Guests - Chad Heinrich, Betsy Smith, Scott Schara
Small Business Optimism, National Police Week, and the Programming That Killed Grace
Thursday on Winn Tucson covered the full spectrum — from the practical economics of small business owners watching gas prices tick up, to the candlelight vigil that lit up Washington the night before in honor of 363 officers whose names were just added to the wall, to a father's patient, meticulous excavation of how an entire medical culture was built, over a century, to do exactly what it did to his daughter.
Chad Heinrich: Small Business Optimism Is Below Average but Stable — and What That Means for Arizona
Chad Heinrich is the Arizona state director for NFIB — the National Federation of Independent Business — the leading advocacy organization representing small independent businesses in the United States. Based in Nashville with state directors in every capital and a team in Washington, the organization represents thousands of Arizona business owners who collectively employ roughly one million Arizonans. He joined with a fresh data release from the prior 24 hours.
The Optimism Index: Below Average, But Not Sinking
The NFIB Small Business Optimism Index rose 0.1 points in April to 95.9 — still below its 52-year historical average, but stable. For small business owners, this number is not an abstraction. It reflects the mood of people who feel gas price increases the same day they happen, who pull back on hiring when they see costs climbing, and who feel every piece of legislation that adds or removes a cost from their operations.
"Our members respond frankly immediately to conditions on the ground," Heinrich said. "If gas prices are going up, that's impacting their bottom line today."
The Iran situation's impact on oil prices is one of the real-time pressures small business owners are watching. The budget standoff in the Arizona legislature is another — not just because of what the final budget will contain, but because uncertainty itself costs businesses money.
The Conformity Fight: What's at Stake and Why Hobbs Is the Obstacle
The primary pending issue in Arizona's budget negotiations — and the one with the most direct impact on small business owners — is tax conformity: the requirement that Arizona's state income tax align its starting point with federal adjusted gross income.
Arizona's income tax is unusually simple in design. Because it starts from a single federal number, any change in federal tax law automatically creates a question about whether Arizona's calculation changes too. When Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill — making permanent provisions including deductions for tips, overtime, and business expensing — Arizona needed to conform to avoid creating a gap between what taxpayers filed on their federal returns and what they owe the state.
"Most folks understand that Arizona has a state income tax, and the reason it's simple is we base the starting point on one line: the federal adjusted gross income on your federal return," Heinrich explained. "So the debate came when federal law changes, because that changes the number you put onto your Arizona form."
The Arizona legislature passed House Bill 2785, which would have fully conformed state law to H.R. 1, including provisions for deductions on tips, overtime, senior taxpayer benefits, and business expensing. Governor Hobbs vetoed it. She also vetoed the prior Republican tax conformity package called the Middle Class Tax Cuts package.
The stakes are now immediate. The Department of Revenue has already issued 2025 tax forms assuming full federal conformity. If conformity doesn't pass, taxpayers who have already filed — and some who have already received refunds — could find themselves owing money on a prior year's return.
"To the extent that 2025 is already in the books is really the thrust behind that point," Heinrich said. "If we don't conform with provisions, whoever is impacted by those will probably owe taxes. And it's not a good thing, especially when you're talking about a prior year."
Heinrich confirmed there is movement behind the scenes in budget negotiations — policymakers are asking questions, something is being sought. He is confident a balanced budget will be signed by July 1st. He won't be making vacation plans before then, but the Fourth of July is after that, which means Arizona can celebrate the 250th anniversary without the legislature getting in the way.
Workforce: Eight Years, and It's Still the Top Issue
One of the more striking metrics in the release: 46 percent of small business owners reported having few or no qualified applicants for positions they were trying to fill — up one percent from the prior month. Heinrich has represented NFIB for eight years. Workforce is the chronic, persistent, number-one-or-number-two issue across all of those years.
"We compete against the big businesses for employees, and we have fewer tools in our toolbox to actually stand side by side with a large business and provide the benefits packages and the pay," he said. "But the upside to working for a small business is the owner knows you, knows your family, knows where your children go to school. There's a personal touch you just can't get working for a large corporation."
He also highlighted the metric he viewed as genuinely optimistic: 13 percent of owners plan to create new jobs in the next three months — up a percentage point. For Heinrich, that number captures something fundamental about how small business owners think.
"They're almost always looking past and around the next corner. They're a hopeful people. We're always looking to grow our business, to be successful."
The large-business investment surge being driven by the One Big Beautiful Bill's permanent tax provisions matters directly for small businesses, he emphasized. Large businesses cannot operate without the ecosystem of small businesses that support them.
"When you see a large business locate in your community, think of all the small businesses that have to support the operations of that large business. Those are indirect jobs. And that's why the federal law was very key to setting us up for growth and success."
To access the Arizona-specific NFIB data, press releases, and issue positions, visit nfib.com/az.
Betsy Brantner Smith: National Police Week, 363 Names on the Wall, Zero Democrats at the Vigil
Betsy Brantner Smith — National Police Association spokeswoman, 29-year law enforcement veteran — was calling from the road. She and Dave Smith were somewhere in the middle of Kansas, heading to Iowa to meet their grandchildren for the pre-Memorial Day weekend. From Lawrence, Kansas, she delivered a Police Week report that every American should hear.
The Candlelight Vigil and the Names That Were Added
The previous night, the candlelight vigil at the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington, D.C., added 363 names to the wall. The process is cumulative — names from the previous year, recently confirmed line-of-duty deaths, and officers who were injured in the line of duty and passed away months or years later from those injuries.
"About 80,000 police officers each year are assaulted in this country," Brantner Smith said, "and about 30 percent of those injuries result in some sort of permanent damage to that law enforcement officer."
The wall currently carries approximately 25,000 names. It is running out of room. The wall will have to be extended.
Her personal tribute: a retired federal law enforcement officer and doctor, Jean Kanakogi, who was one of the readers of the names at the vigil. Their mutual friend Randy Sutton was there representing the Wounded Blue. And almost on cue — as it apparently happens almost every year — when all the candles were lit, it started to rain.
"Everybody always says it's just the sky opening up and weeping for every single one of those officers and their family members."
Locally, one of the names honored was Tucson PD's canine Raven — who died in service in July 2025. Raven's handler was present at the Monday canine service that opens National Police Week.
Tomorrow — Friday, Peace Officer Memorial Day — anyone with a flag should fly it at half staff in honor of those who gave their lives in service.
The Statistic That Should Be National News
By mid-May, approximately 115 police officers have been shot in the line of duty in the United States this year. Line-of-duty deaths are currently down 67 percent. That improvement, Brantner Smith was careful to note, is largely attributable to two factors: dramatically improved body armor (the same type that stopped a shotgun blast at the White House Correspondents' Dinner) and the quality of trauma care police officers now receive.
But attacks on officers are up roughly 150 percent from 2019.
"These officers aren't dying at the rate that they were, but they are sacrificing with injuries," she said. "Don't believe the rhetoric of people like the mayor of Miami talking about more social workers and fewer police officers, because cops are out there literally taking a bullet for the American public."
Zero Democrats at the Candlelight Vigil
There was not a single Democratic member of Congress at the candlelight vigil Wednesday night.
"It just upsets me to have to say that," Brantner Smith said. "But it isn't a surprise."
The connection she drew was direct: if your current political brand is built on attacking ICE, attacking Border Patrol, and attacking law enforcement broadly, you cannot show up at a memorial honoring the people whose lives your rhetoric has helped put at risk. You would be recognized. You would be photographed. The contradiction would be documented.
The local representative — Adelita Grajales — is, in Brantner Smith's assessment, more concerned with people in detention centers than with the officers protecting the community.
The Nanos Referral, the Recall, and Jen Allen's Racism
On the Pima County Board of Supervisors' decision to refer Sheriff Chris Nanos's perjury to the Arizona Attorney General: Brantner Smith expressed zero faith that Attorney General Chris Mays will do the right thing, but believed the referral was legally the correct path. With Mays's record of filing 41 lawsuits against the Trump administration rather than enforcing Arizona law, skepticism is the rational starting point.
The instruction to listeners: continue supporting the recall. Petition signature collection is ongoing. Anyone who hasn't signed can visit the Pima GOP office or find signing locations through Daniel Gutierrez's social media.
On Jen Allen invoking "white fragility" — a term from a 2018 book by Robin D'Angelo, whose research has been largely debunked — at the county board meeting, Brantner Smith was precise.
"I want everybody in the county, regardless of your political affiliation, to know that the woman in charge of your county board of supervisors is a racist. If I stood up before the board and talked about Mexican fragility or black criminals or female weakness, any other obscene, ridiculous term, they would throw me out of there."
The board's current agenda priorities — free feminine hygiene products through SNAP benefits, with a proclamation to accompany the discussion — while Tucson has crime, deteriorating roads, a housing crisis, and a police department staffed at 1970s levels.
"This is where you go to AI and ask AI to write the joke, because there's so much you could say," Brantner Smith said. "When you look at all the serious problems we have, that somehow makes it to their radar."
She and Dave Smith drew the direct line from Los Angeles's Karen Bass to Tucson's Regina Romero, Adelita Grajales, and Jen Allen. "They're like-minded people, hell-bent on destroying their own cities and counties."
The Tombstone story: a Benson man was arrested after setting the Tombstone Trump store on fire. The comments section on the KOLD news article about the arrest — visible on the real Pima GOP Facebook page — contains hundreds of local left-wing users cheering the arson.
"If you think political violence is only in Washington where President Trump is, you're wrong. There are so many lefties in Pima County and beyond cheering on a man who tried to set fire to a retail establishment because the word Trump is on the front of it."
Scott Schara: Part Four — How They Programmed the Medical Profession, the Levels of Evil, and What You Can Do
This is the fourth installment of a continuing series. Scott Schara is the Wisconsin father, researcher, and author whose 19-year-old daughter Grace — who had Down syndrome — died in a Wisconsin hospital in October 2021 after a doctor placed an illegal, unauthorized DNR on her chart and medical staff refused to resuscitate her. His book, Is the Government Legally Killing Us?, is available at ouramazinggrace.net.
A Recap of Parts One Through Three
Grace was 19 years old with Down syndrome. She had COVID. Her oxygen saturation dropped to 88 percent. Schara took her to the hospital. Seven days later, she was dead — given a combination of Precedex, lorazepam, and morphine in a 26-minute window, the standard end-of-life hospice protocol, with an illegal DNR on her chart that the family never authorized. Medical staff refused to enter the room when the family screamed for them to save her.
The lawsuit that followed was the first wrongful death jury trial in the country with COVID listed on the death certificate. The jury returned 11-1 in favor of the defense — in part because the defense brought in paid experts, including two from Johns Hopkins, to argue that a doctor can unilaterally place a DNR on a patient without consent, without a witness, without a signature, and without a DNR bracelet, and that a patient entering a hospital has given "implied consent" to whatever the institution decides to do.
The jury accepted that argument.
Schara's analysis of that outcome: if the courts had ruled against the hospital, there would have been hundreds of thousands of similar lawsuits across the country.
The second part of the series covered the population reduction agenda — traced back to a 1967 document — including the mechanism by which 90 percent of Down syndrome pregnancies end in abortion: not through overt coercion, but through the systematic training of physicians to counsel parents toward termination, funded by insurance reimbursement codes that make the amniocentesis free and the recommendation nearly automatic.
The third part covered the culture of death — specifically Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905), the Supreme Court case in which a pastor's refusal of the smallpox vaccine on documented grounds was overridden, with the court ruling that individual liberty can be restricted under "the pressure of great dangers." This legal precedent, Schara argues, was the foundation on which COVID mandates were built.
How the Medical Profession Was Programmed: The Flexner Report and the Rockefeller Takeover
Modern conventional medicine — what practitioners call allopathic medicine — was not the natural product of scientific discovery. It was constructed deliberately, beginning in 1910 with a report commissioned by the Carnegie family and written by Abraham Flexner.
"The Flexner Report was designed to throw all other modalities under the bus," Schara said. "Naturopathic, chiropractic, osteopathic, homeopathic — they got us to believe in 'trust the science.'"
By 1910, the cultural stage had already been set: Jacobson v. Massachusetts in 1905 established government authority over individual health decisions. In 1909, Schara identifies what he calls the Scofield Bible Deception. And then in 1910, the Flexner Report.
The Rockefeller family joined the effort and by 1925 were funding medical colleges exclusively on the allopathic model. Within 15 years of the report, 50 percent of all medical colleges in the United States had closed. What remained was a training system that had been purged of every competing medical philosophy.
"Now they were only training the programming for allopathic medicine," Schara said. "It doesn't take many generations to change everything."
The result: the United States has 4 percent of the world's population and consumes 45 percent of the world's pharmaceuticals, with 5 billion annual prescriptions. Schara's diagnosis: "We are a society that wants instant gratification. You can go to the doctor and get a pill for anything. We're hooked. We are being controlled."
The Hippocratic Oath and What It Actually Says
A centerpiece of Schara's research is his claim that the Hippocratic Oath — universally understood as a pledge to "first, do no harm" — is actually an oath to four ancient deities, and that the medical tradition built upon it has a philosophical lineage that runs through Plato's Republic and into eugenics.
Plato wrote, in his most famous work, that doctors should not bother working to preserve the lives of the incurably sick, because doing so would "undermine the health of the city's inhabitants." This, Schara argues, is the philosophical seed from which the modern concept of the "non-contributing member of society" grows — the logic used to justify inferior care for the disabled, the elderly, and those deemed not worth saving.
Hitler acknowledged this lineage explicitly. He told his comrades that he had "studied with great interest the laws of several American states concerning the prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would in all probability be of no value or injurious to the racial stock."
The American eugenics movement preceded the Nazi eugenics program. The logic of collectivism — that the population's health supersedes the individual's right to exist — did not originate in Germany. It was imported from here.
Quality Adjusted Life Years and the Budget Ruse
Congress has twice considered and twice rejected the Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALY) metric as a framework for healthcare rationing — a system that would assign numerical value to human lives based on their projected contribution and use that figure to determine who receives care.
The system hasn't been formally enacted. The infrastructure it would require already exists.
"There are 135 million Americans on Medicare and Medicaid, at a cost of 5 trillion dollars a year — over 50 percent of the federal budget," Schara said. "That's how they sell this to the population: through the budget rules. And I say it's a ruse because we have a fiat currency. There will never be a balanced budget when you can just print money."
The Biblical Warnings — And What Was Changed
Schara read three passages from scripture, each of which he argues constitutes a direct warning about placing human medical authority over divine authority.
2 Chronicles 16:12: King Asa — described as a good king — was afflicted with disease in his feet. The scripture notes that "even in his illness he did not seek help from the Lord, but only from the physicians." He died. Schara reads this as a direct indictment of the same error he made in trusting the hospital with Grace.
Mark 5:25-26: "A woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for 12 years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had. Yet instead of getting better, she grew worse."
Matthew 23:10: The passage in modern translations reads, "Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah." The Geneva Bible translation from 1587 reads differently: "Be not called doctors, for you have one doctor, even Christ."
"Why was that changed?" Schara asked. "Instructor and doctor are not the same term. This is a blunt warning that God gave us to not call anyone doctor — because it creates the status, it creates the thing where they are more trusted than God."
Revelation 18:23: "For your merchants were the most important people of the earth, because with your pharmacia they deceived all nations." The Greek word pharmacia is the root of the modern English word "pharmacy."
The Levels of Evil: From Unwitting Participant to Evil Actor
The most important question Schara addressed in this installment was the one he said he gets most often: are the people participating in this system evil?
His answer draws on Hannah Arendt's study of the Adolf Eichmann trial and her coining of the phrase "banality of evil" — the observation that evil, when it becomes systematic and normalized, becomes so common that ordinary people participate in it without recognizing it as evil at all.
He identified five levels of participation:
Level 1 — Unwitting participants. The person checking you in at the hospital who asks for your signature on the general consent document. They are doing their job and have no awareness of the larger system their signature is feeding into. They are not evil.
Level 2 — Programmed fools. People who have absorbed the system's premises without examining them. Almost everyone who knows someone who died with COVID on their death certificate believes that person died of COVID — because they haven't researched that nearly 100 percent of COVID deaths occurred in hospitals, not at home. They believe vaccines are safe because they've been told so their entire lives. They cannot trace a sudden death back to the vaccine because they've been programmed to believe that vaccines save lives.
Level 3 — Those following orders. The Milgram obedience experiment (1963) is the precursor here. In that experiment, 67 percent of participants were willing to administer potentially lethal electrical shocks to strangers when instructed to do so by an authority figure. Today's equivalent: physicians who input patient data into an AI-generated protocol system and dispense the recommended medication without comprehensive diagnostic work.
"If a doctor gives you a medication without doing comprehensive blood work, meeting with you in person, and running diagnostic tests — without any of that — fire that doctor immediately," Schara said. "They're just following orders."
Level 4 — Those who believe in collectivism. People who believe, at least subtly, that a non-contributing member of society does not deserve medical care. This is where participation becomes morally compromised. "Do we have a civic duty for the greater good?" Schara asked. "That has been programmed into the public school system for decades. We have no civic duty for the greater good. That is a lie. We have no obligation to obey an evil government."
Level 5 — Evil actors. The architects and enforcers of the system who know exactly what they are doing.
Schara offered three examples at this final level.
Example 1: Scott and Cindy Schara were removed from the same hospital where Grace died by two armed guards while visiting a woman on the same floor — a patient whose family had contacted them for support. They had been there ten minutes.
Example 2: A labor and delivery nurse posted publicly on Facebook: "I know what I did was not right, but I would inform the parents I was taking the baby to weigh him or her on a more precise scale and take them to the nursery and inject them. Just had to do it." The parents had refused vaccinations. The nurse administered them anyway.
Example 3: When the Schara family hired an additional attorney to pursue criminal charges against the doctor who placed the illegal DNR on Grace's chart, the district attorney wrote back: "A doctor is not required to administer treatment he or she believes is not medically effective. This includes authorizing a DNR. Dr. Schara did not abide by the wishes of the family. However, there is no law in Wisconsin that requires him to do so."
"That's a complete lie," Schara said. "It's called the state constitution."
The Substitute Teacher Analogy and Reclaiming Your Birthright
For listeners asking what to do with all of this, Schara closed with the substitute teacher analogy that frames his entire prescription.
There are good substitutes and bad substitutes. The good substitute walks in and establishes leadership within five minutes. The bad substitute walks in and the class runs the show.
Most Americans have been programmed to let the doctor run the show the moment they enter a medical setting. That programming is exactly what killed Grace.
"We should be in the leadership role," Schara said. "We're hiring a vendor. You don't let the vendor be in the leadership role. You're in the leadership role."
Practical implementation: When you go to a doctor's appointment, establish at the beginning how you will communicate when you have follow-up questions. Don't accept a three-day callback window as the default. Set the expectation: is there a patient portal? Can we communicate through email? What is the method? Establish it before you need it.
He issued a direct theological challenge to the assumptions behind patient submission: "My body is a temple. It's God's temple. I have the responsibility. I cannot delegate that. I cannot transfer it. I am responsible for my body."
And then the call to action: "Repent from that submission to an evil authority and reclaim your birthright. Because that submission is precisely what the culture of death was designed to produce."
The series continues. Next week: the legal architecture — the specific laws in their system that make what they're doing technically legal, and how those laws were built. Schara called it shocking. Winn's description: she's already seen it and it is.
Scott Schara's book, Is the Government Legally Killing Us?, and all related research, are available at ouramazinggrace.net.
Winn Tucson airs Monday through Friday, 9 to 11 a.m., on KVOI 1030 The Voice.
NFIB Arizona: nfib.com/az | National Police Week candlelight vigil archive and Wounded Blue: woundedblue.org
Peace Officer Memorial Day: fly your flag at half staff tomorrow.
Pima County recall signatures: Pima GOP office or Daniel Gutierrez's social media.
Primary voter registration deadline: June 21. Early ballots: June 23. Primary: July 21.