By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice
By Saturday morning, Russ and Deb Minary were home, a refrigerator due to be delivered and an ordinary weekend resuming around them. They couldn’t stop replaying the day before.
They almost hadn’t gone.
Their Friday had cleared at the last minute, and they drove over on short notice for day one of Rocky Mountain Voice’s two-day Freedom Festival, marking America’s 250th birthday and Colorado’s 150th.
“It’s frightening when you see how easily our elections are being changed and manipulated,” Deb said. “But it’s also encouraging to know there are people trying so hard to fight for our freedom.”
The day had split in two for them—what frightened them, and what gave them hope.
They brought the receipts
The first “receipt” that stayed with him came from Mark Cook, a forensic investigator on the Mesa County voting-system case. He pulled a voting-system image onto the screen and walked the room through database tools he said had no business being there. “This should not be on a voting system,” he said.
Cook’s argument went wider than the machine in front of him. “Every problem that we’re experiencing in this nation is downstream of elections.” Then came the part Russ couldn’t get over. “Mark Cook being able to go in live on screen and show us, well, here’s what I found, and here’s what you can do,” he said, “like swapping the results between Biden and Trump, and then back again.”
Deb came away rattled. Russ came away angry. “The back doors that have been built into our voting machines—people should be horrified,” he said. “We should be marching around the state capitol with torches and pitchforks.”
Cook’s conclusions are disputed by Colorado election officials, and the breach he investigated is the one that sent a Mesa County clerk to prison—a story the room would hear later, from the woman herself.
The fight over the SAVE Act
The SAVE Act was the day’s answer, and Russ already knew it cold—he’d made the case for it in an RMV commentary that morning. “The SAVE Act is a complete no-brainer,” he said. “The only reason someone would oppose it is that they want illegal immigration and election manipulation.”
Mike Davis, who runs the Article III Project, gave the short version of what the bill does: a voter ID to vote, proof of citizenship to register. It isn’t stuck for lack of votes, Davis argued—it’s stuck because Senate leaders won’t force the issue.
“All you have to do is make these Senate Democrats debate,” Davis said. “When they run out of gas, you hold the vote, and you can pass it with a majority.” His fix for the calendar excuse: cancel the August recess. “Recess is for kids.”
Kevin Roberts brought the same fight, and turned an insult into the point. The Heritage Foundation president said Senate leaders Thune and Cornyn had accused Heritage of demoralizing the conservative base by pushing the bill. He threw the logic back at them: an 80/20 issue with majority support even among Black Democrats, he said, was “something we shouldn’t insist that Republican senators advocate for?”
Russ found that bracing. “Somebody that has been attacked would stand up there and just go, well, we’re not gonna quit,” he said. His own version was sharper: “I hope the left is demoralized by it.”
By afternoon the Minarys had heard the argument a third time, in a SAVE Act breakout led by Andy Mangione of the Election Integrity Network. The room was full for it—a breakout session, not the main stage, and people had given up their break to be there.
The whole day, Russ said, felt like “drinking from a fire hose.” They left the session with senators’ numbers in hand and a reason to use them.
A warning from Tina Peters
Tina Peters was the speaker Deb had most wanted to see, this soon after her release. The room was on its feet before Peters reached the microphone.
Peters told the crowd she was a clerk doing her job, preserving election records “required by federal law.”
“All she was trying to do was essentially what the law says to do,” Russ said. “She was arrested and imprisoned for it.”
A Mesa County jury saw it differently, convicting Peters in 2024 over the breach of county voting equipment and rejecting the records-preservation defense she asserted from the stage. Twenty-five days out of prison, she told the crowd not to pity her. “Don’t feel sorry for me,” she said. “Don’t be afraid that they’ll do what they did to me, to you.”
To Russ, the warning was simply true: if they could do it to Peters, they could do it to anyone. He answered it like a dare. “You wanna come get me on this stuff?” he said. “I ain’t scared. I am not.”
What Erin Lee laid out
Russ keeps up with the legislature, so what got him about Erin Lee wasn’t the emotion of her story. It was the list. “I loved that she said, are you aware that 20 laws have been passed?” Russ said. Lee, who founded Protect Kids Colorado after her own daughter was secretly transitioned at school, told the crowd Colorado had passed more than twenty laws mandating gender ideology since Jared Polis took office in 2019.
“I had no idea that some of those had made their way through the system,” Russ said.
The bills made him angry in a way the rest of the day hadn’t. “It really pissed me off,” he said. “The people who should be stewards of our state are actually abusing the people really badly.”
Deb heard the same speech and came out the other side of it. “I was really moved,” she said. To her it wasn’t a warning so much as a roll call—ordinary parents who’d refused to stay quiet. Lee had come to the cause from the other side of the aisle, “a recovering leftist,” she said, “clean now for five years.”
What moved Deb wasn’t the politics of it. It was watching people stand on a stage and talk openly about their faith—how, as she put it, God had carried them “through so many different situations.” That people “felt free to do it” in that room was the thing she kept coming back to.
By then they’d noticed something about the speakers themselves. None of them had asked the room only to agree. Nearly every one ended on some version of the same instruction—do something.
Redemption
The speaker Deb was most curious about was JD Vance’s mother. Beverly Aikins didn’t do a politician’s-mom turn. A recovering addict, she walked the stage and refused to clean herself up for the room—the nursing career lost to Vicodin and heroin, the kids who stopped speaking to her, the morning she woke with everything she owned gone.
When her son’s memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” was about to publish and she learned she didn’t come off well in it, she told him to run it anyway: “publish the effing book.”
That composure came a long way down the road. It had started years earlier with a number she couldn’t reach: $385, the price of a sober-living bed—the one place that had one—and she didn’t have a penny. Her sister agreed to cover half. The rest she prayed for.
The night before she was due to leave, with the money still short, the loudspeaker called her to the day room. She hoped it was one of her kids.
It was the pastor. He and his wife, he told her, wanted to cover the other half. “I see something in you,” she remembered him saying. “I think you’re gonna give back to the recovery community.”
“Do you know how long it had been,” she asked the room, “since anybody told this drug addict whore they saw something good in me? It’s been a very long time.”
She got her nursing license back. The son who’d gone years without speaking to her eventually bought her the condo she still lives in. There are grandchildren now. She reads Philippians 4:13 most mornings—”I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” Eleven years clean, she stood at Freedom Fest telling all of it to strangers, and the room came to its feet.
For Russ, that was the speech that stopped being about someone else. What got him was that she didn’t sugarcoat any of it. “She’s just raw,” he said. “Everybody thinks that people who are in the public eye just have a perfect life, they’re squeaky clean. She kind of showed the reality.” Then it turned personal. “That’s my story,” he said. “I was crazy and did a bunch of awful stuff, but at the age of 40, I gave my life to Christ, and it was a 180. The story of redemption, I just love that.”
If Beverly’s story said a person could be redeemed, Kelsey Reinhardt argued Colorado wasn’t beyond it either. Kelsey Reinhardt had lived an unlikely life—a full basketball scholarship to Notre Dame, years in a convent meaning to become a nun, then out again to marry. What Deb admired was that Reinhardt could “just talk about her faith and be fighting for protection for kids” in the same breath.
Now president of CatholicVote, Reinhardt’s message was that being outnumbered didn’t mean being beaten. “The size of the threat is never the measure of what God can do,” she told the crowd, running through Gideon’s 300 and David’s five stones. What Russ took from her was one word, remnant. “You scrape out all the peanut butter you can, then you throw the jar away,” he said. “The remnant is what’s left in that jar.” A faithful few who won’t fold.
Lara Logan gave him the war that remnant is fighting. What struck him was a credible media figure talking openly about spiritual warfare. “People seem so afraid to talk about it,” Russ said, “and she just laid it out”—that people forget they have authority, and the fight is choosing daily whom they give it to. She called Colorado “a captured state.”
Most people in the room were “on the downhill slope,” Logan told them, closer to the end than the beginning. What she couldn’t understand was the fear. “We’re letting fear govern our lives,” she said—fear of loss, of humiliation, of what they’ll do to you. The question worth more, she argued, was what you’d answer for when you stood before God.
Russ had his answer. “I have one good fight left in me at least,” he said. “So let’s go.”
Pray and row the boat
For Russ, the day didn’t change his mind so much as confirm it. He’d been warning people about this for years, he said, the same way Lara Logan had from the stage. Watching it laid out felt like vindication. “People, for a long time, just dismissed me. They’d say, oh, that’ll never happen in Colorado. And then it started happening.” He doesn’t like the phrase, but he used it. “I’m not one to say I told you so. But yesterday was like I told you so.”
For Deb it came back to the flags and the songs and the size of the moment. “I just love America,” she said. “This is a huge year—our two hundred and fiftieth anniversary. This is something we really need to celebrate.”
Years ago, Russ said, Joe Coors gave him a line he’s never let go of. Picture a shipwreck, two people in a lifeboat, an island in the distance. Some believers just sit down and pray to be carried there. Coors told him not to do that. Pray, and row the boat.
By Saturday morning Russ and Deb were home, the refrigerator still on its way, the weekend resuming. The speakers had left them with the same instruction, over and over: do something. So they did. They picked up an oar.