When a pro-Trump mob ravaged the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Mark Baisley offered an explanation that anticipated what Alex Jones would tell his audience a week later.
“It does not make any sense to me that Trump patriots would storm the U.S. Capitol to interrupt a Congressional challenge to the Electoral College results,” the then-Republican Colorado state representative wrote on Facebook. The violence, he said, “matches the signature of Antifa rioters.” He added that he hoped the “sponsors” would be revealed.
None of it was remotely true. Nearly six years later, Baisley is a state senator and the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Colorado, challenging Democratic Sen. John Hickenlooper. Asked about the post by 9News anchor Kyle Clark, who was co-moderating a debate between Baisley and Hickenlooper on Oct. 14, Baisley didn’t back away from the lie that antifa activists carried out the attack.
Baisley belongs to MAGA, a cult of personality around Trump that grew up in the racist sewers of the internet.
Hickenlooper defeated Baisley in what appears to be a landslide, as votes are still being counted Tuesday night. But the scandal of Baisley isn’t only that he’s an extremist. It’s that, after a decade of President Donald Trump, nobody expects anything better from a Republican Senate nominee.
Republicans don’t, Democrats don’t — and neither do most independents, even those who will vote against him. Baisley belongs to MAGA, a cult of personality around Trump that grew up in the racist sewers of the internet. Party leaders can no longer contain it, and there’s no Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney left in office to condemn Baisley or the many MAGA soldiers like him.
People who blame the Capitol attack on antifa rarely hold just one extreme view. In May 2020, Baisley asked a district attorney to investigate the head of Colorado’s public health department, accusing her office of falsifying Covid-19 death certificates to inflate the toll. The state had been counting deaths among people who tested positive regardless of cause, and it changed its reporting under pressure. That was a legitimate data dispute, but Baisley turned it into an allegation of a crime. The DA found no evidence, and Baisley later admitted he had no proof.
In January 2022, Colorado House Republicans used a Democratic voting rights resolution to relitigate the 2020 election. Baisley voted for an amendment that would have had the legislature “call into question the legitimacy of Joseph R. Biden to be President,” thank the people who marched on Washington on Jan. 6 and support Tina Peters, the Mesa County clerk then under investigation for a breach of her county’s election equipment. The amendment failed. A week later, Baisley told a conservative radio host that he regretted the vote, mostly for tactical reasons. Republicans, he said, had taken “the bait,” and he blamed Democrats for “goading us with racist statements,” whatever that means.
Three months later, Baisley stood on the steps of the Colorado Capitol at an event called the “Colorado Election Truth Rally.” The lineup looked like a Lollapalooza for cranks, with Baisley right in the middle of it. The headliner was MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who spent 2021 predicting that Trump would be reinstated as president. Peters, by then under indictment, spoke, too. The event was promoted by Faith Education Commerce United, a group founded by Joe Oltmann, a podcaster and former candidate for Colorado governor who has repeatedly called for the hanging of his political opponents and said a “synagogue of Satan Jews” is controlling the United States. Members of the United American Defense Force, a militia tied to FEC United, patrolled the crowd. Baisley was one of four sitting lawmakers who took the stage. Peters was later convicted and sent to prison for her role in the election equipment breach.
You don’t have to judge Baisley only by his conspiracy theories or the company he keeps. His policy record is just as extreme. In 2020, he co-sponsored a bill to enforce a ban on same-sex marriage and restrict adoption by same-sex couples, five years after the Supreme Court settled the question. Only four of the House’s 24 Republicans signed on, and party leaders kept their distance. At the October debate, he called abortion the “slavery decision of our generation” and said he would vote for a national ban. Asked about his view that public schools should be abolished, he said it was a mistake “from the very beginning” for any level of government to run them. He wasn’t sure even state-set academic standards were a good idea.
None of this has cost Baisley anything inside the Republican Party. Colorado Republicans nominated him at their state assembly in April, and he ran unopposed in the primary. When he launched his short-lived campaign for governor last year, a story from the Colorado Capitol News Alliance, a reporting partnership that includes Colorado Public Radio and The Colorado Sun, noted that he had “primarily focused on business and technology during his time at the Capitol.”
His campaign still leaned on that image. He touted passing 14 of his 18 bills in a Democratic-dominated Legislature and mentions the statue of Thomas Jefferson he keeps on his desk. When Hickenlooper called him a rubber stamp for Trump, Baisley answered, “If I’m anybody’s sycophant, it’s Thomas Jefferson’s.”
Colorado Republicans have not won a statewide race since 2016, the year Trump was elected. A party that wanted to win here would look for a candidate who could reach the middle. This one nominated Baisley without a contest. MAGA has shown open contempt for democracy, and it has little interest in moderating its policies or its rhetoric to win over voters it doesn’t need to persuade. What worries me more is what a movement like that does when persuasion fails, which we saw in 2020.
Even in defeat, there’s little reason to expect the GOP will rid itself of such deranged extremism.
That’s why the most revealing moment of the debate wasn’t anything Baisley said about policy. It came when Clark pressed him on 2020 directly.
“If Coloradans cannot count on Mark Baisley to tell them the truth about something as simple and basic as who won the 2020 election,” Clark asked, “how can they trust that you’ll tell them the truth about anything?”
Baisley said he was “fine with the way it came out” and accused Clark of putting words in his mouth. Clark reminded him he was on the record voting that the election was illegitimate. Asked one last time to answer for the election-rigging lies he had helped spread, Baisley said, “You’re going to have to help me understand what you’re saying.”
Baisley may have been dodging. But the line works just as well as a confession: After a decade of Trump, his party can no longer see any path to power but this one. And even in defeat, there’s little reason to expect the GOP will rid itself of such deranged extremism.
The post Mark Baisley lost his bid for Colorado Senate. But MAGA extremism is here to stay. appeared first on MS NOW.
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