Guests - Merissa Caldwell, Rep. Lupe Diaz, Scott Schara
The SAVE Act Pressure Campaign, Arizona's Historic Budget, and the Population Reduction Agenda
Thursday on Winn Tucson carried a weight that went from the practical — voter registration deadlines, budget votes, and out-of-state registration schemes — to the profound: a father who has now lost two children and believes both deaths trace to the same underlying system. Three guests. Three distinct battles. One shared conviction that things hidden in plain sight are the most dangerous.
Merissa Caldwell: The SAVE Act, the Heap Victory, and the Ground Campaign That Won't Stop
Merissa Caldwell — election integrity activist, organizer of the SAVE Act rally at La Paloma the previous weekend, and one of the most relentlessly active people in Arizona's conservative movement — opened the show with a direct assessment of where the SAVE Act fight stands and what needs to happen next.
The House Strategy: Hold Everything Until the Senate Acts
The SAVE Act has passed the House. The Senate is sitting on it. And the Democratic senators representing Arizona — Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego — are blocking a measure that already reflects Arizona's own existing law.
"What Scott Pressler is saying is that in addition to all of that, we need to be doing a call to action of calling every one of our representatives in Congress and telling them: vote no on FISA, vote no on any legislation that comes from the Senate until they pass the Save America Act."
The logic is straightforward. House members hold leverage over the Senate. If they exercise it — if they refuse to advance any Senate-originated legislation until the SAVE Act is through — the Senate's stalling becomes politically costly rather than consequence-free.
Caldwell's own research into Democratic voters adds a dimension to this that the national coverage misses. She has sent targeted text messages to Democrat voters in Arizona asking whether they support the state's existing laws: documentary proof of citizenship and government-issued photo ID to register to vote.
The initial responses came back as partisan reflexes: "We don't want to support Trump's agenda."
She pushed back. "I said: no, these are actually Arizona's current law. Do you support Arizona's current law, or do you want to see Arizona's law change?"
The responses shifted. With one exception, every Democrat voter she reached said they absolutely support Arizona's current law and want it to stay. When she told them the SAVE Act was modeled directly on Arizona's own statute, the political opposition collapsed.
"The Democrat voters in Arizona are not as radical as the elected officials that represent them. The electorate is much more of a moderate base. The only thing they have to hang on to is that they keep drumming up this hate against President Trump. But where is that leaving us?"
Senator Kelly is up for reelection in two years and is believed to have presidential ambitions. He cannot afford to be on the wrong side of a policy his own voters support. Caldwell's text campaign demonstrates that the gap between Arizona's Democratic voters and their elected representatives on this issue is real and exploitable.
The Maricopa Recorder Victory: How Justin Heap Fought Back and Won
Caldwell provided the most detailed account yet of the year-long legal war over Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap's authority — and how it ended.
When Heap won the 2024 primary, defeating the previous recorder who Caldwell described as having lied about everything and undermined election integrity at every turn, the response from the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors was immediate and deliberate. Supervisor Thomas Galvin — in coordination with deputy county manager Zach Shira — orchestrated a shared services agreement that stripped Heap's office of nearly everything: its IT department, its servers, its resources, its budget, and most of its staff. The agreement was backdated in communications but did not actually take effect until one week before Heap assumed office. When he walked in on day one, he was, in Caldwell's words, operating "with both hands tied behind his back and a blindfold on."
The board then compounded the obstruction. They refused to pay Heap's leadership staff for the first six weeks they worked. They invoked an obscure antiquated law requiring Heap to produce a report on every document his office had generated — with the implicit threat that if the board found the report neglectful, they could remove him from office. They filed charges against staff members who testified in court, accused them of lying under oath despite documentary evidence to the contrary, and threatened them with prison. Every staff member who testified was forced to hire their own attorney, with the county ultimately paying the bill.
The court ruled in Heap's favor. The judge returned all of Heap's statutory duties, staff, equipment, and budget to the recorder's office immediately. The amicus brief filed by Senate President Warren Peterson and Speaker Montenegro — arguing that the board was violating the law — was cited extensively in the judge's final order. Attorney James Rogers, who represented Heap pro bono through the entire case, did so while running for the state House in LD-10. If elected, he would be the only election integrity attorney in the Arizona legislature — a position that becomes more critical now that Alex Kolodin is running for secretary of state.
The board, having lost decisively in court, announced they would pursue a stay — and if the stay is denied, they would appeal the denial of the stay. Caldwell named this maneuver with precision: the Maricopa County Tango. Delay, delay, delay.
"Now they've resorted to organizing openly with the radical left. The same people that came into the board meeting were saying the exact same rhetoric as the man who tried to assassinate President Trump. The board was happy to let them say all of those expletives. But then they tried to remove me for condemning Nazism and fascism in my public comment. Kate Brophy McGee tried to remove me from speaking for condemning Nazism and fascism. The board is completely out of control."
Caldwell's message about why this matters beyond Maricopa County was explicit: Adrian Fontes left Maricopa and came to Pima County. What works as a template in one county gets exported to the next.
"If they get away with it in one part of the state, we're the next good bad example. We absolutely have to pay attention."
Caldwell's election integrity work can be followed at easyaz.org and on X at @MerissaCaldwell.
Representative Lupe Diaz: The Historic Tax Budget, Hobbs' Veto Calculation, and What Rural Arizona Is Living Through
Representative Lupe Diaz represents LD-19 — a legislative district that spans five counties: Cochise, Graham, Greenlee, part of Pima, and part of Santa Cruz. It is one of the most geographically expansive districts in the state and one of the most directly affected by four years of open border policy. He joined Winn Tucson with fresh news: the House had passed the Republican budget the previous evening at 5:45 p.m., unanimously on the Republican side, with all 33 votes in place.
The Budget: What It Actually Does
The Republican budget package is historic in scope and conservative in construction. The key provisions:
A $1.45 billion income tax cut — the largest in Arizona's history — delivered over time, with Arizona becoming the first state in the nation to achieve full conformity with the federal HR-1 big, beautiful bill. No tax on tips. No tax on overtime. Capital improvement tax credits for small businesses. These are not theoretical benefits. For a worker in rural Arizona managing a $127 gas fill-up on a paycheck built for $87, the difference between keeping and losing another $40 a week is material.
The budget spends $800 million less than the governor's proposal while still funding the priorities she has consistently demanded: child care assistance for approximately 4,000 Arizona children, child safety and DCS, congregate care for the developmentally disabled, and foster care programs. DPS, the Department of Corrections, and the Department of Child Services were the only three agencies exempted from the across-the-board 5% agency budget reduction. DPS receives a $4.5 million operational shortfall supplement. Correctional officers receive a 4% raise.
"What we gained was a $1.45 billion income tax cut. This is historical. Arizonans are getting the biggest bulk of the benefit out of this very fiscally conservative budget."
The Senate, fully unified with the House, will pass the budget unanimously the following week — sending it to the governor as the third budget of the year.
The Veto Calculation
Diaz was circumspect but pointed in his assessment of whether Governor Hobbs will sign.
If she vetoes it, she vetoes a budget that funds everything she asked for — child care, child safety, foster care, DCS — while delivering historic tax relief to every Arizonan. The Democrats' rhetorical framing during floor debate was telling: they attacked the bill as giveaways to "billionaires and large corporations." The factual response is stark. There are 10 to 11 billionaires in Arizona. There are 300,000 small businesses.
"That's the economic engine we have in Arizona — small businesses," Diaz said. "And what we're doing is giving them capital improvement tax credits because of the big, beautiful bill. It's going to help Arizona's economy."
Winn's strategic read: Hobbs has been stalling budget negotiations deliberately, keeping the legislature in session and unable to campaign. The pattern — walking away from negotiations, imposing a moratorium on unrelated bills, deploying the veto as a blunt instrument — is not dysfunction. It is a strategy to drain Republican incumbents of campaign time while the primary approaches.
"If she doesn't sign this, that ad writes itself," Diaz said. "You gave her what she wanted and she still said no."
What Cochise County Lived Through
Diaz spoke from experience about what four years of open borders produced in his district.
"Our county was at the epicenter of all of the illegal drugging and the getaways and the high speed chases that came through Cochise County. I looked at the stats — in 26 months, there had been 23 deaths because of high speed chases in Cochise County alone."
He introduced a bill that would allow charges of manslaughter or second-degree murder against those fleeing law enforcement in high-speed pursuits. The governor vetoed it.
Governor Hobbs has stated publicly she will not support federal immigration enforcement in Arizona. She opposes ICE operations in the state, has taken that position explicitly since the State of the Union address, and has built her government-funding priorities around it. In Diaz's plain telling, those positions and the 23 deaths in his district belong in the same conversation.
His call to action for constituents and listeners: call the governor's office. Remind her that this budget contains what she asked for. Tell her that Arizonans — regardless of party — need more money in their pockets.
Arizona fell from fourth to 47th in economic growth rankings under the Hobbs administration. The water policy struck down by the courts this week was not an isolated overreach. It was a pattern.
"She has really destroyed, along with the attorney general, the economy here," Diaz said. "And I think it's really important that we don't lose sight of restoring order."
Scott Schara: Part Two — Grace Was Targeted, the Population Reduction Agenda Is Real, and Travis
This is the second installment in a seven-part series. Scott Schara is the Wisconsin father and author of Is the Government Legally Killing Us? whose 19-year-old daughter Grace — who had Down syndrome — died in a hospital in October 2021 under circumstances a jury found insufficient to hold the medical staff liable, but which Schara has spent more than four thousand hours documenting as deliberate.
After the Trial: The Motion for New Trial and What It Preserved
After losing the wrongful death jury trial 11 to 1 in June 2025, Schara chose not to file a direct appeal. The financial entry cost — approximately $100,000 just to file — combined with the fact that winning an appeal only yields a new trial, made the calculus clear. Instead, he filed a motion for a new trial with the same judge.
The reason: before the trial began, the judge had denied all of Schara's motions in limine without hearing a single syllable of argument. The defense's motions had been heard and ruled on one by one. When it came time for the plaintiff's motions — which requested that Schara's post-death research and his religious beliefs be excluded from trial, since neither was relevant to what the medical staff did to Grace between October 6th and 13th, 2021 — the judge summarily denied every one without reading them.
"He said all of plaintiff's motions in limine are denied. He never heard a syllable."
The judge had also warned during the pretrial hearing, on the record, that Schara's media interviews would result in consequences that would all go against the plaintiff. It was a threat, made openly, from the bench.
The motion for new trial placed all of this on the record — including the illegal DNR that the doctor had placed on Grace's chart without family consent or authorization. The judge scheduled a hearing for December 19th and spent thirty minutes mocking Schara from the bench.
"I just sat there and took it. The good news is the record is now right."
The new trial was denied. Schara describes this chapter as closed — and as something he was called to do not to win, but to illuminate. The medical system. The legal system. Two tentacles of the same apparatus.
"God knew the verdict before we ever stepped foot in the courtroom. So of course I'm very content with it. I'm not angry about it at all."
The Fauci Indictment and the Deception Within the Deception
Schara addressed the week's news directly — the DOJ indictment of COVID health officials related to the pandemic response — and offered an assessment that runs counter to the reaction from most of the conservative media he follows.
"Everybody who is in the know thinks this is a good thing. So I just want to zoom out a little bit and remind everybody — I'm going to go on record and say it's not a good thing. And I want to explain why."
His framework: we have been programmed to read a headline, process it as good or bad, and react emotionally. That programming is itself the tool used against us. The indictment, in his analysis, is not accountability. It is narrative management.
"What he's being indicted for is lying about whether COVID came from a bat versus the Wuhan lab. That is a deception within the deception. COVID did not come from a bat. It did not come from a lab. It did not come from gain of function. They want us to stay focused on the virology and vaccine agenda. The indictment keeps that agenda alive. They will never cut off the head of that snake."
He extended the analysis: the indictment also provides a future mechanism for protecting Trump's Operation Warp Speed legacy. If the narrative settles on lab leak plus bureaucratic lying as the full story, then the president who trusted the bureaucrats is absolved. The larger architecture — who built it, who funds it, who benefits from it — never gets examined.
"They've got to eventually get their savior back in good graces for his bragging about Operation Warp Speed. So they've got to give him that free pass: he didn't know, he thought it was this virus escape. That's what this is about."
Schara is not offering this as cynicism. He is offering it as the conclusion of a researcher who started from a place of complete trust in the system and spent four and a half years finding out what the system actually is.
Grace Was Targeted — and the Research That Proves It
Asked directly whether he believes Grace was targeted, Schara said yes. He answered the same question both in deposition and at trial. The targeting was not necessarily specific to Grace as an individual at that specific hospital. It was systemic.
Ninety percent of Down syndrome pregnancies in America end in abortion. That number does not happen by accident. Schara traced the mechanism to a 1967 document he found in his research: The Plan to Depopulate the United States. One of the plan's identified tentacles is payments to encourage abortion — implemented subtly, through insurance reimbursement codes and physician training that frames Down syndrome children as burdens to families and non-contributors to society.
"So the young couple without roots goes into the doctor's office. He congratulates them. Schedules the amniocentesis. Their only question is, does my insurance cover it? Of course the insurance covers it. They come back. He says the baby has Down syndrome. And they're trained to tell the young couple this child is going to be a burden. They're never going to be a productive member of society. So the young couple schedules the abortion. That's how they pull this stuff off."
The clinical data supporting the specific targeting of Down syndrome patients during COVID is documented in an article published December 12, 2023 in the American Journal of Medical Genetics: "Retrospective Review of the Code Status of Individuals with Down Syndrome During the COVID-19 Era."
The study examined 1,739,000 patients across 825 hospitals from January 2019 through June 2022. The finding: patients with Down syndrome had a 6.3-to-1 odds ratio of having a DNR status ordered upon hospital admission compared to COVID patients without Down syndrome.
"Completely disparate. By far."
The same study — and this is where Schara made his most pointed observation about how good people get trapped fighting for the wrong things — was the context in which disability rights lobbyists spent the COVID era fighting for equal access to ventilators for disabled patients.
"They were fighting that people on disabilities had the same rights to a ventilator as a non-disabled person. Yet they're fighting for the very tool that ended 90% of the lives when used with COVID patients. It's critical that you discern what you're fighting for, to make sure you're not fighting for the less evil — which is part of the satanic agenda."
Travis
Schara disclosed, for the first time in this series, that Grace was not his first loss. His son Travis died by suicide in 2018.
Travis had been prescribed a pain medication. Another medication was added — one that, according to the prescribing data, is contraindicated in combination with the first and known to cause suicidal thoughts. Thirty days to the day after the two medications were combined, Travis died.
"When I see this agenda, I think Travis lost his life to the population reduction agenda also."
Schara's research has led him to the conclusion that the increase in suicide rates — particularly among young people isolated during COVID lockdowns — is not incidental. The 1967 depopulation plan he cites explicitly identifies chronic depression as a target condition to create, for the purpose of building the psychiatry and pharmaceutical industries that would medicate rather than cure.
The United States has 4% of the world's population and consumes 45% of the world's pharmaceuticals. Five billion prescriptions are written annually in this country. Schara's view is that this is not a coincidence and not an accident.
"We have to look in the mirror and see: why did I fall for this? Why do I want to pursue the signs of the American dream versus doing the homework and changing my lifestyle so I don't have to be on meds?"
The Two Goals of the Agenda
Schara's framework for the agenda divides into two halves: physical and spiritual.
The physical goal is to reduce the population through methods too diffuse and gradual to trigger resistance. Not a hundred million deaths at once — that would produce revolt. Instead: 1.2 million COVID hospital deaths. An estimated 750,000 deaths from the COVID vaccine, most attributed to other causes because the connections are never drawn. An increase in brain aneurysm rates. Shortened lifespans across the population — from an average of 90 to an average of 70 — with no single dramatic event to point to.
"They don't do it all at once or we would revolt. They do it systematically over time, and they do it very creatively."
The spiritual goal is to replicate the same structure inside religion: replace direct relationship with God with institutional denomination, fund those denominations through 501(c)(3) structures that make them compliant with government preference, and use them to implement a spiritual agenda that moves people away from authentic faith.
His next book — for which he has a 34-page outline — will be titled Is the Church Spiritually Killing Us?
The Hegelian Dialectic and the Great Depression
Schara placed the current moment in a longer pattern he calls the Hegelian dialectic: problem, reaction, solution. Create the fear. Offer the remedy. Attach conditions to the remedy that give you permanent control.
September 11 created the fear. The Patriot Act was the solution — 24/7 surveillance, accepted voluntarily by a population desperate for peace and safety. COVID created the fear. The vaccine was the solution — accepted voluntarily by a population told it was safe and effective.
The Great Depression, in his research, was a created crisis whose solution included the birth of fiat currency on March 9, 1933 — and, he argues, the legal suspension of the Constitution, which has never been formally restored.
"It's not lawful. God's way is the law. This is all legal in this Satanic system."
He quoted 1 Thessalonians 5:3: While they are saying, 'Peace and safety,' then sudden destruction will come upon them like labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.
The series continues. Next week: the origins of the culture of death, and what Christians and citizens are called to do in response.
Scott Schara's book, Is the Government Legally Killing Us?, is available at ouramazinggrace.net through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Goodreads. His Substack newsletter — including the upcoming piece "Where Do Our Rights Come From?" — is also available at ouramazinggrace.net.
Winn Tucson airs Monday through Friday, 9 to 11 a.m., on KVOI 1030 The Voice.
Merissa Caldwell: easyaz.org | @MerissaCaldwell on X
The SAVE Act: call your House representatives and instruct them to vote no on any Senate legislation until the SAVE Act passes. Call Senators Kelly and Gallego directly.
Arizona budget: call the governor's office and tell her to sign it.