A public relations consultant with the conservative Steamboat Institute is among the people and institutions in Colorado with connections to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which some say would provide a right-wing guide for a possible second Trump presidency.
Alexei Woltornist is listed as a “communications consultant” on the “Our Team” page of the website of the Steamboat Institute, which is based in Steamboat Springs and, among other projects, sponsors an annual conference and campus speakers. Woltornist is identified as co-founder of the Athos, a public relations firm, and as an assistant secretary of public affairs for the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump Administration, where he supervised some 800 public affairs staffers in the giant department that was created after 9-11. He is now a priest at St. Joseph Melkite Catholic Church in Lansing, Michigan.
Woltornist is featured in a Project 2025 video about communications in a conservative administration. ProPublica acquired 14 hours of videos, including Woltornist’s, which spells out how PR staff in a future conservative administration can best serve the president.
He advises that the only way to “reach” people who “vote for a conservative presidential administration” is through “conservative media outlets.”
“The American people who vote for a conservative presidential administration, they’re not reading the New York Times, they’re not reading the Washington Post,” Woltornist says in the Project 2025 video. “To the contrary, if those outlets publish something, they’re going to assume it’s false. So the only way to reach them with any voice of credibility is through working with conservative media outlets.”
Other Colorado connections to Project 2025 can be found on “advisory board” section of the Project 2025 website. It lists the Family Policy Alliance and James Dobson Family Institute in Colorado Springs — as well as the Centennial Institute, which is the public policy arm of Colorado Christian University in Lakewood. There is also the Family Research Council — one of Dobson’s Focus on the Family spinoffs. Neither Woltornist nor any these entities returned calls seeking comment.
Focus on Steamboat Institute
Some speakers at the Steamboat Institute’s past Freedom Conferences have veered in the same extreme rightward direction as Project 2025 does.
Former conference speakers such as John Eastman, Ginnie Thomas, Charlie Kirk, and Michael Flynn have sometimes been respectable figures at the conference, but they were later found to be hip-deep in efforts to deny Joe Biden’s win of the presidency in 2020, as well as the mob assault on Congress on January 6, 2021, spurred by then-President Trump.
RELATED: Will the Steamboat Institute Continue To Offer a Platform to Extremists & Conspiracists?
Last year, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, was a prominent speaker at the Freedom Conference. His speech did not mention Christian nationalism or Project 2025’s plan to remake the federal government should a conservative Republican be elected as president. But the speech presaged many of the elements of those conservative movements/projects that have become so prominent in the 2024 political campaigns for president and Congress.
Roberts’ speech, “Unhyphenated Conservatism,” can be viewed on Youtube, or read on the Heritage Foundation’s website. He decries divisions in the conservative community and offers 10 unifying ideas or themes, many of which can be found in the 900-some pages of Project 2025.
Two former speakers at Steamboat Institute conferences – Stephen Moore and Ben Carson — helped author sections of Project 2025. Moore was one of three authors for the Department of the Treasury section, while Carson served Trump as secretary of the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and authored the Project 2025 piece on reforming HUD. Carson is currently the national faith chairman of Trump’s 2024 campaign.
An investigation by the New York Times into the authors of and contributors to Project 2025 shows numerous connections to those who worked in the 2016-2020 Trump administration.
