re: #122 Anymouse 🌹🏡

Brighton, Colorado, the seat of the Socialist People’s Republic of …

[checks notes]

Weld County, Colorado. Home of wingnut “constitutional sheriff” Sheriff Steve Reams.

Weld County, which exported their burgeoning coronavirus outbreak to our virus-free Wyobraska.

That made me facefault for a second, because I was pretty sure there was no way Brighton would be the Weld County seat. Yes, there are seats in Colorado that aren’t the most populous town, but Greeley is near the centre of Weld County and it’s as large as Bend, Oregon. And at any rate, Brighton’s partly in Weld solely because of post-80s sprawl.

I know I shouldn’t be relying on Wikipedia for much, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t steering me wrong when it tells me Brighton is the Adams county seat. Which makes a lot more sense, even if there are definitely larger communities with a major Adams County portion (Thornton, Westminster and Aurora, specifically, but all three span an adjacent county and Aurora’s Adams-County portion really isn’t all that much there there so at least it makes sense not to give the seat to. And Commerce City’s about equal in population but doesn’t have much land not currently under industrial use).

I suppose it’s possible the arrest was in Weld, but Adams is a blue fortress and has been since the 60s, though working-class rather than executive in nature.
Still won’t doubt for a minute the arrested party was white, though, or Walsh wouldn’t have cared one bit. Besides, about the only PoC that far from Denver are of various Latinx ancestries. Black people don’t tend to go much further north than Thornton, and I’m not sure they even tend to be there (Brighton in particular actually has more First Nations people than Black ones—at 1.47 percent versus UNDER A PERCENT). Though it has gotten up to 40% Latinx, but that includes the white Mexican-Americans as well as the mestizo ones. They could also theoretically have been Asian (about the same percentage as First Nations), but I doubt Walsh would have shown any anger at “Chinese folk” being arrested anymore; I doubt the Right will ever let Asian people have their “model minority” status back, since they appear to be gearing up for actual pogroms against that demo now.

(This has been your “way more than you need to know about how lily-white the entire damn state of CO is, but then again it’s partly that way because the first stationary settlement in its entire territory was AFTER the Mexican War, and the few Southern 59ers rarely brought slaves” update for the day).