A Kansas newspaper apologized for publishing a cartoon equating the governor's coronavirus mask order to the Holocaust

• The Anderson County Review, a newspaper in Kansas, last Friday published a cartoon likening the state's COVID-19 face-covering mandate to the Holocaust.
• The cartoon depicted Gov. Laura Kelly wearing a face mask emblazoned with a Star of David while behind her people were herded onto a cattle train.
• Over the weekend the paper received widespread criticism, including from Kelly, but the newspaper's publisher, Dane Hicks, refused to take it down. Hicks is the chairman of a county GOP party.
• But on Sunday, the paper removed the cartoon from its Facebook page, and Hicks apologized.
• "After some heartfelt and educational conversations with Jewish leaders in the US and abroad, I can acknowledge the imagery in my recent editorial cartoon … was deeply hurtful," he wrote.

A Kansas county Republican Party chairman and newspaper proprietor has apologized after his publication posted a cartoon on its Facebook page likening a state face-covering mandate to the Holocaust.

The cartoon, published on the newspaper's Facebook page on Friday, depicted Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, wearing a protective mask with a Star of David emblazoned on it.

In the background, people are being directed into rail cars alongside the caption "Lockdown Laura says: Put on your mask ... and step onto the cattle car."

After criticism, Dane Hicks, the owner and publisher of The Anderson County Review, posted a statement on Facebook on Sunday announcing that he was removing the cartoon.

"After some heartfelt and educational conversations with Jewish leaders in the US and abroad, I can acknowledge the imagery in my recent editorial cartoon … was deeply hurtful to members of a culture who've been dealt plenty of hurt throughout history — people to whom I never desired to be hurtful in the illustration of my point," he wrote.

The cartoon had come in response to Kelly's signing an executive order earlier that day, which requires most people in the state to wear face coverings in public to try to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

New cases are spiking in the state. As of Friday, nearly 16,000 cases had been recorded in Kansas, according to KWCH 12.

Over the weekend there was widespread criticism of the cartoon and calls for its removal from Facebook.

"Mr. Hicks' decision to publish anti-Semitic imagery is deeply offensive and he should remove it immediately," Kelly said in a statement to the Associated Press.

Hicks, who is the GOP chairman for Anderson County in eastern Kansas, had initially refused to back down, writing in a blog post that he was still planning to run the cartoon in a print edition of the newspaper.

"I would never apologize to them. They're liberal Marxist parasites," he wrote of critics of the cartoon at the time.