What is Decolonize Colorado?
Unmasking the Progressive Colonial Takeover
Welcome to Decolonize Colorado, a Substack dedicated to exposing the progressive takeover of the Centennial State and its devastating toll on freedom, prosperity, and affordability. Once a land of rugged individualism and wide-open opportunity, Colorado has been reshaped by an ideology - Progressive Colonialism - that cloaks itself in compassion and equality but delivers stagnation, control, and decline. Here, we’ll peel back the layers of this transformation, drawing on sharp economic insights and real-world critiques to reveal what’s at stake—and how we can fight back.
From the perspective of Austrian economics, championed by Ludwig von Mises, progressivism is a rejection of the free market’s spontaneous order. Mises taught that liberty and wealth spring from voluntary exchange, guided by individual choice and undistorted by state overreach. Progressivism flips this on its head, leaning on centralized planning—think renewable energy mandates or tenant protection laws—that Mises would argue suffers from a fatal flaw: no planner can harness the decentralized wisdom of market signals.
The result?
Inefficiency, eroded capital, and a steady chokehold on personal freedom, all hallmarks of Colorado’s recent slide.
The evidence is stark. The Cato Institute’s Freedom in the 50 States ranks Colorado 4th overall in 2025, but the devil’s in the details. Land-use freedom has tanked under suffocating zoning and green mandates, labor-market freedom sputters with a high minimum wage and no right-to-work law, and regulatory creep—like drug price caps in emergencies—burdens entrepreneurs. This all aligns with the Austrian warning: intervention breeds more intervention, strangling the entrepreneurial spirit that once defined this state.
How did we get here? The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado lays it bare. Between 2004 and 2008, a handful of wealthy donors and NGOs—dubbed the “Gang of Four”—flipped the state NY, MA, and CA “blue”, using campaign finance loopholes and urban power bases like Denver to impose a top-down ideological reset. The fallout hits hard as housing affordability has collapsed, with Denver’s median home price soaring towards $600,000 with other communities seeing similar stark increases, driven by land-use restrictions and eco-mandates that shrink supply. Tax hikes for programs like universal preschool drain wallets - a textbook case of state overreach punishing productivity and pricing out the middle class. Colorado residents, despite the Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR) are nickel and dimed with fees all while the government schools, roads, and other services decline. As crime as increased, both local and state governments, completely captured by these colonialists have sought to disarm law-abiding Coloradans of their right to bear arms.
Michael Shellenberger’s San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities throws this into sharper relief. He argues that progressives, despite good intentions, worsen the problems they claim to fix—housing costs, homelessness, public safety—through naive dogma. In Colorado, rent controls and anti-development rules mirror San Francisco’s failures, slashing housing stock and driving prices up. Green mandates inflate energy bills, offering little gain for the pain—a pattern Shellenberger ties to progressives’ love of symbolic wins over real solutions. His critique of “victimology” and lax enforcement rings true too: rising overdoses and street disorder in Colorado’s cities echo San Francisco’s decline, a progressive refusal to balance compassion with accountability.
But it’s not just policy—it’s a mindset.
of the Disaffected Show (and Substack) further argues there is something even more nefarious at play - Cluster B dynamics which he’s argued left abusive households and instead gone feral across the country. In other words, it’s the operating system of Progressive Colonialism.Progressivism in Colorado acts like colonialism or evangelism, a crusade to convert or coerce much like empires once claimed territories under the guise of civilizing them. Backed by The Blueprint’s playbook, its proponents treat non-progressive areas as backward outposts needing salvation. Urban hubs like Boulder radiate their creed via laws, ballot measures, and cultural clout, often steamrolling local ways. Shellenberger nails this savior complex: progressives preach equity and sustainability as gospel, branding dissenters—say, on climate rules—as immoral heretics. The “Gang of Four” donors and their NGO machine play colonial overseers, certain their vision justifies domination, while most Coloradans bear the brunt of urban-crafted policies. Calling Progressivism a colonial movement isn’t just a metaphor—it’s a pattern rooted in the ideology’s history and psyche, illuminated by thinkers like Murray Rothbard, Thaddeus Russell, and Thomas Sowell.
In The Progressive Era, Rothbard traces progressivism’s origins to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when elite reformers—often Protestant moralists and corporate titans—pushed for state power to remake society in their image. He shows how progressives allied with big business to centralize control, using regulations and bureaucracy to stamp out local diversity and individual liberty. In Colorado, this echoes in the urban-centric policies—crafted largely in Denver, Boulder, and increasingly the mountain resort towns—that override realities, imposing a uniform vision of “progress” that benefits the connected few while stifling the rest.
Thaddeus Russell’s A Renegade History of the United States flips the script, spotlighting how progressives historically targeted the unruly, self-reliant underclass—immigrants, workers, saloon-goers (who as I’ll argue too created much of the pre-colonialized Colorado ethos) to enforce a sanitized, top-down order. Russell frames progressivism as a cultural conquest, intolerant of lifestyles that defy its prim ideals. In Colorado, this plays out as progressive elites push biology-denying gender ideology, green mandates, and housing rules that clash with the state’s frontier ethos.
Thomas Sowell’s works, like A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles and The Vision Of The Annointed: Self-congratulation As A Basis For Social Policy, nail the psychology too. In A Conflict of Visions, he contrasts the “constrained” view—where human nature limits what’s possible—with the progressive “unconstrained” vision, which assumes experts can perfect society through will and planning. Colorado’s progressive surge, from tax-funded social experiments to eco-regulations, reeks of this hubris. In The Vision of the Anointed, Sowell skewers the self-righteous certainty of progressives, who see themselves as anointed saviors, dismissing dissent as backwardness. This fuels their colonial drive: they don’t just want power—they want to convert, to remake every corner of Colorado into a reflection of their enlightened ideals.
Together, these critiques paint progressivism as a force that doesn’t persuade—it colonizes. Backed by The Blueprint’s machine—the “Gang of Four” donors and their NGO army—it treats rural and conservative holdouts as territories to subdue. Urban hubs radiate their creed via laws, ballot measures, and cultural clout, steamrolling local autonomy. Disagree with climate rules? You’re a denier. Oppose subsidies? You’re heartless. Want to drive a car or own a gun? You’re killing the planet and children. This evangelism demands conformity, preaching equity and sustainability as gospel while branding dissenters heretics. Regular Coloradans, rural, urban or suburban, bear the brunt—a classic colonial setup where the core exploits the periphery under a banner of uplift.
The stakes are clear: freedom is fading, affordability is vanishing, and prosperity is slipping away. Colorado, once a beacon of independence, is being remade by a progressive elite that sacrifices both liberty and practicality for utopian dreams. Decolonize Colorado is here to chart this takeover—and to spark a resistance.
In future posts, we’ll explore how to push back: dismantling the regulatory stranglehold, restoring market freedom, and reclaiming the state’s soul.
Join us as we work to decolonize Colorado, one idea at a time.