“If I were gonna change anything — first of all, there’s only 140 characters. So I really don’t know why people hyperventilate over a tweet,” King says. | AP Photo Rep. King: People hyperventilated over 'babies' tweet

Iowa Rep. Steve King said Tuesday that he doesn’t understand why people “hyperventilate” over tweets, suggesting the uproar over his recent controversial Twitter post was overblown.

King tweeted Sunday that Geert Wilders, a far-right prime minister candidate in the Netherlands, “understands that culture and demographics are our destiny” and that “[w]e can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”


After doubling down on his comments Monday — “I meant exactly what I said,” he told CNN — King conceded on Tuesday that he would have provided more context had Twitter allotted more than 140 characters in a single post.

“If I were gonna change anything — first of all, there’s only 140 characters. So I really don’t know why people hyperventilate over a tweet,” King told the “Breitbart News Daily” radio show.

He questioned whether people who reacted to his tweet were “willfully ignorant.”

“But if I had room to add on, I would say, ‘You can’t rebuild your civilization with somebody else’s babies unless you adopt them and bring them into your homes and raise them as your own,’” he added. “And that’s the core of that tweet. They’re importing a different culture, a different civilization, and that culture and civilization, the imported one, rejects the host’s culture, and so they are supplanting Western civilization with Middle Eastern civilization. And I say — and Geert Wilders says — Western civilization is a superior civilization. It is the first world.”