Rep. Steve King is hosting his Iowa Freedom Summit on Saturday (January 23) and the Democrats and their Main Stream Media adjunct are in high attack mode against him and his home state of Iowa. White, conservative, Christian—what’s not to abhor? The resulting Two Minutes Hate has been an illuminating study in MSM political management, Establishment GOP stupidity—and tangible Ruling Class fear that the immigration issue could spin out of their control.
The co-ordination is blatant. When I was young, I had a knowing, sophisticated view of sociopsychological factors that shape public debate—for example, what the late Joe Sobran used to call “The Hive“, explaining why Leftists everywhere suddenly start saying the same thing. But as I get older, I lean increasingly to the view that it's all a matter of goldarned conspiracies, cabals and corruption. In the immortal words of Spencer Ackerman to his fellow Leftists on the notorious Journolist secret ListServ group during the Jeremiah Wright scandals,
[f]ind a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear…[t]ake one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.
This tactic is exactly what the MSM tried to pull this week after King tweeted to protest the Obamas’ inviting an illegal alien, Ana Zamora, who has benefitted the illegal 2012 DACA Administrative Amnesty:
#Obama perverts "prosecutorial discretion" by inviting a deportable to sit in place of honor at #SOTU w/1st Lady. I should sit with Alito.
— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) January 20, 2015
#Obama perverts "prosecutorial discretion" by inviting a deportable to sit in place of honor at #SOTU w/1st Lady. I should sit with Alito.
— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) January 20, 2015
As one, the MSM reacted as if “deportable” was an obscenity—but in fact an obscenity would not have provoked this reaction:
But the simple fact is that, of course, Ms. Zamora is a “deportable”—she is an illegal alien whose status, even after Obama’s DACA decree, is provisional and could be revoked. Obama’s arrogant flaunting of her was treason and he should be impeached.
And as King himself has said crushingly of his use of the term “deportable”: “I would just direct people that have any question about that to AUSC 1227, which is the section in the U.S. Code that is titled this: ‘Deportable Aliens’…I mean, it is a legal term.” (Steve King and his role as an Iowa kingmaker in the early presidential sweepstakes, by Jeff Zeleny and Jordyn Phelps, Yahoo/ABC News, January 23, 2015).
This bullying attempt to anathematize the term “deportable” is just like the Left’s long war against the term “illegal alien,” which recently resulted in vandalism against a Santa Barbara newspaper (no arrests, needless to say, and therefore no strategic deportations). It’s another example of the Left owning the Megaphone and using it to impose its own version of reality.
Similarly, King was demonstrably right to say in 2013 that there were more drug smugglers than valedictorians among illegal alien minors (and subsequently was further vindicated by a spectacular case of illegal alien minor drug smuggling). Yet the Megaphone blares only that King said illegals develop muscles like cantaloupes (a reference to their immense loads, the 12-year old boy in the subsequent illegal smuggling case was carrying 80 pounds of marijuana) and that he compared once immigrants to dogs (wrong).
Of course, it actually doesn’t matter what King may or may not have said. There is an agenda here, pretty well summarized by neoconservative immigration enthusiast enforcer Jennifer Rubin:
…candidates who attend [the Iowa Freedom Summit] are enabling King to hold court, thereby setting themselves and the party up to be slammed as anti-immigrant at worst or at best merely insensitive.
Events like these, like the Ames straw poll, risk turning Iowa into an irrelevant sideshow. If the caucuses are going to be controlled by fringe characters who egg candidates into positions and declarations that will come back to bite them, top candidates may choose to stay away.
Keeping away from Iowa may be the smarter move, Washington Post, January 22, 2014.
Rubin’s idea of top candidates: Marco Rubio. Jeb Bush.
Too white, too Christian, too conservative…and potentially anti-immigration: Iowa must be discredited.
However, bitter experience has teaches that there is no MSM or liberal lie that some stupid Republican operative does not believe. Thus Politico’s James Hohmann reports:
Democrats are looking to turn a weekend event in Iowa being hosted by immigration lightning rod Steve King into a spectacle that sets the GOP further back with Latinos ahead of the 2016 campaign…. Outside the event in Des Moines, Democrats will do their best to tether the 2016 hopefuls to King and his divisive views on immigration… Across the street, Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz is planning a press conference to call on Republicans to condemn King’s statements on immigration.
Actually, of course, the Hispanic vote is still not big enough to make a difference in national elections. And the very best thing that could happen to Republicans is that they be “tethered” to King and immigration patriotism and forced to run a Sessions-style National Conservative campaign aimed at benefitting American/ white workers.
This is above all true in Iowa, one of what Steve Sailer has called the “Slippery Six”—
Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
In each of these Slippery Six states, Romney won at least 45 percent of the vote. But he still wound up a cumulative 0 for 80 in Electoral Votes. If Romney, rather than Obama, had won all six, he’d be President.The Slippery Six are states with old-fashioned white and black voting demographics, still with a smattering of old time unionized factory workers. Hispanics, much less Asians, are, for the moment, still a minor matter politically.
According to Reuters, Romney lost the Slippery Six states because (exactly as VDARE.com warned repeatedly while digging white share data out of reluctant tracking polls, see here and here and here), he did badly there among white voters—winning only 52 percent, six points worse than nationally.
Most notably, Romney did terribly among the white working class in these six states…
But right on cue, the Stupid Party misses the point:
Craig Robinson, who runs TheIowaRepublican.com and was formerly the state GOP’s political director, said he’s not surprised Democrats are being so aggressive…Robinson believes most of the Republican hopefuls are smart enough not to take the bait. He expects they won’t address immigration in their speeches, or that they refer to it only in broad strokes.
Steve King for a day| Democrats seize on an event being hosted by immigration lightning rod Steve King, January 23, 2015. Link charitably added by VDARE.com
In other words, the GOP/GAP should throw away its best issue.
Steve King, bless his heart, does not agree: Steve King, Ted Cruz Unveil Bill To Revoke US Citizenship Of Terrorist Affiliates, by Sahil Kapur, TPM, Jan. 23, 2015. More importantly, King has returned to the potentially decisive issue of abolishing birthright citizenship: Bill would end birthright citizenship, by Christina Marcos, The Hill, January16, 2015.
(For more VDARE.com coverage of Steve King, click here.)
Peter Brimelow [Email him] is the editor of VDARE.com. His best-selling book, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, is now available in Kindle format.
