Overthrown: How the West is being won (again)
State and local politics of the interior West are undergoing a complete overhaul as the local people are voted out in favor of those from nowhere near here.
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Something changed about the way the interior Western states are governed in recent years to the point that places like Colorado feel entirely different than they did even five years ago.
The behaviors of the state and local governments have changed. Their mindset about money is different. The projects they're doing, the way they prioritize money, and their entire presence is now different. The way our governments communicate is different. The way they plan. The way they zone1. The way they work around laws we put in place to protect our residents from fiscal abuses of taxpayers is different.
The way they target certain voters to vote, the way their constituents vote — and who those constituents are. The way they allocate funding to things like law enforcement has changed. The issues that make it on ballots are different and more subversive. Dirty ethics around how ballot issues are written and presented are more prevalent than ever before. External interference in what makes it onto our ballots is now ubiquitous.
The mindset about use of the government to "protect" people from their own actions has changed. The way our state and local governments have ramped up booster-style2 promotion to drive population growth and development has changed. The way the state and local governments have been rearranged to move the local people aside and primarily serve our newly transplanted populations is a glaring change.
Colorado is the latest western state to undergo these rapid, systemic political changes, and there are very interesting reasons for it.
Colorado’s local and state governments are no longer run by Coloradans.
I was recently poking around to find out more about who’s running my local government. I wanted to know more about who's running the show — who I am being “governed” by. I already knew that Colorado's state government has been entirely infiltrated by outsiders, hilariously evidenced by the fact that we have a culturally-raised and -educated Californian as our governor, who falsely presents himself as a Coloradan simply because he was born in Boulder.
We even have a state senator that wore a New York Yankee’s hat in his official senator photograph. Turns out he’s from Rochester, New York, and represents a large portion of Colorado’s metastasizing metro area. There’s clearly no need to even pretend you’re from around here anymore to take a position of power over the people and spread your east coast sensibilities to the unclean savage locals of Colorado3.
And don’t get me started on the Boulder County-elected state senator that falsely claims she’s from the San Luis Valley of Colorado, despite being born, raised, educated, and lived the majority of her life in North Carolina. Her claim to a political seat in Colorado is that ‘her grandparents lived in the state when she was a child.’ She spent ~50 years in North Carolina, then moved to Colorado and decided to run for political office here, despite having no real lived experience with the people, history, or place. Yet another east coast brood parasite in Colorado’s political nest4.
Since our local governments determine things like our sales tax rates, what those sales taxes are used to fund, how many police and firefighters we have on staff, and perhaps even what kinds of utilities we get, I was curious to know —who— has been elected into my local government and hired as executive staff by the township.
I have to admit, I'm playing coy here — I've known the answer to this for a long time5. I'm only now writing it up, because as more and more local people in the West face this reality in their home spaces, I think it's important to put some optics on it.
In looking into this, I found that my local government's top executive-level staff are almost entirely not from Colorado or even the region, and none of them are from my home city. This first clue is interesting because it's another brick in the wall for why everything in Colorado feels ... off. And the longer you’ve been here and the deeper your roots, the more off it feels.
In gathering some details about the staff who run my local city, I found that the executive staffers are from the following states: Louisiana, New Jersey, Indiana, Texas, and there are only a couple others without online-verifiable pasts. All of the highest-tier staff are not from the city, state, or even region. They're all from the east and the south. The next-tier have a possibility of being from at least the region, though their buttoned-up online identities make that almost impossible to verify.
Then, there's our elected council members. These are the people our residents voted for to serve on our town council. These are the people who won the popularity contest to "govern" our city, its services, and to determine things like our sales tax rates and how funding is allocated to specific projects, the city’s priorities, and what state and federal laws our city advocates for and against.
On a quick skim of our elected council, it looks like our mayor was born and raised in New York, then was partly educated in Arizona, then came to Colorado sometime in the mid-1980s and went straight to Boulder — one of Colorado’s most expropriated, transplant-fortified bastions for urban coastal elites only. Check! … not from here either.
Expropriate - verb - (1) to deprive of possession or proprietary right, to dispossess; (2) to transfer (the property of another) to one's own possession
A quick research on our city council members, it looks like we have a Texan, Californian, Marylander, a New Yorker, another Californian; one might be from Colorado, and I couldn't find anything about the origins of the other two — they’ve hidden their histories online quite well.
It appears we have a trend. In this quick and dirty case study, the substantial majority of people at the top-level of my local government aren't even from the region. Some of them haven't even lived here for more than a few years. Most of them are from heavily urbanized areas on the coasts, and they've all brought their urban cultures and sensibilities with them to govern the people of Colorado — and my hometown.
Does it matter that outsiders dominate our local and state governments' highest positions?
Does it really matter that Colorado has a Californian as its governor? Does it really matter that my little local government is primarily led by people from the east coast, south, and California? What's the impact of my county's highest level elected officials being not from here, either? After all, they're all just Americans, right ... they’re just Americans without any shared experience, political attitudes, or long-term local knowledge of this region, state, and city?
Heck, most of our elected transplant overlords don’t even know that all of Colorado’s landscape is entirely fire-dependent6 and is prone to extreme drought cycles, regularly. They also don’t know how or why our state politics were once different, or how obvious their colonization of our politics is to those from here. They definitely don’t understand why the local people have always turned down the Olympics from coming here. And they probably only understand Colorado from the standpoint of their canned tourist vacation a couple years ago — not exactly the starting point for acculturation to a place and its people worthy of taking to local political office.
For some, it may not seem to matter where someone is from when it comes to their right to get involved with the local government where they’re living, but as most of us from the interior West look around and watch our economy, political culture, environment, and society fundamentally flip into something we never wanted to be part of, I would say it matters a lot.
Here are some questions we can use to uncover the presence of an ethical issue and to frame out why this issue matters ...
Does the place we are born, raised, and educated shape our cultural identity, or understanding of politics, and how we then shape the world around us?
Do the local cultures of the eastern U.S., south, and California have different norms, beliefs, and behaviors than those rooted in the interior West?
Did places like Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Montana have a established political cultures that are unique to the people rooted there and their shared development in these places?
Are there any ethical issues with people moving into an area that is not anywhere near their home range and getting involved with the state and local governments in a place that doesn't have anything in common with where they’re from?
Is it okay to move to a place and then work to "govern" the local people and control their political priorities that you share no common history, upbringing, or background with?
Sure, we're all just Americans. But is it that simple? Is it reasonable to believe that someone whose entire life experience occurred in the most urbanized and fetid shitholes of the country should have any modicum of power over local people in places like Arizona, Wyoming, and Oregon? How about Utah, Colorado, and Nevada? People with deep cultural history in these places are different, I guarantee it.
There's a reason for the political shift, and it's diabolical.
It should come as no surprise that Colorado's population has doubled in the last 30 years. It has consistently been one of the top five fastest growing states in the nation for the last 20 years, and the number of people flooding into the state has only increased over time. I also strongly suspect it has sped up to the point that the ape counters (demographers) haven't been able to keep up and are wildly off in their counts.
The population growth curve in Colorado is so bent, it's safe to say that only one in four people in the state today are from Colorado and this region, and even fewer are born to Coloradans who were also born here. Given the demographic data, it's also safe to say that most of our newcomers are from the east and west coasts, and the south (ahem, mostly Texas).
With that very sudden, very fast explosion of population, we have everyone's politics virally onboard as they come running to get some of that Rocky Mountain High they’ve heard so much about.
As the newcomers settle in, they get their voting ballots, and they start voting. They don't bother to look around and ask how the local people vote, or even what the histories of the issues are — They just vote from the pedestal of their milquetoast7 educations, egos, and personal views on what they think our governments should do, which always happen to be things their home governments did. The way they vote is entirely a result of how their political views formed in the places they’re from.
It should come as no surprise that they never vote for the locals to head our local and state governments. They always pick people palatable to them, which appear to be provably all people like those from where they’re from.
I would call this natural behavior, but there's really nothing natural about it. The east coast is so far away from the interior West that if we were on the Eurasian continent, it would be like having Russians outnumber the French in Paris, then voting Russians into nine out of ten political and staff positions instead of French. War, anyone?
My town in Colorado is so far away from New Jersey that if we were on the Eurasian continent, the same distance starting in Paris would cross six country's boundaries, at least seven different language boundaries, and would finally drop you somewhere in southwestern Russia. All of that to say, there's a huge cultural difference between people who are born, raised, educated, and acculturated over 1,800 miles of geographic separation — regardless of nationstate and language boundaries.
As the population of the interior West has quickly and recently increased, our local cultures have been diluted by the rapid influx of non-local people who now outnumber those acculturated and integrated with this place.
The impact is to everything from the way we approach and design governance, to how we drive our cars, how we fund our schools, what we buy and don't buy, how we understand and internalize clear and present hazards in our environments, and how we understand and interact with our economy, environment, and governments.
It's pretty diabolical if you think about it — Move to a place, decide it's yours, vote in the local elections, vote for people you would have voted for in your home state, vote to shift everything from local policy to local elected officials away from the local people, then start appointing executive staff from far-off places with your newly elected cultural kin. Poof, now it’s just like home after a little electoral expropriation.
Smells like intra-national colonialism.
Intra - prefix - on the inside; within
It sure looks a lot like the locals are being overthrown and systematically removed on their home turf across the West.
In 1992, Coloradans enacted TABOR (the Taxpayer Bill of Rights) to prevent excessive taxation, inefficiency, bloat of our local governments, and to put curbs on how all levels of government in Colorado could tax us and handle our money. The point of TABOR was to prevent Colorado from becoming a dysfunctional, high-cost, government-dependent, politically corrupted shithole like California, Texas, New York, Florida, New Jersey, or any of the other highly dysfunctional states.
Sure, we didn't all agree on TABOR — heck, not everyone here really understood it or how important it might be someday, and some did and still disagreed with it. But now that we see the immense changes here; the skyrocketing living costs8, the influx of new fees and taxes that are rapidly making this place unlivable, and the bloated and nonsensical programs that are eating into core governmental service budgets, and the political smokescreens to mask budgetary mismanagement, it's extremely clear why TABOR is a vital law to protect Coloradans and our money from wasteful spending practices brought on by poorly governed and bloated governments.
Despite the lack of agreement among old school Coloradans on this law, at least it was we the local people of Colorado who had the opportunity to spar on the subject without overpowering outsider interference. The early 1990s were merely the tip of the iceberg for the expropriation of Coloradans from our politics, but the critical mass had not yet been achieved to unseat us from almost every tier of our own governments.
Since TABOR passed, our new arrivals have consistently voted for subversive workarounds, which are actively transforming Colorado into something more familiar to those not from here ... a bloated, under-performing, unaccountable, non-transparent, mess of a state government that consistently fails to deliver its core services, meanwhile performing rhetorical autofellatio9 with all the hippest pseudo-academic buzzwords, and ballooning pet programs that don't deliver a measurable return on investment for the people of Colorado.
It's funny that our schools teach children about the wrongs of colonialism, always using the colonial history of the British, French, and Spanish, but don't ever bother to teach what colonialism is, conceptually. Colonialism is a group of people entering an established space, claiming it as their own, then overthrowing those already there with their own culture, laws, rules, mindsets, and behaviors. Sure sounds like what’s happening in Colorado and across the interior West, doesn’t it?
If we can agree that there is capital-C-Colonialism, which includes these big, old, directly violent events, then perhaps we can agree that there are other grades and severities of lowercase-c-colonialism that operate more subversively and covertly. If so, we can start lensing some of these big migrations and the political changes they bring with a little more clarity.
When I look at my local and state government and all I see are people not from here as our governor, state house and senate representatives, our elected city councils and county commissioners, local government executive staffs, I start to wonder ... how well can they represent the people, economy, environment, and priorities here when they share no experience or history with any of those rooted here?
Why have Colorado’s government systems been almost uniformly infiltrated by people from other places, entirely leaving those with deep local roots out of the governance process as nothing more than mere subjects to be governed?
It’s all in the way we think about governance.
A wiser person once asked me what my theory of governance is. But he asked it like this, "What's your theory of governance? … As in, how you think of what governments are, what they should do, who they should serve, and how they should carry those things out?" He didn't say anything else, just waited for me to start sputtering and babbling.
I would call that a formative moment since it put me face to face with a gap in the foundation of my personal philosophies. Honestly, I'm still working on developing my mind around this question. But there is one thing I know, and it’s that my theory of governance is entirely framed on my lived experience, my cultural identity, my education, and experiences delivered to me through the roots of my family's experiences … and the place that curated all of it. And I also think that’s how it forms in everyone else.
When I look around and see how many local governments in the West are falling to these very clear cases of complete infiltration and systematic displacement of the local people from their own systems of governance, I realize that we have a big cultural problem.
We have people from heavily urbanized areas who have come with their Wizard of Oz-granted degrees designed entirely around working in heavily government-dependent spaces, and who have come out to the little old West to save we ungovernable, “under-served,” savages from ourselves. Turns out, they out-qualify and out-care the locals when it comes to nation-building and governing other people, and they talk more slick in interviews and political campaigns than the locals, too. Imagine that?
I imagine the mental chatter of these political expropriators sounds a little like,
“The people here are under-served and their programs lacking — They need governance like we had back east! They need this program, that program, we need to increase sales taxes, property taxes, state income taxes to fund them! We need funding to help the homeless! We need funding to help make more homeless so we can help them, too! We need nicer government facilities and more lush grassy parks! We need what we had back in California — that worked! … right?”
If it’s even close, we have a big problem. We have people from all over the country taking off to manifest their destiny in ruling the savage locals of the American West, but none of them have any shared experience with the local people. They want organized and governed spaces, and planned experience, not genuine wildness or the absence of an intentionally manifested destiny. It’s like watching Russians run Paris.
Everyone holds their own ideas about what governments are and what they should do, but I bet money that the people of Colorado circa 1965 thought about that concept and question in a vastly more aligned way than to the people of Camden, New Jersey, that same year. And I know for a fact that's true today.
The path to being overthrown.
I hate to deliver the bad news to all of my neighbors from southern New Mexico to the top of Montana, out to the coast of Oregon, but you're either in the process of being overthrown or you're about to be.
If you don't believe me, just take a look at Colorado. It's an apocalyptic mess. And it's a mess because of how our rooted residents have been systematically overthrown and wedged out of our own state and local governance systems.
There's a clear reason for this, too. Those of us in the interior West miscalculated the potential threat the state and local governments could be to our way of life. In part because we built our governance systems to be more service-centered, functional, friendly, non-glamorous, financially sound, but to be kept mostly at bay through our own cultural norms, motivated entirely around not wanting to be like the politically gangrenous eastern and southern states, and California.
In that, we created a system that failed as soon as our local culture was diluted by the millions of people who showed up rapidly in response to booster-driven marketing campaigns intended to drive growth and political change.
We never in a million years would have guessed that our state and local governments would start using our own tax dollars to promote mass migrations to our state just to start packing in more people where resources were already overrun10, only to then kick off an avalanche of other needs and political movements to overthrow the culture and systems we built.
We never would have guessed that our local governments would start buying up housing properties to become landlords and start mucking with our local housing markets. Yeah, that's happening.
We never would have guessed that our local governments would start using our local tax dollars to setup "safe sites" where drug addicts could come and inject themselves in the comfort of a taxpayer-funded facility with taxpayer-funded staff and taxpayer-funded legal liability. That’s happening, too.
And we never would have guessed that our local governments would start using our local tax dollars to fuel an unprecedented explosion of homeless coming to our area to partake in the resources being handed out with no strings attached, only to cry wolf that we need more locally-tax-funded resources to solve this entirely imported externality. You guessed it; that’s happening, too.
Many of us would never have thought that our state and local governments could have been so easily, quickly, and uniformly overtaken by politically invasive groups of individuals with no history in this place. Lesson learned, but the greatest lesson many of us would never have guessed is that this quiet and subversive coup would be entirely the methodical handiwork of people not from here. And when I say not from here; I mean France-to-Russia scale distances-not-from-here. Our systems of governance in the American West were clearly too easy to infiltrate, manipulate, then weaponize against those who built them (us).
The path to being overthrown has been a many step process, and it's coming for any place that gets put on "the map". Utah is undergoing their intra-national political colonization and overthrow as we speak. California was lost decades ago. Oregon and Washington are actively undergoing it, too. Idaho and Montana are deep in the throes of this systematic overthrow, to the obvious chagrin of the local people11.
Just look around, you'll see it. Look at who's on your city council, who your county commissioners are, and who your elected state officials are. Look at who’s working in the executive-level of your local government. You'll notice a trend — most of them aren't from here. Most of what they believe is likely maligned with what you believe about what your state and local governments should be using your money for. And they're going to work to govern you, your money, how to live, and how much it all costs. They're also going to help to economically lever you out of your home space12 by using your money to drive more growth, just as happened in California decades ago, and what's happening in Colorado today. But they'll do it subversively with a vote and a dollar to quietly broker their conquest.
The Fleeting West is written by a rooted Westerner with generations of family with an active eye on our state and local politics, who has carefully watched as rooted Westerners have been incrementally replaced and run out of all positions of local political influence.
Footnotes and Citations
More about how zoning now works in the West here …
Boosterism - an early marketing practice for promoting a city or location in order to change peoples’ perception of it, largely with the intent of driving people to that place to help drive growth and economy. More about that here:
There’s apparently a story behind the NY hat, and that’s that the hat belonged to his son who was killed in a mass shooting. I haven’t verified the story, and quite frankly, I don’t find it all that helpful in justifying wearing New York emblems as a Colorado elected representative of … Coloradans. The optic is bad, no matter what, especially given how antagonistic the relationship is between Coloradans and New Yorkers.
Brood Parasite - The term in biology for animals that lay their eggs in another animal’s nest, causing the other animal to do all the work to raise their brood. https://nestwatch.org/learn/general-bird-nest-info/brown-headed-cowbirds/
Colorado’s elections are now entirely driven by transplants … it’s one of the main drivers of The Fleeting West:
Colorado is a wildfire state. More about that here:
Milquetoast - noun - lacking character or effectiveness. Pronounced, “Milk-toast.”
Living cost increases aren’t just taxes. There’s a snowball effect in motion with supply, demand, and price, multiplied by tax revenues in the housing space … more about that here:
Yeah, I said it. They’re all super busy pleasuring themselves in the weirdest of ways on any new pseudo-academic whim and broadcasting it through government channels to make sure we’re all in on the noise at all times. Tone it down, please.
There are non-violent ways to lever people out of their home areas - there’s the “taking candy from a baby” method. More about that here …
Holy crap that was good. Excellent summary of what has happened. I came her partly because of the way the west governed itself, although in terms of distance, it was not quite Paris to Russia. 18 years ago I couldn't wait to call Colorado home, now I can't wait to say "I used to live there". The changes in that time have not been good. The leaders are diametrically opposed to my ideals and it only seems to be getting worse. I question how much longer I can do it, and question how to time a home sale with the market and get out when the gettin' out is good.