Robinson: Trump, GOP are silent on Rep. King’s supremacism

Why am I hearing faint strains of “Deutschland uber alles”? And why am I not hearing a loud chorus of condemnation from King’s Republican colleagues? King told CNN he is merely “a champion for Western civilization,” which he called “a superior civilization.” Which means, of course, that he considers other civilizations inferior. But we knew that.

King has a history of inflammatory immigrant bashing. In 2013, he said that for every undocumented immigrant who becomes a valedictorian, “there’s another hundred out there that — they weigh 130 pounds, and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”

And as for race, a guy from Iowa who keeps a Confederate flag on his desk is definitely sending some kind of message. We should pay attention to his lexicon, because today’s white supremacism tends to shy away from overtly racial terminology. Listen instead for words such as “culture” and “civilization.”

The idea is that the United States is the land of the free and the home of the brave because its “civilization” is “European” or “Western” — euphemisms, basically, for “white.” According to this view, immigrants have been assets to the country only to the extent that they have assimilated into the dominant culture. As for Muslims, well, forget about it; the Constitution may forbid the establishment of any official religion, but our civilization is resolutely Christian.

Modern white supremacy

I think that’s a fair reading of modern white-supremacist doctrine. Of course, it’s a bunch of racist, ahistorical claptrap.

Immigrants — both voluntary and involuntary — have shaped this nation since long before its founding. The first Africans were brought here in bondage in 1619, one year before the Mayflower. Americans have never been a single ethnicity, speaking a single language, bound by the centuries to a single patch of land. We have always been diverse, polyglot and restless, and our greatness has come from our openness to new people and new ideas.

King’s distress about birth rates can only be read as eugenics. If he is worried about the coming day when there is no white majority in the United States, he has remarkably little faith in our remarkable society — or in the Constitution that he, as a member of Congress, is sworn to support and defend.

President Trump played footsie with the white supremacist movement during his campaign. His chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, waged civilizational war when he ran the Breitbart News site. Trump could definitively denounce King’s racism with a statement or a tweet, but so far his silence is deafening.