Steve King’s Neo-Nazi Love Affair

On Tuesday, U.S. Representative Steve King quote-tweeted British neo-Nazi Mark Collett to—once again—criticize the concept of immigration.

King’s elevating of white supremacist talking points is entirely unsurprising. He is, after all, the same man who once tweeted “we can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies”, compared the Qur’an to Mein Kampf, and suggested treating undocumented immigrants like livestock while discussing the U.S.’s southern border, saying

“We could also electrify this wire with the kind of current that would not kill somebody, but it would simply be a discouragement for them to be fooling around with it. We do that with livestock all the time.”

It doesn’t take much of a leap to see why a bigot like Steve King might agree with some of the anti-immigrant, white supremacist views held by Mark Collett. Collett is the former youth leader of the fascist British National Party (BNP), the leadership of which was immersed in rampant antisemitism. Collett has admitted to being a “Nazi sympathiser”, expressed affection for Hitler and has referred to the Holocaust as the “alleged extermination of six million Jews”. He has attempted to rebrand himself as a figure on the white nationalist alt-right.

But while King retweeting a neo-Nazi is unsurprising, a U.S. Representative espousing white supremacist talking points is incredibly dangerous and shouldn’t become lost in the noise of the near-constant bigotry and scandals coming from the Trump administration. It should, in fact, be viewed in the context of the things done and said by the Trump administration and their allies — a context that displays a disturbing trend.

When viewed in that context, a clear pattern of hate and bigotry appears—a pattern continuously repeated by the likes of Donald Trump, Laura Ingraham, and Donald Trump Jr.

Mark Collett, left, with his former girlfriend Jenna Smith

Whether it’s Donald Trump retweeting the deputy leader of the far-right movement Britain First (which likes to proclaim it ‘invades’ mosques), Donald Trump Jr retweeting a #FreeTommy tweet in support of jailed British anti-Muslim extremist Tommy Robinson, or Fox News host Laura Ingraham retweeting a video posted by Collett—the far-right proves time and time again that the deepest, truest part of their ideology is nothing but hate.

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