EDITOR: In what is starting to become a disturbing pattern at Aurora City Hall, Councilmember David Gruber took to the dais Monday night to tell inflammatory lies about one of his constituents.
In his comments, he named the young woman, Kristin Mallory — then called her a “member of Antifa,” and accused her of organizing one of last week’s protests for the humane treatment of migrants.
Neither of those things to be true.
But as Gruber seems to well understand — if the name of the game is dirty politics, sometimes telling the truth doesn’t matter so much as telling a nice, juicy story.
That certainly seemed to be the case back in July. Gruber used the opportunity of a well-attended city council meeting to publicly accuse three of his council member colleagues of being the organizers, the driving force, and the masterminds behind yet another controversial protest at the Aurora GEO-ICE immigrant detention center.
None of that was true. But it didn’t matter.
Gruber made sure his friends would be there to record the moment, so that it could go viral on online fringe communities. And to secure the spectacle, he did this not from his customary councilmember’s seat, but from the residents’ podium.
Boy, did it work. Since that night, the councilmembers he attacked — all of them his colleagues, all of them young women — have received death threats at a volume and severity which have forced them to take extra measures to keep themselves, and their families, safe.
Gruber has never redacted nor corrected his statements. He has never publicly apologized for them. The six remaining councilmembers whom he didn’t attack refused to censure him. And perhaps because he’s never faced accountability, Monday night, he did it again.
In 2017, a plurality of Aurorans elected Gruber to an at-Large councilmember seat so that he could serve constituents across the entire city. Instead, he has used that honor and privilege to incite violence against individual constituents he disagrees with.
It’s dangerous. It’s unbecoming of an elected official. And so long as he can’t figure out how to emotionally regulate himself, Gruber should leave the work of governing to someone else who can.
— Michael Himawan, Aurora via letters@SentinelColorado.com