August 16, 2021 11:22 AM UTC

The Sad Continuing Decline Of Rep. B.J. Nikkel

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• by: Colorado Pols

Longtime readers will recall former GOP state representative Betty June “B.J.” Nikkel of Loveland, whose star briefly shined in the mid-2010s as a social-issue reasonable conservative Republican after she signed an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in support of LGBT marriage equality–and might have been a contender for higher office had the Colorado GOP as a unit become more tolerant (it of course did not).

Unfortunately, former Rep. Nikkel’s sensible shine started to fade after she became a devoted supporter and Colorado chair of Women for Trump in 2016. Throughout Trump’s single term in office, Nikkel’s social media relentlessly broadcast every kind of Trump agit-prop and nugget misinformation, leading in the days after the January 6th insurrection to the inevitable:

Twitter may have shut down Nikkel’s account when it became too insurrectionist for their terms of service, but apparently Facebook’s standards are lenient enough that Nikkel is allowed to keep her platform there. And checking in last week while “MyPillow” conspiracy guy Mike Lindell’s flop sweat-laden “Cyber Symposium,” which revealed precisely zero promised proof of election fraud last week, we see that Nikkel was cheering on this most epochal of nothingburgers:

Is any of this unique? No. But in Nikkel’s case, because of her once-reasonable record it’s more than a little bit sad. There may be something to the theory that being rejected by the Colorado GOP due to Nikkel’s adverse position on LGBT rights made her more susceptible to Donald Trump’s insurgent (at least in 2016) message. But to still be clinging to this discredited dead-ender denial over Trump’s defeat last November tells us Nikkel won’t be coming back to reality anytime soon, maybe ever.

All these years later, Nikkel is a cautionary tale: even some of the “good ones” went off the deep end for Trump.