Steve King Babies Comments: Watch Iowa Congressman Reaffirm 'Racist' Tweet In New Interview

Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, reaffirmed on TV Monday that he believed the highly controversial comments he posted to Twitter over the weekend saying you cannot rebuild a nation with "somebody else's babies."

King was referencing an anti-Muslim Dutch politician named Geert Wilders in his Sunday tweet. "Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny," he wrote. "We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies."

In an interview with CNN's Chris Cuomo on Monday, King doubled down on his remarks, saying, "Well, of course, I meant exactly what I said."

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King then expanded on the talking point, explaining that he'd given speeches across Europe that focused especially on declining populations.

"I've said to them you cannot rebuild your civilization with somebody else's babies," King said. "You've got to keep your birth rate up. And you need to teach children you values and in doing so then you can grow your population and you can strengthen your culture, you can strengthen your way of life. And that's not happening in any of the Western European countries."

CNN host Cuomo responded with a lengthy rebuttal: "Right, but if you want to apply that kind of thinking to America, it seems like a complete contradiction of what we're all about. This is the melting pot. We are known by those countries that you just mentioned as the bastion of diversity. It is an unqualified strength for us. And it sounds like you are trying to white cleanse our population in saying 'somebody else's babies.' I think that means me, congressman, I'm only second generation in this country. Who's somebody else's babies?"

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"Chris, we're a country here that if you take a picture of what America looks like — you can do it in a football stadium or in a basketball court — and you see all kinds of different Americans there," King responded. "We're pretty proud of that, the different looking Americans. And there's an American culture and an American civilization and it's raised within these children in American homes. That's one of the reasons that we require the president of the United States be raised with an American experience. But we've also aborted 60 million babies in the country since 1973. And there's been this effort, we're going to have to replace that void with somebody else's babies. And that's that push to bring in much illegal immigration into America."

King's defense of his comments Monday came on the heels of widespread condemnation of his original tweet. Some members of the GOP even spoke out against King, while Miriam Amer, the executive director of the Iowa chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a statement that "this racist tweet crosses the line from dog-whistle politics to straight-up white supremacist advocacy."