The governor encouraged Coloradans to follow the controversial online personalities, saying they do “actual thinking.”
Someone from Governor Jared Polis’s team should seriously revoke his social media privileges.
It was just one year ago that the Democratic governor of Colorado inspired statewide outrage for posting a celebration of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s appointment to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — mere months after Polis himself said the famous anti-vaxer would bring back measles and polio.
Now, Polis is back with an even stranger endorsement. In an X post on December 7, the governor encouraged his constituents to follow Richard Hanania and Nicholas Decker on social media.
Hanania spent years writing for white supremacist publications, expressing support for eugenics and opposition against “race-mixing.” Decker has posted frequently in defense of various sex crimes, including consuming AI-generated child pornography and having sexual relations with minors and animals.
Polis lauded Hanania and Decker as “intellectuals” who “are doing actual thinking which is rare these days,” though he noted that his promotion of the men “doesn’t mean I agree with them most or all of the time.”
The governor’s team doubled down on that last part when Westword asked Polis to clarify his endorsement of the men. Westword’s inquiry included an article from The Atlantic detailing Hanania’s ties to white supremacist ideology.
“The Governor was clear in his post that he doesn’t agree with the majority of what these individuals believe and he is always open to hearing differing viewpoints,” says Shelby Wieman, a spokesperson for Polis. “His focus remains on leading for Colorado, and that includes listening to opposing perspectives and finding ways to disagree better no matter where they land in the depths of social media.”
That difference matters a LOT. Leadership personality and tone-setting matters a lot. I don’t think that she would have made things broadly much better in a policy sense, but I didn’t vote for her expecting her policies to make life better, I voted for her to keep fucking Trump out so we can have a few more years to desperately try to keep pushing the needle back left and raise up more potential socialist and progressive leaders like we saw with Mamdani… something that gets squashed more often when someone like Trump is prying the whole system apart and installing judges. I swear we need more fucking mandatory civics classes.
I don’t get why this is controversial for people. It’s like everyone tunes the fuck out every four years and just focuses on that ONE sporting event, instead of looking at politics in terms of a gradual, ongoing process.
Lemmy is really bad about this being a little further left, and I’m not even counting the .ml shadow side of the valley. Generally this site is a good view into the attention spans and mature political analysis of our current leftist movement. Which is to say, any day now some amazing socialist is going to descend from socialist heaven and start leading us to a huge revolution and even after it ends somehow we don’t have to worry about the tens of millions of people who didn’t want the socialist revolution.
It doesn’t really matter though because the last several federal elections have had the highest voter turnout and youth turnout in US history. The problem wasn’t angy leftists folding their arms, the problem is our population has gotten dumb. People tuned out the news because nothing makes sense anymore, you don’t know who to trust, and people broadly don’t socialize as much so there’s less social incentives to have and hold values and opinions. Think hard. No think, scroll.