Joe Oltmann Untamed | Patrick’s Take On: Schoolhouse to Courthouse | 10.23.26

With Joe out today, Patrick takes the host’s chair, and he’s bringing a story he knows from the inside. Patrick spent nearly 20 years as an educator and worked for the Cherry Creek School District before he was let go weeks after saying, in a mandatory equity training, that he loves his country. Today he opens with a family demanding answers: a student's family says the district acknowledged it had no safety plan in place for her, even though, according to the attorney, district representations under oath told a different story. Patrick asks the questions the district hasn’t answered, and looks at the legal office overseeing it all as Cherry Creek faces two active federal lawsuits. Then Patrick walks through the district’s own court filings. In one lawsuit, a 14-year-old Asian student alleges she was suspended for two months over a video she didn’t speak in, while the students who made it go viral faced no discipline, with administrators allegedly citing the “whiteness of the school” and the “race card.” In Patrick’s own case, now before the Tenth Circuit, he reads directly from the district’s motion to dismiss, in which its lawyers argued that school districts “may censor speech and/or compel it” and that his refusal to call America systemically racist “ran afoul of the District’s legitimate interests.” You’ll hear it in the district’s own words. Finally, the show turns to Colorado’s courts, where a judge accused of a conflict in Christopher Gregory’s case ruled on his own recusal and said no without a word of explanation. With ballots due November 3, the Denver Gazette editorial board is urging voters to reject retention for Justice William Hood and Judge Grant Sullivan over their ties to the judicial scandal, and Patrick breaks down the Masias Memo, the document that started it all. From the classroom to the courtroom, it’s a look at institutions that have stopped answering to the people they serve.