January 03, 2018 03:09 PM UTC

What Are These People Smoking? Jared Polis Everywhere Edition

• 14 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

Over the weekend, we promoted to the homepage a reader diary on a protest event we were actually unaware of before it occurred on New Year’s Eve: a trip by a group of activists with disabilities from Atlantis ADAPT, the storied grassroots team who has been fighting since the 1980s in Denver for better accommodations in transportation and public spaces generally, to the small Eastern Plains town of Yuma in hopes of talking to Sen. Cory Gardner about his recent vote for the Republican tax cut bill.

Readers might remember that is the same group who occupied Sen. Cory Gardner’s downtown Denver offices last summer, attracting nationwide news coverage and helping erode public support both for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and Gardner personally after their live-streamed arrest by Denver police. Suffice to say that ADAPT activists are very good at drawing attention to the issues they fight for.

Now, we don’t generally pay much attention to the local conservative blog Colorado Peak Politics, operated by conservative consultant group EIS Solutions, since they’re pretty far from what you’d call an accurate news source and in general just don’t write very well. But after we promoted the post in question written by reader mamajama55, Peak Politics got a little weird:

Over the New Years weekend, the left crowed that it had camped out in Yuma, Colorado hoping to share their opinion on the tax reform bill (that’s helping millions of middle class Americans, btw) with Republican U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner (at his house, with his kids), and it was likely paid for at some place along the liberal food chain by U.S. Rep. Jared Polis… [Pols emphasis]

Wait, Rep. Jared Polis funds ADAPT? We suppose it’s possible, given that they’re a longstanding local activist group engaged in work on issues Polis might naturally support. But there’s nothing we’ve seen to suggest any special relationship there, and given that ADAPT was protesting when Rep. Polis was literally a little kid (see photo above), it’s reasonable to assume that they were perfectly able to plan their New Year’s action and pay for the gas to get to Yuma without anybody’s help.

But where did Peak Politics get this idea, you ask? That’s where this gets even more stupid:

See, here’s the problem that Polis has. He is one of the Gang of Four, who funded the vast left-wing conspiracy in Colorado, which includes the blog referenced above…If Polis was elected, would he stop funding these childish antics or, at least, the publicity of them via lefty blogs?

That’s right, folks. Apparently the fact that we promoted a post written by somebody else about an event we heard about after the fact is evidence that Jared Polis “paid for” ADAPT’s event in Yuma. We probably would have just ignored this so-baseless-it’s-silly allegation, but then we saw it repeated by leading conservative activist group Compass Colorado’s Kelly Maher in a blast email this morning:

Did Jared Polis’ money help to fund people to go protest at the Gardner’s house in Yuma on New Years? This is getting WAY out of line. Seriously. What is wrong with people?

Of course, if anybody wants to go back and read all the times we’ve criticized Jared Polis in this space, you can easily do so using the search function on the right side of the page. To claim that we are editorially beholden to Polis in any way is demonstrably false.

But that’s not even what matters.

To suggest that Polis is paying for ADAPT to protest Cory Gardner simply because we promoted a post–not even a post we wrote–is sufficiently ridiculous as to severely damage the credibility of both EIS Solutions and Kelly Maher. It’s so stupid on its face that we’re honestly surprised to see people who want to be taken seriously suggesting it.

In the end, that could be what’s most notable about this strange story–that allegedly “mainstream” Republicans are engaging in this kind of far-fetched conspiracy theorizing. That they are obsessed with something so plainly ridiculous, not to mention politically irrelevant, shows that with a life-or-death election season underway, the eyes of the state’s GOP political operatives are not on the ball.

Which yes, we suppose is good news for Jared Polis.