"Somebody Else's Babies": A Congressman Says the Quiet Part, in Twelve Words, on a Sunday

On Sunday, March 12, Rep. Steve King of Iowa's 4th District posted approvingly about Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician whose party platform proposes closing mosques and banning the Quran. King's endorsement came with a thesis attached.

Read it twice, because the construction is doing more work than the vocabulary. There is an "our" that owns a civilization. There is a "somebody else" who owns different babies. And there is a claim that the second category cannot maintain the first, which is not an argument about assimilation, or English proficiency, or immigration paperwork. It is an argument about whose infants are structurally capable of carrying a civilization forward.

I. THE DEFENSE, AND WHY IT DOESN'T FIT

Pressed on CNN the next morning, King declined to retreat. He said he meant culture, not race: that he would like to see an America that is "just so homogenous that we look a lot the same," and that assimilation, not birth, was his subject. He has repeated versions of this for three days.

Take the defense at face value and it still collapses on one word, and it is the word he chose: babies.

A baby has no culture. That is the defining feature of babies. A newborn in Des Moines and a newborn in Karachi are, culturally, identical blank slates, and if the concern were genuinely assimilation then the arrival of an infant would be the least alarming thing imaginable... you get eighteen years and a school system. The only way an infant can threaten a civilization is if the thing it carries is inherited rather than taught. King's sentence is only coherent if "somebody else's" refers to ancestry, and he is the one who put babies in it.

The rest of his week supports the reading. Told his remarks were being celebrated by David Duke, who called them "sanity," King did not disown the endorsement.

II. THE THING HE IS QUOTING WITHOUT CITING

King did not invent this. He is restating, in Iowa plainspoken, an argument with a long and specific pedigree.

In 1916 the New York patrician Madison Grant published The Passing of the Great Race, arguing that America's founding stock was being demographically swamped and that its own elites were assisting. In 1924 Congress agreed and wrote national-origin quotas into law. More recently the French writer Renaud Camus gave the idea a marketable name, le grand remplacement, and European nationalist parties (including Wilders's own political neighborhood) have been running on it for years. This site keeps a standing dossier on the whole lineage, because it is going to keep coming up.

What is new this week is the venue. Not a pamphlet, not a message board, not a European rally. A committee-seated Republican congressman, on his own verified account, in twelve words, with no plausible deniability engineered into them.

III. WHAT THE PARTY DID ABOUT IT

Some Republicans objected. Sen. Jeff Flake called the remark unacceptable. Others said nothing at all, which in a week this loud is a position.

Note what did not happen. King was not stripped of a committee assignment. He was not censured. He faces no primary challenge from the party apparatus. He has said comparable things for a decade... about immigrants with "calves the size of cantaloupes," about contributions to civilization by "subgroups"... and been reelected seven times.

That is the actual story here, and it is why this page files it rather than shrugging. A party's tolerances are revealed not by what its loudest member says but by what happens to him afterward. This week the answer is: nothing happens to him. Which is a message received clearly by every other member who has been wondering how far the sentence can be pushed.