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I took time off from work last week to testify at the Capitol. This isn’t as impressive as it sounds. Anybody can do it if you:
1) Know where, when and how to sign up, 2) have a way to get to Denver, 3) can afford to give up a few hours of your life in the middle of the day, and 4) are naive and idealistic enough to believe what you say will somehow make Colorado a better place. Lucky me, I hit the quadfecta. So off I went.
Colorado’s Legislature is bicameral. For those of you who’ve forgotten high school civics (do they even teach that anymore?), that means it’s got two chambers: a House and a Senate. Presumably it’s modeled after the one in Washington, hopefully less dysfunctional. Bills can be introduced in either chamber, and as part of the process of becoming law it gets referred to a committee. Committees hold hearings where citizens can testify. That’s why I was there.
Is there any part of our lives that the progressives under the Gold Dome don’t want to control, right down to how we carry our purchases home?
It’s the little bits of intolerance that help me understand their anti-liberty desires. Maybe because looking at their “small” acts of authoritarianism makes it easier to understand how they are so comfortable pushing the huge ones, like single-payer health care, price controls and banning energy.
It comes down to the fact that they are intolerant of individual choice. They hate that we have different values, and we make choices based on those values.
President Joe Biden, who turned his candidacy around with strong support from Black Americans, is paying them back with the most openly racist public policy since Jim Crow: banning menthol cigarettes.
Banning menthol cigarettes is racist, because the evidence they’re popular among African-Americans is even stronger than the evidence that smoking them causes cancer. According to the Center for Disease Control, African-Americans are the group with the highest percentage of menthol cigarette use. The FDA reports that 85% of Black smokers use menthol cigarettes, more than twice that of whites.
The standard reply to this is that tobacco companies aggressively market menthol cigarettes to Black communities. There’s good evidence this is true. Menthol cigarettes are given more shelf space in minority neighborhoods, and areas with large minority populations tend to have more tobacco retailers.