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Hey fam: This edition is unlocked and open for everyone because it’s a sneaky deep conversation we should be having about the limits of liberalism. Basically: Can liberalism defeat an illiberal threat?
If you find value in it, I hope you’ll join us in the comments and become a Bulwark+ member. Our 14-day FREE trial is wrapping up tonight. Come ride with us.
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1. Freebird
On Friday, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis announced that he would commute Tina Peters’s sentence.
On the one hand, this is a tiny thing. Inconsequential. If we make it out of this period, then it will hardly be worth a footnote in the history of Trumpism.
On the other hand, what Gov. Polis did for Peters is everything. It is the foundational question about how liberalism responds to an illiberal attack.
And I’m going to swerve and tell you that I’m not really sure what I think about it. This might seem like an easy call—but it only seems that way.
Is pardoning Tina Peters the best expression of liberal values? Or is it dangerous capitulation to an illiberal threat? I want to talk through this, together and I’m going to drive you crazy with my on the one hand, on the other hand, on the other other hand routine.
My ask is that whatever your priors are, put them aside to start. I want to give you the best case for every side.
Just a warning: Usually this newsletter is locked for Bulwark+ members. I’m leaving it open for everyone today because it’s an important. If this is the kind of discussion you find value in, I hope you’ll consider joining us.
Okay. Let’s go.
On the one hand, it seems like a slam-dunk that Polis has done something terrible.
In 2018, Tina Peters was elected County Clerk in Mesa County, Colorado. She was 62 years old and had never held elected office before. Her professional qualifications were slim—she went to an un-accredited correspondence college and had sold “natural health” supplements. She seems to have been a flight attendant for some period.
Her life in that moment was at a crossroads. In 2017, her son died in a parachuting accident and her marriage was falling apart. She and her husband divorced and she later became embroiled in a civil lawsuit with him. Her only living child, a daughter named Cayce, would eventually enter the suit on the side of her father. Make of that what you will.
Oh, and Donald Trump had just become president.
This was the moment Tina Peters chose to enter politics.
After the 2020 presidential election, Peters became convinced that massive voter fraud had stolen the election from President Trump—not just nationally, but specifically in Mesa County.
It is worth noting here that Mesa is a Republican stronghold and even though Joe Biden won Colorado by 13 points, Trump won Mesa by 28 points.
So Peters believed that some sort of fraud in her home county prevented Trump from winning by . . . even more?
This belief was insane. Let’s compare the results in Mesa County from 2016—a year in which, as far as I can tell, Peters never claimed there was any fraud—to 2020:
Clinton: 21,729 votes (28 percent)
Trump: 49,779 votes (64 percent)
Other: 6,146 votes (8 percent)
Biden: 31,536 votes (35 percent)
Trump: 56,894 votes (63 percent)
Just look at the numbers—the Mesa results in 2020 were broadly in-line with 2016. The big difference was that the 2016 third-party voters went for Biden in 2020.
Did Peters truly believe that there had been massive voting fraud in the 2020 election in Mesa? There are only three possibilities:
She did not genuinely believe there was fraud.
She did genuinely believe there was fraud, because she is too cognitively limited to understand basic math.
She did genuinely believe, because she was not in full control of her faculties.
Whichever answer you pick, we can safely say—again, just based on her acceptance of the 2016 results as valid—that her belief in election fraud was not made on a reasonable basis.
Anyway: Peters went all-in on the idea of election fraud and then committed a number of crimes while attempting to “prove” this non-existent fraud. She used her office to turn off security cameras that monitored the county’s election machinery and then granted access to the machines to an unauthorized person.
Some months later, various conspiracy theorists published data stolen from the Mesa County voting machines. Peters was eventually indicted on ten counts relating to her abuse of office.
Her criminal trial was eventful. She continually fired her lawyers and was, at one point, held in contempt for lying to the judge. Eventually she was convicted on seven counts. She was unrepentant throughout. Literally the day after she was convicted,