What has the Wyoming Freedom Caucus been doing since we last checked on those gomers? Besides sitting around in red blazers and tinfoil Stetsons, staring at the sky and working up a lather over chemtrails and UFOs, I mean.
Opinion
It turns out they’ve been gazing into their murky crystal ball, and seeing a future for the Big Empty that is equally murky and sepia-toned like the faded photo of a 19th-century frontier ghost town. The Chemtrail Caucus is cranking out legislative initiatives that will set Wyoming back more than a hundred years, and they are high-fiving and back-slapping one another for turning back the clock.
Among the jokers that the Chemtrail Caucus pulled from the bottom of their marked deck is legislation to defund and dismantle the Wyoming Business Council, the organ of state government that allows Wyoming to compete nationally and globally in recruiting new businesses to the state.
They use tired old talking points from Adam Smith to claim that Wyoming must be a “free market” economy, and bootstrap ourselves to prosperity without government involvement. What they neglect to mention is that there isn’t a “free market” economy anywhere else in the world. And to turn Wyoming into some sort of capitalist wetdream is to place us at an existential disadvantage, and doom our young citizens to finding work nowhere but in the Ivermectin mines. Talk about stepping back from the future!
The past year has seen these nincompoops put roadblocks in the way of new energy projects that sought to capitalize on what Wyoming has to offer. But, oh no! Because these projects didn’t dovetail with their crystal ball vision of how they want our state to look in a decade or two, the tinfoil Stetson crowd dug in their heels and said, “Not in OUR state!”
As if that isn’t enough, the Chemtrail Caucus plans to whittle down funding for our only four-year university. Its vision of the University of Wyoming seems to be one dusty old sandstone building standing alone on the prairie. Inside it, no troubling liberal subjects are taught to the hungry young minds of tomorrow, only readin’, ritin’ and ‘rithmetic. Graduates will be perfectly positioned to find work on cattle drives or in the coal patch.
They want to axe funding for Wyoming Public Radio, simply because those stations don’t spew right-wing dogma, and don’t play enough Toby Keith and Kid Rock songs. And they want to divest public land in Wyoming simply because they don’t like feds.
The misguided gomers in the Chemtrail Caucus seem intent on reducing the tax base in the Cowboy State to the point that our dirt streets will run hock-deep in horseshit because our towns don’t have the wherewithal to take care of themselves. No fire departments, no water or sewer systems, no law enforcement, no schools … all our necessary infrastructure sacrificed on the altar of their populist pledge to cut taxes.
And, if they get their way, nobody will be able to vote except land-owning white males, just like it says in our original Constitution.
These knuckleheads don’t want to honor Wyoming’s past, they want to recreate it.
Because some of the Chemtrail Caucus’ anachronistic legislative efforts have been struck down as unconstitutional by the courts, its response is to reduce the number of justices on the Wyoming Supreme Court. They envision a future where the judicial branch will be reduced to only one or two circuit judges wandering horseback through the sagebrush, unable to thwart Wyoming’s inexorable slide backward in time.
It’s easy to conclude that the Chemtrail Caucus crystal ball contains only scenes of a glorified past in which kids die in flickering candlelight, unvaccinated against measles, smallpox and diphtheria. In its vision, Wyoming ekes out a meager existence as an energy colony for the rest of the world, lives hand-to-mouth on what we can scrounge for ourselves and yearns more for the past than the future.
When challenged to defend this bleak worldview, they thump their chests and say, “This is what the people voted for.”
Friends and neighbors, let’s take a gander into our own crystal ball and see what it says about our future.
Look! It says that the GOP primary election in Wyoming is Aug. 18 and we’ll all have the chance to use it as a referendum on the Chemtrail Caucus and the snake oil that they’ve tried to force down our throats since they took power in the last election. Since the Chemtrail Caucus is an abscess on our body politic, here’s our chance to remove it and prevent it from dragging us into the past.
At the risk of repeating myself, I’ll repeat myself … Aug. 18.