The week's conversation opened with a chilling near-miss: a plot involving drones and snipers, allegedly timed around a UFC fight and reportedly intended to target an area where members of Arizona's congressional delegation and their families were in attendance. Host Kathleen Winn described learning that people she knew personally were on-site when the scheme was uncovered. "It doesn't look like it was well conceived," she said, noting that investigators had not yet tied it to a sponsoring terrorist organization or foreign government. "We're still in the but those kinds of things," she added, crediting the FBI's vigilance for the fact that nothing happened.
For Ava Chen, a commentator with the New Federal State of China who joins the show weekly for its China Watch Wednesday segment, the episode's significance ran deeper than the immediate danger. She pointed to the age of those involved — some as young as 19 — as the real warning sign.
While Kathleen Winn was in federal court arguing that the Elections Procedures Manual violates the First Amendment, her guest host for the morning had her own court to hold. Lisa Von Geldern — Arizona state coordinator for the John Birch Society, organizer of the Salt Lake City conference that had just wrapped, and a woman who moved from California to Arizona to escape overreach only to find it arriving close behind — spent two hours making the case that constitutional self-education is not a hobby. It is the only mechanism that actually works. Two guests joined to reinforce it: Susan Ellsworth, the Arizona coordinator for the John Birch Society, who walked listeners live through the Freedom Index scorecards for every Arizona congressman; and Ron DeSouza, a young Tucson entrepreneur whose grandfather was a John Birch Society chapter chairman decades ago, who drove to Salt Lake City and came back convinced that the right is finally starting to organize like it means it.
Monday on Winn Tucson opened on rain — unusual for Tucson in mid-June — and moved into the most consequential news in Arizona electoral politics in years. The legislative session ended at four in the morning. Arizona is now the first state in the country to fully conform to the Trump tax cuts. An Arizona version of the SAVE Act will go before voters in November. And for the state Senate president running for attorney general, a law that's been on the books for 40 years may have just become the most dangerous document in the Republican primary.
Friday on Winn Tucson opened the last weekend before ballots start dropping with two conversations that could not be more different in scale — one national, one hyper-local — and both indispensable for the moment we're in. A brand-new organization that has actually been around for 36 years announced itself to the country this week. And the man who knows Pima County's election machinery more precisely than anyone else laid out the specific vote center schedule, the Green Valley problem, the federal court date on Tuesday, and the arithmetic that makes every Republican vote count.
Thursday on Winn Tucson opened with breaking news from Washington and closed with something more quietly consequential: the final installment of an eight-week series by a father who turned the worst thing that ever happened to him into the most practical warning he could offer anyone who might one day need a hospital. Between those two bookends: a portrait of a changed city that neither guest could have imagined when they first came to know it, and the specific tactics of an advocacy model that might have saved one girl's life — and could save yours.
Wednesday on Winn Tucson was a show assembled in motion. Dave Smith was holding the studio alone when the show started, Anthony Dunham was in-studio ready to talk about the LD-17 State Senate race, and Kathleen Winn was still in the air somewhere between Washington, D.C. and Tucson — having started the day before 4 a.m. She made it. By midday she was on air, back from the Presidential 1776 Award finals at the White House and steering straight into China Watch Wednesday, which arrived with intelligence about a new nuclear pressure circle being assembled around Taiwan and Japan, Chinese police deployed in South Korea's elections, and the framework that explains every seemingly isolated political event happening around the world simultaneously.
Tuesday on Winn Tucson found the hosts in unfamiliar chairs — Dave and Betsy Brantner Smith filling in while Kathleen Winn attended the Presidential 1776 Award finals at the White House in Washington, D.C. The morning covered California's impossible election math, a Sparkle for Freedom Gala update, a Carmelo Anthony trial preloading a summer of riots, and the most personal fight either Smith could name: the attempt by three far-left outsiders to take over the town of Marana. Kathleen called in from the Hotel Washington to break news of an Apache helicopter being shot down in Iran — and to confirm the pilots survived.
Monday on Winn Tucson came back from the White House with energy and kept it all the way through. Three guests, three completely different battlegrounds — all of them converging on the same diagnosis: institutions that are supposed to serve the public have been captured by people who are working against it, and the only path out is to vote people out, sue them out, or constitutionally prohibit what they're doing.
The last Friday of the election season's opening sprint on Winn Tucson covered three subjects that don't share a news cycle but share an underlying problem: institutions that are supposed to serve the public using their authority to serve something else instead. A county attorney who doesn't prosecute crimes suing the president. Three county governments clawing back a benefit from 100% disabled veterans after the legislature already gave it to them. And a federal law that was supposed to protect Native American artifacts being weaponized to exclude women from science, bury irreplaceable history, and empty museum collections for reasons that have more to do with money and activism than cultural preservation.
Thursday on Winn Tucson opened with justice being served on a man who published his own evidence and closed with a Polish-Jewish father whose love of history saved his family from the Holocaust. In between: a detailed accounting of the internecine Republican fight that is consuming time and resources during a critical election cycle, a secretary of state candidate with fresh data on Fontes's latest lies and protected voter data breach, and a Superintendent of Public Instruction who has a personal reason to believe history education is not optional.
