× The scene at Steve King’s town hall today in Grundy Center, Iowa. Photo by Brenna Norman pic.twitter.com/PEtHkmmaFN — corinne_perkins (@corinne_perkins) August 17, 2019 Lone attendee, Jessica Birch (r), and a staff member attend Representative Steve King’s recent town hall in Grundy Center, Iowa.

This past weekend, U.S. Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, caught a bit of attention when his town hall meeting in Grundy Center, Iowa, drew an audience of one.

In a subsequent interview with Iowa Starting Line’s Pat Rynard, the lone attendee, Jessica Birch, said she thought about leaving when she realized she was the only person there, but decided to brave the unfathomable strangeness because she was “really, really angry other Democrats didn’t show up.”

Show up, she most definitely did, quizzing King on a wide range of issues, including reparations for slavery. King responded with this gem:

“It’s kind of hard to hear the arguments for reparations these days and think about it in terms of some people gained a foundation of wealth prior to 1865 because they used slave labor. At the same time, 600,000, maybe 750,000 Americans died putting an end to it. What’s the price for that? There’s no reparations for lost lives, but there is for lost wages? I think it’s a hard argument for them to make, and it’s much better for us to be grateful for both sides.”

The latest estimate is indeed that about 750,000 people died in the Civil War, but nearly half of that tally were Confederate soldiers who died defending the rights of slaveholders.

It’s as though King thinks the Civil War was a human sacrifice whites made to the altar of Eris to free their African American brethren.

In King’s warped view, African Americans are not only indebted to the Union states but also to the Confederates that fought to preserve slavery. It’s as though he thinks the Civil War was a human sacrifice whites made to the altar of Eris in order to free their African American brethren.

Never mind that the precise cause of the Civil War was a traitorous pro-slavery militia attacking a U.S. military base (Fort Sumter), or that about 40,000 African Americans also died in the Civil War, or that more than a million people died because of the Atlantic slave trade—none of that appears to exist in King’s mind, in which the slavery of African Americans is catalogued as “lost wages.”

This is as absurd as saying that WWII needed to happen to end the Holocaust, and that Jews are somehow indebted both to Allied forces for liberating concentration camps, and to the Nazis who played their part in a “both sides” sacrifice.

This isn’t King’s first sympathetic expression of the Confederacy. A few years ago, it came to light that the Confederate flag was one of five displayed prominently on the Congressman’s desk—questionable for anyone in Congress, and weird for someone from a Union state.

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Defending it, King said, “When you think about the price that was paid to put an end to slavery, you can’t discount what this means.”

King doesn’t have a Civil War era Union Jack alongside his Confederate flag.

Following the 2015 church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, committed by a killer who had posed for pictures with the Confederate flag, King gave a speech on the House floor defending the “Southern pride” flag from “symbolism that has been redefined by a lot of members of the opposition party” and cautioning against judgment of the slave states, saying, “none of us know what it was like living during that time and in that era.”

It wasn’t last year, when King asked, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?,” that the Republican House leadership finally acted and stripped King of his committee memberships.

President Donald Trump, perhaps predictably, has been silent when it comes to condemning the highest-ranking racist in Congress—never even once condemning King. In fact, in June, Trump invited King to a fundraiser he was headlining in Iowa.

Buoyed by Trump’s tacit seal of approval, and the President’s own not-so-thinly-veiled white nationalism re-election campaign, King proclaimed to the Washington Examiner this week that he would run again next year “unless I’m dead.”

“None of my language was offensive,” he said, but people “express indignation” when they're told to be angry by the “liberal press.”

Sounds like reparations might be in order for all of Mr. King’s pain and suffering.