An email sent out this week by The Leadership Program of the Rockies (LPR), Colorado’s preeminent training program for conservative politicians and activists, details all the sponsors of its 2025 conference. That list includes some major movers and shakers who have driven conservative policy both in Colorado and nationally.

LPR claims to be nonpartisan, and ostensibly revolves around teaching libertarian principles like the free market. The training program has, over three decades, trained a large number of Colorado conservative politicians, as well as media figures who have gone on use their platforms on radio and podcasts to steer the state GOP towards far-right politics. Several of LPR’s notable graduates, several of whom now hold elected office, have a history of promoting conspiracy theories, including claiming that the 2020 election was rigged.

During its conference in February, LPR stated to attendees that its goal is for training program graduates to “create an echo chamber within traditional and news media as journalists for publications, bloggers, radio hosts, news commentators and opinion leaders.” 

At the conference, several speakers raised concerns about President Donald Trump’s policies on tariffs, immigration, and Russia’s war in Ukraine. (For a more in-depth look at the 2025 LPR conference, listen to Heidi Beedle talk about it on the Colorado Times Recorder’s podcast, Fever Swamp Review.)

Here is a non-exhaustive list of some major sponsors who funded the event. 

Prominent National Groups

Some of the organizations listed will be familiar to anyone following national right-wing politics. Most notable is the Heritage Foundation, the far-right group which published Project 2025, a much-scrutinized document containing a laundry list of social and economic conservative policy goals. While Trump denied having any knowledge of the plan during his campaign last year, many of his executive actions since taking office seem to align with the goals laid out in the 900-page document.

Heritage is listed as having paid for a half-table at the LPR event. In this, it was joined by the Federalist Society, the national right-wing legal network which began to embrace election conspiracies following Trump’s 2020 defeat.

The State Policy Network (SPN) also paid for a half-table. SPN is a national network of over 150 conservative advocacy groups and think tanks, with numerous links to the billionaire Charles Koch’s political work, which coordinate to push a national right-wing policy agenda at statewide and local levels. Several SPN affiliate groups are involved in the promotion of the “American Birthright” social studies standards, a set of pseudohistorical curricula focusing on instilling traditional, conservative, and religious values in students, which has since been adopted by Colorado’s Woodland Park school district.

Other national groups paid only for a single booth. Among them was Turning Point USA, a right-wing organization focusing on building conservative political power on high school and college campuses. On top of allegations of racism and hate speech, Turning Point also began pushing election conspiracies after 2020.

Also in the booth-for-one category was the international Free Cities Foundation (FCF) – a libertarian group advocating for, as the name suggests, “free cities,” which can be summarized as autonomous zones free from government regulation. FCF describes multiple ways of accomplishing this, either through government decree (as in the case of the “startup city” Prospera in Honduras), or by “seasteading” in the ocean outside government borders (attempted a few years ago with the repurposed cruise ship MS Satoshi).

As of last month, advocates for free cities are reportedly meeting with the Trump administration to pursue similar projects in the U.S.

Colorado-Grown Groups

Several conservative statewide groups were also involved in the conference. Of note is Advance Colorado, a right-wing dark money group which has funneled millions of dollars into conservative political causes in Colorado. The group has been a driving force behind numerous recent ballot initiatives, with more seemingly in the works for the near future.

The Anschutz Foundation, founded by billionaire oil magnate Phil Anschutz, paid for a full table at the event. One prominent Republican activist has claimed that Anschutz funds Advance Colorado.

Also in the full table category were FASTER Colorado, a group which advocates for stopping school shootings by training and arming teachers, and Ready Colorado, a conservative nonprofit ostensibly focused on promoting “classical” charter schools that has also spent millions on Republican state senate races.

Two other prominent conservative education groups are also sponsors: Ascent Classical Academies, the very chain of “classical” charter schools promoted by Ready Colorado, and ACE Scholarships, founded by oil magnate Alex Cranberg, after a school voucher initiative he favored lost at the ballot box.

The Rocky Mountain Voice, a conservative news publication founded last year by former CU Regent and 2022 GOP gubernatorial nominee Heidi Ganahl as part of her plan to reclaim Colorado for Republicans, is listed as the event’s Book Room Sponsor.

Christian Home Educators of Colorado (CHEC), a religious-right organization which advocates for keeping homeschooling free of regulations, paid for a booth-for-one. The organization regularly platforms anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.

Some individual well-known conservatives sponsored the event, including former University of Colorado president Bruce Benson. His support of the Boulder campus’s conservative think tank led it to be subsequently renamed the Benson Center. It is best known for hiring coup lawyer John Eastman. Others include LPR board member Danny Moore, Ganahl’s running mate who, in 2021, was booted from Colorado’s Independent Redistricting Commission following the revelation that he had promoted election conspiracies on social media, and Tim Walsh, a Front Range developer who ran for state senate in 2022. Walsh’s money has also funded conservative propaganda videos from PragerU. The name that received top billing as the event’s dinner sponsor, Paul Pittman, is likely the least known- he runs REIT Farmland Partners, which owns about $1.5 billion in farm real-estate nationwide.

Also on the sponsor list are the Colorado Springs-based El Pomar Foundation, a general purpose philanthropic nonprofit, and the Colorado Apartment Association, an interest group for real estate and development.

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