Lauren Boebert

Lauren Opal Boebert ( BOH-bərt; née Roberts; born December 19, 1986) is an American politician, businesswoman, and gun rights activist serving as the U.S. representative for Colorado's 4th congressional district beginning in 2025, having previously represented Colorado's 3rd congressional district from 2021 to 2025. From 2013 to 2022, she owned Shooters Grill, a restaurant in Rifle, Colorado, where staff members were encouraged to carry firearms openly.

A member of the Republican Party, Boebert is known for her gun rights advocacy. In 2020, she defeated 5-term incumbent Scott Tipton in an upset victory in the primaries of Colorado's 3rd congressional district and went on to win the general election over Democratic nominee Diane Mitsch Bush. In Congress, Boebert has associated herself with the conservative Republican Study Committee, the right-wing Freedom Caucus, of which she became the communications chair in January 2022, and the pro-gun Second Amendment Caucus. She won reelection in 2022 by a narrow margin of 546 votes against former Aspen City Council member Adam Frisch. Boebert was reelected to a third term in 2024 after switching to run in Colorado's 4th congressional district.

Boebert's views are considered far-right, a label she rejects. She is an ally and supporter of president Donald Trump and supports Trump's unsubstantiated claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him and voted to overturn its results during the Electoral College vote count. She has also promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory. Boebert opposes transitioning to green energy, COVID-19 mask and vaccine mandates, abortion, sex education, gender-affirming surgery for minors, and same-sex marriage. She advocates an isolationist foreign policy but supports closer ties with Israel for religious reasons. A self-described born-again Christian, Boebert has said that she is "tired of this separation of church and state junk" and argued for greater church power and influence in government decision-making.

Early life

Boebert was born in Altamonte Springs, Florida, on December 19, 1986, to Shawna Roberts Bentz, who was 18 at the time of Boebert's birth. The identity of her father is not known. Professional wrestler Stan Lane was speculated to be Boebert's father but this was disproved by two DNA tests. At the age of four, Bentz took her from Florida to Colorado to stay with her boyfriend, only to move back to Florida with a different boyfriend, and then returned to Colorado with the Colorado man, who became her stepfather. When she was 12, she and her family moved to the Montbello neighborhood of Denver and later to Aurora, Colorado, before settling in Rifle, Colorado, in 2003. Boebert dropped out of high school during her senior year in 2004 when she had a baby. She earned a GED certificate in 2020, a month before her first election primary.

Boebert has stated that her family depended on welfare when she was growing up and that she was raised in a Democratic household in a liberal area. Records at the Colorado secretary of state's office show that her mother was registered to vote in Colorado as a Republican from 2001 to 2013 and as a Democrat from 2015 to 2020. At age 19, Boebert herself registered to vote in 2006 as a Democrat; in 2008, she changed her affiliation to Republican.

According to Boebert, she became religious while attending a church in Glenwood Springs, and that she became a born-again Christian in 2009. She has claimed she volunteered at a local jail for seven years, but attendance logs at the Garfield County Sheriff's office show that she volunteered at the jail nine times between May 2014 and November 2016.

Early career

After leaving high school, Boebert took a job as an assistant manager at a McDonald's in Rifle. She later said that this job changed her views about whether government assistance is necessary. After marrying Jayson Boebert in 2007, she got a job filing for a natural gas drilling company and then became a pipeliner, a member of a team that builds and maintains pipelines and pumping stations.

Restaurant ownership

In 2013, Boebert and her husband opened Shooters Grill in Rifle, west of Glenwood Springs, Colorado. Boebert says she obtained a concealed carry permit after a man was "beaten to death by another man's hands ... outside of [her] restaurant", and began encouraging the restaurant's servers to carry guns openly. That is mostly false: in 2013, a man who had reportedly engaged in a fight blocks away ran to within about a block of Boebert's restaurant, fell, and died from a methamphetamine overdose. The Boeberts also owned a restaurant called Smokehouse 1776, now defunct, across the street from Shooters Grill. In 2015, Boebert opened Putters restaurant on Rifle Creek Golf Course, which she sold in December 2016. Shooters Grill, according to her congressional disclosure forms, lost $143,000 in 2019 and $226,000 in 2020.

In 2017, 80 people who attended a Garfield County fair contracted food poisoning after eating pork sliders from a temporary location set up by Shooters Grill and Smokehouse 1776. The restaurants did not have the required permits to operate at the temporary location, and the Garfield County health department determined that the outbreak was caused by unsafe food handling at the event.

In 2020, Boebert protested orders issued by Colorado governor Jared Polis to close businesses in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In mid-May 2020, she violated the state's stay-at-home order by reopening Shooters Grill for dine-in service, for which she received a cease and desist order from Garfield County, with which she refused to comply. The next day, Boebert moved tables outside, onto the sidewalk, and in parking spaces. The following day, Garfield County suspended her food license. By late May, with the state allowing restaurants to reopen at 50% capacity, the county dropped its temporary restraining order.

Shooters Grill closed in July 2022, when the building's new owner opted not to renew the lease.

U.S. House of Representatives

Elections

2020

Primary

In September 2019, Boebert made national headlines when she confronted Beto O'Rourke, a candidate in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, at an Aurora town hall meeting over his proposal for a buy-back program and a ban on assault-style rifles like AR-15s. Later that month, she opposed a measure banning guns in city-owned buildings at a meeting of the Aspen City Council. The ordinance passed unanimously a month later.

Boebert was an organizer of the December 2019 "We Will Not Comply!" rally opposing Colorado's red flag law, which allows guns to be taken from people deemed a threat. The American Patriots Three Percent militia, affiliated with the Three Percenters, provided security, and members of the Proud Boys attended the rally. On Twitter, Boebert has used rhetoric friendly to the Three Percenters and posed with members of the group. She deleted the tweet with the photos after being asked about it. During her congressional campaign, she said she was "with the militia".

In December 2019, Boebert launched her campaign to represent Colorado's 3rd congressional district in the United States House of Representatives, beginning with a challenge to five-term incumbent Scott Tipton in the Republican primary. During her campaign, she criticized Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other members of "The Squad", positioning herself as a conservative alternative to the progressive representative. Seth Masket, a political science professor at the University of Denver, suggested that Boebert wanted to motivate Republican voters to participate in the primary during a slow election cycle by stirring up their anger at Ocasio-Cortez and others.

Boebert criticized Tipton's voting record, which she said did not reflect his district. Before the primary, Trump endorsed Tipton, but Boebert characterized him as unsupportive of Trump. She accused him of supporting amnesty for undocumented immigrants by voting for H.R. 5038, the Farm Workforce Modernization Act of 2019, saying that the act had a provision that led to citizenship and provided funding for housing for undocumented farm workers. Boebert decried what she said were Tipton's insufficient efforts to continue funding for the Paycheck Protection Program, whose money had run out within two weeks, arguing that more was needed. Boebert raised just over $150,000 through the June 30 primary.

In a May 2020 interview on SteelTruth, a QAnon-supporting web show, Boebert said she was "very familiar with" the conspiracy theory: "Everything I've heard of Q, I hope that this is real because it only means America is getting stronger and better." The Colorado Times Recorder reported that she followed multiple YouTube channels connected with QAnon before deleting her YouTube account when it came under scrutiny. Boebert later said she was not a follower of QAnon, in a statement where she endorsed investigations into "deep state activities that undermine the President".