Rep. Steve King claimed in a radio interview yesterday that the message of Martin Luther King Jr. has “been hijacked now by the left,” repeating his attack on the Congressional Black Caucus as “self-segregating.”

Breitbart radio host Curt Schilling asked King, an Iowa Republican who has a long history of promoting white nationalist ideas, to respond to his theory that while liberals think everything is about “a person’s identity,” conservatives don’t care about race, gender, religion or sexual orientation, they just care about “legal or illegal.”

King responded that this liberal viewpoint has been “indoctrinated into” young people in schools and “crept into the minds of the public, the culture, our civilization.”

He recalled a recent conversation with a fellow Republican member of Congress who King said had urged him to stop quoting from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “been to the mountaintop” speech because he “might be misinterpreted.” (We can only imagine what part of the speech King may have taken out of context to support his own political views.)

“My gosh, has it gotten so bad that we can’t quote with reverence Dr. King because we don’t own what he said because our skin’s the wrong color?” King demanded. “What he said was true, right, just and noble, and what he said was the high point in American civilization and society and it’s been hijacked now by the left.” He added that an “example” of this is “the self-segregating Congressional Black Caucus” because members were attempting to recruit a black woman for a Senate seat.

He concluded that Democrats are the “party of division.”

King clearly hasn’t bothered to read the speech he’s quoting from, in which Martin Luther King Jr. promoted the strike of sanitation workers in Memphis and urged his audience to boycott companies with discriminatory hiring practices and to “strengthen black institutions” by putting their money into black-owned banks and insurance companies.