July 14, 2025 10:41 AM UTC

Just Another Patriot Who Believed Donald Trump Too Much

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• by: Colorado Pols

As Colorado Public Radio’s Bente Birkeland reports, another MAGA patriot has allegedly taken matters into his own hands, delivering a dose of vigilante justice to enforce the continuing dogmatic insistence on the part of President Donald Trump and everyone who wants to curry favor with him that the 2020 presidential election was stolen in a conspiracy that involved Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems:

A man who once ran for sheriff in Archuleta county has been charged with arson for allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail into the Archuleta County Clerk’s office.

William Wayne Bryant, 71, appears to have targeted the room where the county’s Dominion voting machines are stored. There are indications Bryant subscribes to conspiracy theories that Dominion equipment has been used to steal elections…

According to the arrest affidavit, Bryant spoke publicly about wanting the county to get rid of its Dominion Voting machines. The Denver-based company has been at the center of false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald Trump. He has also expressed anti-government views, posting on social media that taxation is extortion.

Minutes from an Aug. 2, 2022 county commission meeting, quoted in the arrest affidavit, note that Bryant “expressed his continued dissatisfaction with the Dominion Voting Machines.”

Trump this weekend declared once again that the 2020 elections were “rigged and stolen,” and Trump as readers know is using every means at his disposal to cajole the state of Colorado into releasing convicted felon former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, who is currently serving a nine-year sentence for her crackpot plot to allow conspiracy theorists to steal data from Dominion Voting Systems computers. Trump’s pardoning of violent January 6th rioters further upended the rule of law, sending a clear signal that such crimes won’t be punished. While nobody may have whispered into this man’s ear to firebomb the Archuleta County clerk’s office, his motivation sprang from an ecosystem of lies about American elections with one purpose–and one beneficiary. And those lies have consequences.

It would be better if the condemnation of this mindless act of political violence could be unequivocal and bipartisan. But as long as Trump is in power to dispute history, there will always be a caveat–and a percentage of the population for whom this man is a hero like Tina Peters.

And that is much more harmful in the long run than a Molotov cocktail.