March 12, 2024 12:25 PM UTC

Way, Way Off The Deep End With Rep. Scott Bottoms

• 3 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

Freshman Rep. Scott “There Is No” Bottoms of Colorado Springs, whose day job is lead pastor at an area evangelical Christian church, has a reputation for couching most if not all of his views on the temporal world in the language of “spiritual warfare”–this in accordance with Bottoms’ apocalyptic worldview in which we are presently in the Biblical End Times where stuff gets really bad before Jesus comes back. Bottoms’ strident theology makes it difficult to debate any subject with him rationally, since it’s hard to convince anyone who believes the world as we know it is about to end that they should care about such mundane matters as taking care of the planet or tolerating folks who are not similarly apocalyptically minded.

But on Sunday, Rep. Bottoms took the fire and brimstone rhetoric to a new level while being interviewed by conservative journalist Christine Dolan. It started with Bottom’s by-now familiar rants about how Colorado “doesn’t protect children from predators” and the loss of “parental rights” to legislation protecting LGBTQ+ people from discrimination. But from there, the conversation took a wild turn into the conspiratorial, with Bottoms offering his theory about how Gov. Jared Polis is himself being “groomed” (a different kind of grooming, we assume) for the Presidency by “Davos,” a reference to the Swiss town where the World Economic Forum convenes each year.

And that’s not all:

BOTTOMS: So, so things are coming from D.C., to Polis, as an extreme leftist globalist, and here’s two other things to remember is, Washington D.C. is extremely corrupt with pedophilic mentality. [Pols emphasis] Okay? This is why Epstein never, Epstein didn’t hang himself but nobody cared. This is where this is come from and nobody’s investigating, nobody cares. Because why? Epstein owned Washington D.C. They were…

At this point, Dolan cut Bottoms off to return the conversation to some semblance of reality:

DOLAN: Well, I think that’s, that’s, he didn’t own it. Okay, that’s a little bit too far. [Pols emphasis] He certainly hung out with a lot of people on both sides of the aisle…

It’s not the first time that Bottoms has stated on the record that he doesn’t believe sex offender billionaire Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide in 2019, but the terrifying depiction given by Bottoms of a pipeline of “pedophilic mentality” from Washington, D.C. and beyond to Colorado via Gov. Polis is a window into Bottoms’ mentality. There are Republicans who regurgitate far-right conspiracy theories, at least to the limited degree they can themselves stomach, simply because it’s what they think their constituents want to hear. And then there are Republicans who have, as the saying goes, “drunk the Kool-Aid” and truly believe the conspiracy theories that underpin QAnon, PizzaGate, and the rest of the MAGA-era crazypants canon.

Scott Bottoms is one of the Republicans who believes.