Colorado Republicans shocked to see Victor Marx leading the Republican gubernatorial primary should realize that electing a serial confabulist with questionable finances is a feature of their party, not a bug. The Republican party’s descent into political madness was on full display last weekend at the Rocky Mountain Voice Freedom Festival in Castle Rock.
RMV founder Heidi Ganahl and conservative talk radio host Jeff Hunt organized the two-day event. Ganahl’s own gubernatorial bid, derailed by preoccupation with furries in public schools, seems mild in comparison to Marx. The speaker lineup featured a half-dozen election deniers, including Tina Peters, the president of the Heritage Foundation, conservative Christian religious freedom legal advocates, Republican candidates and elected officials, and Vice President J.D. Vance’s mom.
“This place is gonna get crazy over the next few hours,” Ganahl, joined by KNUS radio host Jeff Hunt, told the mostly empty event hall on Friday morning. “I encourage you to stay hydrated, stay excited. We’ve got amazing speakers.”
Seth Keshel, a former junior intelligence officer in the Army, shared election conspiracies in a speech peppered with sexual innuendos like “electile dysfunction” and “premature inauguration.”
Anti-trans activist Erin Lee retold her well-trod story about her daughter’s experiences with an LGBTQ club in her public school, and how her outrage was harnessed by conservative media figures. “I eventually found my way to Kim Monson and then John Caldara and then a journalist friend at the Epoch Times, and boom, within a week I was on Tucker Carlson,” she said. “I continued to say yes. I got onto Glenn Beck and Fox News and the more I spoke the more families reached out with similar stories.”
The culmination of Lee’s efforts are this year’s slate of ballot initiatives from Protect Kids Colorado — Initiative #109, which would create a statewide ban on trans athletes in girls’ sports, as well as Initiative #110, which would ban certain gender-related healthcare procedures for anyone under 18. Protect Kids Colorado co-founder Kevin Lundberg described the effort as an attempt to “stop the transgender plague in Colorado.”
The highlight of the day was Peters, the former Mesa County clerk whose 9-year prison sentence was recently commuted by Governor Jared Polis. Since her release, Peters has refused to admit to any wrongdoing. “We cannot let Jena Griswold get in office,” she said. “Have you seen her ads? Her big claim to fame is putting an ordinary citizen — because of their First Amendment rights and for doing the right thing — in prison.”
Peters claimed that Griswold was also responsible for her loss in the 2022 Republican primary for Secretary of State. “I was running for Secretary of State and Jena Griswold cheated the election,” she said. “And then she cheated the recount.”
Peters also shared anecdotes about her time in prison. “The woman who was running the prison was a Satanist,” she said. “She had a statue of some kind of demon in her office and she ran the prison like that. And, of course, being a bearer of life and loving the Lord, not only was I that kind of spiritual opponent, but she knew who I was there.”
Mike Davis, founder and president of the Article III Project, a conservative legal advocacy group, discussed debunked conspiracies about Venezuelan gangs and lauded President Donald Trump’s immigration efforts. “The liberal media says that Tren de Agua did not exist here, and lo and behold, they went and broke up Tren De Agua apartment buildings in Aurora, and now they went from ‘they didn’t exist here’ to that they’re just fathers trying to make a living and they’re heroes,” he said. “So President Trump campaigned on the fact that he is going to secure our border. He’s gonna expel these animals.”
Davis went on to defend Trump for a variety of controversies. “We saw the lawfare against President Trump,” he said. “They did everything they could to try to destroy the man. They tried to bankrupt him for non-fraud. They tried to bankrupt him from that [E.] Jean Carroll, that beauty queen who said that Trump tried to sexually harass or assault her, which is just complete nonsense, as everyone knows just by looking at her. So they tried to bankrupt Trump. They tried to throw Trump in prison four times for the rest of his life for non-crimes. They tried to throw him off the ballots right here in Colorado. Jena Griswold, another beauty queen, our Secretary of State, who should be in prison for what she did to Tina Peters.”
In between conspiracies and invective aimed at Griswold, the audience was treated to emotional stories from Patti Fox, whose daughter was severely injured in a car crash with an undocumented driver who fled the scene of the crime, and Beverly Aikins, J.D. Vance’s mother, who described her battle with addiction and repeatedly referred to herself as a “drug addict whore.”
The keynote speaker for the first day of the Freedom Fest was former Newsmax correspondent Lara Logan, who railed against globalists and claimed the CIA was behind election irregularities. “The intelligence agencies are determining who they’re selecting, who’s actually going to rule over us,” she said. “And you know a lot about that in Colorado because of Tina Peters, right? I mean that’s why you know it. You know the role that this has played.”
Logan used QAnon talking points to spur the audience to take action. “Once you knew that they rape children for money,” she said. “Right here in your state, right now, somewhere not too far from here, children are being raped and tortured and some of them murdered. Once you knew, what did you do?”
Logan also warned against popular music festivals like the one owned by conservative billionaire Phil Anschutz. “Do you see what’s happening at all these big venues like Coachella and these big concerts that people go to, and they have all these great light shows that light up the night sky and all the kids are doing their thing to the music,” she said. “And when you look at that symbology, what do you see? You see images of ancient demons. You see demonic images, you see images that are satanic, and you know what they’re doing at those events? They’re praying, they’re worshiping those demons. So whether the kids know it or not, they are participating in the worship of demons. This is calling on these ancient demons to come forth. And you know what that’s called? That’s giving you authority to the demonic. So instead of giving it to God, you’re giving it something much darker. And what are they actually doing at those places? They’re harvesting the souls of our children.”
The second day of Freedom Fest was more of the same. The day started with a rodeo event, and the political programming was kicked off by a presentation from Jennica Pounds, known more widely by her social media username Data Republican, titled “When Will Soros Be Arrested?”
Author James Lindsay explained to the crowd — most of whom were old enough to remember the Cold War — that communism is when the air conditioning doesn’t work. “You have to do all this paperwork to be allowed to turn the air conditioning on [in Europe] in case you violate some sustainability measure,” he said. “That’s communism, guys, this is socialism. In America, you’re like, dang, it’s hot. Let’s make it cold, because that feels better.”
The audience also heard from a number of Republican elected officials and candidates, including U.S. Representatives Jeff Crank (R-CO) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO), as well as Colorado Sen. Mark Baisley (R-Roxborough Park), Colorado Rep. Scott Bottoms (R-Colorado Springs), and 4th Judicial District Attorney Michael Allen, who is running for Attorney General, among others.
The Douglas County Fairgrounds was a fitting venue for the event, not just because Douglas County has been a hotbed of feverishly paranoid conspiracy politics, but because the Douglas County Board of Commissioners were willing to give Ganahl and Hunt $25,000 for the event.
Hunt and Ganahl pitched the event to the commissioners during their March 9 meeting. “Heidi’s organization is a non-profit organization, so this is not a partisan event,” said Hunt. “It’s not meant to advance a particular party or any particular candidate, but to highlight the issues that we love about Colorado, the principles that make Colorado great, and its 150th birthday, which is a key aspect to this.” Ganahl has previously pitched her organization, the Rocky Mountain Voice, to donors as part of her larger project called “Road to Red,” which has the goal of returning Republicans to power in Colorado.
The event featured booths full of Trump merchandise and a nearly exclusively Republican line-up of speakers, except for former Republican Greg Lopez, who is running for governor as an independent.
Ganahl noted that the reason they needed so many sponsors was to pay for speaking fees. “Jeff Coors is one of our first key sponsors or donors, and he’s doing the match on 50k of the donations, so we’re starting to get some momentum on the donations,” she said. “We’re going to try and raise about a million dollars to do this well. A lot of that is speaking fees because, you know, they cost a lot of money to bring here, and then just making it a really amazing event, production-wise, too.”
Douglas County taxpayers helped bring Lara Logan to Castle Rock to tell Republicans that Katy Perry is eating babies. Perhaps that helps explain how Victor Marx is the gubernatorial frontrunner.
