Freedom Unaffiliated

By Jon Caldara

Of all places to find a growing citizens’ rebellion against the nanny state, who’d guess it’s happening in woke Denver?

Take note — if Denverites can claw back a little freedom from their elite, it can happen in your city too.

In this city of 70 breweries, 2,000 liquor establishments, some 300 cannabis dispensaries and now mushroom clinics, it was pure poetry when the city council and Mayor Mike Johnston passed a ban on adults buying flavored tobacco and nicotine products, you know, for the kids.

A hint of cherry in your beer — sure. Peach-infused vodka — bring it on! Any bit of flavor in the product you’re using to help you quit smoking — a perversion that must be stamped out.

I imagine the city council members who voted to disempower people from their own bodily autonomy also spout “my body, my choice.”

The cognitive dissonance required for this type of selective maternalistic fascism is monumental. After all, those elite took away the personal decisions of 730,000 Denverites because, well, they know what’s right for others.

What they don’t say aloud, but we hear perfectly, is, “your body, our choice.” And constituents are finding that offensive.

Fortunately, some feisty business owners who didn’t appreciate potentially watching their shop be put out of business as pot shops spring up around them decided to do something. They delivered more than 17,000 signatures to repeal this bit of intolerance. And they’re starting to get some interesting allies.

Referendum 310 on the Denver ballot this fall repeals the ban on new smoking cessation products like Zyn and old favorites like Swisher Sweets cigars, which back in my day had to be smoked by every grandfather under penalty of law. Kids today just can’t get enough of them (if not obvious, that’s sarcasm).

Some progressives are understanding woke nannyism is driving people away from the Democratic Party.

Progressive leader Deep Singh Badhesha announced on X, “After a fight, the Denver Democrats will officially take no position on the flavored tobacco ban. Let’s stop nanny state politics that alienate working class voters and protect much needed revenue. This kind of government overreach is exactly what turns voters off.”

Democratic state Sen. Nick Hinrichsen piled on, “Democrats need to take a page out of the libertarian playbook. Adult choices that have no non-consenting third-party impact are never the government’s damn business. Ever.”

Have progressives decided they no longer care about children, realizing pre-teens just look cool with lit cigarettes dandling from their little mouths?

Or have they recognized many of their African-American constituents like menthols, which are now contraband? Or maybe they’ve noticed the large number of black and Hispanic voters who are growing tired of woke policies and voted for President Donald Trump.

In any event, it’s refreshing to see progressives stand up for personal liberty — just like it’s disappointing when conservatives join the nanny left and “for the children” prohibit adults from buying Swisher Sweets cigars.

Also encouraging is the pro-freedom team is outraising “team nanny” in campaign contributions. Tobacco and vape-shop owners losing their businesses to these bans are putting in the most money, followed by the companies that make the products.

The committee fighting to keep the ban is “Yes for Denver Kids,” which as far as I can tell has no kids in it, only aspiring babysitters. They hide behind kids, but — like tobacco, booze, cannabis and mushrooms — it’s already illegal to sell nicotine products to kids.

They say the reason to ban nicotine products to everyone at every age is sometimes these products have found their way into young people’s hands. Fortunately booze, tobacco, pot and mushrooms never find their respective ways into young people’s hands. We know that hasn’t happened because if it did city council would quickly ban those products too. They are that consistent and care that much about kids.

Most of the money for team nanny comes from Tobacco-Free Kids Action Fund (even though kids can’t buy tobacco), Kaiser Permanente and nanny ultra-funder Michael Bloomberg, who also outlawed large sodas when he was mayor of New York.

So, just what is the difference between Michael Bloomberg and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? Both have strongly held and controversial beliefs on public health policy. But though RFK Jr. says you shouldn’t take Tylenol, he hasn’t banned it.

Election night we’ll see if Colorado’s deepest-blue voters tell their elite they can make their own decisions.

By Jon Caldara

Only about a month and a half ago I predicted the Denver Broncos will use the subtle threat of leaving Colorado to get taxpayers to build them a new stadium.

In other words, I predicted history will repeat itself. Football stadiums are on a rotating 25-year life cycle with taxpayers buying these playpens so the ultra-wealthy can let their boys concuss one another.

Apparently, Denver Broncos ownership wishes to make me look foolish, (not a high bar; watch me dance).

So, after my poorly timed column ran, The Denver Broncos announced their plans to privately finance a new stadium in the heart of the city.

If they are good to their word, it will be a refreshing and rare example of an ownership group respecting both taxpayers and fans. Their announcement caught me off-guard. Even I had to be impressed.

But until the entire deal is signed in permanent ink, I will take my lead from Ronald Reagan to “trust but verify.” In other words, let’s see the details

The joint statement from the Broncos’ owners, the governor and the mayor of Denver was, after all, a well word-smithed work of craftsmanship: “In the spirit of a true civic partnership, the Walton-Penner Family Ownership Group will privately fund this investment and work with the community, city and state to reconnect historic neighborhoods — with no new taxes.”

The magic words of course being, “with no new taxes.” These words have been used before to lull voters into whopping tax increases. In fact, the Denver Broncos under its previous ownership used that very phrase to get us to pay for their current stadium.

After Coors Field was basically paid for, meaning the 0.1% sales tax was set to expire, voters were asked to continue that tax to pay for Sports Authority-Invesco-Empower-Acme-Explosives-and-Road-Runner-Traps Field at Mile High.

If you keep a current tax from sunsetting, can you with a straight face say that it’s not a new tax? Bond dealers can. But of course, it’s a new tax.

We can only hope the Broncos’ owners aren’t eyeing some expiring tax to continue. Remember what happened after George H.W. Bush broke his “no new taxes” promise. History was rightfully unkind.

Also, new tax is different from new debt. It’s one thing for the Walton-Penner family to take out a mortgage for their stadium, it’s another thing if we somehow pick it up.

Since money is fungible, we should be careful of the shell game where taxpayers don’t pay for a new stadium but instead pay for all the improvements and new development around it.

With all that as a warning, we all should show our gratitude to the owner’s group for their rejection of corporate welfare by at least forgiving their loss to the Colts. (Really, the Colts?)

Now let’s get down to the shameful, depraved and totally un-American issue with the new proposed stadium.

Football is a war. Maybe a battle performed for our amusement, but a war all the same. It’s war played out on the gridiron. There are aerial assaults, long bombs, crushing ground offensives fighting for every inch. It’s war baby. (For the uninitiated I recommend George Carlin’s classic take of football versus baseball.)

And war is not fought indoors; chess tournaments and ping-pong matches are.

Football. Isn’t. Played. Inside.

At least real football isn’t. Although now that breathing too hard on the quarterback is “roughing the passer” and kickoffs look like a pee-wee T-Ball game, we might need to prevent a little snow giving a linebacker the sniffles

I get it. The Walton-Penner family wants a stadium with a retractable roof to allow events like concerts to happen year-round. They’d like to land a Super Bowl here. All very understandable. And all an insult to everything that makes America, well, America.

The Buffalo Bills are building a new stadium without a roof. For a quick reminder, Buffalo NY makes Denver look like Pasadena. Colorado is home to dueling cowboys, towering, rugged mountain peaks where the battle of the fittest plays its life-and-death game and men don’t lift their little pinky when they drink coffee.

Are we going to be out macho-ed by, by, well, New Yorkers?

Maybe a tax subsidy to make the stadium open-air could fit into my libertarian mindset somehow. I’ll ask our “libertarian” governor for advice.

By Mike Rosen

In a recent Colorado Politics column, Eric Sonderman described the chronically underperforming American public education system as “nothing short of a national scandal,’’ deserving of the disparaging moniker “Edugate.” Quite an indictment coming from an erstwhile Democrat. As a conservative Republican, I heartily agree with that appraisal.

I agree with many of Eric’s reforms like variable pay for teachers based on their individual skill and their students’ performance rather than seniority and college credits; paying exceptional teachers the most, rewarding above average ones, and clearing out the “deadweight.” I also support ending grade inflation and the false boosting of self-esteem, and raising the bar of expectations to close the performance gap between American students and those of other countries in “preparing children to meet the test of an interconnected, global world.”

Eric also supports more school choice for parents and students but he stopped short of defining “school choice.” There’s already limited choice in Colorado, like public charter schools run largely by parents. However, comprehensive choice would allow the public funding earmarked for their kids’ education to follow students to the private school of their parents’ choice. Such programs are surging across the country in Republican led states.

Eric noted that “there are a plentiful number of superb, highly dedicated teachers across America,” and I agree. But the elephant in the classroom not mentioned in his column are the teacher unions, the insurmountable obstacle to any substantive public-school improvement. The unions are flatly opposed to competition from private schools to their monopoly on government funding of public education. And so are governors, legislators and school boards in Democrat-controlled states where teacher unions lavishly fund political campaigns and get out the vote exclusively for Democrats.

Individual merit pay and accountability for teachers that Eric and I both support are inalterably opposed by the unions who prefer that teachers are paid collectively like assembly-line workers. The last thing they want is competition among their members.

The poster boy for militant teacher unions was Albert Shanker (who chaired the Socialist Study Club in his college). Shanker was president of the United Federation of Teachers in NYC from 1964-1985, serving jail time for leading illegal strikes in 1967 and again in 1968, when nearly all city schools were shut down for two months. Shanker infamously proclaimed, “When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of schoolchildren.” Shanker died in 1997. The Albert Shanker Institute, founded in his honor and beliefs in 1998, has predictably claimed that there’s “no proof” Shanker ever said “exactly” those words. Maybe not, maybe yes, but there’s no doubt that’s how he behaved, as does the current president of the Shanker Institute, Randi Weingarten, who’s also the ultra-militant president of the American Federation of Teachers, the second largest teacher union. This is the mentality typical of unions, serving the interests of its members first and foremost.

The largest teacher union is the National Education Association (NEA), with over 3 million members, the largest labor union of any kind in America. Glaring proof of the teacher unions’ priority for their members over schoolchildren was their insistence on keeping public schools closed way too long during the COVID epidemic, when school-aged children were proven to have a very low risk of serious illness or death.

In 2023, the Colorado Education Association (CEA) passed a resolution at its annual convention declaring that capitalism inherently exploits children, public schools, land, labor, and resources; and that it’s incompatible with addressing systemic issues like racism, climate change, and inequality. If it cared less about politics, socialist indoctrination and the self-interest of its members and more about students, the CEA’s highest priority would be rigorous instruction in basic academics like reading, writing and arithmetic.

The much ballyhooed federal “No Child Left Behind Act” of 2002, pushed by the NEA, only added to the decline in public education. Even the Act’s title was misguided. One size doesn’t fit all, and students aren’t equal in brain power, dedication or discipline. Leaving no child behind in classrooms lowers the pace of learning to that of the slowest child, leaving the rest of the kids idle. Certainly, slow and remedial learners deserve attention and would benefit from an educational approach tailored to their needs. Hence, the more appropriate title would have been the “No Child Left Out Act,” and should also have devoted more emphasis on cultivating the gifted and talented: our future Edisons, Lincolns, Einsteins, and (Milton) Friedmans.

By Jon Caldara

Enough. Damn it, enough!

Enough virtue signaling instead of preventing school shootings. Enough of elected school boards denying reality.

It is time for all of Colorado’s 178 school districts to join the 50 that currently have volunteer, trained, concealed armed staff to stop a shooter the moment he begins — because when seconds count, the police are only minutes away

The difference is wanting to feel safe versus wanting to be safe.

By constantly making it harder and more expensive for law-abiding people (i.e. the good guys) to purchase, practice and legally carry firearms, our lawmakers think we will feel safer. Maybe some will even fall for it and feel safer. But none of it makes us any safer.

Actually being safe, making our schools safe, requires us to accept realities many simply cannot stomach:

The reality is unicorns are not invading the United States to confiscate the more than 400 million firearms here — more than one gun per person. Guns are and will be omni-present in America. The more gun-phobes restrict them, the more people buy them. It’s why former President Barack Obama is considered the greatest gun salesman in history.

The reality is there is no way to afford having 20 armed police officers wandering the halls of every school, all day, every day, just waiting for the moment a shooter starts firing.

The reality is the safeguards most schools implement are for us, not the shooter, to show they are doing “something.” They need enough to prove in court, after our children are massacred, that they did what they reasonably could.

Lockdown drills and fortified front doors do not, have not and will not deter school shootings or stop a shooter once he started.

The reality is nearly 30% of Colorado’s 178 school districts have trained arms staff who volunteered to take on the extra responsibility to protect our children.

The reality is Jefferson County schools do not allow their school staff that option.

The reality is “gun-free zones” kill children.

Let me be blunt: School boards that do not allow willing, qualified staff members to protect our kids have the blood of the dead on their hands. They did not do all they reasonably could protect our children. They should legally be held responsible.

There has not been a hijacking of an American airliner plane since Sept. 11, 2001. One major factor — pilots who volunteer to carry concealed guns. Just like how schools can’t afford to put a cop in every hallway, the TSA can’t afford to put an undercover air marshal on every flight. About one in 10 flights has an armed pilot, trained by the air marshals for only one situation — a hijacking.

If our lives are worth protecting this way, why aren’t our children’s lives worth it at school?

Nine years ago, the organization I run, Independence Institute, created a similar training program not for pilots, but for teachers. Under the leadership of the indefatigable Laura Carno, the idea was to work with law enforcement to train willing, capable and qualified school staff to conceal a gun just in case the worst happens.

Our FASTER program, which is now its own separate 501(c)(3) organization, has trained more than 500 school staff members from some 50 school districts across the state. Many of these schools have signs on the door, “Our students are protected by armed staff.”

We now have written proof of what we’ve been saying for decades. The written manifestos of the Minneapolis and Nashville shooters made clear they chose their targets because they knew there’d be no armed resistance.

Unless you can afford a private school or homeschooling, you are required by law to surrender your children to a government schools for six hours a day. The state says their first priority is their safety. Do you believe it?

We need to get over our phobia of guns and realize 15% of all Colorado adults have concealed carry permits and have used them to stop mass shooting including in Colorado Springs and Arvada.

When a school shooter is pointing a gun at your child, do you prefer both child and teacher cowering under their desks, praying for the police to come in time. Or would you feel safer with an armed, police-trained adult next to your child ready to end the threat

Be loud. Demand your school board vote on trained, armed staff.

By Mike Rosen

Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old who won the Democrat primary (endorsed by fellow socialists Bernie Sanders and AOC) is now the party’s wholly unqualified candidate for mayor of New York City. He’s a Muslim antisemite and Israel hater. In college, he co-founded the school’s chapter of the pro-Hamas “Students for Justice in Palestine,” and graduated with a degree in Africana Studies. His thin resume includes a job as a foreclosure-prevention housing counselor, hip-hop musician, political campaign worker, and all of four years as a New York state assemblyman. With those meager credentials he presumes to govern the Big Apple.

The centerpiece of his campaign is to transform NYC – ironically, the financial capital of the world – to a model of “democratic socialism.” Zohran is a charismatic preacher to a young, gullible progressive demographic. (Aptly named, he’s a generation Z-er.) I’ve forgotten more about economics than he knows – and I haven’t forgotten much. The Z-man is a glib pretender, and a proud member of the anti-capitalist Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), whose membership features such economic geniuses as Congresswomen AOC, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. Here’s an example of the ignorance of this ideology from DSA’s web page:

“We believe that working people should run both the economy and society democratically to meet human needs, not to make profits for a few.”

“Make profits for a few?” DSA is idiotic! In a capitalist economy businesses can’t exist and employ workers without profits. “Workers” don’t start businesses, they join them and abandon those that are unprofitable. Entrepreneurs provide creativity and their personal wealth to start a business. They, their stockholders, and lenders require a return on their investment derived from profits. “To meet human needs” and fund our ever-expanding welfare state, federal, state, and city governments impose payroll taxes (that fund Social Security and Medicare for all), income taxes, property taxes, and sales taxes on businesses. And tax their investors on interest income, dividends and capital gains. Without profits those businesses disappear along with the products and services that satisfy multitudes of consumers.

Socialists claim capitalism is “unrestrained.” That’s also absurd. In practice, our mixed-economy is a balance of limited government, capitalism, and individual freedom tempered with extensive regulations on businesses, redistribution of income, and a cornucopia of government welfare programs. To the nation’s detriment, creeping socialism has upset this balance, poisoning the mixture, eroding freedom and propelling government spending beyond the nation’s tax capacity while driving up the national debt to the brink of fiscal insolvency.

Democratic socialism is a con game. It’s final goal is communism. The father of socialism, Karl Marx, was an idealistic philosopher not an economist, whose vision was that capitalism would inevitably be overturned in a worldwide revolution of the proletariat (workers) and replaced with communism (“the dictatorship of the proletariat”), which, itself, would ultimately “wither away” as human nature would be perfected and government no longer needed in his imagined utopian, classless, harmonious society.

Instead, the world got the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (with the accent on “socialist”). In reality, it was a totalitarian dictatorship and police state in which the Communist Party was the government, controlling everything from the economy to the culture, to religion, to the media. With no private enterprise, no property rights, no free press, no free speech, and no other political parties allowed.

North Korea and Cuba fit that model today. Communist China was all of that before it became a hybrid of sorts, reviving its morbid economy by tolerating a slice of government-controlled capitalism – while that lasts. Today, it’s crushing freedom in Hong Kong and planning to take over the free and prosperous nation of Taiwan.

Zohran Mamdani has said he intends to “seize the means of production ” in NYC. But democratic socialists of his ilk won’t stop there. Like the Democrat party, they have no limiting principle when it comes to the expansion of government to run people’s lives. As an economic system, democratic socialism is ultimately doomed to failure because it flies in the face of human nature. Humans aren’t collectivist worker ants in a colony or bees in a hive. They won’t involuntarily work as hard and creatively for the benefit of others as they will for themselves and their family.

When socialists demand “equity” they don’t mean equality of opportunity. They mean equality of outcome regardless of effort, ambition and ability. Socialism rewards failure, mediocrity, and laziness. Consequently, it gets more of that. By penalizing individual excellence, it gets much less of that. That outcome is equality in poverty.

By Jon Caldara

The 23-year-old shooter of Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis was born male. He identified as a woman and legally changed his name before he killed two and injured 18.

The shooter of the Nashville Covenant School in March 2023 was born female. She identified as a man and killed six. So was the shooter at a Rite Aid in Maryland, female identifying as male. She killed three and injured three.

And in our backyard, the 22-year-old who killed five and injured 19 at Club Q in Colorado Springs was born male but declared himself nonbinary.

The 16-year-old shooter at STEM School in Highlands Ranch was female identifying as a boy. She murdered Kendrick Castillo, the hero who died saving his classmates.

Is there a connection between gender dysphoria and mass violence? Maybe, but correlation is not causation.

If you’re a regular reader, you know I have no patience for the intolerance of the Shiite transgender movement. Their caliphate demands we publicly deny biological reality, science and chromosomes. We are coerced to use incorrect language on threat of cancellation and, thanks to new legislation, it’s now all punishable by Colorado law. No First Amendment, free speech-loving person should tolerate this.

I am told since I won’t call an obvious man a “woman,” I am anti-trans. I’m not. I’m pro-reality and pro-liberty. I don’t care if you think you’re a different gender, or both genders, or a kumquat. I defend your right to do so.

In exchange, I expect you to defend my right to identify as I will. I identify as someone who likes proper grammar. I will not say “They is over there.”

You do you. I do me. We call it tolerance and free speech.

The conservative news site DailyWire.com recently published this headline, “BREAKING: Trump DOJ (Dept. of Justice) Deliberates Over Gun Ban For Transgenders.” Giving voice to what many are thinking, they report, “Individuals within the DOJ are reviewing ways to ensure mentally ill individuals suffering from gender dysphoria are unable to obtain firearms while they are unstable and unwell.”

After the Club Q and STEM school shootings would Colorado welcome disarming transgender people? As the argument goes from every gun control advocate, if they couldn’t have guns, those lives might have been saved …

But let’s remember, while trans people have been behind the gun in some shootings, tragically they have been in front of the guns much, much more often. Think of LBGT nightclubs like Club Q and Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., where 49 people were killed and 53 injured.

It’s not just nightclubs. Cameron Thompson, an 18-year-old trans girl, was fatally shot in Tuscaloosa, Ala., in December. Keshia Chanel Getter, a trans woman shot and killed in Augusta. LBGT activist, Lauri Carleton, was murdered over a Pride flag she displayed in Cedar Glen, Calif. You get the point.

Like all people, trans people have a constitutional right to protect themselves and those they love. In fact, like minority groups past and present, they might have a greater need to protect themselves.

Disarming minorities is nothing new. The nation’s first gun control laws were created in Southern states to disarm black citizens after the Civil War. All too often, a black man’s gun was all that stood between him and lynching.

Colorado’s new swell of anti-gun legislation disproportionately hurts people of color, who are poorer and cannot afford the new gun and ammunition taxes. And the new law requiring you pay your sheriff to perhaps give you a permission slip to then pay for a 2-day class (meaning you’ll miss two days of work) just to buy an ordinary gun disproportionately affects who exactly?

Political and racial minorities have always been in greatest need of the Second Amendment. The LBGT community might need it now more than ever even though gay marriage is a long-ago settled issue, and celebrating the gay lifestyle is mandatory.

As the L, B and G part of the LGBT coalition refuses to condemn the T’s radical coerced speech mandates and grade-school indoctrination efforts, they all get threatened in the angry backlash.

Gun restrictions targeting any minority group is discrimination plain and simple. Those of us who have been most critical of the trans agenda should be the first to shout our outrage of the singling out of, and the possible disarming of, trans people.

By Jon Caldara

Fashion sense? Oh, I got it. After all, 98% of my wardrobe was proudly purchased at Costco. And the ladies dig a man who’s dripping in Kirkland-labeled couture. They sense the money, the power.

Another man who knows fashion is former state Rep. Ryan Armagost. On a private Signal chat, this Republican fashionista took a picture of Democratic state Rep. Yara Zokaie and sophomorically commented on her clothing choice. Other Republicans joined in.

Classy? Obviously not. But it makes a delightful case study of media bias, the power of the professional victim class and the hypocrisy of Colorado’s one-party ruling class.

A picture is worth a thousand words; thus, they give awards for photojournalism. And at the center of this little storm is a photograph — a picture the media refused to show us. They won’t allow us to form our own opinions.

This photo and its accompanying written comments are the key pieces of evidence to the whole mini drama. The media knowingly and deliberately withheld it so we can be at the mercy of their interpretations.

Kyle Clark at 9News interpreted for us Armagost was a “creep,” and he took a picture of Rep. Yara Zokaie and “shared this photo” with other House Republicans.

When he said “shared this photo” the 9News TV screen showed her official photo from the state legislative website, implying that was the photo he shared. But it wasn’t.

At best that was some seriously sloppy reporting. At worst, fake news fitting their “mean conservatives” narrative. Insult a woman about how she looks in her chosen photo is just so … Republican. So … Trump.

Armagost did share a photo of her at the well of the House of Representatives wearing knee-high, spiked-heeled leather boots. Those party boots were offset by her bare thighs popping out just below her black sport coat.

Clark then interpreted Armagost’s colleagues “likened her to a stripper and a prostitute.” Maybe. The actual words in the text thread were, “That’s awful. I didn’t know it was dress like a stripper day,” and “Wellllll, we ARE on Colfax.”

I guess “on Colfax” only means “prostitute” to 9News.

I haven’t seen any mainstream outlets publish the photo in question. Very few even reprinted the text exchange. Content matters. And the media failed by hiding not some, but all the content.

Again, I’m not defending the boorish humor. It wasn’t professional. But maybe it also wasn’t professional to dress like you’re going on a hot date at the legislature.

The event reminded me of two other mini scandals. In 1994, Ohio Congressman Martin Hoke had a “hot mic” moment. Unaware the tape was rolling, he whispered to another congressman before a TV interview about the looks of the reporter, “She’s got big breasts.”

Yep. He shouldn’t have said it. But if it matters, she did have big breasts. Proof politicians can tell the truth.

TV stations hire hotties to tantalize us. Notice only the opinions of leggy bombshells seem worthy of broadcast. So, when the same media pounces on a guy for crudely taking their bait, does it have a whiff of entrapment?

When the United States Senate loosened its dress code, Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. John Fetterman infamously came to work in shorts and a sweatshirt. Many found it inappropriate.

Some might have found Zokaie’s cocktail attire inappropriate too, but the moralistic media protected our virgin eyes from it, presumably for our own good.

The legislature voted to denounce Armagost. They could not censure him — the legislature’s most severe form of reprimand — since he’d already resigned. But according to news reports, a censure was in the works.

So, they denounced a guy who wasn’t even there. Our one-party rulers will have their pound of flesh to virtue-signal their victimhood. No “sticks and stones will never hurt me” types in this crowd of oppressed overachievers.

But odd, isn’t it, that these folks who are so dialed into sensing hurtful behavior can’t bring themselves to censure their own?

I don’t recall a censure vote by the legislature on Zokaie for comparing parental rights groups to hate groups like the KKK, or even when former Denver Rep. Elisabeth Epps heckled a Jewish lawmaker speaking about the Holocaust.

Sen. Faith Winter can show up to work sloppy drunk; former Rep. Matt Gray can drive drunk in a school zone; Sen. Sonya Jaquez Lewis and Rep. Regina English can abuse their staff. All did so without having to face a censure.

The truth of this hypocrisy should be made as bare as Rep. Zokaie’s thighs.

By Mike Rosen

A criminal repeat-offender steals a car in Englewood, which is later identified by police at the Castle Rock Outlets using drone technology. Three police officers drive through the parking lot and blockade the perpetrator as he gets into the driver’s seat of the stolen car. The perp then rams through the three police vehicles and at least one parked car “treating the shopping center like a racetrack,” according to a 23rd Judicial District deputy prosecutor.

The high-speed chase lasts for a few more minutes and ends with one officer crashing his police vehicle head-on into the stolen car. Then the perp flees on foot but is shortly captured. This all happened in January 2022. Just a few weeks ago that criminal, Roy Allen Elliot-Casaus, pleaded guilty to aggravated vehicle theft, assault on a police officer, and vehicular eluding. He was sentenced to 13 years in prison to be served consecutively with a six-year sentence for an unrelated crime in another county.

Personally, I like cops and don’t like robbers. And I’m a long-time TV viewer of “Chicago PD,” where Sgt. Hank Voight and his squad use surveillance cameras and all kinds of modern technology to catch criminals. Justice being served and the conclusion of the above story owes its success to the Flock cameras that first identified that stolen vehicle.

The Atlanta- based Flock Safety company’s crime-fighting systems are highly-valued by law-enforcement agencies nationwide for solving vehicle thefts, jewelry store robberies, missing persons, kidnappings, human trafficking, etc. There are more than a hundred Flock automated license plate readers (ALPRs) at intersections across the Denver metro area that photograph and record details, including GPS location, of every passing vehicle. A “hot list” of all “wanted” license plates in Colorado and nationwide is stored in the Flock system. When a vehicle with a “hot list” plate enters an intersection, officers may receive an alert notification within 16-seconds.

Commander Jacob Herrera, head of DPD’s auto theft program, credits Denver’s 12-month pilot program with Flock for dropping auto thefts from more than 12,000 in 2023 to 8,550, with 289 arrests made, 170 vehicles recovered, along with 29 firearms. They’ve even helped in Denver homicide cases. Douglas County Sheriff Darren Weekly says, “Tools like Flock are force multipliers that allow us to fight crime proactively and effectively.” The Thornton Police Department also praised the system and Arapahoe County approved a Flock extension and the addition of 17 new cameras.

Guess what? Feckless Denver Mayor Michael Johnston and the usual left-wing Democrat radicals on the Denver City Council are dumping Flock, rejecting a two-year contract extension. Why? Because of paranoid concerns about mass surveillance, invasion of privacy, and potential targeting of illegal immigrants. About the latter, I think illegal immigrants ought to be targeted just like anyone else who’s breaking the law.

Anti-police activist Kristen Seidel of the so-called Denver Task Force to Reimagine Policing and Public Safety delivered a petition with 1,336 signatures to Johnston’s office insisting that all of the city’s Flock camera’s be immediately turned off. Wow, 1,336 ignorant people, what a landslide!!

The left-wing and woke American Civil Liberties Union – whose political agenda excludes property rights – doesn’t want Flock cameras to be used “disproportionally” in low-income areas or communities of color. But the great majority of law-abiding folks in these areas are the ones disproportionally victimized by criminals. On balance, low-income areas and communities of color will benefit from the Flock systems.

A libertarian critic of Flock’s cameras concerned about invasion of privacy, equated Flock’s cameras with Big Brother’s mass surveillance of the populace in Geroge Orwell’s classic, dystopian novel “1984.” But the secret cameras in that totalitarian government’s TV screens were in everyone’s homes! Flock’s cameras are only in public venues where law-abiding citizens have nothing to hide.

The Fourth Amendment’s protection of privacy is not absolute. Yes, crime-fighting surveillance tools have pros, cons, and tradeoffs that need to be weighed. For example, the mass search of travelers at airports without “probable cause” is permitted to make it more difficult in the future for terrorists to hijack planes and crash them into places like the Pentagon and World Trade Center or blowing them up in mid-air. I think that’s a reasonable trade off.

There is a danger that mass public surveillance by government can be carried too far. So, let’s be vigilant about not letting that happen. The anti-Flock paranoia of Denver’s progressive politicians and activists goes way beyond vigilance.

By Jon Caldara

Colorado conservatives have dreamt of the day they could kick 9News anchor, and the Imelda Marcos of sport coats, Kyle Clark to the curb. Their day may be coming.

And I must admit, there’s a certain satisfaction imagining Kyle selling his wardrobe at a garage sale. But conservatives will find a national conglomerate owning half the local TV news outlets is worse. We should remember what happened to radio.

Colorado’s channel 9 and their affiliate Channel 20 are being sold, along with some other 62 news stations around the country, to an even larger media giant that already owns Colorado’s channels 2 and 31.

So, four major over-the-airwaves TV news stations here will combine their operations into one to be run by an out-of-state company. And this will help hold politicians accountable?

We’ve seen this type of conglomeration here before, in radio, and it’s served no one well, including, ironically, the companies that did it.

Before 1996, the Federal Communication Commission’s rules usually allowed only two radio stations to be owned by one entity in any one media market, an AM and FM station. It made for the “WKRP in Cincinnati” period of radio — local, often independently owned, stations with a variety of styles and personalities. In other words, lots of choice for listeners.

It also gave birth to the heyday of local talk radio, arguably the most potent force for limited government news and views we’ve ever had. It’s what drew me to work in talk radio for nearly 27 years now.

In Colorado, we had local giants like Mike Rosen and Peter Boyles who would dive into local politics and bring out stories and opinions the newspapers and TV stations wouldn’t touch. They kept the mainstream media honest

Talk radio was a political force. Those days are gone.

The FCC changed their rules so one company could own up to eight radio stations in any market. It started a buying spree. Companies went into debt to buy as many stations as they could as fast as they could.

The plan was to centralize the operations of the radio stations; thus, saving a lot of money by taking meat cleavers to the local stations.

Why have a newsroom crew serving only one station when you could have that one newsroom serve eight radio stations? Lay off all the other newsrooms’ employees, and there’s your profit.

If you’ve ever heard the same voice on different radio stations report the same news item, it’s because they record the story once and send it out to eight “sister” stations. No option of hearing how up to seven other stations might have covered that story differently.

If you’ve ever heard a radio traffic reporter mispronounce a common Colorado street or city name, it’s because they’re not in Colorado. They’re in another studio in a different state reading off some computer screen; then the guy does the same for the next city.

But the biggest damage done was the death of local news coverage and talk shows. Oh, yes, they’re still around, but they are not nearly the influencers and power brokers they once were.

Why would a conglomerate pay for local talk-show hosts when broadcasting one of their nationally syndicated shows is basically free. Local coverage and conversation makes way for yet more national twaddle.

Oh, and to pay off the massive debt they still owe, they increased the commercial spot load tremendously. That’s why talk radio has more ads for erectile dysfunction treatments than actual talk radio. Should old guys lose their sex drive, all talk radio goes out of business.

As local conservative radio stations lost impact, where did many listeners go for news? Government-funded, liberal Colorado Public Radio.

Yes, 9News along with the other local stations have a left-leaning bias. But, when Kyle Clark and crew do occasionally question the state’s progressive overlords, as they did shine a light on the Prop HH tax increase, called Polis out over his TABOR rebate games and questioned tax money for an ugly vanity pedestrian bridge, it changes the whole debate.

When the new owners of channel 9 start shedding costs at all four of their Front Range news stations, it likely won’t result in more coverage of conservative stories, just less coverage of all stories.

By Jon Caldara

Disclosure: Gov. Jared Polis wrote much of this column.

The epitaph on Jared Polis’ gubernatorial gravestone will simply read, “He knew better, but would not stand up to his own party.”

For seven years, our hyperprogressive legislature has sent him one industry-killing bill after another. And he kept signing them, even when he knows they are bad policy, economically devastating, and even if they go against his strongest-held convictions.

One such strongly held conviction is his faith in technology.

In the tech world, the man’s no slouch. As much as I’d like to tease Polis for just being a rich kid who got richer putting his momma’s greeting-card company online, the fact is he made fortunes many times over in varied tech ventures. And most importantly, he understands what the coming artificial intelligence revolution can bring for humanity in general, but also the endless opportunities it could bring Colorado in particular.

So then why did he agree to make Colorado the first state in the nation to effectively stamp out AI development by signing Senate Bill 24-205? This law will repel AI companies from providing us their services or locating here. The AI revolution could skip Colorado.

SB-205 was designed by the “we see oppression even before it exists” crowd. They are going to stamp out discrimination from — get this — software code. Starting next year, the law outlaws “algorithmic discrimination” in AI with ridiculously costly compliance regulations.

Polis clearly laid out why 205 is terrible law in what read like a veto statement. But, since he can’t veto much of anything, he crapped all over the bill in — get this — his bill-signing statement.

So, let’s let his own words explain why he shouldn’t have signed it.

Polis noted laws against discrimination focus on intentional efforts, writing, “This bill deviates from that practice by regulating the results of AI systems use, regardless of intent.”

He’s right. A baseball bat can be used in a hate crime, but the bat manufacturer didn’t intend it for that. There are already myriad laws, regulations and codes against discrimination. If AI is used to discriminate, shouldn’t we employ all that existing legal enforcement first?

The law doesn’t target outcomes — it regulates computer code that doesn’t even exist yet. Liberals used to say code is speech and therefore protected. Those liberals are extinct.

Polis goes on to say the new law will, “create a complex compliance regime for all developers and deployers of AI” through “significant, affirmative reporting requirements.”

Again, he is right. One reason the internet turned into the economic super engine it is was early on the feds had a “hands off the internet” policy to let the industry first develop. Now Colorado is the first state with a “hands all over AI” policy while it is in its infancy. Those hands will strangle this baby.

Small, innovative AI developers will be the first driven out of Colorado. It’s confusing how the left hates big business yet builds regulatory regimes that only big businesses can afford to navigate. Add it to the list of how progressives hate the little guy.

Polis knew this law is an economy killer: “I am concerned about the impact this law may have on an industry that is fueling critical technological advancements across our state for consumers and enterprises alike.”

“Government regulation that is applied at the state level in a patchwork across the country can have the effect to tamper innovation and deter competition in an open market. To that end, the important work of protecting customers from discrimination and other unintended consequences of nascent AI technologies is better considered and applied by the federal government.”

Again, he’s right. Ironically, Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill had a 10-year “hands off AI” moratorium — a smart move Polis supported. But leave it to Republicans to strip it out.

Polis understands why what he signed is horrid. That’s why he included a call for fixing, delaying or repealing SB24-205 in the upcoming special session.

For the sake of Colorado, free speech and a better future where America isn’t at the mercy of China’s AI, I hope Polis spends the political capital needed to fix his obvious regret.

He built his fortune online, but now he’s logging off Colorado’s AI future.