July 25, 2023 02:46 PM UTC

Boebert Turns Rare "Apology" Into Another PR Debacle

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• by: Colorado Pols

Last week, Colorado’s nexus of narrow-minded nuttery Rep. Lauren Boebert earned another round of negative press after she brusquely tossed in the trash a pin memorializing one of the victims of the Ulvalde, Texas school shooting given to her by a gun safety activist. Support for gun rights isn’t supposed to automatically translate to hostility toward victims of gun violence, and Boebert’s displayed lack of compassion was ugly even by today’s thoroughly polarized standards.

Enough so that yesterday, Newsweek reports, Boebert issued one of her rarest statements of all: albeit strained with excuses, an apology.

“Last week, there was a video of me throwing an item away that I had received randomly from somebody in the hallway,” Boebert said in a video posted Monday by the Twitter account @PatriotTakes. “I was walking, had Air Pods in, and tried to tell the man that I was occupied and he continued…

“And as he was handing me what turned out to be a memorial pin, I recognized him as a man who came at me very aggressively just a few weeks prior during a press conference. [Pols emphasis] He was so aggressive that he was apprehended by another member and detained by Capitol Police officers.”

She said: “I wanted to make it very clear that I did not want to receive anything that this man had to give me, nor did I know what he was handing me.”

Nonetheless,

“If anyone thinks that I was disrespecting a child who tragically lost their lives at the hands of an evil, evil person, I want to apologize for the appearance of that,” she added. [Pols emphasis] “But that’s not at all what it was. I simply didn’t want to receive anything from this aggressive man who was harassing me and my office.”

Newsweek reports that Boebert’s office identified the man Boebert thought was handing her this memorial pin as Brett Cross, the father of an Ulvalde shooting victim. But the UK Independent, a British outlet that finds Boebert fascinating and covers Boebert more closely than most American media, checked with Cross and discovered that Boebert has got the wrong man, twice over:

Mr Cross said the activist [who gave Boebert the pin] is named “Elijah” and that he’s “a big dude” who “towers over a lot of people.” The man who was kicked out of the press conference was called “Jake” and doesn’t match that description, as seen in the video…

“You looked down at the pamphlet. You looked down at the pin. You knew what it was and you threw it away when you thought nobody was f***ing looking,” Mr Cross said. “You got caught and now you’re trying to spin a web of lies.”

The Independent previously spoke to Elijah Pelton who agreed with what Mr Cross said, that the congresswoman is confusing him for another activist who confronted her: Jake Burdett.

Readers will remember the incident in May being referred to here, in which Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana violently manhandled an activist named Jake Burdett away from Boebert at a press conference on Capitol Hill. Video of that incident (still above center) shows that Burdett is definitely not the much larger man identified as Elijah Pelton who gave Boebert the Uvalde memorial pin (above left). And neither of those men particularly resembles Brett Cross (above right).

The conclusion can only be that if you approach Lauren Boebert with a message she doesn’t like, not only will you be accused of harassment even if you’re perfectly polite about it, but you’ll be amalgamated with some other activist Boebert doesn’t like and accused of whatever they did, too. Boebert could have avoided this by simply apologizing and leaving it at that instead of front-loading her apology with excuses about all the mean nasty people who dare to tell Boebert that which she does not want to hear. The takeaway is that yes, there are a whole lot of people telling Boebert what she doesn’t want to hear–and she clearly doesn’t respect any of them.

Not only does Boebert no longer tolerate the dissent that launched her career, the dissenters now all look the same.