Who is
MAGA Mark?
Meet Lauren Boebert’s hand-picked candidate, Mark Baisley. He is a Colorado State Senator who is racing to be Trump’s rubberstamp crony in Congress.
After Boebert introduced him at the Republican Assembly, MAGA Mark’s speech centered on pushing his extreme views like creating a national ban on abortion, attacking “gender studies,” and overturning common sense gun control.
TOO EXTREME FOR COLORADO: MAGA MARK
Mark Baisley stands by
Trump’s secret police and
their cruel attacks on
our immigrant communities.
Baisley blamed ICE protestors for the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. When Hickenlooper called out Baisley’s remarks, he doubled down and claimed that ICE “effectively saved” the five year-old boy when ICE detained him with his father and sent them to Texas, away from their family in Minneapolis.
On the other hand, Hickenlooper has refused to give ICE another penny, shown up at ICE facilities for oversight visits, and helped Coloradans who are detained. He is committed to fixing our immigration system, which is fundamentally broken. He’s introduced legislation to ban ICE from wearing masks and require them to display clear identification. He has also fought to prevent immigration enforcement from targeting schools, hospitals, and places of worship.
Baisley has demonized our immigrant community and espoused Islamaphoic views. At an Elbert County Candidate Forum, Baisley stated that Islam “is in direct conflict” with the Declaration of Independence and is an “existential threat for our liberties.”
Meanwhile, Hickenlooper has called out the Trump admin’s racist threats and introduced legislation to protect against discriminatory immigration bans like those President Trump implemented during his first term.
Mark Baisley backs
Trump’s corrupt
administration
Baisley went after Hickenlooper, stating that Hickenlooper’s biggest weakness was how he is standing up to the president for all his cruel attacks on Colorado.
Meanwhile, Baisley has described the Trump administration as an “amazing Renaissance,” even as president vetoed. Hickenlooper’s bipartisan bill to deliver clean drinking water to 50,000 Coloradans, denied emergency funding to help families rebuild their lives after wildfires and floods, and is attacking funding for science and arts across the country.
Baisley even flat-out said he “look[s] forward to working with the Trump administration.”
Hickenlooper knows the Trump admin is the most corrupt administration in our history. He’s stopped from selling our public lands to fund tax cuts for the Epstein class. He’s fighting Trump’s slush fund to give taxpayer handouts to election criminals like Tina Peters.
Mark Baisley has attacked
the LGBTQ+ community and
tried to ban gay marriage in Colorado.
MAGA Mark has consistently attacked his LGBTQ colleagues in the Colorado General Assembly saying they have a “brokenness in their spirit and in their minds” and are “in rebellion against nature.”
Even as 65% of Americans support gay marriage, Baisley tried to ban gay marriage in Colorado in 2020 and introduced a bill to allow businesses and religious organizations refuse service for people based on their sexual orientation.
Baisley praised the Supreme Court’s decision to allow the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop to discriminate against gay couples, urging “fellow conservatives to rejoice for justice.”
In contrast, Hickenlooper has fought for equal rights for all.
As governor of Colorado, Hickenlooper signed into law legislation that allowed same-sex couples to enter into civil unions in 2013. Hickenlooper also signed a law to expand the Family and Medical Leave Act in Colorado to include same-sex partners.
In the Senate, he helped passed the Respect for Marriage Act, which protects marriage equality and guarantees same-sex and interracial couples the same rights afforded to all other marriages nationwide.
Speaking at the Colorado Capitol last week, State Sen. Mark Baisley (R-Woodland Park) blamed protesters for the violence in Minneapolis, calling it a “horrible idea” for protesters to “get involved in legal law-enforcement activity.”
“It endangers those people,” said Baisley from the Senate floor. “It endangers the agents who are trying to carry out the lawful orders to remove violent people from the United States.”
“We want to keep the number of immigrants low enough so that those folks will assimilate into our culture, more than they will bring the richness of their culture,” continued Baisley.
A few days later, U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) posted a video of Baisley’s comments on X with the comment, “American citizens shot dead. A five-year-old separated from his family and taken into custody. Masked officers tossing people into unmarked cars without due process. And you’re instead going after peaceful protestors and our immigrant communities??”
Asked on KHOW radio Feb. 2 to respond to Hickenlooper, Baisley said ICE didn’t arrest the 5-year-old boy, but “effectively rescued” him.
“As I understand it, the ICE agents effectively rescued that abandoned five-year-old boy, took him to his home to go hand him over to his mother, who would not open the door. So what do you do? You take care of a child like that. And they did, and they did absolutely,” said Baisley.
As a factual matter, the child was arrested by ICE after his father fled.
The child’s mother, who is pregnant and had other children in the house when ICE arrived with her son, told Telemundo she feared agents would arrest her if she opened the door. “They used my boy as bait,” NBC News reported.
Baisley’s statement about limiting immigration in order to prevent cultural change in the U.S. isn’t the first time he’s expressed concern about migrants from other countries. In 2021, Baisley told the Colorado Times Recorder that his statement “we have allowed the weeds to overwhelm the garden was not a reference to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, but rather that “these are people responding to President Biden’s invitation of coming to America in droves in order to become dependent on government largess and vote for more of the same; the destructive culture of socialism.”