Declaring he’s on a mission “to save the Republic,” retired Army Major George Athanasopoulos filed Monday to run in a GOP primary to challenge five-term U.S. Rep. Ed Perlmutter, a Golden Democrat.

“When I heard we were making a deal with Iran, I was floored,” Athanasopoulos, who served four tours in Iraq, told The Colorado Statesman. “I view it as a single-point disqualifier for federal office for anyone who supported that deal. Iran was trying to kill us five years ago. It’s not like we had disagreements, they were actively trying to kill us.”

Athanasopoulos, a prominent figure in the local conservative social media sphere — he runs the Colorado Freedom Initiative page on Facebook and is part of a tight group that coordinates messaging on Twitter — could wind up in a June 28 primary with Westminster Councilman Bruce Baker, who launched his run for the GOP nomination in the 7th Congressional District in late January.

Bruce drew criticism — including a call for him to resign his city council seat — after telling The Statesman that he plans to run on a platform of ending all immigration into the United States and slapping a punitive tariff on all imports.

Athanasopoulos said he disagreed with his primary rival on those counts and expects that Bruce’s position on abortion would also pose a problem making it out of a Republican primary.

“Here’s my issue with Bruce,” Athanasopoulos said. “Bruce is a nice guy who wants to cut off all immigration, who wants to impose a 10 percent tariff on imports, and he’s pro-choice running as a Republican. My father’s from Greece, my mother’s from Northern Ireland. You say no immigration? It’s preposterous. It is a shoot from the hip position that does not adequately address the challenges we have today.”

Both candidates plan to seek the primary ballot through the caucus and assembly process.

“Looks like the Republicans have a primary, and we’ll know our opponent June 28,” Perlmutter campaign manager Chris Kennedy told The Statesman. “In the meantime, we’ll run the kind of campaign we always run — fighting for the hard working people in the middle.”

Athanasopoulos said he was tired of hearing Democrats and many Republicans talk about helping the little guy when, he charged, politicians have been doing anything but.

“The Democrats like to say they stand up for the average consumer,” he said. “That is a lie. What they support is bigger government, government that requires more resources — more taxes, more government intervention. We can’t afford the government we have, and they want to increase it.”

Calling the president’s recently unveiled budget plan “a fiscal hallucination, a dream, a fantasy,” he added, “They are making promises they expect my boys to pay for. That is so morally repugnant it makes me angry just talking about it.”

Athanasopoulos had equally harsh criticism for more mainstream GOP politicians.

“The civil war in the Republican Party right now is largely between cronyists and the average Joe. The Export-Import Bank is a perfect example. That is a tool for cronyists to subsidize industries favorable to them,” he said, adding, “Just because the cronyists make a deal with the socialists so they can benefit together doesn’t mean it does anything for the little guy.”

But it’s national security and foreign policy — including aspects of immigration policy — that Athanasopoulos said concern him most.

Athanasopoulos, who officially retired from the military last week for medical reasons, was embedded with Iraqi forces in the northern part of the country, “the area that ISIS controls,” he said. “It got to the point where I didn’t even need to use a map when I was driving around.” He said he takes the Iranian nuclear deal personally but also believes it’s a disastrous policy.

“Half of my job in my last deployment was trying to keep track of which Iranian faction was trying to kill which Sunni faction, and, when they weren’t dong that, they were trying to kill Kurds,” he said. “Just because we have an agreement doesn’t mean they have had a change of heart. They will do what’s in their best interest, and if that means developing nuclear weapons surreptitiously, they will absolutely do it.”

In August, Perlmutter said he supported the agreement between the United States, Iran and six leading nations, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

“The U.S. and its international partners have committed to a diplomatic solution that I believe reduces and limits Iran’s ability to develop or manufacture nuclear weapons and is in America’s best interests,” Perlmutter said in a statement. “This Agreement should also reduce nuclear tensions in the Middle East and will make our friend and ally, Israel, safer and less prone to nuclear conflict with Iran.”

Following “growing pains” and difficulty responding to the insurgency, Athanasopoulos said the tide had started to turn in Iraq, but President Obama came into office “bound and determined he was going to pull out.” As American forces withdrew, he said, “the Iranians were filling the void.”

“The way I look at it, everything we fought for, that everybody died for, was traded for political benefit so the Democrats could win an election,” he said. “They’ve made the world less safe. They’ve endangered us all.”

Hoping to employ cutting-edge voter-contact technology — saying he’s “very disappointed with what Republicans are doing in terms of the mechanics of the campaign,” Athanasopoulos plans to diverge from the GOP’s off-the-shelf options, though he also notes that there’s something else afoot in a year when Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are presidential frontrunners.

“Candidates need to address a rising anger in the electorate, because the electorate intuitively understands they’ve gotten the short end of the stick,” he said. “When you see the budget deal that benefits big business and grows the size of government, voters understand something is very, very wrong. That’s why wages have stagnated, that’s why the labor-participation rate is lower than it’s been in 30 or 40 years. That’s why people are angry.”

Athanasopoulos acknowledges it’s an uphill battle to take on Perlmutter, who has defeated all comers — including well funded and well-known challengers Ryan Frazier and Joe Coors — by double digits in the district, which covers northern Jefferson County and western Adams County.

Perlmutter reported in January that he raised $156,016 in the last quarter of 2015 and had $645,986 on hand. He’s raised $906,939 this cycle.

“What’s most important to me is truth,” Athanasopoulos said. “I know that sounds corny as all get-out, but people need to realize what’s going on. They need to realize how perilous their security is, they need to understand Democrats are destroying future opportunities for our children. If that message is out there, if that message resonates, I’ll have won no matter what the vote totals are. But if that message gets out there, I don’t see how anyone in good conscience votes for Ed Perlmutter or any Democrat.”

— ernest@coloradostatesman.com