The Anderson County Review’s Facebook page on Friday posted a cartoon showing Kansas Governor Laura Kelly, a Democrat, wearing a mask adorned with a Star of David, in front of a picture of Jews being hoarded onto the trains during the Holocaust, with the caption: “Lockdown Laura says: Put on your mask … and step onto the cattle car.”
According to Wikipedia, the Anderson County Review is a local weekly newspaper for Garnett, Kansas with a circulation of about 3,000. The publisher, Dane Hicks, is the Republican county chairman in Anderson County, and apparently drew the cartoon himself.
The governor called on Hicks to remove the offensive cartoon, which suggests that enforcing health regulations in an attempt to stop the spreading of the most lethal pandemic in US history since the Spanish Flu of 1918 was tantamount to the Nazis sending Jews to Auschwitz.
Seriously?
Hicks refused to remove the cartoon from Facebook, and promised to run it in his paper’s Tuesday’s edition. He wrote an email saying: “Political editorial cartoons are gross over-caricatures designed to provoke debate and response — that’s why newspapers publish them — fodder for the marketplace of ideas. The topic here is the governmental overreach which has been the hallmark of Governor Kelly’s administration.”
Much like the Nazi government’s overreach that resulted in the industrialized murder of 6 million blameless Jewish souls. It’s so clearly the same case…
Hicks (some folks’ names just fit them, don’t you agree?) refused to apologize, stating ever so bravely: “Apologies: To whom exactly?. The critics on the Facebook page? Facebook is a cesspool and I only participate to develop readership.”
Hicks insisted he “intended no slight” to Jews or to Holocaust survivors.
Didn’t Adolf Eichman say something like that during his trial?
Rabbi Moti Rieber, executive director of Kansas Interfaith Action, posted on his own Facebook page: “1: Use of Holocaust imagery to score political points: don’t.; 2: Comparison of Gov. Kelly’s actions, designed to save lives, with mass murder: odious.; 3: Star of David on her mask: anti-Semitic.; This thing is the trifecta of garbage. The KS GOP must repudiate immediately.”
The state off Kansas, population roughly 3 million, with only 191,561 tests, has 16,376 diagnosed cases of the coronavirus, with 283 deaths. Clearly, Kansas needs to increase its testing and to encourage its residents to take up all the recommended measures to save their lives and the lives of others, and chief among those are the facemasks which prevent the spreading of this airborne virus.
Finally, Facebook user Joanna Davidson Smith was among thousands of Hicks’ readers who responded to the cartoon: “You have turned common sense health precautions during a pandemic into a political talking point. It is very disappointing to see. We will depend on family & friends to keep us updated. Unfollowing.”
So much for developing a readership in Facebook’s cesspool…