ANALYSIS
Disclosure: I am the respondent in Rep. Boebert’s protection order case in Weld County. My attorneys are contesting it with a anti-SLAPP motion.
At Thursday’s hearing in Weld County, Judge Dana Nichols made clear early on that the day was not going to be a hearing on the evidence. That didn’t stop Scott Gessler, Rep. Lauren Boebert’s attorney. He kept coming back to one theme: my posts about his client. He read them aloud. He called them nasty. He suggested they were evidence that she needs protection from me.
I’ll own my posts. Some are harsh. I’ve called her a liar, a hypocrite, whore, and worse, and I stand behind the commentary or rude comments under every one. All of it is political speech about a sitting member of Congress, which is the most protected speech there is under the First Amendment.
But if crude, mocking, or insulting posts about political opponents are the standard, it’s worth looking at the congresswoman’s own record. Not because her posts are illegal. They aren’t. Hers are protected too. The point is that a politician who has built a brand on mockery is now asking a court to treat mockery of her as a threat.
I reviewed 971 posts from her two X accounts, her personal account and her official congressional account. Here is a sample, in her own words.
On LGBTQ Americans
The worst post I found didn’t come from her campaign account. It came from her official House account, the one run as part of her congressional office. In it, she asked Democrats whether they were groomers or pedophiles. She has also called a transgender federal health official a groomer, and told critics to expect to be called “groomers” too.
On Vice President Kamala Harris
She has called Harris “psychotic,” “incompetent,” and “a Communist at heart,” and mocked her for using pronouns.
On President Joe Biden
On guns
On everyone else
A fellow Republican on the morning of her primary. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, under the “Jihad Squad” label Boebert later apologized for using against Rep. Ilhan Omar. Beto O’Rourke, the day after the Uvalde school shooting. John Fetterman, while he recovered from a stroke. And her own House colleagues, whom she called “creatures” this year.
“It goes directly to her”
Gessler’s other argument was that tagging his client’s accounts on X is contact. Any time someone uses either of her handles, he told the court, it goes directly to her and she receives them.
So I asked X how many posts that is.
According to X’s own data, her two accounts have been tagged in 24.7 million posts since December 2019. In 2026 alone, through September 30, it’s 625,241. That’s about 2,300 a day.
In the three days Gessler cited in his contempt motion, September 24 through 26, her accounts were tagged 2,690 times. I wrote 19 of them. That’s less than 1 percent. Over the life of her accounts, my posts tagging her add up to about 2,475, roughly one of every 10,000.
Now take Gessler at his word. If every tag lands in front of her personally, and she spends 15 seconds on each, that’s more than nine hours a day reading X notifications in 2026. At her 2022 peak, it would have taken 90 hours a day.
If that’s true, we finally have an explanation for her legislative record.
What she gets done
Since 2021, Boebert has introduced 74 bills. One became law on its own: a land transfer for Clifton, Colorado, signed in January 2025. Two more slipped through only because their text was folded into the annual defense bill. Six others passed the House and died in the Senate. Nothing she has sponsored has become law in 2026.
Her office advertises “75 legislative priorities signed into law.” Those are funding lines and provisions tucked into large spending packages, not bills she wrote. That’s still a lot of free time for reading 2,300 tags a day.
Why not just mute me?
Of course, that isn’t how X works. Mentions are public posts. X filters and ranks them, and users can mute, block, or never open the notifications tab at all. Neither of her accounts even accepts direct messages. A tag is a public conversation about her, not a letter to her.
And if my posts were really landing in her inbox, X gives her a two-tap solution: mute. She’d never see my tags again, and I’d never know. She didn’t need a judge for that. She needed a judge to stop a reporter.
Blocking me from her official account would be a different matter. Courts have treated officials’ government-use accounts as public forums, where blocking critics over their views can violate the First Amendment. In other words, the law treats her official account as a public square. Gessler wants the court to treat it as a private mailbox.
The threats she ignored
Real threats against Boebert exist. A search of X turns up posts from strangers wishing she would die by firing squad, saying federal agents would be justified in shooting her, and calling for her to be hanged, several posted directly to her accounts. As far as court records show, she has never sought a protection order against any of them. She sought one against the reporter who filed an ethics complaint.
What the Supreme Court said about this in 1988
In Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, the Rev. Jerry Falwell sued over a crude parody ad that mocked him in the most personal way imaginable. A jury awarded him damages for emotional distress. The Supreme Court threw it out, 8 to 0.
Chief Justice William Rehnquist, a conservative, wrote the opinion. He started here:
“At the heart of the First Amendment is the recognition of the fundamental importance of the free flow of ideas and opinions on matters of public interest and concern.”
He warned that public figures will face “vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks,” and that one who brags about a spotless record “cannot convincingly cry ‘Foul!’ when an opponent or an industrious reporter attempts to demonstrate the contrary.”
He rejected the idea that speech loses protection because it’s offensive:
“[T]he fact that society may find speech offensive is not a sufficient reason for suppressing it. Indeed, if it is the speaker’s opinion that gives offense, that consequence is a reason for according it constitutional protection.”
And he explained why “outrageous” is no standard at all, because it would let a court punish speech “on the basis of their dislike of a particular expression.”
Falwell was a public figure who said he was emotionally wounded by something far cruder than anything I’ve written. The Court told him that’s the price of public life. A member of Congress gets the same answer.
The double standard
Every one of her posts is protected speech. I would defend her right to post every one of them.
What I won’t accept is the idea that the First Amendment protects her when she asks Democrats whether they’re pedophiles from an official government account, mocks a stroke survivor, and calls a transgender health official a groomer, but somehow stops protecting me when I report on her conduct and call her names. Or that one reporter’s 19 posts, among 2,690, are a threat she can’t escape.
A protection order is supposed to stop real threats. It is not supposed to settle who gets to be rude on the internet. If it were, she’d have a lot of explaining to do.
The next hearing is November 16.
Stand with me
Fighting this case costs real money, even when you’re right. If you believe the First Amendment applies to everyone, not just members of Congress, please chip in to my legal defense fund.
David B. Wheeler
Sources: Rep. Boebert’s posts retrieved through the X API v2 full-archive search, October 3, 2026, and rendered from X. Tag counts from the X API v2 full-archive counts endpoint, retrieved October 1, 2026; counts include posts, replies, and quotes still on X, and exclude deleted posts. Legislative record from the Congress.gov API, retrieved October 3, 2026, and Rep. Boebert’s press releases. Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46 (1988).
About the Author
David B. Wheeler is the president and co-founder of American Muckrakers, the Western North Carolina accountability organization best known for helping end Madison Cawthorn’s congressional career in 2022, the rare instance in modern politics of a sitting incumbent losing his own primary because somebody bothered to do the homework. Since then, American Muckrakers has turned its attention to Lauren Boebert, Ken Paxton, and a growing roster of politicians who confuse public office with a personal ATM. He publishes accountability journalism at Muckrakers.Today.
Wheeler co-hosts the MUCK YOU! podcast with Col. Moe Davis, the retired Air Force colonel and former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay. He is the author of Color the Crooks, Case File #001: Lauren Boebert, the coloring book James Carville endorsed with the words “She earned every damn page. Buy it.” *He is also the founder of VoteROI.com, a political data company built on 86.9 million FEC records that helps donors figure out where their money actually goes, which, as this essay makes clear, is a question more people should be asking.
Before all that, Wheeler spent three decades in politics, elections, and event production in more than 50 countries on all seven continents. Along the way he lowered the Mississippi River, produced the first professional sports event ever held in Moscow, and produced the first marathon ever run on Antarctica. His political education started early: Page for the Iowa House of Representatives, intern in the United States Senate, and National Committeeman for Iowa on the Young Democrats of America national committee. David was the lead advance guy for then Senator Obama in Iowa City, Iowa, in October of 2006, and then again during his presidential announcement in Waterloo, Iowa, in February 2007. And, he has some good stories from both experiences.
An Iowa native and proud Hawkeye, Wheeler is a father of three and lives in the mountains of Western North Carolina, in the district Chuck Edwards is currently failing. He believes sunlight is the best disinfectant, filings don’t lie, and the loudest guy in the room is usually the one with the most to hide.
And, Beetlejuice Boebert claimed she was going to sue him. She never did, so David sued her in Federal Court in Denver and partially won.
Paid for by American Muckrakers PAC II (americanmuckrakers.com). Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Donations made to American Muckrakers, Inc. are not deductible for federal or state tax purposes.
This publication is First Amendment protected speech and commentary on matters of public concern. All individuals referenced are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law. No portion of this publication may be used for commercial purposes without the written consent of American Muckrakers PAC, Inc. and David B. Wheeler.
Pathetic
References
Federal Election Commission. (2022). Factual and legal analysis: MUR 7876 (Lauren Boebert for Congress).
Federal Election Commission. (2026). BOEBERT, LAUREN - Campaign finance candidate overview. U.S. Government.
Schouten, F. (2021, September 23). Rep. Lauren Boebert used campaign funds for rent and utilities, new filing shows. CNN.