All of us are flawed humans, some more so than others. This is the tale of Kwame Spearman who burst onto Denver’s business and political scene a handful of years back. His ride has taken a downhill trajectory.

Within the past week, Spearman was shown the door as an undefined executive at the just-opened Denver Book Society, a new venture for the literary-minded in Denver’s Uptown neighborhood.

Exits have become something of a pattern for Spearman. A Denver native, he came to the public fore a few years ago as the proverbial young man in a hurry.

In 2020, amidst the pandemic, Spearman was part of an investment group that acquired the venerable Tattered Cover bookstores with designs on breathing new life into a struggling business. He served as the operation’s CEO for nearly 3 years.

His leadership was marked by some expansion, including the move of the downtown store to McGregor Square. But it was also tinged with repeated complaints of workplace bullying and mismanagement.  

Early in 2023, Spearman was also something a surprise entrant into Denver’s all-comers mayoral contest. While it was always a distant prospect that he could compete with the likes of Mike Johnston and Kelly Brough, Spearman garnered attention and circles of support. He is surely passionate and well-spoken, even charismatic perhaps.

Though even then, there were signs of deficiency when it came to interpersonal relationships. Former mayoral hopeful Jamie Giellis had endorsed Spearman as a new breed of candidate. When Spearman realized his prospects were fading and suddenly dropped out of the race, he neglected to give Giellis even the courtesy of a heads-up.

In April of 2023, just after departing the mayoral race, Spearman left his top-dog position at the Tattered Cover. This was six months before the company’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing which then led to the eventual sale to Barnes and Noble the following year.

Not one to sit still and clearly bitten by the political bug, Spearman within a few months decided to run for the Denver School Board in the November 2023 election.

To call Spearman’s political convictions elastic is to understate the degree of his pliability. He entered the school board race touting his commitment to a wide range of education reforms. When that lane was preempted, he conveniently flipped and wound up with the endorsement of the teachers’ union.

In a conversation as he was considering this run immediately on the heels of his failed mayoral campaign, Spearman went on about the adrenalin rush of being on the political stage. In a call lasting more than 30 minutes, he never once mentioned anything about education or kids.

His school board candidacy ended in a rather crushing loss.

Dialing back to the 2023 mayoral campaign, Spearman had gone onto a conservative talk radio show (always a mistake when running in uber-progressive Denver) and voiced an endorsement of a stepped-up ICE presence in Denver. Specifically, he said that illegal immigrants commuting from the suburbs into Denver offered “opportunities for us to apply the letter of the law.”

Suffice to say, that comment has not aged well into 2026 among many Denverites. However, in the context of 2023, it is at least arguable that ICE was far less aggressive; even that the relative lack of border enforcement of that era called for a stricter approach.

To be clear, I am not advocating for such a position and did not at the time. But his was not a wholly illegitimate, unreasonable, out-of-bounds viewpoint.

All of which brings us to the current moment and Spearman’s latest saga. Depending on who is doing the talking, he was either a partner or a consultant with a leadership role in opening the Denver Book Society, a new addition to Denver’s bookselling scene.

That role, too, came crashing down within weeks of the store’s opening when reports of Spearman’s 2023 comment resurfaced and the online left went into full outrage mode.

The Denver Book Society is a private enterprise and its owner, Rich Garvin, is entirely free to employ whomever he wishes.

Clearly, I am not a member of the Kwame Spearman fan club. But this latest episode strikes me as yet another example of our overwrought pattern of not simply disagreeing with those across the political divide, but of feeling compelled to cancel their voices and, in this case, their livelihood.

Criticize other viewpoints to your heart’s content. Disagree as strongly as you wish.  But too many on both sides of the schism find it necessary to go so much farther.

There was much online banter about customers wanting the Denver Book Society to feel like a safe space for believers in immigrant rights. Silly me, but I thought one of the purposes of books, at least in days of old, was to take us out of self-satisfied, comfortable environs and force us to challenge our own thinking.

Whether choosing a travel destination or buying craft supplies or picking up the latest novel, I yearn for days when so many among us did not feel driven to sort ourselves by political friend and foe, and to shun the latter.

Eric Sondermann is a Colorado-based independent political commentator. He writes regularly for Colorado Politics and The Gazette. Reach him at EWS@EricSondermann.com; follow him at @EricSondermann