Right-leaning activists, media personalities, scholars and politicians gathered in Denver this weekend at the Western Conservative Summit to sound the alarm over threats to the region’s way of life, which some warned is under attack.

More than 1,000 people filled a corner of the Colorado Convention Center for the two-day summit, sponsored by Colorado Christian University’s Centennial Institute, to hear from a lineup of speakers and join in discussions.

Institute President Jeff Hunt set the tone for the summit and its “Western Strong” theme in his welcoming remarks, delivered Friday morning from the stage of the convention center’s Bellco Theatre.

“We’re creating a place for conservatives to get together,” said Hunt, noting that the gathering was in its 14th year.

But this year, he added, conservatives appear to be on the run in the West.

“If you’re like me, this election was tough,” he said, referring to last November, when Democrats swept every statewide office in Colorado and increased their majorities in the Legislature.

“I’ve been through some elections that were gut-punches before. This one was really hard in the state of Colorado to get out of.”

Hunt noted that the summit’s sponsors are nonpartisan and “not in the business of getting anyone elected here” but said that elections “are kind of temperatures of how the culture is going,” and recent ones in Western states haven’t gone well for conservatives. “In fact, it seems like the whole West is shifting.”

During the last presidential election, Hunt said, Donald Trump only won five of 13 Western states, and there are 6 million more Democrats in the West than there are Republicans.

“That’s going to shape our culture,” he said. “It’s going to change things.”

He said he was encouraged by a conversation with John Andrews, a former Republican leader in Colorado’s state Senate and Hunt’s predecessor running the institute.

“He said this is exactly why we have the Western Conservative Summit,” Hunt said. “It’s easy to be a conservative when everyone’s winning, the sun is shining, blue skies, and you can just follow everybody else to all the victories. It’s tough to be a conservative when we’re all losing.”

Hunt recalled that he had been in the same venue during the 2015 summit when news broke that the U.S. Supreme Court had legalized same-sex marriage, casting a pall of “heaviness and depression” over the crowd. That’s when the late Bill Armstrong, a former U.S. senator and longtime president of CCU, “walked right to this podium, and he said, ‘Fellow patriots, now is the time to mount your horses and ride to the sound of gunfire,” Hunt said.

“And that’s what I hope we can do through this conference. So be inspired, be educated, be activated. And let’s go change this culture.”

Headliners at the summit included U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, Christian author Eric Metaxas, and Seth Dillon, owner and CEO of the satirical conservative website The Babylon Bee. Colorado’s three Republican House members – U.S. Reps. Doug Lamborn, Ken Buck and Lauren Boebert – also spoke.

Noting that his grandfather was a first-generation American, Hawley described his approach to politics during this keynote speech Friday night.

“Now, we believe that the nation is a family, and when you come to this family, we stick up for one another, we we believe in one another, we fight for one another,” he said. “That’s why we believe in citizenship, because we believe in the value of this nation. And we believe that this nation has a purpose, this national has a destiny. And God isn’t finished with it.”

While the summit was once considered an essential stop for Republican presidential hopefuls – Trump’s appearance in 2016 marked a move to solidify support in the GOP’s conservative wing – this year just two longshot White House hopefuls showed up: talk radio host Larry Elder and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who has called on Trump to suspend his presidential campaign in the wake of federal criminal indictments. Although Hutchinson didn’t mention Trump or the felony charges, his midmorning speech on Friday drew some boos and prompted some audience members to walk out.

U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman, the Wyoming attorney and rancher who defeated Republican Liz Cheney in last year’s primary, described “coastal elites” and environmentalists as “the problem.”

“They want to tell the rest of us how to live,” she said, despite not understanding the West or its residents.

“They think they know what makes us tick. I think it’s because they watch ‘Yellowstone’ on TV, that they know all about us,” she said, referring to the popular Paramount TV hit starring Kevin Costner.

“They love to glamorize Western culture, and they love to watch it on TV and in the movies. But at the very same time, they want to make it impossible for real cowboys to exist. They want to make our entire way of life disappear.”

Later in her speech, Hageman put it more bluntly: “They may deny it, but we know what’s true. The fact is, they despise your ranch, they hate your farm, they hate your sheep and your cattle, and they hate your coal and oil and gas. They despise these things because they represent strength, independence, self-sufficiency, community and family, and they despise you because you might oppose what they’re trying to do. It’s a war. It is a war on us and on the entire Western way of life. So we must fight back; we can’t ever give up.”

Colorado Democratic Party Chairman Shad Murib, who helps operate a cattle ranch in Eagle County with his wife, former state Sen. Kerry Donovan, D-Vail, told Colorado Politics that he didn’t know enough about Hageman to respond to her remarks but said he had some thoughts about her tone.

“One of the things that I’ve learned in my foray into running the ranch and being a part of – I guess what you’d call the cowboy way of life – is we typically treat each other with respect, and these politicians who try to turn us against each other out west have no idea what they’re talking about,” he said.

“The irony of this all is, they all worship a celebrity from New York, so I don’t really want to hear from them about who supports ranching or not when that guy decimated agriculture in this country and we’re doing our best to bring it back.”