Shock Gloves in Omaha Schools, a Student Walkout Over ICE, and the Politics of Victimhood

On the September 4, 2026 broadcast, Kim Monson looks at what schools are teaching children and what Colorado voters will decide in November. Unaffiliated candidate for governor Greg Lopez explains why he left the Republican party and how he answers the charge that he splits the vote. Author Michael A. Hancock introduces his essay on how a politics of victimhood strips people of moral agency. Spartan Defense co-owner and Senate District 4 candidate Teddy Collins lays out the graduated income tax and what it does to pass-through small businesses. Entrepreneur Susan Kochevar reports on the shock gloves Omaha school resource officers used on students, and commentator Yvonne Paez tells parents what a directed walkout is.

Colorado’s Unaffiliated Governor Ticket Answers the Vote Splitting Charge

Start listening at 16:19 – Hour 1

Greg Lopez, the former mayor of Parker now running for governor without a party, opened on his recent debate against Democrat Phil Weiser. What people told him afterward was that they appreciated an evening with no back and forth over which party was to blame, because it let them hear the answers and see how differently the two men understand the role of government. Republican Victor Marx was invited and chose not to appear. Lopez counted about five more debates on the calendar, the next one at Club 20 in Grand Junction, where roughly 22 Western Slope counties bring the candidates in to talk about what matters on that side of the mountains.

He changed his affiliation at the end of the year because he had come to believe that both parties give the struggles of everyday Coloradans a great deal of lip service while their actions come down to money, power, and control. Running unaffiliated means running with no machine behind him, which he called the hardest path anyone can take to the governor’s office. When Kim Monson put the vote splitting worry to him, Lopez answered that the ballot arriving at a voter’s house carries that voter’s name, so the decision on it belongs to the person holding it and never to a party chairman.

He hears the same first issue everywhere he goes, and that issue is affordability: registration fees on vehicles, insurance, groceries, housing, and what people pay at the pump after eight years of single party rule. He wants people to research the down ballot races by name instead of voting a straight ticket, which he says is how Colorado ended up where it is. His running mate is Taralyn Romero, who spent 25 years in the medical industry and will take the lead on Medicaid, and voters can find the ticket at the Lopez campaign website.

“If they vote for me, that is democracy at the ballot box because their voice is being heard.”

Greg Lopez, Unaffiliated Candidate for Governor

A New Essay Argues a Politics of Victimhood Erases the Capacity to Choose

Start listening at 34:00 – Hour 1

Michael A. Hancock, the retired technology executive and author of Rules for Restoration: A Counter-Manifesto to Radicalism, came on to introduce an essay the show publishes this weekend, “The Death of Moral Agency: How a Politics of Victimhood Robs People of Responsibility and Dignity.” His argument is that modern institutions reinforce what he calls a politics of diminished agency, and that a free society cannot survive it. Moral agency, as he defines it, is the capacity to tell right from wrong, make meaningful choices, and accept responsibility for them. Bad things happen to people, and some of those things genuinely make them victims, yet none of it settles who they become.

Hancock traced the habit back to Genesis, where the serpent persuades Eve and Adam that God has wronged them, and he said externalizing blame is humanity’s oldest temptation. What the essay asks for is a more demanding compassion, one strong enough to acknowledge real suffering without letting that suffering define a person’s identity or erase the ability to choose a future. Kim Monson raised Gloria Steinem and the women’s liberation movement, and Hancock said the same deception runs through all of them, women’s rights and gay rights alike, because a person who takes victimhood on as an identity loses the moral agency underneath it and ends up a slave to whatever movement they joined.

Hancock was blunt about the schools, saying more money and more programs keep getting asked for while results keep falling, and he put American students at roughly 38th in math and reading against a first place standing in the early 1960s. He doubts the students walking out that morning could defend the protest on any principle, because principles are no longer taught to them. His granddaughter will attend Excalibur Classical Academy, and he pointed to homeschooling and classical schools as the places still teaching children how to think.

“A free society requires that the people in it embrace moral agency.”

Michael A. Hancock, Author, Rules for Restoration

The November Graduated Income Tax Measure Would Push the Top Rate to 8.41 Percent

Start listening at 64:17 – Hour 2

Teddy Collins, who owns Spartan Defense in Colorado Springs with his family and is running for Colorado Senate District 4, described one of the largest Senate districts in the state by area, taking in eight counties: all of rural Douglas County, southern Jefferson County, and Park, Lake, Chaffee, Custer, Fremont, and Teller. Affordability is what he hears first in every one of them. His opponent’s answer is price controls, more regulation, and subsidies, while Collins would strip out the rules that made Colorado expensive to begin with. He put the state sixth in the nation for regulation with more than 205,000 rules on the books, and said about $100,000 of regulation and red tape is baked into the price of an average new home.

The measure he considers the most consequential on the November ballot is the graduated income tax. Kim Monson had the brackets in front of her: 7.41 percent above $500,000, 7.91 percent from $750,000 to $1 million, and 8.41 percent on everything above $1 million. Collins said the part that goes unnoticed is that most Colorado small businesses file as limited liability companies or S corporations with pass-through taxation, so a business clearing $1 million in revenue would watch its state tax bill come close to doubling. Wealthy individuals, he added, will simply move to a state that taxes them less, and he has already heard from industry leaders who say they are finished in Colorado if it passes.

Monson tied the graduated rate to envy and to the American premise that the person in the high bracket got there through an opportunity anyone else can pursue. Collins agreed and came back to spending, pointing to more than 4,000 Colorado jobs lost in the last two years and to legislators he says have only ever signed the back of a paycheck. Taxes, in his view, exist to fund the general wellness and protection of constituents, which means law enforcement, roads, and infrastructure.

“If we want Colorado to be more affordable, what we need to do is make government get out of the way.”

Teddy Collins, Candidate, Colorado Senate District 4

Omaha School Resource Officers Used 324 to 362 Volt Shock Gloves Twice Last School Year

Start listening at 75:11 – Hour 2

Susan Kochevar, the entrepreneur who owns the historic 88 Drive-In Theatre, brought Kim Monson something she had come across in Nebraska. School resource officers in Omaha middle and high schools have been wearing a device called a shock glove, a low output voltage emitter made by a company named Compliant Technologies, a name she said reads like something out of George Orwell’s 1984. The glove delivers a painful shock ranging from 324 to 362 volts through direct skin contact. Omaha used it on students twice during the 2025-2026 school year, once on one who was trespassing and fleeing, and once inside a special education program. It leaves no mark, and the company advertises that as a benefit. Once parents and the community learned about it, the district said it would stop.

She would go at the cause of the disorder instead. Expel the students who are violent, she said, and bring parents back in, because the further a school pushes families away the worse the behavior gets. She watches her grandchildren in a homeschooling program and sees far fewer behavior problems once children are actually taught to read and do arithmetic, and she would let students spend less time in class and start working younger, since a job shows them how things really work. Closing out the show she said the students walking out that morning are being used as pawns, and she described gangs recruiting inside lower income schools where both parents work, feeding and paying students until they are pulled away from their families.

Kochevar also pushed back on the idea that ranchers can readily process their own beef. In Texas a buyer has to purchase shares in the animal, and getting cuts to market means finding a processor inspected by the United States Department of Agriculture, which is expensive, scarce, and booked months out. She buys her beef locally and knows most people cannot. What she wants on packaged meat is a label of origin, so imported product cannot be stamped American at the end of the line, and she made the same argument for food that she makes for manufacturing, that growing your own protects you from another country deciding to stop supplying something you need.

“I think schools have really gotten away from truly educating children.”

Susan Kochevar, Owner, 88 Drive-In Theatre

More Than 170 Schools Held a Directed Walkout to Protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement

Start listening at 104:23 – Hour 2

Yvonne Paez took the last segment just before eight o’clock with what she framed as a public service announcement for parents: do you know where your children are today, and what they are doing. More than 170 schools were holding a walkout to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and she told listeners their children were being used for it. Years ago her son’s high school ran what she called a general walkout, where students could protest whatever they liked, and her son was one of three who stayed behind and went to study hall. What is happening now is a different thing, which she called a directed walkout, organized around the school’s cause rather than the student’s.

Paez told parents that a walkout teaches children victim worship and disrespect for the people who protect their communities. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are police who keep dangerous people out of the country, she said, so anyone who supports police has no honest reason to withhold that support here. Speaking in Spanish and then translating herself, she told the audience she is rational rather than racist. Her advice to parents was practical, either keep the child home or find out where the child is and act accordingly.

Her closing thought came back to the parents who have no idea any of this was happening. She repeated that children were being sent out of schools that day to protest, that an ICE protest is a dangerous place for a student to be standing, and that teaching them to do it now sets them up for something worse later.

“Fast forward to today, and now schools are doing what I call a directed walkout, where your kids are being used for their agenda.”

Yvonne Paez, Commentator