Four Republican candidates vying to be Colorado’s next governor came together over the weekend for the first official forum of the campaign to replace term-limited Jared Polis next year – and put on the strangest, bleakest performance I have seen in my decade-plus political career in the process. As the candidates took turns painting a vision of what they see as wrong with Colorado and how they hope to make it right again, each provided a glimpse into a dark fantasy world which bears little resemblance to our own.
Held at the Truth & Liberty Coalition’s annual conference, the forum occurred under the pall of the recent shooting of conservative agitator Charlie Kirk. In addition to being a long-time ally of Truth & Liberty and Charis Bible College – both of which are run by evangelist Andrew Wommack – Kirk was scheduled to be the conference’s keynote speaker. It is difficult to imagine that the shock of Kirk’s murder did not contribute to the dark tone of the candidate forum, but it is equally clear that each candidate on stage arrived at his own troubling positions even before that event.
Participating in the surreal forum were four candidates for governor: state Senator Mark Baisley, Teller County Sheriff Jason Mikesell, state Representative Scott Bottoms, and former congressman Greg Lopez. Notably, Baisley and Mikesell have close, longstanding relationships with the Bible college which hosted the event. Baisley has taught at Charis for seven years and Mikesell, the local sheriff, is a frequent participant in programming put out by the ministry and its political arm, Truth & Liberty. Locals consider the sheriff a close political ally of the controversial ministry.
Missing from the stage was state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer (R-Brighton), who announced her candidacy for governor last week. Minor candidates who have raised less than $1,000 were not invited.
Together, the four men on stage took turns answering questions about abortion, education, LGBTQ issues, crime, and other topics. Over the course of nearly two hours, they managed to stretch reality to its breaking point, parrot language originally popularized by the literal Nazi Party, and reveal both their ignorance of state power and their deep desire to use it against their enemies.
Though not the kind of performance one used to expect from serious Republican candidates, I imagine it’s the kind we will see more of in the future.
The forum started on the topic of abortion, a topic which retains little ability to surprise. And, to no one’s surprise, the four candidates onstage stood in lockstep against the right of women to seek medical care in the termination of a pregnancy, with Lopez going so far as to endorse fetal personhood – an issue with an extremely losing record in Colorado.
The surprises started in response to the next question. Posed by the moderator, Truth & Liberty executive director Richard Harris, the question was, “Are there any pro-LGBT laws, regulations, or policies that you would seek to change or repeal as governor, and why?”
Setting aside the fact that the role of the governor does not include changing or repealing laws, the candidate’s answers were striking. Of course, there is nothing surprising about these men harboring homophobic or transphobic views, but I was, in fact, surprised by how unhinged and conspiratorial those views are, and how willing the candidates were to speak them out loud.
Bottoms, a pastor and state Representative with a long history of disdain and disapproval for trans people, stated that he would “repeal all of them.” Then he plunged into the deep end. “LGB is a sexual preference,” he said, “but TQ+ is an ideology. It is rooted in Marxism. It is rooted in Satanism.” He vowed to never use anyone’s pronouns, and said that, as governor, he would ban teachers from addressing any students by pronouns (my apologies to Rep. Bottoms for referring to him – er, Scott? – as ‘he’).
Baisley went in another direction, but a no less troubling one, turning the focus onto his colleagues in the legislature who identify as anything other than heterosexual, saying that they have a “brokenness…in their minds” and are in rebellion against God. If you look at the legislature, he said, “you’ll see that there is a larger than representative population of LGBTQ folks [who are] members of that body. Why do you suppose that is?” In a long response, linked here, Baisley claimed that his queer colleagues are “using the state as their kind of church to force their religious beliefs on the rest of us.”
Like so much about the forum, Baisley’s remark was emblematic of a conservative movement crippled by its significant deficit of basic human empathy, incapable of understanding its opponents as anything but a mirror image of itself.
As the topic moved to education, Lopez inadvertently underscored the importance of the subject by referring to the 1960s as “forty years ago,” before explaining that that’s when judges “told us there wasn’t room for Christ in our schools.” Mikesell, meanwhile said that the state should “pass laws to stop indoctrination by any teacher” and vowed that, as governor, he would pull teachers’ licenses if he heard of any indoctrination, which he said would “actually be easy to do because, as governor, you control those strings.” It’s unclear what he meant.
Baisley, for his part, came right out and said that “every school should be a private school,” and Bottoms suggested getting the government out of education funding altogether and returning per-pupil funding ($14-18,000 per student, per year, here in Colorado) to parents as tax breaks.
After that, the forum veered into eyebrow-raising territory, parroting language originally popularized by the Nazi Party – as in, the actual Nazi Party – when Harris asked a question about combating “cultural Marxism.”
It’s a term you may have heard before. “Cultural Marxism” is the culprit which a certain kind of conservative likes to blame for “woke” and desegregation and book-learning and whatever else they have decided is in conspiracy against them. It is also, and I think it’s important to be abundantly clear about this, quite literally a Nazi conspiracy theory.
First rolled-out as “cultural Bolshevism,” the term was originally used by Nazis in the 1930s to describe an imagined conspiracy by Jewish socialists to weaken the German spirit with modern art, sexual liberation, and intellectualism. In the 1990s, despite having no basis in fact, the conspiratorial phrase was intentionally reintroduced (this time as the updated “cultural Marxism”) by a handful of far-right activists and intellectuals. From there, belief in “cultural Marxism” grew into a conspiracy juggernaut, even inspiring multiple terrorist attacks, most notably the 2011 Norway attacks perpetrated by Anders Behring Breivik. After seeing how problematic the term and belief were in relation to Brevik’s attack, Michael Minnicino, credited as the main popularizer of the term in the 90s, disavowed his earlier work on the subject.
To be clear, I am not calling the candidates Nazis, but I believe it’s relevant to note that they were engaging with ideas created and popularized by the Nazis.
When Harris asked the four candidates how they would comply at the state level with Donald Trump’s “orders designed to eliminate culturally Marxist policies like DEI and CRT,” they responded with various grievances which could broadly fall under that conspiratorial umbrella.
“When the President of the United States tells you to do something, that is something you should be doing. It’s a law,” Mikesell said, displaying a fundamental misunderstanding of law rivaled in magnitude only by his loyalty to the president. He proceeded to rail against DEI, cryptically commenting that, if pastors had to “deal with DEI,” they “wouldn’t be able to say what they needed to say,” and then warning that the consequences of Colorado’s refusal to follow the President’s unilateral laws could be “civil war.”
“That’s how those things start,” he said, “when a state decides we will not follow those laws.”
Baisley, for some reason, went off on a tangent about “Black kids.” Those kids, he said, might be struggling, “but rather than looking at it as, is it because of the melanonin [sic] in their skin, how about if we look at whether they have fathers in the house.” Bottoms, for his part, claimed that “right now, the average 14-year-old girl, freshman in high school, is being groomed” into a “transgender mentality.”
By the time the last question rolled around, I was almost relieved to hear the candidates unanimously agree to pardon multiple-felon Tina Peters, if only because I knew it meant the fever dream was almost over.
This forum was strange. Concerning, even. And I don’t mean in the sense that I disagree with the candidates on their positions. I knew that would be the case going in. It was strange in the sense that the four candidates on stage so clearly share a worldview, down to the hallucinated specifics, which is so far divorced from the observable reality around us. Delusion is not uncommon; that it should so uniformly swallow an entire debate stage is.
I try to resist the urge to valorize Republicans of the past. The fact that contemporary Republicans have drifted into what I can only think to term “Facebook Fascism” does not render their predecessors noble. In fact, since Barry Goldwater staggered maniacally onto the scene some 70 years ago, movement conservatism has been afflicted by the constant background radiation of conspiracism and bigotry. The only difference now is that they have had 70 years to follow that path past a point of no return, and have done so.
Still, watching this forum, it was hard not to be wistful for the Republicans of 20 years ago, not because those Republicans were perfect, but for the simple fact that they would have been embarrassed to say half of what Baisley, Mikesell, Lopez, and Bottoms said on that stage this weekend. 20 years ago, political careers would have been ended by any single answer given on that stage. It’s not that some Republicans in the audience did not secretly feel the same way 20 years ago, it’s that they were a fringe, and that they understood to keep it secret. That it was weird. Embarrassing. That explaining some of these things out loud makes it impossible to avoid hearing the tinfoil-hat tone emanating from them.
At some point in the past 20 years, that impossibility evaporated, and the tinfoil-hat tone became the room tone. Now, a field of candidates running for the highest office in the state agrees in lockstep that a Nazi conspiracy theory is a pressing contemporary issue, that being transgender is Marxist Satanism, and that teachers are part of a grand conspiracy to turn the kids gay. These things are not real – and yet, they are the central topics in a statewide race.
These are not idle ramblings; they are the vengeful fantasies of fevered minds. The candidates pushing these dark delusions uniformly expressed their urge to use state power to fight back against their imagined enemies. Mikesell vowed to ruin teachers’ careers for wrongspeak, Bottoms said he would use the National Guard to “clean out” the state’s most racially diverse city in an afternoon, Lopez wants to mandate Christianity in the classroom, and Baisley is willing to fire every public school teacher in the state in order to abolish the public education system. This is (most of) the Republican field for Governor. In real life.
I do not agree with the frequent refrain from Democratic leaders in D.C. that we “need a strong Republican Party,” but we finally have one – and I’m wishing we’d been careful what we wished for.
