National Harbor, MD– Brita Horn, candidate for chair of the Colorado GOP, has led the organizing of volunteers at CPAC for the past four years.
“Colorado is really involved here,” Horn said. “They really do like CPAC. They really like the style of it.”
On the main stage at CPAC, speakers gave talks with titles such as “Stacey Abrams Needs a Job: The People Fight Back.” Horn said one of the highlights of CPAC was seeing Elon Musk speak. Musk came out on stage waving a “chainsaw for bureaucracy.”
Nancy Miller, who traveled to CPAC from Pueblo, Colorado, seconded Horn’s thoughts about Musk. She also said the highlight of CPAC was, “being around like-minded people that share our same beliefs and looking forward to what the future holds for the U.S. and just for our local government.”
When it comes to the future of the Colorado GOP, Horn said she is all for anything that would attract different types of conservatives and Republicans, which she said does not include the new proposed bylaws that came up in the chaotic Colorado GOP meeting in late January.
“They [the proposed bylaws] were all to make the party smaller, to make the voters, the voting members, smaller, to keep control,” Horn said. “And that’s not how you run an organization that is already small.”
The Colorado GOP also recently announced it is nullifying the results of the Weld County GOP’s local leadership election. Horn said she thinks the party should have gone with what the county wanted.
“Having that kind of chaos going on and finding some minor rule to do something and to try to overturn it and have one person out of the whole party, that whole county to complain, I mean it’s definitely suspect,” Horn said.
Miller said she works with the Pueblo County Patriots. Although it is a “non-partisan” group that fights against the “Socialist Agenda,” Miller holds conservative values and the group itself is led by Colorado’s RNC Committee Woman Christy Fidura, an election denier who has shared multiple conspiracy theories online.
“Our vice president is normalizing having his children out in the public instead of where the left is trying to abort them,” Miller said.
Upstairs at CPAC was also “media row,” an expansive hallway of conservative news outlets, including Colorado’s own Jeff and Bill Show on 710KNUS. Host Jeff Hunt set up a “budget” booth where he broadcast live from the conference. Among his guests was longtime Colorado operative Jim Pfaff, a former chief of staff for the Colorado House Republican Caucus who now runs the Conservative Caucus, a grassroots advocacy organization.
This morning, while recapping his experience at CPAC, Hunt noted that the conference is now “Full-on MAGA. It is MAGA-dominated… The Neo-cons completely abandoned CPAC, they’re not even in the room- they not getting booths, they’re not having conversations.”
Downstairs, vendors pitched products with conservative branding, such as Patriot Mobile cell phones and advocacy groups promoted their causes to attendees. Among those groups was Do No Harm, which focuses on ending Diversity Equity and Inclusion policies and gender-affirming care for minors. At its booth the group had fliers recounting its recent lawsuit against the University of Colorado.
The University of Colorado settled with Do No Harm on Feb. 14 over a scholarship called the “Underrepresented Minority Visiting Elective Scholarship,” which was meant for those who identify with the groups such as, “African American/Black, Native American, Hispanic/Latino, Pacific Islander, LGBTQ+, or those from a disadvantaged socioeconomic background.”
Do No Harm sued on behalf of a student that said was “qualified” for the scholarship, but was not able to receive it under factors they could not control. They claimed the scholarship excluded white and Asian American students.
As a part of the settlement, the scholarship was changed to the “Radiation Oncology Visiting Elective Scholarship.”
Several other speakers at CPAC also had Colorado connections. They included Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, who owns Denver-based Liberty Energy, the nation’s second-largest hydraulic fracking company, and a pair of lawyers: former Colorado Special Attorney General Mike Davis and John Eastman, who authored the infamous “coup memo” while serving as a Visiting Conservative Scholar at CU Boulder’s Benson Center. Eastman’s law license is currently suspended in both California and the District of Columbia pending the California Supreme Court’s ruling on his permanent disbarment.
In his speech, Wright did not talk about climate change. He recognized climate change in his Senate confirmation hearings, but recently said on Fox Business there are pluses to global warming. He also recently admitted a mistake in firing nuclear security workers.
