Just out, a powerful new book you need for citizen action as we face a crucial election, the end of a scary year, and more leftist aggression next year. Unmasked 2020, co-authored by 15 Colorado conservatives, spells out how freedom is eroding in our state under the current crisis atmosphere, with an urgent warning for your state as well. Get your copy of the book today.
Four sitting legislators, Tea Party leader Randy Corporon, and think tank director Jeff Hunt are among those who wrote chapters. The editors are former Sen. Kevin Lundberg and veteran conservative strategist Charles Heatherly. I was honored to pen the introduction, as given below.
Colorado’s Warning to America: Book Introduction
How do a free people lose their freedom? More often by inches than by miles. More often by neglect and passivity than by conscious consent or a losing fight.
It was said that Britain acquired its empire in a fit of absent-mindedness. Could a state like Colorado discard its proud tradition of liberty and limited government in much the same way?
And if this could happen in my state, couldn't it happen just as easily in yours, wherever in America you live?
Across the map, in states both blue and red, opportunistic leftists are primed to let no crisis go to waste. Unmasked 2020 is our effort to alert Coloradans to what has overtaken them, and to warn our fellow Americans everywhere.
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The book is a chronicle of lawmaking and lawbreaking, public attitudes and media narratives, in Colorado during the first eight months of 2020, one of the stormiest years our country has experienced since the Great Depression and World War II.
Of course, eight months is just the blink of an eye in the Centennial State’s century and a half of history. Our contributors are not saying everything changed completely or irreversibly for Coloradans during that short time. But we thought it important to lay down a record of how much did change, why that took place, and how it may alter our way of life in years to come—not for the better.
Turning the page into 2020 last January, Colorado was enjoying a robust economy, visitors from around the world were looking forward to winter vacations here, and it was expected the state’s Democrat-dominated executive and legislative branches would move cautiously as election-year wisdom dictates.
Compounding Crises
By March, only a few weeks later, this had all changed with the suddenness and vehemence of a “bomb cyclone” weather event. First the coronavirus pandemic upended everything. Then in May after another few weeks, racial tensions flared following the George Floyd death. Then before long, well-organized seditious elements began abusing the people’s freedom of assembly with violent nihilist riots.
The shock and strain these compounding crises placed upon Colorado’s institutions of self-government, and on the elected officials leading them, can hardly be overstated. Having run for governor and served in legislative leadership, I don’t envy the difficult judgment calls that Gov. Jared Polis, Senate President Leroy Garcia, and House Speaker KC Becker, decent individuals all, had to make.
But I agree with our chapter authors that these leaders and too many others in state government, local government, public health, and law enforcement did not rise to the occasion as we the people had a right to expect they should.
Nor did many of our news media, many of our judges, many of our educators, many of our churches. Across the ranks of our state’s leadership elites, it must sadly be said that 2020 has not been their finest hour.
Not exempt from scrutiny, I hasten to add—as we seek to learn lessons and regain our balance—are some of the interests I’ve long allied with as a conservative Republican. It’s fair to ask how well GOP political leaders and business lobby groups and policy think tanks have met the moment. My tentative answer, between friends, is: Probably not as well as they might have.
Today as the state and nation are less than two months away from a bitterly contested, highly consequential election, Coloradans look around them and see this place we love, sharply changed in ways that deeply worry some of us.
We see the governorship engorged with habit-forming powers to rule by edict. We see the General Assembly acquiring a taste for improvisational lawmaking and rule-bending. We see the courts imposing few checks on all this overreach. How much longer will the Colorado constitution be worth the paper it’s written on
We see the state's once-roaring economy reeling from dubiously necessary shutdowns, with the timeline for recovery anyone’s guess. Kids back in classrooms, fans back in stadiums, diners back in restaurants? Eventually, sure—but what’s the damage toll until then?
We see the State Capitol itself, seat and symbol of our representative republican form of government, battered and defaced by hateful mobs. Graffiti scrubbed off, monument from the war to end slavery restored, the people’s house again cherished and protected? Someday, maybe—but what’s the hurry?
Danger of Faction
How much of this would have occurred no matter which party and what personalities were in power? How much of it was by design from the left—and merely the opening phase of a grander design set to unfold methodically year by year?
How much of the harm already done can be undone by countervailing electoral gains this fall and in upcoming election cycles? Many of us on the right fear that won’t be easy.
Progressives’ shrewdly constructed political and media infrastructure in Colorado was already showing its “ratchet power” to lock in one-way change when Adam Schrager and Rob Witwer published The Blueprint in 2010. The ratchet has tightened since then, with one of its architects and financiers, Jared Polis, now sitting in the governor’s office.
Arguably, the Colorado Democratic Party with its phalanx of outrider groups and its legion of megadonors has now become a classic instance of “faction,” that bane of republics about which James Madison warns in Federalist 10.
A faction, Madison explains, is a political bloc so welded by self-interest that it no longer defers to constitutional restraints, a respect for the outnumbered opposition, a spirit of fair play, ethical norms, or even a sense of the common good.
Where faction prevails, he writes, “instability, injustice, and confusion” are rampant. Raw majoritianism runs unchecked, and might makes right. If that sounds like what our state has lived through in 2020, we have a problem, Colorado.
Political Biopsy
We have, if you will, a raging illness in the body politic. The essays collected here are thus a sort of biopsy, a clinical analysis of samples from the diseased entity, aimed at finding out what’s wrong and beginning to identify remedies.
But make no mistake. As troubled as things are, our state is far from needing an autopsy. Coloradans are a resilient and resourceful people. Freedom is in our DNA, so is justice, so are generosity and compassion. It would take a lot more adversity than 2020 has so far delivered to defeat us.
So we of the Unmasked analytical team are energized with determination and hope in submitting these biopsy results for consideration and perhaps, in due course, for action. We believe Colorado’s best days are still ahead—as are those of the USA.
In my early days as a state senator, two decades ago, it was funny to have constituents who should know better ask how I liked “being in Congress” and whether I could get them White House tour tickets. “Don’t feel bad,” I would joke when they apologized, “a hazy knowledge of state government is a sign of good mental health.”
But in our new era of strongman governors and strident federalism, that’s no longer the case. These days, neighbor, to paraphrase Lenin, state government is very interested—perhaps too much so—in you, whether or not you’re interested in it.
We offer Unmasked as a survival manual for liberty-loving neighbors from Denver to Dover to Del Mar and everywhere else nationwide. We second what Jon Caldara of the Independence Institute said to the authors of The Blueprint: “Colorado is big enough to be important but small enough that just a few people can radically change the political landscape.”
True then and truer still today. Radical change on steroids has now overtaken our state—and it may be coming soon to yours. Be warned, America.
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