When the Kansas Legislature spent its 2023 session focused on the culture wars — with bills aimed at keeping transgender kids out of sports competition, and penalizing doctors who provide gender-affirming care — we occasionally wondered: Are the state’s right-wing Republicans actively trying to chase away the Kansans who don’t share their narrow viewpoint?
We now know the answer to that question.
The nonprofit Kansas Reflector this week reported on a newly revealed recording of Adam Peters, the Ellis County GOP chairman, who during a March 2 meeting in Hutchinson made plain his desire to purge the state of any Kansan who doesn’t subscribe to his conservative beliefs. He railed against the “degradation” of society caused by so-called “critical theory,” which he blamed for crime, suicide and racial strife.
His solution? Harassment.
“If you can make it hostile to that group of people, that small sliver of society, and have them move elsewhere, that does a huge amount to shut this down,” Peters said, according to the Reflector’s Sherman Smith. “It’s both sides of it: You need to attract the good people here, and you also need to make it clear to the bad people, this isn’t gonna go well for you.”
Ominously, he also offered a suggestion of violence.
“You know,” Peters reportedly said, “if we look in scripture, there was a time when the nation of Israel had to take up arms in defense of themselves.”
Let’s call this viewpoint what it is: Thuggish. Antidemocratic. A shabby representation of the faith it purports to represent.
Unfortunately, it’s also unsurprising.
Nationwide, conservatives unleashed by Donald Trump’s political ascent have made increasingly clear their desire to use the levers of government to squelch dissent and ways of thinking and living they dislike. Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban is a hero to this crowd. So is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has used his powers to punish one of his state’s biggest employers — the Walt Disney Company — for the crime of speaking out against the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law there.
Peters’ comments, then, are just the local manifestation of a rising right-wing authoritarianism in American public life. It prizes mean-spiritedness and hates diversity of any sort. As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer memorably observed during the Trump presidency: The cruelty is the point.
We wonder: What does Peters think Kansas will become if liberal and LGBT “bad people” leave the state? Where are all those anti-woke “good people” going to come from? Will some sort of conservative prairie paradise suddenly ensue?
That seems unlikely. Kansas — which, we need hardly mention, already has a fairly conservative reputation — is already struggling. We’re barely growing as it is.
The 2020 Census revealed that foreign-born immigrants provided nearly all of the Sunflower State’s population growth during the previous decade. Surveys regularly demonstrate more people are moving away than coming here. And the annual “Kansas Speaks” survey last year revealed that 18.7% of respondents expect to move to another state at some time in the next five years.
Meanwhile, the people who stay here often move to the state’s more urban areas, while rural communities now struggle to attract lawyers, doctors and other educated professionals they need to survive and thrive.
