Every second Saturday of the month at its headquarters on 17th Avenue, the Independence Institute hosts a “Barter Market,” ostensibly for freedom-loving citizens to exchange goods and avoid sales tax. Items listed as either on offer or requested at the monthly gathering include organic local food items, homemade candles and guitar lessons, but also more conspiracy-minded products like “EMF protection clothing,” chlorine dioxide (a dangerous solution billed as a cure-all, including for COVID), and accounting services to “opt out of the IRS.”
Dig into it a bit further and you’ll find that the market was organized in part by a national far-right anti-government group called People’s Rights. It was founded by Ammon Bundy, who helped lead two armed stand-offs against federal law enforcement, first at his father Cliven Bundy’s Nevada ranch in 2014, and then in Oregon in 2019. Bundy explains his group as a network you can call upon to “defend your rights,” i.e. show up armed and en masse, when law enforcement knocks at your door. He uses the example of his militia members responding to a call from a fellow member who has Child Protective Services and law enforcement officers at their home to remove a child.
This upcoming Saturday morning, in addition to possibly picking up a tinfoil hat, you can catch a “Sovereignty 101” presentation sponsored by a man who claims the United States is actually only Washington, D.C., insists that American citizenship is a fiction, and promotes his training with a flyer indicating that the U.S. Civil War never ended.
This is what you get from the Independence Institute, a multi-issue advocacy organization pushing anti-government initiatives on multiple fronts in Colorado. The outfit, which is the Colorado affiliate of the Koch-funded State Policy Network, presents itself as being somehow more rational, safer, and funnier than extremist conservatives. It sponsors a TV show on public television, often featuring serious and entertaining discussions. Its board of trustees includes establishment figures like former Colorado Treasurer Mark Hillman and GOP strategist Dick Wadhams, who loves to throw embarrassing public tantrums about Trump’s poison-pill effect on Republicans.
Its leader, Jon Caldara, drinks bourbon and chit-chats on panels and at conferences, but you get the sense he’d rather be crouched in the back of the room, shooting spitballs through a plastic straw. He may be the best in Colorado punditry at delivering one-line commentary that’s obnoxiously effective. And often offensive. Hence he was once even fired as a columnist from the thick-skinned Denver Post.
But when you open the doors and check out who’s sleeping with whom at the Independence Institute, you find people in bed with Trump and the right-wing conspiracies he’s spawned.
Caldara himself was an enthusiastic supporter of Trump last year — after being a reluctant one in 2016.
And then there’s Rob Natelson, the director of the Independence Institute’s Constitutional Studies Center. He has “no idea” if the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
“For the record,” KNUS’s Peter Boyles asked Natelson about a year after Trump lost the election, “was the election stolen?”
“I have no idea,” replied Natelson baselessly. “I do know there were serious irregularities. But I don’t know about the five states that remain unsettled.”
No idea? Unsettled? This is a “constitutional scholar?”
Natelson, who writes regular opinion pieces for the pro-Trump, conspiracy-pushing Epoch Times and worked with Arizona Republicans as they planned to push back on the 2020 election results with an audit and more, states in his biography on the institute’s website: the “U.S. Supreme Court justices have relied explicitly on Professor Natelson’s research in eight cases (sometimes several times in the same case).”
Via email, Natelson told me he didn’t vote for Trump in 2016, though he didn’t support Clinton, and voted for Trump “very reluctantly” in 2020. He also doesn’t believe Trump won the popular vote in 2020. He also wrote he was a “regular guest on conservative radio [in 2020] and often was on the receiving end of hostile phone calls for not supporting Trump. And I do not support him for the GOP Presidential nomination now.”
Natelson credits the Independence Institute for pushing out his work so judges would “notice.”
After toiling in obscurity at the University of Montana, Natelson came to the Independence Institute in 1994, and then, as he told Caldara in a recent KNUS interview, “justices of the United States Supreme Court and judges on federal appeals courts started to quote my work with some regularity. So it’s not enough to do good work. It’s also important to be able to let people know about it. And the Independence Institute has certainly served that function for me.”
“And I’m very grateful to you folks for that,” Natelson told Caldara.
Another good example of the Trump extremism embedded at the Independence Institute: Senior Fellow Paul Prentice. He supported a slate of Trump-aligned conservatives who control the El Paso County Republican Party and hoped to win GOP primary elections for various offices representing parts of El Paso County. The group had the backing of FEC United, an election conspiracy group with a militia arm.
After they lost, Prentice filed a lawsuit to challenge the results, baselessly arguing in the legal documents, “The [Dominion electronic voting] system is illegal because it systematically deletes records in the normal course of its operation. The records it deletes are required to be preserved under Colorado and federal law. Accordingly, it is illegal to continue to use the system.”
There are more folks at the Independence Institute with ties to election conspiracists and extremists, like Laura Carno, who served as Lauren Boebert’s communications director. And you can at least question the judgment of Kathleen Chandler, who runs the organization’s program to encourage right-wingers to run for local office, given that she liked a Facebook comment that an insurrectionist was ANTIFA.
But, to be fair, you can’t name a conservative institution in Colorado that doesn’t have Trump’s blood — and conspiracists — running through it.
The question is, when will things change — if not after a mind-altering election loss last year by conservatives?
When will it be unacceptable for a constitutional scholar at the Independence Institute to say he has no idea if the 2020 election was stolen?
When will a senior fellow get a public rebuke for making baseless denunciations of Colorado voting systems?
Caldara now says the January 6 insurrection was a line too far, as far as his support for Trump goes.
That’s a step forward.
But Caldara told me he’d still likely vote for Trump if he’s the GOP nominee next year.
That’s five steps backward.
Especially if you’re trying to keep democracy breathing and, as a side benefit, win over Coloradans.
As for having election conspiracists in his midst, Caldara doesn’t see any problem with it.
“Natelson’s opinion is, ‘I don’t know if the election was stolen.’ Great,” said Caldara, arguing that it’s not the same as saying that the election was, in fact, stolen. “It doesn’t take away from the incredible body of legal work he has done over the decades.”
“As a scholar, he’s not going to offer an opinion about something he doesn’t know,” said Caldara, who himself does not believe that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. “There is evidence out there, and there are questions out there. Just because people don’t agree with your point of view, that’s fine.”
Similarly, Caldara dismissed Prentice’s election denialism, saying, “Paul is an extremely talented economist. I am more than honored to have Paul Prentice associated with the Independence Institute. I am more than honored to have Rob Natelson associated with the Independence Institute.”
Caldara was adamant that I quote him saying that “no employee of the Independence Institute has ever called for violence,” and he asked me to defend Colorado Times Recorder reporter Heidi Beedle’s statement in support of violence in unspecified situations, which I have already done. I told him you don’t have to be a pacifist to work at the Colorado Times Recorder — I’m not a pacifist — and, in any case, Beedle renounced violence last week and became a pacifist. Without going into a rabbit hole of details, I also told Caldara that I disagreed with his view that the KKK is the same as ANTIFA.
Election Denialism a “Bogeyman”
Caldara doesn’t find the belief that Trump won the election “offensive” or a “threat to democracy.”
“It helps the left to keep it front and center,” said Caldara, calling election denialism a “bogeyman.”
That’s ironic because if you listen to Caldara on right-wing radio, you know he’s constantly mocking his fellow Republicans for ineptitude.
But it’s the height of ineptitude to promote election conspiracies and Trump in our blue state.
Yet, Caldara is running an organization that’s cozying up to folks who are doing Trump’s bidding and promoting election conspiracies as we speak — and helping fellow conservatives like Caldara himself dig their way into oblivion in Colorado.
Heidi Beedle and Erik Maulbetsch contributed to this article.
UPDATED 4/10/23 with Natelson’s comments about his stance on Trump in 2016, 2020, and presently.
