If I were conspiracy minded — like, you know, approximately half the modern-day Republican Party — I’d seriously wonder if Dave Williams, who’s simultaneously the state GOP’s party chair and its foremost culture-war troll, might not be a Democratic plant.
Because there’s no one, other than Lauren Boebert anyway, who has done as much in recent years to discredit the ever-shrinking — in fact, heading directly down the path of totality — Colorado GOP than its small-minded party chair.
Maybe you’ve heard the latest — that Williams, in what might be generously called a temper tantrum, had Colorado Sun reporter Sandra Fish kicked out of a state party assembly because of her so-called “very unfair” reporting.
By “very unfair,” Williams means the kind of fair and clear-minded reporting for which Fish, who has been covering Colorado politics for more than two decades, is well known. But it seems that her fair and clear-minded reporting has offended Williams because, just a guess here, her reporting happened to point out both Williams’ vast incompetence and his petty corruption.
“Incompetence” and “corruption” are my words, not Fish’s. I’m an opinion columnist, whereas Fish is a straight-down-the-middle reporter, the kind of throwback journalist who does the hard work — you think sitting through the tedium of any party’s political assembly is anyone’s idea of fun? — to produce the stories that, without bias, inform you and me and anyone else who might be interested.
But when Fish wrote about the state GOP’s inability to pay its employees, she didn’t call Williams incompetent. That was left for the reader to interpret. When she wrote that Williams used party money to announce his intention to run for Congress in the 5th Congressional District and to hammer his opponents along the way, she didn’t say he was corrupt, even though he was and is.
And when she wrote that the state GOP, at the direction of the election-denying chairman, endorsed Donald Trump in the still-putatively-competitive presidential primary, she didn’t say Williams’ move was anti-democratic. You might have, though. I know I did.
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It’s no wonder Williams called Fish, in his best Trumpian style, a “fake” journalist. It’s no wonder, given the state of the Colorado GOP, that Williams might well become its nominee to run for Congress in the traditionally hard-right 5th CD.
But it may surprise you just how many Colorado Republicans called Williams out. Former state chair Kristi Burton Brown called him “dangerous.” Republican state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer said she was “embarrassed.” And there’s this from former legislator Greg Brophy, who in his time served through at least a half dozen state chairs:
“Un-frickin-believable. But then again, with (Williams) ‘leading’ the GOP and already breaking every ethical and moral norm, it’s not surprising. It’s time for the Central Committee to bounce him.”
Oh, it’s past time for the GOP Central Committee to do something about Williams, but don’t hold your breath. You might as well wait for the committee and the rest of the Republican world to do something about Donald Trump, who was applauding approvingly from the sidelines.
If you want to understand how Willliams operates — and what state Republicans seem all too willing to tolerate — I can give you the perfect example. And there’s not a fake word here. When Fish was kicked out of the assembly, politicians from both parties rushed to her defense. As I said, Fish is well known for her fair-minded journalism.
One of Fish’s defenders, and a Williams critic, was Deborah Flora, a conservative commentator who is running for Congress in the 4th CD in a field that includes, yes, Lauren Boebert, the well-known carpetbagger and MAGA conspiracist.
When Flora tweeted that Williams was “wrong” and “in violation of the First Amendment” for ejecting Fish, Williams not only tweeted back that Flora was “boot licking fake journalists,” but also took the opportunity to abuse his post again by endorsing Boebert over Flora and the rest of the field in what is a deeply competitive race.
Why would Williams take sides in the 4th CD primary? Why did he throw Fish out of a party assembly?
You might call Williams’ response to Flora immature and wrong headed. But his actions against Fish represent more than a snit. They’re an affront to the (soon-to-be-former?) American values of a free press, open assembly and a lot of the other stuff involving democracy they put in the Constitution back in the day.
It’s such an affront to democratic norms that the story has been picked up by the Washington Post, CNN, the Guardian, the San Francisco Chronicle, not to mention every Colorado news outlet that actually deals in, well, news.
And maybe the funniest part about this not-so-funny tantrum was Williams’ defense of his offense to the First Amendment:
William claimed that he could legally eject Fish, despite the First Amendment, because the state GOP is a “private party” and not a government agency. He is probably right in that respect. And yet, if tossing Fish from the assembly in Pueblo was not a First Amendment violation — although I think we can agree that the spirit of the amendment has been grossly violated — we can take this issue one step further.
The state GOP is not only a private party, as Williams contends. The way elections are trending in this once-red, once-purple, now-solid-blue state, the Colorado GOP has become very nearly an exclusive party.
You know the statistics. The GOP claims exactly zero statewide officers. Democrats control the legislature by a 3-to-1 margin. Republicans have won exactly one top-of-the-ticket election — when Cory Gardner beat Marc Udall in the 2014 Senate race — since 2004.
That’s the kind of consistent losing that would make even Rockies owner Dick Monfort blush.
In fact, the only category in which the state GOP seems to be winning is in the number of groping jokes offered by late-night-show comics. Thanks to Lauren Boebert, the GOP is taking that competition in a landslide.
And the state GOP has become so exclusive that it doesn’t want to allow the largest segment of the voting population — the state’s unaffiliated voters, which include hundreds of thousands of GOP leaners — to participate in their primary elections because of the chance that people like Williams might otherwise lose.
Williams has been leading this counterintuitive shrink-the-party effort ever since he was elected state chair. He has gone so far as to hire the now-disbarred John Eastman — yes, that John Eastman, the former CU visiting “conservative” professor and architect of the Trump fake-elector scheme — to help Williams overturn the will of Colorado voters, who, as you may remember, chose in a statewide referendum to include unaffiliated voters in primary elections.
Eastman isn’t the only anti-democratic Williams ally, of course. Rushing to Williams’ defense was Trump himself. Posting on his free-falling social media site, Trump wrote that Williams “is under Fake News assault because he is doing such a strong job as an advocate for MAGA.”
Of course the only advocacy Trump cares about is that Williams is a full-throated election denier.
And if that’s a minority position in Colorado, where Trump lost to Joe Biden by 13 points in 2020, Williams doesn’t seem to care. Or maybe — as he tries to shut out journalists from reporting the real news about him and his MAGA buddies — Williams just doesn’t want the, uh, fake-news press to remind you.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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