Guests - Ava Chen, George Khalaf, Jenny Clark
Watch China Watch on YouTube
Kathleen Winn's Wednesday paired the sweeping and the local: an hour on what her China Watch guest calls a decade-long foreign campaign against American elections, followed by a victory lap on a school-choice fight that ended the day before at the Arizona Supreme Court. The thread between them was the one Winn returns to every show — that the same vigilance is required whether the threat comes from Beijing or from a ballot measure, and that turnout is the answer to both. The morning also carried breaking news of a deadly shooting that underscored her closing argument about crime in Pima County.
Ava Chen: The Case That Foreign Interference Is Systematic
Ava Chen of the New Federal State of China opened the show arguing that the Chinese Communist Party will try to influence the coming midterms, and that the evidence is no longer a matter of speculation. She pointed to a presentation by Garland Favorito, co-founder of Voters Organized for Trusted Election Results in Georgia, broadcast two days earlier on Real America's Voice, which she said walked through recently declassified U.S. intelligence assessments in the agencies' own words — texts, emails, and internal reports drawn from across the 18-agency intelligence community. "This is not some made up thing," she said. "This is a fact." Her framing was that Americans now have "the receipts," and that the task is to become a megaphone, because "the media is not your friend."
Chen laid out the assessment in three stages as Favorito presented it. The first is influence — the long preparation before an election, in which she said the CCP studies a nation's voting history to identify Trump-supporting states, maps their economic pressure points, and cultivates what the reports call agents of influence: think-tank officials, academics, former government employees, and business figures drawn in through travel, speaking fees, and economic incentives until they are, in the intelligence community's quoted phrase, "hooked on China." The second stage is direct action on the vote itself. The third, which she said any patriotic American would find a betrayal, is a cover-up she attributed to elements within the country's own intelligence agencies. She stressed the corruption is bipartisan — "in some cases, we think it may be all Democrats, but it's not; there's actually been Republicans involved" — a point Winn echoed from Arizona's and Georgia's shared history of contested elections.
The goal, in Chen's telling, was singular: to mobilize domestic and foreign opponents of President Trump and force his resignation, tying the 2018 midterms, the Russia investigation, and the impeachment into a single coordinated environment. She connected it to the show's recurring subject, arguing COVID-19 was timed to derail the 2020 election. Chen described what she called the mature form of "unrestricted warfare" — a stage at which the CCP no longer needs to control a few individuals like the Bidens, but has reshaped the information environment itself so that people, acting on their own self-interest, fear, and prejudice, produce the outcomes Beijing wants. "The CCP does not have to defeat America from outside," she said. "It only has to make the society fight itself." She cited Stephen Bannon's invocation that morning of Cicero — that a nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious, but cannot survive treason from within.
Chen extended the argument to commercial leverage, saying Beijing targeted business leaders who had donated to Trump because so many hold interests in China, and pointed to Elon Musk's recent public encouragement for Americans to visit China — contrary to State Department warnings — as an example of a figure whose Shanghai manufacturing presence gives the CCP a pressure point. She described paid journalists, financed social unrest, cyber intrusions targeting political figures' personal emails, and the exploitation of every divisive issue — race, gun control, women's rights, LGBT questions — as instruments to keep Americans fighting one another. She also described the hacking of a voter database of more than 200 million registrations, which she said allows the alteration of registration information and the obtaining of absentee ballots. Winn's throughline was that the interference was perpetrated with the help of Americans and American systems, and that the country's failure to prosecute is itself the vulnerability. Both framed the fight as shared between the American and Chinese people against what they called one evil force, and Chen closed with the reminder that Miles Guo, the movement's founder, mapped all of this years ago and now sits in a federal prison in New York. The through-line for voters, Winn said, is simple: "You fight back by voting."
George Khalaf: A School-Choice Victory, and the Fight That Remains
George Khalaf — who helps run the Arizona Loves ESAs PAC and is a Republican candidate for the state House in LD3 — joined to mark the previous day's ruling. The Arizona Supreme Court declined to take up the appeal, letting stand a lower-court ruling that left Proposition 212, the union-backed measure to roll back Arizona's Empowerment Scholarship Account program, off the November ballot. Khalaf called it a day to celebrate for the tens of thousands of families whose ESAs are preserved, and credited the Goldwater Institute, the Arizona Free Enterprise Club, and lead plaintiff Jenny Clark.
Khalaf stressed that the win was not a technicality. Of roughly 415,000 signatures submitted, he said, the effort ended with about 243,000 valid — more than 10,000 short — after the disqualification of some 30,000 gathered by felons ineligible to circulate petitions (including, he and Winn noted, a person with a record of a crime against children), roughly 30,000 duplicates, and additional signatures from people not registered to vote. He quoted Goldwater Institute president Victor Riches: despite spending an unprecedented $7 million to deceive voters, the unions could not convince even a small fraction of Arizonans to sign, because the ESA program is working. Khalaf named Governor Katie Hobbs, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, and Attorney General Kris Mayes as officials who wanted the measure on the ballot, and argued that protecting ESAs means not returning them to office.
Turning to his own race, Khalaf said he and appointed Representative Cody Rhyme both advanced from the LD3 primary into a general election in a district with a 29 percent Republican registration advantage — meaning his job, he said, is to help the statewide ticket. He made an extended case for voting the full ballot: with two effective parties whose platforms are known, a voter dissatisfied with a particular Republican should examine the Democrat's record and ask whether they align with a single position on it. He argued the Democratic Party is making that calculation easier by running as far left as it can, with Democratic Socialists of America members now winning legislative endorsements. He named the LD17 race — Republicans John Winchester and Rachel Keshel against incumbent Kevin Volk — as one of six swing districts that will determine control of the legislature, and urged voters to fill both House bubbles rather than split their ticket. Even a voter who doubts Volk is a socialist, Khalaf argued, should recognize he would vote to empower progressive leadership. He cited a statistic that fentanyl overdoses are down in 48 of 50 states while Arizona is among the two still rising, tying it to what he called failed border and enforcement policies. His closing appeal was against retreat: "You feel disaffected, you feel angry, you feel demotivated — don't retreat. Lean in." His site is georgekhalaf.com.
Breaking News: A Deadly Shooting in Star Valley
Midway through the show, producer Matt Neely relayed breaking news from KOLD. A Tucson Police Department recruit was dead and a Pima County Sheriff's Department corrections officer was recovering after a shooting early that morning, around 6 a.m., in the Star Valley area south of Valencia and east of Valhalla, near South Enchanted Springs Drive. Sheriff Chris Nanos confirmed that a 23-year-old male TPD recruit died at the scene and a 23-year-old PCSD corrections officer suffered a gunshot wound and was in stable condition at a local hospital. No suspect had been arrested or identified, and TPD asked anyone with information to call 911. Winn said the show would share more the next day and offered prayers for the family, noting again her recurring theme that whatever is happening across the country tends to be magnified in Pima County.
Jenny Clark: 'We Are the Model'
Jenny Clark — founder of Love Your School and chairwoman of the Arizona Loves ESAs PAC — joined to take what Winn called a well-earned victory lap. Clark described an army of roughly 4,500 families who signed up for the "decline to sign" effort her organization launched in January, the moment the teachers unions filed the initiative. Volunteers recorded signature gatherers, she said, some of them convicted felons collecting the personal information of the people they solicited, and some caught claiming to work for the Secretary of State's office. The effort fell short on signatures, the duplicates were rejected, and the Supreme Court declined the appeal. Clark, whose funding she attributed entirely to the National Education Association on the union side, framed the lesson as vigilance against out-of-state special interests buying their way onto Arizona's ballot.
Clark's larger message was about the program itself, which she called the gold standard nationally. Arizona's ESA is the most flexible in the country, she said — usable for private schools, micro-schools, home education, and everything in between — and its funding follows the student, with awards for children with disabilities set as a percentage of what the school would have received, so that a student with autism might receive around $34,000 a year to build out tutoring, therapy, or a specialty school. Her organization, she said, has expanded to two other states and will launch in five more by December, driven by demand from families who, in many states, lack the access Arizona provides. Her message to legislators was to resist calls for "guardrails" and added restrictions: "You will never make these people happy. What we need to do right now is protect the program we have."
The conversation turned personal and economic. Clark, who has three children diagnosed with dyslexia that she said her district school could not adequately serve, described the reading crisis as a national-security concern, citing poor national scores and the difficulty of catching a child up who isn't reading proficiently by third grade. Winn framed the ESA program as an economic engine as well, with millions of dollars flowing to new private schools, tutors, therapists, and service providers launching businesses around it. Both tied school choice to parental control — a value Winn said crystallized for many families during COVID — and to Arizona's free-market identity. Clark credited former Governor Doug Ducey with building the model, and her organization is now raising $1 million to double the number of students on ESAs and spread awareness. Her site is loveyourschool.org.
Winn closed the show as she had framed it — a Wildcat taking a victory lap, grateful for a win, and already turned toward the next fight. The ballots, she reminded listeners, arrive in under 50 days.