On January 7 in Minneapolis, a 37-year-old mother named Renee Nicole Good was executed in broad daylight by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent named Jonathan Ross. Her children, who had already lost their father, were orphaned when Ross fired three rounds into Good’s SUV and body. In the five days since her killing, I am not sure what has disturbed me more: the footage itself, which from every angle shows an unjust execution, or the hordes of sociopaths celebrating it online.
As fighter jets screeched through the sky above Caracas on the third night of the year, raining munitions on residential buildings, the clouds of destruction took on the shape of a Rorschach test for American audiences. In my eyes, those clouds resolved into the image of a bloody history, an image of the dozens of other times the United States has wrought chaos in Latin America for national resources. In the eyes of many, the rubble-made Rorschach blot took on a complex character, one strongman chaotically removing another. The nation’s growing cohort of Christian nationalists saw something else, though; something no one with a passing knowledge of politics, international relations, or Venezuela is capable of seeing: revival.
Education has always been of particular interest to our team at the Colorado Times Recorder. With more than 170 school districts in the state, much of the activism, advocacy, and political machinations to reshape education in the state fly under the radar, completely unreported. Each year, we do our best to find important education stories — stories which might otherwise be overlooked — and shine what light we can.
This year, the Colorado Times Recorder team focused a lot of our efforts on one of the biggest problems plaguing American democracy: the presence of dark money in politics. Whether it’s anonymous funds from billionaires, funds funnelled through a dozen national orgs until the source has been lost, or the unaccountable fortunes flowing into lobbying and influence efforts, the flood of unaccountable dark money is deteriorating our politics.
During the 2024 presidential race, it was difficult to consume much political news without coming across a reference to Project 2025: the right-wing establishment’s plan to use a second Trump administration to usher in a fundamental reorganization of American public life. Since Trump took office in January and the authoritarian project officially got underway, though, coverage of the initiative has fallen off. According to online journalism archive Newsbank, which tracks more than 12,000 outlets around the globe, Project 2025 was mentioned more than 50,000 times in 2024. Though one might expect mentions to increase as the project steadily becomes reality, journalistic references to Project 2025 have declined by more than 30% this year.
In the 13 months since the Democratic Party reached its modern electoral low point in the 2024 Presidential election, a crowd of centrist Democratic consultants have proclaimed that they have a simple answer to the party’s woes: abandon support for transgender rights. “It’s what the polling says,” they insist while ignoring everything the polling says about the economy. “It’s just too extreme,” they say, as if that’s a normal way to frame a discussion of human rights.
If you look at some of the most significant Supreme Court cases on cultural issues coming out in the last three terms, where have they come from?” the attorney quizzed the crowd of activists, advocates, and elected officials gathered in an air-conditioned Colorado Springs event center in August. He answered his own question: “Colorado.” He meant it as good news, and the crowd of attendees at the 2025 policy summit of a small but influential organization named Colorado Leaders for Academic Success, or CLAS, took it as such.
It would be asinine to pretend that the state of things in this country has not deteriorated since I wrote last year’s Thanksgiving column; that, for those of us who believe in a vision of America which is currently being trampled under ICE’s boots, there is not ample reason to experience the opposite of thankfulness. Now is the winter of our discontent, not yet made glorious summer, “my idols are dead and my enemies are in power,” all that jazz.
You haven’t seen this reported anywhere yet, but a member of Colorado’s congressional delegation is mentioned in the tranche of emails released by the House Oversight Committee from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate last week — and, frankly, it’s not the one I would have expected.
The first thing to know about Woodland Park is that it’s a conservative town. Last year, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance received more than twice as many votes in Teller County, where Woodland Park is located, than Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. The second thing to know is that not a lot of people in the small mountain town agree on what that word means: conservative.
