The Washington Post has described King as "the U.S. congressman most openly affiliated with
white nationalism", while
Vanity Fair has said his opinions in this direction are "barely veiled".
David Leonhardt in an opinion piece for
The New York Times has explicitly identified King as being a "white nationalist". King has stirred controversy and come to prominence by making statements that have been described as racist or racially charged. He is a staunch opponent of immigration and multiculturalism, and has supported far-right European politicians. According to
The Guardian, King "has long been one of the most vociferously anti-immigration members of the House Republican caucus." King has said that he is not a racist. The NRCC said it would not help King in his 2018 re-election efforts. Senator
Ted Cruz called King's rhetoric "divisive" but stopped short of condemning him. He was subsequently condemned by numerous Republican members of Congress, including House Minority Leader
Kevin McCarthy and other members of the House Republican leadership. Conservative commentator
Ben Shapiro called for King to be
censured and for a primary challenge against King. After the interview was published, and following backlash from across the political spectrum, King issued a statement via Twitter stating that he was "simply a Nationalist", that he did not advocate for "white nationalism and white supremacy", and that "I want to make one thing abundantly clear: I reject those labels and the evil ideology they define." King said
The New York Times had misunderstood his comments, and that he did not question why "white nationalist" and "white supremacist" were offensive terms. On Twitter, he later stated: "As I told
The New York Times, 'it's not about race; It's never been about race'." The House voted 416–1 to rebuke King's comments; Illinois Representative
Bobby Rush was the lone "nay" vote, but only because he believed a rebuke was too lenient and that King deserved to be censured.
Immigration and multiculturalism King is a staunch opponent of
immigration and
multiculturalism. In April 2006, when asked if "the US economy simply couldn't function without" the presence of illegal immigrants, King said that he rejected that position "categorically". He said the 77.5 million people between the ages of 16 and 65 in the United States who are not part of the workforce "could be put to work and we could invent machines to replace the rest." In 2006, King called for an electrified fence on the US border, commenting that such fences were successful in containing livestock. Despite strong rebukes from both Democrats and other Republicans, including
House Speaker John Boehner, who called his statements "ignorant" and "hateful", and
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who called the comments "inexcusable", King defended his comments, saying he got the description from the
border patrol. In July 2015, referencing HUD secretary
Julián Castro's remarks on how poorly the Republican Party was doing with Hispanic voters, King responded, "What does Julian Castro know? Does he know that I'm as Hispanic and Latino as he?" King is neither Hispanic nor Latino by either family history or ethnic definition. In 2016, a journalist for the
Iowa Starting Line reported that King displayed the
Confederate flag on his office desk, although Iowa was part of
the Union during the
American Civil War. He removed it after a Confederate flag-waver later
fatally shot two Iowa police officers. King attempted to block a bill that would remove
Andrew Jackson and replace him with
Harriet Tubman on the
twenty-dollar bill. King praised
Bernie Sanders numerous times for his view on immigration, saying they were "closer to mine than it is some of the presidential candidates on the Republican side." In March 2017, King wrote "culture and demographics are our destiny. We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies." When asked about his comments, King stood by them, saying: "you need to teach your children your values" and "with the inter-marriage, I'd like to see an America that is just so homogenous that we look a lot the same". King was rebuked by members of his own party, including Speaker Paul D. Ryan, but praised by white supremacist
David Duke and
The Daily Stormer, a
neo-Nazi website. saying, "I would find half of a billion of dollars of that right out of Planned Parenthood's budget, and the rest of it could come out of food stamps and the entitlements that are being spread out for people who have not worked in three generations." On November 5, 2018, King referred to Mexican immigrants as "dirt" while at a campaign stop.
The Weekly Standard reported the comment; King denied saying it and called on
The Weekly Standard to release audio of the remarks.
The Weekly Standard then released a recording of the exchange, confirming that King had made the remarks. On September 4, 2019, King posted a video of himself drinking water from water fountains over toilets at migrant facilities. Congresswoman
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized the GOP as "anti-immigrant" following the video.
President Barack Obama On March 7, 2008, during his press engagements to announce his reelection campaign, King made remarks about then U.S. senator and Democratic presidential candidate
Barack Obama and his middle name "Hussein", saying: I don't want to disparage anyone because of their race, their ethnicity, their name—whatever their religion their father might have been, I'll just say this: When you think about the optics of a Barack Obama potentially getting elected President of the United States—I mean, what does this look like to the rest of the world? What does it look like to the world of Islam? I will tell you that, if he is elected president, then the radical Islamists, the
al-Qaida, the radical Islamists and their supporters, will be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on
September 11. On March 10, King defended his comments to the
Associated Press, saying "[Obama will] certainly be viewed as a savior for them... That's why you will see them supporting him, encouraging him." Obama said he did not take the comments too seriously, describing King as a person who thrives on making controversial statements to get media coverage. He said, "I would hope [Obama's opponent] Senator John McCain|[John] McCain would want to distance himself from that kind of inflammatory and offensive remarks." The McCain campaign disavowed King's comments, saying "John McCain rejects the type of politics that degrades our civics... and obviously that extends to Congressman King's statement." In 2010, King speculated that Obama's immigration policies were influenced by racial favoritism toward black people.
Racial profiling On June 14, 2010, King said on the House floor that racial profiling is an important component of law enforcement: "Some claim that the Arizona law will bring about racial discrimination profiling. First let me say, Mr. Speaker, that profiling has always been an important component of legitimate law enforcement. If you can't profile someone, you can't use those common sense indicators that are before your very eyes. Now, I think it's wrong to use racial profiling for the reasons of discriminating against people, but it's not wrong to use race or other indicators for the sake of identifying people that are violating the law." As an example of profiling, King described an instance when a taxi driver would stop for him before he had to hail a cab, just because he was in a business suit. The same day, on
G. Gordon Liddy's radio program, King said that Obama's policies favored black people: "The president has demonstrated that he has a default mechanism in him that breaks down the side of race—on the side that favors the black person in the case of
Professor Gates and Officer Crowley." On January 13, 2018, King tweeted that racial oppression was a "thing of the past".
Comments on Western civilization On July 18, 2016, King participated in a panel discussion on
MSNBC, during which a panelist from
Esquire magazine suggested that the 2016 convention could be the last in which "old white people would command the Republican Party's attention". King responded, "This whole 'old white people' business does get a little tired, Charlie. I'd ask you to go back through history and figure out where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you are talking about? Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?" Panel moderator
Chris Hayes later described King's comments as odious and preposterous. That evening, King was asked about his comments during an interview with
ABC News. King said he had meant to say that "Western civilization", rather than "white people", is the "superior culture": "when you describe Western civilization, that can mean much of Western civilization happens to be Caucasians. But we should not apologize for our culture or our civilization. The contributions that were made by Western civilization itself, and by Americans, by Americans of all races, stand far above the rest of the world. The Western civilization and the American civilization are a superior culture." On December 9, 2015, he told
MSNBC that he agreed with his party that Islam is "incompatible" with American life. In an interview with
Breitbart News, King said he did not want Muslims working in meat-packing plants, because "I don't want people doing my pork that won't eat it, let alone hope I go to hell for eating pork chops." On March 7, 2019, he voted "present" on a resolution the US House passed condemning anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim discrimination. On August 27, 2019, King joked about
Uyghur Muslims detained in China's
Xinjiang internment camps being forced to eat pork.
Abuse at Abu Ghraib prison In May 2004, King compared the
torture and prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison to "
hazing". He argued that violence against American soldiers in Iraq was more extreme than the prisoner abuse, saying that comparing the two was like comparing the crimes "committed by
Jeffrey Dahmer compared to those of
Heidi Fleiss".
Affirmative action King opposes
affirmative action. He has said: "There's been legislation that's been brought through this House that sets aside benefits for women and minorities. The only people that it excludes are white men... Pretty soon, white men are going to notice they are the ones being excluded." In 2015, King introduced a bill that would require colleges to report affirmative action.
Support for far-right politics On March 12, 2017, King expressed his support for
Geert Wilders, a
far-right Dutch politician known for his
anti-Islam views, leading up to the election in the Netherlands, stating, "Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny" Former
Ku Klux Klan leader
David Duke praised King's statement. King supported
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a right-wing populist and strong opponent of admitting migrants during the
European migrant crisis. On December 8, 2017, King tweeted Orbán's quote that "Diversity is not our strength. Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban , 'Mixing cultures will not lead to a higher quality of life but a lower one'." "Assimilation has become a dirty word to the multiculturalist Left. Assimilation, not diversity, is our American strength," he tweeted. In June 2018, he retweeted a comment by
Mark Collett, a British
neo-Nazi and self-described admirer of
Hitler, about Europe "waking up" to mass immigration. King also endorsed right-wing Canadian political commentator
Faith Goldy in the
2018 Toronto mayoral election. Goldy participated in a neo-Nazi podcast and has been described as far-right or alt-right. In response to the Goldy endorsement, and King's other racially contentious remarks, Minnesota-based
agricultural cooperative Land O'Lakes ended its support for his reelection. In February 2021, after he left office, it was announced that he would be a speaker at
Nick Fuentes'
America First Political Action Conference.
White genocide King subscribes to the
white genocide conspiracy theory, and has stated this view while in Congress.
Mother Jones and other media have reported more generally on his belief in and promotion of the conspiracy theory. In 2018, King spoke to an Austrian far-right publication about "the great replacement", which
The New York Times described as "a conspiracy theory on the far right that claims shadowy elites are working behind the scenes to reduce white populations to minorities in their own countries."
Antisemitism controversy in 2018 In late October 2018, after the
Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, the
Anti-Defamation League (ADL) sent the House speaker,
Paul Ryan, an open letter calling on him to censure King, citing King's relationship with far-right
Freedom Party of Austria and other far-right groups in Europe. The letter accused King of engaging in
antisemitic smearing of the Jewish investor and philanthropist
George Soros. It concluded, "Rep. King has brought dishonor onto the House of Representatives. We strongly urge you and the congressional leadership to demonstrate your revulsion with Rep. King's actions by stripping him of his subcommittee chairmanship and initiating proceedings to formally censure or otherwise discipline him." ==Post-political career==