By SHERMAN SMITH
Kansas Reflector
TOPEKA — Joan Farr’s campaign flyer is designed to get attention.
The 67-year-old appears armed with an assault rifle, wearing a yellow bikini beneath a black jean jacket, curls of reddish-brown hair under a straw cowboy hat. The flyer says she is “GUNNING for the U.S. Senate” in both Kansas and Oklahoma. On her website, she says the Deep State is her TRIGGER, and her AIM is to give them the boot.
This is the fifth time Farr has run for office. Most notably, she received 18% of the vote in the 2010 Kansas GOP primary race against Sam Brownback. Her new look is a departure from the long dress and shotgun she presented two years ago during her independent run for U.S. Senate in Oklahoma. That image was too “frumpy,” Farr said in an interview.
“I thought, ‘I gotta pull out all the stops,'” Farr said. “I’ll hold my son’s gun, I’ll be in a bikini, and I’ll run in two states.’ I was just stepping it up from last time because I can’t get publicity.”
In Kansas, Farr is challenging incumbent U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran in the GOP primary. Career politicians, she says, are destroying the country. A spokesman for Moran’s campaign declined to answer questions or comment for this story.
Farr’s top priority is reforming the legal system in Kansas — starting with keeping innocent people out of jail in the first place — but that message is surrounded by a sea of conspiracy-minded positions driven by her disdain for the Deep State.
She wants to ban the United Nations’ plan to control the world population, a hoax known as Agenda 21/2030. Mass shootings are staged, she said, to justify changing gun laws. Government operatives use satellites to insert microchips into people’s brains without their knowledge. “They,” by which she means the Deep State, or the good-old-boy network, used 5G to give her family COVID-19. “They” also rig the elections in Kansas.
But what most people want to know about, she said, is how she can run in two states.
Farr isn’t the first person to take advantage of language in the U.S. Constitution that says you can run for the House or Senate in any state where you have a residence, without limiting your options to a single state. If she happens to win both races, she would have to choose whether to represent Oklahoma or Kansas. Farr said she spends most of her time in Kansas, taking care of a family member at her Derby home.
In addition to taking on the legal system, Farr wants to remove innocent people like herself from the “terrorist watchlist,” and she proposed a plan to help people get out of debt.
The way Farr sees it, the biggest complaint Republicans have with Democrats is “they don’t want to work, blah, blah, blah.” So she tried to come up with a new idea for debt relief, based in part on conversations she had with students on college campuses.
“I put it on social media,” Farr said, “and I just got hammered: ‘You’re socialist. You’re communist.’ ‘What?’ I said. ‘For wanting to help people get out of debt because of COVID?’ That’s just crazy.”
Her plan is a social compact: If you give up drugs, alcohol and social media for one year, a wealthy person will pay off up to $50,000 of your debt. If elected, she promises to use her congressional salary to pay down people’s debt in this way.
“It’s just an idea,” Farr said.
Farr said she landed on the terrorist watchlist about 20 years ago after becoming involved in a legal fight over a real estate project. She said she previously worked as a police officer, and also worked in security and purchasing at Boeing.
The Deep State took an interest in Farr, she believes, “because I speak out against them, and I don’t think they want Christian women in office. Pretty much, it appears to be good versus evil. I mean, look at what they did to Trump.”
Being on the terrorist watchlist, she said, means they hack her phone, get into her computer and bank accounts, intercept her mail, and sabotage her campaigns.
“They actually have CIA operatives posing as medical personnel in the hospital, to discreetly kill people,” Farr said. “And this went on way before COVID. I know, because it happened to me. So if you print anything, I would just ask that you not make me look like I’m crazy.”
Farr said she printed her campaign flyers last August, long before the recent high-profile massacres at a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school and a Buffalo, New York, supermarket.
“Back then, it was a positive thing,” Farr said of the initial reception to her flyer. “Now, you know, my campaign card is out there, but of course we’ve had these shootings, which, I’m sorry, but a lot of these shootings, in my opinion, are staged. I mean, I could go into it, but these mass shootings are what is allowing the government to take away our guns or to revise gun laws. You understand what I’m saying?”
The “common denominator” in mass shootings, Farr said, is that the shooter heard voices. That’s because “they” can implant a microchip from a satellite, allowing government operatives to talk to people.
Farr said the operatives “get them involved in video games, violence, so that they’ll go shoot up: ‘Oh, you can do this. You can do just like this video game. Go shoot up the school. Go shoot up the theater.’ That’s what’s going on. A lot of people don’t want to believe that. ‘They wouldn’t do that.’ Yes they would.”
Farr shared her theory about mass shootings on her personal Facebook page in a May 26 post, two days after the Uvalde shooting. It was poorly received.
Suzie Hartford-Bell responded: “Did you eat lead paint chips as a kid?”
“Oh blame the deep state,” Hartford-Bell wrote. “Microchips from space? Omg it’s no wonder you think god is real. Mental Instability much! Holy cow I thought Jerry Moran and Roger Marshall were bad. You have crashed the crazy wagon and caught it on fire! What a loon!”
“Wake up and smell the coffee gf,” Farr replied. “I’ll be praying for you.”
Farr said she is challenging Moran in part because his office wouldn’t help her in an attempt to get a Medal of Honor for her father, who died while serving in Vietnam.
She thinks she has a chance of competing with Moran, who has served in the U.S. Senate since 2011, after 14 years in the U.S. House.
“If you notice, there’s no polls out there,” Farr said. “When they’re not showing any poll, that means they have internal polls but not publishing them. And so they must not look very good. And I’ve heard a lot of people say, in the Republican party, they want him out. So yeah, I think I have a chance to win.”