Inside Lauren Boebert's First 100 Days

You won't believe what the Colorado Congresswoman has done in her few months in the House. It goes beyond bizarre, deranged, or offensive—and into the realm of the genuinely dangerous.

Introduction

An increasingly common refrain among politicos is that Trumpists don’t come to D.C. to work for their constituents—they become members of Congress for no other reason than to be members of Congress.

An appropriate analogy here is the difference between a brain surgeon and an influencer. While in 2021 few of us would consider any member of Congress the equivalent of a brain surgeon, much like medical professionals, the ostensible task of a member of the United States House or Senate is to shepherd and safeguard the health of an entity—in the case of Congress, a nation—through periods of grave turmoil and terrible danger.

By comparison, the only “job” an influencer has is to capture our attention. Once an influencer has the attention of an audience, they use that attention to advance their own self-interest—then feed their self-advancement back to their audience in ways that further engage attention, but are also designed to make viewers feel like they’ve accomplished something.

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) is an aspiring far-right influencer who uses Americans’ taxpayer dollars and a seat in the House of Representatives as a “publishing platform” much like, say, YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram.

Indeed, in 2021, Congress is little more than a platform for a subset of Trump Party influencers that includes not only Boebert but Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH). In the Senate, GOP influencers include Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), among others.

{Note: The Trump Party has decided, for administrative purposes, to continue operating under the name “Republican Party,” as there’s residual brand value in that moniker. But the Trump Party is in only a very few ways—such as its support for systemic racism and voter suppression—resonant with the historical Republican Party with respect to its platform, agenda or values.}

The goal of a House GOP influencer is to become either a Senate GOP influencer, a Fox News weekend host, and/or a Regnery author with a mid-six-figure advance.

Meanwhile, the aim of a Senate GOP influencer is to become a Fox News weekend host, a Regnery author with a mid-six-figure advance, or a member of the presidential Cabinet of whichever Donald Trump family member, Trump crony, or illicit quid pro quo-participant designee Donald Trump permits to run for the White House next.

None of these influencers have an earnest policy agenda or particular issue they care about. They pick up and drop Trumpist “causes” on the basis of whether they (a) please Trump, or (b) gain them attention, influence, and at some future date a gig hosting a Fox News weekend show, a Regnery book deal with an advance in the mid-six-figures, and/or a position in a future Trump or Trumpist Cabinet. Note that should any of these influencers secure a job in a future Trump or Trumpist Cabinet, their short menu of ambitions would shift dramatically to either (a) a seven-figure D.C. lobbyist job, (b) a Fox News weekday hosting gig, or (c) a Regnery book deal with a seven-figure advance.

None of this has anything to do with governance, principles, beliefs, or advancing any legislation with a prayer of passing or—in the miracle scenario of it passing years from now, when Republicans have suppressed so many Democratic voters or gerrymandered so many House districts they’ve gained a substantial House and Senate majority—any legislation that, once passed, has a prayer of affecting voters’ lives in measurable ways.

Lauren Boebert wants to make Americans’ lives better to the exact same degree that Logan Paul does, or Catalin Onc and Elena Engelhardt do, or David Dobrik did.

If, as is the case with many Trump Party voters these days, all one is looking for out of politics is politics-themed influencer shenanigans—or, more succinctly, entertainment—Boebert is doing her “job” right now and doing it well. But that doesn’t mean Boebert’s first 100 days in Congress have looked anything like what America expects—or at least at one time expected—from members of Congress.

So, with that preamble, here are the things Rep. Lauren Boebert has spent her time on in her first 100 days representing the people of Colorado’s 3rd congressional district.

{Note: March 30 is Boebert’s eighty-eighth day in office. She has 12 days to add to this record.}

QAnon

(1) Never one to let a domestic terror movement that launched an armed rebellion against America go to waste, Boebert recently made stunning claims about the recently attacked U.S. Congress that are ripped straight from the digital literature of an army of domestic terrorists. (link)

As the Colorado Times Recorder reports, “a QAnon-linked conspiracy theory promoted by the Epoch Times [claims] that secret documents declassified in the final days of the Trump administration will expose wrongdoing by Trump’s enemies and lead to resignations and arrests, allowing Republicans to gain a majority in the U.S. House and Senate prior to the 2022 election” (emphasis in original).

Some of you will only need to read the above sentence once to see how deranged it is, but many will require two readings to really get the full flavor of it.

In case you missed it, Boebert is saying that there is such a vast criminal conspiracy within the Democratic Party—one heroically pursued by a Superman-like Trump throughout the course of his presidency—that so many Democrats will be facing criminal indictment for their actions before the midterm elections,there will be a mass exodus of Democratic politicians from Congress before the midterm elections and the result of this will be that the GOP will retake both the House of Representatives and the Senate (say it with me now) before the midterm elections in 2022.

The New York Times had called the Epoch Times “a leading purveyor of right-wing misinformation.”

(2) As we all now know, QAnon supporters want to kill House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. That’s why they love Boebert for tweeting out Pelosi’s location during the January 6 insurrection. Just a few weeks after the news dropped that Pelosi had been marked for assassination by a domestic terror movement that adores Lauren Boebert, Boebert released an ad featuring (a) Pelosi, and (b) the sound of gunshots. (link)

Boebert has now endangered the life of the Speaker of the House on more than one location—the second time, therefore, if not also the first, intentionally. This alone would be enough to justify her expulsion from Congress, which arguably is on some level what Boebert really wants—as it would almost certainly land her a Fox News gig, a massive book-deal advance, and/or a role in any future Trump presidential campaign.

The Insurrection

(1) In response to an armed assault on the U.S. Capitol—an ongoing rebellion on a scope unseen since the Civil War, and one led by Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, QAnon conspiracy theorists, 8kun trolls, and Boogaloo Bois—Boebert has sponsored legislation to declare antifa, which is not an organization, a “domestic terror organization.” (link)

Boebert has been told so many times that antifa is not an organization—and has seen her claim fact-checked so frequently by major media over the last year—that there can no longer be any doubt that she knows her bill is an actual nonsense. But it’s also worth noting that, even if one erroneously believed the abstract concept of being “anti-fascist” to actually be a nationally organized paramilitary operation, it would be beyond deranged to choose to introduce new legislation regarding this entity rather than self-declared paramilitary operations now in the midst of an armed rebellion against the United States: the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, and Boogaloo Bois.

(2) We don’t know if Lauren Boebert gave a Capitol tour to insurrectionists pre-attack, as alleged by at least two of her House colleagues. But it does seem as though she’s lied about the issue. At first she claimed that the only Capitol tour she’s ever given involved just eight people—her husband, mother, aunt and uncle, and four children—which doesn’t match the description of the “large group” her colleagues say they saw her with on January 3 or January 4, after Trumpist radicals had descended on DC for a series of “Stop the Steal” rallies. Now Boebert says that she was giving a tour to her notably “big family,” which doesn’t seem to fit her earlier characterization of just four adults and four minors. (link)

Though her colleagues say they saw Boebert giving a “tour” to a “large group” (with no mention of half of it being comprised of minor children) on January 3 or January 4, Boebert’s defense is that she was at the Capitol on January 2 and January 3 with just eight people, four of them minors. This may turn out to be so, or it could be that the current federal investigation into these tours—launched after a third and fourth Democratic witness reported seeing multiple such tours pre-insurrection—will reveal that Boebert is playing a semantic game here, and was present with an unauthorized tour being given by a colleague but simply insists she was not “giving” the tour herself.

Indeed, Boebert is named—with known Ali Alexander co-conspirators Reps. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Mo Brooks (R-AL)—in a letter by Democratic lawmakers asking the House Committee on Ethics and the Office of Congressional Ethics to investigate the pre-insurrection actions of certain members of Congress inside the Capitol building.

Gun Control Issues

(1) Boebert says America can’t pass new legislation regarding background checks for gun purchasers unless it first passes legislation requiring background checks for “hand[s], fist[s], feet, even hammers.” (link)

Boebert’s “reasoning” is that hands, fists, feet, and hammers cause more deaths than guns annually. In fact, as Rolling Stone writes, “annual deaths caused by firearms (handguns and other types) in 2019 numbered 9,649; annual deaths from personal weapons (hands, fists, feet, etc.) and blunt objects (clubs, hammers, etc.) numbered 997. That means guns killed 8,652 more people in 2019 than personal weapons and blunt objects combined.”

(2) Boebert says any new legislation seeking to close background-check loopholes would be a slippery slope toward banning all “knives” in the United States. (link)

As Boebert is aware—because the most radically anti-gun control U.S. gun owners talk about the issue incessantly—no country on Earth bans all knives. Boebert is referring to statutes enacted in certain countries that ban knives of a certain length or internal structure from being carried in public for personal rather than professional use. As the U.S. has the second-highest rate of per-capita gun deaths of any nation on Earth, one thing you can be certain of in countries with more gun-control measures than America, or more knife-control measures, is that fewer people are dying from guns, adjusted for population size, in those countries than here. In other words, a country could ban all guns and all knives and the odds would approach 100% that on the back end of such legislation it’d still be safer than America as to per-capita death-by-firearm statistics.

(3) Boebert has made a stink about bringing her Glock to work every day, though she works in one of the safer buildings in the United States. According to Boebert, the survival of the Second Amendment depends on her packing heat in the halls of Congress; even more than this, being armed on Capitol Hill, per Boebert, is essential to “keeping my family safe”—a bizarre statement Boebert has never explained. (link)

Oops, sorry! I meant to say, above, that the U.S. Capitol was one of the safest buildings in the United States, until tens of thousands of supporters of Trump and Lauren Boebert—some armed with guns, some knives, some clubs, some tasers, some chemical weapons—stormed the building on January 6, 2021, with at least 30 to 40 participating in a conspiracy that would’ve seen all of Congress gassed to death in the tunnels beneath the Capitol. Given that Boebert ally Sen. Ron Johnson has already said he considered the Trumpist irregulars who assaulted the Capitol on January 6 to have been of no threat to anyone of his political persuasion—a group that would clearly include Boebert—or indeed any threat to anyone at all, one wonders what Boebert’s point is in obsessing now over being armed in the corridors and executive offices of the Capitol complex.

(4) Boebert attended a Congressional Zoom meeting while prominently displaying two AR-15 rifles, a long gun, and a handgun on a shelf behind her. The weaponry on display in Boebert’s Zoom shot would’ve required four humans (or, in the alternative, eight arms on two bodies, i.e. the “double General Grievous”) to use effectively. (link)

Per the Washington Post, the committee hearing in question was of the House Natural Resources Committee. At the hearing, reports the Post, “Republicans offered an amendment to remove a provision prohibiting lawmakers from bringing firearms to meetings.” The Post adds that “A 1967 law banned firearms anywhere in the Capitol building and grounds but gave U.S. Capitol Police the power to make exceptions. Later that year, Capitol Police decided that lawmakers could keep them in their personal offices and transport unloaded firearms ‘within the Capitol Grounds.’”

In other words, Lauren Boebert can’t carry a loaded firearm on Capitol grounds under any circumstances, so her weapons are of no use to her in a Congressional hearing. It is clear that Boebert knows this, despite choosing to use as her Zoom background—to quote Rep. Jared Huffman, a California Democrat—a “shrine to [her] gun fetish.”

(5) Even though it was Americans obsessed with the Second Amendment who put all of Congress in danger on January 6, the Washington Post reports that immediately after the armed insurrection against the U.S. government in part incited by Boebert—who spoke at a Stop the Steal event before the attack—the Congresswoman has made opposing any new security measures at the Capitol her cause célèbre. (link)

As the Washington Post explains, “After the January 6 siege on the Capitol, Capitol Police put up metal detectors outside the House and Senate chambers. Boebert led a revolt against them after setting off the detector and refusing to allow police to check her bag.” Not only is the U.S. Capitol under no threat targeting conservatives like Boebert, as noted above Boebert is unable to carry a loaded weapon with her on Capitol grounds, so her “revolt” over the installation of new metal detectors at the U.S. Capitol has nothing to do with self-defense—and everything to do with grandstanding for the very insurrectionists whose conduct forced the installation of new security equipment at the Capitol in the first instance.

(6) Boebert referred to an assault weapons ban as “evil,” and accused former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX) of “legislating evil” by seeking to ban assault weapons. (link)

As Boebert is well aware, assault weapons were previously banned in the United States from 1994 to 2004—without any increase in gun crimes resulting from the legislation. Unfortunately, gun-rights advocates slipped so many loopholes into the 1994 ban that it remains unclear if such a ban significantly reduces gun crimes; and yet, the use of automatic weapons in mass shootings has risen substantially since the 1990s, making an assault weapons ban more clearly relevant today than it was when first passed.

Boebert’s claim that a new assault weapons ban would leave her “defenseless”—her justification for calling such a ban “evil”—remains unexplained, given that we know her gun shrine houses many weapons that would fall outside an assault weapons ban.

(7) Though Boebert almost always cites the need to defend one’s “family” by lethal force in supporting a lax or non-existent gun control policy agenda, it turns out that Boebert also thinks teenagers should be able to get concealed-carry permits. (link)

The view that kids who can’t even drink legally should be able to carry hidden automatic weapons is as stupid as you think it is, and can’t be explained using Boebert’s usual “defense-of-family” rhetoric—so according to Fox News, Boebert has slid into a very different mode for this particular “policy” argument, contending that “the Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting [but rather]…our right to defend ourselves and our protection against an overreaching government.” Preparing teenagers for insurrection—or helping them deal with schoolyard bullies by gunning them down—is therefore part of Boebert’s agenda as a Colorado Congresswoman.

It is worth remembering that human brains aren’t fully developed until the age of 25, so Boebert would like to see kids still seven years from having a fully developed brain secretly packing heat at school. Fortunately, she knows this will never happen—so she won’t ever be blamed for the consequences of it happening.

(8) While most members of Congress follow the news whenever a mass shooting is underway in their state, Lauren Boebert spend the period of time in which the recent grocery-store mass shooting in Boulder, Colorado was unfolding railing about the Biden administration choosing to let White House reporters go home early. (link)

The White House calls a “lid” on new developments to be communicated to the public when it believes no more news will be generated voluntarily by the executive branch. {Note: Obviously, reporters get called back to the White House if there’s a sudden emergency.} Boebert’s premise seems to be that Team Biden calling a “lid” at 1:13PM on a given day meant that Biden wasn’t working hard at being President of the United States.

This may be a good time to remind everyone that Boebert’s hero, Donald Trump, began a period of three consecutive weekends playing golf just two weeks after his presidency began. As the Washington Post has reported, Trump spent 1 out of every 3.4 days in office visiting a Trump Organization property (as the Post notes, this comes out to “two days of every week of his presidency” and 57% of his weekend days as president), and these trips cost taxpayers—somewhere well north of $100 million.

(9) Boebert does fund-raise off mass shootings, though—once she notices them. (link)

As MarketWatch reports, “As the nation mourned its second mass shooting within a week on Tuesday, a Colorado Republican drew backlash for appearing to use the tragedy as a fundraising opportunity. Two hours after a gunman fatally shot ten people in a Boulder grocery store, Rep. Lauren Boebert’s campaign sent supporters an email with the subject line ‘I told Beto “HELL NO” to taking our guns. Now we need to tell Joe Biden.’” Lest you think the message ended there, and that the email it appeared in was not a fundraising email, alas, no. Readers who clicked on the email quickly encountered a series of red buttons and this text: “Will you please help me send them [Biden and the Democrats] a message by pitching in $10 right now?”

(10) Surely Boebert didn’t mock a college-age school-shooting survivor as weak? (link)

No—she did. After her friend Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) was caught on film literally stalking Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg just prior to Rep. Greene’s election to Congress, Boebert felt safe in publicly telling Hogg that he isn’t “tough.”

Fundraising

(1) Boebert has been using calls for her arrest to raise money, without responding in any detail to her participation in the insurrection-inciting events that led up to the armed assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6. (link)

On some level, this is just smart politicking. However, in view of the information on this topic reported by the Durango Herald, some might feel that certain of Boebert’s appeals are not merely tasteless but risible. After Boebert infamously tweeted out Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s location on Insurrection Day—having already tweeted “Today is 1776”—some might feel Boebert asking donors to give her “$17.76” in response to allegations that she helped incite an armed rebellion, even using a hash-tag making that allegation as a tagline, suggests not that the allegations against her aren’t serious or well-founded but that despite their seriousness and clear evidentiary foundation, Boebert refuses to take them seriously or express remorse for her actions.

Miscellaneous

(1) Given how much the radical right that Boebert hails from loves the Jussie Smollet story—any opportunity to position Black Americans are whiny (fake) victims is not to be missed—you might find it odd that Lauren Boebert decided to concoct a fake story about violence. But it appears that she simply couldn’t resist the temptation, knowing that her white voter base would never hold her accountable for it. (link)

The wild thing here is that Boebert’s lie isn’t just a run-of-the-mill fabrication, it’s a massive, ever-expanding cornucopia of deceit that relates to her political origin story.

In other words, at the heart of Lauren Boebert’s entire political career is a vile lie.

As CNN explains, “Boebert, an outspoken advocate of gun rights, has for years told a dramatic story about why she began openly carrying a gun. She says it was because a man was beaten to death in 2013 outside Shooters Grill, her restaurant in the municipality of Rifle, Colorado. She told the story to Fox News in a 2014 feature piece on the restaurant’s gun-packing servers. She told it during her successful 2020 campaign for Congress. She told it at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2021. And on Wednesday, she told it again on the floor of the House of Representatives during a debate about a bill that would require background checks for gun sales by unlicensed or private sellers.”

You can probably guess where this is headed.

Per CNN, “Boebert’s claim that a man was beaten to death outside her restaurant is inaccurate, according to records obtained from local authorities. A forensic pathologist determined that a man who was found unresponsive by police on a sidewalk near the restaurant in August 2013 died because of ‘methamphetamine intoxication,’ not homicide.”

While CNN—bending over backwards to find a way not to position this as a risible lie about a dead man—notes that the death in question was originally investigated as a potential homicide because of rumors that the decedent had “been involved in some sort of physical altercation shortly before he collapsed”, the idea that Boebert would know enough about an investigation to know the initial internal theory of the case at the Rifle Police Department, but not enough to know how the case ended and was reported in the news, and that she would then take her knowledge of the initial (wrong) internal theory of the case at the Rifle Police Department and turn it into her entire basis for being a Second Amendment radical, strains credulity well beyond its breaking point.

Perhaps this is why other news outlets aren’t as kind as CNN. Business Insider simply calls it a “bogus story”—which it most certainly was.

(2) If a federal department wants to have power, it needs to be located in the seat of federal governmental authority in the United States: Washington, DC. Just so, if a federal department wants to have the most talented federal public servants flock to it, it likely needs to be located where individuals interested in and qualified to be longterm federal public officials are likely to want to live: Washington, DC. It’s probably for this reason that Boebert wrote a bill insisting that the Bureau of Land Management’s national headquarters be located in Grand Junction, Colorado. (link)

For those wondering, Grand Junction—a town of around 60,000—is the eighteenth-largest municipality in Colorado, which is America’s twenty-first most populous state.

On some level, this is just Boebert bringing home the pork to her district by exploiting the corruption of the federal gover—wait, isn’t Boebert’s animating principle, indeed her very reason for being in Congress, that she wants a less corrupt federal government, one not perpetually beset by the sort of YIMBY and NIMBY games federal politicians have been playing for centuries? Apparently not.

(3) Republicans were livid for weeks when a Missouri Congressman used the phrase “awomen” in addition to “amen” at the end of a public prayer. So if there’s one thing you know Boebert won’t do, it’s claim that “men” is a gender-neutral term that also means “women,” as making such a claim would clearly undermine her unsurprising insistence on a rigid gender binary. But that’s just what she did—on the floor of the House of Representatives, even. (link)

That’s right, in a speech attacking the Equality Act, which “would expand federal civil rights law to protect against discrimination based on LGBT and gender identity”, Boebert demanded to be called “Congressman Boebert” because, she said, the Fourteenth Amendment—which was passed in 1868, when women didn’t have the right to vote—used the word “man” in a gender-neutral way, such that, forever after, any use of the word “man” in America must be deemed gender-neutral.

Boebert has called the Equality Act an attempt to establish “the supremacy of gays and lesbians and transvestites.” {Note: As you can see, Boebert here deliberately uses an outdated, offensive, and inapt word for trans Americans.}

Conclusion

I had to leave much good information out of this article because of the memory limits Substack imposes, but suffice to say that Lauren Boebert has apparently told many lies about her background, and that besides seeing her top spokesman resign immediately after the January 6 insurrection, according to the Washington Post “dozens” of Colorado lawmakers have called for her to be expelled from Congress. Whether it will happen or not (expulsion is rare) is an open question; whether it deserves to happen is less murky.

Members of Congress who unrepentantly endanger their colleagues, advance theories originating within a domestic terror movement, raise money off of mass murder, lie to their constituents about even the most basic facts of the very biographies they ran on, openly exhibit grotesque bigotry, refuse to follow lawful orders from the U.S. Capitol Police, and are under investigation for both pre-insurrection incitement and possible seditious conspiracy don’t belong in the House of Representatives.

Coloradans have a right to send whoever they like to Congress—as long as it’s not a seditionist. Boebert has done so little of consequence in her first 100 days (her most consequential proposed legislation appears to be an angry attempt to bring back to America a captured ship that has been a tourist attraction in North Korea for more than a half-century) that the argument that she’s irreplaceable is laughable on its face.

If they like, Boebert’s constituents in Colorado can quickly find another local lunatic to send off to DC to become a taxpayer-funded influencer. It just can’t be this one.

And note that I didn’t even touch upon, above, what The Independent calls Boebert’s “history of criminal troubles, financial malfeasance, and association with militias.” Or the reporting in Mic about her arrest history and lies about her past volunteer work. Or her decision to attack rescue dogs—yes, rescue dogs—as the equivalent of illegal immigrants (a grave accusation in Boebert’s book). Or, as Newsweek has reported, her decision to support Trump’s “Big Lie” about “winning” the 2020 election by referring to the former president’s CPAC speech as a presidential “State of the Union address.” Boebert even had the audacity to support disgraced Trump attorney Sidney Powell’s since-debunked conspiracy theories about Dominion voting machines, demanding that Dominion machines be removed from all the precincts in her House district—despite the fact that when she won in 2020 by 6.5%, she did so via such machines.

In summary, Lauren Boebert has taken under 90 days to establish herself as one of the gravest menaces in DC—and a charlatan who defrauded the voters who voted for her.