The election and reelection of Lauren Boebert to the U.S. House of Representatives shows how eccentric the right wing of the Republican party has become.
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Boebert, who represents Colorado’s 3rd district, is perhaps second in congress to only Marjorie Taylor Greene with respect to overall zaniness. – although measuring zaniness is of course not an exact science. Regardless, Boebert’s viability as an elected official is concerning – more concerning than anything that Trump was ever impeached for, more concerning than any alleged mishandling of classified documents. This is because Boebert’s viability is a projection of the hearts and minds of her constituents.
Shooting Toward Congress
One nice thing we can say about Boebert is that she is a high school dropout who later earned her GED. W
hile the increasingly elitist left, a contingency dominated by graduates of Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, NYU, Georgetown, and the like, sneer at Boebert’s educational background, there’s something democratic about a GED-holder in Congress.
Most of the country did not graduate from Yale, or from law school. In fact, most of the country doesn’t have a four-year degree at all. Yet the three branches of government are dominated by advanced-degree graduates of elite institutions. These are people who are not especially inclined to be in touch with the realities of the everyday American.
In theory, a GED-holding member of Congress offers to remedy that out-of-touchness. There should be a wider variety of educational backgrounds represented across our government – and Boebert helps to balance against the Harvard-Yale dominance.
Yet, while Boebert’s educational background is refreshing – and the left should be ashamed for deriding someone who holds a GED – Boebert’s worldview is a hellscape.
Boebert’s rise to political relevance was unorthodox.
After high school, she worked as an assistant manager at a McDonald’s. Later, she worked as a pipeliner for a natural gas drilling company. In 2013, Boebert and her husband opened Shooters Grill, in Rifle, Colorado. Shooters was distinct in that the Boeberts encouraged their patrons to carry guns openly. Despite the appeal to second-amendment devotees, Shooters operated in the red, hemorrhaging over six figures-worth in 2019 and 2020.
Boebert made national headlines in September 2019, when she confronted presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke at a town hall event. O’Rourke was proposing a buy-back program and a ban on assault rifles. Boebert wasn’t impressed with the policy proposal.
Many Coloradans agreed with Boebert. Not long after, she announced her candidacy for Congress.
In 2020, while campaigning for congress, Boebert (and Shooters Grill) tapped into a sort of repressed zeitgeist when she refused the governor’s orders to close shop during the COVID-19 pandemic. In direct defiance of Colorado’s stay-at-home orders, Boebert opened Shooter’s for dine-in service. Many Coloradans, who would vote in the upcoming fall elections, loved Boebert’s defiance.
Can ‘Normal’ Win Out?
Boebert won the election of course, and she was sworn into congress in January 2021. Since entering office, Boebert has given voice to a variety of unattractive political views.
For example: Boebert supports eliminating the U.S. Department of Education; she opposes Colorado’s red flag laws, which allow the police to remove a firearm from someone deemed dangerous to themselves or to others; she believes that the market, not the government, should determine how the energy industry functions; she opposes gay marriage; she opposes the separation of church and state; and she believes in a market-driven health-care system.
Boebert also promotes several conspiracy theories, including QAnon.
Despite her zaniness, Boebert just won another term in Congress – although by a very small margin.
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Harrison Kass is the Senior Editor at 19FortyFive. An attorney, pilot, guitarist, and minor pro hockey player, he joined the US Air Force as a Pilot Trainee but was medically discharged. Harrison holds a BA from Lake Forest College, a JD from the University of Oregon, and an MA from New York University. He lives in Oregon and listens to Dokken. Follow him on Twitter @harrison_kass.
Craig Glover
December 29, 2022 at 12:44 pm
That she is a high school dropout who got a GED is not worthy of any praise when she is so dileberately uninformed and ignorant. As far as her commonality with so many Americans, only 26% of Americans have a high school diploma only.
As a high school history teacher I saw special ed students being mainlined into regular courses. Without exception they were eager to learn. She is not. She continues with conspiracies and false narratives that fit her bias, and added to that has despicable behavior, such as heckling Biden in the State of the Union Address and defiantly packing a gun into Congress.
Kip Dellinger
December 29, 2022 at 4:15 pm
she is more main-stream American than the majority of the clowns serving in congress and the deep-state federal bureaucracy. Oh, and the leftist MSM. and obviously than you, dear author. you are clearly a supporter of big-government-knows-all. I was in her congressional district until I fled the blue-bleeding state of Colorado. people like you have ruined it….and many other places. you are biased, bigoted and misogynistic. that someone like you writes for this rag further proves that the rot in our country goes deep and wide.