For anyone who wonders why legislators in red states like Missouri keep passing laws that seem to have no purpose but to harass transgender citizens or people with liberal racial views and others like them, a Republican Party official in Kansas blithely offers this explanation: It's part of a deliberate effort to hound anyone from these states who doesn't share the hard-right ideology of their political leaders.

"If you can make it hostile to that group of people, that small sliver of society, and have them move elsewhere, that does a huge amount to shut this down," said Adam Peters, the GOP party chairman of Ellis County, Kansas, in an audio recording of a speech at a private event that was obtained by the news site Kansas Reflector. His riff on how to drive away "bad people" amounts to a call to turn red states into ever-more conservative enclaves that purposefully make life difficult for anyone with even slightly less-extreme views.

That's not to suggest that this one party official in a small Kansas county speaks for Republican lawmakers across America. Nor is it to suggest there is some concerted conspiracy to systematically depopulate liberals from red states in order to sway future elections to Republicans' favor.

When Republican lawmakers in Missouri, Kansas, Florida and elsewhere pass mean-spirited legislation attacking trans medical care, library autonomy, race- or gender-related school curriculum, "woke" corporate policies or other blustery solutions in search of problems, they aren't thinking that big. They're mainly just trying to get to the right of any potential Republican primary challengers in deeply divided political environments where the primaries are the only real contests.

But Peters' secretly recorded speech in March provides a useful discussion point about the prevalence in these states of people who, like Missouri's Republican legislative majority, somehow keep failing to adequately fund roads and schools while prioritizing legislation that sounds like it came from adult versions of playground bullies.

Missouri legislation seeking to outlaw transgender medical care for kids without regard to what their doctors say, or to ban teaching of racial or diversity topics in schools, or the state's new administrative policy looking over the shoulders of public librarians, all contain a common thread: They treat regular citizens like enemies of the people, based solely on indications, manufactured or otherwise, they these citizens merely don't share lawmakers' hard-right views.

Those who go out of their way to be "hostile" to a "small sliver of society," when those targets aren't hurting anyone, aren't the "good people" that the Kansas Republican chairman talked of wanting to keep in his state. To use his own phrase, they're the "bad people." And as long as the voters keep reelecting them, statehouses in Missouri and elsewhere will continue being playgrounds for these cynical bullies while the actual duties of government go unfulfilled.

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