Guests - Dennis Kneal, Steve Bonta, Alex Kolodin, Kristen Pruett
A single number framed the entire Thursday broadcast: less than half of Americans now say they believe in capitalism. On a rainy morning in Tucson, days before Arizona's primary, host Kathleen Winn built her show around that statistic and its consequences — a country where a rising generation is drawn to socialism without understanding its costs, and a state where the mechanics of voting itself are on the ballot. Four guests worked the theme from different angles: a veteran financial journalist, an economic historian from the John Birch Society, a state legislator running for Secretary of State, and a Pima County Republican organizer. What follows is their case, in their words.
Dennis Kneale: 'Capitalism Is Optimism Monetized'
Dennis Kneale — bestselling author and longtime broadcast journalist who anchored at CNBC and Fox Business and held senior roles at The Wall Street Journal and Forbes — opened by naming what he sees as a generational collapse in economic literacy.
"Capitalism is one of the founding principles of this country," Winn argued, and Kneale answered with data. A new Wall Street Journal/NORC poll, he noted, found that among 18-to-34-year-olds, only about 40 percent believe in capitalism — a lower rate than the national average. His explanation was blunt: "For 30 years, our education system, K-through-12 and college, has been teaching a liberal agenda" that emphasizes America's sins over the virtues of its economic system, while never accounting for the roughly 100 million deaths Kneale attributes to socialist and communist regimes over the last century.
He set aside that body count to make a narrower argument from two statistics. In 2008, he said, the United States and Europe were roughly comparable — similar populations, similar economic size. Since then, "the US economy has grown 120 percent, and the socialist European economy has grown less than 50 percent." The gap shows up in paychecks: Kneale put median income in Europe at about $24,000 a year against roughly $80,000 in the United States. "That's capitalism," he said.
The conversation turned to wealth and the politics of resentment. Kneale described a moment when SpaceX went public, its stock reaching $225 a share and briefly making Elon Musk, in his telling, the world's first trillionaire — an event he called "the worst Rorschach inkblot test that I've ever seen." His point was what followed: the stock later fell below its first-day price, Musk lost tens of billions, and, Kneale argued, the same media and politicians who condemned the windfall went silent rather than update the record, "because it ruins their narrative."
For Kneale, billionaires are best understood by what they build. Jeff Bezos, he said, employs more than a million people at Amazon and has created some two trillion dollars in wealth held by other investors, with those employees paying billions in taxes over time — all while delivering goods cheaply and overnight. "That's a value to life that makes life better," he said.
Winn contrasted that with New York, where she said Zohran Mamdani's agenda — from a wealth tax to designs on the food supply and property rights — is driving the wealthy out. Kneale supplied figures: roughly $10 billion in tax income has fled New York City through 2022, and California has lost about one trillion dollars, half of its billionaire wealth, as it heads toward a November "soak the billionaires" wealth-tax vote. He warned against the promise that such taxes are one-time and aimed only at billionaires, pointing to the 1913 income tax, which he said originally applied only to income above roughly $7 million in today's dollars and now reaches almost everyone. A wealth tax, he added, would be historically novel: government taxing not what you earned last year but the lifetime of wealth you've accumulated.
Against that, both host and guest pointed to states moving the other direction. Winn cited Andy Biggs, running for Arizona governor, and his push to eliminate state taxes. Kneale highlighted Florida's property-tax proposal on the November ballot: a full exemption from non-school property tax for about 30 percent of homes, with the standard homestead exemption tripled from $50,000 to $150,000 and rising to $250,000 in 2027 — enough, he said, to leave roughly 60 percent of homes paying no non-school property tax, and a reduction for everyone else. "Why should your aging mom have to continue paying the government after she's paid off her mortgage and she owns her home?" he asked.
Winn tied it back to Arizona, which she said ranked fourth in the nation for economic growth before the 2020 election of the state's Democratic governor. The deeper problem, she argued, is that voters who don't understand inflation, housing costs, student debt, and the offshoring of manufacturing and jobs simply don't understand how the economy works — and she'd wager most 18-to-34-year-olds don't.
Kneale's remedy started with attitude. He rejected the fashionable emphasis on work-life balance for people just starting out: "Kid, get to work, man. There is no work-life balance when you're starting your career and building it." He cited a lesson from his book The Leadership Genius of Elon Musk, which lays out eleven lessons drawn from Musk — chief among them, work harder than you ever have, "because most people are loafers and you will get ahead super fast when you throw yourself at it."
Winn offered her own family as proof of concept: seven children, all married with families of their own, six of the seven homeowners, spread across the country and ranging in age from their mid-30s to 51. They succeeded, she said, because they understand economics, family, and faith — "and those are things we demonized over the last 10 years." Kneale added the line that became the segment's thesis: "Capitalism is optimism monetized. You don't invest unless you have hope for where things are going."
Yet hope is scarce in the polling. Only about 25 percent of Americans, Kneale said, believe the American dream — that children will be better off than their parents — is alive or ever was, and only 8 percent of Democrats believe America stands above other nations, a founding idea of American exceptionalism dating back to de Tocqueville. He diagnosed "a crisis of unnecessary, misplaced depression," fueled by relentless negativity from the political left and much of a mainstream media he was part of for more than 30 years. The tell, he said, is that consumer sentiment in the University of Michigan survey sits near all-time lows while stock prices sit near all-time highs.
Asked by Winn what actually fixes it, Kneale was candid that the damage was "decades in the making." Drawing on his reporting for his book about how Oregon chased away businesses and residents, he recalled officials telling him that, like an addict, the state won't reform until it hits bottom — and hasn't felt enough pain yet. The socialist turn in the Democratic Party, he suggested, might be the shock that wakes the country. He pointed to Oregon's governor's race, where Christine Drazan has her best chance in years against incumbent Tina Kotek — a win that would produce Oregon's first Republican governor since 1982, "a message to the rest of the blue states."
On the day's other fronts, Kneale argued the case for the Iran campaign in moral terms — not a display of military strength but an effort "to get rid of the most murderous, despicable terrorist regime in modern history" — and marveled that Democrats couldn't support even that during conflict. He closed on the unseen good news: federal government employment, he said, has fallen to 1993 levels, and Florida is about to approve a state budget that spends less than the year before for the fourth consecutive year. And he returned to SpaceX to make the capitalist point whole: on the day Musk's fortune peaked, some 4,400 SpaceX employees became millionaires through their work. "That's what capitalism does," he said. In a free market, Winn added, "it's not diversity, equity and inclusion — it's who's got the best product," with customers, not a small enriched class, picking the winners.
Steve Bonta: The Anatomy of Socialism
Steve Bonta, an economic expert and publisher of The New American, the John Birch Society publication, opened on Iran and pushed back — from the right — on Trump's approach. He said he never understood the logic of pausing the war to negotiate: "A lot of people think he's playing four-dimensional chess. Personally, I think he's sort of improvising as he goes."
His impatience rested on his read of the regime. He described a government that "massacred 50,000, mostly young people," a few months ago and continues executing dissenters by the dozens each week — people guilty, he said, of little more than lighting candles in the street to express a desire for freedom. "These are absolute monsters," he said, arguing that negotiation with them defies common sense.
Bonta framed the confrontation as long overdue rather than optional. Iran, he said, has committed acts of war against the United States for 47 years, beginning with the seizure of the entire U.S. embassy staff, and bears responsibility for terrorism including the mid-1990s bombing of the Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires that claimed dozens of lives. Those who insist the conflict is "just an Israel thing," he added, miss that Iran calls the United States the "great Satan" and Israel merely the little one. He reached back to the Barbary Wars — the young republic's first controversial foreign conflict, fought against North African states that kidnapped Americans and seized merchant vessels, and the source of the Marine Hymn's "shores of Tripoli." His conclusion: an attack on the American homeland is not the only legitimate cause for war, even as he distanced himself from open-ended interventionism. He drew a firm line between the regime and the Iranian people, for whom he expressed sympathy: "I hope Trump has the good sense to finish the job."
Turning to socialism at home, Bonta rejected the idea — held even by some conservatives — that a little socialism, of the benign Scandinavian variety, might be tolerable. That thinking, he said, "betrays a fundamental naivete about what socialism is." For his definition he reached back to 1848, when Alexis de Tocqueville addressed the French Assembly after that year's socialist revolution and identified three traits common to all socialism. Quoting directly, Bonta said the first is "an incessant, vigorous and extreme appeal to the material passions of man" — a fundamental materialism that explains socialism's hostility to religion. The second is an attack, "either direct or indirect," on the principle of private property. The third is "a profound opposition to personal liberty and scorn for individual reason." All three, both host and guest agreed, describe Mamdani. "This is not original thought," Winn said. "This is a strategic way to undermine the founding fathers' principles."
Socialism's real danger, Bonta argued, is that it is a philosophy for governmental absolutism. Collectivism is the most powerful form of government conceivable "because by definition it involves everybody" — more total than any monarchy — which is why socialists of every stripe profess undying love for pure democracy. He reminded listeners that the worst tyrants, from Mao and Stalin to Pol Pot and Hitler, were exceptional in their capacity for destruction ("Nazism is short for national socialism," he noted), but that the ordinary socialist functionary is merely incompetent. The trap is structural: once a society surrenders its weapons, its economic freedom, its religious liberty, and its free speech, "sooner or later you're going to get a Napoleon, a Caesar, a Hitler." Britain, he said, has been de facto socialist since the mid-20th century and has so far been lucky enough to avoid a homegrown tyrant — but the apparatus is in place, and the country is suffering "a death of a thousand cuts." Undoing even the socialism already present in the United States, he warned, will take real effort.
The segment's hardest question was Winn's: how do you reach 18-to-34-year-olds who embrace socialism without understanding it? Bonta first placed the phenomenon in history — Marx, Lenin, and Stalin were all idealistic young radicals, and youthful attraction to leftism is nothing new. What's changed is scale. The beats of the 1950s and hippies of the 1960s were a small minority, perhaps 10 to 20 percent; today, he said, the polls suggest well over half of young people are drawn to figures like Mamdani.
His explanation was economic and developmental. Life for the young is now "so much more socialistic," he said. They leave home only to have government subsidize them through college, then finish into public-sector or quasi-public-sector work — health care, which he called effectively socialized medicine, or agencies like the park service. Cocooned first in familial provision and then in government provision, many never confront budgeting, career risk, or independence. The result, he argued, is a "prolonged adolescence" in which people can "live in a state of suspended animation" into their 30s and 40s, holding essentially the same political views they had at 14 or 15, "except maybe with a harder radical edge." Big government, he said, creates its own constituency at every age — the young through subsidies, the old through Medicare and Social Security they feel they've earned.
The fix, in Bonta's view, is to disincentivize the mindset, not merely to lecture against it. "People respond to incentives," he said. If young people had to pay their own way through college by borrowing from an actual bank in an unsubsidized way, costs would fall dramatically and students would quickly become discriminating about degrees "in queer studies or whatever." But he cautioned that intellectual arguments have limited power against people who are morally convinced. Invoking a phrase from his precinct work — "morality sees farther than intellect" — he argued the left operates from a wholly different moral framework: a rejection of individual liberty in favor of the collective, and a positivist view of law holding that rights are created by government, not endowed by God. Add to that a youth culture in which "everything is physical, everything is corporeal," and appeals to abstract or spiritual truths land, to the young, as the noise of "useless fuddy-duddies." The best a society can do, he concluded, is accept that youth will always be rebellious and shortsighted, and stop paying them to stay that way — building "a world where young people can grow up in a hurry."
Alex Kolodin: 'This Is the Election for Arizona'
Alex Kolodin, currently the representative from LD3 and a candidate for Secretary of State, joined in the campaign's final days and previewed what he expected from the president's remarks that evening: "a strong push to get the SAVE Act across the line." The federal bill, he said, has stalled in the Senate despite House members — among them Abe Hamadeh, Eli Crane, and Paul Gosar — trying to attach it to everything from the National Defense Authorization Act to the FISA reauthorization.
Arizona, Kolodin emphasized, doesn't have to wait on Washington. He referred a state version to the November ballot that would require government-issued ID for every ballot cast, constitutionalize the rule that a voter must be a citizen, prohibit foreign funding of elections, and — unlike the federal bill — speed up election results. His message to disillusioned voters was that Arizona Republicans deliver where Congress stalls: the Republican legislative majority put the measure on the ballot, and Governor Katie Hobbs's refusal to sign it, he said, "actually gave us a gift" by sending it to voters directly. Allowing people without the legal right to vote, he added, "waters down your voice, it waters down your ballot."
He framed the stakes in existential terms. "This is the election for Arizona," Kolodin said — the one that decides "whether we're going to go the way of Colorado and California with an economy that's oligarchs and homeless people," or restore a competent conservative executive branch that can clean up elections and repair the economy. Every state, he said, eventually faces one pivotal election that determines the future its children and grandchildren inherit; Florida's came almost eight years ago, Colorado's a decade or two back. For Arizona, "this is the most important one that we're ever going to have."
The mechanics, he stressed, come down to turnout — and turnout is a habit. "The best predictor of what party is going to win in the general election is what percentage of people vote in the primary," he said, urging listeners to vote by the July 21 deadline and to call five friends and family members who hadn't. Winn reinforced the point with precinct-level numbers from Pima County, where turnout ranged from about 30 percent in the strongest legislative district down toward 16 percent in the smallest, with an overall target of 40 percent and a hope of 50.
Kolodin drew sharp contrasts with the state's current Democratic officeholders. He said Attorney General Kris Mayes has sued Donald Trump 44 times — "that doesn't benefit anybody in Arizona" — and pointed to businesses leaving the state. His central target was Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, whom he accused of expanding his authority beyond its statutory scope through the elections procedures manual, a document a federal judge had rebuked. If Republicans fail to turn out and Fontes is reelected, Kolodin warned, "he's going to take that as a mandate" — a mandate to disenfranchise uniformed officers, to criminalize criticism of election officials, and to spend taxpayer money on what Kolodin described as campaign-style advertising, including commercials during the World Cup.
He made a specific pitch to southern Arizona, where he said he'd worked to clean up elections for nearly 15 years, beginning with an early case in Santa Cruz County. In statewide races, he reminded listeners, "one vote from Pima County and one vote from Mohave County count as exactly one vote each" — and Pima's first- and second-generation Americans, many from countries where honest elections were impossible, are among the most passionate advocates for election integrity he knows.
The conversation then turned technical. Winn raised Pima County's mobile voting center — donated by one of the tribes — which she said operates on shortened hours from 10 to 3, visits only four locations, and follows different rules than fixed polling places. Kolodin said he favors expanding in-person voting options, "but when you use it as an excuse not to expand access to voting, but to reduce the transparency in voting, that's when I have a problem." He credited the Pima County GOP with restoring observer access to those units and urged listeners to sign up as observers. He accused Recorder Gabriella Cázares-Kelly of learning partisan tactics from Fontes — placing voting centers where officials expect favorable turnout and making it harder elsewhere. Winn cited Green Valley, where she said polling places were cut from 13 to three despite an 85 percent turnout rate. As Secretary of State, Kolodin pledged accessibility standards governing how far a voter can be from a polling location before the county must add another: "We don't want you to have to spend ten dollars on gas" to vote.
Pressed on the danger a reelected Fontes would pose, Kolodin called him "the leader of that faction of the party in Arizona" — the man the socialist wing hopes to make governor, who nearly challenged Hobbs in the primary. He tied election policy to economic decline, describing a California he once visited as a child that "looks like there was a war in a lot of places" today, and warned that Fontes is "trying to seize the power to throw out votes from entire counties," criminalize criticism of officials, and burden uniformed voters.
On citizenship, Kolodin said Fontes has spent four years working to undermine the requirement, is before the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to dismantle it, and has changed the law to allow a Social Security number — which non-citizens can hold — to serve as proof of citizenship. He cited Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap, who ran about 60,000 registrations through the federal SAVE database and found roughly 400 non-citizens, about half of whom had voted. Quoting Senator Mike Lee, he joked: "The thing that we were promised never happened just happened again." Citizenship, Kolodin said, "is the most valuable thing that we have in our civic life," and the right to vote "belongs only to citizens." He closed on a personal note — a promise to Charlie Kirk to close the Republican gap in Pima County: "If we have nothing else, I will have kept my word."
Kristen Pruett: Why the Primary Builds the Habit
Kristen Pruett — a member at large of the Pima County Republican Party and an organizer across several mothers' coalitions — made the case for the one act many voters dismiss: showing up to a primary. Voters are quick to wave it off as "just Republican versus Republican," she said, but "the most important thing about the primary" is that it builds good habits. "People that vote in the primary are more likely to turn up in the general." Her recurring line: "It doesn't matter who's on the ballot if the ballot doesn't end up in the box."
Sitting out, she argued, sends the wrong signal. "It sends a message to Democrats that they're beating us, that we're giving up." The remedy is to "quit being the silent majority." Winn reframed the choice in tangible terms: a primary vote is a verdict on roads, homelessness, drug use, crime, and leaders who can't follow a budget — and, she added, dissatisfaction crosses party lines, with plenty of Democrats unhappy with their own leadership. Returning the same people to office, Pruett said, "seems kind of like the definition of insanity." Arizona, she noted, "went from fourth to 47th in prosperity" while Texas and Florida did not: "Policies matter."
On reaching young voters, Pruett offered a practical entry point: school boards are on the ballot, and fixing the youth drift toward socialism "starts with the parents" voting for good school leadership and instilling values at home. She also faulted her own party's communication. Democrats, she said, were quick to master social media, and Republicans are only now catching up through organizations like Turning Point and Young Republicans — the very vehicle, built on Charlie Kirk's campus videos, that drove Turning Point's success.
She pushed back on the doom narrative with numbers. In the 2024 cycle, she said, voters aged 18 to 34 moved 13 points to the right, while older populations moved three points left — a shift she attributes to younger people getting their information from social media while older audiences still watch a mainstream media that leans Democratic. "The liberals and the Democrat side are louder," she said, "but we are really trending in a better direction with the youth." Winn added that she's seeing more young men — and young women — coming up conservative, even as headlines insist the entire generation has fallen for socialism. Many, Pruett said, can't even define it: they've grown up in a household where parents provided everything, so it feels natural to expect the same from the state. Life experience corrects it, she said, invoking the old line that if you're not a Democrat when you're young you have no heart, and not a Republican when you're old you have no brain — "because life experience teaches you that it doesn't work that way, as much as you would love for it to."
Pruett closed with logistics and a rallying cry. The party would gather on election night at the Union — with thanks to Grant Krueger — where polls close at 7 but anyone in line by 6:30 still gets to vote, across 30 legislative districts. She previewed "party at the polls," with volunteers handing out voter guides and water, Super Saturday canvassing at Madera Highlands Park and in the Sahuarita/Green Valley area, and a Sunday push in Tombstone and Tucson joined by activist Scott Pressler. The reason for the intensity, she said, is that Arizona's outcome will shape the 2028 presidential race: "We are under attack, and in Pima County we've been living it. We have a community to save."
The Election-Integrity Discussion: Lisa von Geldern Calls In
Longtime listener and activist Lisa von Geldern called in to praise the earlier segment and sharpen one of its themes. What she valued most in Steve Bonta's remarks, she said, was the point about constitutional education — "that the limits are on government, not on the people." Elections, she stressed, are "not a Republican issue or a Democrat issue. It's we the people, and we have to hold government accountable."
Von Geldern pointed listeners to two tools for that accountability. The first was The New American's congressional scorecard and its Freedom Index (thefreedomindex.us), which rates how members of Congress vote against the Constitution; very few, she said, vote 100 percent constitutionally. She argued the presidency is not where attention belongs: "It's your Congress. Holding your congressmen and congresswomen accountable — that is where the bills are supposed to start." Using Representative Thomas Massie as an example, she noted his "no" vote on the NDAA and defended it: the objection wasn't the voter-eligibility provisions folded inside, but everything else "shoved in" alongside them. "All those bills should be voted on individually," she said, urging listeners to understand why a member votes yes or no on omnibus legislation before judging it.
In a later exchange, von Geldern described her work with Unite for Freedom (uniteforfreedom.org), a self-funded grassroots effort she said has enlisted dozens of data analysts to audit registrations and results against state and federal law. Their conclusion, as she put it, is stark: that the country has not had a lawful, valid, properly certified election "in years, if not decades." Even where a preferred candidate wins, she argued, "we have no way of proving it was valid" — a vulnerability that leaves certifications open to legal challenge. She said the board of supervisors members who certify results bear personal and criminal liability but face no accountability, for lack of constitutional sheriffs and willing attorneys general. Kris Mayes, she said, "is certainly not going to hold the people who got her into office accountable."
Winn named the three Arizona races that still trouble her: the 2020 presidential result, Abe Hamadeh's attorney general race, and Heather Lappin's county sheriff race — each, she said, marked by anomalies rather than simply an unwelcome outcome. She flagged a practical hazard for listeners: interactions with the motor vehicle system, which is tied to voter records, have quietly changed some voters' party registration to independent, meaning a voter who assumes they're a Republican may be unable to vote in the primary. "Check to see what party you are," she urged, and if it's wrong, change it and vote in person. Both women argued for repealing the motor-voter regime, with von Geldern contending that voting should be exercised by "people who are educated and understand the issues," and Winn adding the point they returned to all morning — "especially if they're not citizens."
Voting Logistics and the Final Push
Winn closed the broadcast with practical guidance for a county she said was fielding reports from polling places all day. Her first instruction was restraint: if you see something you believe is wrong, "don't create arguments at the polling places" — document it, write it down, and send it in for an affidavit. The show, she said, had already collected more than 50. Poll workers have a job to do, and voters shouldn't let a dispute deter them: "Go vote, go vote, go vote. Don't let them discriminate against you."
She walked through the express drop-off option for anyone holding a mail ballot at home. Fill it out, sign it, bring your ID, and turn it in — no need to wait in the full in-person line, and no mailing it at this late stage. Once a ballot is turned in and the voter is marked off, she added, the party's canvassers can stop calling and knocking: "We are out there knocking thousands of doors. We are committed." She reminded listeners of a congressional seat to defend in November — Representative Juan Ciscomani's — and previewed the next morning's show, a recap of the president's speech with election analyst Seth Keshel.
"We have to preserve and protect our elections," Winn said, sending listeners into the final weekend before Tuesday's primary. "Stay safe, stay dry — and go vote."