“Than white people?” Hayes asked, taken aback. “Than Western Civilization itself,” King said.

It was classic King: Nonchalantly delivered, stunningly offensive, and completely fact-free, since non-white people, and indeed non-Western people, have contributed a great a deal to the world.

On Sunday, King offered up his latest outrage, in a tweet expressing his support for the far-right, anti-Islam and anti-immigration Dutch leader Geert Wilders:

Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies. https://t.co/4nxLipafWO — Steve King (@SteveKingIA) March 12, 2017

The tweet was, by King standards, somewhat nuanced: Although it’s hard to read the tweet as anything but a statement of white racism, especially given King’s past comments about how “other categories” or “subgroup[s]” of people have not contributed to the world, King left himself some wiggle room for implausible deniability with his choice of pronouns. As the famous fictional non-white person Tonto asked the Lone Ranger, “What you mean … ‘we’?”

On Monday, King went on CNN and tried to do some clean up. On the one hand, he told Chris Cuomo, “I meant exactly what I said.” King explained that he was referring to birth rates in Europe, arguing that native-born citizens were reproducing too little, and immigrants too much. (King is correct that birth rates are falling in Europe, as well as in the United States.) He connects these demographic statistics to vague innuendo about the need to “strengthen your culture, strengthen your way of life,” which amount to warnings about anyone who has values different from King’s, though Muslims are presumably the central focus. (For the record, the percentage of the American population born abroad has risen in the last few decades, but is still lower than where it stood between the 1860s and 1920s.)

But King also claimed this wasn’t about race. “If you go down the road a few generations or maybe centuries with the intermarriage, I’d like to see an America that’s just so homogenous that we look a lot the same from that perspective,” King said. Apparently forgetting the many race-obsessed things he’s said over the last decade, he added, “I think there’s been far too much focus on race, especially in the last eight years.”

The yearning for interracial marriage can become a sort of slightly-more-benign racism, as Jia Tolentino memorably put it three years ago: “The subtext is clear as anything: look how nice we look, as a people, when white gets to be more interesting and minorities get to look white. Look at this freckled, green-eyed future. Look at how beautiful it is to see everything diluted that we used to hate.” But believing that’s what King meant requires giving him a benefit of the doubt his own past statements do not afford him.