Guests - Sam Anthony, Stephen Mundt, Ian Faith
Free Press, Military Strategy, AI Campaigns, and the End of 56 Years of Federal Prohibition
Friday on Winn Tucson came loaded. Four guests, four distinct battlegrounds — the collapse of legacy media and what replaces it; the military standoff in the Strait of Hormuz and the redistricting fight tearing through Virginia; the use of AI to win down-ballot elections; and a 56-year federal prohibition that ended, without fanfare, in the middle of the week.
The common thread running through every conversation: the old systems — media, military strategy, political campaigning, federal drug law — are either failing or being dismantled. The question in every case is who steps into the void and with what.
Sam Anthony: The Death of Legacy Media and the Citizen Press That Replaces It
Sam Anthony is the founder and owner of Your News dot com — a hyper-local citizen journalism platform that he believes will become the next mainstream media. He is not speaking in abstractions. He came on with numbers, a history of failure and reinvention, and a very specific vision for what a free press in America should look like when the last legacy outlet finally goes dark.
The Collapse Is Already Happening
"The legacy media is not going to survive," Anthony said plainly. "Many people say it's because they're lying. It's absolutely nothing to do with it. It is everything to do with the younger generation and how they consume news."
The numbers bear this out. In terrestrial radio alone, one in ten audio consumers is listening on a traditional broadcast signal. The other ninety percent are streaming. CBS Radio just announced May 22 as the last date for its nationally syndicated programming. The first news jobs to go in any media contraction are always the reporters. And the ad revenue that once funded those reporters has migrated entirely to the platforms — YouTube, Rumble, Spotify, TikTok — leaving nothing behind to pay the people gathering the actual news.
"You can get the Monday Night Football game anywhere," Anthony said. "What you can't get is the high school football game."
That gap — the irreplaceable local story that no algorithm will ever decide is worth covering — is exactly where Your News is planting its flag.
How It Works
The model is deliberately simple. Anyone can create an account, apply to become a citizen journalist, and begin reporting. The content can be audio, video, or written. The platform embeds it, distributes it, and — critically — shares ad revenue with creators based on the traffic they drive to their content. A self-service ad platform allows local businesses to buy advertising targeted to a single zip code.
"Your local news reporter is going to be somebody you know," Anthony said. "It's going to be your neighbor who creates an account because she already goes to the city council meeting or the school board meeting or the high school football game. They're going to report the news and share it with the community. And you're going to say, did you see what Kathleen said about this? Because they already know you."
The marketplace decides who succeeds. Nobody edits the content for ideological compliance. Nobody is protected because they went to broadcast journalism school. The people who report things accurately, entertainingly, and usefully will build audiences. The people who don't will post once and disappear — just as they already do on YouTube.
"You see all these YouTube channels where the last posting was three years ago," Anthony said. "Do you honestly believe it's because they made so much money they couldn't fit any more money into their bank account? No. It's because nobody liked their stuff."
The Monetization Model and the Global Vision
Anthony's background is not journalism — it is investment banking and capital raising. He has tried and failed at versions of this model before, which he views not as a liability but as proof of concept.
"I didn't believe the media was lying at first," he admitted. "I thought, why would they do that? They live here too. But when Trump won in 2016, I went — oh my God. These people are lying through their teeth. And that's when I realized what we're doing is really important."
The current platform has just under 6,000 news reporters. Anthony projects 20,000 by end of 2026 and 30,000 to 40,000 the year after, with a path to taking the company public so the public itself can own it.
The next country to launch on the platform, within a matter of weeks of this conversation, is Canada. Contributors already exist across the globe.
The platform ran a story from State Senator Mark Finchem that broke nationally — a raid on a Tennessee police station that Anthony learned had been covered by an investigator who just happened to be on the site. He mentioned receiving threatening emails from candidates who don't want their public records — DUIs, domestic violence arrests — published on the platform. His response to those threats is consistent: the documents are public, the information was reported accurately, and no amount of legal intimidation changes that.
"The public will let you know" if a contributor is telling the truth or not, he said. "I have to rely on the contributor. But who's telling me? The public."
For listeners who want to become citizen journalists, create accounts, or simply follow Arizona and Tucson coverage, the platform is at yournews.com. Winn Tucson is exploring a formal partnership to expand its reach on the platform.
Stephen Mundt: Iran, the IRGC, Virginia's Gerrymandering Assault, and Chuck Schumer's Moment of Reckoning
Retired Brigadier General Stephen Mundt — formerly of the Pentagon, now in Virginia — joined from his car, which gave Winn and her listeners an unintentional gift when a pothole interrupted the conversation, prompting a solidarity moment with Tucson's own legendary road conditions.
Mundt's perspective on both the Iran situation and Virginia's redistricting fight carries the weight of someone who has spent a career distinguishing between what sounds alarming and what actually matters strategically.
Iran: The Upper Hand Is Real
On the military standoff in the Strait of Hormuz, Mundt was direct. The United States has the upper hand, and the strategy is playing out better than many military observers had projected.
"You had a country for forty-seven years that has been sponsoring terrorism throughout the world and killing Americans," he said, citing the anniversary of the Beirut bombing as a marker. "We basically said enough's enough. You're not going to have a nuclear weapon. We take down their nuclear capability. Then we start taking out targets, taking out leadership, and we say — we would like you to come to the table and just agree you're not going to have a nuclear weapon. If you want nuclear energy, we can work with that, but you're going to have supervision. You're not going to sponsor terrorists."
Every president since the Iranian hostage crisis has wanted exactly this. None of them achieved it.
"Then you have President Donald Trump, who says, I'm not going to let it go beyond my watch. We're going to send a signal now."
The blockade is costing Iran hundreds of millions of dollars weekly, billions monthly. The naval presence in the region is massive — Mundt noted that the number of U.S. ships in the area leaves very little room in the water for anything else. Economically, the regime cannot sustain this indefinitely.
The question of who is actually making decisions inside Iran complicates the path to resolution. The Ayatollah is incapacitated — essentially a figurehead providing Islamic clerical signatures, not strategic direction. The Iranian Republican Guard is fractured by design: decentralized, scattered, with no clear unified command and control. And there is a specific figure — a senior IRGC commander, son of a prominent Iranian leader — who carries a personal vendetta against Trump because of the killing of a close associate during Trump's first term.
"He's going to fight Trump tooth and nail," Mundt said. "But is that what that one man wants? At some point, you have to ask: is he more important than everyone else in Iran?"
Mundt's assessment of U.S. intelligence capability in this environment was pointed. "I don't understand the part where they don't realize our intelligence is so good that we know where they're at. If the sanctions get lifted, a bunch of those guys are going to disappear."
The administration has been patient, willing to wait the economic pressure out. Defense Secretary Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dan Cain's ongoing briefings signal a command structure that is disciplined and deliberately opaque about its timeline — which Mundt said is exactly right.
"That's what's good — that we don't know," he said. "As a military guy, that's correct."
Virginia's Redistricting Maneuver: A Preview of What's Coming
Virginia passed a redistricting measure that General Mundt described as one of the more brazen electoral manipulations he has observed in his home state.
The backstory matters. Virginia's constitution and law required redistricting every ten years following the census, conducted by a bipartisan commission. That was done five years ago. The Democratic-controlled legislature decided to redo the lines now — mid-cycle, without a census, using a partisan process.
"It's in violation of that," Mundt said flatly. The ballot measure that authorized this redrawing was written in language designed to confuse, not inform. It was phrased so that a yes vote appeared to support fair elections. The yes side used a photograph of President Trump on billboards with the clear implication that Trump endorsed the measure — with the Democratic National Committee sponsorship noted only in small print below.
"You can't be any more misrepresentational than that," Mundt said.
The measure passed roughly 51 to 49 percent, perfectly tracking party registration. A state judge has since blocked it on constitutional grounds, but the decision will be appealed to the Virginia Supreme Court. The "temporary" framing the yes side used — that this is just a five-year fix — is, in Mundt's analysis, dishonest about the actual consequences.
"Once you redraw those lines and go through midterm elections, the whole House and Senate in the state of Virginia will change. You'll start changing seats in the national House. That's not temporary with no real impact. You'd go through the next regular election cycle and another midterm."
His critique of the RNC was unsparing. "What does the Republican National Committee do for you? They send a young kid out of Florida that knows nothing about Arizona. Did anybody call you or talk to you or any other Republican leadership in the state and say, what is it we can do for you?"
He connected Virginia directly to Arizona's importance. If the Virginia lines hold, Arizona and a handful of other states become the decisive battleground for controlling Congress. Arizona's state constitution prohibits mid-cycle gerrymandering, which offers some protection — but Mundt's point is that the electoral stakes in every Arizona race just increased.
Swalwell, Schumer, and the Democrats Who Have No Moral Courage
Mundt weighed in on the Democrats who have stayed silent about what they knew and when regarding Eric Swalwell.
"A number of women had come forward in other circles to try to tell that this was happening, and people shut them down," he said. "Senior leadership in the Democratic Party should be held accountable for this. If there's one woman who dared speak up and they tried to shut her up, they should be held accountable."
He named Nancy Pelosi directly as someone who facilitated the protection of Swalwell — not by speaking up, but by ensuring others did not.
On President Trump's call for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to resign following Schumer's description of DHS agencies as illegitimate — Mundt was unsparing.
"Nobody respects ICE and CBP agents? Really? Talk to the mothers and fathers that have lost kids due to illegal immigration." He described Schumer as a man who has lost control of his own party to Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, reduced to parroting positions he cannot keep consistent from day to day.
"When Schumer is going to get so sore from being a puppet on the end of strings, jerked every which way — he's a man without a country because he's hating on this country. So where the hell does he think he's going to go?"
Ian Faith: The AI Tool Built to Win Down-Ballot Races
Ian Faith has spent more than thirty years at the intersection of technology, supply chain, and business strategy. He is now bringing that expertise to the Arizona Republican Party — specifically to AZGOP and Legislative District 4 — with an AI-powered intelligence tool designed to solve one of the most persistent problems in conservative politics: getting voters to go all the way down the ballot.
The Problem It Solves
The pattern is well documented. Republican voters show up for governor, for Congress, for president. They stop voting when they hit the legislative races, school board seats, justice of the peace, county commissioner. The result is that candidates with enormous downstream impact on daily life — property taxes, school curricula, who goes to jail and for how long — routinely lose by margins of dozens or hundreds of votes, not because the voters disagreed but because the voters didn't know who they were.
"You look at Abe Hamaday's race — it was, I think, 248 votes," Faith said. "If every precinct committeeman would have just turned one person to vote down the ticket, Chris Mayes would not be in a position right now. Abe would." He added the caveat Winn immediately reinforced: 9,000 ballots in that race were never counted, a fact that belongs in the same conversation.
Faith's tool is called LIDI. It is an AI intelligence agent built on curated, vetted, Republican-sourced information — not the 98% left-leaning search results that come up on Google, and not the general training data embedded in ChatGPT. The information is specific to each legislative district.
"What may affect someone in CD1, LD4 isn't going to be the same thing that's going to be affecting someone in Tucson or Goodyear," he said. "Different propositions, different ballot measures. You need to have curated information."
How It Works in Practice
Jody Johnson, a forward-thinking leader in LD4, is currently curating the information fed into the system — pulling from every candidate who could appear on the district's ballot, from school board races up, and from every policy question currently in play.
The tool can be queried instantly. A precinct committeeman in a coffee shop who gets asked when the primary is, where to vote, what a specific proposition does to property taxes, who the Republican-endorsed candidate for the local school board is — can answer in real time rather than fumbling through six different websites.
"I thought, you know what, I'd have to go to a website, put in my information, look it up," Faith said. "Why can't I just ping a tool that I've got in my hand and give them that information straight away?"
Beneath the surface, the tool is simultaneously building a real-time pulse of what voters are actually asking about. When enough people query the tool about gas prices, or ESA scholarships, or property tax increases, that data flows back to campaign staff and precinct workers who can adjust their conversations accordingly.
"We can actually flow in real time the people information that can help us say — talk about kitchen table issues, talk about gas prices, don't talk about border issues — whatever is trending. We can have those conversations in real time."
The Funding Problem and the Voter-Facing Version
AI tools run on tokens — essentially a cost-per-query model. A version deployed to millions of voters asking millions of questions requires significant funding. Faith and his team are actively in conversations at the Washington level to find that funding. At the individual LD level, the tool is already deployable at a fraction of that cost, with each district maintaining control over its own curated information.
"If anyone's interested in this, please reach out to me," he said. The contact number: 877-855-6755.
He emphasized that the tool was built explicitly for Republicans and will not be sold to Democrats, regardless of the money offered.
"At the end of the day, we provide AI tools to other businesses. When it comes to providing them politically, we are consultants to campaigns. And I'm very openly a GOP supporter. I'm not here to provide AI tools for Democrats to win races. They've offered us money. We're not going to do it."
The Message for Every PC Who's Treating This Like a Social Club
Faith's message to precinct committeemen across Arizona was pointed: registering voters is necessary but insufficient. The job is to get them to the polls with accurate information in hand, having a specific sense of what is personally at stake for them if they don't vote.
"We always say, vote for me, vote for this, vote for that. But we don't say: if you don't vote, here's what's going to happen. Your taxes are going to go up. They're going to take away ESA empowerment scholarships. Be specific about what's on the line. That is about educating the voter."
With the July 22 primary on the horizon and a general election ballot that Faith and Winn both predict will be four to five pages long — including legislative referrals, citizen initiatives, and contested down-ballot races — there is no longer room for vagueness.
Mo Asani: Fifty-Six Years of Federal Prohibition Just Ended — Here's What It Actually Means
The final guest of the week was Mo Asani, who opened his first cannabis dispensary in the summer of 2013 and has been operating in Arizona's regulated cannabis market ever since. Two days before this conversation, the Department of Justice under Todd Blanch formally executed the rescheduling directive from President Trump's December 2025 executive order — moving cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III under the Controlled Substances Act, ending 56 years of federal prohibition.
What Just Happened, in Plain Terms
In 1970, Richard Nixon placed marijuana in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act. Schedule I means no medical value and high abuse potential. It is the same classification as heroin. That designation ended this week.
Schedule III means the substance has recognized medical applications, can have addictive properties, and is subject to regulated pharmaceutical oversight. That is the category cannabis now occupies federally.
"Fifty-six years of linear prohibition ended," Asani said. "It takes 38 states to modify the Constitution. You're already at 40 states with some form of medical marijuana law. Over 200 million Americans live in states that have this program. It's not like they're sneaking it through. It's been around for a long time and is established."
Arizona legalized medical cannabis in 2010 and recreational use in 2020, when the ballot measure passed with 60 percent of the vote. The state added PTSD as a qualifying condition for medical use only after a New Mexico study demonstrated efficacy for veterans — a fact that Asani offered to illustrate how slowly the evidence has moved through official channels.
The Veteran and Opioid Crisis Dimensions
Asani connected the rescheduling directly to two of the most consequential public health crises of the last generation: veteran suicide and opioid mortality.
Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans have died in greater numbers since returning home than they did in combat. The data on cannabis and PTSD treatment has been building for over a decade. The VA has been slow to embrace it.
"I would love to see the day where veterans who have a diagnosis of PTSD are treated with cannabis by the VA," Asani said. "If it helps them, I really don't care which one works better for them. It matters that they have a better outcome."
On opioids, he cited a 2020 study showing that states with legal cannabis programs had seen between a 20 to 35 percent decline in opioid mortality.
"You're literally having a significant number of people not dying when a state lights up a marijuana program because of opioid addiction," he said. "Less people dying because they got addicted to pills — and we know what the downstream effects are. Heroin, fentanyl addiction, all the things that come after."
President Trump also signed a separate executive order the prior Sunday authorizing the use of psilocybin and Ibogaine — both psychedelic plant-based compounds — in treatment settings, particularly for veterans. Joe Rogan was present at the White House when that order was signed.
"I really go back to a very simple principle," Asani said. "Plant-based medicine — if we're able to use that and make it a one or two shot thing, and stop treating patients like a subscription model where you make revenue off of them for the rest of their lives, I think people are waking up to that as part of the MAHA movement."
What It Changes for the Industry
The immediate practical impact for consumers is limited — no major changes happen overnight. But the structural changes are substantial.
Banking access has been a persistent crisis for the cannabis industry. Because Schedule I drugs are federally illegal, banks subject to federal regulation could not — and largely would not — do business with cannabis companies. Cash-only operations, limited access to loans, inability to accept credit cards at scale. The rescheduling to Schedule III begins the process of normalizing that relationship, though the full integration will take time and involve multiple federal agencies.
The stock exchange issue was, to Asani, an obvious absurdity that the rescheduling begins to correct. "On the American stock exchanges, we allow companies from outside this country — Canadian cannabis companies, Australian companies — to list their shares and access American investors. But an American company can't get on the American stock exchange. President Trump realizes how crazy that is. That's why we're making these changes."
Tax treatment under Section 280E of the federal tax code — which applied punitive tax treatment to Schedule I businesses — also shifts under rescheduling.
The MAHA Moment and the Topical Product
On the political dimension of the executive order, Asani was careful but clear. Polling consistently shows 77 percent of Americans support legal medical cannabis. The issue is not partisan by the numbers, even if the politics around it have historically been.
"It's probably helpful to the president who does it," he said. "And I think it's important that people feel democracy works — not just 'that's my guy and I got him into office,' but this is what you said you were going to do and you're actually doing it."
He also discussed the company's topical gel product — formulated with eleven essential oils alongside THC and CBD, developed in 2017, and currently available in nearly a hundred Arizona dispensaries including three D2 locations in Tucson. The formulation was originally developed with input from a clinical aromatherapist to address his wife's pain from an earlier injury. The product notably doesn't smell like cannabis — a critical consideration for many users. Winn acknowledged using it for lower back pain from a car accident and confirmed its efficacy.
Asani's goal is to place the product into an FDA approval pathway once that pathway becomes accessible — enabling national and eventually international distribution without changing a formulation that has demonstrably worked.
The product is currently available exclusively at licensed dispensaries in Arizona, including D2 Dispensary locations in Tucson.
Winn Tucson airs Monday through Friday, 9 to 11 a.m., on KVOI 1030 The Voice.
Sam Anthony's platform: yournews.com — create an account, become a citizen journalist, or simply follow Arizona news.
Ian Faith's AI tool for campaigns and legislative districts: 877-855-6755.
Mo Asani's dispensaries: D2 Dispensary, three Tucson locations. The topical gel is available at nearly 100 Arizona dispensaries.