Former Congressman Steve King, left, talks with Hamilton County Sheriff's Deputy Alex Pruismann, with his back to the camera, who is running for the office of Hamilton County Sheriff. Kevin Virgil, who wants to unseat Iowa Congressman Randy Feenstra, is pictured center. They are joined by Richard Rieck, in the red hat, and Mark Gillette. Virgil and King met the group for coffee at the Mornin' Glory Coffee Shop in downtown Webster City on Monday.

The Republican who wants to unseat U.S. Rep. Randy Feenstra stopped at the Mornin’ Glory Coffee Shop Monday to talk about his ideology.

Kevin Virgil, whose roots are in Sutherland, is running to replace Feenstra, of Hull, who represents Iowa’s sprawling 4th District in Congress. With Virgil was former Congressman Steve King, the Republican from Kiron, who lost in the primary against Feenstra in 2020.

“I think that this is one of the most important congressional districts in the country. It’s certainly one of the most conservative, definitely the most conservative in Iowa, and we currently have a congressman who has one of the least conservative voting records of the entire Republican delegation of Congress now. He votes for the Constitution literally only half the time. If you look at his score from the Republican Liberty Caucus, you know he received a score of 50 out of 100 last year.”

King, who said he is proud of the work he did while in Congress, joined Virgil at a table in the coffee shop in downtown Webster City with a handful of local Republicans. He is actively supporting Virgil’s challenge to his own former seat.

“I met (Steve King) about a year ago, which is when I first started learning about the carbon capture pipelines and their efforts to enact that chief eminent domain over private landowners,” Virgil said. “I thought it was not constitutional, but American. You probably know he’s started the Free Soil Coalition, which is a group that’s working to build a legal defense fund to fight the pipeline companies and those, like Randy Feenstra, who are enabling them by pushing through federal tax credits that make it financially lucrative for them to seize land.”

Virgil drilled down on his conservative message just outside the coffee shop, vehemently addressing his disdain for Feenstra’s support of the use of eminent domain against landowners who have crossed paths with the push to install carbon capture pipelines.

“I think the most egregious thing I’ve seen with the original reason I got into this race was because he worked so hard to enable carbon capture pipeline companies like Summit Power Solutions to pursue eminent domain and, in my opinion, illegally seized land from century farms, little landowners here in Iowa, right? For their private gain, which is a violation of the 5th Amendment,” Virgil said.

“And, you know, we can also look at his record to show that most of the money he raised was for his campaigns from outside the state, which, when you consider how little he shows up to meet with the donors or the voters here in the district or to vote in their interest, it’s pretty clear who he’s working for and I think we can do better,” he said.

“I don’t think that the carbon cache pipeline is being built for the reasons that its owners would want us to believe. I think it’s being built to ship liquefied carbon dioxide up to North Dakota to sell to the oil extraction industry and they have to, you know, bamboozle the public and believe in that they’re building this to help out all industry here in Iowa in order to get the support they need to achieve eminent domain, but that’s not why they’re building it all,” he said, “if they can receive billions of dollars and a half credit from the federal government along the way. Thanks to Randy Feenstra and the other Iowa Republicans who have attached those tax credits to a debt ceiling bill last year, by the way.”

He added, “Randy Feenstra pushed, he supported, those cash credits exactly one week after he received the $26,000 donation from Bruce Rastetter, the chairman of Summit Carbon solutions, right. It’s just yet another example of how transactional and how you know how financially motivated a thinker is, and I think that’s why he’s a bad fit for the office.”

Virgil, who graduated from high school in O’Brien County and attended the United States Military Academy at West Point, served in the U.S. Army career in the 82nd Airborne Division and the 75th Ranger Regiment, where he served with distinction, according to his online biography. After his military service, he attended business school at Emory University in Atlanta before pursuing a career on Wall Street.

“In the summer of 2001, Kevin was working in New York, across the street from the World Trade Center, and narrowly missed being in the city on 9/11. He answered the call of duty and joined the CIA as a case officer.”

In 2018, he founded Polysentry, a data analytics firm that works not only with the private sector, but also with the U.S. Department of Defense. Last year, Polysentry won a contract with the U.S. Air Force to develop a data classification system that uses artificial intelligence. Two years earlier, the company signed a $950 million deal to provide its software for the Air Force Advanced Battle Management System.

“The solution that my company built was originally intended for wholesale security teams, not for the military,” he said Monday. “We just discovered the opportunity later.”