October 21, 2024 01:04 PM UTC

The Gabe Evans/KBB Connection: A Window Into Evans' Closeted Extremism

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• by: Colorado Pols

The Denver Post’s Sunday front page was dominated by the paper’s profiles of the competing candidates in Colorado’s most competitive congressional race in CO-08, a race expected to help decide the majority in the closely-divided U.S. House. Both worthwhile reads–here’s reporter John Aguilar’s profile of incumbent Democratic Rep. Yadira Caraveo–but it’s Seth Klamann’s story on Republican challenger Gabe Evans’ background that breaks news, or at least news to lots of people including ourselves:

An Aurora native and second-generation American, [Evans] was homeschooled through high school. In middle school, he was in an electives class with Kristi Burton Brown, who would go on to be the leader of the Colorado Republican Party when Evans first ran for office in 2022. Her family was close with the Evans family, and they went to church together. Burton Brown’s mother taught the electives class through a program Evans’ mother ran, she said.

“We both, I would say, really cared about American history, American politics and just the deeper issues of the day,” said Burton Brown, now at the conservative advocacy group Advance Colorado. “He’s someone who looked at issues, looked at problems and had a very active way of approaching them.”

That Evans was homeschooled for his entire K-12 education was known, but the connection to former Colorado Republican Party chair and GOP candidate for the state Board of Education Kristi Burton Brown is a significant new data point that says more than meets the eye about Evans’ own upbringing. From a very early age, Kristi Burton Brown served as the public face of the “Personhood” no-exceptions abortion ban ballot measures that Colorado voters have shot down at the polls over and over, frequently with measurable collateral damage inflicted on Republican candidates sharing the ballot with those measures. As vice-chair of the Colorado GOP, “KBB” collaborated with Rocky Mountain Gun Owners to launch a disastrous failed recall attempt against then-Rep. Tom Sullivan, one of the legislature’s most sympathetic figures.

As chairman of the party, KBB helped torpedo 2022 GOP U.S. Senate candidate Joe O’Dea’s campaign by refusing to let O’Dea’s attempted reset on the issue of abortion to go quietly. In the end, her no-compromise position on abortion proved more important than the job of electing Republicans with which KBB was entrusted, helping pave the way for her successor Dave Williams’ calamitous rise. It was also during this time when Evans penned his now-infamous op-ed warning that marriage equality would lead to the acceptance of bestiality, which Evans claims to no longer stand behind.

Klamann goes on to describe Evans’ transition from homeschooling to the conservative Christian Patrick Henry College in Virginia, where Evans received a very specific academic program tailored to future conservative public officials:

Evans went on to Patrick Henry College, a small conservative Christian school in Virginia. He majored in strategic intelligence, which prepares students to “anticipate moral, ethical, and mission challenges in order to defend the security of the United States,” according to the college.

This period of Evans’ background was well explored by the Colorado Times Recorder in their excellent series on Evans, which for months served as the most comprehensive exploration of his background available from any outlet. Although Evans leans heavily on military and police service to make him appear normal to swing voters, his education background is that of a religious zealot educated from an early age to infiltrate elected office in the service of a religious right political agenda. No longer party chair, KBB can’t directly undermine Evans on abortion this year like she did with O’Dea in 2022, insisting despite O’Dea’s desperation to put the issue to bed that “all Republican candidates are firmly pro-life.”

But she doesn’t need to. KBB knows Gabe Evans used to call the right to abortion “ridiculous.” KBB’s silence while Gabe pretends to pivot signals her assent.