Iowa Rep. Steve King found himself in the unusual position of having to campaign for his seat in Congress in what has been for him, a relatively safe district. After buying a last-minute television ad, (one recycled from 2014, I’m told), King hit the campaign trail on November 5. At a campaign stop in Webster City, Iowa, his second public event of the day, he met with about 15 supporters in the back of a restaurant.

Just before the event formally began, King was telling his supporters about his annual pheasant hunting event. In the past, Rep. Louie Gohmert and Donald Trump Jr. have been guests. This year’s guest was Antonia Okafor, a gun rights activist.

An audience member asked, “Hey, how’d you do pheasant hunting?”



Rep. King replied: “I better not say so, because ... if I told them then the animal rights activist will go ballistic. And so I tell them, this is my answer, I’ll say ‘it was a beautiful clear, still day, an October day in Iowa, the sky was blue, the air was moving just a little bit, and the sky was so full of feathers that one could be convinced the angels were having pillow fights.’ And we were well fed, I made a big ol’ batch of my patented pheasant noodle soup for everybody. It took us two days to eat it all, but everybody loved it. When I get it all put together then I put about a half a dozen jalapeno peppers, just whole, drop them floating around in there. It scares off some of the people so there’s a little more for the rest of us to eat. I raised a bunch this year, and they don’t have enough bite. I guess I’m going to have to go and get some dirt from Mexico to grow the next batch.”



[Laughs]



Audience member: Trust me, it’s already on its way.



Steve King: Well, yeah, there’s plenty of dirt, it’s coming from the West Coast, too. And a lot of other places, besides. This is the most dirt we’ve ever seen.



What began as a story about his pheasant hunting trip, turned into, what seems, a veiled jab at Mexicans—as understood and promoted by his audience—innuendo about Mexicans or Mexican Americans as “dirt.” Iowa does have a topsoil depletion problem, but it’s hard to imagine that the audience and King were discussing the shipment of soil from out of country or from California. More likely, King was indulging in dehumanizing rhetoric about immigrants who come through California from Mexico, or from Mexico, directly. And he has a history of doing just that.

For decades, King has been a hard-core restrictionist on immigration. And his comments on the topic have been pretty straightforward. He views them as “someone else’s babies,” and says that for every one who comes here “who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”

It’s not just immigration, either. King endorsed white nationalist Faith Goldy’s bid to become Toronto’s mayor and lost the financial support of the NRCC while earning the ire of fellow Republicans like Steve Stivers (Ohio) and Carlos Curbelo (Florida) for past racially charged comments.

Update, November 6, 2018, 8:36 p.m.: The King campaign's Jeff King emails "If you spent anytime with Congressman King throughout the district over this past week you would know that he has been referencing all the 'dirt' the dishonest, leftist media have been using to attack him. The Weekly Standard has proven this with the completely false narrative they are pushing in this article. Their unwillingness to change their narrative shows they have no desire to really report the facts. Voters are smart enough to see through this."

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Editor's Note: November 6, 2018, 8:36 p.m.: The story is accurate. We quoted Representative King at length, on purpose, to provide readers with all of the context for his remarks. Steve King never mentions the media in his remarks. To claim he was referring to the media when he worried about "dirt" coming from Mexico is absurd. We stand by the story.