King criticized media coverage of his remarks that "white people" had done more for civilization than any other "subgroup" and later said he meant "Western civilization." | AP Photo Steve King: MSNBC panelist 'was disparaging ... old white people'

Rep. Steve King is still trying to explain what he meant with his comments earlier in the week in which he initially suggested that “white people” had done more for civilization than any other “subgroup” and later said he meant “Western civilization.”

The Iowa Republican, speaking at a Washington Post event on Wednesday, criticized media coverage of his remarks as lacking the proper context in which he had made them during a panel discussion on MSNBC.


Fellow panelist Charlie Pierce, of Esquire, had said on Monday: “If you’re really optimistic, you can say that this is the last time that old white people will command the Republican Party’s attention, its platform, its public face,” adding, “That hall is wired by loud, unhappy, dissatisfied white people.”

“Now, that’s disparaging a group of people, and ‘old white people’ — can you trade that language out by adding any other group in there as an adjective?” King said Wednesday. "And by the way, I am wise enough not to even do that for people, because then it blows the whole Twittersphere up again. But he was disparaging a group of people, a subgroup of people, ‘old white people,’ and saying they’re going to be out of the politics of the Republican Party. That’s gotta be answered.

King added, “If you’re sitting here as a seated member of Congress on a national television show and asked to swallow something like that and curl up again, no other group of people would take that.”

King then said that he knew of no one in “the media or public life” who would have turned “that around the other way and have made that assertion to anybody sitting on that panel.”

“And by the way, Charlie Pierce is not a young white guy,” King quipped.

Offering a further explanation, King said he pointed out “that Western civilization is the most successful civilization the world has ever seen,” and the foundation of the United States’ “ideological thought is rooted in the Enlightenment in Europe, and then this country was born at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, with that thought process and that coming over here to this country, like a giant Petri dish that was created for America to burst up onto the scene in the world. And we did a lot with that.

“And so, yes, any civilization, you can look down through that and say these are things that we’re not proud of. I could go back and give you that list,” King acknowledged. “But the sum total that’s been contributed by Western civilization, it surpasses any other culture or civilization, partly because we borrowed from them along the way, and we’re flexible enough to do that. And so I don’t think we should apologize for our success. And the idea of multiculturalism, in that every culture is equal — that’s not objectively true. And we’ve been fed that information for the last 25 years in this country, and we’re not going to continue to become a greater nation if we don’t look at this objectively.”

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Steve King

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