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Steve Bannon speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center last month in Oxon Hill, Md.
Pikes Peak towers over the Antlers Hotel and Pikes Peak Avenue on a sunny morning in early February 2025.
Boot Barn Hall at Bourbon Brothers was rebranded as the Phil Long Music Hall at Bourbon Brothers under a new naming rights deal announced in November 2024.
Steve Bannon exits court in New York on Feb. 11, 2025, after pleading guilty to a fraud charge related to duping donors who gave money to a private effort to build a wall along the U.S. southern border.
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Steve Bannon speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center last month in Oxon Hill, Md.
The Colorado Republican Party was left scrambling, looking for a new location for its annual fundraising dinner after The Antlers in downtown Colorado Springs on Monday abruptly canceled the March 28 event featuring keynote speaker Steve Bannon, a former top Trump adviser, in response to an online uproar the party blamed on “radical leftists.”
By Tuesday evening, party officials said they’d secured a new location and anticipated the dinner would take place at the former Boot Barn Hall in Colorado Springs, a spacious country-Western music venue that frequently hosts GOP gatherings and recently changed its official name to Phil Long Music Hall.
In a social media post earlier Tuesday, the party blamed The Antlers cancellation on a social media campaign launched by far-left activists.
“Antifa, the Denver Democratic Socialists of America, and other radical Democrats are trying desperately to disrupt and cancel our event but we won’t let them,” read the post, which went on to promise that the event would remain in Colorado Springs with an unchanged roster of speakers.
Pikes Peak towers over the Antlers Hotel and Pikes Peak Avenue on a sunny morning in early February 2025.
“This dinner event will move forward with Steve Bannon,” the party stated.
Event organizers originally planned to hold the dinner at a hotel in the Denver Tech Center but announced in early March that the party’s annual Centennial Dinner would be held at the historic hotel, a venue that has been host to GOP gatherings in recent years, including the El Paso County Republicans’ Lincoln Day dinner.
Online protesters claimed victory, declaring that they had chased the event from Denver and forced organizers to move it again from The Antlers.
Boot Barn Hall at Bourbon Brothers was rebranded as the Phil Long Music Hall at Bourbon Brothers under a new naming rights deal announced in November 2024.
Attempts to reach management at The Antlers, part of the Wyndham Hotels and Resorts group — owned since 2015 by Perry R. Sanders Jr. and John Goede — were unsuccessful as of Tuesday evening.
An architect of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for president and the longtime host of “Steve Bannon’s War Room” podcast, Bannon pleaded guilty in early February in New York to a state fraud charge as part of a deal that avoided jail time. The charges stemmed from a multimillion-dollar fundraising effort to build a wall along the country’s southern border. Bannon was pardoned on related federal charges by President Donald Trump near the end of the Republican’s first administration.
Outcry against The Antlers event was spearheaded in part by Colorado Springs social activist and business owner James Proby and driven by online posts accusing The Antlers of hosting a “White supremacy gathering.”
Bannon has denied being a White nationalist, instead casting himself in a 2016 Wall Street Journal interview as an “economic nationalist.” He served a four-month sentence in a federal prison in 2024 for contempt of Congress after refusing to cooperate with a congressional investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Steve Bannon exits court in New York on Feb. 11, 2025, after pleading guilty to a fraud charge related to duping donors who gave money to a private effort to build a wall along the U.S. southern border.
Colorado GOP staffer Darcy Schoening said she learned that The Antlers had pulled the plug on the dinner in a roundabout way, from a friend who received an email alert from the hotel canceling a related room reservation.
Schoening said Tuesday morning that the left’s attempt at “cancel culture” has had the opposite effect. Even before the new venue was secured, she said she was seeing an online spike of interest in the fundraiser.
“This event is now bigger than it was. I’ve been watching tickets sell all night, so thank you Democrats,” Schoening said.
Traditionally the Colorado GOP’s largest fundraiser, the dinner falls on the eve of the state party’s biennial reorganization meeting, scheduled for March 29 at a church in Colorado Springs.
The party initially offered about 300 tickets to the event, according to the online ticketing site. It will be the party’s first Centennial Dinner since 2023, when the keynote speaker was Arizona Republican Kari Lake.
Colorado Politics’ Ernest Luning contributed to this story.
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