It’s no secret that Iowa congressman Steve King is a flaming racist, but he apparently doesn’t want his family to know about it. Such was the focus of one line of King’s questioning of Google CEO Sundar Pichai during Pichai’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday morning.
King, a noted bigot who is often described as such in the media, lamented that his seven-year-old granddaughter was playing a children’s game on her phone one day before the midterms. Suddenly, she saw a photo of her walking hate crime of a papaw pop up, with a headline King opted not to describe, but probably wasn’t about the Confederate flag he used to display on his desk, or his referring to Mexicans as “dirt,” or his desire for a “homogenous” America, or his defense of racial profiling, or his description of American civilization as a “superior culture,” or his fear-mongering about “mixing cultures,” or his general anti-immigrant nonsense, or his embrace of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and vocal white supremacists (and their embrace of him).
Definitely not those kind of headlines.
While waving his phone around like an old man yelling at a cloud, Rep. King demanded Pichai explain how headlines about his hate could possibly show up on his grandchild’s iPhone.
“I have a 7-year-old granddaughter who picked up her phone during the election, and she’s playing a little game, the kind of game a kid would play,” King told Pichai. “And up on there pops a picture of her grandfather. And I’m not going to say into the record what kind of language was used around that picture of her grandfather, but I’d ask you: how does that show up on a 7-year-old’s iPhone, who’s playing a kid’s game?”
“Congressman, iPhone is made by a different company,” Pichai calmly said. And he’s right—Apple makes the iPhone!
Rep. King hurriedly corrected himself, saying it “could have been an Android,” which actually is a Google product. Pichai offered to look into it for him, before the freshly re-elected KKKongressman yielded the remainder of his time.
Good thing Rep. King is on the House Judiciary Committee. This self-centered exchange really gives the American people confidence that he’ll ask the smart questions of the tech giants before him.