Congressman King releases this video of remarks he delivered on the floor of the House of Representatives this afternoon. The speech was delivered on the one-year anniversary of the day a “disparaging misquote” was published by the New York Times that was subsequently used by House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy to improperly remove King from his committee assignments. King also used the occasion of this speech to announce his introduction of a resolution which formally seeks a correction in the Congressional Record for an inaccurate portrayal of comments he delivered on the House floor. In fact, the error the Congressional Record made was identical to the error made in the New York Times misquote, and shows how easily the Times’ error could have been made, even if one accepts no malice or bias on the part of the liberal Times.
In his speech, King makes a compelling and well-researched case that the political left has adopted a strategy of using the “weaponization of language” to attack Conservatives/Trump supporters. This strategy, which includes the intentional weaponization and deployment of phrases like “white nationalist”, “white supremacist”, “Nazi”, and “fascist” against Conservatives/Trump supporters, were all products of a strategy King believes was developed during a widely reported on conference held in Washington DC’s Mandarin Hotel on November 13, 2016, shortly after President Trump’s election, that featured some of the far-left’s most aggressive political operators. These meetings, King asserts, were the beginnings of the “Resistance Movement” designed to take down President Trump, and the “weaponization of language” was a key element of this strategy. King’s assertions are made even stronger by the data he discusses which show a contemporaneous rise in the usage of these disparaging terms in conjunction with the Mandarin Hotel strategy sessions.
Unfortunately, as King observes, “we should never forget that the Left in this country, in particular, and I hope it’s to a lesser degree and I believe it is from the other side, assigns a belief system to people and then attacks them for the belief system that they have assigned. And they use the words that they’ve been assigned to use to assign to people for the belief system that they’ve assigned.”
King’s treatment by GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy is unprecedented. Of the 4 Members of Congress who have previously been removed from committees, three of them had been convicted or pled guilty to the commission of a federal felony. King has broken no laws, no rules, and was provided with no due process by his own leadership. Not only has King violated no laws; he doesn’t even have a single accuser who has ever come forward to assert mistreatment.
As King notes: “to be treated like a federal felon by my own leadership for a made-up story that doesn’t hold up, cannot hold up under the scrutiny of history must be rectified.”
Background Information:
- During his remarks King made reference to a 6-page fact check document that refutes the New York Times misquote and that concludes that GOP Leader McCarthy’s actions amounted to little more than a railroading of King. That document may be read in full at this link.
- The corrective resolution introduced by King today can be read at the following link. It has not yet been assigned a bill number.
