Progressive politics rarely arrives announcing itself as ideology.

It arrives as emergency, not to solve a problem, but to justify a savior.

The language is familiar: equity, justice, compassion, fairness. The tone is moral. The urgency is absolute. And the message is always the same — this city is broken, its institutions are corrupt, and only radical intervention can save it.

That is how Aurora’s new progressive class rode into office. Not on a record of results. Not on demonstrated competence. But on a bed of lies — narratives untethered from facts, designed to manufacture crisis and justify policies that quietly but predictably damage the city’s economic and civic foundations.

This is not a dispute over values.

It is a dispute over reality.

Consider how the narrative is constructed.

Newly elected City Councilwoman Ali Jackson has said she was motivated to run for office after a city council member allegedly made racist statements. Yet no such statements have been identified. No names. No quotes. No record. In a city where council meetings are recorded and archived, this omission is not trivial. It is a serious accusation offered without evidence.

Such claims do more than impugn an individual. They delegitimize the institution itself. Once the charge of racism is emotionally accepted, facts become secondary and scrutiny becomes suspect. Moral accusation replaces proof, and governance becomes performance.

A similar pattern appears in claims about economic neglect. Councilwoman Amy Wiles has positioned herself as an advocate for grocery stores in Ward II, presenting the issue as evidence of systemic failure. But grocery access in Ward II has already been addressed through city planning, redevelopment strategies, and partnerships. This was not an unrecognized problem suddenly discovered by new leadership.

It is revisionism.

Progress requires continuity.

Narratives require amnesia.

The most consequential distortions, however, concern policing, crime, and public order.

Some city council members have declared that the Aurora Consent Decree has failed. This assertion betrays either ignorance or intentional misrepresentation.

Aurora’s police department operates under a state-level consent decree, designed to correct specific deficiencies through training, accountability, and oversight under Colorado standards. Its purpose is reform with benchmarks — not permanent condemnation. By those benchmarks, progress is significant, real and ongoing.

Declaring “failure” without reference to those benchmarks reveals a deeper truth: improvement itself is politically inconvenient. A narrative of permanent crisis cannot survive evidence of reform.

That narrative is reinforced by the distortion of oversight itself. The independent monitor created a Citizen’s Advisory Council intended to strengthen community communication with the monitor during reform. In practice, the council became dominated by anti-police activists, many of whom openly rejected the legitimacy of the monitor himself.

This is not civic engagement.

It is ideological capture.

When an advisory body denies the authority of the very process it was created to support, failure is not discovered — it is pre-decided.

The same moral inversion appears in how crime and immigration are discussed.

Progressive council members routinely refer to individuals who entered the country illegally as “newcomers”— a term chosen to erase illegality, neutralize enforcement, and transform a policy failure into a humanitarian abstraction. Language is doing the work policy refuses to do.

Words are not incidental.

They are instruments.

When lawbreaking is linguistically laundered, the rule of law itself becomes negotiable. Enforcement is framed as cruelty. Accountability is treated as intolerance. And the costs — financial, social, and civic — are borne by working-class neighborhoods least able to absorb them.

That inversion reaches its most grotesque expression in the creation or endorsement of memorials to criminals, where individuals who committed violent or destructive acts are recast as victims or martyrs. In these moments, justice is not merely softened — it is inverted. Victims disappear. Communities are asked to mourn the very behavior that destabilized them.

A city cannot maintain order while ritualizing disorder.

And yet this rhetoric persists, alongside the repeated assertion — explicit or implied — that Aurora’s police force is racist. It is an accusation made broadly, casually, and without grounding in comparative data or acknowledgment of reform.

You cannot demand better policing while insisting improvement is impossible.

These lies are not isolated. They form the moral foundation upon which the next phase of policy rests — and those policies are economically destructive.

Progressive governance in Aurora has grown increasingly hostile to enterprise. Retail businesses face reversal of recent limits on retail crime.

And crime tolerance, reframed as compassion, becomes an unspoken economic policy. Disorder raises insurance costs, drives out investment, and punishes families with the least ability to absorb instability.

Redistribution is prioritized over production. Wealth is treated as something to be reallocated rather than created. But you cannot redistribute what you have already driven away.

Housing policy follows the same logic. Price controls, mandates, and delays treat housing as a moral abstraction rather than an economic reality. The result is predictable: less housing, higher costs, slower development.

This pattern is not unique to Aurora. San Francisco, Portland, Chicago, New York, Denver — the same moral storytelling, the same denial of reality, the same economic wreckage.

Aurora still has a choice.

The issue is not left versus right.

It is fantasy versus reality.

Lies can win elections. They cannot run cities. And economic reality — unlike ideology — always collects its debt.

Aurora deserves leadership grounded in truth, accountability, and respect for institutions that can be reformed rather than endlessly condemned. Progress built on lies is not progress at all. It is merely the prelude to decline.

Michael A. Hancock is a retired high-tech business executive and a Coloradan since 1973. Originally from Texas, he is a musician, composer, software engineer and U.S. Air Force veteran whose wide-ranging interests — from science and religion to politics, the arts and philosophy — shape his perspective on culture, innovation and what it means to be a Coloradan.