Colorado. The name conjures images of dazzling vistas of snow-capped peaks, pristine rivers, and shimmering lakes. In fact, Kathleen Bates penned America the Beautiful’s lyrics as she stood atop Colorado’s fourteen-thousand-foot Pikes Peak in 1893. Who doesn’t recognize her stanza, “For purple mountain majesties, above the fruited plain?” In addition to its natural beauty and resources, Colorado has historically epitomized the spirit of The West both culturally and metaphorically. The rugged, hardworking, independent, self-reliant, conservative rural and agrarian ethic has been the ethos undergirding Colorado’s history, informing its future and guiding its populace. That is the Colorado known and loved.

Sadly, that is not today’s Colorado. In just a few brief years, Colorado has been transformed from a symbol of independence and self-determination into the liberal Left’s laboratory for social experimentation. Its citizens have become caged lab rats made to endure unrelenting torturous socialist/Marxist research procedures that are subsequently exported to and replicated by fellow travelers in other liberal states. Put simply, Colorado is the nation’s leftist-lab for social engineering. This state is now the political equivalent of the Nevada and Marshall Islands nuclear testing sites of the 1940s. Colorado is now politically radioactive.

Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis popularized the saying that states “are the laboratories of democracy.” Justice Brandeis, regarding a case in 1932, wrote that “a state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” Sorry, Justice Brandeis, but Colorado’s Dems are perverting your sentiment. Colorado is now the laboratory of Democrats - not Democracy; testing, then spreading their leftist experiments to kindred liberal states.

Here’s a quick snapshot of the current Colorado Liberal Laboratory leadership: U.S. Senators are both democrats; U.S. House congressional delegation is four Democrats to three Republicans; both houses of the Colorado State Legislature enjoy large Democrat majorities; Colorado’s governor, our nation’s first openly gay state chief executive, is a multi-millionaire Dem; and Colorado voters are 61% unaffiliated, 22% Democrat and 17% Republican. Colorado has seen massive immigration of left-leaning voters from failing blue states who mule their prepubescent, authoritarian, ideological baggage into our state.

You want proof of Colorado’s hard left turn? How about this:

• Restrictive gun laws are already in place with more legislation on the way.
• Colorado, the fifth largest oil-producing state just five years ago, has fallen off the energy-producing map as the Democratic legislature has gutted and is purging the entire petroleum industry.
• Although livestock production accounts for 75% of Colorado’s agriculture products and the state ranks 11th nationwide in cattle numbers, the Democrat-controlled legislature is inventing legislation that will destroy Colorado ranching.
• A referendum requiring introducing wolves into western Colorado agricultural counties was passed by a slim margin due to metropolitan voters. Rural communities overwhelmingly voted against it. History suggests that Colorado will replicate Wyoming and Idaho’s experience of wholesale wolf predation of livestock, deer, moose, and elk populations.

How in the world, you ask, did Colorado so rapidly and dramatically abandon its heritage, culture, and rationality?

It started in 2004 with a group of four ultra-liberal multi-millionaires -- three men and the heiress to the Stryker medical device fortune – who became known as “the gang of four” or, euphemistically, “the four horsemen,” an obvious reference to the Apocalypse. Point of interest: One of these four is now Colorado’s governor, Jerod Polis.

These politically astute architects put their heads and checkbooks together to concoct a plan that would become known as The Blueprint. It laid out a plan to transform Colorado from a red to a blue state by creating a hub and spoke infrastructure which would recruit and train candidates, generate coordinated narratives, build networks, and activate grassroots action.

The Gang of Four personally founded and funded dozens of 501(c)(3), 501(c)(4), and 527 organizations that collaborated to speak with a single voice that the media presented as the majority opinion on all political issues. These organizations effectively coalesced to take down local and state Republican candidates, officeholders, and appointees, replacing them with “progressive” policymakers and their minions.

The Four Horsemen elevated social engineering and community organizing to a level that would have made Saul Alinsky orgasmic. And now what the Left did to damage the freedom-loving people of Colorado is being replicated to wreck states across the nation.

You may ask, what exactly does The Blueprint prescribe? Here it is in a nutshell:

First, invest personal wealth to create a privatized, hyper-aggressive, and controllable political infrastructure consisting of dozens of not-for-profits and PACs. Then, adorn this overarching edifice with PC language and victimhood mentality.

Once established, this metropolitan-centric network of fabulously underwritten organizations develops, synchronizes, and disseminates coordinated talking points and narratives that demonize everything and everyone conservative. The host political creatures have Borg-like extensions that rope in media, businesses, and high-profile personalities anxious to virtue signal their wokeness, all the while identifying, nurturing, and underwriting liberal and far-left candidates for every Colorado elected and appointed office.

Then, these same entities organize rallies supporting their ilk, as they conduct demonstrations against their opponents. Fueling all of this is the four horsemen’s bottomless pocketbooks which provide cash in amounts never before seen in Colorado political history.

Colorado has been lost.

Is all hope lost too? Maybe; maybe not. The Colorado GOP has elected strong, young, female, political activist leaders to head (and heal?) the party. They are doing things differently than their predecessors. Their meme is butt-kicking not boot-licking. They offer hope.

We can’t just copy and paste The Blueprint tactics into our plan. We must expand upon and evolve beyond those tactics, as well as adding our own bold ideas, inspiring messaging, and innovative actions. To quote Buckminster Fuller, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

Here are five simple tenets I would include in the conservative version of The Blueprint. We might call this something like the “We the People Plan.”

1. “We are America.” We are a party of all but especially the middle-class, so deliver to Americans specific pragmatic policies embracing hope, independence, and financial opportunity. Then, organize and rally them. Sound familiar?
2. “You are Smarter than They are.” Offer youth a sovereign path away from the leftist media’s and despotic left’s authoritarian indoctrination and control over their lives.
3. “We are Family.” Engage people of color and offer neuro-emancipation from the racist, destructive labeling the elitist leftists spew, casting them, especially Blacks, as being incompetent victims. Cerebral bondage is as disabling as physical slavery. We must identify and embrace minority individuals who are potential candidates for elected offices.
4. “Let’s End Wars.” Co-op the left’s gender and class wars by demonstrating the deeper human principles of individual liberty, mutual respect, goodwill and, most importantly, happiness.
5. “Let’s Get to Work.” Literally. Support commerce and people who want to start, build, and expand businesses including fossil fuels and agriculture with business-friendly actions.

Today, we face a coldblooded and well-organized leftist juggernaut that is intent on expanding its malevolent, authoritarian rule in this country with The Colorado Blueprint as its model.

Look to Colorado to learn what evil experiments are headed to your state and also watch the Colorado GOP to see if it can establish a “new model” to resurrect the liberties that conservatives sacrificed through naivete and inaction.

IMAGE: Colorado’s Pikes Peak by MarkTSnow. CC BY-SA 4.0.

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