A booth at a recent Republican fundraising event in Kansas featured what is being described as an “effigy” of President Biden, and attendees were allowed to punch and kick the visage of the President for fun. The booth was sponsored by a local karate instructor, and it featured a mask of President Biden on a training mannequin that was also wearing a “Let’s Go Brandon” T-shirt. The event was widely trashed on social media for being juvenile and unprofessional. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains what happened.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
A very weird thing happened in Kansas last week. And I mean, that statement could really lend itself to pretty much anything. But this happened at a Johnson County Republican Party fundraiser event in the state of Kansas, where one of the vendors present at this event had one of those, you know, self-defense mannequins that people can punch and kick and do all kinds of things with. But they had dressed this little mannequin in a Let’s Go Brandon shirt and put a President Joe Biden mask on it so that it looked like President Biden. And this vendor was allowing people to come up and just beat the living hell out of this effigy, the media’s calling it, of President Biden. Now, the organizers of this Johnson County Republican fundraiser said, look, we had nothing to do with it. This was a local karate instructor, they’ve got self-defense classes they were promoting.
And so they had this thing out there. We didn’t have anything to do with it. And according to the reports, that is about the extent that the Johnson County Republican Party had with people beating the hell out of an effigy of President Biden. They didn’t disavow it. They just said, well, hey, it wasn’t us. It was just this person. We saw people doing it. There’s videos and photographs of it all across social media. We knew it was happening. We just, you know, we didn’t do it. So it’s okay. Well, the former chair of the Johnson County Republican Party seems to think differently. And here is what the former chair of the Republican Party there, actually the former head of the Kansas Republican Party, not Johnson County, sorry, Mike Kuckelman had this to say about the entire incident.
This conduct is shameful and it is wrong. Brown and Holiday must resign. That’s the current head of the Kansas GOP and the current head of the Johnson County GOP, Brown and Holiday. Republicans, especially elected Republicans, must demand the resignations of Brown and Holiday. Silence is complicity in this case. Others described it as quote, a disgusting display designed to encourage political violence. Democratic State Senator Cindy Holscher said, as an elected official who has received dozens of threats over the past few years from Trump supporters via social media as well as to my email and voicemail, I can’t say I’m surprised by this display. This type of behavior is not only juvenile but dangerous and has no place in politics or our society. This continuing growth of extremism in the GOP is why I left the party several years ago. The few remaining members with integrity have condemned these actions, yet sadly, they’re the ones who keep getting pushed out of the party.
Now, I agree with that statement, not just about the normal Republicans getting pushed outta the party, y’all should have seen what was happening to your party decades ago, honestly. So you kind of waited a little too long for me to agree with you on that. But this, this kind of political violence, it’s like this is what this sparks. There was no reason to do that. I’m sure you wanted the attention for your little booth because you’re given self-defense lessons and it’s a Republican event. So let’s have a Biden thing. You could have had your dummy next to, you know, some kind of Biden thing that people didn’t touch. But imagine for a second the backlash because this story’s kind of a buried story. It’s not something that you’re seeing all over the media.
But imagine if a local Democratic group had an effigy, you know, an image of Donald Trump that people were allowed to go up and spit on and punch and kick. Um, that’d be national news. MSNBC would be condemning it. CNN would be condemning it. All of us would probably be condemning it. But it happens at a conservative thing. And granted, yeah, Johnson County Republican Party, not the National Party, not even the state party, but crickets. And this is what sparks that political violence. But Republicans don’t care. The media doesn’t care. And this will probably be the last any of you even hear about this story because that’s how pathetic the media is.
