On Jan. 19, the evening before Inauguration Day, Schumé Navarro, who is running for Cherry Creek School Board and was recently elected Secretary of the Arapahoe County Republican Party, recorded a video in which she promised her followers that the inevitable wouldn’t happen.
“I want you to know that Joe Biden — ‘President-Elect’ — is not going to become the President,” said Navarro. “This has been an ongoing coup that has been perpetrated by China. Everything — I’m talking about the virus. I’m talking the lockdowns.”
Over the course of a two-part video, Navarro continued to speak for over an hour, promoting a variety of conspiracy theories and quoting Bible verses.
“I’ve just been watchful and this has been the craziest ride I’ve ever been on,” said Navarro. “After that stuff happened, that’s when I fell on to the QAnon stuff and that has been given such a bad rep! And I say that and I feel people’s— ‘Ooo don’t say that!’ I feel people say that!
I’m gonna tell you- I’ve held that lightly! I’ve held that like — let’s see, people say, ‘you’re a conspiracy theorist! No more conspiracy theories! I’m tired of conspiracy theories!’
You want to know what? You also have people who are like, ‘I believe science!’ Okay well, have you heard of the scientific method? What you do is you have a hypothesis or a theory. You state the theory and then you find facts that prove or disprove the theory. If they’re supporting things that prove it, then — it’s not a con –it’s like literally a conspiracy. It’s like I mean, it’s like legit. It’s a conspiracy.”
She recounted how she “fell into QAnon” by explaining that she began “doing research” online after she and her husband had fortuitously called off a planned trip to the 2017 Las Vegas country music festival that became the deadliest mass shooting in our nation’s history.
As with so many mass shootings, the tragedy immediately became the subject of a myriad of conspiracy theories, most alleging government involvement for the purposes of restricting Americans’ access to firearms.
Navarro’s “research” led her to QAnon, a web of pro-Trump conspiracy theories based around the foundational belief that a secret cabal of Democrats and Hollywood elites are trafficking children to rape and/or eat them and that these activities are protected by legions of bureaucrats and corporations. In the video above, she defends these conspiracies as fact by claiming that she used the “scientific method” to find evidence that proves the theories are true.
Navarro’s devotion to QAnon led her to bring a handmade red “Q” sign when she and a friend attended President Trump’s Colorado Springs campaign rally in February of 2020. She wasn’t the only QAnon supporter in attendance, as the Colorado Times Reporter noted at the time, another woman in the audience wore a sweatshirt promoting the conspiracy.
In a TokTok video posted later that day, Navarro documented her creation and display of the sign at the event, both outside and from her seats behind Trump’s podium. The video features a screen capture from the event’s livestream, proving that the “Q” sign was visible to everyone who viewed the event online. The soundtrack to the video is a song titled, “Don’t Be Suspicious.”
Navarro also attended another Trump rally: the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally that launched the storming of the U.S. Capitol.
In a now-deleted video from her “Don’t Tread on Mae” Facebook account (Navarro uses that name on numerous social media platforms), Navarro appears to be within 20-30 feet of the Capitol, filming from within a packed crowd of protestors.
The text of the post reads, “Please note the MASS amount of people who are rejecting “certain” protestors’ actions. The crowd pointing out #antifa and rejection their actions will never be reported in the mainstream news.
A voice, presumably hers, shouts “Antifa! Antifa!” at a man in a red hat who is attempting to break a window, before saying “people need to know it’s not us!” before cheering as the man is dragged away from the window by another protestor.
Two days later on Jan. 8, Navarro was back in Colorado attending an all-day class as a member of the Leadership Program of the Rockies (LPR) class of 2021. LPR is Colorado’s most established conservative political training academy. Many of Navarro’s pro-QAnon social media posts were and are public. She posted one openly pro-Q Tik Tok video on Aug. 19 of last year, nearly two months before her first LPR class.
Navarro isn’t the only conspiracist among LPR’s recent classes. In fact, several recent LPR grads have publicly expressed conspiracist views.
Classmate Jacqueline Anderson (pictured immediately above Navarro in the upper-left image above) is a “Big Lie” election conspiracist who also serves as First Vice Chair of the Mesa County GOP. 2018 alum Vanessa DeMott expressed her support of the QAnon WayFair Furniture conspiracy during her failed 2020 statehouse campaign.
The Chair of the Colorado Republicans, Kristi Burton Brown, is a member of the 2020 LPR class and has repeatedly cast doubt on the validity of last year’s election.
2019 graduate Danny Moore, who now serves on the LPR board, was forced to step down as chair of Colorado’s Independent Congressional Redistricting Committee over his numerous election fraud conspiracy posts.
By Jan. 10, Navarro appears to have reconsidered her earlier objection to violent protest, punctuating a Facebook post about the upcoming inauguration with several threatening hashtags, including #insurrection, #huntingseason, and #warmupthegallows.
One month later on Feb. 9, the Arapahoe County Republicans chose Navarro over two other candidates to be their party’s Secretary, one of only three county officials.
Navarro serves alongside Chair Suzanne Staiert, a former Colorado Deputy Secretary of State and 2020 state senate candidate who rejected claims of election fraud after losing her race.
Navarro’s website for her Cherry Creek School Board campaign states that she “believes in UNITY, TRANSPARENCY and Parental CHOICE.” Her public statements about the district have focused on hot button issues such as critical race theory, gender identity, and mask policies.
After first agreeing to an interview with the Colorado Times Recorder, Navarro ultimately did not make herself available, failing to return multiple requests for comment.
