Tucson’s Conservative Talk

The morning Dr. Anthony Fauci sat before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right, Kathleen Winn built her Wednesday broadcast around a single claim she and her guests have pressed for years: that the origins of COVID-19, and the response to it, were neither accidental nor benign. The hearing supplied the hook. What followed was two hours of argument — first a sweeping account of the pandemic's origins from the movement that says it warned the world in 2017, then a blistering local turn on crime, prosecution, and the Tucson officials her second guest holds responsible. Much of what was asserted across the morning is contested, unproven, or a matter of the speakers' opinion, and it is presented here as such.

Ava Chen: The Hearing, and a Claim of Vindication

Ava Chen of the New Federal State of China joined for the show's standing China Watch Wednesday segment, and both women treated the Fauci hearing as confirmation of what they had said before the mainstream press. Chen said she watched the second half and wanted to bang her head against the wall as Fauci pleaded the Fifth; Winn caught the first half before a dentist appointment. Both praised the senators — Chen singling out Josh Hawley, who she said asked Fauci what day of the week it was and what color tie he was wearing to underscore the blanket refusal to answer.

Winn's framing was that a presidential pardon may shield Fauci on federal ground but not from state-level consequences flowing from what she called his "expert advice," in air quotes. Her recurring point: "We called this out with Wuhan long before the mainstream media." Chen agreed the day was "a great validation."

The status of these claims should be clear to readers from the outset. The lab-leak and deliberate-release theories Chen advances are disputed. U.S. intelligence agencies remain divided on COVID-19's origin, with some favoring a laboratory-associated incident and others a natural spillover, and there is no consensus that the virus was an engineered bioweapon deliberately released. What follows is Chen's account, offered in her voice and attributed throughout.

Ava Chen: The '13579' Timeline

Chen's central narrative is built on the whistleblowing of Miles Guo — the movement's founder, now in federal prison following a fraud conviction, which Chen characterizes as persecution rather than a legitimate verdict and which readers should understand as a contested framing. She laid out a chronology.

In 2017, she said, Guo turned over to the FBI a document describing a CCP program she calls the "13579 plan," which the bureau authenticated but, in her telling, acted on. Guo did not share it publicly, she said, until September 5, 2020, in a livestream with Steve Bannon. The numbers, as she decoded them in a prior episode, describe a single engineered bioweapon, a release, sustained social effect, seven target economies, and — the "9" — a vaccine launched within nine months to shift global dependency onto China. "These are long-plotted, dark, evil plots," she said, "against humanity basically."

She dated Guo's warnings to the Hong Kong uprising of June 2019, when he cautioned that the CCP might resort to biochemical weapons to crush the protests, escalating through the fall to a late-December 2019 warning of an outbreak. She tied this to Peter Navarro's account, in his book, of January 2020 conversations with Guo and Bannon that she says informed the White House travel ban — Guo's purported intelligence being that the virus aimed both to crush Hong Kong and to derail President Trump's reelection. "The economy was booming and the Chinese did not want four more years of Trump," Winn said.

Ava Chen: 'Three Attempts'

The segment's most detailed and most contested passage was Chen's claim that the CCP tried three times to release the virus. She attributed this to the private European testimony of a PLA general and bio-defense scientist who she says fled China, and to directives she says Guo has produced signed by Xi Jinping. She was explicit that she could not force anyone to believe it: "It's up to you whether you want to believe or not. I'm not forcing that theory on anybody, but I'm just sharing the information."

Her sequence: a first attempt in rural Guangzhou in September 2019 that failed to spread; a second at the October 2019 Military World Games in Wuhan, which drew delegations from more than a hundred countries and which she called a "perfect launch pad"; and a third, successful release tied to the Huanan seafood market. As corroboration for the second, she pointed to a 2025 report she said was published by The Hill, describing seven U.S. service members who developed COVID-like symptoms after the 2019 Wuhan games. These claims are unverified and run contrary to the prevailing scientific account, which traces the earliest known cases to the Wuhan market in late 2019; they are recorded here as Chen's assertions.

Chen argued the CCP then locked down Wuhan domestically while keeping international flights open during the Chinese New Year travel season — in her framing, deliberately seeding the virus abroad while its own people traveled home. Winn recalled the early Seattle-area outbreak and the deaths at a senior facility. Chen put the direct Chinese death toll "over 10 millions" in the first three months and cited a mobile carrier's reported loss of subscribers, along with accounts of crematoria emissions turning satellite images orange — figures that are unverified and far exceed official tallies, offered here as her claims. "What kind of government is that?" she asked. "It's not a legitimate government."

Ava Chen: The Broader Thesis — Labs, Elections, and 'Soft Power'

From origins, Chen widened to the movement's global thesis. She warned that thousands of pathogen strains sit in Wuhan's P3 and P4 labs, and claimed the CCP has established such labs in Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Turkey, and Pakistan, and expanded biochemical infrastructure across Africa and the Middle East — sending PLA researchers wherever the labs go. Her conclusion was a call to action: "You have no choice but to take down the CCP, because if you don't take them down, it's going to come back to you."

She described the vaccine as "attack number two," designed from the outset to pair with the virus — a claim about the vaccines' intent that is unproven and contrary to the medical consensus, and recorded here as her assertion. She named Dr. Li Wenliang, the Wuhan physician who warned colleagues in December 2019, was detained for "spreading rumors," and later died of the virus, calling him a hero. She alleged that Chinese scientists' warnings emailed to the CDC and Fauci in late 2019 were ignored and the warners reported back to the regime. She revived a claim, which she noted the show had discussed before, that Guo has asked whether Fauci received Bitcoin from the CCP — an allegation offered without substantiation and recorded as such.

Chen's closing frame connected the pandemic to what she calls a pattern of CCP infiltration: intelligence agencies first, then media, then Wall Street, then the judicial system — "a country run by lawyers." She argued the CCP corrupts national leaders into "kleptocrats," steals elections, and installs one-party rule, treating nations as provinces. Winn tied it to her recurring domestic warning, citing New York's mayor Zohran Mamdani as an example of manufactured chaos and his stated intent to have Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrested — "that's not going to happen," she said, "but it distracts from what really needs to be done." Both landed on the same note Winn returns to weekly: "For me, I know God's in control. But if we leave it to men, we will fail."

Betsy Brantner Smith: Fauci, Accountability, and 'The Process Is the Punishment'

Betsy Brantner Smith, spokesperson for the National Police Association, called in from the road for the "Smith and Winn" segment and picked up the Fauci thread from a law-enforcement angle. On whether Fauci faces real consequences, she made the legal observation that a presidential pardon can strip the ability to plead the Fifth — a point of live legal debate rather than settled law, worth noting for readers. Absent that, she argued, "the process is the punishment": Fauci has been embarrassed worldwide.

She and Winn had sport with the 1,141-page set of Fauci's writings released by Senator Rand Paul, incredulous that a man in his seventies kept a diary preoccupied with his own fame while people were dying. Smith's sharper point was about consistency: Democrats who defended Fauci's decades of public service, she argued, deny that same status to ICE agents and police officers. "The hypocrisy of the left truly knows no bounds."

Smith's substantive historical claim concerned Fauci's AIDS-era record — that early government messaging he was associated with overstated casual transmission risk — which she used to argue a pattern of costly error. She also asserted, citing a book by Dr. Deborah Birx, that about a week before the national shutdown Fauci met with Barack Obama and later said he could pressure Trump into shutting down the country. That characterization rests on Smith's reading of Birx's account and should be weighed as such. Her throughline back to the show's core subject was mass mail-in voting: "That's why we have to bring it all back to Pima County."

Betsy Brantner Smith: The Downtown Shooting and the Prosecutor

The segment's hardest edge was local, and it named names — so the article should be precise about what is fact and what is characterization.

On the downtown Tucson shooting that wounded nine, Smith and Winn returned to a point they consider settled: the shooter was a convicted felon and prohibited possessor who, on the facts they cited, should not have had a gun and should not have been free, having received a plea deal on a prior felony offense involving a rifle that carried no jail time. Winn faulted Mayor Regina Romero for responding to the shooting by calling for gun restrictions rather than commending the officers who ran toward the gunfire. Smith argued the shooter should be charged with attempted murder and had instead been charged with lesser crimes by County Attorney Laura Conover — and suggested federal prosecutors step in. Readers should note the specific charging claims are checkable in court records and worth confirming before relying on them.

Smith made a legal point that is accurate and worth preserving: prosecutors and judges hold absolute immunity from civil suit, while police officers hold only qualified immunity. It framed her broader complaint — "rules for thee but not for me" — but it also means her call for the nine victims to sue would run into that immunity where the prosecutor's office is concerned; she acknowledged as much.

The most pointed passages concerned Tucson Police Chief Chad Kasmar's successor, Chief Monica Prieto, and here the article draws a firm line: Smith's characterizations are her opinion, sharply worded, and not established fact. Smith, a 29-year city police veteran, said she was "wildly frustrated" and floated two possibilities — that the chief is willingly aligned with the mayor's politics, or that she is allowing herself to be used as a "prop." She invoked a "communist cabal" framing that is rhetoric, not reporting, and it should read that way. Winn was somewhat more sympathetic, casting Prieto as "caught between a rock and a hard place," noting the chief ultimately works for the mayor, and saying she knows Prieto personally and believes she is "doing a lot of things right." The concrete, checkable fact underneath the heat: after testimony in Winn's suit against the Secretary of State and Attorney General, a police captain directed rank-and-file officers to give 24 hours' notice before voting and to change out of uniform — a directive Winn says a court then found unlawful. That court ruling is the factual anchor; the reads on the chief's motives are opinion.

Smith also faulted anti-gun advocacy tied to former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, arguing Giffords's charity frequently criticizes law enforcement — a characterization readers can check against the organization's own public statements, and one Winn softened by noting Giffords "was, for a Democrat," supportive of law enforcement in her time.

Betsy Brantner Smith: Seattle, Connecticut, and the Immigration Argument

Smith drew a national through-line on crime and immigration, and these passages mix reported incidents with contested framing.

On Seattle, she described a mass shooting at a food festival near the Space Needle and criticized the city's leadership for hesitating to call two armed groups a gang conflict — noting the police chief there previously led Madison, Wisconsin, and lives in Chicago. The mockery of Seattle's city council honoring an internet-famous raccoon, and of New York's mayoral politics, is opinion and color rather than substance.

On Connecticut, she recounted the deaths of off-duty Bridgeport police officer Cooper Whiteside and his girlfriend, killed when a driver Smith identified as Melissa Ramirez — allegedly nearly twice the legal alcohol limit and in the country illegally — crossed into their lane. A Democrat-appointed judge, they said, reduced her bond, citing community ties and two young children, and the open question is whether local authorities will honor an ICE detainer. The core incident is a reported tragedy; the political inferences drawn from it are the speakers'. Smith's broader claim that illegal immigrants vote — citing roughly 6,000 Virginia registrations she attributed to that state's motor-voter system, and the governor's "software glitch" explanation — is a contested characterization of a disputed episode, offered as her argument.

Her constructive close was electoral: judges appear on the November ballot, and organizations like the Pima County GOP research which to support. "This is why it is so important, Tucson, for you to get involved and to vote."

The Numbers, and the Argument for Turnout

Winn closed both hours where she always does — on Pima County's primary turnout and what it portends. She read the results as of Monday: 646,190 registered voters, roughly 186,000 ballots tabulated, 175,956 early ballots returned, 19,315 cast on Election Day, and 268 provisional ballots. Republicans turned out at nearly 42 percent, Democrats at 46 — a margin under four points, which she treated as a breakthrough given the county's Democratic registration edge. In raw numbers, 75,262 Republicans voted against roughly 108,000 Democrats, but the closeness of the rate, she argued, is why Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva was "sounding the alarm bells." She confirmed Jeff Rhodes made the November ballot as a write-in in Supervisor District 5.

She flagged again the 8,679 undeliverable ballots — with 14 deceased voters and two who had moved removed — as evidence the rolls need cleaning, and tied it to the fight over the Arizona SAVE Act that Alex Kolodin referred to the November ballot. Her charge against Secretary of State Adrian Fontes was specific: that in the measure's official write-up he resisted language distinguishing legal from illegal voters, and that he won't give the Department of Justice access to Arizona's voter rolls. "He's trying to protect the Democrat vote," Smith said. Both cast the SAVE Act as essential and pledged to "fight like hell to get it across the finish line."

By district, Winn credited her own LD17 — about 64,000 registered Republicans, 30,456 of whom turned out, near 48 percent — while conceding LD19 and Eileen Wilson's team edged them out on rate. She thanked the observers, volunteers, board members, LD chairs, and precinct committeemen by role, and set the frame for the fall: "We've got another job to do, and it's going to be a heavy lift, and we're going to have to come together."

Her sharpest line captured the argument running under the entire broadcast — that the direction of a city is a choice voters still hold. "It's like a prescription for death, and you are watching the death of a city and a county," she said. "It is why we are standing up and fighting back. There are 80-20 issues — public safety, securing the border, only citizens vote — and reasonable people, whatever your party label, agree on them."

A week past the primary, the general election came into focus around a single dynamic: two parties both trying to hold themselves together. Kathleen Winn spent Tuesday's broadcast on the Republican side of that problem and the Democratic side of it — first with a congressional challenger absorbing an early attack from his opponent without swinging back, then with a wide-ranging conversation about the COVID reckoning set to unfold the next day on Capitol Hill. Underneath both ran the argument Winn returns to every show: that turnout, not affection, decides everything, and that a party which purges its own hands seats to the other side.

The primary is certified in all but name, and Kathleen Winn spent the last Monday of July setting the table for the hundred days ahead. The message she kept circling was turnout — Pima County Republicans came in at nearly 42 percent, above the state average, while Democratic turnout collapsed to 28 — and the argument that the county long treated as a lost cause is now the state's swing. Around that spine, the show made room for a subject with no party attached: a former big-city fire commissioner making the case that the country can track an Amazon package but not a firefighter inside a burning building. And it closed on the ballot measure Winn intends to fight all fall, a Pima County spending cap she wants voters to reject.

The week that Arizona held its primary ended with a number Kathleen Winn kept returning to: Pima County Republicans turned out at better than 40 percent, above the statewide average and well above the county's own history of lagging the rest of Arizona. "This is where Pima County will make the difference in these state elections," she said. The Friday broadcast moved between the granular — hand-count audits, provisional ballots, a voter turned away who shouldn't have been — and the sweeping, as a documentary filmmaker and two organizers made overlapping cases that the fight over how Americans vote is inseparable from a larger fight over what kind of country they'll live in.

Joel Strabala: The Count, the Audit, and What Comes Next

Joel Strabala, Winn's lead on elections and the LD17 chair, opened with the mechanics of certification. Because this was a statewide and federal election, the county elections department must conduct a hand-count audit of selected races and selected batches of ballots — verifying, he explained, that roughly three percent of ballots were tabulated correctly by the machines. The effort begins Saturday at nine, with members of all political parties assisting. Boxes from voting centers and bags from the early-voting batches are opened, workers hand-count the chosen races, and the totals are matched against the machine count.

Strabala was candid that the machines have generally won these contests. "The machines, from my experience in the last four years, have been more accurate than the hand count," he said. "I've had to hand-count several races several times to get the hand count right." At the end of the day, the audit certifies that the machines tabulated correctly, and that certification goes into the end-of-election canvass report.

On the numbers, he gave the statewide picture: 4,306,000 registered voters, about 1,140,000 ballots cast, for roughly 26.5 percent turnout — a figure that made Pima County's 40-plus percent look, in Winn's word, like a crushing. Several legislative districts ran above the state average: LD16 at 39 percent, LD17 at 43, LD18 at 40, and LD19 at 45. All still short of the 50 percent threshold Winn wants, but strong for a summer primary that had been moved up two weeks.

Turning to certification's timeline, Strabala said fewer than about a thousand ballots remained to be tabulated — roughly 800 transferred from the recorder to the elections department, plus a to-be-determined number of conditional provisional ballots that must be cured by end of day Saturday. Tabulation would continue Monday, and the results published at the end of that day would eventually be certified as official. Pressed on when "eventually" lands on a calendar, he estimated the Board of Supervisors would approve certification about two weeks from the coming Tuesday.

The volunteer effort behind it was substantial: roughly 400 Republican poll workers, some working multiple 13-to-15-hour shifts, plus about 120 observers at voting centers on Election Day working five-hour shifts. Strabala made a point of thanking the Democratic Party too, framing the observer fight as bipartisan. When the party fought to restore observers after a long absence, he said, the rules governing how observers are treated became a live issue — and "if there's a rule, people like to add to it or interpret it a particular way" to make it harder. Some administrative disputes over getting observers into sites and keeping them there through the closing process were resolved through phone calls among Strabala, Winn, and the state party. He acknowledged his side was "partially responsible" for a few, and said all were cleared up expeditiously.

On problems that stood out, Strabala flagged the one that troubled him most: two reports of a party-not-declared voter told they couldn't vote. "They should have been able to vote," he said — a PND voter who requests a Republican or Democratic ballot is entitled to one. He didn't yet have the data on whether it happened at the same site twice or two different sites, or why. Winn's experience matched: voters who flagged her down were coached on what to say and did get to vote. "I think it's just a function of the tenacity of the voter," she said — which is precisely why she wants an August maintenance push so no voter in November is stopped by something they didn't know.

Strabala also walked through a consequential court development. A federal judge in Boston had barred the Postal Service from developing rules to withhold early ballots from voters in states that won't provide their voter rolls; this week, he said, the D.C. Circuit ruled the Postal Service does have authority to decline delivering ballots to voters ineligible to receive them. In his view, that will significantly affect mail-in voting in states that don't share voter-roll data with the federal government — a group that includes, pointedly, Arizona under Adrian Fontes.

Why would an official resist turning voter rolls over to a federal agency? Strabala tied it to figures the president had cited from an audit of four states: roughly 400,000 registrations that shouldn't have existed and about 275,000 registered voters who were deceased. Corrupted rolls, he argued, are the vulnerability — names that can be used to generate excess ballots and feed them into the system, "kind of like ballot laundering," until they're tabulated and corrupt the result. He noted reports of Department of Justice observers at polling locations in both Pima and Maricopa counties, evidence of federal interest in how Arizona runs its elections, though he was careful to say he didn't know what would come of it.

Kathleen Winn: The Ballot Ahead, and Holding Leaders Accountable

Between guests, Winn laid out the stakes she sees in the general and made her recurring plea for party unity built on results rather than affection.

Her framing of the governor's race was blunt: with Andy Biggs taking better than 70 percent, "that has to be where we head for the state." She rejected the "governor for all people" line coming from Katie Hobbs — "I don't know which people, but they aren't the citizens of Arizona." Her message to disappointed primary voters was one she promised to keep repeating: "I understand your candidate didn't get through. I had disappointments personally. But at the end of the day, the option on the other side doesn't believe in God, doesn't want any of the things that we stand for with our Constitution, and are trying to take us to a socialist country." You don't have to like the Republican who won, she said — "you can even say mean things about them, just not publicly" — but you can't claim to support the legal system and the voting system and then decline to vote.

She previewed the down-ballot consequences of the primary's incumbent upsets. On the Corporation Commission, Kimberly Yee defeated Tom Horne and now faces a Democratic opponent Winn identified as a teacher who will have the teachers' union behind her — "so that now is not a foregone conclusion." Senate President Warren Petersen takes on incumbent Attorney General Kris Mayes, and Winn warned voters not to let the Democrats' sudden "for all people" posture erase four years of memory.

Winn also introduced two ballot measures she'll be tracking. Arizona's version of the SAVE Act — requiring citizenship to vote — will be before voters in November, and she framed it as insurance in case the federal government doesn't act, given the open question of states' rights. She contrasted it with what she called Proposition 425 (too far out to interview candidates on, she noted), which she opposes because it would dip into state reserves and alter the pay structure — "we're going to be a big no on 425."

Her sharpest passage was about public safety and the downtown shooting, which she tied to a panel featuring County Attorney Laura Conover, Mayor Regina Romero, and former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords advocating for gun restrictions. Winn's grief was personal on the last name: "Gabby never felt that way. She was an advocate for the military and for guns, and so I'm sad to see her being used as a pawn this way." Her prescription was enforcement of existing law: "We have sentencing guidelines. It's time that we apply the guidelines that we have, so we can be a safe community — and you get there through your vote."

She connected the corrupted-rolls discussion to a local reality she says crosses party lines. Hundreds of extra ballots get delivered to Pima County addresses, especially apartment complexes, because people move without updating their records. "We have people that don't even live here anymore that still get ballots at their old address," she said — Republicans included — and pointed to Florida's practice of updating rolls every two years as a model. "Then you know who's voting."

Sergio Arellano: A New Headquarters and the Hispanic Vote

State Republican Party chairman Sergio Arellano called in on what he called a huge day: the unveiling of the party's new headquarters on 16th Street and Campbell in Phoenix, moving closer to central from the old 24th Street office. A Tucson native and U of A alum, he brought news of a grand opening featuring RNC leadership flying in from Washington, radio host James T. Harris as MC, and appearances by the party's nominee for governor, the House speaker, and the Senate president — plus tacos, on what he noted was National Tequila Day.

Winn used the moment to credit a partnership she said hadn't existed when she started as Pima County chair. "We have always kind of been neglected," she told him, and the state party's support was showing up in results — Pima's 40-plus percent turnout, beating the state average, "doesn't happen without support and help." Arellano's history with Winn is long: she brought him into politics years ago at the attorney general's office during the mortgage crisis. "You caught me as a baby in politics," she said. His response: "I didn't end up in jail or hooked on drugs."

He laid out the party's priorities as rural areas and Pima County, the latter because "that's where the election is won" and where the goal is "stopping the communist socialist machine from turning out in Pima County and killing us in this election cycle." He noted the symbolism of the ticket's Tucson roots — both he and Biggs are Tucson natives and Wildcats — and framed it as an "exchange program" that could put more leaders in place who understand the city's problems.

On crime, Arellano pointed to Empire Pizza, the business near the downtown shooting, which he said publicly called out the media and the mayor. His account of their message: look down the alley, look at the open drug use and needles, look at the blight that failed leadership has allowed to invade the city. "There has to be some personal responsibility, but the socialists here who want to take over our country want to shift the blame to a national media narrative that guns are the problem."

He drew hard lines around two congressional races, characterizing the Democratic nominees as socialists. In CD1, he framed Jay Feely against an opponent whose policies he said lean socialist; in CD6, he made a pointed claim about Juan Ciscomani's opponent, JoAnna Mendoza, attributing to her a statement about legalizing prostitution tied to transgender employment. Winn's response steered toward evidence and civility: "We have to fight intelligently, Sergio, not emotionally. If people really get to see this is what they stand for," she said, then voters of any party can judge — adding that she knows Democrats who believe in faith and family and wants to be welcoming to them.

The centerpiece of Arellano's segment was Hispanic outreach. Both parties, he argued, have gotten it wrong: "The Democrats took that vote for granted, and the Republicans gave it up for lost." His approach is to treat the conversation as ordinary. "People ask me still to this day, how do we talk to Latinos? And I say, well, how do you talk to everyday Americans? Because we have the same concerns. The Latinos care about public safety, they're pro-family, they're pro-life, they're pro-school choice — all of the things that we stand for as Republicans." For the first time, he said, the state party has a communications department dedicated to Latino engagement, plus a new coalition and an account, AZ GOP Latino, built to remind Latino voters why they turned out for Trump in record numbers and to call out what he characterized as the governor's hypocrisy.

Winn closed the segment with her own history in that community. During the mortgage crisis, she recalled, CD7 was the hardest-hit congressional district in the country, in part because of predatory "stated income" lending that put many Hispanic families into homes they couldn't afford. Working with then-Congressman Raúl Grijalva's office, she said, they saved over 400 homes in Pima County. Her lament was that the district still hasn't recovered and that its current leadership prioritizes people here illegally over constituents — including the Marines at Yuma — "and that's despicable."

Steve Lance: Making an Invisible Influence Operation Visible

Steve Lance, an investigative host at NTD and executive producer of the new documentary Unbroken: The Untold Story of Shen Yun, joined to connect the show's weekly China focus to a concrete case study. His central difficulty in making the film, he said, was the nature of the target: "Much of it is invisible. There is overt, but much of it is covert influence operations — things done by proxy, with plausible deniability." Try to explain it, he said, and three sentences in, people's eyes glaze over. "They don't understand that if they don't address this now, we're all in trouble."

He offered background for listeners. Shen Yun is a classical Chinese dance company founded in the United States by Chinese dissidents and Americans who understand communism, with the tagline "China before communism." China's 5,000-year history, he said, is deeply rooted in spirituality and belief in the divine — traditions the Communist Party went to great lengths to uproot so it could be "the sole authority in people's hearts and minds." When Shen Yun emerged in the mid-2000s offering a glimpse of pre-communist China, it drew the party's ire and became, in his phrase, "public enemy number one."

The film runs on two tracks. One is human interest, following the dancers — "Olympian-level athletes and artists" — to counter propaganda about how they're treated. The other is investigative, examining the New York Times' editorial process behind what Lance said was a series of roughly twelve pieces attacking Shen Yun. The parallels between those pieces and the messaging out of Beijing, he argued, are "almost verbatim," and investigators connected fake social media accounts amplifying the coverage to the CCP. Lance's employer NTD is a sister outlet of the Epoch Times, which he credited with the investigative connections. Readers should note these are the filmmaker's characterizations of the Times' coverage and its origins; the Times has publicly defended its reporting on Shen Yun as independent journalism.

The deeper history Lance recounted concerns Falun Gong — also called Falun Dafa — a Buddhist-based meditation discipline built on truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance, introduced in 1992. It spread so fast that a late-1990s census, he said, found one in twelve Chinese practicing it — roughly 100 million people, outnumbering the Communist Party's 60 million members — at which point the leadership condemned it as an evil cult and launched a persecution. Confirmed deaths run into the thousands, Lance said, with the true toll suspected to be far higher, and he tied the group to the emergence of forced organ harvesting, which he described as state-sanctioned and later extended to the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Winn framed the segment explicitly as a lesson: "We're trying to do this lesson in socialism now, because of the insanity in our country that we would want to go to a government like that."

The personal stakes came through one performer. Lance said about 90 Shen Yun performers and staff have family directly persecuted in China. He described a dancer, Stephen Wong, who got a phone call on tour that his father had been persecuted to death for practicing Falun Gong — and who, in a performance vignette depicting modern China, plays the lead role of a man being persecuted. "He was living his father's persecution and killing on stage," Lance said. "They're not playing a role. They're communicating what's happened in their nation."

Asked the takeaway, Lance returned to the case-study frame. What the CCP did to this dance company, he argued, it can do to any American target — "an American company, an American organization, a politician, using our legal system, using lawfare, using our media — all without having their fingerprints on it." He invoked the Cold War concept of soft power, noting how the arts were once used to counter Soviet propaganda, and pointed listeners to the book Unrestricted Warfare, written by two Chinese colonels, as an outline of the strategy. He also connected it to the broader pattern the show covers weekly, referencing CCP-linked overseas police stations in New York and the imprisonment of whistleblower Miles Guo as examples of "lawfare" being turned against Americans on their own soil.

On reception, Lance said the film had just screened on Capitol Hill to journalists and officials from across the branches of government, with additional screenings in New York and Los Angeles. Some attendees who had believed the critical coverage, he said, came away not only changed on Shen Yun but questioning their broader trust in their information sources. The film is available on Amazon, Apple, and YouTube, and free at NTDfilms.com. As a moderator of NTD's election-night coverage, Lance said he'll be tracking key races this cycle; Winn pitched him Arizona's governor's race as a swing-state story worth national coverage.

Kelly Walker: Building a Bridge Between Generations

Kelly Walker, a former Tucson resident and the founder of the monthly publication Freedom Talk: The Journal of Truth and Virtue, joined to discuss a project Winn found especially compelling: a deliberate effort to connect Gen X and Gen Z.

The spark was a 22-year-old named Jack Gordon, founder of a website Walker described as ritebooks.com, dedicated to preserving the books that built Western civilization — "good, bad, and indifferent." You'll find books you agree with and books you don't, Walker said, citing Oxford apologist John Lennox, whose father had him read the Communist Manifesto as a young man so he'd understand what other people think. Gordon wanted to advertise in Freedom Talk and build a book bundle; the two got to talking, and a single conversation stretched past an hour, prompting a live follow-up scheduled for Sunday at 5 p.m. Central on X and Instagram at Real Freedom Talk, or at realfreedomtalk.substack.com.

Winn's enthusiasm was about transmission. "It's the only way to transfer knowledge," she said — and different generations "communicate differently. It's like speaking a certain dialect" of the same language, and the message has to get across the bridge for the impact to be made.

Walker's framing was less about ideology than posture. "It's not so much that in my generation I want to push certain rigid ideologies onto the younger generation," he said. "It's more like I care. I have this sense of passing a baton, and I want to be helpful, in an advisory role." Raising young men in Gen Z himself, he described his son Zach explaining the different challenges the generation faces — a lower chance of owning a home, a harder dating world. He said he respects Gordon's ideas and wants to learn: "I don't look at him as a 22-year-old punk kid. I look at him as someone who is really thinking and engaging with this world."

Winn pressed the harder question: how to counter what she called the grooming and indoctrination of Gen Z into socialism, which she argued is being romanticized and misrepresented — part of a decade-long pattern in which the left "tests" an idea in one area, builds a network, and speaks into it. Walker's answer drew on Andrew Breitbart's line that "politics is downstream of culture." Rather than only draining the swamp, he argued, "we need to be at the headwaters of culture," reintroducing young people to good ideas by putting "pure water" upstream.

But his core answer was spiritual and relational. "There's no fear in love; perfect love casts out fear," he said. If an older generation approaches the young from fear — "all I've got to do is warn them and change them" — they experience it as something pushed on them. Approach with love and genuine curiosity instead, and "you become less threatening. You're seen as somebody who wants to see them succeed." He described the discipline it takes: when Gordon says something that challenges him, "I felt myself getting this almost anxiousness in my soul, and then I calmed down when I listened, and I realized I don't think he's saying what I thought he said." What he wants is for young people to walk into adulthood feeling like part of things, rather than seeing their elders as outdated.

The conversation widened into Walker's read on both parties. He agreed with Winn that the Democratic Party is fracturing between garden-variety Democrats and a Democratic Socialist wing he called a cancer its older leaders will have to remove "with surgery." He flagged the process replacing Graham Platner in Maine as "a little wonky," part of a pattern — as with the elevation of Kamala Harris and the sidelining of Joe Biden — of the party overriding its own voters when a candidate polls poorly. He warned of an "alliance between Islam and socialism" he considers dangerous, pointing to New York's mayor as embodying both.

Walker was equally willing to criticize his own side. He said many on the right feel the GOP, handed power, isn't delivering — and spoke as someone whose family, he said, falls into the category of victims of what he called government weaponization during the Biden administration. He described people still waiting for pardons after being "subjected to lawfare," and characterized the targeting of school parents and others as a "coordinated sedition" to silence swaths of Americans, with people still imprisoned who he believes shouldn't be. That grievance, he noted, is now feeding third-party talk from figures like Tucker Carlson — a fracturing that worried both of them, since a split vote before November helps no one. As Winn noted, third parties have been tried many times, from the Greens and Libertarians to Ross Perot, "a smart man who just sounded like a clown."

Kelly Walker: 'Define Safe'

The segment turned to Tucson itself when Winn recalled a local host asking whether the city is safe. "Define safe," she said — and handed the question to Walker, who left three years ago.

His answer was personal and grim. "We always went around armed," he said. "My wife didn't want to go into the city without me, and if she did, she went armed." He described his oldest son being beaten in an altercation while trying to protect a young woman he was walking with at the mall, followed not long after by another young person in similar circumstances being stabbed or shot. The Tucson of his childhood was "this beautiful city, tons of restaurants, very clean," and by the time his family left, "it felt third world in areas — tents everywhere, a lot of criminal activity, police who supposedly are stretched too thin." He argued the ability to defend oneself is "a natural, God-given right," and said his family was threatened often enough that neighbors watched their house and, at one low point, quietly drew up an evacuation plan he only learned about later. "Please, by no means, don't let them take your guns."

Winn's response threaded a needle she was careful about. She credited the Tucson Police Department and first responders for minimizing the downtown shooting's toll through quick action, and stressed her critique is of policy, not officers. Walker agreed emphatically: "I really don't think that police officers should be engaged in social politics. They should be engaged in doing their job and protecting people" — noting officers he's spoken with are frustrated by exactly that, and that it's "not a jab at the police by any means." Winn's accountability argument moved up the chain: the shooter should never have had a gun, and if a judge departs from sentencing guidelines, "then as the prosecutor, hold the judge accountable." She said County Attorney Laura Conover was quick to note her office gave sentencing guidelines — which it did — and to say the judge went rogue. Her conclusion: "That judge should resign. This is not a dance routine. This is a court of law."

Closing on the general election and the world beyond it, Winn argued people vote with their pocketbooks, and that the benefits of tax cuts are beginning to show even as Iran looms over everything. She expressed confidence in the president's willingness to confront "terrorists" and "people that want death to America," pointing to their partnerships with the CCP and Russia. "What are we willing to sacrifice to have a free and Christian nation? That's the crossroads we're at." Walker's final thought was measured: "It's easy to say in theory we don't want any wars, but there's such evil in the world sometimes it's not avoidable. The president's between a rock and a hard place." He offered congratulations to Andy Biggs and to Mark Lamb — a friend and, he noted, his congressman — and to the other primary winners: "We're praying for you, we're rooting for you."

Winn signed the week off with a nod to the heat — 108 the day before — and a promise of "exciting news on Monday." Her closing instruction was the one that ran through the entire broadcast: register, check your status, and turn out, because "all roads to victory lead through Pima County." As she put it to Walker's generational project and to the county alike: "Stay safe, stay aware, and we'll be back on Monday."

Two days after Arizona's primary, with roughly 20,000 Pima County ballots still uncounted, Kathleen Winn opened with a result nobody expected her to get: for the first time in years, Republicans have fielded a candidate in Supervisor District 5. Jeff Rhodes needed 143 write-in votes to make the November ballot. He appears to have cleared it comfortably. "The good news is in November, it'll be pre-printed on the ballot," Winn said — which means voters in a district that has effectively had no choice will have one.

The rest of the morning worked outward from there: what a second conservative vote on a five-member board actually buys, why a felon with a prior aggravated assault conviction was out at two in the morning with a gun, and — with former county chair Dave Smith — the uglier question of how a party that just finished beating itself up intends to unify before October.

The morning after Arizona's primary, Kathleen Winn opened with the scoreboard and moved quickly to the harder question: what the results mean, and what still has to be fixed before November. Andy Biggs took the Republican nomination for governor with something north of 70 percent, setting up a general election against Katie Hobbs, who had no primary opponent. "Two very different forms of leadership and government," Winn said. "Katie Hobbs is running as the candidate for all Arizonans. I would argue that Andy Biggs is that person — but they're going to have to make their case to the people of Arizona."

Down the ballot, Alex Kolodin advanced to face Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a matchup Winn expects to be "one of the most contentious and interesting races that we have in the state," noting the two have met in court repeatedly with Kolodin coming out ahead. Elijah Norton won the Republican nod for state treasurer, the seat Kimberly Yee is vacating, and will face an unopposed Democratic nominee. Yee, meanwhile, appears to have defeated Tom Horne for superintendent of public instruction, setting up a race between two women — with the future of Arizona's ESA program riding on it. And Senate President Warren Petersen will take on Attorney General Kris Mayes, who Winn argued "has pretty much spent her whole four years suing Donald Trump. I don't think there's an appetite for just that."

The Republican registration advantage is real, Winn said, but it doesn't help if those voters stay home — which made the rest of the morning a post-mortem on why some of them couldn't.

It’s Election Day in Arizona! Kathleen Winn's phone started before dawn. By the time the microphones opened on primary morning in Pima County, the reports were already stacking up — the most urgent one out of Marana, where voters were being handed ballots printed on ordinary copy paper rather than the heavier stock the tabulators require. Sixty-odd calls would come in before the show ended. Against that backdrop, the morning ran on two tracks at once: the long-horizon questions of what Arizona's utilities, water, and legislature will look like for the next decade, and the immediate, unglamorous work of getting a legally cast ballot into a machine that will read it.

The day before Arizona's primary opened with news from 2,400 miles away: an explosion at the Manhattan federal building housing ICE, the FBI, and other federal offices. Kathleen Winn scrapped her planned opening and called the National Police Association's Betsy Brantner Smith, who traced a line from that attack to the rhetoric being used in Pima County's own races. From there, the morning ranged across a downtown Tucson mass shooting, the Canadian smoke drifting over half a continent, the science being invoked to explain it, an Air Force reflagging at Luke, the attorney general's race, and — running underneath all of it — the mechanics of getting a ballot counted before polls close Tuesday night.

Four days out from Arizona's primary, with the president's overnight address on election security still echoing, Kathleen Winn built her Friday broadcast around the one issue she and both of her guests treat as the foundation of everything else: whether the vote can be trusted. First a reminder for listeners caught off guard — last year's five mail-in elections left many assuming they were still on the early-ballot list when they were not. "You still can vote," Winn said. Go to a voting center today, or vote in person Tuesday. "We need your vote." From there she turned to two men who have spent years inside the mechanics of Arizona elections: a data analyst and Army veteran who forecasts vote trends, and a retired Master Sergeant who investigates election process.

A single number framed the entire Thursday broadcast: less than half of Americans now say they believe in capitalism. On a rainy morning in Tucson, days before Arizona's primary, host Kathleen Winn built her show around that statistic and its consequences — a country where a rising generation is drawn to socialism without understanding its costs, and a state where the mechanics of voting itself are on the ballot. Four guests worked the theme from different angles: a veteran financial journalist, an economic historian from the John Birch Society, a state legislator running for Secretary of State, and a Pima County Republican organizer. What follows is their case, in their words.