Guests - Ava Chen, Charles Heller
Ava Chen: The Fauci Files and How the CCP Captured America's Top Doctor
Ava Chen, commentator with the New Federal State of China, joined the show for China Watch — shifted to Friday this week after Winn spent Wednesday in federal court — to walk through what she described as a watershed moment: the Director of National Intelligence's release of hundreds of pages of intelligence files, plus five or six additional documents, detailing the alleged cover-up surrounding Dr. Anthony Fauci's ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Chen framed the release as long-overdue confirmation of claims made publicly by Miles Guo years earlier, and credited a pointed question from Captain James Sano on a recent podcast appearance as the right way to frame the scandal: not why the media has gone silent on the story, but why America's intelligence apparatus — which has tracked the China threat since the 1940s and 1950s with dedicated units — apparently missed something this significant for so long. "Maybe they didn't miss it," Chen said. "They just ignored it, and many people protect it."
Chen laid out what she described as the CCP's standard playbook for compromising high-value targets, a method Guo has called BGY — blue, gold, and yellow. Blue refers to round-the-clock digital surveillance, including hacking into a target's devices and the devices of their first- and second-degree contacts, building a comprehensive profile of habits, relationships, and vulnerabilities. Gold refers to financial inducements that don't have to take the form of direct cash — speaking invitations, book deals, or cryptocurrency payments that are harder to trace. Yellow refers to sexual leverage. "CCP's BGY has not been failed," Chen said. "If you are the target of the CCP, they will capture you one or the other... they just need you to step on one and they capture you."
Applied to Fauci, Chen said the CCP identified him as a high-value target decades ago because of his durable institutional authority, his access to a national biodefense lab network, and his control over gain-of-function research funding — capabilities the CCP did not yet possess on its own at the time. She described the operation as having been run through a researcher she said was sent specifically because operatives understood Fauci's particular vulnerabilities, while the researcher's husband — who Chen said had been recruited into China's Hundred Talents Program as early as the 1990s and held a U.S.-earned immunology PhD — provided the technical credibility. The relationship, in Chen's telling, allegedly began with a private meeting at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C., with subsequent meetings in Los Angeles and Palm Beach. She noted the woman, whom Chen identified as Wang Yanyi, was already married at the time, and later became director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Chen tied the alleged compromise directly to Eco Health Alliance's roughly $600,000 grant to the Wuhan lab in 2014 — a sum she dismissed as financially trivial to Beijing. "That's not even pocket change," she said. "That's a one-meal cost by a CCP top official."
Chen alleged the payments to Fauci flowed through cryptocurrency rather than direct cash transfers, attributing the claim to New Federal State of China's own intelligence-gathering. She framed the underlying motive for skepticism toward official vaccine messaging in similarly stark terms, citing Guo's repeated public question of whether Fauci and his family ever took the actual vaccine themselves, and alleging that Wang and her husband held financial stakes in companies positioned to benefit from the pandemic response — a dynamic she characterized as a form of insider trading layered atop the broader cover-up.
The human cost of that era remained close to home for Winn, who shared two stories from her own community: a man's daughter with Down syndrome who died after what Winn described as systematic overmedication during a hospital stay for a routine cold, with parents barred from being present, and a retired military veteran in Tucson who Winn said died in a local hospital after what she characterized as inadequate care, leaving behind two daughters. "We know that there were atrocities across this country," Winn said. "I know there's many of us that have these stories from COVID, and I think they have not forgotten." She connected the moment to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard's recent decision to step down, crediting Gabbard's tenure with bringing the underlying documentation to light even as her time in the role comes to a close.
Chen broadened the conversation to argue that Chinese Communist Party influence operations have penetrated four key American sectors, in descending order of severity: intelligence, media, finance, and the judiciary. On intelligence, she cited Huawei's continued designation as a CCP military-linked company — first flagged by Guo in 2018 — and noted the federal government is still spending billions to rip Huawei equipment out of domestic telecom networks years after the warning. She extended the same critique to Alibaba, recently added to the Pentagon's blacklist of Chinese military-linked firms, alleging the company's cloud infrastructure quietly hosts data for numerous unsuspecting American businesses and that Alibaba's AI model was built in part on stolen American technology — pointing to a reported June letter from OpenAI executives to lawmakers alleging Alibaba had stolen elements of its AI model just before the Trump administration moved to restrict TikTok over national security concerns. She also flagged Zoom, used by roughly 80% of U.S. courts and universities, as a platform she said operates under CCP military influence, and renewed warnings about TikTok that she said the Pentagon had recognized years earlier when it barred military personnel from using the app, even as the broader public continued ignoring the same warning.
On media, Chen argued the near-total silence from mainstream outlets on the DNI's Fauci disclosures is itself damning, given how aggressively the same outlets have postured as adversarial toward government power on other stories. "If you're still subscribing to them, you can shut them off, because they're already captured," she said. On the financial sector, she warned that American pension funds have been steered into what she called illusory promises tied to emerging markets, naming Pacific Alliance Group as a CCP-linked entity she said has financially backed legal action against Guo — including, she alleged, funding from Alibaba directed at the same litigation.
Chen connected the broader ideological throughline — from European communism's roots in the 18th and 19th centuries through Nazism, Soviet communism, and the Chinese Communist Party's current form — as fundamentally about the gradual concentration of power under cover of moral promises. "They take from the rich until there's no more money to take from the rich, and then everyone's poor and you're under an oppressive government," she said, citing New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani's policy proposals — eminent domain seizures for affordable housing, free public services — as a live domestic example of the same pattern. Winn drew a direct local parallel to Tucson's fare-free bus program, which she said has become a magnet for crime and a drain on city finances serious enough that officials are now pulling from reserve funds to cover budget shortfalls tied in part to the program's ongoing costs.
Chen closed by urging voters heading into Arizona's July primary to look past campaign text messages and negative advertising and do independent research on every statewide candidate — governor, secretary of state, attorney general, treasurer, and superintendent of public instruction — framing an informed electorate as the only meaningful check against the kind of institutional capture she spent the segment describing.
Charles Heller: The Legal Fight Over Uniformed Voters
Charles Heller, a 31-year concealed-carry instructor and the host of Liberty Watch on the same station, joined Winn in studio to dig into the legal mechanics behind her ongoing federal court case over whether uniformed law enforcement officers and military personnel can vote while in uniform and carrying their service weapons. Heller, who has previously sued Pima County successfully over what he described as an illegal ordinance, walked through the relevant Arizona statute from memory and confirmed its language live on air: A.R.S. 13-3102 generally bars deadly weapons from polling places on election day, but a specific exemption in subsection C carves out peace officers performing official duties and military personnel performing official duties. "Lack of knowledge of the law is no excuse," Heller said, arguing poll workers should be trained on the exemption regardless of whether the state's election procedures manual acknowledges it.
Heller framed the policy dispute as fundamentally about authority versus rights — a distinction he insisted on directly. "It's not an encroachment on their rights," he said. "It's an authority. There's a difference. Governments don't have rights. Only people have rights. Governments have authorities." His core legal question was whether the elections department's procedures manual carries authority that exceeds existing state statute, and he was blunt about where he thinks that question is headed: "This is ripe for a judicial pronouncement," he said. "I don't think that the people who run government here have the intellectual ability to read a sentence and interpret it properly. They're going to need the help of a court to do that."
He pushed back forcefully on the manual's stated rationale — that uniformed, armed officers present at polling places "disenfranchises" other voters simply by their presence. "How would something that is not an act be a disenfranchisement?" Heller asked. "Him standing there is not an act. Him voting is an act between he and his government." He argued the policy functions less as a genuine safety measure and more as a tool to discredit law enforcement publicly, suggesting to voters that officers in uniform are inherently untrustworthy. Winn, married to a former law enforcement officer, agreed, framing the broader context as part of a sustained public campaign against ICE and police agencies generally that has since expanded to include military personnel as well.
Both Heller and Winn emphasized that litigation is a last resort rather than a first instinct. Winn noted that a similar dispute in December over restoring poll observer access was resolved through direct negotiation with Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, Attorney General Kris Mayes, and Governor Katie Hobbs's office rather than going to court, eventually resulting in observer access being extended to the county's new mobile voting center as well. The current dispute, she said, reached litigation only because the other side declined to negotiate in good faith. "That always makes me suspicious," she said.
Heller also addressed a practical question about call-back obligations: an off-duty officer who is technically on-call while voting remains subject to recall at any time, which he argued strengthens rather than weakens the case for exempting officers from disarmament requirements at the polls, since they may need to respond to an emergency immediately after casting a ballot. He suggested that an officer who simply insisted on his statutory right to vote armed, and was arrested for it, would likely prevail if the case reached court — though he noted that scenario would shift from a straightforward legal question into an internal departmental disciplinary matter depending on whether the officer had violated a specific internal policy in the process.
The conversation closed on a lighter note tied to the broader Israel-Iran conflict, with Heller and Winn discussing the recent incident in which a drone struck an American Apache helicopter, forcing the aircraft down — the pilots survived and were recovered by a naval rescue drone, a detail both found almost cinematic. Heller, who lives near Tucson's Davis-Monthan Air Force Base and watches A-10 Warthogs on final approach regularly, used the moment to make a wry aside about always hoping for "master arm off" when watching the aircraft's cannon swing into view.
Closing Notes: Liberty Watch, the Declaration Reading, and a Fourth of July Tradition
Heller used the second half of his segment to promote the 21st annual public reading of the Declaration of Independence, which he organizes and moderates each Fourth of July at Udall Park near the corner of Sabino Canyon and Tanque Verde, gathering at 8:30 a.m. under what he calls the "Tree of Liberty." The document is divided into 27 segments, with volunteers from the crowd — which Heller estimated will exceed 250 people — each reading a portion aloud, before the group recites the final section, pledging "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor," together in unison. He's recorded the reading in many different voices over the years, including contributions from immigrants and even a participant who phoned in from federal prison and has since been released, framing the diversity of voices as a living embodiment of the document's universal relevance. Winn, whose family is directly descended from Founding Father James Wilson — whose collected works sit on a bookshelf beside her own framed copy of the Declaration at home — has participated in the reading for the past two years and called the experience transformational, encouraging listeners to bring children and grandchildren. Heller also plans additional readings in Green Valley and other locations in the days surrounding the holiday, distributing printed copies of the segmented document for anyone who wants to organize their own local reading.
Winn closed the show with a sharper note on local election administration, criticizing Pima County's reduction of polling locations from 13 to just 3 — including the elimination of a Green Valley site that she said saw an 86% voter turnout rate in the most recent cycle. "Why would they not want people to show up to the polls?" she asked, framing the consolidation as one more example of administrative decisions that quietly suppress participation under the guise of efficiency or safety concerns. She urged listeners receiving their ballots this week to do their own research on every statewide and legislative race rather than reacting to text messages or attack ads, reiterating a theme she's returned to throughout the week: that voters should choose candidates based on what they stand for, not merely on how aggressively they attack their opponents. "If your best thing to do for your campaign is to tell me what a bad guy the other guy is, you have nothing," she said.