Republican congressman criticised for retweeting British Nazi sympathiser and ex-BNP activist

The Iowa congressman retweeted a screenshot of a Breitbart article on Italian attitudes to migration

Steve King has made inflammatory comments before (Rex Features)

A Republican congressman has been criticised for retweeting a British activist who is a prominent Nazi sympathiser and has described himself as an admirer of Hitler.

Steve King of Iowa has a history of making inflammatory statements about immigrants and promoting white nationalist views.

The activist, Mark Collett, is the former chairman of the Young BNP, the youth arm of the far-right British National Party, and like Mr King he has often warned that influxes of immigrants pose a danger to Western countries.

Mr Collett’s tweet was a screenshot of a Breitbart article titled “Vast Majority of Under-35 Italians Now Oppose Mass Migration,” and his commentary: “Sixty-five per cent of Italians under the age of 35 now oppose mass immigration. Europe is waking up...”

Mr King’s retweet included a comment of his own: “Europe is waking up...Will America...in time?” As of Wednesday afternoon, it had not been taken down.

Mr Collett was the subject of a 2002 documentary on Channel 4 called “Young, Nazi and Proud”. In it, he says that Aids is a “friendly disease because blacks, drug users and gays have it”, HuffPost reported.

Nick Ryan, a spokesman for anti-racism advocacy group Hope Not Hate, told HuffPost that “no mainstream politician in their right mind should be retweeting Mark Collett”.

Mr King’s office declined to comment on the matter.

It was not the first time Mr King, who was elected to Congress in 2002 and has displayed a Confederate battle flag on his desk in Washington, has promoted extreme anti-immigrant or white nationalist views.

In 2013, he said that for every child of unauthorised immigrants “who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”

Speaking on MSNBC in 2016, he questioned the historical contributions of non-white “sub-groups”.

Last year, he said that “we can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies”, setting off widespread anger that included criticism from his congressional colleagues.

But his comment drew praise from other figures, like former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

The New York Times