Lee Habeeb: “Storytelling is urgent work”

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice

Lee Habeeb is coming to Castle Rock this month, and he’s not telling anyone what he’s going to say.

“A good storyteller always likes surprising the audience,” he told RMV. He did offer one detail. The crowd at RMV’s Freedom Fest will hear a song they all know and love. They just won’t know the story behind the man who wrote it. Not until Habeeb tells them.

Habeeb speaks on the main stage Saturday, June 27 at RMV Freedom Fest at the Douglas County Fairgrounds in Castle Rock.

What his grandfather taught him

Some lessons get taught at the dinner table. Habeeb’s grandfather taught his in a courtroom gallery, watching strangers become citizens. “My grandfather made me go to these immigration ceremonies to see first-hand how this is the greatest country in the world,” he told the Oxford Eagle in 2018. 

In a Newsweek column, he wrote that “we dark-skinned immigrants didn’t come here to change America; we came to have America change us.”

His mother’s side gave something harder. “My Italian grandfather’s only son — my mother’s only brother — enlisted in WW2 and died in battle in France,” Habeeb told RMV. “He was the uncle I never knew. He never had kids of his own. Or grandkids.”

Lee Habeeb grew up in New Jersey — “Soprano’s country,” he told RMV. Habeeb was the only person with an Arabic last name in a town of 20,000. He was heckled and sometimes taunted. His parents didn’t intervene. 

“They refused to organize the world around my sensibilities,” he wrote in Newsweek. “There were no calls to the principal’s office. They taught me to handle things myself and to ignore ignorance. To take such claims seriously, they explained, would only give power to the offender.”

Personal responsibility and agency, he wrote, were “a big deal to my Italian and Lebanese family. It was taught without ever being taught—it was that fundamental.”

Habeeb married a woman who is part Irish, part French, part American Indian and part Viking. Along with his heritage, their daughter carries all of it.

“She’s an Italian, Lebanese, Swiss German, French, Irish, American Indian Viking,” Habeeb said. “She’s the pluribus in E pluribus unum. Only in America is such a thing possible. How we live and love in this country is astonishing.”

The show he had to build

Habeeb didn’t drift into conservative media. He was scrapping over it in law school. “I went to law school with Laura at the University of Virginia, where we battled the faculty’s leftward turn way back when,” he said. They both finished in 1991. Habeeb went on to co-found and executive produce The Laura Ingraham Show in 2001, helping push it to a top-five spot on the Talkers Heavy 100 by 2007.

He has been the VP of Content at Salem Media Group since 2007, spending the better part of two decades producing some of the biggest names in conservative talk including Bill Bennett, Dennis Prager, Larry Elder, Hugh Hewitt, Charlie Kirk, Dinesh D’Souza and others. He still holds that role today.

But a different idea had been building alongside all of it. “I like celebrating stories of people who have done the hard work, who are doing the hard work,” he told the Oxford Eagle. “They are happier. Other people are happier because of their hard work.”

“I had the idea for a storytelling show, without politics, simmering in my head for years,” Habeeb said, “and Bill Bennett helped prompt me to action.”

“Our American Stories with Lee Habeeb” launched in 2016. No debate. No opinion. No news of the day. The format puts real people telling real stories in their own words. A Midwest farmer. A small business owner whose life was well-lived. “We tell some tragic stories too,” Habeeb said, “like the story of Lincoln’s last day.”

In a foreword he wrote last month for the story collection The Immigrant and the Outlaw, Habeeb wrote that “it has also been said that one can’t love something they don’t know. Which is why I have spent a good deal of my life telling the story of America to Americans with the show I founded and host…'”

“Without spending a single penny on marketing,” Habeeb told RMV. “The show’s growth has been completely organic. Our 1.2 million weekly listeners are a Nielsen number, which you can’t buy.” 

By 2021 the show was independently syndicated on nearly 200 stations, five nights a week, two hours a night. After iHeartMedia’s syndication arm, Premiere Networks, signed it to a national deal, the show grew to nearly 500 stations. Its podcast has been downloaded 7 million times in the past year. Talkers Magazine ranked it #98 in 2018, #30 in 2020 and #10 on the most recent Heavy Hundred.

The show runs as a nonprofit. “It took a while,” Habeeb said, “to beat algorithms that reward darkness, anger, outrage and conspiracies.”

Bernie Goldberg, winner of 12 Emmy Awards at CBS and HBO, wrote, “Lee is a man who can tell compelling stories to the great American middle that doesn’t eat and breathe partisan news. He understands the power of story, and the tremendous power of radio. And how to turn that old medium into a new one.” 

Reagan’s chief speechwriter Tony Dolan wrote: “He understands that truth goes beyond facts, but also know that once facts are collected and ordered properly, they can become the most powerful form of communication in the world. The Four Gospels and their parables transformed history. Reagan and his stories transformed a country. Lee Habeeb’s love of storytelling, his talent in the narrative form, and his vision with Our American Stories, can transform American politics and culture.”

Rule of law, even for people we dislike

In August 2025, the White House tapped Habeeb to narrate the story of John Adams for the America 250 “Story of America” series, produced in partnership with Hillsdale College and the U.S. Department of Education. The video was published on whitehouse.gov and Youtube on August 11, 2025.

The story was Adams’ decision to defend the British soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre of 1770.

“What John Adams did … took great courage and character,” Habeeb told RMV. “But rule by mob was also on trial, and Adams understood that if America were to become the nation it would become, rule of law must prevail. And due process of the law, especially for people we dislike.” Adams won acquittals for most of the soldiers, who he argued had acted in self-defense.

In the same foreword, Habeeb looked to Reagan’s 1989 farewell from the Oval Office. “If we forget what we did,” Reagan warned, “we won’t know who we are.” 

Habeeb wrote that memory “matters in the health and preservation of a nation. Of a state. Of a town. And of a family and the individuals that comprise that family.”

“Storytelling is urgent work for all Americans,” he continued. “We have not just an obligation to tell them, but a duty: because if we forget what the people who came before us did, we will most certainly forget who we are.”