Photo by Michael Hupfer
Audio By Carbonatix
What are the differences between Colorado Republicans and GOP backers across the country? Wayne Laugesen, editorial page editor of the Colorado Springs Gazette and the Denver Gazette, has some ideas.
“Colorado Republicans writ large are fiscally conservative but socially moderate – and some of them are socially liberal,” Laugesen says. “I probably fall into the latter category, with the exception of abortion. I think an elective abortion is simply the murder of a child, and a lot of Republicans disagree with me on that.”
There are other potential areas of dispute, too – including some pertaining to the current occupant of the Oval Office, many of whose followers seem to treat his every utterance like scripture. As Laugesen puts it, “I am not a political purist by any means. I like a lot of what Donald Trump is doing and has promised to do, but that doesn’t mean I agree with him on absolutely everything.”
People who cannot handle dissent probably won’t like his new podcast, Wayne’s Word, an independent project that’s not affiliated with the Gazette, Laugesen says.
The highly personal ideology at the heart of the podcast has roots stretching back to Laugesen’s early childhood in Philadelphia. His father died unexpectedly when he was six, leaving his mother, whom Laugesen says “grew up in abject poverty,” a single parent of three with no formal education. But she eventually earned a GED, went to college and became a teacher, as well as a vocal advocate for progressive causes.
“She was very much a liberal Democrat at the time. She had me out campaigning for George McGovern” during the South Dakota senator’s unsuccessful presidential run in 1972, he says.
Another worldview entered his life after his mom met the principal at a high school in the Kansas community where the family moved on the cusp of Laugesen’s adolescence. “He had a ‘Barry Goldwater Would Make a Great President’ framed poster, and they got into it,” he recounts. “They definitely didn’t hit it off at first. But a couple of months later, they were married. So I grew up in a household of conflicting political rhetoric – and that’s really what got me interested in communications and politics.”
His transition into journalism also had a familial connection. “My dad wanted to get out of the education business. He wanted to be in the newspaper business, so he bought a small-town newspaper and started another one. I worked at those papers through high school and then went to Fort Hays State University and studied communications. From there, I did an internship at the Washington bureau of Newsweek and worked at the Salina Journal in Kansas. After that, I went to the Mesa Tribune in Arizona, then back to Washington, D.C., where I was at a magazine called Consumers Research. That’s where I really developed my political persuasion, which is sort of a combination of my bleeding-heart-liberal mom, who was a wonderful person and a great American, and my conservative stepfather, who ultimately went on to get his Ph.D. and became a college professor.”
By the second half of the 1990s, Laugesen had relocated to Colorado and was working for the Boulder Planet, a free weekly newspaper that ceased operations in 2000. But another opportunity soon came calling. “Some of the columns I wrote for the Planet challenged the city’s anti-gun-law proposals, and Colonel Robert K. Brown, the publisher at [Boulder-based] Soldier of Fortune magazine, liked them and called me,” he recalls. “He had a position open for managing editor, and it turned out to be an absolutely fantastic place to work. He doubled my pay, gave me my own office with my own bathroom, and I did a lot of foreign travel. It was phenomenal.”
At the same time, Laugesen was freelancing for the Boulder Weekly. “I had been doing a column for them that was very counter-cultural for Boulder, because it was right of center,” he recalls. “The column was a hit and people liked it – and I liked the publisher, Stewart Sallo, despite very disparate political views. We got along pretty well, and Stewart asked me to help him find a new editor for the publication as a sort of a consultant. And as part of the process, of me helping him, he asked me if I would do the job.”
Laugesen was interested, but he had conditions: “We had a contract where I could write anything I wanted to opposing abortion, and I couldn’t be fired for that. I wasn’t going to work for a publication that wouldn’t let me defend the unborn, and graciously, Stewart contracted with me under those circumstances. I didn’t turn the whole publication right-wing; I wouldn’t have done that. But I think it was beneficial to the Weekly, because it provided something no other publication in town did, which was to include a right-of-center view of things that were going on locally at the time.”
After his stint at the Weekly, Laugesen freelanced for a variety of national publications, including the National Catholic Register and Faith and Family magazine – and, in conjunction with his wife, Dede, he created Holy Baby!, a DVD series that “was for young Catholic children, from toddlers to seven years old, and was prayer-based. It was a way to immerse kids in prayer in a fun way,” according to Laugesen.
The next career shift took place in 2007, after a colleague, former Westword reporter Richard Fleming, sent him an ad for editorial-page editor at the Gazette. Laugesen was hired shortly thereafter and has been there ever since – and given the Gazette‘s conservative stance, he’s never had to bargain for the opportunity to decry abortion, gun-control legislation or the like.
In recent years, Laugesen’s oldest son, George (he and Dede have six boys between fifteen and thirty), began encouraging him to start a podcast. At first, he resisted the notion, in part because he’d already had a rough experience with the format.
“I tried this before, back at the start of the 2000s,” he says. “We put together a studio and everything. But at the time, nobody was podcasting and nobody knew what it was. You’d go out and tell somebody, ‘I started a podcast. I’d like you to listen to it.’ And people would ask, ‘What the hell is a podcast?’ Back then, you had to download it onto your iPod, which was another problem. So I was completely a voice in the wilderness.”
In 2025, he continues, “the exact opposite is true. It seems like everybody has a podcast. Talk about a crowded market. In doing one, I felt like I’d be a drop of rain landing in the ocean.”
Still, Laugesen was impressed by the impact Joe Rogan’s podcast had on the outcome of the 2024 presidential election. After nearly twenty years at the helm of the Gazette‘s editorial page, he had what he calls “a wonderful array of contacts” across the political spectrum, which has come in handy throughout the five episodes of Wayne’s Word that have been distributed to date. The first pod, which went live on January 18, featured Derrick Wilburn, an at-large member of Colorado Springs’s Academy School District 20 school board.
Subsequent guests have included Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, Colorado Springs Mayor Yemi Mobolade and Cindy Romero, whose video of alleged Venezuelan gang activity in Aurora became a national talking point taken up by Trump. Many officials and observers in Aurora have claimed the assertions about gang-related dangers in the city have been exaggerated for political purposes, but Laugesen disagrees. “What’s going on in Aurora is far worse than anybody thinks,” he asserts.
If Laugesen has a favorite session to date, however, it was his sit-down with Scott Riopelle, CEO of Interstate Roofing.
“Scott lives in Denver, and he’s a high school dropout who got into all kinds of trouble with drugs. He had to steal to support his drug habit, got a gun and ended up in jail for three years. But now, he’s started one of the two or three biggest roofing companies in the country. He’s relatively unknown outside of the roofing industry, and he’s the kind of guest I love to have on, because he’s an inspiration for anybody. He shows how you can be sitting in a prison cell that used to be occupied by Tim McVeigh and then turn your life around and become stupendously successful.”
Wayne’s Word can be accessed on multiple platforms, including Instagram, YouTube and X. The clicks on the latter have varied from the low quadruple digits to a whopping 239,000-plus for the Romero conversation on March 4, the most recent to date. That last number is impressive, but Laugesen concedes, “It will never meet my expectations. If you put out a podcast, you’ve got this little part of you that thinks, ‘I’m going to publish it and by midnight, it will have 10 million views.’ Of course, that’s not going to happen, but you can hope.”
After a laugh, he acknowledges that “when I look at it realistically, I’m very pleased with the progression – and I’m really enjoying doing it. Right now, it’s as much of a hobby as anything else. If it stays that way, it’s fine, and if it becomes something more than that, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. But I want people to hear who I have on. These are conversations for anybody who wants to put on some headphones as you work out or are driving down the road. If you want to hear an honest, raw, non-corporate conversation, tune into Wayne’s Word.”
Here’s the YouTube clip of the podcast featuring Scott Riopelle.
