Guests - Ava Chen, Joel Strabala, Dave Smith
Kathleen Winn's argument for the week was that the same force shows up in three places — the manipulation of American media, the mechanics of a Pima County ballot, and the intellectual history of a political movement — and that all three trace back to a hostility toward the American system itself. Her Wednesday show ran that thread through China Watch Wednesday with Ava Chen, the nuts and bolts of the general election with Joel Strabala, and a long conversation on socialism with former Pima County Republican chair Dave Smith.
Ava Chen: The CCP, the Media, and the Long Game
Ava Chen of the New Federal State of China opened the show arguing that the deep-state actors Americans keep hearing about and the Chinese Communist Party are not separate problems. "CCP is in the deep state," she said, invoking movement founder Miles Guo's warning that the Party sits behind a chain of American disasters. She pointed to John Solomon's Just the News, which she said has been publishing a steady stream of declassified documents — including a report that day identifying 14 intelligence officers she said were involved in providing cover on the Biden-Ukraine corruption question while working to undermine Donald Trump. Follow the leads far enough, she argued, and "you will see the connection with the CCP."
Chen's central claim was about information control. Drawing again on Guo's framework, she said the most heavily penetrated American institution is the intelligence community, followed by media, then Wall Street, then the justice system. She walked through how she believes media consolidation enables it: most outlets, however independent their newsrooms appear, subscribe to a handful of wire services, and control of the upstream sources shapes what flows downstream. As an example she cited the coordinated October 2017 wave of Associated Press–sourced coverage discrediting Guo, which she said originated from CCP officials and a Chinese police investigation — her illustration of how a narrative can be distributed across dozens of outlets on a single day. The lesson she drew for listeners was to build "the muscle" to separate fact from propaganda and to ask, of any narrative, who benefits.
She tied it to the rise of socialism in American politics, noting that socialism is explicitly embedded in the Chinese Communist Party's constitution — revised under Xi Jinping at the 20th Party Congress in October 2022 to define the Party as the leadership core for "socialism with Chinese characteristics" — and tracing the ideology's lineage through Marx and Lenin. She praised Kelly Loving's reframing of the Democratic Socialists as "destructive socialism," and argued that what the United States is experiencing amounts to a cultural revolution echoing China's own, visible in movements from DEI to campus radicalism. The Party's method, she said, runs on cultivating resentment and hatred — "everything Satan wants you to do" — and on severing people from faith and family, because a population disconnected from God and from one another is easier to control. Her prescription was spiritual as much as political: that Americans anchored in faith are "fearless," and that the country's founding on belief is precisely what the CCP wants to extinguish.
On current events, Chen said intelligence she'd seen indicated Iran's IRGC had planned to shoot down Air Force One using shoulder-fired missiles, and alleged the CCP had secretly supplied Iran with nearly 20,000 such missiles — an effort she framed as part of a broader campaign to remove a president the Party views as a threat. She closed with fresh intel she said pointed to insecurity inside the regimes themselves: a newly formed 18,000-strong special security force jointly protecting Xi Jinping and North Korea's Kim Jong-un, co-led by Xi's younger brother and Kim's sister and positioned near the Changbai Mountain border — a sign, she argued, that the dictators feel vulnerable, and therefore an opening. "If you really wanted to take down the CCP, you really need to rely on the Chinese people," she said. Winn's framing throughout was that the greatest threat to the United States is not Iran but "those that seek to destroy us," and that understanding the source is the first step toward "a prescription" to heal what is broken.
Joel Strabala: Check Your Registration, and Sign Up to Work
Joel Strabala — LD17 chair and a member of the Pima County Election Integrity Commission — returned with the practical machinery of the November election, and one instruction above all: check your voter registration now. Voters can do it at recorder.pima.gov, he said, clicking the voter-registration dashboard on the homepage and entering a name plus the last four of a Social Security number or driver's license, which also lets them confirm or join the active early voting list — a step that must be completed by October 5th.
The urgency, Strabala explained, is a pattern of registrations changing without voters' knowledge. Reports indicate that an interaction with the Motor Vehicle Division, where a form wasn't completed fully, can inadvertently alter party affiliation. "It's not just anecdotal," he said. Winn pressed him on the roughly 8,900 ballots that go undeliverable every election and return to sender; Strabala said his understanding is that the problem will recur, because the rolls aren't being cleaned quickly enough and undeliverable ballots keep going to the same addresses until they've been rejected four times. Both discussed a fix floated by several precinct committeemen — that the party obtain the list of undeliverable addresses and verify, in person and through residency databases, whether those voters still live there — along with the perennial question of homeless registrations mailed to the recorder's office rather than a physical address.
On staffing, Strabala said the general election will need observers, poll workers, marshals, and processing staff, many of them paid: $400 for a marshal or inspector on Election Day, $300 for a judge or clerk, and $17 to $20 an hour for three to six weeks of ballot processing or signature verification. He directed job-seekers to the recorder's site (under "About Us," then job openings, currently IT support roles) and the elections department at pima.gov/elections (scroll to "get involved, be a poll worker"), noting the department works hard to balance party affiliation among workers — but that Republican volunteers remain in short supply. His closing three-part message: vote early to reduce the odds the party has to call or knock, check your registration, and get smart on the candidates and ballot measures, which the party will support with "golden ticket" or "copper ticket" voter guides — recommendations drawn from conservative principles and vetted down to the school-board level. He flagged school-board races and bond overrides as consequential, along with the District 5 supervisor special election, where he echoed Winn's line: "Give Steve Christy a friend."
Dave Smith: 'There Is No Difference' Between Socialism and Communism
Dave Smith — the former Pima County Republican chair whose segment with Winn is a recurring feature — joined, newly the owner of a lime-green Jeep, to talk about the socialist movement's near-miss in a Wisconsin race and what he sees as the ideology beneath it. He read the Wisconsin result, where a more moderate Democrat narrowly edged a socialist-aligned candidate, as a sign the movement is concentrated in university towns, and noted the irony of the left now discovering "irregularities" in its own primary after years of what he called election denial dating to 2016.
Smith's core argument was definitional and delivered with force: the distinction between "democratic socialism" and communism is a fiction. "Marx himself said socialism is communism, period," he said. "There is no difference. Full stop." He traced the academic capture of criminology as a parallel — the shift from treating crime as a punishable choice to a decarceration model — and argued the same intellectual current has hollowed out civic education, leaving a generation that doesn't understand why past wars were fought or why membership in subversive movements was once a disqualifier for military and government service. "Now these people consider it a mark of achievement," he said. "It's a destruction of your liberties."
His warnings drew on his own reading and law-enforcement background. He cited Orwell — a socialist who broke with communism after being shot fighting in Spain and nearly killed by Stalinists — as one of many authors who tried to warn the West, and argued utopian projects fail because "human beings don't do well in utopian paradises. We flourish in freedom." Invoking a line he attributed to Barry Goldwater, Smith warned that the silent majority "can out-shout and out-shoot the Marxists," and cautioned that a left "dancing on the edge" of its own revolution risks triggering a rebellion in response — which he suspects is why figures like Bernie Sanders have begun to temper their message. He argued the constitutional oath sworn by officials, soldiers, and police is "that hard wall between slavery and freedom," and pointed to Arizona statute barring a party from advocating the government's overthrow, faulting Attorney General Kris Mayes for not enforcing it.
The conversation turned personal and political by turns. Smith said his youngest daughter suffered severe effects he attributed to vaccine mandates while living in Chicago, where he said she couldn't enter a restaurant or leave her building without a vaccine passport — "that's not freedom, that is slavery." He and Winn revisited COVID as, in their telling, a pursuit of power rather than science, and criticized the media as propagandists who won't credit an improving economy. On the electoral outlook, Smith predicted Susan Collins holds her Maine seat and argued the national Democratic Party has become something he no longer recognizes as "an American party," while noting that disaffected Democrats are increasingly open to Republican candidates. Winn returned to Pima County's own opportunity — a strong primary turnout that surprised the state, critical LD17 races for both chambers, and the discipline of voting the whole ticket. Both noted the Board of Supervisors had voted 5-0 the night before to table the $120,000 education-council item that Jay Tolkoff had flagged the day before. "The revolution in America has always been the vote," Smith said. "Too big to rig."
Winn closed the show on the stakes she returns to daily: an opportunity, on the nation's 250th anniversary, to prove Arizona is a red state rather than a purple one — but only if registered Republicans actually vote. "The only person you can be responsible for is you," she said. "Don't say that it went down on your watch. I'm holding you accountable."