Colorado’s Shift Left Sparks Growing Resentment in Neighboring States

By Wes Flynn | Commentary, Fleeting West (Substack)

Coloradans were once known for being friendly, modest, and considerate. That reputation has fundamentally shifted thanks to the last three million people who arrived and steamrolled the place.

I remember a time when meeting people and telling them that I’m from Colorado was met with intrigue and positive reception. Prior to the last 20 years or so, Coloradans were recognized as being friendly, modest, and maybe a little idiosyncratic due to our orientation to the outdoors and not paying much mind to the domestic space. Our roads were friendly and safe, our cities were quiet and friendly, and like most westerners, we really just wanted to go our own way and do our own thing and stay off the radar.

But that reputation has fundamentally shifted over the last 20-30 years into something unrecognizable from our prior statewide identity and there are clear reasons for it.

Doubling Colorado’s population over 30 years was the path to extinguishing Colorado’s culture.

I’ve noticed that those in our neighboring states are now kinda irritated when meeting “Coloradans.” Coloradans in sarcastic quotes because very few with this fashionably branded-identity-flare are from anywhere near Colorado. The entire sense of who Coloradans are, what we stand for, and how we behave has paradigm-shifted into something entirely opposite of a time when the majority of Coloradans were actually from the place.

When I say, from the place, I mean born, raised, educated, and worked in the place —The whole lived experience of being from that place1. I’m talking about acculturation to the place from the start, where the whole mind and body were formed in a way that’s interwoven with the entirety of the place itself.

Colorado’s population has grown so fast and doubled over such a short time that the majority of people living in the place are now not from Colorado or even the region. We’ve added three million people over the last 30 years by migration alone, which is a doubling of our population.

And the mass hysteria and psychosis that the pandemic caused drove people here faster than ever, more carelessly than ever, in such a way that I don’t think any of our population counters have a single clue how many people are here today. Then, there’s weed decriminalization. I suspect the state’s understanding of our population is low by factors in the hundreds of thousands.

Our highways are larger than they’ve ever been and also more gridlocked and packed than ever before, decriminalization of weed led to a huge population boom, and the pandemic appeared to pile people in like turds in clogged truck stop toilet that was already overflowing with shit.

We have more housing than ever before, yet housing prices for rent or purchase are higher than they’ve ever been2. The state is constantly under construction, but never able to fill the demand3. We keep building, and more people keep coming. Simultaneously, everything about living here gets worse, more expensive, and more intolerable to the people who were already here4.

Our state demographer doesn’t appear to have the tools to measure how many people inserted themselves into the state as a result of the unrecognized social and individual psychoses the pandemic triggered that led so many to believe that they needed to move to Colorado ‘in case things got bad enough, so they could live off the land.’ Their words, not mine — Pure Hollywood-fueled delusion.

The relationship with neighboring states has been turning more sour every year.

Colorado is a dying canary in the coal mine of the West that should act as warning about what can happen when the American urban subcultures decide that your city and state are the next object of their fad-driven obsessions. The spillover that will happen as Colorado becomes a worse and worse place to live will spill over into our neighboring states and region, which is already visible.

And it’s not just Colorado — Montana, Utah, Idaho, and Oregon are experiencing similarly explosive growth and the ensuing annihilation of their local cultures, economies, and environments. I know which states are next, too, and their people are really unfriendly and wisely dismayed about what’s happening in Colorado, Montana, and parts of Idaho and Oregon.

As a result of the explosive migration-driven growth and where it’s coming from, Colorado’s culture has been overturned. Our local culture that made Colorado friendly, easy, fun, and independent is now gone. The people who made that image are now buried under the hegemonic5 weight of the urban transplants who have moved here in mass, rapidly, and have overthrown every aspect of the local peoples’ influence over the experience of the place6.

The complete smothering of the local people of Colorado under a socio-political blanket of east coast, California, and Texan urbanites has fundamentally changed the perception of who Coloradans are, what they stand for, and how we behave everywhere from on roads while driving to how we behave as patrons and tourists. And it definitely isn’t for the better.

Despise of ‘Front Rangers’ is bubbling up across the region.

The total erasure of rooted Coloradans in our politics and regional culture has resulted in a highly negative perception with our neighboring states. Hilariously, even within Colorado, there are deep hatreds brewing. There are even hyper-local divides arising due to the extreme and rapid overturning of specific places that seem to attract perhaps the worst people on earth to move to in droves — places like, Denver, Colorado Springs, Boulder7, Parker, Aurora, Arvada, Golden, Loveland, Firestone — and so on. Pretty much every city on the Front Range of Colorado has undergone this apocalyptic transformation.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT FLEETING WEST

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