Politics & Power Quote by Peter King

King’s line is built like a chain of borrowed authority: he doesn’t merely warn about “extremists,” he recruits a Muslim cleric, a federal venue, and a hard-sounding statistic to do the warning for him. “Shaykh Kabbani…at the State Department…more than 80 percent” is a rhetorical triple-lock. It lets a politician float an incendiary claim while signaling, implicitly, I’m not the one saying it; I’m just repeating what a credible insider told the government. That’s the intent: to pre-legitimize suspicion.

The subtext is more muscular than the surface content. “Controlled” doesn’t describe ideology; it implies capture, infiltration, an enemy operating behind familiar doors. And “from all I’ve seen” converts a sweeping empirical assertion into lived certainty, a move that can’t be audited because it’s framed as experience. The timeline (“several years ago,” “four or five years”) also matters: it suggests a steady deterioration, priming the listener for escalation and exceptional measures.

Contextually, King’s statement sits inside a post-9/11 political marketplace where credibility is traded in security language and where “community” institutions become the terrain of threat assessment. Citing a controversial figure and a contested percentage isn’t a bug, it’s a feature: the goal isn’t precision, it’s permission. Once mosques are cast as majority-extremist spaces, surveillance, hearings, and suspicion feel not only defensible but overdue. The line works by collapsing nuance into urgency, then laundering that urgency through a supposedly unimpeachable source.