On July 3, the publisher of the Anderson County Review, a local newspaper in eastern Kansas, posted a political cartoon to the paper’s Facebook page. The publisher, Dane Hicks, who also serves as the county’s GOP chairman, had created the image himself in response to a recent mask order by the state’s Democratic governor, Laura Kelly. The cartoon depicted Governor Kelly wearing a mask adorned with the Jewish Star of David. In the background, women and children are being loaded onto trains. The caption made the political valence clear: “Lockdown Laura says: “Put on your mask… and step onto the cattle car.”
Hicks’s cartoon quickly garnered international attention. The Associated Press and The New York Times ran stories, which fed reporting as far away as The Times of Israel. Many condemned the cartoon for trading in antisemitic imagery, for trivializing the Holocaust, and for undermining efforts to curb the coronavirus pandemic. Some critics accused Hicks of conspiracy-mongering. Rabbi Moti Rieber of Kansas Interfaith Action suggested the cartoon implied that “nefarious Jews” are behind Kelly’s actions. Hicks himself denied any “slight” to Jews or Holocaust survivors. “[T]hey better than anyone,” he explained in an email, “should appreciate the harbingers of governmental overreach and the present but tender seedlings of tyranny.”
I am a native of Anderson County, Kansas, and I return there often. Today, however, I am also a historian of modern Germany who specializes in fascism and the radical right. In other words, I study the kind of destructive and dehumanizing politics that Mr. Hicks purports to warn against. As someone surprised to find his hometown in the headlines in a way so interwoven with his work, I would like to suggest that something else is going on in this episode, which is itself symptomatic of how wearing masks in a pandemic has become a marker of partisan loyalty.
