has also shot a video of himself drinking from a functioning toilet fountain. The administration has denied the account from detainees—and when has this administration ever lied about anything, especially when it concerns immigrants?—but the detainees’ claims are backed up by at least four House members, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
During recent testimony before the House Oversight Committee, Ocasio-Cortez said, “When these women tell me that they were put into a cell and that their sink was not working, and we tested the sink ourselves, and the sink was not working. And they were told to drink out of a toilet bowl. I believe them. I believe these women.” They were telling the truth, and we all know it.
In a tweet in response to King’s stunt, Ocasio-Cortez wrote, “There is a genre of videos where GOP House members—who clearly didn’t read sworn testimony that detention sinks were broken—filming themselves drinking out of toilet sinks. They’re so anti-immigrant they risk pink eye to show off that they didn’t do the reading.”