Guests - Daniel Butierez, Lisa Von Geldern
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.
Daniel Butierez: Answering an Attack Without Throwing One
Daniel Butierez, the Republican nominee in Congressional District 7, came into the studio a day after his opponent, Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva, sent out a fundraising blast branding him a "MAGA extremist." Winn framed the district honestly from the top: CD7 is one of the poorest in the country, drawn long ago for the Grijalva family — first Raúl, now his daughter Adelita, appointed and then elected to fill out the term. This November's race is for a full two-year term.
Butierez recounted getting the news from a supporter, Victoria Lem, who forwarded the message upset. He read it on air in full: Grijalva's claim that statewide turnout was just 23 percent, that Republicans had nominated an extremist who "stands with Trump's cruel immigration policies," supports "turning our border communities into a military zone," and "even supports sending homeless people to involuntary work camps they cannot leave," followed by an appeal for day-one donors.
His decision was not to answer in kind. "I'm not going to attack back," he told Winn, noting he and Grijalva had agreed earlier in the campaign to keep it clean, and that she had publicly acknowledged he'd been respectful. What he did instead was correct the record. The work-camp charge, he said, distorts a voluntary homelessness plan he presented to the Board of Supervisors last November — a document anyone can pull up in the meeting archive. "It was such a silly lie and absolutely provable," he said. "She made it sound like a Nazi work camp. And it's actually my plan to help these people get their lives back."
That plan, he explained, grows out of his own business. Butierez runs a painting company and has hired homeless people onto paid crews — "they're not slaves," as Winn put it, "you're giving them a hand up." He described his employees pooling their own money once a month to buy pizzas at Costco and hand them out at parks, a habit that started by watching him. "That's what I represent," he said. "I represent hope for our community. And that's why I don't want to get into this dirty politics stuff."
Winn read his written response aloud as the segment's centerpiece. In it, Butierez said he was "disappointed and shocked" to be labeled an extremist, denied ever supporting family separations or militarized border communities, and clarified that he simply believes in enforcing existing immigration laws enacted under presidents of both parties. On the work-camp claim: "I never said the homeless should be forced into work camps. How she came up with that is of disbelief to me. It is a 100 percent lie." He closed by challenging her to debate: "I have not lied about your positions. Please do not lie about mine."
The restraint, he reported, was paying off online — hundreds of shares, thousands of reactions, and a run of messages from self-identified Democrats discovering his community work. Winn's read was that the attack revealed weakness: "If she had an accomplishment, she'd say I've done this and this for the district. But there's no there there. So if all she has is to attack you..." Her advice to disappointed Democrats was an invitation rather than a demand — "the Democrat Party is leaving me behind because what they're professing is not what I believe."
Daniel Butierez: The District, the Economy, and the Case for a Change
Asked what he'd actually do, Butierez started with the district's geography and its poverty. CD7 runs from Douglas to Yuma, takes in a big chunk of Tucson's west side, and stretches up toward Phoenix around Tolleson and Avondale. "Everything around CD7 grows," he said older residents told him, "but CD7 stays the same." His diagnosis was capital leaving the community — remittances sent abroad rather than reinvested in local stores and neighborhoods — and his prescription was industry. "The only way we can raise wages is to bring industry here that pays really good," he said, walking through the mechanics with his own business: if customers can pay more to have a house painted, he can give his painters raises. "It's not rocket science. And it's not socialism. It's called capitalism."
He grounded his politics in his family. Two of his children are enrolled members of the Tohono O'odham Nation, and he described taking his son to see the tribal housing he was entitled to and steering him away from it. "You don't own it. The tribe owns it," he recalled telling him — and the point he drew was about ownership and self-reliance versus getting something for free. His daughter is retiring from the Air Force; his sons work with him and are buying their own homes. "Rather than getting something for free, go out and earn it," he said. Winn extended it to governing philosophy: "We want that in government. We don't want to be reliant on our government."
On immigration and public safety, Butierez drew clean lines. He supports ICE as law enforcement doing the job Congress wrote the laws for — "who you should be protesting is my opponent," he said of activists, "because she's out protesting rather than being in Washington drafting a law to change the law." He tied local crime to non-enforcement, pointing to the downtown Tucson shooting that wounded nine, in which the shooter was a prohibited possessor sentenced below guidelines for a prior offense. "The only reason that crime happened is because the mayor, our city council, our board of supervisors, our sheriff did not enforce our laws." He said he'd tagged national outlets to force coverage of it.
He also leaned into faith as common ground in a heavily Catholic district — he estimated half of CD7 is Catholic — objecting to Grijalva's reported call to investigate the nation's 250th-anniversary commemoration as too faith-based. "My opponent needs to read the Bill of Rights," he said. "Our rights are granted to us by the creator, period." Winn's framing was about religious freedom cutting both ways: you can honor other beliefs "but you don't get to suppress and oppress all the other believers."
Butierez recalled the 2010 cycle, when Republican Ruth McClung came close to unseating Raúl Grijalva after he called for a boycott of Arizona and Democrats stayed home. He sees the same opening now. The registration math is steep — he put it at roughly 172,000 Democrats, 92,000-to-94,000 Republicans, and about 150,000 independents — meaning he has to win independents and peel off Democrats. His pitch to them was simple: "Because I'm going to fight for you." His policy priorities were water for Yuma's farm economy, funding for senior and assisted-living facilities in Nogales, and dismantling the drug-cartel networks he says run through the district as the nation's "front door" for illegal drugs. He noted an endorsement from Arizona's police union and a fundraiser being thrown for him in Yuma.
His campaign is at Butierezforcongress.org, and across social media as Butierez for Congress. He spelled it himself: "B-U-T-I-E-R-E-Z. It's like Gutierrez except with a B and only one R."
Kathleen Winn: 'It's All About Math'
Between guests, Winn delivered the argument she has been building toward all week — that both parties are fracturing, and that the discipline to vote the whole ticket is what separates winning from moral posturing.
She was pointed about the Democrats purging their moderates, citing Lydia Hernandez, a pro-life Democrat and school board chair in Maryvale whom she said the party's socialist wing pushed out and is now working to remove from her board seat, despite a record focused on school safety. But she refused to let Republicans off the hook. "We can look and say, oh, look what they're doing over there. But be very clear. If we don't fix it in our house, people in our party won't turn out to vote."
The math was explicit. Arizona has 30 legislative districts; a majority is 16. Republicans must win 16 Senate seats to hold the chamber, which made LD17 — where she is chair — a race she treats as pivotal. But she drew a hard line about her own role. "I am not the mom. I'm not the mediator," she said. Her job is turnout; whether voters back a particular candidate is on that candidate. "If you've alienated or offended the other people, that's not up to me to fix. That's up to you to fix." She stressed she meant several races, not one.
Her appeal to disappointed primary voters was blunt and personal. "We're not electing a prom king or queen." From the moment she lost her own race, she said, she supported her opponent unequivocally, and she expects the same. "If you don't vote for the Republican because of some personal bias you have, then you made it about you, not about the party." To winners, the instruction was to win graciously: "You can beat your chest and say I won in private. But win graciously." And the way to win over the people who didn't vote for you, she argued, is to stop talking about yourself: "Most people don't care. What they want to know is, what are you going to do for me? And can I count on you?"
She praised Rodney Glassman's endorsement of Warren Petersen after a hard-fought AG primary as the model, and framed the stakes of that race around Kris Mayes, who she noted first won by a couple hundred votes. She flagged the still-open question of whether Mayes will act on the Board of Supervisors' referral concerning Sheriff Chris Nanos — an election-year test she doubts the attorney general will take up. And she pointed to warning signs beyond Arizona: a new Democratic mayor in Chandler, incumbents thrown out in Gilbert. "If you think there's not an active movement to have us lose in this state, and you decide that by not voting for someone you're doing some moral or righteous thing, you may cost us the state."
Lisa von Geldern: The Fauci Reckoning
Winn's second hour turned to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing scheduled for the next day, where Dr. Anthony Fauci was set to appear before Senator Rand Paul. Ahead of it, Paul had released a 1,141-page set of Fauci's personal writings. Winn brought on Lisa von Geldern of the John Birch Society, a frequent guest on the subject, and the conversation that followed was a sweeping indictment delivered almost entirely in von Geldern's voice. Much of what she asserted is contested or unproven, and it should be read as her account and her opinion rather than as established fact.
On the documents themselves, Winn described writings in which Fauci disparaged President Trump and reveled in his own celebrity and media coverage. Von Geldern's framing was that Fauci, long the highest-paid federal employee, had also collected award income his staff engineered, and she alleged a $900,000 payment from a foreign country she strongly implied was China. She credited Paul and Senator Ron Johnson for their work with people who say they were injured by the COVID vaccines.
The heart of the segment was a series of vaccine-injury claims, and here the article should be plain about their status. Von Geldern described family members and acquaintances she attributes to the shots, and cited a figure of "over 17 million" vaccine deaths worldwide — a number Winn immediately pushed back on as seeming high, prompting von Geldern to characterize it as an estimate. She made broad claims about VAERS underreporting, about no vaccine ever being properly placebo-tested, and about specific mechanisms of harm. None of these claims was accompanied by verifiable evidence on air, and several run contrary to the scientific and regulatory consensus. Winn twice interjected to add caution to the record — noting the 17-million figure "seems high," and later joking that any unproven assertion should carry a caveat. Readers weighing any medical decision should consult a physician, not a talk-radio segment.
On the legal track, von Geldern noted the indictment of a former Fauci adviser, David Morens, and calls for the Justice Department to prosecute Fauci himself over allegations he misled Congress about funding risky research in China. Both she and Winn questioned whether Fauci's pardon from President Biden — which Winn suggested may have been signed by autopen — would shield him if new charges arose. Winn added a note of significance to the show's own history: the Oversight Project, whose president Mike Howell she quoted on Fauci's culpability, is the same organization that represented her in her suit against Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and Attorney General Kris Mayes over uniformed voting and election observers. "The same people that helped us here in Pima County," she said, are now pursuing the COVID accountability fight.
Von Geldern's account of the virus's origin — that it was an engineered bioweapon involving U.S. Department of Defense and gain-of-function research routed through Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina and on to China, spread internationally through military games in Wuhan — is a theory she stated with certainty. It is disputed; the origin of SARS-CoV-2 remains formally unresolved, with U.S. intelligence agencies divided between a lab-leak and a natural-spillover hypothesis and no consensus that the virus was a deliberately engineered weapon. It belongs in the article as her stated position, not as settled history.
Two moments drew explicit pushback from the host, and both are worth preserving because they show Winn drawing lines her guest would not. When von Geldern said Fauci "should be executed," Winn did not adopt the sentiment. And when von Geldern argued that people who "just followed orders" during the pandemic — invoking Nazi Germany — bore Nuremberg-style guilt, and appeared to extend the principle broadly, Winn interrupted to separate that from a police officer ordering an active shooter to stop. "I don't understand the parallel between telling a man who's wildly shooting at people to stop," she said. "It is a completely different scenario. But if you make a blanket statement like that..." She pressed until the distinction was on the record, saying, "I just want to be responsible." Von Geldern ultimately clarified she meant officials, medical personnel, and the officers who arrested people for paddle-boarding alone — not the shooting.
Von Geldern also described her own severe illness during the pandemic — double pneumonia, hospitalization, being turned away from emergency rooms she said declined to treat her over her vaccination status, and a long recovery. She recounted asking for ivermectin and being refused. She offered these as personal testimony; they are not independently verified here, and the passage is included as her stated experience.
Winn's closing framing pulled the segment back toward her recurring theme: distrust of unaccountable authority, and accountability that reaches past the famous name. Von Geldern's version was that Fauci is "a convenient face" for a much larger cast — boards of supervisors, school boards, mayors, and governors who imposed lockdowns they could have refused, funded by federal pandemic money. She named former Governor Doug Ducey among those she faulted for keeping restrictions in place. Both agreed the deepest damage was to small businesses, schooling, and daily life. "It was a lot friendlier and a lot more wonderful in 2018 than it is today," von Geldern said. Winn gave the arc one more turn toward the political: a thriving pre-pandemic economy, in her telling, was disrupted by a crisis that forced Americans to surrender freedoms — a lesson she wants voters to carry into November.
The two closed on the day ahead — the Fauci hearing, and the show's standing China Watch Wednesday segment, which Winn noted would intersect with it, "because it all started there." As she signed off: "Whether he answers anything or not, it's all going to be made of the record. Never a dull moment here."