Guests - Josh Jacobsen, Matt Beienburg, Stephen Mundt
A Crime Bus, Queer Food Politics, and California Counting Ballots for a Month
Monday on Winn Tucson came back from the White House with energy and kept it all the way through. Three guests, three completely different battlegrounds — all of them converging on the same diagnosis: institutions that are supposed to serve the public have been captured by people who are working against it, and the only path out is to vote people out, sue them out, or constitutionally prohibit what they're doing.
Josh Jacobsen: The Crime Bus, Joanne Mendoza's Platform, and the Chronic Homelessness That Isn't Getting Better
Josh Jacobsen is the founder of Tucson Crime Free Coalition, an organization now in its fourth year that has spent every one of those years trying to get the city and county to apply basic public safety logic to a problem they keep making worse. He came in with data, with specifics on the CD-6 Democratic challenger, and with the Kansas City story the city of Tucson has been hoping nobody would Google.
What the Free Bus System Has Become
The Tucson SunTran free fare system is, in the most direct functional description available, a mobile homeless shelter and drug distribution network that is now so dysfunctional that the Teamsters — the bus drivers' own union — voted last week on their ability to strike when their contract expires at the end of June. Driver safety is the central issue in the contract negotiations.
Tucson Crime Free's position has always been consistent: financially support people who qualify for free fares, charge everyone else, and restore security and policing on the buses so they can be used for transportation rather than substance use disorder management.
"Right now they're just transporting crime and drugs and homelessness all around the county. People that would pay to ride them won't because they're dangerous."
The city's own most recent study showed that up to 90% of current bus riders would not pay a fare. This is a significant increase from two or three years ago, when 50 to 60 percent of ridership was subsidized because they qualified. The shift is almost entirely in the wrong direction.
The ridership counting methodology is itself suspect. Jacobsen described observing people step onto a bus, look around the bus to see if there's anyone to sell drugs to, and step back off — with each step-on counted as a ride. He also noted that a large and growing percentage of riders are simply riding in circles, looking for air conditioning.
The model city the city of Tucson keeps pointing to: Kansas City, which pioneered free fares as a civic initiative.
"Kansas City has brought fares back because of all the same reasons we're talking about here in Tucson."
The fact that Kansas City reversed course is precisely the kind of evidence that Tucson's leadership declines to incorporate into its planning. The city has a budget deficit it won't resolve because the free bus is both ideologically sacred and — Jacobsen's pointed observation — an example of ego invested in a visible public policy.
Congressman Ciscomani, whose father is a retired SunTran bus driver, brought the full package of Tucson Crime Free statistics on free fares, incidents, and associated criminal activity to a House Appropriations Committee meeting where Transportation Secretary Duffy was present. He got it onto the national record. The conversation is continuing.
Joanne Mendoza: Legalizing Prostitution, Defunding Police, and Mayor Romero's Endorsement
Winn had previewed the subject of Mendoza's positions before the break and came back with a recording: Joanne Mendoza, interviewed by Michael Soto of Equality Arizona, was asked whether she would support decriminalizing sex work — specifically because LGBTQ people, and particularly trans women of color, sometimes have "no other choice" than sex work due to employment discrimination. Her answer was yes.
Winn's translation for the listeners: Mendoza supports legalizing prostitution. Jacobsen didn't soften it.
"When we're out in the encampments and we're talking to females and we ask them what life is like, they'll talk quite a bit about having to prostitute themselves and the struggles. Legalizing prostitution is not the solution. It doesn't help. It doesn't solve the problem for what means they need it — it creates disease, it creates crime, and then there's all the trauma of being a trafficked human being."
The legalization argument is a standard talking point in progressive policy circles. The documented outcomes of legalization experiments — in the Netherlands, in New Zealand, in Nevada — consistently show increases in trafficking, not decreases, because legalization expands the market and the market is supplied primarily through coercion and exploitation. Jacobsen, who has worked with women living in encampments, knows this from the ground up.
The Arizona Police Association has endorsed Ciscomani. Mendoza has separately said she favors reallocating funds away from police toward affordable housing, social services, and climate justice.
"She's going to just keep supporting this. This is Mayor Romero's agenda as well — it would be an extension of the policies Mayor Romero has enacted in Tucson."
The Point-in-Time Count and the Homelessness That Isn't Changing
The city recently reported a 4% decrease in homelessness, citing the Point-in-Time count — the annual one-night snapshot of unsheltered and sheltered individuals.
"That's the same people counting the bus riders."
What the Point-in-Time count captures, when it captures anything, is the shallow end of the homelessness population — people who are couch surfing, temporarily sheltered, or between situations. The chronic homelessness population — the people actually living on the streets, many with serious mental illness and substance use disorder — has not changed.
"Our chronic homelessness population on the streets has not changed. But what we are seeing is that it is getting sicker."
Emergency rooms across Tucson are seeing higher rates of serious mental illness and substance use disorder. The figure Jacobsen cited: close to 90% of the chronic homeless population is now dealing with substance use disorder at a clinical level.
Tuscon Crime Free has been working on a solution for the data tracking problem — the mechanism by which counting errors systematically undercount chronic homelessness while overcounting temporary improvement. They raised the issue directly with HUD Secretary Turner during Ciscomani's visit to Tucson.
The book Winn was handed by a mutual friend shortly before the friend passed — a 2025 work about fixing homelessness without affordable housing — is on the list for a future interview. The core thesis of that book aligns with Jacobsen's own position: you cannot buy your way out of homelessness without solving the underlying behavioral and clinical conditions that produce it.
"If you don't solve the core problem, everything else you do is putting a bow on a pile of horse poop."
Tucson Crime Free Coalition can be found at TucsonCrimeFree.com and on all major social media platforms.
Matt Beienburg: Queer Food Politics, Mandatory Indoctrination, HCR 2044, and the DOJ That Just Showed Up at ASU
Matt Beienburg is the Director of Education Policy at the Goldwater Institute and Director of the Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy. He came on with three convergent developments in the DEI fight in Arizona — a state Supreme Court case, a Department of Justice investigation, and a constitutional amendment one Senate vote away from the November ballot — and with specific course titles from ASU's and U of A's honors programs that no parent who pays tuition should have to read without warning.
Two Active Legal Cases: One at the Arizona Supreme Court, One at the DOJ
The Goldwater Institute is currently litigating a case before the Arizona Supreme Court that addresses DEI training requirements at state universities — specifically, requirements that force faculty to sit through DEI modules as a condition of employment. The case does not address admissions or contracting discrimination, only the mandatory training. It is nonetheless significant because it treats the issue as what it is: a constitutional problem, not a personnel management question.
The Department of Justice announced an investigation into Arizona State University's DEI practices the day before the Arizona Supreme Court accepted the case — a coincidence of timing that signals, in Beienburg's assessment, broad institutional recognition that the practices have gone far beyond what any legitimate educational mission requires.
What triggered the DOJ investigation: viral videos of ASU faculty members explicitly saying they are not changing their DEI work, just changing how they talk about it.
"Strong indications of this underlying continuation of DEI even though they know the public has grown very tired of this idea. We're going to discriminate. We're going to divide people based on race."
The Course Descriptions That Should Not Exist
Beienburg brought specific examples from the Goldwater Institute's public records research — obtained by forcing the universities to hand over syllabi.
At the University of Arizona, a mandatory two-course DEI requirement was announced for all undergraduates, described in the university's own language as focusing on "issues of racism, classism, sexism, ableism, imperialism, colonialism, trans" — the university's explicit list. The financial implication: approximately $70 million per four-year period in tuition and taxpayer resources forced toward this content.
The U of A's honors college requires students to take a seminar course. Courses that satisfy the requirement include:
"Eating the Globe: The Diverse, Weird, and Queer Food Politics" — described as asking students to "grapple with the global interplay of identity including reproductive labor, ethics of healthcare, racism, orientalism" and to engage with the question "Can food be colonized and decolonized?"
"Black Lives Matter Across the Americas"
"Cut and Paste: Constructing Identity Through Collage"
Courses on "social justice" generally
"This is what apparently distinguishes a kid meeting the top tier of educational excellence at U of A."
At ASU, the honors program requires all students to complete a two-semester course called Human Event in its second semester. The syllabi for this course are supposed to be available through ASU's public portal. The Goldwater Institute filed public records requests to obtain them.
Their finding: the vast majority of syllabi for the required second-semester course were hidden. Students are required to take one of these courses — randomly assigned, essentially — with no advance knowledge of the content.
Among the syllabi they did obtain:
One course described readings focused on "violence and capitalism, power and powerlessness, environmental violence, European this and African this" — listed as a course on "great thinkers" across civilizations.
Another included the question: "What is the relationship between the white female gaze and the eroticized black male body in the text?"
"That's racist," Winn said. "And what does that have to do with education?"
Beienburg's answer: nothing. It has nothing to do with education. The university's advertised premise for the course is an engagement with Shakespeare, Plato, and Aristotle across civilizations and time. More than 70% of the syllabi Goldwater obtained through public records contain DEI content. One hundred percent of honors students must take it.
"This is a required course. Not every kid is going to take that specific professor, but they are being forced to blindly take one of these courses and then be forced to sit through a semester of this indoctrination."
After the Goldwater Institute published their report, the link to the "Queer Food Politics" course description went down.
HCR 2044: One Vote Away From the November Ballot
The state constitutional amendment that would put an end to this permanently — regardless of who is in the White House or on the U.S. Supreme Court — is HCR 2044, sponsored by Arizona Speaker of the House Steve Montenegro.
What it would do: prohibit DEI requirements in public universities and state agencies. No mandatory DEI courses. No mandatory DEI training. No race-based discrimination in hiring, admissions, or contracting. No forcing any student, faculty member, or state employee into race-based ideological programming regardless of what it's called.
It does not require the governor's signature. It requires only that the House and Senate pass it — which, if the legislature refers it to the ballot, sends it directly to Arizona voters in November.
The House has advanced it. It is now in the Senate, needing one final vote. That vote is being held up while the legislative session wraps up budget negotiations.
"Arizona voters passed an original protection against this kind of thing by 20 points. We're going to get this done. The question is whether the legislature pulls the trigger before the session ends."
One Democratic state lawmaker explicitly went on record opposing the measure with this argument: it would jeopardize federal funding tied to diversity initiatives. Beienburg noted the significance: the opposition's own stated reason for opposing HCR 2044 is that it would prevent the federal government from using funding as leverage to force DEI programming on Arizona. That is precisely the point.
"This says: under no circumstance are we going to let the federal government extort Arizona into pushing DEI content. That's again why this is so critical."
The Trump administration has cut off federal DEI funding. But the next left-wing president can turn the spigot back on. HCR 2044 locks in the prohibition permanently, at the constitutional level, so that no future federal administration can use money to impose it.
Call your senator. Ask specifically for HCR 2044 to be brought forward. The window for this session is weeks, not months.
Stephen Mundt: California Is Counting Ballots for 30 Days, Graham Platner Is a Problem, and the DEI Fight Is Also a Virginia Fight
Retired Brigadier General Stephen Mundt joined from Virginia — back home after traveling to California, where he was a firsthand observer of the primary and the state's ballot-counting apparatus operating in full public view.
California Is Counting Ballots for 30 Days and They Know It
Mundt had been watching California's election coverage while he was in the state, and what he described was not a surprise or an accident. Television stations in California were openly, explicitly stating they were following California law, which allows ballots to be postmarked on Election Day and received for days or weeks afterward. Smudged postmarks are no impediment. No postmark at all creates a rebuttable presumption in favor of counting.
"It's going to take them up to 30 days, maybe longer, until they get the result that they want."
The structural problem he identified is mechanical and not theoretical: at polling places, party observers sit and count people walking in. As each voter arrives, their party affiliation is logged against the voter rolls. When one party's count falls short of what its analysis suggested the precinct should produce, operatives outside make calls to get more people to the polls — legally and directly. The days-long counting window gives that operation time to run.
The California results were already showing the pattern: Steve Hilton was well ahead with early-reporting precincts, but as mail-in and late-counted ballots accumulated, Becerra and Steyer — both Democrats — were closing in on him. The final outcome at broadcast time remained uncertain.
Mundt's comparison was sharp and useful: Germany, France, Brazil, and other major democracies all report results for tens of millions of voters within hours of polls closing. Nobody uses a 30-day window. Nobody operates on the assumption that results require a month to produce. The only argument for a 30-day counting window is that it gives one party time to manufacture the result it needs.
Graham Platner: Using PTSD as an Explanation Is an Insult to Veterans
On the Maine Senate race, Mundt was blunt about what Graham Platner's candidacy represents — and specifically about Platner's use of post-traumatic stress as an explanation for his documented behavior.
"Veterans in his state and veterans in general are upset with him for using PTSD as an explanation for why he did all his horrific behavior."
The distinction Mundt drew is clinical, moral, and legal. PTSD is real. Veterans courts exist in Virginia and across the country precisely because the connection between combat trauma and subsequent behavioral issues is documented and recognized. The veteran who comes before those courts, shows remorse, completes the program, and changes their behavior can have their record cleaned. The program works because it requires accountability and genuine change.
"You've got to come in and you've got to change and you have to be remorseful and you have to regret what you did and you have to be behavior change. You don't just get to say it."
Rape is not a PTSD symptom. Platner's framing — that his behavior was that of "a bad boyfriend" — does not match his own public statements or documented conduct. The veterans who are offended by his candidacy are not being callous about trauma. They are being precise about accountability.
AOC has now distanced herself from Platner. Mundt's read: she has future ambitions that a Platner association would damage. Bernie Sanders has not distanced himself, which Mundt characterized as consistent with Sanders's entire political framework.
John Fetterman has also criticized Platner, which Winn acknowledged. Mundt's counter: show him the other Democrats doing the same. As of broadcast time, they remain sparse.
DEI Is Also a Virginia Fight — And the Contract He Signed in South Dakota
Mundt connected the HCR 2044 conversation directly to his time on the Maricopa Community Colleges governing board from 2008 to 2022, during which he personally confronted faculty who were teaching "Through Your Whiteness" as a mandatory course for other teachers.
"As a board, we said: no, you can't do that. But they then found ways around it. They change the language, they change the words, but they're still doing the DEI."
The deeper point: name changes are not policy changes. Diversity Equity and Inclusion became anti-racism became social justice became decolonization. The content and the ideology are identical regardless of the current label. The only durable solution is what HCR 2044 provides — a constitutional prohibition that bars the behavior regardless of what it's called next.
He closed with an anecdote that captured the moral of the morning in miniature. When he was young, in South Dakota, he made a contract with his grandfather's neighbor to shovel the man's walk. It turned out to be the worst winter in memory. He was shoveling every day, complaining constantly. The neighbor's response: "Young man, you signed the contract. You made a commitment. You'll shovel. Next year you may want to renegotiate your contract."
"That's not the way we behave today. Today it's: I don't like it, I don't want to, and I'm not going to."
His argument for the election ahead: consequences matter, commitments matter, and the people working to strip both from American civic life are doing so on purpose. The response is showing up, voting, and holding the line.
Winn Tucson airs Monday through Friday, 9 to 11 a.m., on KVOI 1030 The Voice.
Tuesday, June 10th: Dave Smith and Betsy Brantner Smith fill in while Kathleen Winn attends the Presidential 1776 Award national finals at the White House. Arizona finalist: Sam Crumley.
Wednesday, June 11th: China Watch Wednesday with Ava Chen.
HCR 2044 — Anti-DEI constitutional amendment for Arizona universities: Contact your state senator now. One vote needed to send it to the November ballot.
TucsonCrimeFree.com for Tucson Crime Free Coalition updates, statistics, and resources.
Primary voter registration deadline: June 22nd. Early ballots: June 24th. Primary: July 21st.