In 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, as well as 2019, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” published profiles of Kris Kobach, the Secretary of State of Kansas and a member of the Republican Party’s Platform Committee in both 2012 and 2016. In our first profile, we pointed out how Kobach wrote Arizona’s legal racial profiling law, SB 1070, and who not coincidentally has ties to the anti-immigrant hate group FAIR, is a Birther, and also has the nasty habit of trying to convince people that the LGBT community are working to promote pedophilia. In our second report on Kobach, he had further spread the myth of free “Obamaphones” being handed out (there’s a government program to get phones to poor households, but it was instituted by President Reagan to help people offer a phone number to potential employers and get hired and off of welfare). Kobach also has warned against Latino voters forming a “socialist voting block” and didn’t think it beyond the realm of possibility that President Obama would stop having African-Americans prosecuted for committing crimes. Kobach has claimed his critics are akin to the “class enemies” of China during its cultural revolution, so we guess we’re in that boat now, too. Kobach was appalingly racist enough to become an immigration advisor to the Donald Trump campaign, and continued his xenophobic crusade with him, every step of the way.
In October of 2015, Kobach spoke at a “writer’s workshop” event for the Social Contract Press, a publication that often prints articles for white nationalists, and a month later, was echoing conspiracy theories started on Alex Jones’ InfoWars to claim that massive voter fraud takes place using same day voter registration and schemes with “voting buses” and used his own conservative talk radio to ask guests if President Obama was “putting his finger on the scale in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood or the radical Islamists.” Speaking of Kobach’s relationship with Obama, we already knew Kobach was a Birther, but he decided to call back to it in April of 2016, saying that perhaps the reason President Obama opposes proof of citizenship laws is because “he’s not a citizen”.
By June of 2016, Kobach raved about anti-Trump protests in New Mexico, suggesting that immigration protesters and people testifying in front of state legislators should be “rounded up” (because that doesn’t sound scary, at all). When the 2016 Republican National Convention rolled around, Kobach was dragging the GOP into its most bigoted era in modern history, making sure that Trump’s proposed Border Wall in it. Kobach rode the election of Donald Trump to the White House, continuing to lay seeds of anti-immigrant fears into the ear of a guy who’s already pretty receptive to them. From day one, Kobach wanted to change the way voting rights in our country, because of course he wanted to in order to make sure Democrats could never, ever win. He spent most of the transition trying to get Trump to agree to creating a Muslim registry, a horrifying prospect with all sorts of bad historic parallels as well as “extreme vetting” of all immigrants because we know was an idea because Kobach carelessly allowed his agenda to be revealed by walking in with it out in plain view because he’s a wanker too dumb to invest in a manila folder (they’re too dark a shade of brown for him to hold, of course).
For months, Kobach has continued lying his ass off at a frantic and disgusting pace, insisting we need new Voter ID laws even though his own studies disprove that. And yet, he’ll try and convince the public that Donald Trump isn’t lying when he claims Hillary Clinton received 3-5 million illegal votes, or that “a significant number of refugees will become terrorists” (HINT: They won’t, and there’s no evidence to think such a thing would come to pass.) Kris Kobach is now on the legal record, known to be a liar, as he was fined for misleading a Kansas court and refusing to disclose a previous Trump memo. Maybe his reputation as a disingenuous extremist is the reason why when Trump let him created a new “voter fraud commission”, that 44 states (and counting) told him they would not be cooperating with requests to reveal voter information at the risk of revealing the personal details of voters. Hell, even the Secretary of State of Mississippi… hardly the most liberal of individuals… even the Secretary of State of Mississippi told Kobach he could go jump in the Gulf of Mexico with a stupid request like that. But Kobach’s end goals are still working just by requesting that voter information, as some people have begun calling about deregistering for fear that their personal information could fall into the hands of hackers. Kobach and his office responded to online criticism from individuals who said not to do it and give over their personal info in the form of responding by doxxing those critics.
Kris Kobach shows that his attempts at purging this country of any immigrant of color like the bigot he is have begun to make him a complete laughing stock. His “voter fraud commission” was disbanded as an abject failure in January of 2018. And, he didn’t just lose his case in court in his last attempt at voter suppression in Kansas in June of 2018, but his attempts to defend his fascist ideas were so poorly logically argued that the judge ordered him to take remedial law school courses. Ignoring that the general public now was well aware that he was a bigoted, incompetent huckster, in June 2017 Kobach announced that he’s running for Governor of Kansas. Kobach managed to win the primary, but as he lost with only 43% of the vote to Laura Kelly in Kansas, a long-time GOP bastion.
We thought we were done trying to warn the general populace about this fascist, undemocratic, racist hatemonger… but alas, this is not the year we can stop letting the name Kris Kobach exit our lips in American politics. Kris Kobach is running for U.S. Senate in 2020, hoping to fill the seat of the retiring Pat Roberts. Kansas Republicans are already criticizing him and warning that he could allow for the first Democratic Senator to come out of Kansas in over eighty years, and he jumped off to a great start, misspelling his own name on his paperwork to file to run for office. The Republican Party know what a liability a piece of garbage Kris Kobach is for them, as they’ve spent millions of dollars in ad campaigns supporting his primary opponents and running attack ads against him and labeling one of their own as a white nationalist. It’s not hard to see how someone with his track record could be given that designation, especially given his response to the Covid-19 pandemic was to start fearmongering that infected Chinese people would come across the U.S./Mexico border to spread the disease.
Whether or not Kansas Republican voters respond to that by rallying around Kobach and making him their nominee when he’s so incompetent he can’t even responsibly keep track of his own firearms… Well, we’ll see. But if he ends up being the nominee on the ballot in November, he could end up costing the GOP a Senate seat in Kansas for the first time in about half a century.