Guests - Anthony Dunham, Jeff Rhodes, Gilda Carle, Elijah Norton, Joel Strabala, Rick Shafton
Anthony Dunham: A Judge Steps Forward and Sets the Record Straight
Anthony Dunham, Republican candidate for the LD17 State Senate seat, came on the show to do one thing: correct a false record before more ballots were returned. In the final two weeks of the primary, his opponent's campaign had circulated mailers, emails, Facebook posts, and Instagram content alleging that Dunham was unfit for office due to child abuse claims spanning 2020 to 2023. The attack had been landing. People were asking Winn about it. Ballots were already coming back.
The rebuttal came from an unlikely source: Judge Ray Carroll, the district court judge for the area where Dunham lived during the period in question, who has since retired to a justice of the peace role. Carroll reached out to Dunham directly at a speaking engagement on the Thursday before the broadcast, telling him he'd been meaning to make contact since the moment a reporter working on behalf of Dunham's opponent reached out to him months earlier. Dunham called Carroll's chambers the morning of the show. The judge reiterated his position and agreed to put it on the record. His statement: "There is nothing now legally pending or legally against Mr. Dunham and near as I can tell why he lived in this area during the time period I just mentioned and in my district, there was nothing legal or legally pending against Mr. Dunham and to say anything to the contrary would be categorically false."
Dunham walked through what actually happened. He had been briefly married to a woman who mistreated his children. The moment the abuse came to light, she was removed from the home and an order of protection was placed against her. She went through the legal process. He was never charged, never arrested, never the subject of any criminal proceeding. His children were briefly removed during the transition — the courts move slowly, he acknowledged, and it is rarely in the best interest of children — but were returned to him within months. He is a single father raising them now. "Because my name is loosely associated in those documents, and because it was my children involved in that situation, I guess they decided to take that and run with it," he said.
The judge had told the reporter the same thing months ago, before the mailer went out. That means, as Winn noted plainly, Dunham's opponent knew or should have known the claims were false before publishing them. "When you lie about your opponent — like outright, categorically lie — I think that's a disqualifier," she said. With a significant number of LD17 ballots still not yet returned as of the broadcast, Dunham urged voters who had been influenced by the mailer to reconsider. His contact number is 520-261-0523 and his campaign website is DunhamForArizona.com.
On the race itself, Dunham was direct about why he entered it. The assassination of Charlie Kirk last September was his call to action. "I believe that real reform begins at home and I believe Americans and specifically the voters of LD17 are tired of seeing the same old, same old in politics." He cited Arizona's freefall from fourth in the nation for new job growth and economic development when Katie Hobbs took office to 43rd today, and framed his three core priorities — child and school safety, community safety, and a more affordable Arizona — as the beginning of reversing that trajectory, ideally alongside a Governor Andy Biggs and a strong Republican legislative majority. He has taken no money from lobbyists, large corporations, unions, or NGOs — a fact verifiable through the Secretary of State's website. His Democratic opponent in the general, Edgar Soto, runs uncontested in his own primary and will face whoever emerges from the Republican contest on July 21st.
Jeff Rhodes: The Write-In Mechanics and the Case for Supervisory District 5
Jeff Rhodes, the Republican write-in candidate for Pima County Board of Supervisors District 5, joined the show to update listeners on the mechanics and momentum of his campaign. The basic premise bears repeating: his name will not be pre-printed anywhere on any ballot. To vote for him, a voter with a Republican primary ballot must find the Board of Supervisors District 5 section — at the very bottom, below the last fold — fill in the bubble, and hand-write his name. Both steps are required. The name must be spelled correctly: J-E-F-F R-H-O-D-E-S. An unfilled bubble or a misspelled name means the vote doesn't count.
Why the write-in path? Rhodes and Winn explained the timing: Adelita Grijalva resigned the seat to run for Congress. The supervisors appointed Andrés Cano — C-A-N-O — as her replacement. Because Cano was appointed rather than elected, the seat is subject to a special election this November. The window to qualify for that special election as a petition candidate had already closed before Rhodes got fully organized, leaving the write-in route as the only path onto the November general election ballot. If he secures enough write-in votes in the primary — roughly 150 is the threshold — he qualifies as the Republican nominee and his name will be printed on the November ballot.
Rhodes made the structural case for why one more Republican on the five-member board matters even without changing the majority. Currently, Supervisor Steve Christie cannot get a second on any motion he makes. Nothing goes to a vote. The Democrat majority can block, spend, and act without ever going on record. A second Republican changes that: every motion gets a second, every action gets a recorded vote, and every tax increase or spending decision becomes publicly attributable. "We want to get them at least voting on record," Rhodes said. "That's the first step."
He connected the board's fiscal dysfunction to the county's history of spending windfall money — COVID relief, ARPA funds, immigration-related federal pass-throughs — as though it were permanent revenue. "They increased staffing, but it wasn't sustainable." And then there's the immigration expenditure he cited: Pima County, with roughly a million residents, assisted an estimated 517,000 illegal immigrants with housing, food, and transportation to their chosen destinations — driving up housing costs in a county where young people already can't afford to live. "Everything they're doing has long-term effects they're not taking into account," he said. "What they're taking into account is the short-term effect of how it makes them look — like they look compassionate — but they're not being compassionate."
The proposed property tax rate increase now heading to November's ballot is a case study in the same logic: home values were already rising, generating more tax revenue automatically. The board wanted to raise the rate on top of that increase, double-dipping from homeowners even as spending remained untethered from structural revenue. Rhodes was unambiguous: "There's no way I would have a tax increase." Voters in Supervisor District 5 who hold a Republican primary ballot — covering precincts in LD16, LD18, LD20, LD23, and a portion of LD17 — should check their registration, confirm their district, and write in Jeff Rhodes. His website is RhodesForDistrict5.com — R-H-O-D-E-S-For-District-5.com — and he is on Facebook at RhodesForDistrict5.
Dr. Gilda Carle: Radicalized Young Women, the Taylor Swift Effect, and What's Actually at Stake
Dr. Gilda Carle, author of Real Men Don't Go Woke and a psychologist and communication expert, joined the show to focus on what she described as the deliberate radicalization of young women and the cultural moment that may, improbably, be offering a corrective.
Her opening argument centered on the Supreme Court's transgender sports ruling. Three of the dissenting justices — Sotomayor, Jackson, and Kagan — voted, in Carle's framing, against women's physical safety by finding no constitutional bar to biological males competing against girls and women in publicly funded athletics. She found that alignment notable and alarming: "Women hating women is out there, and these are supposedly our leaders." She was not ambivalent about where she stands. "In my world, there are two genders: men and women. Men playing with men, women playing with women." The court case should never have needed to happen, she said, but given that it did, she was grateful for the outcome — female athletes were being physically injured, and there is no mother in the country who would knowingly put her daughter in a competition against a biological male with greater bone density, muscle mass, and physical reach.
Her broader argument about young women was more troubling than the sports ruling alone. She described 18-to-21-year-old women as statistically the most mentally affected demographic in the country — radicalized by educational systems, social media, and a cultural environment that has, she argued, deliberately driven a wedge between men and women. The downstream effects are measurable: men opting out of dating, refusing to marry, declining to work toward a future that a hostile legal and social environment makes feel futile. An Uber driver told her he didn't want to work hard and have a future partner "take half his stuff." Men are protecting themselves, she said, because they have been systematically beaten up, and nobody wins from that dynamic — not women, not children, not the culture. "We cannot continue going along as we have been going and thinking that women can just sustain themselves on their own as their own sex without having men around."
She connected the ideological campaign against family formation to a broader deliberate project — including fentanyl, the abortion industry, and the gender-ideology curriculum — to suppress the next generation. "There is a concerted effort so that we don't have a next generation."
Then came Taylor Swift — an unexpected cultural inflection point that Carle, to her own admitted surprise, found genuinely encouraging. Swift built an enormous following among young women by narrating the experience of being hurt by men. Her audience bonded around that narrative for years. And then Swift did something the "woke witches" on the left have not forgiven: she fell in love with a man, married him, and wrote a lyric expressing that she wanted children who look like him. The backlash — which Carle noted included the term "trad wife" being deployed as a slur — is precisely the proof of concept. Young women who worship Swift as a style icon are now watching their idol choose exactly the life the radicalized left spent years telling them was oppressive. "She is their leader," Carle said, "and there's no getting away from that." She expressed genuine hope that Swift's example would do what no political argument has managed: make traditional commitment aspirational again for the cohort that needs it most. "I pray, please God, hear us."
She closed by noting that her own experience of going to meetings confirms the argument empirically: women-only gatherings are echo chambers; mixed gatherings with men in the room produce better thinking, more accountability, and real growth. "I want that yin and yang because that's how we all grow."
Elijah Norton: Debate Results, Doges-Style Audits, and the Race That Should Not Have Been a Primary
Elijah Norton, candidate for Arizona State Treasurer, called in from the road after an evening with the Cochise County Republican Committee in Sierra Vista to continue making his closing argument to primary voters. The core of his case has not changed: finance experience is not optional for the office, and the race on July 21st is effectively a hiring decision that will determine who goes up against a Democrat in November for control of a $32 billion treasury.
On debate performance, Norton cited two straw polls conducted at the close of head-to-head debates with his primary opponent. In the first, he won 25 to 5. In the second, 68 to 4. He attributed his opponent's inability to gain traction to a message that amounts to: the treasurer should be a passive custodian, not an active steward. "She doesn't believe in doing a Doge-style audit," he said, contrasting that position with his own commitment to working with the legislature and the auditor general to conduct a historical Doge-style audit of the state's finances from the ground up — monitoring daily transactions in and out of the treasury, alerting proper authorities to fraud, and using the office's bully pulpit to expose waste and abuse in real time. He pointed to the Santa Cruz County treasurer who embezzled over $30 million over two decades without detection as the precise kind of failure a more vigilant approach would catch.
He described his opponent's professional background candidly: a Jeb Bush-era Republican with a seat on the State Board of Education, no finance experience, and a plan to deflect investment responsibilities to unelected bureaucrats. "She's admitted on camera multiple times she's got no finance or investment experience." By contrast, Norton manages over $100 million in claims reserves under conservative investment guidelines through his own business, which generates roughly half a billion dollars in annual revenue.
The broader stakes he outlined: Arizona has not had a Democrat treasurer since 1967. A Democrat controlling $32 billion is, in his telling, simply not an outcome the state can absorb at this moment — particularly when the goal is to restore Arizona's standing as a top-five state for business and job growth, a position it held when Hobbs took office before sliding to 43rd or 45th depending on the metric. "If we can do all those things — Republican governor, Republican attorney general, keep the Republican treasurer — I think it results in our state turning things around and we can go back to joining Texas and Florida as some of the highest-growth states in the country."
Joel Strabala: Pandora's Box, Voter Roll Problems, and One More Deadline Push
Joel Strabala, LD17 chairman and Election Integrity Commission member, rejoined the show mid-broadcast after Winn opened an ad hoc listener hotline and started receiving texts about a cascade of election irregularities. The ballot receipt crisis, the wrong-party ballot sent to an independent who requested a Republican ballot, reports of voters being told they cannot bring a person or a purse into a polling place — all of it was hitting at once.
Strabala confirmed the wrong-ballot case: an independent voter who specifically requested a Republican ballot was mailed a Democrat ballot. She called the recorder's office and got the runaround. Strabala got her in touch with elections experts, who directed her to go to an early voting site in person, ask to have the incorrect ballot spoiled, and vote with the correct ballot on-site. She went and voted. That process — surrender the wrong ballot, vote in person — is the correct fix for anyone in the same situation.
On missing ballots, Strabala offered his working theory: the voter roll purge conducted earlier in the year may have inadvertently removed active voters from the Active Early Voting List without removing them from general voter registration, meaning they're still registered Republicans but no longer flagged to receive mail ballots automatically. Those voters would have no reason to suspect anything was wrong until the ballot simply didn't arrive. His advice: go to recorder.pima.gov immediately, check your voter dashboard, verify party registration and AEVL status, and act today if anything is wrong. Email hq@pimagop.org with documentation of any anomalies so they can be aggregated and brought before the Board of Supervisors as a formal record rather than dismissed as anecdote.
He reiterated all key deadlines: the absolute last day to request a mail ballot is Friday, July 10th. The recommended last day to mail your ballot back is Wednesday, July 15th, to ensure arrival by the 7 p.m. July 21st cutoff. If you don't have a ballot in hand by Friday, you will need to vote in person. Early voting sites are open now; a new location has opened at the Oro Valley Library. LD17 Republicans have an in-person meeting Saturday, July 11th: check-in at 8:30 a.m., meeting at 9 a.m. at Faith Community Church.
Rick Shafton: The Plattner Problem, the Socialist Sweep, and What Republicans Must Do
Rick Shafton, political consultant and longtime Winn collaborator, joined the show's final segment from the East Coast to provide national political context for the races converging in Arizona's final two primary weeks.
The immediate subject was Maine's Democratic Senate primary and the unfolding Graham Plattner controversy — multiple women have now publicly accused Plattner of sexual assault, with one giving a detailed televised account that drew even Senator Ruben Gallego's endorsement withdrawal. But Shafton's analytical take was less about the moral dimension than the political mechanics. The first rape allegation, made by a Republican, drew almost no party response. Only when a Democrat made the second allegation did the party machinery begin to stir. "The first one comes forward — nobody believed her. If it's like somebody from Kavanaugh, right, then it's like, of course, everything she said." The selective application of "believe all women" is, Shafton argued, neither a principled commitment nor a serious vulnerability — it's a weapon deployed when convenient and shelved when not. Plattner's statement that he would only exit the race if replaced by someone who shares his values "100%" Winn characterized as revealing: "I don't know when you don't have any values, how you would replace yourself with someone with no values."
Shafton's strategic advice to Arizona Republicans was broader and more forward-looking. His core argument: every Democrat running in Arizona in November, however moderate their presentation, is functionally an agent of the national party's socialist wing because they will vote with the machine when it counts. Dan Goldman had more money than any candidate in the field and lost to a Marxist challenger. Adriano Espaillat, head of the Hispanic caucus, the first Dominican-American elected to Congress, lost in a primary to a further-left opponent. "The moderate Democrat who says they're not like those people — they're lying," Shafton said. "They're going to do whatever they're told."
His tactical recommendation for Republican campaigns: take whatever the far left's most radical positions are — sex change operations for minors, open borders, defunding police — and simply attribute them to the Democratic opponent directly. Force three possible responses: silence (an admission of guilt), enthusiastic agreement (alienating to swing voters), or disavowal (which triggers the socialist base to destroy the candidate from the left, as happened to figures like state Senator Scott Wiener in San Francisco when he wasn't considered sufficiently extreme). There is no clean escape. "When they get up and say, I don't believe that 10-year-olds have a right to have sex change operations, the crazies in the Democratic party are like: why not? Are you for trans rights?"
He extended the argument locally with a point about grassroots organizing that he said Republicans perpetually underestimate. In the reddest areas of the country, progressive activists embed themselves in local community groups — homeowners associations, civic organizations, library boards — and gradually shift their agendas toward sustainability frameworks, walkability indexes, and climate-adjacent messaging. "Our people — we don't have time to go to these meetings once a month," Shafton said. "So they take them over." The counter is not optional: Republicans who aren't physically present at local governance structures are, by default, ceding them. The past two weeks of Arizona primary season, Shafton noted, are the exact period when candidates need to be at peak intensity — the period when the last persuadable voters are making their decisions, when bad news breaks with maximum damage, and when turnout operations determine whether all the preceding work amounts to anything.