7 JANUARY 16-22, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NEWS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | Hence the promises that the podcast is changing. Crude and shrewd A few days later, Oltmann puts his chief marketing offi cer on the phone, who reveals the new name of the show: Untamed. Untamed is certainly an edgier, slicker branding than Conservative Daily, but the name alone doesn’t promise less partisan content. However, that promise is coming from Oltmann and his team. “We just want a platform that promotes free speech,” says Josh Shave, the marketing executive. “At the end of the day, we really want to bring a community together. The goal of this is: We don’t care what football team you’re on. We don’t care what side of the aisle you’re on.” As for advocating for Peters, “I don’t see Tina any different than I do the injustice against someone that gets abused by a po- lice offi cer,” Oltmann says. “I want to give people a voice. “Prior to 2020, nobody ever called me left, right, green, yellow, purple,” he con- tinues. “There was never this divide that was happening now, strictly what’s right is right and what’s wrong is wrong. And now we’ve mixed those two together in the same salt and pepper shaker, so it’s really diffi cult to divide what you should and should not support. It’s caused a lot of division in our communities.” Oltmann, who participated in pro-police rallies in 2020 while Black Lives Matter protests were happening across the country, says he wants to “push towards ‘How do I have a better dialogue?’” He insists that before 2020, he would call himself a centrist. “I’m like the Elon Musk conservative,” he says. “I’m just right there in the middle to hang out with people. And then it turned into right-wing extremists, which is absurd.” Election integrity remains a focus. In the fi rst ninety days of the Trump administra- tion, Oltmann predicts the country will see an end to mail-in ballots and that election offi cials like Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold will be held accountable. “And that’ll get us to a place where now we can start talking about sports,” he says. “We have to start healing,” Oltmann adds, sounding like an intentional parody of the political left. The sound and the fury Oltmann and his team haven’t offered a precise date for the launch of the rebranded podcast as Untamed, though he’s been mention- ing upcoming changes on Conservative Daily. On one recent show, Oltmann brings up avowed white nationalist Nick Fuentes. “Man, I gotta tell you something,” he says of the self-described “proud incel.” “You guys have built up a reputation around this guy, and I went back and just watched a bunch of stuff — I felt like a little fanboy.” But then the kinder, gentler, less partisan Oltmann does attempt a clarifi cation: “I don’t agree with everything that he says.” He is more up front about his intentions on January 1. About ten minutes into that show, Oltmann reveals, “I’ve got a brand- new podcast that I’m launching in 2025, brand-new. I’m literally going to change the name of my podcast and I’m going to move towards having conversations like I want to. … I want to talk to people who I don’t agree with and that I do agree with, and I want to hear their perspective.” Beyond that statement, though, there’s little to indicate a change of tone in Oltmann’s programming, or a change of heart for his con- frontational and accusatory on-air persona. The new year brings with it the Cyber- truck explosion in Las Vegas and the attack in New Orleans, both of which are fodder for Oltmann right out of the gate. He pivots from announcing the new show to criticiz- ing the Black female FBI spokesperson in New Orleans as a “DEI hire” after she stated that the bureau wasn’t yet calling the event a terrorist attack. “The reality of it is this is a mostly white country, and mostly white countries, frankly, are the ones that are being asked to assimilate, assimilate to, and, and bow down and kowtow to things that happened 100 years ago,” he continues. “And frankly, there are racists on both sides, Black people and white people.” Oltmann segues from that to: “Anytime a white person says that I’m proud to be white, right, or disagrees with you, you go straight to racism.” But a minute later, he adds, “You got white liberal women that, frankly, are just retarded.” Talk is cheap One week before Trump’s inauguration, one week after the anniversary of the Janu- ary 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Peters is back on what is still called Conser- vative Daily. She is speaking from Larimer County Jail, talking with Oltmann about the denial of her most recent appeal. Oltmann goes to break when Peters’s visitation time expires, then returns to talk about a good point that white nationalist Nick Fuentes made on X. But soon Peters is back on the show, using her jail-issued tablet to make more unrepentant claims about the corruption of the system. Untamed seems an appropriate rebrand for Oltmann’s show, but conservatively speaking, it’s hard to believe he’s about to trade owning the libs for nonpartisan dia- logue and “healing.” Email the author at [email protected].
