Guests - Ava Chen, Thomas Horne, Juan Ciscomani
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Ava Chen: Miles Guo Sentenced to 30 Years — A Firsthand Account from the Courtroom
Ava Chen, New Federal State of China commentator and China Watch Wednesday regular, was inside the Southern District of New York courtroom on June 29th when Miles Guo — founder of the NFSC and one of the CCP's most prominent public opponents — was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison by Judge Analisa Torres. Chen's account was granular, emotionally raw, and delivered on the same day as the verdict, making it among the first detailed firsthand reports available outside of mainstream media coverage that both she and Winn characterized as carrying the CCP's preferred narrative.
The day began at 3 a.m. for some NFSC supporters who lined up outside the courthouse fearing they wouldn't secure seats in the courtroom. The sentencing, originally scheduled for 11 a.m., was delayed until 4 p.m. — five hours in which roughly 150 supporters stood or sat in the building's lower floors, phones and electronic devices surrendered at the door, unable to learn what was causing the delay. When supporters were finally escorted to the 15th floor the first time, roughly 50 to 60 were admitted. The second time, with multiple rows reserved for media — much of it, Chen noted, Chinese-language outlets she described as CCP-controlled propaganda vehicles — and other designated individuals, fewer than 30 NFSC supporters ultimately witnessed the sentencing.
The delay itself, Chen revealed, stemmed from an hour-long sealed session that pulled both defense and prosecution attorneys into a separate courtroom at 3 p.m. No one waiting outside was told what was being discussed. After that session concluded, proceedings resumed and the sentence was rendered.
Chen described Miles Guo's physical appearance as a shock. "I've never in my whole life saw him so pale," she said, contrasting it starkly with his normally vigorous appearance. The explanation came later, in a phone call he was able to make to a fellow fighter after the sentencing. That morning, Guo had fainted in his cell at the Metropolitan Detention Center — widely described as one of the worst federal detention facilities in the country — after drinking spoiled milk that triggered severe diarrhea, leaving him dehydrated and too weak to stand. When he fell, his face hit the floor and his lips bled. His vomiting aggravated old injuries from a 2003 detention in China, where CCP operatives held him in a black site for 18 days, hung him upside down, beat him, and asphyxiated him with a plastic bag filled with his own cut hair — damage that left permanent lung and bronchial scarring. He was spitting blood in his cell when 9-1-1 was called at approximately 9 a.m.
Hospital staff treated him with injections and told him he needed to stay. MDC marshals overruled the doctors and transported him to court anyway. Chen described a woman in civilian clothes — not a standard marshal's uniform — who arrived at MDC around 1:30 p.m., directed his transfer, and rode in a BMW ahead of the transport vehicle to the courthouse. When the prosecution later told the court that only one marshal had escorted Guo and implied his illness had been fabricated to delay proceedings, Guo stood and corrected the record directly. He told the judge to check the cameras — at MDC, at the hospital, and at the courthouse — and invited her to count the number of people who transported him and in what condition he arrived. "Don't trust me," Chen recalled him saying. "Trust what you're going to see in the cameras."
The prosecution's framing throughout the sentencing, Chen said, characterized Guo as a con artist with no remorse. He rose to rebut that framing as well, telling the court: "I came to America to take down the CCP." He then read a statement confirming that more than 270 of his family members and colleagues had been arrested, that he had lost billions, and that he would appeal. "I thank you," he told the court, "for everything you have done in this proceeding."
After the sentencing, Guo was not returned to his regular cell immediately. Under federal procedure for sentences exceeding ten years, he was placed on suicide watch: stripped, placed in a glass-walled cell the size of a bathroom with no privacy, no clothing, and minimal toilet paper — a detail Chen noted with particular bitterness given his ongoing gastrointestinal distress. He was moved twice during the night — first to the wrong tower, then woken and relocated to the Eastern tower at midnight — before finally being returned to his regular cell at 9:30 a.m. on June 30th, roughly 30 and a half hours after the sentence was rendered.
Chen walked through the evidentiary record that the defense had sought to have formally reviewed at a sentencing hearing and been denied. Of 1,286 individuals who submitted letters to defense counsel, 1,182 expressly stated they had invested in one or more G-series instruments; 1,223 expressly disclaimed being victimized. Among those who disclosed investment amounts, the total came to $72 million — a figure Chen said dwarfs the combined claims of the prosecution's five material witnesses (one of the original six having withdrawn funds before any alleged fraud was completed, leaving him, in Chen's view, ineligible to be counted as a victim at all). Additionally, 108 of those 1,286 individuals had been interrogated by the CCP in connection with their association with Guo and his movement. Thirty-five reported being coerced into making statements characterizing themselves as defrauded. Seven reported being forced to file false claims directly against Guo. Twenty-eight had been arrested and jailed by the CCP. One testified in 2024. One submitted an affidavit six months before the sentencing. Chen argued these numbers — people still inside China, risking arrest to write letters of support for a man their government considers a criminal — are not the behavior of a fraud's unwitting victims. They are the behavior of a movement.
The court denied the request for an evidentiary sentencing hearing, with Judge Torres ruling that she had sufficient information to proceed. Chen's assessment was direct: "If you already decided, do you have all the evidence you need to make a case? The court is not the right place. But we have the evidence. We just need an impartial environment to present it."
Guo's message to his supporters, relayed through that post-sentencing phone call, was the one Chen found most remarkable given the circumstances. He told them there was no need for anxiety, that those who succeed never surrender to hatred or give up, and that everything that had happened was "truly arranged by heaven" to let America and the world see how much power the CCP actually holds inside the American legal system. "He was the one giving us strength in the darkness," Chen said, "even in the worst moment for him." She renewed her vow that the NFSC would not stop, framing the 30-year sentence not as a defeat but as a demonstration of exactly what they have been warning about — and a call for more, not less, outreach to the American public. "When they know the truth, they will join us," she said. "We just know we have a lot more work to do."
Tom Horne: The Supreme Court, Girls' Sports, and ESA at 111,000
Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne joined the second hour to discuss the Supreme Court's ruling upholding states' authority to ban biological males from competing in women's and girls' sports at publicly funded schools — a fight he has been waging in Arizona courts for years, largely alone.
Horne recounted the specific legal battle in Arizona: two large New York law firms filed suit challenging the state's existing ban on biological males in girls' sports, naming four defendants. The other three conceded. Horne carried the case forward alone. When he sought representation from the state Attorney General's office, it was refused. "She apparently thinks boys should be in girls' sports," he said of Attorney General Kris Mayes — a position both he and Winn characterized as disqualifying for any future reelection campaign. Horne's department funded the litigation out of its own budget, a decision he called high priority given what was at stake for Arizona's female student athletes. The Supreme Court's ruling — authored in majority part by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a longtime youth basketball coach — held that neither the Constitution nor Title IX require an overhaul of women's and girls' sports to accommodate transgender participation, while emphasizing that transgender students deserve respect and should not be vilified.
Horne was unsparing on the biological and physical reality underlying the legal fight. He cited the case of a female volleyball player who suffered brain damage after a biological male's spike hit her head with force she could not have faced from a female opponent. He noted that the chromosomal difference — males having X and Y chromosomes, females having two X chromosomes — is covered in ninth-grade biology and has not changed. "I don't care what you want to be or who you think you are," he said. "If you are born a biological male, you have certain physical attributes. You cannot then insert yourself into girl sports."
On the ESA program — Arizona's Education Savings Account school choice initiative — Horne pushed back against attack ads in his primary race alleging widespread fraudulent payments. He credited the Goldwater Institute and other independent reviewers with debunking the claim, noting that the program's error rate on payments is under 2%, which he said compares favorably to almost any other government-administered program, and that recoveries are made on identified mistakes. He placed the program's enrollment in context: when he took office in 2023, roughly 11,000 Arizona students used ESAs. As of the broadcast, the number had grown to approximately 111,000 — a tenfold increase achieved without increasing department staff. "What does it tell you?" Horne said. "It tells you that people, unfortunately, are leaving the public schools."
He connected that exodus directly to the dysfunction he first encountered in public education when he began fighting critical race theory in Tucson Unified School District in 2008, writing legislation to end what he called race-based curriculum, and seeing it later morph into DEI and social-emotional learning frameworks that he argued have consistently displaced academic instruction. He cited his own family history — Jewish parents who fled Poland as Hitler rose to power, entered Canada because they could not enter the U.S. legally, and were naturalized when Horne was four — as the context through which he views any ideology that assigns collective guilt or privilege by demographic group.
On career and technical education, Horne described a statewide initiative he launched in partnership with 40 of Arizona's largest employers, including several headquartered in Tucson. He divided the state into 11 regions, conducted a traveling road show, and brokered a direct exchange: employers would teach CTE teachers what skills their companies needed, and those teachers would deliver workforce-ready graduates. His stated goal: every student graduates either college-ready or career-ready, with no exceptions. He cited math scores rising 27% at an adopted school in a low-income neighborhood — achieved through consistent on-site support from his department — as proof that the limiting factor in student achievement is instructional quality, not demographics. "Poor kids can learn as well as rich kids if they're properly taught," he said.
Horne saved particular enthusiasm for the prospect of the federal Department of Education being eliminated under the current administration. When journalists called expecting him to defend federal education funding, he told them the first thing he would do if the Department were eliminated was throw a party. His reasoning: his own department has 600 staff who work on Arizona schools every day. The people in Washington, he said, live in an echo chamber and routinely make decisions that reflect no understanding of what is actually happening in classrooms. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, he noted, has been actively downsizing the department with an eye toward returning authority to states, which he characterized as overdue. He reminded listeners that he is available for reelection as Superintendent of Public Instruction — 24 years on a school board, multiple terms as Superintendent, and a full term as Arizona Attorney General representing a record of institutional knowledge he argued the state cannot afford to discard at this particular moment.
Juan Ciscomani: The SAVE Act, the Kids Online Safety Act, and a Race That Matters
Congressman Juan Ciscomani, representing Arizona's 6th Congressional District, joined the show in the final segment to address both his legislative work on children's online safety and the escalating reelection fight heading into November.
On the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act — which Ciscomani described using the shorthand "Kids Act" — he framed the legislation as a direct parental-rights response to a documented crisis. He cited survey data showing 44% of parents are concerned about teen mental health, with 50% of children regularly accessing tablets, 47% using smartphones, and 35% using gaming consoles as pathways to content that parents cannot easily monitor or control. The legislation, he said, puts parents back at the center of their children's digital lives by requiring stronger transparency from platforms about how algorithms work and how they target minors, mandating more accessible parental control tools, and establishing stronger safeguards around AI, chatbots, and other digital tools that interact with children. "This is one of those things that policy hasn't caught up with technology," he said, adding that the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, based in Washington, D.C., was among the bill's strongest advocates.
On the federal SAVE Act — the national version of what Alex Kolodin passed through the Arizona legislature — Ciscomani explained that the path through the House is open but the Senate's 60-vote threshold makes it nearly impossible on a standalone basis. The alternative being actively explored: including the SAVE Act's core provisions in a reconciliation bill, which would require only a simple majority in the Senate. He acknowledged that even within Republican ranks the vote count would be tight, describing a scenario in which Vice President Vance might be needed as a tiebreaker. "If it plays out that way, it'll be like down to the fourth quarter, last second of the game kind of thing," he said, calling the outcome necessary regardless of how dramatic the path to get there.
He addressed the week's flurry of Supreme Court rulings with measured candor, pushing back against any suggestion that the current court is reliably aligned with conservative outcomes. "Just look at some of the decisions that came down this week — they weren't all in what we wanted them to be," he said, noting that the appropriate response to an unfavorable ruling is to find other legislative paths to address the underlying issue, not to burn things down. "You don't see things being burned down around the country because we didn't like a decision by the Supreme Court. So that's the way our side acts."
On his reelection race, Ciscomani was pointed about his Democratic opponent, whom he identified as a former military officer. While crediting her service, he described specific positions she has taken publicly: that prostitution should be available as a livelihood for transgender individuals because, in her words, there is no other way they can make a living — a position Ciscomani called not hyperbole but her own stated words on record. He also cited her characterization of anyone who opposes biological males competing in girls' sports as "toxic and un-American" — a position the Supreme Court, by its ruling this week, has directly contradicted. "Someone like her in Congress would be dangerous to our community," Ciscomani said. He directed listeners to find both his congressional office and campaign websites by searching his name, noting that both will appear in results and serve different purposes: constituent services through the official site, campaign information through the campaign site.
Winn closed the segment by noting that Ciscomani's field staff — including a staffer named Colin and a supporter named Teresa Wright — have been working with visible intensity on the ground, and urged listeners to match that effort by ensuring their ballots are returned before the primary closes. "We need to reelect him," she said, framing the CD6 race as one of the linchpin contests in the broader fight for Arizona's direction in the next Congress.