#2570: Lauren Boebert

Lauren Opal Boebert is a high-school dropout, conspiracy theorist and Representative for Colorado’s 3rd district in the US House of Representatives, where she represents the QAnon & stupidity faction together with Marjorie Taylor Greene and Louie Gohmert.

 

Like so many candidates who run on an ostensible “law and order” platform, Boebert has a long criminal record, in addition to an even longer record of morally questionable behavior, having been court summoned and fined a rather impressive number of times for an interestingly variegated set of crimes. She also sports a long record of payments to and cooperation with terrorist groups, including hiring representatives of the Three Percenters group as security for her campaign events.

 

QAnon and other conspiracy groups

“thank God for you guys and the Proud Boys”

-       Boebert’s campaign manager Sherrona Bishop (“you guys” refers to some self-declared members of the group)

 

Boebert’s official position on the QAnon conspiracy theories vary according to the principle of opportunism. In a May 2020 interview on Ann Vandersteel’s QAnon web show SteelTruth, she claimed to be “very familiar with” the claims, and asserting that “everything I’ve heard of Q, I hope that this is real because it only means America is getting stronger and better.” She was also a follower of a number of QAnon-connected YouTube channels at the time. When her affiliation with the movement later faced some scrutiny, she deleted her YouTube account and denied everything.

 

During a March 2021 town hall in Montrose, however, Boebert responded to an interlocutor wondering when Hillary Clinton and other former officials would be arrested (a recurring delusional dream among QAnon loons) by claiming that she knew someone involved with documents declassified by Trump during the closing days of his presidency, and that the documents would reveal corruption to trigger resignations that would allow Republicans to retake the House and Senate before 2022. That particular piece of Trump fan fiction is familiar e.g. from the ridiculous conspiracy theory outlet The Epoch Times. Boebert, however, urged people to just overlook the outlet’s status as a fake news purveyor (a status earned by fact checks establishing its systematic lack of reliability about anything whatsoever), claiming instead that they were using information from “very good sources” (the sources being, of course, not further specified). For the most part, however, Boebert prefers to ignite the Qanon crowd with the help of dogwhistles her critics tend to miss.

 

Stop the steal and Capitol storming

Boebert has been a staunch supporter of Trump’s false and baseless claims that 2020 election was stolen from him, and she voted to overturn the results of the Electoral College vote count.

 

She has, in particular, tirelessly spread misinformation and baseless conspiracy theories about Arizona’s election results, alleging widespread voter fraud and accusing everyone who intended to accept the “results of this concentrated, coordinated, partisan effort by Democrats” of having allied themselves with the extremist left. In December 2021, Boebert reiterated the claim that hundreds of thousands of ballots were illegally mailed to voters. Did she provide evidence? What do you think?

 

She also supported the rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 (“Today is 1776”) and was herself an invited speaker at the March for Trump/Save America rally directly preceding the riot. During the riot itself, Boebert tweeted the location of Nancy Pelosi, which resulted in widespread calls for resignation. At least, her communications director had sufficient integrity to leave the clown ship over Boebert’s January 6 behavior.

 

In June 2021, Boebert voted against a resolution to give the Congressional Gold Medal to police officers who defended the U.S. Capitol. She also rejects the term ‘insurrection’ for the January 6 events, calling the House inquiry into the attack a “sham witch hunt” and equating the riot with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests – which she anyways thinks should be prosecuted en masse and is linked to terrorism, which makes it unclear what her defense of the January 6 riots is really supposed to be. Boebert’s fans don’t seem to notice the tension, and neither does she. She freely used fear of another insurrection when applying for a concealed gun permit in DC, but ranted against the metal detectors in the Capitol designed to prevent attacks on Congress because the detectors made it challenging for her to bring a gun to Congress.

 

Here is her reasoning for why Kamala Harris should be impeached, and it would have been sort of noteworthy if it hadn’t been so daft. (Biden should of course be ‘imeached’, too).

 

Education

Boebert supports eliminating the US Department of Education because “critical race theory”, which is not taught in schools but which should be banned from schools nonetheless.

 

Bigotry

A full-time bigot, Boebert is of course opposed to marriage equality and any measure to ease the life of transgender people. She freaked mightily out over the 2021 Equality Act, alleging that it aimed to establish the “supremacy of gays, lesbians and transvestites,” which she probably genuinely believes, and it is very telling.

 

She has also gotten some attention for her altercations with Ilhan Omar, whom Boebert has described as “a full-time propagandist for Hamas” and an “honorary member of Hamas”, referred to as “the Jihad Squad member from Minnesota”, and implied to be a terrorist. According to Boebert, she herself would put “America first, never sympathizing with terrorists. Unfortunately, Ilhan can’t say the same thing.” Of course, as opposed to Omar, Boebert has associated with terrorists, even financed them. The Denver Post apologized on Boebert’s behalf for her remarks, saying that it was embarrassing that a Colorado representative engaged in such behavior.

 

COVID denialism

As expected, Boebert is a COVID denialist with a lengthy record of attempts to downplay the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic, and her 2020 campaign was largely based on opposition to official COVID restrictions. She kept the restaurant she runs in Colorado open despite a cease-and-desist letter from the sheriff's office and a later suspension of her restaurant license – apparently, you only need to follow the laws you agree with, a principle she struggles to apply to others than herself, such as the Black Lives Matter movement. (Her restaurant, the Shooters Grill, was, before Boebert landed a seat in Congress, mostly famous for causing 80 people to contract food poisoning at a 2017 event due to unsafe food handling. Currently, it operates more likea Trump shrine employing a number of hardcore Qanon adherents, having for instance hired Mona and Bud Demicell as accountant and general manager, respectively.)

 

In Congress, Boebert has consistently opposed measures intended to prevent the spread of COVID-19, and has on several occasions posted misinformation and conspiracy theories related to face masks and COVID-19 vaccines (which she keeps falsely calling “experimental” because she doesn’t know what ‘experimental’ means). For instance, she falsely claimed that during the two months that followed the end of the Texas mask mandate, the state did not record any COVID-19-related deaths – a claim that is easily fact-checked, of course, but Boebert, playing by Trump’s book, doesn’t really care. She subsequently introduced a bill that would ban all mask mandates on federal property and during travel in interstate commerce, which failed to garner sympathy even with her sometimes Congressional allies.

 

And yes, of course she is antivaccine. Boebert has even employed the familiar antivaccine nonsense gambit of comparing vaccines to the Holocaust (e.g. when comparing the federal government’s COVID-19 vaccination efforts to “Biden [deploying] his Needle Nazis”). Meanwhile, the COVID-19 virus is just like communism. And no, she really doesn’t know how vaccines – or contagious diseases – work: attempting to mock the point of herd immunity, Boebert wrote: “I woke up with a headache this morning. I took some Tylenol. Now if everyone else could take some Tylenol too so mine would start working, that would be great,” which must be one of the feeblest attempts at a gotcha since Chuck Missler’s peanut butter argument against evolution.

 

Boebert has also accused Anthony Fauci, who told people to get the COVID-19 vaccine, of bullying, because encouraging people to do something they don’t want to do is just what bullying is and Boebert and her fans are apparently some really fragile flowers.

 

In June 2021, Boebert advised her constituents in Mesa County, who were experiencing an uptick of Delta variant cases, that the “easiest way to make the Delta variant go away is to turn off CNN [and] vote Republican” (she quickly deleted that particular tweet).

 

Diagnosis: Stupidity is an interest well served in Congress, but Boebert is among its most systematic champions (though we grudgingly admit that she often seems to be cleverer than her opponents tend to realize). A serious gohmert and a major threat to civilization.