The King and the Duke Play Rivertown

How a traveling Holocaust show fleeced the rubes in Kansas City and Reddit censors helped them do it

This was originally published on May 15, 2023. Our subscriber list is 130 times bigger now than it was then, so I’m reposting it.

It had everything a white, culturally Christian American could want. Somber music, hushed tones, and dim lighting. There was a pile of old shoes, an actual German train car from the 1940s parked out front, and actual soup bowls with their actual spoons from an actual Nazi death camp. There was even an especially moving, actual death camp uniform on display in an actual glass case (because the Germans wanted their genocide victims to be uniformed. You know how those Germans are. Attention to detail!)

The show, called “Auschwitz,” was presented a couple of years back in the basement of Kansas City’s glorious Union Station—a beautiful train station completed in 1914 and located on a gentle incline between downtown and the national memorial to the war completed just a few years later.

It was the largest event ever held in Union Station.

According to the organizers of the Auschwitz show, 315,000 Kansas Citians viewed it during its run, which had to be extended due to demand. The price of entrance to the show was 25 dollars for adults (students got a discounted price of, as I recall, [edit: $17.50]). In all, the organizers grossed somewhere north of seven million dollars from their Kansas City engagement.

Did a single parent object? Probably not.

I’d seen the billboards all over town advertising the event. “Auschwitz,” the billboards proclaimed over a grayish photo of train tracks leading ominously into a brick building, “Not long ago. Not far away.” Well, that’s probably true in perpetuity, I remember thinking to myself, and gave it no more thought until I happened to notice, as I was driving by Union Station one morning, the long line of school buses out front. I parked and stood beside the front entrance to Union Station and watched for a while—white kids from elementary schools in Olathe and Overland Park and middle schools in Lee’s Summit and Raytown and high schools in Topeka and St Joseph and Lenexa disgorged by the busload at $17.50 per tax-paid head.

I asked a uniformed employee of Union Station, who was standing there, “Do you get this many school kids coming to this show every morning?”

“Yeah, pretty much,” he replied.

Students exiting the show at Union Station in October, 2020. Except for the first guy, I’m assuming.

“I see,” I murmured and the whole business suddenly took on a much more sinister aspect. I followed along the stream of school kids descending the escalators to the entrance to the show and read the informational pamphlets they had displayed at the ticket booth. There were two women stationed there and I asked the one who seemed to be the senior of the two, pointing at a line in the brochure mentioning genocide, whether their show included material about the Bolshevik genocide of 66 million Russian Christians that began 25 years before Hitler came to power in Germany, intensified during WWII, and continued long after Germany had surrendered.

“It’s on the website,” she croaked, without missing a beat, and I suddenly realized that the show that had managed to install itself in the basement of this beautiful old railway station was The Royal Nonesuch, the show The King and The Duke performed for the rubes downriver from Kansas City in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

I went home and made a graphic, then posted it to the r/kansascity subreddit:

Well, one does not poke fun of grifters if their grift is a Grift. I was immediately and permanently banned by the Reddit censors from r/kansascity (which was full of effusive—effusive—praise for Auschwitz).

Someone who believes they have the right to tell you what you may or may not say also necessarily believes they have the right to tell you what you may or may not hear—that is to say, what you may or may not believe or think. They, therefore, believe they have the right to remove your humanity itself to serve their own ends. They are the genocidalists and there is no creature on the planet more vile than this one.

I really hate censorship, so I made another graphic, blew it up, and spent several mornings posted at the entrance to Union Station with my poster displayed:

Any students who expressed an interest as they filed past my poster received an informational brochure, which included the graphic depicted above. I have no doubt the organizers of the Auschwitz show demanded my removal, but the employees at Union Station let me be. Perhaps, among those students who saw my graphic, there were some who will let the information start them on a path to a deeper, truer understanding of the world in which we live. I don’t know. But I do know we need more people like me. (Share this substack, please, to help people like me!)

And, finally, here is a picture I took in December, 2017 of the St Louis train station. I include it here for its sheer beauty. This is what our ancestors built. Not Auschwitz. Not the gulags. (Those were both Jewish creations!)¹ This is what our young people should be learning about, for crying out loud.

Interior St Louis Union Station Dec 2017. The streets around this old downtown train station are a desolate, crime-ridden wasteland. So fucking criminal what we Europeans have allowed to be done to us.

1. By the time Auschwitz was presented to the West, it had been transformed by the Bolshevik Jews of the Soviet Union.