Weekly publisher and county GOP chair takes down cartoon equating mask order with the Holocaust, apologizes

The paper is in Garnett, seat of Anderson County (Google map)

"A Kansas county Republican Party chairman who owns a weekly newspaper apologized Sunday for a cartoon posted on the paper’s Facebook page that equated the Democratic governor’s coronavirus-inspired order for people to wear masks in public with the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis during the Holocaust," The Associated Press reports. Gov. Laura Kelly asked the paper to remove the cartoon.

"Dane Hicks, owner and publisher of The Anderson County Review, said in a statement on Facebook that he was removing the cartoon after 'some heartfelt and educational conversations with Jewish leaders in the U.S. and abroad.' the newspaper posted the cartoon Friday, and it drew dozens of critical responses and international attention. A blog post by Hicks on Saturday defending it also drew critical responses."

The cartoon showed Kelly wearing a mask with a Star of David on it, next to a digitally altered image of people being loaded onto train cars, with the caption, “Lockdown Laura says: Put on your mask ... and step onto the cattle car.” Hicks told AP that he assembled the images and planned to run the cartoon in the paper’s print edition Tuesday. The paper, in Garnett, is the only one in the county.

Hicks said in his statement, “I can acknowledge the imagery in my recent editorial cartoon describing state government overreach in Kansas with images of the Holocaust was deeply hurtful to members of a culture who’ve been dealt plenty of hurt throughout history — people to whom I never desired to be hurtful in the illustration of my point.”

AP reports, "State law allows counties to opt out of her mask mandate, and Anderson County has done so. It has about 7,900 residents in a conservative swath of eastern Kansas, and President Donald Trump carried it with nearly 73% of the vote in 2016. The state health department has reported only four coronavirus cases for Anderson County, all of them since May 8."