Iowa Congressman Steve King’s long history of barely veiled racist statements predates the election of Donald Trump. But in recent months, with with the president giving license to immigrant-bashing as a central plank of the Republican platform, he’s barely bothered to veil them at all. “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,” he tweeted in March 2017, prompting condemnations from his party. And yet, far from shaming him into silence, the controversy seems to have prompted King to position himself at the vanguard of the culture wars. “I’m not deleting that,” he declared in June, explaining his refusal to apologize for re-tweeting a Nazi sympathizer. “Because then you’ll all pile on me and say: ‘King had to apologize! He was wrong. He knew he’s guilty.’”

He’s kept up the drumbeat in the lead-up to the midterms, perhaps spurred on by the fact that he’s facing his first legitimate Democratic challenger in years. And in a Tuesday night tweet, he went so far as to endorse Faith Goldy, a veritable white nationalist, for mayor of Toronto. “Pro Rule of Law, pro Make Canada Safe Again, pro balanced budget, & . . . BEST of all, Pro Western Civilization and a fighter for our values,” he wrote.

If anything, King is understating Goldy’s views. As her former colleague Michael Coren wrote in Now Toronto, the onetime right-wing darling has begun making claims of “white genocide in Canada,” posted videos from Bethlehem claiming that the city was “ethnically cleansed” of Christians, and recited the white supremacist “14 Words” oath on a podcast. “How did she end up within nationalist and racist political circles?” asked Coran. ”The most obvious answer is that she’s there because she wants to be.”

Fringe as they may be, Goldy’s views—and, by extension, King’s—are part of a trend in the Republican Party that’s only grown more prominent. The G.O.P.’s midterm primaries were chock-full of candidates spouting extremist views, from Roy Moore and his anti-Muslim, anti-L.G.B.T., and anti-pretty-much-everything-else stances, to Arthur Jones, the Holocaust-denying Republican candidate in the race for Illinois’s 3rd District who once said he would combat the “two-party, Jew-party, queer-party system.” (Paul Nehlen, a self-described “pro-White” candidate, was briefly the front-runner to replace Rep. Paul Ryan in Wisconsin’s 1st District.) According to Right Wing Watch, more than a dozen other prominent candidates fell squarely into the far-right camp, including Pizzagate conspirators, pastors who believe that homosexuality is a mental illness, and full-blown, card-carrying white supremacists. While their views were forged by fringier sites like Breitbart, which has long beat the anti-immigrant drum, they have also begun to trickle onto more mainstream platforms. ”Your views on immigration will have zero impact and zero influence on a House dominated by Democrats who want to replace YOU, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever increasing number of chain migrants,” Fox’s Laura Ingraham recently warned on her show.

These sorts of comments aren’t necessarily working in Ingraham’s favor: though her ratings are up, big-name advertisers are still shunning her show. King’s Iowa district, however, is another matter. Though a September poll showed his Democratic opponent, J.D. Scholten, behind by just 10 points—a slim lead compared to the 22-point margin King commanded two years ago—Scholten will have to up turnout significantly if he hopes to threaten the incumbent. As it stands, King’s district still carries a strong anti-Hispanic sentiment, driven by the influx of immigrants, both documented and undocumented, to work in dairy farms. “I hate to drive down Storm Lake streets and see more Hispanic shops than what we had,” a woman, who refused to give her name, told the Des Moines Register earlier this month. “All these names you read in the paper and you can’t even say them, and they’re making trouble. . . . I’m totally not racist, but . . . we have people who don’t live like we do and don’t have our morals. They move in and everything’s falling to pieces.”