Colorado’s party of “law and order” is full of law breakers and flaunters
From the president of the United States and his chief advisors to the chairman of the Colorado Republican Party, the Colorado House minority leader and too many right-wingers up and down the ballot to list here, one thing is becoming clear: the party of “law and order” is a pack of enormous lawbreaking hypocrites.
These unscrupulous politicians and operatives have broken rules and laws they find inconvenient, raised money for an accused murderer, promoted fake made-to-fail lawsuits, then demanded swift punishment for their political opponents. These same “justice for thee and not for me” politicians and activists openly flout the law and public health orders put in place to suppress the pandemic, and shamelessly fleece resentful rubes hopped up on a steady diet of Fox
News, racist dog whistles from the president, and conservative AM radio demagogues.
Congressman Ken Buck, who is also chairman of the Colorado Republican Party, called for a Justice Department investigation into the ongoing racial justice protests in Denver and throughout the nation. In the same week, at least two more Black men were executed in the streets by police. But instead of being upset about the killing of Black men, Buck claims without a shred of evidence that protesters are having “transportation costs, food costs, and housing costs, and perhaps salaries and other benefits”
Ian Silverii is the executive director of ProgressNow Colorado, the state’s largest progressive advocacy group.
covered by a mysterious (imaginary) funder, preposterously going on to say, “it’s important to know when you’re dealing with organized crime like this where the funding is coming from.”
Rep. Buck was spotted a few days before at a GOP fundraiser for Sen. Cory Gardner and Lauren Boebert, the conspiracy-curious Republican nominee for Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District, wearing a t-shirt with the U.S. Marine’s informal slogan: “kill ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out.” So much for the “pro-life” party.
As for general law and order, I didn’t see Buck, or any Colorado Republican leader utter a peep of dissent when the Republican National Convention took place on the south lawn of the White House last week. Turning the White House into a backdrop for the RNC was a flagrant violation of the Hatch Act of 1939, a fact that Trump reportedly relished because he knew that nobody would try and stop him.
Congressional candidate Lauren Boebert has quite a rap sheet herself and has been arrested at least three times in the past. She once told detained underage drinkers that they should flee from police at a country music festival. While Boebert was being handcuffed for disorderly conduct at the same event, she told the cops that she had friends at Fox News and if they arrested her it would be national news. She was, and it wasn’t. Boebert failed to appear to her court dates on multiple occasions, refusing to answer several summonses, leading to yet another arrest and detention in county jail. She reportedly let her pit bulls freely roam her neighborhood, harassing other residents, and gave dozens of attendees at a rodeo in 2017 food poisoning with clostridium-tainted pork sliders.
And then on Tuesday, House Minority Leader Patrick Neville joined Michelle Malkin at a large “anti-masker” rally at Bandimere Speedway in Jefferson County, in open defiance of the statewide public health order for maskwearing in public and against Jeffco’s specific orders against gatherings of 175 people or more. Malkin is a fringe right-wing commentator who called antiSemitism “a useless, meaningless term and everybody knows it,” and who also said it was not antisemitic to question “whatever the precise number of people is who perished in World War II,” to say nothing of her ties to outright Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.
The worst example of the right’s recent embrace of lawlessness comes from Dudley Brown, former executive director of Colorado’s extreme gun enthusiast group Rocky Mountain Gun Owners. Brown’s national organization, the National Foundation for Gun Rights is now raising money for Kyle Rittenhouse — the 17-year-old militia member who has been charged with first-degree murder for shooting multiple protesters after the police killing of yet another Black man, Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
In the end, this is about projection: an attempt to distract voters with stories about vandalism and graffiti while Republicans break laws, cheer on and justify the actions of an accused murderer, violate public health orders, and scam their own base for funds — all the while chanting “Blue Lives Matter” and claiming to be the party of “law and order.”
For those leading today’s conservative movement, the real lawbreakers are in the mirror.