By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice
After Freedom Fest ended, Pueblo resident Randy Thurston was still talking his way through the weekend. Not in order. One speaker reminded him of another, and a story from Saturday connected to something he had heard Friday.
He was not replaying the event. He was still putting it together.
“I still don’t know how she pulled it off,” he said, meaning Rocky Mountain Voice founder Heidi Ganahl. “I don’t know how she even had that vision and then the ability to manifest it. Do you know what it took to get everybody there on the weekend before the Fourth of July? That in itself was impossible.”
A little later, after talking through several of the presentations, he came back to it again. “Any one of these speakers, I would’ve driven a thousand miles to see,” he said. “But to have all of them here under one roof … it was the most incredible experience or opportunity you can ever imagine.”
Heidi Ganahl and Jeff Hunt open the second day of Freedom Fest. Photo by Shaina Cole.
Leaders, not politicians
Thurston runs people through one filter. “I don’t support politicians,” he said. “I only support leaders.”
He has said it often enough that people usually ask him what he means. “Every politician has one thing in common. They all have a hidden agenda. A leader doesn’t. A leader looks at his role being elected by the people, for the people, and he never forgets that.”
It is an old habit. Years back, someone suggested he meet a Denver businesswoman who had just announced a run for governor. He had never heard of Heidi Ganahl. They talked about 45 minutes.
“When we got done, I said, ‘Oh my God. Where did you come from? You’re not a politician?'” Thurston recalled. “And she says, ‘No.’ And I said, ‘I’m in.'”
He brought that test to the fairgrounds, where he spent the weekend volutneering. He was not deciding who gave the best speech. He was listening for leaders.
Attendees listen during a Freedom Fest presentation. Photo by Randy Thurston.
A bigger fight than energy
The first presentation he kept coming back to was Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s. Thurston expected a talk about drilling, electricity and state energy policy. He heard something larger.
Wright told the room the race for artificial intelligence would decide more than technology. “If China became the dominant power in artificial intelligence,” he said, “China will be the global superpower of the twenty-first century. And I don’t want to live in a world where China is the dominant power in the world.”
Days later, Thurston was not repeating anything about permitting or natural gas. He had reduced the whole talk to one line. “If we let China control the data centers,” he said, “we will work for China.”
Heidi Ganahl interviews Energy Secretary Chris Wright at Freedom Fest. Photo credit: Jen Schumann.
The questions no one else asks
The next speaker he came back to could not have been more different. Nick Shirley was not talking about energy. He was talking about journalism, about citizen reporting and the duty to ask questions when no one else will.
Shirley, whose footage of suspected daycare fraud in Minnesota ran up four billion views, told the crowd the press had quit the job. “They just stopped representing the people, and they just started representing their party or their agenda or who they’re getting that funding from,” he said. His instruction was small enough to repeat. “If you see something, say something. There’s a lot of power in citizen journalism, especially with X.”
Thurston heard his own question in it. “He’s asking the questions that we should all ask,” he said. “Why isn’t the media telling us the truth?”
Nick Shirley speaks during Freedom Fest. Photo by Jen Schumann.
The poem 20 classmates never heard
Then a 13-year-old changed the temperature of the room. Noelle Caskey was not a commentator or an official. She was there because a poem her own school would not let her read aloud had reached millions of people instead.
The slam poetry assignment asked students to write about a conflict they cared about. She chose abortion. Her teacher told her the poem was good and met every requirement, then said she could not read it to the class because it was too political.
Standing next to her mother, Jacki, she read it at Freedom Fest anyway. “A baby still has a heartbeat at six weeks,” she read. “Boom, boom, boom, boom.” The refrain held it together: “A life is a life, no matter how small.”
Jacki Caskey has her own stake in it. Her birth mother was 14 when she got pregnant and 15 when she gave birth, then placed her for adoption. “She made the brave decision to carry me and deliver me,” Caskey said.
When the family pushed back, administrators ended the meeting with a suggestion. “Maybe you should go home and read the poem to someone who would like to hear it.” They did, and the count is past three million.
Thurston saw them as the choice the system is not offering. The people who set the agenda, he said, hand the public a fixed menu and call it a decision. A 13-year-old reading a poem her school tried to bury was the option that menu leaves off—which, to him, is what freedom looks like.
Some answer fear with laughter
Gutfeld’s answer was to laugh. After hours of speakers asking the room to take things seriously, he made the case that taking the intimidation too seriously was part of the trap.
He said he built his late-night show less around politics than around refusing to let cancellation set the terms. “My goal of the show was to really kill cancel culture,” he said. “You took the power away from them.” His verdict on the people doing the intimidating drew the loudest laugh in the room. “They’re boring. There’s nothing worse than boring.”
What Thurston carried out was not the jokes. “The people that are trying to cancel people, they’re a joke,” he said. “They’re irrelevant. They have no value, so stop giving them credit. Stop giving them any attention.”
Seeing the network
Thurston reacted immediately to DataRepublican’s presentation.
As she traced relationships among nonprofit organizations and advocacy networks, he found himself realizing he had been looking at individual pieces instead of the whole picture.
“I didn’t know,” he said afterward, still shaking his head. “I just didn’t know.”
The organizations weren’t new to him. Seeing how they fit together was.
A country forgets one story at a time
Lee Habeeb never asked the audience to memorize dates. He asked them to remember stories.
The founder of Our American Stories talked about young people in China who have never seen the image of the lone man standing before tanks in Tiananmen Square because an entire generation grew up without hearing the story.
Then he quoted historian David McCullough.
“You can’t love something you don’t know.”
Habeeb made the point again through music, telling the story behind “Georgia on My Mind,” written by one songwriter, made famous by Ray Charles and embraced simply because Americans loved the song.
Thinking back on Habeeb’s presentation, Thurston wasn’t talking about Tiananmen or Ray Charles.
“One of my understandings is human dynamics in people,” he said. “The emotions that we feel today… what new emotions do we have now that we didn’t have then?”
He answered his own question.
“None. The same. It’s just different times and different things. The question is, are we willing to fight for freedom?”
“If we’re not, ask yourself, what does our life look like without freedom?”
That thought came back later when Congressman Jeff Crank described a Cuban grandfather visiting an American Walmart for the first time.
Standing in the cereal aisle, the man stopped.
“Which one will they let us take?”
“You can take whatever you want. You can get two boxes if you want,” his granddaughter said.
When Thurston talked about Crank’s story, he wasn’t thinking about cereal.
“Freedom is taken for granted. We don’t really even have a concept of how good it is here.”
What we have in common
Pastor Lorenzo Sewell, who prayed at President Donald Trump’s inauguration, came on near the end of Saturday. His remarks touched politics and elections, but that was not the part Thurston repeated.
Pastor Lorenzo Sewell speaks during Freedom Fest. Photo by Shaina Cole.
Sewell ran the night on a structure of bad news and good news. “The bad news is we have federal judges that are fighting against our president,” he said. “But the good news is, the Bible says that when the enemy comes in like a flood, that the Lord will lift up a standard against him.”
He kept returning to the idea that the fight was not finally against people. “We’re not fighting against a Democrat nor Republican,” he said, “but we’re fighting against the principalities and the powers.” He closed on the line that fit Thurston’s whole weekend. “The truth will set us free.”
When Thurston tried to explain why it reached him, he did not repeat Sewell’s examples. “It shows that we’re all Americans,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what race, what religion. We have something in common.”
Finding which way is up
By then we had moved through a cabinet secretary, a journalist, a comedian, a historian, a pastor and a 13-year-old. Thurston kept saying they had all done one thing. “They were just adding another piece.”
He had not said what the pieces became. At one point, Thurston described getting buried in an avalanche.
“It all comes back to awareness,” he said. Most people start digging right away, and the trouble is they do not know which way they are pointed. The first thing to do is spit. Saliva follows gravity, so it tells you where down is, and only then do you know which way leads back to the light. Will you ever forget that?” he said. “Never.”
By the end of the conversation, Thurston had stopped talking about individual speakers. “It was the most incredible accumulation of awareness in one place that I’ve ever seen,” he said. Not because everyone agreed, but because each had shown him another piece of a picture he could not see whole when the weekend began.
Janis Gatlin, Bonnie Shirley, Randy Thurston, Larry Gatlin, Nick Shirley and Curtis Grimes gather backstage during Freedom Fest. Photo by Randy Thurston.
One election
Near the end, Thurston brought up Ronald Reagan. Most people know the warning that freedom can be lost in a generation. Thurston thinks the clock moves faster now.
“We can lose our freedom in one election, not a generation,” he said.
For Thurston, the audience’s role was just as important as the speakers’.
“They had to self-discover it,” he said. “They couldn’t be force-fed that.”