US Newspaper Owner Aplogizes For Comparing Face Mask Rule To The Holocaust

Fact checked
face mask rule

A Kansas newspaper owner has apologized after publishing a cartoon comparing face mask orders to the Holocaust.

Dane Hicks, a GOP official who owns a weekly Kansas newspaper apologized on Sunday for a cartoon that was posted on the paper’s Facebook page that compared Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s order for Kansans to wear face masks to the roundup and murder of Jews during the Holocaust.

Hicks said that political cartoons are “gross over-caricatures designed to provoke debate”

“The topic here is the governmental overreach which has been the hallmark of Governor Kelly’s administration,” he added.

Breitbart reports: 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.

Hicks is the GOP chairman for Anderson County in eastern Kansas. The state party chairman deemed the cartoon “inappropriate.” Gov. Laura Kelly, who is Catholic, called for it to be removed and she and other critics called it anti-Semitic.

“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,” Hicks said in his statement.

The cartoon depicted Kelly wearing a mask with a Jewish Star of David on it, next to a digitally altered image of people being loaded onto train cars. Its caption is, “Lockdown Laura says: Put on your mask … and step onto the cattle car.”

Hicks said Saturday that he put the images together and planned to publish the cartoon in the paper’s next edition Tuesday.

His newspaper is based in the Anderson County seat of Garnett, about 65 miles (105 kilometers) southwest of Kansas City and has a circulation of about 2,100, according to the Kansas Press Association.

Kelly did not immediately respond to Hicks’a apology, but her office said she could address the issue during a news conference Monday.

The governor issued the mask order because of resurgence in reported coronavirus cases that increased the state’s total to nearly 16,000 as of Friday, when Kansas finished its worst two-week spike since the pandemic began.

4 Comments

  1. Stop apologizing for the truth! Every time there is an apology, there is another nail in the coffin of our Constitutional Republic!

    • Pope Emeritus Benedict ” they in there hate the truth ” Speaking of the Vatican wherein lies the moral authority for rule of law.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.




This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.