Kansas SecState Kris Kobach has the most single-minded agenda in American politics. The one thing he cares about is race, the one agenda he pushes is getting immigrants out of the country and poor/Black voters off the voting rolls. I'm watching him claw his way to power (now he's a well-situated Trump adviser and running for governor of Kansas in 2018), and you can just see the presidential run on the horizon.
And, unlike Trump, he's brilliant and in control of himself.
Short version of the story: Kobach has been indoctrinated into White Nationalism for decades, and has spent his entire career trying to restrict voting rights (you know where that leads), harass immigrants and Muslims, and promote Birther talking points and other conspiracies about Obama.
This is what I've put together on his history. He don't even try to hide it now - the man is White Genocide in a Harvard suit.
1985. At Harvard, Kobach becomes a protégé of Prof. Samuel Huntington, famous for his "clash of civilizations” theory of a coming race war. Under Huntington's influence, Kobach campaigns against divestment in South Africa's Apartheid government.
2001. Kobach writes the law forcing every visa holder from 24 Muslim countries to be fingerprinted and interviewed on an annual basis. In 10 years of operation the program fails to result in a single terrorism conviction, but does lead to the deportation of 14,000 Muslims on mostly minor immigration violations. Kobach declares the program a huge success.
2002. Writes a memo for the Justice Department claiming that local police have the right to arrest people for simple civil immigration violations, setting the precedent for Sheriff Joe Arpaio's unconstitutional racial profiling.
2003-2007. Includes material from anti-immigrant and White Nationalist-associated sources in his courses on immigration law.
2004. Begins working as a lawyer for FAIR, the anti-immigration think take founded by a White Nationalist. Kobach focuses on restricting voting rights and immigrant rights across the country.
2006: The mayor of Hazleton, Pennsylvania claims that "illegals" in his town have started a crime wave. Kobach helps him create the most anti-immigrant city ordinances in America, including a rule denying the ability to rent an apartment without a driver’s license. It is later shown that from 2000 to 2007, only 20 out of 8,575 felonies committed in Hazleton were connected to an illegal immigrant. Kobach’s laws are declared unconstitutional. Later, the mayor’s house is raided by local police after his teenage son was caught spraying graffiti, and marijuana is found in the home.
Over the next ten years, Kobach makes over $6 million helping dozens of other cities and states craft similar laws. Nearly all of them are declared unconstitutional, resulting in legal fights that cost taxpayers tens of millions more. One Kobach-written Georgia law, later declared unconstitutional, resulted in the migrant labor workforce dropping by 30-40% for the season in Georgia and $140 million in losses to farmers due to crops rotting in the fields. Kobach declares his work a success, saying that the laws are “tests” to determine which laws will get through the courts and which will not.
2007. Working for the Kansas GOP, Kobach brags about the number of voters he had been able to “cage”, or purge from voting rolls. The practice involves sending tens of thousands of mailers to registered voters, usually in heavily Black or Democratic neighborhoods, and then removing people off the voting rolls if their mailer comes back as undelivered.
2009: Kobach jokes about Obama’s birth certificate at a GOP event and suggests that it is false.
2010. While running for Kansas Secretary of State, Kobach states that questions about Obama’s birthplace are fair until he releases his “long form” birth certificate.
Sheriff Joe Arpaio comes to Kansas to campaign for Kobach.
2010. In conjunction with Arizona state senator Russell Pearce, Kobach helps Arizona craft a law that requires immigrants to carry their documents at all times, police to check immigration status at every stop, makes it a state crime to apply for a job if you are undocumented, and allows police to arrest you without warrants if they have “probable cause” to believe they can deport you. Three of the four provisions (everything but checking status) are determined unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Four years later, Sen. Pearce (who had previously been Deputy Sheriff under Joe Arpaio and once endorsed a Neo-Nazi friend for city council) is forced to resign from his post in the GOP after he calls for the sterilization of Medicaid and welfare recipients.
April 18, 2011. Kobach writes and passes a law forcing Kansas voters to prove their U.S. citizenship in order to register to vote and bring photographic identification when voting. Voter registration drives cease as people don’t tend to carry their birth certificate along with them, and tens of thousands of people are prevented from voting. Kobach’s own expert finds that 18% of the 18,000 people blocked from registering to vote at the DMV are African-American, even though they only represent 6% of the voting population.
The law is eventually declared unconstitutional.
September 2012. As Kansas Secretary of State, Kobach demands that Obama produce evidence of his citizenship before he will place him on the Kansas ballot, even though Obama had already released his long-form birth certificate.
Kobach finally agrees to place Obama on the ballot after receiving a letter from Hawaiian officials verifying the legitimacy of the birth certificate.
2014: Kobach works to get 27 states to participate in “Crosscheck”, a supposed anti-voter fraud program that checks whether people are registered to vote in more than one state. The Crosscheck program is riddled with errors, as many people share a name and birthdate with someone elsewhere in the country. One study finds that 200 legal voters will be removed from voting rolls for every 1 illegal voter correctly detected, with Black voters tagged more than any other racial group.
Nov 16, 2014. A caller to Kobach’s radio show states that Obama’s implementation of DACA could lead to the ethnic cleansing of White people in border states. Kobach doesn’t conclusively rebuke him, saying “I wonder what could happen” because Obama “disregards the law when it suits his interests.” Kobach also states concerns with what Latino immigrants will do to America, saying “If you look at it in ethnic terms...You’ve got a locked-in vote for socialism.”
On the same day, Kobach tells another caller that Democratic turnout was low because Obama's voters were "people who were sitting in front of the TV all day talking on their Obama Phones" and said that Obama was an underachiever who was a product of “affirmative action culture."
March 1, 2015: A caller to Kobach’s radio show claims that Obama is going to stop arresting black suspects or prosecuting black criminals. Kobach replies, "It's already happening, more or less, in the case of civil rights laws...So I guess it's not a huge jump. I think it's unlikely but, you know, I've learned to say with this president: never say never.”
Kansas Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley calls Kobach “the most racist politician in America today” and demands his resignation.
May 2015. Kobach gets the Kansas Legislature to give him the power to prosecute voter fraud, claiming he knows of over 100 cases of fraud. Over the next two years, he is only able to uncover 9 cases of voter fraud in the entire state. Eight of the nine cases are elderly White Republicans with homes in multiple states who had voted in both places.
October 25, 2015. Kobach is the featured speaker for The Social Contract Press, a publishing house founded by White Nationalist John Tanton which frequently publishes the writings of White Nationalists.
December 15, 2015. Kobach suggests to a guest on his radio show (supposed former terrorist and current right-wing shill Kamal Saleem) that Obama’s policies may intentionally be promoting radical Islam.
February 29, 2016: Kobach endorses Donald Trump for president, railing against Obama's "amnesty" for illegals, claiming that the American refugee system has been abused by terrorists, and suggesting that all money sent back home to people’s families in Mexico be blocked until Mexico agrees to pay for the wall.
April 20, 2016. Kobach brings up Birther claims again, claiming there are discrepancies in Obama's story and suggesting that Obama opposed his anti-voter laws because Obama isn’t a real citizen either.
August 3, 2016. Kobach responds to a caller complaining about Gold Star parent Khizr Khan's DNC speech by saying, “It is maddening to be lectured about our Constitution and about what American law should be by aliens in the United States.” The Khans, of course, have been U.S. citizens for over 30 years and have a son who was awarded a Bronze Star and Purple Heart after losing his life while stopping two suicide bombers in Afghanistan.
November 10, 2016. Kobach is named to Trump’s transition team. He suggests rejecting every Syrian refugee and creating a database of Muslim immigrants from all “high risk areas” who would then be tracked by law enforcement.
November 30, 2016. Kobach claims that Trump would have won the popular vote if not for the millions of illegal immigrants who voted, despite not having uncovered a single case of illegal immigrant voter fraud in the four years that he has been Secretary of State in Kansas.
January 2017. Kobach claims there are 18,000 non-citizens registered to vote in Kansas. It is later shown that he based this claim on a list of 6 non-citizens who allegedly attempted to register, though not a single one of them actually appeared on a voting roll.
May 4, 2017. Kobach is sued for his attempt to implement a program called “birth link” to Kansas’s voting system. It automatically confirms the voter registration of people born in Kansas while doing nothing for people born out-of-state, thereby giving an advantage to voters with long-term ties to Kansas.
June 2017. Kobach associates refugees with terrorism in his first Breitbart article. By August he becomes a regular Breitbart columnist, advertising his run for governor at the bottom of every column.
I gotta emphasize that - the guy running for governor in Kansas is a Breitbart columnist.
June 24, 2017. Kobach is a featured speaker at the “Olathe Lives Matter” anti-immigrant event in Olathe, Kansas.
July 14, 2017. Kobach’s commission demands that states turn over sensitive voter information to them. When thousands of voters began pulling their voter registrations as a result, Kobach suggests that they are felons or illegals.
July 18, 2017. The NAACP files a lawsuit against the "voter fraud commission" that Kobach is running for Trump, alleging that the intent of the commission is racist in nature. Kobach’s presence on the commission is listed as one of the proofs that it is racist.
July 26, 2017. Kobach is fined by a federal court for lying about his work on Trump's voter commission, which includes what appears to be a play to change the National Voter Registration Act.
August 18, 2017. Kobach denies that Trump’s Charlottesville statements had anything to do with racism and mocks accusations of racism in general.
“For years now, the liberal media, and the left in politics in America, have used racism as their Number One scarlet letter, the scarlet ‘R’. If they can put that on somebody, then they have something. You know the old joke: What’s the definition of a racist? It’s a conservative who is winning an argument.”
September 5, 2017. Kobach supports immediately rescinding DACA, calling on government officials to "deport the whole family" and saying that even young immigrants who only know life in America need to "go home and get in line."
A bit of background:
FAIR, who Kris Kobach has worked for since 2004, is listed as a hate group by the SPLC. FAIR’s founder had friendly correspondence with members of the Conservative Citizen’s Council, Ku Klux Klan, pro-Nazi groups, and other White Nationalists, and received over a million dollars in funding from Pioneer Fund, which works to “preserve White bloodlines” and prove that White persons are intellectually superior to Black persons and other minorities. Their board and employees continue to maintain connections to VDARE, American Renaissance, and other groups heavily populated with White Nationalists. Writings of FAIR’s founder include gems like:
"As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?”
“I've come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that."
"Do we leave it to individuals to decide that they are the intelligent ones who should have more kids? And more troublesome, what about the less intelligent, who logically should have less? Who is going to break the bad news, and how will it be implemented?"
Dr. Samuel Huntington, Kobach's close mentor at Harvard, was an adviser for South Africa’s White Apartheid government. He believed that White/Western culture was under siege and society is gearing for “clash of civilizations” race war. Kobach wrote his senior thesis under Huntington, arguing that American businessmen shouldn't divest in Apartheid South Africa but should rather seek investments there with the goal of becoming "agents of change." A book by Dr. Huntington that Kobach later used in his immigration law courses claimed that the USA is defined '"in large part by its Anglo-Protestant culture and its religiosity."
More on Kobach from The Root: The Troubling History of the Most Racist Politician in America
And some from the SPLC: When Mr. Kobach Comes to Town: Nativist Laws and the Communities They Damage
And the New York Times: The Man Behind Trump’s Voter-Fraud Obsession
And, unlike Trump, he's brilliant and in control of himself.
Short version of the story: Kobach has been indoctrinated into White Nationalism for decades, and has spent his entire career trying to restrict voting rights (you know where that leads), harass immigrants and Muslims, and promote Birther talking points and other conspiracies about Obama.
This is what I've put together on his history. He don't even try to hide it now - the man is White Genocide in a Harvard suit.
1985. At Harvard, Kobach becomes a protégé of Prof. Samuel Huntington, famous for his "clash of civilizations” theory of a coming race war. Under Huntington's influence, Kobach campaigns against divestment in South Africa's Apartheid government.
2001. Kobach writes the law forcing every visa holder from 24 Muslim countries to be fingerprinted and interviewed on an annual basis. In 10 years of operation the program fails to result in a single terrorism conviction, but does lead to the deportation of 14,000 Muslims on mostly minor immigration violations. Kobach declares the program a huge success.
2002. Writes a memo for the Justice Department claiming that local police have the right to arrest people for simple civil immigration violations, setting the precedent for Sheriff Joe Arpaio's unconstitutional racial profiling.
2003-2007. Includes material from anti-immigrant and White Nationalist-associated sources in his courses on immigration law.
2004. Begins working as a lawyer for FAIR, the anti-immigration think take founded by a White Nationalist. Kobach focuses on restricting voting rights and immigrant rights across the country.
2006: The mayor of Hazleton, Pennsylvania claims that "illegals" in his town have started a crime wave. Kobach helps him create the most anti-immigrant city ordinances in America, including a rule denying the ability to rent an apartment without a driver’s license. It is later shown that from 2000 to 2007, only 20 out of 8,575 felonies committed in Hazleton were connected to an illegal immigrant. Kobach’s laws are declared unconstitutional. Later, the mayor’s house is raided by local police after his teenage son was caught spraying graffiti, and marijuana is found in the home.
Over the next ten years, Kobach makes over $6 million helping dozens of other cities and states craft similar laws. Nearly all of them are declared unconstitutional, resulting in legal fights that cost taxpayers tens of millions more. One Kobach-written Georgia law, later declared unconstitutional, resulted in the migrant labor workforce dropping by 30-40% for the season in Georgia and $140 million in losses to farmers due to crops rotting in the fields. Kobach declares his work a success, saying that the laws are “tests” to determine which laws will get through the courts and which will not.
2007. Working for the Kansas GOP, Kobach brags about the number of voters he had been able to “cage”, or purge from voting rolls. The practice involves sending tens of thousands of mailers to registered voters, usually in heavily Black or Democratic neighborhoods, and then removing people off the voting rolls if their mailer comes back as undelivered.
2009: Kobach jokes about Obama’s birth certificate at a GOP event and suggests that it is false.
2010. While running for Kansas Secretary of State, Kobach states that questions about Obama’s birthplace are fair until he releases his “long form” birth certificate.
Sheriff Joe Arpaio comes to Kansas to campaign for Kobach.2010. In conjunction with Arizona state senator Russell Pearce, Kobach helps Arizona craft a law that requires immigrants to carry their documents at all times, police to check immigration status at every stop, makes it a state crime to apply for a job if you are undocumented, and allows police to arrest you without warrants if they have “probable cause” to believe they can deport you. Three of the four provisions (everything but checking status) are determined unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Four years later, Sen. Pearce (who had previously been Deputy Sheriff under Joe Arpaio and once endorsed a Neo-Nazi friend for city council) is forced to resign from his post in the GOP after he calls for the sterilization of Medicaid and welfare recipients.
April 18, 2011. Kobach writes and passes a law forcing Kansas voters to prove their U.S. citizenship in order to register to vote and bring photographic identification when voting. Voter registration drives cease as people don’t tend to carry their birth certificate along with them, and tens of thousands of people are prevented from voting. Kobach’s own expert finds that 18% of the 18,000 people blocked from registering to vote at the DMV are African-American, even though they only represent 6% of the voting population.
The law is eventually declared unconstitutional.September 2012. As Kansas Secretary of State, Kobach demands that Obama produce evidence of his citizenship before he will place him on the Kansas ballot, even though Obama had already released his long-form birth certificate.
Kobach finally agrees to place Obama on the ballot after receiving a letter from Hawaiian officials verifying the legitimacy of the birth certificate.2014: Kobach works to get 27 states to participate in “Crosscheck”, a supposed anti-voter fraud program that checks whether people are registered to vote in more than one state. The Crosscheck program is riddled with errors, as many people share a name and birthdate with someone elsewhere in the country. One study finds that 200 legal voters will be removed from voting rolls for every 1 illegal voter correctly detected, with Black voters tagged more than any other racial group.
Nov 16, 2014. A caller to Kobach’s radio show states that Obama’s implementation of DACA could lead to the ethnic cleansing of White people in border states. Kobach doesn’t conclusively rebuke him, saying “I wonder what could happen” because Obama “disregards the law when it suits his interests.” Kobach also states concerns with what Latino immigrants will do to America, saying “If you look at it in ethnic terms...You’ve got a locked-in vote for socialism.”
On the same day, Kobach tells another caller that Democratic turnout was low because Obama's voters were "people who were sitting in front of the TV all day talking on their Obama Phones" and said that Obama was an underachiever who was a product of “affirmative action culture."
March 1, 2015: A caller to Kobach’s radio show claims that Obama is going to stop arresting black suspects or prosecuting black criminals. Kobach replies, "It's already happening, more or less, in the case of civil rights laws...So I guess it's not a huge jump. I think it's unlikely but, you know, I've learned to say with this president: never say never.”
Kansas Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley calls Kobach “the most racist politician in America today” and demands his resignation.May 2015. Kobach gets the Kansas Legislature to give him the power to prosecute voter fraud, claiming he knows of over 100 cases of fraud. Over the next two years, he is only able to uncover 9 cases of voter fraud in the entire state. Eight of the nine cases are elderly White Republicans with homes in multiple states who had voted in both places.
October 25, 2015. Kobach is the featured speaker for The Social Contract Press, a publishing house founded by White Nationalist John Tanton which frequently publishes the writings of White Nationalists.
December 15, 2015. Kobach suggests to a guest on his radio show (supposed former terrorist and current right-wing shill Kamal Saleem) that Obama’s policies may intentionally be promoting radical Islam.
February 29, 2016: Kobach endorses Donald Trump for president, railing against Obama's "amnesty" for illegals, claiming that the American refugee system has been abused by terrorists, and suggesting that all money sent back home to people’s families in Mexico be blocked until Mexico agrees to pay for the wall.
April 20, 2016. Kobach brings up Birther claims again, claiming there are discrepancies in Obama's story and suggesting that Obama opposed his anti-voter laws because Obama isn’t a real citizen either.
August 3, 2016. Kobach responds to a caller complaining about Gold Star parent Khizr Khan's DNC speech by saying, “It is maddening to be lectured about our Constitution and about what American law should be by aliens in the United States.” The Khans, of course, have been U.S. citizens for over 30 years and have a son who was awarded a Bronze Star and Purple Heart after losing his life while stopping two suicide bombers in Afghanistan.
November 10, 2016. Kobach is named to Trump’s transition team. He suggests rejecting every Syrian refugee and creating a database of Muslim immigrants from all “high risk areas” who would then be tracked by law enforcement.
November 30, 2016. Kobach claims that Trump would have won the popular vote if not for the millions of illegal immigrants who voted, despite not having uncovered a single case of illegal immigrant voter fraud in the four years that he has been Secretary of State in Kansas.
January 2017. Kobach claims there are 18,000 non-citizens registered to vote in Kansas. It is later shown that he based this claim on a list of 6 non-citizens who allegedly attempted to register, though not a single one of them actually appeared on a voting roll.
May 4, 2017. Kobach is sued for his attempt to implement a program called “birth link” to Kansas’s voting system. It automatically confirms the voter registration of people born in Kansas while doing nothing for people born out-of-state, thereby giving an advantage to voters with long-term ties to Kansas.
June 2017. Kobach associates refugees with terrorism in his first Breitbart article. By August he becomes a regular Breitbart columnist, advertising his run for governor at the bottom of every column.
I gotta emphasize that - the guy running for governor in Kansas is a Breitbart columnist.
June 24, 2017. Kobach is a featured speaker at the “Olathe Lives Matter” anti-immigrant event in Olathe, Kansas.
July 14, 2017. Kobach’s commission demands that states turn over sensitive voter information to them. When thousands of voters began pulling their voter registrations as a result, Kobach suggests that they are felons or illegals.
July 18, 2017. The NAACP files a lawsuit against the "voter fraud commission" that Kobach is running for Trump, alleging that the intent of the commission is racist in nature. Kobach’s presence on the commission is listed as one of the proofs that it is racist.
July 26, 2017. Kobach is fined by a federal court for lying about his work on Trump's voter commission, which includes what appears to be a play to change the National Voter Registration Act.
August 18, 2017. Kobach denies that Trump’s Charlottesville statements had anything to do with racism and mocks accusations of racism in general.
“For years now, the liberal media, and the left in politics in America, have used racism as their Number One scarlet letter, the scarlet ‘R’. If they can put that on somebody, then they have something. You know the old joke: What’s the definition of a racist? It’s a conservative who is winning an argument.”
September 5, 2017. Kobach supports immediately rescinding DACA, calling on government officials to "deport the whole family" and saying that even young immigrants who only know life in America need to "go home and get in line."
A bit of background:
FAIR, who Kris Kobach has worked for since 2004, is listed as a hate group by the SPLC. FAIR’s founder had friendly correspondence with members of the Conservative Citizen’s Council, Ku Klux Klan, pro-Nazi groups, and other White Nationalists, and received over a million dollars in funding from Pioneer Fund, which works to “preserve White bloodlines” and prove that White persons are intellectually superior to Black persons and other minorities. Their board and employees continue to maintain connections to VDARE, American Renaissance, and other groups heavily populated with White Nationalists. Writings of FAIR’s founder include gems like:
"As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?”
“I've come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that."
"Do we leave it to individuals to decide that they are the intelligent ones who should have more kids? And more troublesome, what about the less intelligent, who logically should have less? Who is going to break the bad news, and how will it be implemented?"
Dr. Samuel Huntington, Kobach's close mentor at Harvard, was an adviser for South Africa’s White Apartheid government. He believed that White/Western culture was under siege and society is gearing for “clash of civilizations” race war. Kobach wrote his senior thesis under Huntington, arguing that American businessmen shouldn't divest in Apartheid South Africa but should rather seek investments there with the goal of becoming "agents of change." A book by Dr. Huntington that Kobach later used in his immigration law courses claimed that the USA is defined '"in large part by its Anglo-Protestant culture and its religiosity."
More on Kobach from The Root: The Troubling History of the Most Racist Politician in America
And some from the SPLC: When Mr. Kobach Comes to Town: Nativist Laws and the Communities They Damage
And the New York Times: The Man Behind Trump’s Voter-Fraud Obsession
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