Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, Vice Chairman of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity and a candidate for governor, joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Friday’s Breitbart News Daily to discuss the political fallout from Charlottesville.
“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’,” Kobach observed. “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.”
“This has given them an opportunity, these recent events and their claim that President Trump didn’t say the right words. When he said the words they wanted him to say, he said he still hasn’t said the right words. It goes on and on,” he said.
Kobach noted “Republicans across the spectrum” have been subjected to this treatment.
“Any time you oppose illegal immigration, the left will say you’re a racist. Go down the line. You name the issue. Just talk about the voter fraud commission – if you support photo ID like we have in Kansas, a proof of citizenship to register to vote, you must be a racist,” he said.
“You have a lot of politicians who are afraid of any attack in that regard, rushing to distance themselves from the president, when the attacks on the president are not well-founded. It just sort of shows how this constant targeting of conservatives and falsely calling us racists has made some politicians rather, I would say, a little bit irrationally fearful. Instead of standing up and stating their beliefs if asked, they have rushed to do anything they can to avoid coming under any scrutiny at all. It’s interesting to watch, and not particularly heartening,” said Kobach.
Marlow said far too much of the Republican caucus has been “quick to virtue-signal and to preen for the CNNs of the world, in order to try to get the moral high ground on race relations.” He called it a “deceitful, lying game where there’s never going to be a winner on the right side.”
Kobach applauded Marlow’s use of the term “virtue-signaling.”
“That’s really what it is – this kind of simplistic ritual where something happens, and then if you’re an elected official, you have to say the right words,” he said.
“Here in Kansas, I’ve been criticized by one of the state Democrat leaders, and by a local, the Kansas City Star – or the ‘Red Star,’ as I call it – for not saying the right words soon enough. Of course, I said it in a statement a couple of days ago, it goes without saying that racism and bigotry and white nationalism, they’re intolerable, et cetera. They are attacking me for not saying it soon enough. They say I should have said it on the day of the event, not a few days later when asked,” Kobach said.
Marlow concluded by asking for updates on the Kansas gubernatorial race, and on the work of Kobach’s election integrity commission.
“Regarding the governor’s race, Kansas is in some ways a microcosm of the national issues. We’re fighting, in my case, to repeal a massive tax increase that we had this past session, and we’re trying to stop sanctuary cities in Kansas,” Kobach replied.
He described this agenda as “similar to what President Trump is trying to do – reduce taxes and get rid of sanctuary cities.”
As for the Commission on Election Integrity, Kobach said the next meeting was scheduled for September.
“I think people should stay tuned because the commission is doing a lot of work to bring facts to bear on the issue and put them on the table, so the American people can see them,” he said.
Kobach said that in the September meeting, the commission would hear from “academic experts, other experts on the prevalence of different forms of voter fraud across the United States.”
“As you may know, in the first meeting the commission presented 938 cases of convictions for voter fraud,” he recalled. “And yet, you still hear the left either ignoring that fact or pretending that 938 convictions is not a big number.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern.