Denver Post columnist Krista Kafer worries that crazy people now control the state GOP. The man who was just elected state chairman, Dave Williams, had his name legally changed to add “Let’s Go Brandon” as his middle name.
She writes:
After the Colorado GOP chose former state Rep. Dave Williams as party chair, many sane Republicans wonder if there is a place for them within the Colorado Republican Party. By sane, I mean rational, evidence-based thinkers who get, at a minimum, that Trump lost the 2020 election, vaccines save lives, and Trump’s repellent, mendacious style has hurt Republicans’ standing in a once purple state.
Williams, an election denier and conspiracy theorist, believes Trump won in 2020 sans evidence. He alleged without proof that 5,600 dead people voted in the 2020 Colorado election. Despite 300 years of vaccine science and millions of saved lives, Williams is a proud anti-vaxxer. Upon beating out six contenders for chair (all but one of the conspiracy theorists or tinfoil hat-lite variety), Williams stated, “Our party doesn’t have a brand problem. Our party has a problem with feckless leaders who are ashamed of you,” implying that GOP leaders lost because they were insufficiently Trumpist, an assertion belied by evidence that such candidates fared worse in Colorado and around the country.
Speaking of feckless, Williams tried and failed to have the tacky phrase “Let’s Go Brandon” added to his name on the ballot for the 2022 primary against Rep. Doug Lamborn.
Williams has vowed to be a “wartime leader” leaving many of us to wonder if mainstream Republicans are a battlefield target. Former Minority Leader of the Colorado House of Representatives Mark Waller queried Williams via social media about the future, “I have been called a RINO and told I no longer belong in our Party. I don’t believe the election was stolen, and I believe the events of January 6th were a disgrace to our Country and our Party. I am also a proud Republican who believes in our foundational principles. Please let me know if I have a place in our fractured Party.”
Some Republicans have determined that there is no place for the sane, and they do not want to be associated with the lunatic fringe. Popular center-right KOA radio host Mandy Connell and the former Republican University of Colorado Regent Sue Sharkey are no longer affiliated with the party. They are two of the more than 133 Republicans who changed their voter registration since Williams won, according to an analysis by 9 News reporter Marshall Zelinger.
As I noted in a previous column, Republicans have been lagging behind unaffiliated voters since 2014 and behind Democrats since 2017. Today, Republicans account for 24% of Colorado registered voters. If sane Republicans leave the party, the con artist-crackpot contingent will gain more influence and visibility, prompting the flight of other mainstream Republicans. Unmitigated, this could trap the Colorado GOP in a death spiral just when the party should be rebounding as Trump sinks into ignominious insignificance.
Colorado isn’t alone. In Michigan, the state GOP picked Kristina Karamo for party chair. A rabid conspiratorialist, she has yet to concede her loss in the Michigan secretary of state race. The Kansas and Idaho GOP chose election deniers to chair their state parties. In Arizona, former chief operating officer for Trump’s campaigns, Jeff DeWit, beat out other contenders with the endorsement of uber-Big Lie proponents like failed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, state Sen. Wendy Rogers, and the former president. Fortunately, the contagion has not spread to other states.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
A party of aging troglodytes and crackers from Podunk, all of them totally nuts and antidemocratic
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And all of them furious about a changing culture and Zeitgeist that they cannot control, one that is leaving them far, far behind. One can almost see them shrinking from view and their voices becoming squeakier and squeakier. . . .
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THEY STOLE THE ELECTION . . . SQUEAK SQUEAK . . .CRT classes!!! . . .squeak squeak . . . transgender drag queen groomers . . . eek eek . . .
idiots
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In September 2022, the New Yorker had a long, in-depth portrayal of Sam Alito. The picture that emerged was of a deeply conservative judge who hid his true feelings until he was in the majority on the Supreme Court. Even his good friends thought he was a moderate but in the Dobbs decision the true Alito came out: an angry bitter man who wants to turn back the clock on the culture. He is angry because not even Dobbs can revive his childhood memories.
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Well said, Diane. You nailed him.
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Alito is not a conservative. He is a reactionary fundie xtian (Catholic version) theocrat.
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Agreed. He wants to destroy, not to conserve. He’s a Greek fury.
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Careful. Podunk does not have a lock on crackpots. They are coming out of the cracks like bugs.
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They are indeed! LOL.
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Fascist Double-Talk from Heidegger, Putin, and Trump
Fascists always accuse others of doing what they are in fact doing.
The philosopher Martin Heidegger, who, though married, had an affair with his young Jewish student Hannah Arendt and owed his entrée to the academic world to his mentor the great Jewish phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, became, during the period of Hilter’s rise to power, it is now known, a fervent Nazi. He embraced Nazism with gusto; praised Hitler to the skies in letters to his brother; gave his inaugural address as rector of Freiburg University in a hall festooned with Nazi flags (after the singing of the Nazi party anthem, the Horst-Wessel-Lied); participated in the removal of Jewish faculty; barred his mentor Husserl from using the university library; and never in a long life (he lived into the mid 1970s) apologized for having been a devoted member of the Nazi Party. In his recently published Black Notebooks, as Adam Kirsch points out in an essay in Tablet, we find that during the Second World War, Heidegger wrote, “World Jewry (Weltjudentum), spurred on by the emigrant that Germany let out, remains elusive everywhere. Despite its increased display of power, it never has to take part in the practice of war, whereas we are reduced to sacrificing the best blood of the best of our own people.”
So, Kirsch notes, at the very time when the Nazis were murdering Jews by the millions, Heidegger was castigating Jews, in his notebooks, for being responsible for the deaths of Germans by not fighting in the war. (Whom Heidegger is referring to when he speaks of the Jew whom “Germany let out” I do not know; perhaps Lenin; the role that Germany played in bringing Lenin to power and so creating Bolshevik Russia is one of the more bizarre examples in history of strange bedfellows.)
But this is what Fascists always do. We see the same phenomenon occurring, today, when Putin’s troops are carrying out genocide in Ukraine even as Putin provides as one of his many false excuses for his imperialist adventure an accusation that Russia had to invade to end Ukrainian genocide against ethnic Russians. We see the same in Fascist wannabe Donald Trump accusing others of stealing the election from him, when he was, in fact, himself the head of several concurrent conspiracies to steal the election—none of which he has been held accountable for by our law, which evidently only goes after small-time nobodies from Crackerville and Podunk–the ones who carried out Trump’s assault on the Capitol.
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Fascinating history, Bob.
I knew Heidegger was a Nazi, I knew he had an affair with the brilliant Arendt. The rest I did not know.
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Thanks, Diane. His notebooks and his letters to his brother (these are particularly damning) have only recently been published. Yeah, it’s bad. Really bad. Alas, Arendt made apologies for this awful person until the end. Heidegger is proof of the reality of the genetic fallacy. You can’t judge an idea based on its source. He had some fascinating ideas. But he was a TERRIBLE writer and an even worse human being. I am working on an essay about the nexus of connection between his abominable politics and his philosophical system. A lot of this can be put down to the notion that you can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy. He remained, in some respects, a provincial rube all his life, despite his philosophical pretensions. But, until I finish with the Heidegger piece, here’s a little intro to Kant I prepared recently, to whet people’s appetites:
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Interesting about Heidegger. I have often been confronted with the phrase “that person is so stupid, but his vote counts as much as mine.” It always makes me think of one or the other brilliant Nazis. There were many intellectuals in the post-war period who turned to fascism in their thinking. I suppose being intelligent does not make you immune to being wrong.
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It certainly doesn’t. Joseph Goebbels had a PhD, with specializations in philology and Romantic era literature, and he was a playwright. And a monster.
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@Bob “The Legend”. Another WOW! moment in my journey to enlightenment. Here is a little article that especially hit home with me about “tribal behavior” and how facts don’t matter. https://jamesclear.com/why-facts-dont-change-minds
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I once had a lengthy conversation with George Lakoff, about a decade ago. I wanted to understand how to persuade people to change their minds. His argument to me: people choose emotion—a story—over facts every time. Liberals rely on facts, he said, conservatives appeal to emotions. But facts are not persuasive.
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A little essay on teaching writing (incorporating some stuff I learned from the endlessly fascinating George Lakoff):
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@Bob — Well, as always, I need to be on my toes and take my time to devour what you sent me. Emotion vs. Facts. George W. Bush vs. John Kerry. I remember playing all the debates for my kids and then asked, “No wrong answer, but going with your gut, who would you vote for?” “George Bush. Seems like a nice guy. We don’t understand John Kerry.” And when I was in “Advertising Writing 101” the instructor said, “Use a fog index. The less syllables the better. Most people do not about a 13-year level, so if you complicate things, no one will read your copy.” So our job was to use the least amount of syllables to convey the same message.
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[Excuses self. Goes somewhere to weep.]
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Like I said, I learn so much by paying attention to this blog and great writers like you. I feel blessed. “Truth Sandwich” — I knew how it worked, but didn’t connect the name. Reminds me of “Wag the Dog” starring Robert Deniro and Dustin Hoffman plus a whole host of others.
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Feeling is mutual. Loved that film. A truth-telling one, that.
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Not sure about the being kind. People respond to sanction, positive or negative. Before Trump made it OK for people in the U.S. to express dog-whistle-y racist stuff outloud again in the United States, negative social sanction had just about killed that crap off. And this had the salutary effect of making it not part of the air breathed by our nation’s young as they were growing up in the last 20 or so years.
Social sanction, both good and bad, works.
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@ Bob — Love it. I think somewhere in my class “things I made up that didn’t go with the standards” I created something like this for my students. I probably read this in the past. Also reminds me of “If I have so much bad stuff in my brain, there is no room for the good stuff”. — could be a “Charvetism” or something from CBT I read. As for the James Clear article, I agree, as some of the stuff was “okay, yeah,” but the tribal behavior resonated with me. Thanks for sharing with me so I can reach the next realm.
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I don’t think it’s properly realized by most folks how vastly different are the worlds that red staters and blue staters inhabit. These differences go far, far beyond articulated beliefs/differences. These folks live in different worlds, with differing unarticulated assumptions built in. They have vastly differing ways of being in the world. My Trumpy Christian cousin in Kentucky literally hears voices of divine entities that guide him in his life. Me, I think this is totally nuts–that he is talking to himself and imagining things. He has NO CLUE about most anything having to do with law or government or history. In other words, he is so ignorant about this stuff that he is not even wrong. LOL. But he’s familiar with cabinets full of guns for going hunting and scaring trespassers off one’s land.
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And he thinks he’s heard that there are crazy people up North who don’t know the difference between boys and girls.
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Bob, I just said this to my wife in the morning. THEIR way of thinking is so beyond me — I don’t get it. I just listened to a snippet from Chris Cuomo who invited an RNC person to “talk” and she insisted the January 6 riots were peaceful protests and no one listens to “President” Trumps great ideas. You got me, I haven’t heard a thing from him except made up garbage. She insisted the election was stolen and we need to get back to MAGA! I said to my wife, “For who?” And as I read the Dali Lama, he said, “No one cares to make America great, we are a global world. We need more love, empathy, and compassion.” I don’t get it. Like you said, my tribe speaks and thinks in a completely different way. Well, me and my dog Charly. Maybe some birds, a few cats, one squirrel, and a wiley raccoon.
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LMAO!
And the interesting word in Trump’s slogan is the “Again” part. Fascists ALWAYS harken back to an imagined Golden Age that they (and only they) are going to return the people to. The very term Fascist, of course, comes from the bundle of rods that symbolized ancient Rome.
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And I’m pretty certain that aside from the textbooks he had to read for classes and the Bible, ofc, that he has never read another book in his entire adult life. I don’t know if he has ever even met a Jewish person. He has probably encountered two or three Asians in his lifetime. In contrast, he’s listened to sermons by a hundred preachers, and he knows lots of folks who are sometimes possessed by the spirit and speak in tongues. So, the entire web of cultural checkpoints that most readers of this blog have, he doesn’t have, and he has a whole lot of checkpoints that readers of this blog don’t have. I doubt that many here know how to keep minnows or to gig for frogs or to find morels in the woods.
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this could trap the Colorado GOP in a death spiral
Repugnicans think that young people are becoming gay and lesbian and transgender because they are being groomed. They think that they are becoming sensitive to race-based inequities because they are being indoctrinated in CRT. LOL.
Morons. What is actually, happening, ofc, is that we are in the midst of a cultural shift, and the Pugs and their abhorrent belief systems are being left behind.
“[T]his could trap the Colorado GOP in a death spiral,” the post says. Same is true of the Greying Old Party as a whole. It has a very short period of time in which to try to institute and hold by violence its revolution, or it will go the way of the Know Nothings.
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It’s Trumpish Fascist Revolution
Even the crowd of Idiot supporters at the Trump 2024 kickoff rally in WACO (The choice of locations isn’t a dog whistle; it’s a freaking air raid siren) started thinning out after about 30 minutes. Even they couldn’t stand to listen to The Idiot go on and on with the same old lies ad nauseam.
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We’ve come to that point, where Trump is boring even the most die hard. Soon, it will be only those Senators and Congresspeople on whom Putin has significant kompromat who will still be in Trump’s camp.
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Mainstream Republicans would be better off joining the Democrats to help defeat the unhinged and crazy in their party, even if they are not 100% in favor of their platform. They can always vote for the GOP if sanity returns to their party.
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From your lips to Dog’s ears, RT!!!
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Are there still “Mainstream Republicans?” McConnell sort of is but even when Trump ridicules him, he says he will support Trump if he wins the nomination. Who else?
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Who else? Mitt Romney.
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The GGOP: The Greying and Grieving Old Party
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The dude changed his name legally to Let’s Go Brandon? Wow, that’s extreme. If, however, he really wants to display his depravity in a permanent way, might I suggest a facial tattoo?
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And a split tongue.
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And while we are on the subject of Repugnican idiocy, we are now well into the second generation of school shooting survivors. We now have people who survived school shootings working as reporters during live school shootings.
This unique variety of American entertainment brought to you courtesy of the Repugnican Party.
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Does a focus on the “crazy” individuals in the GOP distract from the power brokers who enable wins by the party?
The following is information from the bio of the Executive Director of the Colorado Catholic Conference- founding Executive Director of Catholic Education Partners (Catholic Education Partners is a Catholic education policy non-profit launched by the USCCB.)
– Director of state policy for the Friedman Foundation for EdChoice Indianapolis – conducted domestic policy research for the Heritage Foundation (Koch) in D.C. – a member of a AEI council.
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The part of Krista Kafer’s opinion column that doesn’t appear in the Ravitch post, “Mainstream Republican officials work quietly on behalf of Coloradans…for limited government.”
Kafer was formerly a senior expert in education policy at the Heritage Foundation.
The Koch network appears to be both embracing the public distraction of party crazies and distancing itself from the crazies. The network is not distancing itself from the anti-libertarian, Catholic religious patriarchy that attempts to co-rule with despots.
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