Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, is refusing to apologize for retweeting a known neo-Nazi who called for an end to "mass immigration."
King retweeted Mark Collett, the former chair of the far-right British youth party, last week after Collett shared a Breitbart article criticizing "mass immigration."
The congressman, who once said "mixing cultures will not lead to a higher quality of life, but to a lower one," defended himself Wednesday in an interview on CNN, claiming he had not known he had retweeted a Nazi sympathizer who admires Adolf Hitler, but said he is "not sorry" he did.
"It's unjust to simply put a politically correct bridle on someone and say, 'You've got to do a background check on everybody that ever tweets something out before you can ever agree with a single sentence that they might put out,'" King said. "And, by the way, I didn't even know it was his message. I thought it was a Breitbart message."
He added, "I am aware of many leftists that are attacking me, trying to get me to take this down. I'm not taking it down. It was simply a Breitbart story that I tweeted. It had a guy's name on it that I had never heard of.
"Now, a lot of people have heard his name. It's going to stay on my website as long as it takes; it's going to go into the rearview mirror."
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