Steve King

U.S. Congress, 5th & 4th Districts of Iowa 2003-2021 Author, “Walking Through The Fire” — ‘My Fight for the Heart and Soul of America’ buy at

[Steve King @SteveKingIA]

Three wise African-Americans: Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Elon Musk.

[Steve King @SteveKingIA]

Death to America, death to all Christians and Jews must mean after we are all dead there can be peace.

[County MAGA @ShaBacksTheBlue]

@RealJamesWoods @RashelleJu3381 How in the hell is this even allowed on US soil?

[Steve King @SteveKingIA]

We are undergoing an attack on our culture. The United States is the flagship of Western Civilization which is strategically under attack from Communism, Islam, and Leftism. Two of which are atheist and the other is a death cult. Without Jesus Christ, there would be no Western Civilization. Immigration imports foreign cultures who create enclaves that replicate their home countries.

[Bleeding Heartland @LauraRBelin]

It sounds like Zach Lahn is saying that when too many people practice a different religion, that is tantamount to "destroying" the local culture.
It's not the government's role to promote one religion over others. Hundreds of thousands of Iowans are not Christian.

[Tiffany Justice @4TiffanyJustice]

Show your daughters this video. 👇

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr @RobertKennedyJr]

Bream fishing in St. Marys, Iowa, with MAHA gubernatorial race superstar and regenerative farmer Zach Lahn. #GetOutside #LiveRealLife

[Benny Johnson @bennyjohnson]

I asked the next Governor of Iowa how we keep young people from leaving the Midwest.

His answer was incredible:

Zach Lahn: “Here’s what I look at—how are we using the government of Iowa to promote the wellbeing of the people of Iowa and put programs in place so they stay here?

-Give high school graduates an income tax abatement for with money going into an account to help with the down payment on your first home.

-Put programs in place to prevent hospitals from closing and keep the doctors that are getting trained at University of Iowa, Drake and DMU in state.

-Give tax incentives to Iowa’s homegrown businesses instead of global companies.

-Start treating family farms as entrepreneurial activities.

-Allow family farms to serve public schools.

We should be rewarding the people, not massive companies.

Spot on, @ZachLahn

[Steve King @SteveKingIA]

Rubio has become the master of clarity.

[Isaac @isaacrrr7]

Marco Rubio lo acaba de clavar como un martillo:

«La violencia de la izquierda no es una “protesta”. Es una revuelta de lo peor contra lo mejor. Es la pataleta de los débiles, los mediocres y los cobardes contra los fuertes, los capaces y los buenos.

Son aquellos que no saben construir, crear ni lograr nada grande… y por eso deciden vengarse del mundo destruyendo lo que otros levantaron con esfuerzo, talento y visión.

Eso es el izquierdismo radical en su esencia más pura. Da igual la etiqueta del momento: anticapitalista, antiimperialista, comunista, anarquista, marxista, “progresista” o “activista climático”. El ADN es siempre el mismo.

Es resentimiento venenoso disfrazado de “justicia social”.

Es envidia podrida maquillada de “igualdad”.

Es odio a la excelencia envuelto en banderas de “liberación”.

Su único talento es destruir.

Su única alegría es ensuciar lo hermoso.

Su único objetivo es arrastrar todo hacia abajo para que nadie brille más que su propia mediocridad.

A través de la violencia, el terror y la cancelación buscan imponer su fealdad espiritual sobre la sociedad. No es idealismo. No es utopía. Es nihilismo puro con sonrisa moralista.

El viejo dogma se equivocó: esto no viene de gente que sueña con un mundo mejor, sino de gente que no soporta que el mundo sea mejor sin ellos.

Y ya estamos hartos.

La civilización no se defiende pidiendo perdón. Se defiende nombrando al enemigo por su nombre.

Vía @Jhonffonseca

[Steve King @SteveKingIA]

If a blended family father spends 3 hrs on the road to see his kids, it there a distinction between spending air time vs. road time to see them?

[Bleeding Heartland @LauraRBelin]

Republicans are trying to dismiss Qs about the time Zach Lahn spends in Kansas by accusing people of targeting his children.
It's a straightforward Q: How much time does he foresee spending in Kansas if elected? Is he going to keep flying himself or will state troopers fly him?

[Steve King @SteveKingIA]

No Muslims in America and a safe home for Jews preserves the American Dream.

[Uri Israel @Israel2252]

Jews - 0.02% of the world’s population - have won 25% of Nobel prizes.
Muslims - 25% of the world’s population - have won 0.5% of Nobel prizes.

If you think the world’s problems are even remotely related to the Jews, YOU are part of the world’s problems.

[Laura Ingraham @IngrahamAngle]

One of the greatest living Americans.

[Steve King @SteveKingIA]

Happy Birthday, Thomas Sowell, one of America’s three wise men!🎂

[Willis Eschenbach @WEschenbach]

Happy 96th birthday to Professor Thomas Sowell, one of the greatest thinkers of our time and the undisputed king of the epigram! In his honor, here are twenty of his most famous quotes:

1. “Nearly a hundred years of the supposed ‘legacy of slavery’ found most black children being raised in two-parent families in 1960. But thirty years after the liberal welfare state found the great majority of black children being raised by a single parent. The murder rate among blacks in 1960 was one-half of what it became 20 years later, after a legacy of liberals’ law enforcement policies.” (A Legacy of Liberalism)

2. “Public housing projects in the first half of the 20th century were clean, safe places, where people slept outside on hot summer nights, when they were too poor to afford air conditioning. That was before admissions standards for public housing projects were lowered or abandoned, in the euphoria of liberal non-judgmental notions. And it was before the toxic message of victimhood was spread by liberals. We all know what hell holes public housing has become in our times.” (A Legacy of Liberalism)

3. “The blacks in the West Indies had all sorts of experiences growing their food, selling the surplus in the market, and being responsible for budgeting what they had. Black slaves in the United States were deliberately kept from having that. Dependence was seen as the key to holding the slaves down. Ironically, that same principle comes up in the welfare state 100 years later.”

4. “If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood a hundred years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state. Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the civil rights laws and ‘war on poverty’ programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began.” (A Legacy of Liberalism)

5. “What the welfare system and other kinds of governmental programs are doing is paying people to fail. Insofar as they fail, they receive the money. In so far as they succeed, even to a moderate extent, the money is taken away.” (Free to Choose, 1980)

6. “The way the [welfare] programs are organized, poor people are only paid to do things that are counter-productive, such as breaking up their families, such as not earning above a certain level of income.”

7. “The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people’s money away quietly, and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.”

8. “Not since the days of slavery have there been so many people who feel entitled to what other people have produced as there are in the modern welfare state, whether in Western Europe or on this side of the Atlantic.”

9. “The more people who are dependent on government handouts, the more votes the left can depend on for an ever-expanding welfare state. Although the big word on the left is ‘compassion,’ the big agenda on the left is dependency.”

10. “Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area, crime, education, housing, race relations, the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.” (Is Reality Optional?)

11. “The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore, we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.”

12. “Socialism is a wonderful idea. It is only as a reality that it has been disastrous. Among people of every race, color, and creed, all around the world, socialism has led to hunger in countries that used to have surplus food to export.”

13. “As long as human beings are imperfect, there will always be arguments for extending the power of government to deal with these imperfections. The only logical stopping place is totalitarianism, unless we realize that tolerating imperfections is the price of freedom.” (Ever Wonder Why?)

14. “The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy.”

15. “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”

16. “Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.”

17. “It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication, and a government bureaucracy to administer it.” (Knowledge and Decisions)

18. “I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.”

19. “Racism is not dead, but it is on life support, kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as ‘racists.’”

20. “The old adage about giving a man a fish versus teaching him how to fish has been updated by a reader: Give a man a fish, and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries! Moreover, some politician who wants his vote will declare all these things to be among his ‘basic rights.’”

[Steve King @SteveKingIA]

A wonderful clip of Clarence Thomas.

[SirOliverPollock(KAIZER)😎 🧐 🤫 @SirCensorLot]

JUSTICE THOMAS DOESN'T SPEAK TOO OFTEN IN 'PUBLIC' CROWDS... BUT WHEN DOES... WE SHALL ALL BE PRIVY TO THE CONVERSATION!

[Steve King @SteveKingIA]

Wisdom from Warren Buffett. Take a look at #17.

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

In 1998, Warren Buffett gave a 1-hour masterclass on how to never lose money investing.

Here are the 22 most valuable lessons from his lecture:

1. You only have to get rich once. If you have $100 million and can make 10% unleveraged or 20% leveraged, the difference between $110 million and $120 million at year-end means nothing to your life, your family, or anything. But the downside, especially with other people's money, is disgrace, humiliation, and facing the friends whose money you lost. The equation never makes sense.

2. To make money they did not need, they risked money they did have and needed. That is just plain foolish, Buffett says, regardless of your IQ. If you hand him a gun with a million chambers and one bullet and offer him any sum to put it to his temple and pull once, he will not do it. There is nothing on the upside that justifies the downside. People do this financially all the time without thinking.

3. The smartest people in finance went broke, and that is the most fascinating story Buffett knows. Long-term Capital Management had 16 people with possibly the highest average IQ of any business in the country, 350 to 400 combined years of experience, and most of their own net worth in the firm. They still went bankrupt. Buffett says if he ever wrote a book, it would be called why smart people do dumb things.

4. Beta and sigmas tell you nothing about the real risk of going broke. The LTCM team relied heavily on mathematics and believed a six- or seven-sigma event could not touch them. They were wrong. History does not tell you the probabilities of future financial events. The real risk is not volatility. It is a permanent, irreversible blind spot in something crucial, often caused by knowing a great deal about something else.

5. Invest only in businesses you can understand. That one rule narrows the field by about 90%, and that is fine. Buffett can understand Coca-Cola. he cannot value an internet company, and he says if a student handed him a valuation of one on a final exam, he would flunk them. People thought Enron was incredible because it had a good track record, but almost nobody understood how it made money. That was the signal to avoid it.

6. You want a business that is a castle with a wide moat around it. Inside the castle, you want an honest, able, hard-working duke. The moat can be low cost, like Geico in auto insurance, or brand, or patents, or location. But a wonderful castle will always be attacked, so the job of every manager Buffett owns is one thing: widen the moat. Throw crocodiles and sharks into it to keep competitors out.

7. Moats change slowly and invisibly, but they change. Thirty years ago, Kodak's moat was as wide as Coca-Cola's. They had share of mind; the little yellow box meant best in everyone's head. Then they let Fuji into the Olympics and narrowed their own moat. Coca-Cola's moat, by contrast, is wider now than 30 years ago. Every time infrastructure gets built in a country that is not yet profitable, the moat widens a little. You cannot see it day by day, but in 10 years, the difference is enormous.

8. Share of mind beats share of market. When you say Disney, every person in the room has something in their head. Say Universal Pictures or 20th Century Fox, and you have nothing. A mother with two kids will pick the $17.95 Disney video over the $16.95 alternative because she knows it will be fine and does not want to preview ten videos to decide. That little bit of certainty in the customer's mind is worth a fortune.

9. The best businesses have pricing power and require little capital. see's candy sold 16 million pounds at $1.95 when Buffett bought it for $25 million. The entire thesis was whether the price could go to $2.25 without hurting sales. It could, because nobody wants to hand their valentine a box of candy and say, "This year I took the low bid." Today, See's makes $60 million on the same formulas and still takes almost no capital. Compare that to GM, which had to reinvest every dollar into better factories and whose stock barely moved over 50 years.

10. The best businesses earn a royalty on other people's capital. Coca-Cola sells a formula and collects a royalty on every drink. American Express takes a few percent of every dollar you spend. You put up the capital, they take a cut. Low capital intensity is one of the most underrated qualities in a business and one of the surest paths to durable wealth.

11. Define your circle of competence and stay inside it. The size of the circle does not matter. Staying inside, it does. If you know which 30 companies out of thousands you actually understand, you are fine. Buffett understood H.H. brown shoes and Frank Rooney, so he closed that deal in five minutes. If you do not know enough to understand a business instantly, you will not understand it in a month either.

12. Ignore the macro entirely. Buffett has never bought or skipped a business because of a feeling about interest rates, the economy, or any macro forecast. If Alan Greenspan and Bob Rubin both whispered exactly what they would do for the next 12 months, it would not change what he pays for anything. You want to focus on what is important and knowable. The macro is important but not knowable, so you ignore it.

13. Inactivity is the strategy, not a flaw. Wall Street makes money on activity. You make money on inactivity. A broker is like a doctor paid by how often he changes your pills. If everyone in a room trades their portfolio with everyone else every day, they all end up broke, and the intermediary keeps the money. Buffett looks for one good idea a year and rides it to its full potential. He measures Berkshire by how little turnover there is, like a church where the same people fill the seats every Sunday.

14. If you understand businesses, diversification is a mistake. For the 99% who will not evaluate businesses, Buffett recommends a low-cost index fund and extreme diversification. But if you bring real intensity to evaluating companies, owning more than six is a terrible idea. Very few people got rich on their seventh best idea. A lot of people got rich on their best one. Buffett keeps about half his money in what he likes best.

15. Buffett's biggest mistakes are mistakes of omission, not commission. The times he understood a business well enough to act and instead sat there sucking his thumb. He passed on healthcare stocks during the Clinton plan and on Fannie Mae in the mid-eighties, each a multi-billion-dollar miss. Accounting never captures these. The $2,000 he put into a Sinclair service station as a young man, money he lost, has an opportunity cost of about $6 billion today.

16. Focus on what will happen, not when. Coca-Cola went public in 1919 at $40 a share and dropped to $19 within a year. There was always a reason not to buy: the great depression, world war, sugar rationing, thermonuclear weapons. But one share bought then and reinvested would be worth about $5 million. If you are right about the business, you will make a lot of money. The timing is the tricky part, so do not focus on it.

17. When hiring, look for integrity, intelligence, and energy. But if the person lacks the first one, you actually want them dumb and lazy. Because a person with intelligence and energy but no integrity will destroy you. Buffett borrowed this from Pete Kiewit. The trait everyone screens for last is the one that matters most.

18. Here is a thought experiment Buffett gives students. Imagine you could own 10% of one classmate for the rest of their life. You would not pick the highest IQ or the best grades. You would pick the person you respond to best, the one who is generous, honest, gives credit to others, and has leadership qualities. Now imagine you also had to short one classmate. You would pick the egotistical, greedy, slightly dishonest one. The qualities that decide both are not talent. They are character.

19. Every quality on the admirable side is achievable, and every quality on the repellent side is removable. The things that make you want to own 10% of someone are not the ability to throw a football or run fast; they are behavior, temperament, and character, all of which anyone can choose. Buffett's point: you already own 100% of yourself, so you might as well become the person worth betting on.

20. The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. Buffett sees people in their forties and fifties trapped by self-destructive patterns they can no longer change. At a young age, you can choose any habits you want. Ben Franklin and Ben Graham both did exactly this, looking at people they admired and simply deciding to behave like them. There was nothing impossible about it.

21. Take a job you would take if you were already independently wealthy. Buffett told a 28-year-old at Harvard who wanted a consulting job "to look good on his resume" that it was like saving up sex for your old age. There comes a time to just start doing what you love. Buffett offered to work for Ben Graham for free, was told he was overpriced, and kept pestering him for years. Take the job you would jump out of bed for. You cannot miss.

22. You won the ovarian lottery, and that should shape how you think. Buffett imagines a genie 24 hours before your birth letting you design the world's rules, with one catch: you do not know which of 5.8 billion balls you will draw. Born here or in Afghanistan, with an IQ of 130 or 70, male or female, able-bodied or not. If you could put your ball back and draw one of 100 random others, most people would not, because they are already in the luckiest 1%. Buffett knows he is perfectly wired for a market economy that pays him like crazy, while an equally good citizen leading scout troops and teaching Sunday school is not, purely by luck.

[Steve King @SteveKingIA]

A non inclusive list to revisit each time we see another Rob Sand ad.

[Hawkeye Enjoyer 🐤 @HawkGuyEnjoyer]

“Moderate” Rob Sand:

• Backed by billionaire father in law
• Backed by Reid Hoffman
• Backed by JB Pritzker
• Backed by George Soros
• Donated to Howard Dean 2004
• Caucused for Barack Obama
• Interned for Senator Harkin
• Campaigned for Joe Biden
• Campaigned for Kamala Harris
• Donates only to Democrats
• Funded by Democratic donors
• Ivy League Elitist larping as a rural Iowan
• Audits target Republican-led programs
• Takes credit for others’ work
• Modeled for gay underwear company in Europe
• Supports abortion
• Backs LGBTQ+ for children
• Opposes parents right to choose schools
• Opposes removing gender protections
• Proposes weed legalization
• Gets elected into office and doesn’t work
• Supports gun control
• Blames Republican control for issues
• Supports illegal aliens flooding into Iowa
• Vetoes culture war restrictions
• Appoints farmer fined for polluting Iowa water multiple times as Lt. Gov

What else am I missing?

[Steve King @SteveKingIA]

I remember a talk with livid young Muslim men who could not abide the fact that Jews live in Israel. I rolled out a map and showed them the vast range of Muslim countries and the tiny space of Israel. They screamed that Jews can not be allowed to live in Israel. I said, “Where then can they live?” NOT there! Where? NOT there!
I’m getting the same attitude about Muslims. Where can they then live? NOT here!

[Megan Basham @megbasham]

If Republicans of past generations had not continually sold us out on the issue of illegal immigration, we would not currently have Marxist Muslims taking over New York right now.

This is what “compassionate conservatism” got us.

[Steve King @SteveKingIA]

A clear analysis of the continuing conquest of the West by Islam and why Israel’s thriving survival is so important.

[Dan Burmawi @DanBurmawy]

https://t.co/e7DGopQWlj

[Zach Lahn @ZachLahn]

Rob Sand is wanting debates only in Iowa’s four largest cities - nothing in our rural communities.

Sounds like typical politics.

Our cities were built by the outpouring from our rural communities.

We will not ignore them when it comes to debates nor when I am governor.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Wow

[A Man Of Memes @RickyDoggin]

RULES FOR SONS:

1. Never shake a man’s hand sitting down.
2. Don’t enter a pool by the stairs.
3. The man at the BBQ Grill is the closest thing to a king.
4. In a negotiation, never make the first offer.
5. Request the late check-out.
6. When entrusted with a secret, keep it.
7. Hold your heroes to a higher standard.
8. Return a borrowed car with a full tank of gas.
9. Play with passion or not at all…
10. When shaking hands, grip firmly and look them in the eye.
11. Don���t let a wishbone grow where a backbone should be.
12. If you need music on the beach, you’re missing the point.
13. Carry two handkerchiefs. The one in your back pocket is for you. The one in your breast pocket is for her.
14. You marry the girl, you marry her family.
15. Be like a duck. Remain calm on the surface and paddle like crazy underneath.
16. Experience the serenity of traveling alone.
17. Never be afraid to ask out the best looking girl in the room.
18. Never turn down a breath mint.
19. A sport coat is worth 1000 words.
20. Try writing your own eulogy. Never stop revising.
21. Thank a veteran. Then make it up to him.
22. Eat lunch with the new kid.
23. After writing an angry email, read it carefully. Then delete it.
24. Ask your mom to play. She won’t let you win.
25. Manners maketh the man.
26. Give credit. Take the blame.
27. Stand up to Bullies. Protect those bullied.
28. Write down your dreams.
29. Always protect your siblings (and teammates).
30. Be confident and humble at the same time.
31. Call and visit your parents often. They miss you.
32. The healthiest relationships are those where you’re a team; where you respect, protect, and stand up for each other.

[Hawkeye Enjoyer 🐤 @HawkGuyEnjoyer]

In the 2000’s, Zach Lahn was debating Barack Obama and defending conservative principles while Rob Sand was modeling underwear in Paris.

One was preparing to fight for Iowa.

The other was preparing for a photoshoot.

[Steve King @SteveKingIA]

It’s enough to give me hope we can save Western Civilization from Barbarism.

[Michael Bloss @micha_bloss]

Es ist zum kotzen🤮 .

Rechte und Rechtsradikale „feiern“ im Europaparlament das Abschiebegesetz mit Sprechchören: „Send them back“.

Mittendrin: @ManfredWeber.