KS GOP’s fake post of Gov. Kelly in sombrero crosses the line to blatant racism | Opinion
I was pretty happy when Mike Brown, the opportunistic and anti-First Amendment former chairman of the Kansas Republican Party, got voted out of office.
I thought, maybe now the state party could return to the common-sense conservatism that marked previous generations of Republicanism in the Sunflower State.
But the leadership that replaced him, led by Kris Kobach mouthpiece Danedri Herbert, is even worse.
For all his flaws, Brown didn’t publicly resort to open, blatant racism and white nationalism to get his point across.
The new management has crossed that line.
On Saturday, following the lead of their esteemed president, Donald Trump, the state party posted on Facebook a racist, Photoshopped image of Gov. Laura Kelly with a sombrero and a “Frito Bandito” moustache.
The image accompanied a paragraph criticizing Kelly for refusing to turn over to the Trump Administration the personal information of at least 188,000 Kansans receiving food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. That’s an at-least number because the administration is demanding the data on all recipients and their families going back five years.
And the fine print in the data request says the SNAP program could disclose the records to any other agency, “whether Federal, foreign, State, local, or tribal.” Yes that means those with Hispanic surnames — noncitizens and citizens alike — could have their and their families’ personal information turned over to ICE and foreign governments.
That’s a blatant violation of USDA confidentiality rules that’s being challenged in court by 21 states, regrettably not including Republican-dominated Kansas.
Significantly, the Kelly-as-a-Mexican ha-ha post from the Kansas Republican Party comes less than a week after a court case where the governor beat the pants off Chairwoman Herbert’s boss, Kobach, who sued to try to force Kelly to turn over the records.
Kobach had no reason to get involved in the first place — the dispute is already being handled via the regular appeal process at the Department of Agriculture.
But Kobach can’t help himself from simping for the Trump Administration and persecuting Hispanics every chance he gets.
One might think that after being called out on their racist post, Kansas Republicans might think about taking it down.
Instead, they doubled down.
The next thing they posted was a GIF image that morphs a picture of Laura Howard, director of the Kansas Department for Children and Families, into a lucha libre Mexican wrestler.
It’s hilarious, if you’re a Ku Klux Klansman whose social maturity froze in place after dropping out of sixth grade.
But it’s not just juvenile, racist bullying.
These posts expose the Big Lie that Republicans have been telling for years, that this is about illegal immigration, and Hispanic citizens have nothing to fear.
To the state’s residents of Hispanic descent, Republican leadership may smile in your face when they’re campaigning for your votes.
But in their private moments when you’re not around, this is how they see you — as lesser people to be fooled, exploited and ultimately discarded on the road to building the white nationalist Kansas of their dreams.
That they’ve taken it public says they don’t think they need to worry about what you think of them anymore. And that’s scary.
Next year, remember in November.
This story was originally published October 4, 2025 at 9:53 AM.
