Speaking to Cuomo yesterday, King was marginally more accepting of these unnamed other “categories” of human beings, offering that certain groups “contribute differently to our culture and civilization,” but maintaining his opinion that “certain groups of people will do more from a productive side than other groups of people will. That’s just a statistical fact.”

Though King offered that he would one day like to see “an America that is so homogenous that we look a lot the same...” and that he believed there’s been “far too much focus on race,” ahem, “especially in the last eight years. I want to see that put behind us,” the more alarmingly racist and floridly delusional parts of his message are the ones that have proven most popular—and increasingly so—in America today. No less than the sitting president of the United States, Donald Trump, told an audience in Iowa in 2014 that King had “the right views on almost everything.”

White supremacists including David Duke and Richard Spencer, who believe that truly “American” babies are the products of Western civilization, the rightful heirs to its bounty of freedom, Christianity and the English language, praised King’s tweet. And they affirmed that Western religion, culture, and language are the tenets upon which they believe this country was founded and to which it must return—if it is to survive.

Instead of roundly condemning King, though, establishment Republicans like House Speaker Paul Ryan offered only tepid responses to his bluster. In a statement, Ryan’s office allowed: “The speaker clearly disagrees and believes America’s long history of inclusiveness is one of its great strengths.” (Rep. Carlos Curbelo, an immigration moderate from Florida, was noticeably more offended.)

Meanwhile, babies of non-Western stock (brown, and apparently occult) are, in the eyes of Spencer and Duke—and perhaps King—dismantling American civilization. They are not of this place, not of this land. They are “somebody else’s.” I am one of them.

In part this is ironic, because the Wagners of Lansing, Iowa (Mr. King’s home state) would have been familiar and happy characters in any King homily: my paternal grandfather was a rural mail carrier, his wife a stay-at-home mother of six. They were devout Catholics who ate fish on Friday and had home-made donuts on Sunday. Their town was lily white, and my father could recall ever only having seen one person of color during his childhood: the town’s black dry cleaner. When Steve King and his brethren dream of the Good Ole Days, I imagine my father’s Iowa childhood is exactly what they envision: stickball in the evenings and “Western” homogeneity that stretches further than the cornfields in late July.

This is the part of America they wish to see more of, and these Wagners are the Americans King and Co. wish would just have more babies—presumably in a bid to balance the scales with the country’s increasingly brown population. So far, most of my family has obliged: The Wagner progeny, overwhelmingly, would qualify as “American babies” in King’s estimation. They remain mostly headquartered in the Midwest, products of white, Christian, Western unions (if not necessarily Republican ones).