The Republican congressman Steve King applauded the far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders on Sunday, using Twitter to write an apparent rejection of immigrant children in the United States and Europe.

“Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny,” the Iowa representative wrote, linking to another tweet in praise of Wilders, who has espoused anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric, and last month called Moroccans “scum”. “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,” King wrote.

David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, quickly tweeted his approval, writing “God bless Steve King” in all capital letters.

King was first elected to Congress in 2002 and represents a solidly Republican district in north-western Iowa, where both he and Donald Trump received over 60% of the vote in 2016.

The Iowa Republican has aligned himself with the European far right before. He met the French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen with fellow a Republican congressman, Dana Rohrabacher, last month in Paris. In September, he posted a photo of himself with Wilders and wrote: “Cultural suicide by demographic transformation must end.”

In October, King deleted a retweet about Britain’s decision to leave the EU and, in December, expressed his condolences about the loss of the far-right Freedom party in the Austrian presidential election.

King’s tweet follows a televised tirade on MSNBC in July asking what non-white “subgroups” had contributed to society.

King has long been one of the most vociferously anti-immigration members of the House Republican caucus and is known for his controversial rhetoric on the subject. In 2013, King said that for every valedictorian whose parents were undocumented immigrants, “there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130lb and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75lb of marijuana across the desert.” The Iowa Republican has also compared immigrants to dogs and called illegal immigration a “slow-rolling, slow-motion terrorist attack on the United States.”

This week, King urged Trump to “purge” all of Barack Obama’s political appointees from government service.

“I will use the word purge,” he said. “I’ve used it over the last few days. I think that needs to happen. I think it’s a descriptive word that fits well within the English language, and I know there are people that will attach extra meaning to that. I don’t know a better word to use.”

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