Colorado Senate Assistant Minority Leader Lisa Frizell (R-Castle Rock), the former Douglas County assessor elected to the Senate in 2024 after two terms as a state representative, reflected on her time at the legislature during this week’s Women of Influence Luncheon hosted by the Castle Rock Chamber of Commerce. Approximately 50 women and two men enjoyed the $40 a plate — $50 for nonmembers — event at the Olinger Andrews Caldwell Gibson funeral home.
“Going into the legislature, I have to say that I was so idealistic,” she said. “I had this idea that all I had to do was just persuade. I can be persuasive. I was [Douglas County] Assessor. All I had to do was persuade. If I could change people’s hearts and their votes, it was gonna be great. The reality is — and what I didn’t understand was — that outside of this amazing bubble we call Castle Rock is a world that is actually experiencing a crisis of connection.”
Republicans in Colorado have certainly been weathering an ongoing crisis of connection. Most recently, Frizell’s colleague and ally Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer (R-Weld County) narrowly lost the gubernatorial primary to ministry leader Victor Marx, a casualty in the ever-growing conflict between so-called “establishment” Republicans and right-wing grassroots activists. Fellow Douglas County Rep. Anthony Hartsook (R-Parker) ran afoul of Rocky Mountain Gun Owners (RMGO) earlier this year, after the group opposed his bill, which would have authorized the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to access the FBI’s fingerprint search service, allowing authorized agencies to receive notification of activity on individuals who have submitted to a background check. Frizell received pushback from the group for her 2025 bill to increase protections for social media users.
“I was a sponsor of Senate Bill 86 in 2025, and that was creating some requirements for social media companies, and it was, I thought, a very important bill,” she said. “I don’t think that social media companies should, what I would call ‘abuse,’ our children for their own profit. I am all about profit. I’m all about the free market, but there are some really egregious things that happen. It is not just Facebook or Meta. It’s Snapchat and TikTok and Google and YouTube. These are very deep pockets, and we passed Senate Bill 86, it passed through the Senate, passed through the House, went to the Governor’s office, and he vetoed it.”
During a March 24 appearance on the Free State Colorado podcast, Catching Valentinis, RMGO’s director of operations, discussed the group’s problem with the bill. “Sen. Lisa Frizell is associated with Ready Colorado, an organization that has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars attempting to ban you off of the internet for posting about firearms or anything of the sort,” he said. “RMGO and some other grassroots groups, including Free State Colorado getting into the mix last year, we had to kill Senate Bill 86, which was going to do exactly what I just described, and Sen. Lisa Frizell was right at the forefront, but also, so was Rep. Hartsook. We had this meeting of Republicans who wanted to push not just online censorship, but it was going to ostracize anyone who was talking about firearms or using firearms and putting that online, which made it a big issue for us at RMGO, given that the culture of Colorado to embrace our right to keep and bear arms in all spaces is very important.”
Frizell alluded to to her spat with RMGO, who endorsed Tim Arvidson, recently arrested for murder in Colorado Springs, in the primary against her, during the luncheon. “We felt so passionately about [Senate Bill 86],” she said. “We had a little bit of drama. That was super fun, actually.”
According to Valentinis, conflict with Frizell came to a head at this year’s Douglas County GOP Assembly. “Along comes Sen. Frizell, and she looks at all of us informing the delegates, giving them information about who’s been behaving well at the Capitol, who’s been misbehaving at the Capitol, and she says, ‘You all should be ashamed of yourselves,’” he said. “In fair response, I said back, ‘No, you should be ashamed of yourself, Senator.’ That was the end of that interaction. I didn’t think anything of it. All of a sudden, I look through to the center of the fairgrounds from where we were standing and there is the small senator standing next to an officer, pointing at me. I go, ‘That’s never good news. This is going to be something.’ I cross my fingers, and five, ten minutes went by and nothing happened, and then all of a sudden I have two officers walking towards me … he tells me that they were called there today to investigate me because there were claims that I had been harassing individuals, including the Senator herself.”
During the luncheon, Frizell lamented the current political landscape. “We all live in this world where political animosity, incivility, and technological dehumanization has divided us beyond measure,” she said. “How do we fix it? My approach is one meaningful conversation at a time, and seeing, really trying to see people. Because there’s nothing more dehumanizing than ignoring someone. Nothing. People want inherently to be seen, acknowledged. You don’t do that on social media.”
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story used the headline “DougCo Senator Who Called Cops on Gun Activist Laments ‘Political Animosity.'” Frizell contests Valentinis’ characterization of the incident, but declined to comment further.
