Olathe (O-LATHE-uh) is a largely conservative, middle class, Kansas City suburb. Its annual Faith & Freedom Republican picnic typically attracts just about every serious candidate for statewide office.
In 2017, the organizers of the picnic ingenuously chose the line "Olathe Lives Matter" as its annual theme. As the emcee, I know the organizers well.
In choosing the name, they had no sense they were about to be pilloried in the press and pegged as white supremacists, the left's ascendant accusation against those who resist its agenda.
As the Kansas City Star reported, "The perceived mockery of the Black Lives Matter movement and the attendance of prominent officials sparked backlash on social media."
The story quickly went nationwide. The AP story circulated under the headline "Kansas GOP event promoted with 'Olathe Lives Matter' Slogan." It was picked up by newspapers from coast to coast.
Sensing an opportunity, the Star focused its article on the Democrats' bete noire: "Kobach will appear at GOP event promoted with 'Olathe Lives Matter!' slogan." At the time, Kris Kobach was Kansas secretary of state.
The scheduled keynote speaker was U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran. When the Star called Moran about his attendance, a spokeswoman said he would be elsewhere. Then U.S. Rep. Kevin Yoder, also scheduled to speak, suddenly had a conflict as well.
Under pressure, the organizers asked me if they should cancel the event. I said absolutely not.
In my 2015 book, "Scarlet Letters: The Increasing Intolerance of the Cult of Liberalism," I made the case that when the left gins up an accusation against an individual, the accused should never back down or even apologize. Apologies just whet the left's appetite.
A week before Donald Trump declared for the presidency in summer 2015, I summed up what I had learned in the opening sentence of a WND column: "The Republican nominee for president will be that candidate who best understands there is no future in apologizing."
I did not know Trump was going to run, but he immediately attracted rank-and-file support by refusing to apologize for his remarks about illegal immigration the day he declared.
Trump showed Republicans – or at least should have – that backbone matters. Kobach has it. He was the one major office holder to show up at the Olathe picnic.
That backbone, like Trump's, scared Democrats. The fact that Kobach was a good-looking, well-spoken constitutional lawyer with credentials that included Harvard, Oxford and Yale scared them even more.
On Tuesday, the Democrats and their media stooges got their final revenge. They scared enough Republicans that the "polarizing" Kobach could not win in the fall that he lost the August primary for a U.S. Senate seat to Congressman Roger Marshall.
Marshall promises to be a go-along, get-along Republican in the mold of Sen. Pat Roberts, now serving his last of far too many terms.
What made Kobach polarizing was less his unswerving stand on illegal immigration – he is a national authority on the same – than the media's insistent drumbeat that Kobach was a closet white supremacist or white nationalist.
As late as 2015, when "Scarlet Letters" was published, the phrases "white nationalist" and "white supremacist" were not part of the left's arsenal of attack.
They are today. Iowa Rep. Steve King fell prey to their sting when the conservative constitutionalist lost his primary in June. Like Kobach, an outspoken opponent of illegal immigration, King found himself being accused of being soft on white supremacy and white nationalism based on one unrecorded misquote by the New York Times in January 2019.
Trump has platform enough to stand on. Lesser figures like King and Kobach do not. They need the support of Republican Party leadership, and they rarely get it.
In a vain effort to keep his committee assignments, King commissioned a Lexis/Nexis search on his language selection. The researcher found that King had used the phrase "Western civilization" 276 times during his congressional career but never once used "white supremacy," "white nationalism" or any derivatives until allegedly championing them in an interview with the Times.
House leadership rolled over and worked to elect King's instant primary challenger, a politician as unthreatening as Roger Marshall.
In 2017 Black Lives Matter was still a sideshow. Today, BLM is center stage. With a growing power to intimidate, the openly Marxist organization is currently focusing its get out the vote effort on defeating, yes, "white supremacy."
Republicans better get the message before November – you can no longer sacrifice your "white supremacists." You are all white supremacists now.
@jackcashill's forthcoming book, "Unmasking Obama," is available for pre-order at Amazon.
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