Kris Kobach compared Joe Biden to Hitler. Then he whined about political ‘demonizing’

Kris Kobach believes President Joe Biden sounds a lot like Adolf Hitler.

That’s not hyperbole. The GOP nominee for Kansas attorney general went on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” TV show last Friday to respond to the president’s Philadelphia speech, which argued that “MAGA Republicans” are a threat to democracy.

Actually, Kobach said, it’s Biden who is the real threat.

“It’s a wartime speech and it has echoes of history in it,” he told Bannon. “Remember, Hitler rose to power by demonizing the opposing party. The end of the Weimar Republic occurred in 1933, 1934, when — in June 1933, Hitler outlawed the opposing Social Democratic Party. This is a huge threat to our system and to do it at the birthplace of our Constitutional Republic just adds insult to injury.”

There is a big difference between criticizing Republicans and outlawing them, of course. Biden did the former, not the latter. You’d hope the candidate to be the state’s top lawyer would understand those important distinctions — but Kobach blurred them instead.

Beyond that, there are three reasons not to take Kobach seriously.

First, Kobach appeared on Bannon’s show just moments after Bannon — the famously pugnacious former adviser to Donald Trump — likened Biden to Moloch, an ancient pagan god associated with child sacrifice. He literally demonized Biden, but Kobach didn’t object.

Also, Kobach compared Biden to Hitler. If you want to complain about “demonizing,” it’s not very consistent to compare your opponent to the modern, genocidal incarnation of evil. The attorney general wannabe was apparently oblivious to irony, or maybe he just didn’t care.

Finally — most importantly — Kobach himself has built a career on the unending vilification of Democrats and other disfavored groups.

Last year, for example, he claimed that Democrats have a “plan” to replace American voters with undocumented migrants — an echo of the “white replacement theory” that sparked last spring’s mass shooting in Buffalo, New York.

“They have no desire to stop the surge” of immigrants, Kobach wrote of Biden’s administration. “It’s all part of the plan.”

Never mind the fact, of course, that only citizens can vote.

The year before that, he accused Democrats of using the coronavirus pandemic to impose socialism and tear down America’s free market economy.

“This is what the socialist Left has been demanding for decades,” Kobach wrote. “Their demands aren’t about bringing the coronavirus crisis to a swift close; they are about enlarging the dependency class. They are exploiting the coronavirus for all it’s worth.”

That or they were alarmed by projections that more than 1 million Americans would die from COVID-19 — a grim forecast that has since become true.

Then there’s what Kobach said in 2017 about athletes who took a knee to protest police killings of Black people: “Maybe they really do despise America and all that it stands for.”

All of this is overwrought at best, mean-spirited and outright false at worst. It’s in keeping with Kobach’s habit of seeking out villains and scapegoats — his bumbling efforts as Kansas secretary of state to seek out all-but-nonexistent voting fraud, his failed work on behalf of Trump to prove that illegal immigrants gave Hillary Clinton her popular vote victory in the 2016 election.

For Kobach, it’s rarely the case that his opponents in an argument are simply wrong about this or that issue. It’s that they’re evil schemers — malefactors who must be vanquished — instead of fellow citizens.

To be fair, this is how many of us, on both sides of the political aisle, see our opponents these days. We’re all better at seeing our rivals’ antidemocratic flaws while ignoring our own.

But Kobach is a particularly pungent example of the phenomenon, and Kansans have noticed. It’s why they rejected him for governor in 2018, why Republicans turned instead to Roger Marshall for the U.S. Senate in 2020, and why even now party leaders fret that he’ll lose a winnable race for the AG’s office.

So yes, Americans of all parties should try to demonize their opponents less often. Kobach could start by dropping the Hitler comparisons.