Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) visited Austria in August and gave an extensive interview to a far-right publication there in which he spelled out, in clearer and more shocking terms than he ever has before, his white nationalist worldview.
The eight-term congressman, up for re-election next month, talked to Caroline Sommerfeld of the Austrian far-right propaganda site Unzensuriert (which means uncensored in English). Sommerfeld is a prominent intellectual in Europes neo-fascist identitarian movement, which has deep connections to Americas so-called alt-right.
The interview, published in September, came to HuffPosts attention this week. In his conversation with Sommerfeld, King discussed his belief in the superiority of European culture over others. He talked fearfully of falling fertility rates in the West and spoke at length about his belief that Europe and America are threatened by Muslim and Latino immigration.
If we dont defend Western civilization, then we will become subjugated by the people who are the enemies of faith, the enemies of justice, King said.
The interview is remarkable, capturing a sitting U.S. congressman completely fluent in modern white nationalist talking points just weeks before an election he is favored to win.
This interview reveals a whole new level of reality underneath this guys politics, said Roger Griffin, an expert on fascism and modern history at Oxford Brookes University.
King never would have opened up that way with mainstream reporters, since they wouldnt understand what he was talking about, Griffin said. He added, But with her, who is obviously steeped in this stuff, he just opens up because he knows hes going to be understood.
The congressmans office did not respond to a request for comment. Unzensuriert also did not respond to questions about details of the interview.
Kings conversation with Sommerfeld largely revolves around the paranoid idea of the Great Replacement the belief that mass migration, particularly from Muslim-majority countries, is an extinction-level event for white European culture and identity. Or as he put it in the interview, a slow-motion cultural suicide.
The U.S. subtracts from its population a million of our babies in the form of abortion, King said. We add to our population approximately 1.8 million of somebody elses babies who are raised in another culture before they get to us.
Sommerfeld responded, Thats what we call the Great Replacement.
Nick Ryan, the director of communications at the British-based anti-racism advocacy group Hope Not Hate, told HuffPost that terms such as Great Replacement are the preserve of conspiracy theorists and extremists.
Its a phrase, he said, widely used by anti-Muslim European networks to refer to the supposed Islamification of Europe by migrants and refugees.
The idea of the Great Replacement is imagined most vividly in The Camp of the Saints, a stunningly racist 1973 novel by Jean Raspail that reframes everything as the fight to death between races, said Ccile Alduy, a professor of French at Stanford University and an expert on Frances far right. It describes the takeover of Europe by waves of immigrants that wash ashore like the plague.
In the interview, King said that he read the book and that it was completely logical to me that this could come to pass. He went on to describe how he believes George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist and bogeyman of the far right, might be footing the bill for the Great Replacement.