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May 22, 2024 10:47 AM UTC

May 21st, 2024: The Day The Colorado Republican Party Died

  • 13 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols
Colorado GOP chairman Dave Williams jumping the proverbial shark.

As 9NEWS’ Kyle Clark reported last night, the Colorado Republican Party sent out an email blast yesterday that if we’re to take it at face value completely resets the debate over education policy in Colorado, making claims and recommendations so far from the mainstream no matter what your views on public education may be that we’re all struggling this morning to come to drips with the implications.

The Colorado Republican Party is issuing a call to its members to pull their children from public school, saying Democrats are using schools to “turn more kids trans.”

The message was delivered in an email blast to Republicans statewide Tuesday.

“All Colorado parents should be aiming to remove their kids from public education,” [Pols emphasis] read the directive from Darcy Schoening, director of special initiatives for the Colorado GOP.

It’s one thing to complain about public schools in the abstract as Republicans are fond of doing, but the paradox in attacking public education is that parents consistently believe that their kid’s own public school is the “exception” to the bad stories they see on the news. Republicans in the Colorado legislature celebrated alongside their Democratic colleagues the increases in public education funding achieved this year. Crucial constituencies Republicans can’t lose in the suburbs and rural areas care about their public schools. You can’t just tell voters, even conservative-leaning voters, to pull their kids en masse from the public schools their kids have attended for years.

And why are parents supposed to take this life-changing drastic action? Trans panic, naturally!

If your child decides he identifies as a girl because he is angry with you, or all of his friends are doing it, the Colorado government will actively encourage his new fetish by allowing him to identify as “she,” “they,” or whatever nonsensical terms your son’s teachers and peers may dream up…all without notifying you of your child’s disturbing behavior, which should be treated rather then encouraged.

If you haven’t been paying attention over the past year, Colorado Republicans under the party’s far-right bomb-throwing chairman Dave “Let’s Go Brandon” Williams have heavily invested in scare tactics about transgender people as an election turnout issue, which resulted in some of the most acrimonious debates in the state legislature this year and an incipient anti-trans ballot initiative campaign. It’s a continuation of the message from 2022 Republican gubernatorial candidate Heidi Ganahl, who became obsessed in the late days of her losing campaign with “furries” supposedly taking over the hallways of Colorado public schools.

The problem, as Ganahl discovered in 2022, is that anti-LGBTQ scare tactics simply don’t work on a majority of Colorado voters. Voters who are agitated by anti-trans messaging are already in the GOP camp, and swingable voters are repelled by the intense animus directed at such a small percentage of the population.

In short, the GOP’s latest election-year moral panic is another dud, just like the “furry panic” of 2022–and by calling on parents to pull their children out of public school over this sideshow issue the Colorado Republican Party has, to borrow the meme, “jumped the shark.” Every single Republican in Colorado now must either repudiate the position taken by their own party, or explain why they will not.

It’s an embarrassment that there’s just no coming back from. Or there at least there shouldn’t be.

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13 thoughts on “May 21st, 2024: The Day The Colorado Republican Party Died”

    1. I hope suburban voters in purple or red-leaning states recognize the declining sanity of the GOP and deliver themselves from evil stupidity. For places like Colorado, the GOP here already lost much of that vote as far back as 2004. I guess they can try doing crap like this but I have a hunch that it won't bring back much people, not those from the pre-2004 days and definitely not those from after the 2018 political shift.

  3. Has anyone done a timeline of wingnut moral panics through the years?  That could be kinda fun.  I am old enough to remember when homeless people, food stamps, and gay marriage were going to destroy civilization.

    1. I might take a stab that mission, MM!  I keep a stash of memes related to some of their most recent fuckery but it would be fun to go back to the child labor, social security, forty-hour work week days and start there. Just as a daily reminder as to the moral rot harbored in Orange Jesus: 

  4. It's their latest contribution to the psycophants moulding the party into the image of Orange Jesus.  Yesterday Ohio's SOS sent a letter to the Chair of the OH Dem Party that he will exclude Biden from the OH ballot since the DNC convention is after their arbitrary deadline. (Ohio extended the deadline for Repubs in 2012 & 2020, but refuses to do it now).

    It's a mystery why they keep losing ground with the center of the population. 

  5. Ridiculous? Yes! But the timing is perfect since EVERYONE will be pulling their kids out of school in the next week or so due to the… end of the school year. This basically gives the GOP three months to beat this drum when it doesn't matter because no kids are in school. Don't be fooled if next week they declare that the majority of parents took their advice.

    1. Don't be fooled if next week they declare that the majority of parents took their advice.

      i'm gonna laugh/cry so hard when this happens.

  6. I do hope there will be a checklist for Democratic candidates and the media, making certain that Republicans as a party and individually as candidates need to clarify their positions on

    • Furries in the schools
    • Women's health care – abortion rights
    • Women's health care – birth control (Trump is moving towards a position that "states should decide")
    • "One-day voting" and hand counting to replace mail ballots with machine counts and audits
    • "Rounding up the illegal immigrants and shipping them to ????"
    • The validity of the 2020 election of Joe Biden
    • The "patriotism" of the January 6 riot participants
    • The opportunity for Unaffiliated voters to choose a Republican primary ballot.
    • …..

    I'm sure I'm overlooking other key issues. 

    1. The opposition nor the media doesn’t really have to press Republicans on these issues, they are quite open about their beliefs. In fact, here is how  the Colorado GOP would answer you point by point: 

      • “Yes!!! Furries are invading the schools cuz of those woke groomer teachers!”
      • “Abortion will bring about God’s rage! We must criminalize it and imprison doctors and women who defy God’s Will!!!”
      • [See Above]
      • “Election Fraud!!!”
      • “Ship them to all the Blue states (obviously not Colorado because we are a quaint little Red State)”
      • “Clearly Biden didn’t win! Not even within Colorado! We have tried to unsuccesfully pass bill amendents and measures to aid in Trump’s God-Given Truth since Day 1 of his stolen victory.”
      • [See Above but replace Trump with “Patriots”]
      • “Those unaffliated voters are trying to have us advance RINO candidates inseatd of Patriotic Trump supporters that will convince the majority of moderate and liberal voters to support us!”

  8. I had to comment even if I'm late to the party. This is just the new normal of the Colorado GOP, a stauch far-right poitical party that believes it operates in a solid red state for some reason. As the article mentions, how does this rhetoric help them? Only the most rabid right-wing culture warriors care about this LGBT stuff and they make up a very small minroity of Coloradan voters, I would suggest that even many Republican voters don't care that much and if so, not enough to be a actual political priority for them. So that basically means they trying to scare off moderate and indpendent voters, something they seem to excel at. Once again, how is going full MAGA and far-right in a state like Colorado a good idea? As problematic and flawed as Democrats can be, I lose no sleep voting for them if this is what the GOP has become.

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