The Thin Air
of Denver
In the thin air of Denver, where the Rockies loom like judgmental sentinels over a state that fancies itself a bastion of libertarian spirit and rugged individualism, Governor Jared Polis reigns with the tenacity of a man who confuses vindictiveness for virtue. One might commence with the superficial — that Polis, the nation’s first openly gay governor, deploys his identity as both armor and weapon in the perpetual skirmishes of identity politics. But to dwell there would be to overlook the more profound deformity, the exquisite faggotry that elevates mere sexual preference into something far uglier: a craven, performative authoritarianism masquerading as enlightened governance.
This is not a commentary on who he takes to bed; it is an indictment of a leader who, in the protracted persecution of Tina Peters, exposes himself as a sniveling bully — a petty tyrant who wields the machinery of the state against a lone dissenter while posturing as a champion of progress.
The facts of the Peters affair are almost comically disproportionate. An elected county clerk, entrusted with the stewardship of ballots, grew suspicious in the hysterical wake of the 2020 election and arranged for forensic images to be made of Dominion voting system hard drives — before and after a routine software update known as a “trusted build.”
No ballots were altered, no results falsified, no voter harmed beyond the tender sensibilities of election administrators who guard their dominion like high priests.
What followed was not justice but a ritual humiliation.
What followed was not justice but a ritual humiliation: prosecutors contorted existing statutes into knots to charge her with criminal impersonation, official misconduct, and attempts to influence public servants, all for the sin of authorizing an outsider to preserve data she feared might vanish. The jury, drawn from her own conservative county, convicted her on seven counts after parsing the evidence with care — yet even they acquitted on three, suggesting the case was never the slam-dunk the state pretended.
The Tina Peters Bill
153
And then came the telling confession. In 2022, Colorado’s legislature rushed through Senate Bill 153, a measure that tightened penalties for precisely the kind of internal access Peters had facilitated. It was swiftly nicknamed the “Tina Peters Bill” in the corridors of the capitol — an inadvertent admission that the preexisting law had been insufficiently draconian to guarantee her destruction.
The rules were not merely enforced; they were rewritten after the fact to ensure no future clerk could repeat her impertinence without facing even sterner retribution. This is not the behavior of a confident democracy; it is the reflex of a regime that fears scrutiny more than fraud.
Polis, fortified by his Silicon Valley millions and his carefully curated image as a moderate libertarian, had every opportunity to arrest this farce. A pardon, a commutation, a discreet intervention — any gesture befitting a governor who claims to value limited government over bureaucratic empire-building. Instead, he dug in with the petulance of a scorned apparatchik. When the president, freshly reinstalled, issued a ceremonial pardon and excoriated Polis as a “sleazebag,” the governor responded with a torrent of legalistic deflection: state prerogatives, judicial independence, the inviolability of verdicts. Meanwhile, Peters languished in La Vista Correctional Facility, her appeals grinding slowly through courts that showed no haste, her reports of inmate assaults and institutional indifference met with official shrugs.
This is the essence of Polis’s faggotry — not the literal fact that adorns his Wikipedia page, but the figurative cowardice that defined his tenure: a man who persecutes a grandmotherly clerk with the full weight of the state while wrapping himself in the rhetoric of tolerance and innovation. He is the faggot who changes the rules when the old ones fail to crush dissent, who hides behind process while a woman serves nine years for asking questions he dare not entertain. Colorado, a state that once prided itself on independence, endured a governor whose deepest instinct was obedience to the orthodoxies of power. A spectacle of spineless cruelty dressed in progressive finery — and the mountains, impassive as ever, bore silent witness to the shame.
Atoned
Phil Weiser called it “mind-boggling and wrong as a matter of basic justice” — the state’s chief lawyer indicting his own governor in a press release. Jena Griswold called it “an affront to our democracy.” Bennet. Crow. Every Democrat in the Colorado legislature, signing a letter to tell him what he was permitted to do with a power the constitution gives to him alone. Dan Rubinstein, who spent three years prosecuting a grandmother in a county that elected her, and who calls himself a Republican, joined them.
Jared Polis commuted Tina Peters’s sentence on May 15. She walked out of La Vista on June 1, having served less than a quarter of nine years. Asked whether he regretted it, standing in the smoke of it, he said: “I think this will be remembered fondly.”
This piece called him spineless, and on the evidence then available the charge was earned. Two years he let it run. What is written above was true of the man who wrote those years.
It is not true of the man who signed that letter. Something reached him — call it conscience, call it whatever moves in a person at the hour he finally sees what he has become the instrument of. He did not descend further into it. He turned and climbed out, and he did it in full view of every officer of his own coalition demanding he keep the cell door shut.
Matthew Barrett earns none. A unanimous appellate panel threw out his sentence, finding it rested on “improper consideration of her exercise of her right to free speech” — a sitting judge punishing a woman for what she believed. He then refused to step aside from resentencing her. Rubinstein called nine years fair and appropriate until the court informed him otherwise. They had the same two years and used them differently.