Politics & Power Quote by Peter King

King’s sentence is engineered to do two jobs at once: light a match and keep his fingerprints off the gasoline. The headline-grabbing claim, “85 percent of the mosques have extremist leadership,” is an assertion of scale, not evidence. It’s a rhetorical multiplier: even if the listener can’t verify it, the number sounds precise enough to feel researched, turning suspicion into something that resembles common sense. The follow-up, “Most Muslims... are loyal Americans,” functions less as reassurance than as legalistic insulation, a preemptive rebuttal to charges of bigotry. He’s not condemning Muslims, he’s condemning mosques. That distinction is the point.

The subtext is that the public should separate “good” Muslims from the institutions that form them, implying that the primary civic threat is not individual belief but communal infrastructure: clergy, governance, sermons, funding. It’s a policy argument in the guise of a demographic observation, nudging listeners toward surveillance, informant programs, or restrictions on religious leadership while maintaining rhetorical cover: we’re protecting loyal citizens from a radical minority.

Context matters: King became nationally prominent in the post-9/11 security politics era, including congressional hearings that cast Muslim communities as uniquely suspect. His framing also taps into a long American pattern of treating houses of worship for minority faiths as political cells first and spiritual spaces second. The line works because it offers audiences moral permission to fear a community while claiming respect for its members, a neat trick that converts prejudice into patriotism.