When Steve Bannon took the stage to raucous applause at last Friday’s fundraising gala for the Colorado Republican Party, he wasn’t just the keynote speaker, he was also the third convicted felon to address the crowd.
The lineup began with a jailhouse call from MAGA martyr Tina Peters, who remains defiant.
“I have faith in God, I had faith in all of you that this wrong will be righted,” said Peters, a former Mesa County Clerk. “I’m the only one in Colorado who actually preserved the presidential elections from the 2020 election. The rest of them were deleted, and I suspect not only in Colorado, but across the United States. I know that God has plans in place to bring these criminals that have stolen your vote down. And that’s the only thing you and people like Steve Bannon and President Trump and others like him, that Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, my attorneys who have done stellar work in spite of these rulings by corrupt judges and DAs that have been funded, as we know, by billionaire globalists to keep the truth from you.”
Newly elected Jefferson County GOP Chair Rich Wyatt was on stage using his phone to bring Peters’ voice to the gala. Wyatt, who took over running the GOP in Colorado’s fourth-largest county in February, won despite his felony convictions for conspiracy to deal firearms without a license and tax fraud, crimes for which he served a year behind bars and another on parole, as well as his more recent calls for political violence.
After some live auctioning and an introduction from outgoing state GOP Chair Dave Williams, Bannon, who, in addition to his four months in federal prison last summer, had just weeks earlier avoiding going back to jail by pleading guilty to another felony in his border wall fraud case, ambled to the stage. He largely stuck to three main talking points: Tina Peters, Tom Tancredo, and Donald Trump, along with a hefty dose of vitriol for Gov. Jared Polis (D-CO) as one of the “globalist elites” who want to destroy Colorado and the nation.
Bannon’s trademark blend of pro-wrestling bravado and AOL chat room troll played well with a crowd that couldn’t get enough of his beyond-the-pale propositions. He called for Trump to cut off all federal funds to Colorado, including closing the Denver branch of the Federal Reserve, until Polis pardons Peters. He heaped praise on former Congressman Tom Tancredo, who leveraged the notoriety from his infamous “Bomb Mecca” threats into a purely xenophobic 2008 campaign for president, including an ad imagining border-crossing terrorists blowing up a mall. In Bannon’s words, “He was Trump before Trump!”
The trio of speakers shared more than felonious rap sheets, however. All three are unapologetic election deniers who firmly believe that Trump won the 2020 election. Bannon kept returning to that point both in his defense of Tina Peters, and in his call for a third term for President Trump.
“In 2020, the second election, he won, right? He won. Tina Peters rots in prison tonight on the fact that he won and she’s one of the heroes that showed that. But it was providential, it was stolen. It was! Think about it. Number one, you can understand. They’re not Democrats you used to know from decades ago, right? This is not, this party is a party of neo-Marxist and globalists.
“So in 2028, I made my endorsement. It’s Trump. A man like Trump comes along once in a nation’s history… But within the first hundred days, get your pitchforks out, get your bayonets ready. Because they’re gonna be coming for Trump. They gotta stop it now. That’s where they got these radical federal judges are the anvil in the deep states the hammer and that’s what they hope to crush Trump on, right? They just gotta go with these Marxist judges and the entire apparatus that hasn’t been taken apart yet. He’s gonna need more than four years to that and I’ve got a plan. I’m not gonna share it with you yet.”
Bannon’s attacks on Governor Jared Polis, on whom he seemed quite fixated, especially for a politician he insists will never mount a credible presidential campaign, invoked multiple antisemitic tropes such as globalist elites and controlling the media.
“Polis is gonna get kicked into the ashbin of history,” said Bannon. “He’s got the old politics. The old politics when they controlled the media, the old politics when they controlled the universities, the whole politics they controlled high culture, low culture, Wall Street, Silicon Valley — you ain’t controlling any of it now! We’re breaking every one of these institutions that you corrupted and we’re giving them back to the people to purge them, to renew them and to make sure that they work for America first and American citizens first.”
Bannon restrained himself in at least one way, however. He didn’t conclude with a Nazi salute as he did a few weeks ago in his speech to the conservative conference goers at CPAC.
