Steven King ignited a hysterical backlash in the summer of 2016 when he modestly asked, in response to a journalist who made a comment about “old white people” making up the majority of the GOP:
Where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you’re talking about? Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?
When moderator Chris Hayes asked, “Than white people?”, King added:
Than Western Europe itself. That’s rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the United States of America.
At this point the panelists started speaking over each other in a frantic state, with some reporter asking: “What about Africa?” What about Asia?” Before cutting to a commercial and ending this dangerous line of conversation, Hayes said:
Let me note for the record that if you’re looking at the ledger of Western Civilization, for every flourishing democracy you’ve got Hitler and Stalin as well. So there’s a lot on both sides.
Apoplectic Reactions Against King
The next day the media together with academic servants of the state unleashed a barrage of articles denouncing King as “racist” and “mentally stunted”. Varying “lists” of the contributions of non-Europeans to “civilization” and to “modern society” appeared everywhere. A white female from Salon, after producing a list about non-European contributions to “humanity”, “first civilizations”, “citizen rule”, “written law”, “tools”, “surgery”, “numbers”, and…