Dear Steven:
I’m writing to you because I don’t know what else to do, frankly. You’re a Kansas state representative from my city, though not my representative.
Which means you probably already stopped reading. No, let’s be honest, you probably will never see this at all.
I say this because I’ve gathered, from people who know you in real life, that you never saw the other things I’ve written about you.
Which is probably good, actually, because those other things I wrote about you were anything but complimentary. They were downright angry. I don’t regret or retract any of the things I said, because I think they were amply justified.
I’m reaching out to you because the world is a mess, because you’re a local elected official, and because you once wrote an opinion piece that sorta seemed like you kinda had something like a conscience about really bad things unfolding as a result of the rhetoric and actions of people in power despite those people being influential in your political party.
I’m even going to dial back my normal, exasperated habit of cursing for emphasis, as I get the impression that you are a sort of a buttoned-up religious fellow who frowns on that type of language. It’s a sign of my respect for your preferences and where you’re coming from, a nod to what makes you comfortable in interactions—a bit like the simple dignity one affords another when one uses the name and pronouns one has been told to use when referring to them.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, I think.
I’m well aware that this is absolutely not the proper way to write to an elected official. The correct way to do it is to follow some kind of script, keep things short and to the point, include an “ask,” all that stuff. The logic is basically quantitative: numbers count, not so much the substance, apart from saying Yes or No, Support or Oppose. In the imagined scenario, some harried staffer counts up the stack of phone messages or emails and then, if there’s a deluge on one side or another, informs the elected that “The base is with you, sir,” or “We’re getting a lot of pushback….”
This datum then gets thrown into the political calculus machine alongside donor preferences, future political ambitions, how secure your district is, and all that, and maybe, in theory, constituent input has some kind of weight at some level, perhaps.
Which is why I hate the quantitative approach.
I’d rather go with a qualitative approach, the substantive approach, even though I know ahead of time, it’s like talking to an empty room.
I’d like it if we could sit down and jaw for a few hours over coffee, straight-up, honestly, human to human. Me, trying my best to reach you as a human being with some kind of soul and decency inside you. You, dropping all the learned aversions to consorting with the enemy or being tainted by by woke cooties or having to maintain some kind of persona that’s fit for the cameras, even if there’d be no cameras rolling.
But we’re in the legislative session, and I’m not your constituent, and I don’t have money to donate, and I’m on record saying harsh things about you, and everything else I’ve said and written puts me squarely in the Lefty camp, so such a heart-to-heart isn’t ever going to happen.
So all I can do is write this stuff out and leave it here for you.
The reason I was so angry with you back in April of 2024 was your introduction of HB 2460, the Kansas anti-DEI bill, which of course passed the Kansas House, then a version passed the Senate, then made it into law without the signature of Governor Laura Kelly.
(If it helps soften the blows I delivered to you back then, I also had a lot of angry things to say about the state Democrats when it came to their ill-fated efforts to oppose your bill.)
It stings more than usual when something like the anti-DEI measure comes, at least in part, from Salina, my hometown, the place where I was born and raised and where, aside from college in Hays and about a year living in southern Ohio, I’ve lived all my life. Where my wife and I raised our three children. In a strange way, your actions are more my fault than, say, what Dan Hawkins does … because he’s from Wichita, and I don’t feel as much ownership of or identification with Wichita.
The same is the case when bad things hurting the nation originate from Kansas. Like when Kris Kobach does another racism on the national stage, or when Mike Pompeo got into the cabinet, or when the Koch network enacts yet another heinous thing. It’s like your dog escaped and bit someone, and they got rabies and maybe died or were at least facially scarred for life.
Except it’s not really “your” dog, and you never wanted this particular dog, and you wanted, and tried, to get a dog that didn’t have rabies or a penchant for attacking people. Or at least teach the dog to be good instead. But it came from your neck of the woods, so you feel responsible in some stupid, associational way. Like you should have done more, because your were closer to the root cause of the problem, the Patient Zero. In a similar, stupid vein, I’d hate to be some poor schmuck who just lived his life, did his work, raised his kids, etc., then had to tell someone else he hailed from Wuhan China. It’s not his fault, but that association is tarnished thanks to stuff completely out of his control.
So that’s a big reason I was so particularly mad at you for HB 2460 in April. I know you didn’t write the bill. It was more or less written by FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, but that just feeds my larger point here.
See, I want to go back to that opinion piece you wrote about voting for Trump. Several Salina libs felt you deserved some grudging praise for daring to speak out against the QAnon cult when you said people should “examine the actions of the former President, and determine whether or not you think he exemplifies the virtues and values we hold dear as Americans.”
Of January 6, you wrote, “How could this have happened? How did we get to this point?…I was lied to. You were lied to. America was lied to. The election was not stolen or rigged..”
You also wrote:
…what actually occurred that day must be accounted for and fully addressed by Republicans and the Republican Party.
…Will Republicans truly stand for the truth, even when it does not benefit us politically? Will Republicans nominate the former President who repeatedly lied to us, as the standard bearer of the party which elevated the likes of Lincoln, Eisenhower and Reagan?
Republicans cannot ignore the past. Failing to address it head on will forever damage the integrity of the party, and its viability as a legitimate governing coalition. Time will ultimately provide us with a verdict.
…Will Republicans be a party of integrity and truth, or will we give-in to a cult of personality, group-think, and mob mentality that undermines the rule of law and our constitutional republic? Will political violence, intimidation and retribution become the norm of our country's body politic?
All these remarks came in the context of the 2020 election and Donald Trump’s fitness.
What I want to ask you is whether those words, that rhetoric, that feeling, comes home to roost given your labors on behalf of the anti-DEI bill in the Kansas House.
In your opinion piece you said, “After the 2020 general election I literally tuned out from the day-to-day media reports. I was fatigued from the election year so I distanced myself from the political drama - no television news for me.”
I get that sort of fatigue. The whole country gets that right now, 13 days into Trump’s second term as President, but by all that’s precious, I hope you haven’t been averting your eyes from “the news,” such as it is.
There really are not words to describe what’s been happening. I have been alive over half a century, have made a hobby of learning about American history, and I can think of nothing that compares to the onslaught of chaotic, reckless, and malicious acts this Administration has taken and allowed its personnel and hangers-on to take.
You might be inclined to say, if you greet some of this with horror, that it confirms your prior warnings about Mr. Trump’s unfitness for office. Well, yes, insofar as you actually came out and said he was unfit, sure. Your opposition to him was highly personalized, of course, and the most you did was urge others to reflect on the question of his fitness, which is hardly a battle cry of warning against what so many of the rest of us saw coming and worked very hard to spread the word about.
But let me call your attention to how you aided and abetted Mr. Trump in material, rhetorical, political and yes, electoral ways with your concrete, sustained actions serving in the Kansas House. I am of course, speaking of HB 2460.
You and your colleagues took up the anti-DEI cause and ran with it, never defining DEI except to call it an “ideology,” implying it was nefarious and insidious, relying on your supporters to fill in the blanks as to its contents and implications, knowing they would do so using the dog whistles and innuendos provided by right-wing news outlets and influencers. In the process, you and your allies offered specious arguments, dodged questions and accountability, spoke in bad faith or colossal ignorance, slandered the public university system of Kansas, and fed a narrative that essentially claimed that conservative and reactionary white people were the victims of reverse discrimination.
Donald Trump campaigned substantially on the same narrative. Several of his cabinet appointees are practically avatars of this narrative.
When—on Kansas Day—American Airlines Flight 5342 crashed into the Black Hawk over the Potomac killing all passengers—of course, many Kansans among them—Trump blamed DEI.
You might object that you would never have said such a thing, that you personally reject Mr. Trump on characterological grounds, and that your opposition to DEI in Kansas is very different from the President’s use of the same narrative.
But here’s what you said at the well in the Kansas Statehouse:
Instead of a merit-based approach, universities have chosen to embrace ideologies which discriminate against people that do not hear [sic] to their orthodoxy.
And here’s what Vice President JD Vance said about the crash:
When you don’t have the best standards in who you’re hiring, it means on the one hand, you’re not getting the best people in government. But on the other hand, it puts stresses on the people who are already there.
Is there a difference? I can’t see any. Not in theme. Not in implication. Not in meaning. Not in the message conveyed.
Under the pretext of eliminating DEI (along with other, overlapping pretexts), the Trump Administration is running amok with government databases, webpages, records, funding, and public employee morale, both domestically and internationally. If you have been “watching the news” you may have caught wind of this. You can blame the personal character flaws of Mr. Trump, of course, which allows you to draw a distinction between yourself and the President, but please note the self-same rationale you both champion under which he is doing this historic damage.
In your opinion piece, you listed Trump’s long history of seeding lies about the integrity of elections and pointed to these as evidence of a building narrative that led to the events of January 6. Again, I return to your words: “How could this have happened? How did we get to this point?”
We got there thanks to enablers who parroted the lies and fed the narrative. As you wrote, “The former President and many fellow Republicans continued to tell Americans that the election was stolen.”
Well, you played a prominent role in your chamber, and as chair of the Higher Education Budget Committee, in feeding the narrative of evil, insidious DEI undermining merit in education and training in Kansas, until your bill was passed, another passed in the Senate, and they had enough support to become law without Governor Kelly’s signature.
I haven’t looked it up, but I’d be willing to bet money you are a supporter of the anti-trans measures the Republicans are so keen to pass year after year in Kansas. You should know that I view these as an atrocity. I can understand if you are personally ignorant about trans people, even if you are uncomfortable with the idea of them. I can easily imagine even a visceral disgust or knee-jerk rejection of the whole concept.
But by your own admission, you were very wrong about supporting Mr. Trump.
I think the record shows that you were terribly, terribly wrong to give him your active personal support again (despite not voting for him in 2024) by platforming, publicizing, and advancing into law one of his signature campaign themes in the state of Kansas—one that now stands starkly revealed as nothing more than the naked racism and sexism some of us always knew it to be.
I believe you would be wrong, yet again, to remain aligned with the bigoted mob intent on criminalizing and driving from public life (and, let’s be honest here, in many cases, from life itself) transgender Kansans, especially young people.
I don’t know how to convince you that you’re getting really bad ideas, information, arguments, frameworks for thinking, and much else from your fellow conservatives and Republicans, but I do want to suggest to you that the record is not looking good.
Maybe you are just not up to the task of being both an elected representative and a person of conscience. Conscience has to be informed, and your actions have consequences that will echo for decades to come.
You supported Trump for at least four years despite so many very good reasons not to, so many very smart people warning not to, so many very clear red flags. In that time, how much did you actually associate with folks who ardently disagreed? How much did you actually question your support? How much time did you spend seriously investigating the arguments against the man? How much time did you spend in serious conversation with those who opposed him with every fiber of their being?
You noted in your opinion piece that Trump’s record of casting doubt on election integrity dated back to 2012, and certainly was more prominent in 2016. But those stirrings didn’t set off alarm bells for you, while they certainly did for legions of people on the other side of the aisle. Did you not encounter those positions until after January 6? Did you dismiss them as political hyperbole? Do you question your judgment in hindsight? If so, what else should you be questioning?
Letters like this are supposed to include an “ask.”
I don’t know what I should ask of you. I’m premising this whole thing on the idea that you’re not a vicious little troll, that you try to be a good person, that you have a moral conscience.
I’d like it if the scales fell from your eyes.
I’d like it if you stood up and renounced your past support of the anti-DEI law, though it won’t do any good now, of course.
I’d love it if you voted to uphold any veto of anti-trans legislation Governor Kelly might hand down.
I’d like it if you held a press conference and denounced the GOP as wholly owned by evil forces and toxic ideas and repudiate your association with them, becoming an Independent or even a Democrat.
All of the above is probably lunacy. I’m trying to be as nice as possible here, but I don’t like lying, so I’ll confess that I don’t believe you’re all that smart, Steven. Not smart about ethics and moral choices and the big waves of history and politics and how you’ve gotten swept up in a really bad one. I suspect you’re insulated from a lot of the ugly, believing the best about people who really are not good folks, while believing lies about folks who are just trying to go about their lives.
Yeah, I know that’s condescending, and that’s a rotten way to end this letter. But like I said, I prefer honesty to B.S., and whatever caused you to write that opinion piece about Trump and January 6 might just cause you to wonder if maybe, just maybe, you’re spending years and years being wrong about this other stuff as well.
Do you want to figure that out when you’re 20, 30 years older and utterly unable to go back to repair any of the damage?
Seriously, man. The anti-DEI stuff was awful. I hope you blundered into that through naivete, gullibility, and go-along ignorance instead of malice. Not that it changes the fact that it helped Trump get back into power and…take a look at what he’s doing and saying: does that resonate Lincoln and Eisenhower to you?
Standing against the anti-trans hate may not mean much if Trump continues to weaponize the entire federal government against this tiny minority of people just trying to live their lives, but every little bit helps, and they are not the enemy of you, your kids, your family, or your religion. They’re just different. Being threatened by difference and trying to stamp it out is at the root of just about every human evil ever recorded.
I don’t know how bad things are going to get here. I do know that our current situation is unprecedented in a lot of ways. That kinda means history will take note.
Do you want your small part of that history to be that you were a well-meaning guy who just kept getting played and roped into supporting awful people and things until you woke up far too late for it to matter?
Sincerely,
James
P.S. If you want to know why you were so deeply wrong about the anti-DEI stuff, have at it.
Conspiracy, Iniquity and Exclusion, Part 1
All the attention in Kansas politics is rightly on Governor Kelly’s vetoes of anti-trans and anti-abortion bills, and whether the legislature will overturn those vetoes.
Two Nazis Walk Into A Public Forum
The last couple days I’ve published a zillion words trying to spell out all the wrong things about treating diversity, equity and inclusion in higher ed as some kind of nefarious political ideology we mustn’t ask anyone about, lest we “discriminate” against their political or personal beliefs.
R.I.P., DEI
I was 196 words into the first draft of this post when I took a break and hung up my new Pride Flag.