An Odd Discrimination

Discrimination is the unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people or things (especially on the grounds of race, age or sex). Synonyms for discrimination include:  prejudice, bias, bigotry and intolerance.  Another definition of discrimination is the recognition and difference between one thing and another and its synonyms include:  differentiation and distinction.

Add “odd” to the word “discrimination: and you get an “odd prejudice or bigotry,” or an “odd differentiation or distinction.”  It seems to me an odd prejudice and an odd distinction that the U.S. House of Representatives voted  overwhelmingly yesterday to pass a resolution disapproving statements made by Representative Steve King (R-Iowa) that were criticized as racist.  The vote was a reaction to King’s interview with the New York Times in which he said, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?  Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?” This odd discrimination came after a long list of similar statements made by King, such as “we can’t restore our civilization with other people’s babies,” that “cultural suicide by demographic transformation must end,” and that “we need to get our birth rates up or Europe will be entirely transformed.”  “He has called immigration a ‘slow-motion holocaust,’ language that echoes the neo-Nazi doctrine that non-white immigration is a form of ‘white genocide.’” 

The odd prejudice or bigotry—the odd differentiation or distinction—is not that King’s antics have finally drawn a condemnation from his own party (even the National Review called for King to be expelled from Congress—and conservative Henry Olsen urged the same to avoid the “seeds of bigotry” from taking root in the Republican Party).  This should  have been said and done a long time ago in reference to King.  The odd prejudice, the odd differentiation is that these reactions seem to miss the obvious.  Adam Serwer wrote in The Atlantic, “there is little daylight between Steve King and the president of the United States, Donald Trump.” Funny, isn’t it, that the National Review, Olsen and GOP members of congress failed to see the connection and never mentioned the president’s name.

In 2014, as Trump considered running for president, he made an appearance with King in Iowa, calling him “special guy, a smart person, with really the right views on almost everything,” and Serwer writes of Trump “noting that their views on the issues were so similar that ‘we don’t even have to compare notes.’”  The GOP outrage and the House’s condemnation of King is an odd discrimination, an odd differentiation by any stretch of the imagination.  How can the GOP censure King, but  continue to embrace Trumpism, and all it represents?