THE POWER OF THE BIG LIE

Three days after I graduated from South High School in Denver, Colorado, I was gone, having enlisted in the Navy. I had learned at age 10 - when the kid who became my best friend in school moved in with his family across the street, coming from Salt Lake City - that I didn’t have to stay there all my life and had been planning my escape since. I came back three years later for a year to go to college, since the “number two teacher’s training school in America,” known then as Colorado State College, was the only school a kid with test scores in the top 12 percent and grades 125 from the bottom of a class of 950 could get into. I was gone a year later and other than two three day Christmas visits and two visits to be sure they were burying the right body, I haven’t been back.

I was reminded this morning why that is when I read the news about the weekend meeting of the Colorado Republican Party.

The favorite of all the candidates who appeared before the party faithful in search of their support for the election this fall was Tina Peters, the Colorado county clerk who faces federal charges for her involvement in a conspiracy theory-fueled scheme to breach her county election systems’ security protocols.

Peters received 61% of the vote for Secretary of State, more than twice what was required to appear on the primary ballot. It was the highest percentage of support for any candidate in any contested race and came despite - or more likely, because of - Peters’ recent 10-count federal indictment for having bypassed election data security protocols in the Mesa County clerk’s office.

Peters proclaimed, “They made me sleep on the concrete jail floor for 30 hours, because I protected your election data.” In RepublicanWorld, where the sky is green and the grass is blue, Peters is criminally accused of doing the opposite. According to the federal grand jury indictment, her actions involved stealing the identity of a local man to create an extra security pass for the elections office, which resulted in the distribution of confidential information from county election systems. The information ultimately surfaced at a “symposium” organized by Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow., who announced at a recent rally with her that he had donated $800,000 for her legal defense - a violation of Colorado state law, which caps such donations at $65.

While Peters has been prohibited by a judge from handling election matters, that didn’t stop the 3,700 Republican delegates gathered Saturday from throwing their weight behind her. Greg Lopez, the top vote-getter to become Colorado’s next governor promised in his acceptance speech that if Peters was convicted, he as governor would pardon her. Lopex conveniently forgot that a governor cannot pardon someone convicted of a federal crime.

The top vote-getter for the party’s Senate nomination was state representative Ron Hanks, an 2020 election denier who crossed police lines at the capitol in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021. Hanks, an outspoken voter fraud conspiracy theorist, boosted the lie at the convention and even compared the election to the terrorist attacks on 9/11. “I fully expected Donald Trump to win in 2020 - and he did. When we saw what we saw on election night in 2020, it changed everything just like the changes we felt after 9/11.” Hanks got 39% of the vote from assembly delegates to be on the Republican primary ballot, clearing the required 30% threshold.

Peters’ success demonstrates the ongoing political power of The Big Lie that Donald Trump has fueled for the past 14 months. Last month Kristi Burton Brown, the leader of Colorado’s Republican Party, called on Peters to suspend her secretary of state campaign due to the federal indictment filed against her.

On Sunday, Burton Brown tweeted Peters and other party assembly winners a big “CONGRATS!”

I guess Colorado proves that Some. Things. Never. Change. I never met anyone outside the Denver Metro area (including Boulder), who wasn’t a moron.

The Republican Party is the greatest internal subversive threat facing our country.

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