Oh you do have the audio
Steve King dared a conservative outlet to release audio of him calling immigrants ‘dirt.’ It did. https://t.co/W6dPBFBisl
— Nope. (@JoyAnnReid) November 12, 2018
Rep. Steve King, the newly reelected Iowa Republican with a history of incendiary comments about race and immigration, dared a conservative magazine to show evidence that he had called immigrants “dirt.”
“Just release the full tape,” King, who eked out a narrow victory last week despite affiliations with white nationalists, told the Weekly Standard’s online managing editor Saturday on Twitter. Days earlier, the magazine reported that King had made an inflammatory joke about immigrants.
The Weekly Standard released the recording — a two-minute audio in which King can be heard bantering with a handful of supporters at the back of an Iowa restaurant during a campaign stop on Nov. 5, the magazine reported. He talked about pheasant hunting and his “patented pheasant noodle soup” sprinkled with whole jalapeño peppers he had grown himself. Around the 1:20 mark, King joked that he’d have to get some “dirt from Mexico” to grow his next batch of peppers because they didn’t have enough bite.
“Trust me, it’s already on its way,” a woman quipped, appearing to refer to the caravan of Central American migrants traveling from Mexico to the U.S.-Mexico border.
King engaged, saying: “Well, yeah, there’s plenty of dirt. It’s coming from the West Coast, too. And a lot of other places, besides. This is the most dirt we’ve ever seen.”
The Weekly Standard reported on this charming “banter,” via the transcript but not including the audio. King’s chief of staff said it was all lies, and over the weekend King brawled with the editor on Twitter and said there was no audio.
“Trust me, it’s already on its way,” a woman quipped, appearing to refer to the caravan of Central American migrants traveling from Mexico to the U.S.-Mexico border.
King engaged, saying: “Well, yeah, there’s plenty of dirt. It’s coming from the West Coast, too. And a lot of other places, besides. This is the most dirt we’ve ever seen.”
Which was a very stupid thing to do, because then the WS posted the audio.
Hours later, on Saturday, the Weekly Standard did, along with a column from Hayes.
“So, King claimed our reporter lied. He didn’t. He claimed we didn’t have a recording. We did. He insisted we refused to release the audio. Untrue,” Hayes wrote.
The congressman, who shares President Trump’s hard-line immigration policies, has a long history of inflammatory rhetoric against immigrants, minorities and the media and has peddled conspiratorial views about “white genocide.”
He has compared immigrants to dogs. He said immigrants have “calves the size of cantaloupes” because they haul drugs across the desert. He tweeted a cartoon depicting President Barack Obama wearing a turban. He retweeted a self-described Nazi sympathizer. He endorsed a white nationalist mayoral candidate who questioned whether immigration is causing “white genocide.” He said he hoped Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor “will elope to Cuba.” He reportedly attacked the National Republican Congressional Committee for backing a gay candidate.
He met with members of the far-right Austrian Freedom Party, which has historical Nazi ties, during a trip financed by a Holocaust memorial group. In the aftermath of the mass shooting inside a synagogue in Pittsburgh, King defended associating with the Austrian party and said: “If they were in America pushing the platform that they push, they would be Republicans.”
On Election Day, King barred the Des Moines Register, Iowa’s largest newspaper, from covering his election night event, calling the paper a “leftist propaganda media outlet.”
But hey, let’s not be partisan about this. Let’s still be friends with Steve King, because after all friendship is much more important than mere politics.
Austrian anti-immigrant racists? “If they were in America pushing the platform that they push, they would be Republicans.”
Q.E.D.
Ha, I don’t advocate being friends with Steve King. That guy is malicious for sure.
He’s claiming he was talking about literal dirt. I actually think he initially was, but then his fan turned it into an anti-migrant slur and he rolled with it, so he’s a racist liar (as we all knew).
Is it even normal to call the stuff you plant crops in “dirt”? Just wondering because from a British perspective there is no way anyone would get away with pretending they meant “Mexican soil”
Catwhisperer, it is common in the US to (erroneously) call soil ‘dirt’. I give my students lessons in that, and they remember it until they walk out the classroom. My mother never referred to it as soil. Nor do my siblings. My father, from a long line of farmers, calls it dirt. The phrase “dirt farmer” used to be fairly common. So, yeah, I could buy that…but, no, I don’t in this case. I think he was using a double entendre.
Iknklast: Thanks for clearing that up. I mean, it was sort of clear what was going on there with the “dirt” comment but I do enjoy the occasional venture into the foreign language that is US english ;)