Where Donald Trump has employed subtext and dog whistles in the service of his anti-immigration agenda, Republican Rep. Steve King of Iowa doesn’t bother with such subtleties. Last summer, on live TV, he claimed that white people have contributed more to civilization than any other “sub-group” of people and said it is not “objectively true” that every culture is equal. Before that, he was perhaps best known for his flawed argument that for every DREAMer “who’s a valedictorian,” there are 100 undocumented immigrants with “calves the size of cantaloupes” from smuggling marijuana across the border. On Sunday, King went further, tweeting a cartoon praising the far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders, a fierce anti-immigrant and anti-Islam critic, and writing a message below: “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” Critics immediately seized on the post as an apparent endorsement of white nationalism, but King doubled down in an interview with CNN Monday morning, telling host Chris Cuomo, “Of course I meant exactly what I said.”

King didn’t seem to understand why Cuomo, and half the Internet, was apoplectic. “I have said the same thing as far as 10 years ago to the German people and to any population of people that is a declining population that isn’t willing to have enough babies to reproduce themselves,” King [said]. “And I have said to them, ‘You cannot rebuild your civilization with somebody else’s babies, you have to keep your birth rate up and teach your children your values, and in doing so then you can grow your population, you can strengthen your culture, you can strengthen your way of life.’”

Cuomo pushed back, arguing that King’s stance was in conflict with American values, that the United States is a “melting pot,” and that it sounded like the congressman was defending a cultural “white wash.” But King powered on through:

“If you take a picture of what America looks like—you can do it in a football stadium or a basketball court—and you see all kinds of different Americans there. We are pretty proud of that, the different-looking Americans that are still Americans and there is an American culture, an American civilization, and its raised within these children and these American homes. And that is one of the reasons why we require that the president of the United States be raised with an American experience.

But we have also aborted nearly 60 million babies in this country since 1973 and we are going to have to replace that void with somebody else’s babies, and that’s that push to bring in much illegal immigration into America, living in enclaves, refusing to assimilate into the American culture and civilization—some embrace it, yes—but many are two and three generations living in enclaves that are pushing back now against the assimilation.”

King was insistent that his defense of Western Civilization was about values, not race. “If you go down the road a few generations or maybe centuries with the intermarriage, I’d like to see an America that’s just so homogenous that we look a lot the same,” he insisted, later arguing that the problem with immigrants is “culture,” not “blood.”

The Iowa congressman first incited a wave of criticism on Sunday afternoon, when he shared a racially charged cartoon depicting Wilders plugging a hole in a dam labeled “Western Civilization” that is holding back a deluge of green liquid branded with Islam’s star and crescent symbol as a group of bearded men armed with machetes and wearing suicide bombing vests look on. “Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny,” King wrote. “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”

It is certainly not the first time that King has explained his opposition to immigration in such stark terms, nor the first time that he has been accused of promoting a thinly-veiled white nationalist agenda. King caused a similar stir last summer, during an MSNBC panel discussion at the G.O.P. convention in Cleveland. “This whole ‘white people’ business does get a little tired, Charlie,” King said in response to a comment made by his fellow panel member, Esquire writer Charles Pierce. “I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out, where have these contributions been made by these other categories of people that you’re talking about. Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?” King added. Later, in a subsequent interview with The Washington Post, King stood behind his statement. “The idea of multiculturalism and that every culture is equal—that’s not objectively true,” King said, adding that Western civilization is “the most successful civilization the world has ever seen. And some of the reasons for that is that it has borrowed the best of some of the cultures along the way.”

King did find one fan in former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, who was quick to applaud King’s display. “GOD BLESS STEVE KING!!!” Duke tweeted on Sunday afternoon. “Any criticism of the demographic replacement of Whites in America is considered “White Supremacism” by these crazies. Sick.”