Politicians should be held responsible for their actions, not for the crimes hatched in the imaginations of their critics.
I’m not a fan of Colorado representative Lauren Boebert. I don’t like her rhetoric or her style. I wouldn’t be surprised if she said something completely insane tomorrow. But I’m also not a fan of the slander she’s been subjected to by journalists and Democrats.
The Hill reports today that a local Colorado Democrat challenging Boebert in 2022 calls her a “threat to democracy,” and blames her for helping incite the January 6 Capitol riot. The piece casually asserts that Boebert supports QAnon and “has been sharply criticized for tweeting details of lawmakers’ locations during the Capitol breach.”
Lots of journalists make these claims without context. Snopes, Axios, CNN, Associated Press, basically every news organization, has asserted that Boebert is a “QAnon supporter,” and compared her to Marjorie Taylor Greene. I suppose you’re going to need more than a single elected official to be QAnon friendly if you’re going to keep pretending the movement has taken over the Republican Party.
But is it true? Boebert, a political neophyte and restaurateur from Rifle, Colo., sounds like an unpolished, sometimes hyperbolic, slightly loopy Tea Party candidate. Even though her Second Amendment rhetoric might be off-putting to some suburbanites, most of her views, I expect, are well within the norm in her sprawling rural district.
When I went back to read her interviews from the 2020 campaign, I was expecting an unhinged lunatic. Instead, I found her saying things such as: “Do humans have a role to play in climate? Sure. We are always interrupting nature, but that’s part of our role is to interrupt nature and we need to be responsible and make sure we’re doing that in the best way, the most environmentally-friendly way.”
Anyway, the pro-QAnon charge, as far as I can tell, can be traced to a single podcast appearance, where she said this: “Everything that I’ve heard of Q, I hope that this is real. Because it only means that America is getting stronger and better, and people are returning to conservative values.”
There is no excuse for it. Boebert would later claim everything she had learned about QAnon came in a single conversation with her mom. Since then, Boebert has condemned the conspiracy as “Fake News,” and on numerous occasions denied having anything to do with it. This is a positive development, since all of us allegedly want Americans to eschew this conspiracy. But, while Boebert has to live with her own past statements, and those comments are fair game, it’s a stretch to call her a “supporter.”
In any event, Boebert was one of the GOPers who falsely claimed the election was stolen. Again, fair game. But after the Capitol riot, Democratic representative Steve Cohen went on numerous media outlets and repeatedly accused Boebert of giving a group of people a tour of the premises prior to the January 6 attack. He noted he wasn’t sure if they were involved in the insurrection or not but assumed an ominous tone in a CNN interview when he said, “she’s not on the home team. She was with the visitors.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other Democrats followed by contending that the violent mob had had help from inside. Representative Mikie Sherrill alleged that Republicans House members had been leading “reconnaissance” tours of Congress. I see this allegation repeated on social media all the time.
Boebert, however, says she had only given tours to her family members who had come to town for her swearing-in ceremony on January 2. And no one has ever provided any evidence to the contrary.
As the Denver Post — no QAnon shills, I assure you — noted, Cohen’s smears were not only unsubstantiated, they sparked a flood of “blatantly sexist and elitist attacks.”
For some, the riot was just another event to exploit for partisan gain. Soon, anyone who had voted the wrong way on the election certification in Congress — something numerous Democrats had done in 2015 and 2004 — was being held personally responsible for subsequent violence they had not endorsed in any way.
As the Post observed:
It’s just like how Boebert used terms like “stop the steal” and “voter fraud,” but when forced to articulate in an interview her election concerns, she delved into the weeds of changes in law in certain states that made it easier for people to vote (mail in ballots, accepting ballots arriving after Election Day, etc). No one would have sieged the Capitol and killed a police officer over mundane, perennial debates surrounding election law and policy.
On top of Cohen’s accusations, Democrats accused Boebert of helping seditionists as they rioted. Representative Debbie Dingell went on to claim that “one of our colleagues was telling people where Nancy Pelosi was. That’s, that’s just inexcusable.”
This, too, was directed at Boebert, who during the Capitol riot tweeted, “We were locked in the House Chambers,” and then a few minutes later “the Speaker has been removed from the chambers.” Several Congress members and journalists had also posted tweets about their locations and the safety of others during the riot. Whether Boebert should have been tweeting anything is up for debate, but to believe she was colluding with rioters is paranoia and cynicism. Politicians should be held responsible for their actions, not for the crimes hatched in the imaginations of their critics.