The GOP staffers at the party’s state headquarters in Greenwood Village should go ahead and take down the American and Colorado flags and run up the Trump and Q flags that they hid in the closet for 2022.
The party is done pretending in this state to reject the extremists’ lies that fueled an attack on the U.S. Capitol and caused a constitutional crisis. It’s a shocking decision following an election where even their most anti-Trump candidates got trounced at the polls.
Last week Dave Williams, an election conspiracy theorist who maintains without evidence that the 2020 election was stolen, was regretfully nominated the head of the Colorado Republican Party.
Williams certainly hasn’t come a long way since his college days when he used his position as student body president to discriminate against an LGBT student group at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.
Since being ousted from student council in 2007, Williams has served as the chair of the El Paso County Republican Party, represented Colorado House District 15 in El Paso County, and run an unsuccessful campaign for Congress.
But while his job title has changed, Williams is still the same old bigoted bully, only now with more power to wield than just refusing to sign off on the approximately $2,000 check to fund an LGBT student organization.
Williams proposed several amendments to a House Resolution supporting voting rights in 2022, thanking those who joined the Save America Rally for Trump in 2020, and then calling into question the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s election. The amendments also supported indicted Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters who he claimed “now faces unjust persecution and prosecution.” He also called for the state to end use of Dominion Voting Systems — a Colorado company subjected to outlandish claims of election fraud by Trump and his supporters following the 2020 election.
We aren’t sure exactly what was going through the heads of the approximately 200 Republican Party leaders who voted for Williams. We thought that conservative El Paso County sent a pretty clear message about Williams’ divisive brand of politics – often divorced from reality – when only 33% of voters in Congressional District 5 supported Williams.
A conservative who can’t win a majority in El Paso County against a flawed incumbent who faced an embarrassing personal scandal involving the misuse of congressional office resources, including allowing his son to sleep in Capitol office space, should be a red flag to those who hope for a Republican Party comeback.
And yet, Williams is now bearing the standard for the Colorado GOP.
The second-place choice, Erik Aadland, would have been a much wiser choice.
Aadland is a thoughtful man who served this country in the Marines. Yes, he was caught on camera once fully endorsing the stolen election conspiracy, but Aadland has worked hard to distance himself from that position, including taking a more forceful stance against the election lies when he ran for Congress than GOP candidate for governor, Heidi Ganahl, did in 2020.
We can see why Republican insiders wanted to move away from former Chair Kristi Burton Brown, who oversaw a historically dismal Republican performance in 2022, at a time when many predicted a red wave in a mid-term election with an unpopular Democrat in the White House.
But we are dismayed that they decided to move further away from decency and instead embrace the group that rallied across the street from GOP headquarters in November, calling for Burton to resign in vulgar and appalling terms, including calling leaders of the GOP “whores,” “evil” and saying Burton “hates America.”
Williams styled himself as a “wartime leader” at the convention in Loveland where he was elected, talking about a war within America.
If we were to employ such outlandish rhetoric, we would say there is a war, but it is an anti-corruption war for honesty, equality and freedom with Trump on one side and most Americans on the other. Williams stands on the wrong side of history.
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