Guests - Alex Kolodin, Dan Butierez, Eileen Wilson, Michael Letts, Jeff Rhodes
Alex Kolodin: Closing Argument for Secretary of State
Alex Kolodin, state senator and candidate for Arizona Secretary of State, used his segment as what Winn called a closing argument — a final direct appeal to voters as early ballots arrive in mailboxes across the state. Kolodin opened with a three-point summary of his case: a track record of suing Arizona's current Secretary of State Adrian Fontes in the Arizona Supreme Court, in federal court, and in the Ninth Circuit, winning each time; successfully maneuvering bipartisan election-security legislation through a divided state government — getting Governor Katie Hobbs to sign it despite multiple prior vetoes — by building and applying leverage; and delivering Arizona's SAVE Act, his own bill, passed by the legislature and now headed to the November ballot as a citizen referendum after D.C. failed to pass equivalent federal legislation. "I've never phoned it in in my life," Kolodin said, describing himself unapologetically as "an obsessive, myopic lawyer" — exactly what he argued Arizona's election system needs right now.
The show's technical difficulties gave Kolodin and Winn an impromptu opportunity to sharpen their critique of Fontes before he reconnected. Winn had obtained an internal Tucson Police Department memo from a whistleblower, issued the day after testimony concluded in her federal court case over uniformed voting rights, directing officers to notify supervisors 24 hours in advance before voting and to store their duty weapons before entering a polling location. She was direct about the operational absurdity. "Do you as a police officer know what your day is gonna be like?" she asked, describing the nature of patrol work — where emergencies are unpredictable, breaks are seized opportunistically, and no officer can commit to a 24-hour-advance timeline for something as routine as voting. Marana, Oro Valley, and the Sahuarita departments had issued no comparable directive. Only Tucson.
When Kolodin returned, he connected the memo to a broader pattern. "Remember the Pima County recorder is his protege — she's the person who hired him after he got fired by the voters of Maricopa County to be her second-in-command," Kolodin said of Fontes, arguing that the Tucson directive and the Secretary of State's court posture are coordinated. His articulation of the intended effect was clinical: officers on a beat cannot simply leave the public unprotected for the duration of changing clothes, traveling to a poll, voting, and changing back. The predictable outcome, he said, is that officers won't vote at all. "That's exactly the intended effect. He doesn't want our law enforcement to vote because he knows they're probably not going to be voting for him."
Kolodin went further on the legal architecture, pointing out that the Arizona Secretary of State's authority is strictly bounded by what the legislature has explicitly authorized. Unlike the legislature, which can act on anything the Constitution doesn't forbid, the executive branch can only act where law affirmatively grants it power. "Nowhere did the Arizona State Legislature ever give the Secretary of State the ability to regulate anything about firearms," Kolodin said. "It's not within his wheelhouse." He recounted a direct exchange with Fontes on a separate matter in which the Secretary of State told him, essentially, that he could do whatever wasn't explicitly prohibited. Kolodin's response: that is not how executive authority works, and it is precisely the mindset that continues to land Fontes in court — and losing.
He also flagged a constitutional problem with the 75-foot protest-distance provision at the center of Winn's lawsuit: because the restriction contains no clear standard beyond an arbitrary numerical line, anyone protesting at 76 feet could theoretically face arrest based on an election official's subjective noise assessment, violating due process requirements that laws must clearly delineate what is and is not permitted. "The due process clause demands that the law be clear as to what's permitted and what's forbidden," Kolodin said, arguing that the rule would also fall disproportionately on left-leaning protest groups in Pima County rather than Republicans — a dynamic he said Fontes hasn't thought through. "He can do whatever he wants unless somebody goes through all the trouble to go to the court to stop him. That's the way he thinks."
Kolodin's closing appeal: if you're not an election-day voter, get your mail ballot in immediately. Turnout in the Republican primary, he said, is being watched nationally as a signal of whether Arizona Republicans are ready to fight for the state. "People across the country are going to be looking at the turnout for Republicans in Arizona to decide whether they want to invest in helping us take back our state." Listeners can support his campaign at AlexForAZ.com.
Daniel Gutierrez: CD7, Adelita Grijalva, and the Civics Gap
Daniel Gutierrez, the Republican candidate for Arizona's 7th Congressional District, joined the show to address a question he said has been flooding his inbox: why isn't his name on people's ballots? The answer, he explained, is civics. Democrats and Republicans each vote in their own party's primary; Gutierrez's name appears only on Republican ballots, and CD7's Democratic primary is a separate contest. Independents may request either ballot. His opponent — Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva — runs unopposed in her primary, while the competitive race between the two won't appear until the November general election.
Gutierrez pushed back against the narrative that CD7's demographics make it unwinnable for a Republican, or that last year's New York socialist wave has any bearing on southern Arizona. "I was born and raised in CD7. I'm Hispanic. My family are all Hispanic, and I can tell you southern Arizona is not the same as New York City." He noted that many of his own constituents — Democrats and Hispanics among them — have been approaching him upset about misinformation they've been fed about ICE enforcement, and said he's been consistent in correcting the record: "ICE is nothing — they're law enforcement. They're doing what Congress asked them to do. If you want to protest somebody, go protest Congress, not the officers." He pointed out that the only difference between the previous administration and the current one, in terms of what ICE actually does, is the direction of travel: before, people were being brought in from the border to detention centers and released into the country; now they're being brought from inside the country back to detention centers for removal.
Gutierrez reserved particular criticism for Grijalva's pattern of selective engagement: attending anti-law enforcement events and supporting ICE detainees while skipping the State of the Union when President Trump addressed Congress. He argued CD7 — the fourth-largest congressional district in the country by geography, home to a Marine Corps base and a large veteran population — deserves a representative willing to show up for all of it, not just the parts that align with a progressive activist base. "You don't get to represent just the people that think like you," he said.
He closed by reminding voters that while his name won't appear on the primary ballot, Republican voters in CD7 still have an obligation to turn out — every other race on the ballot is live — and that a strong Republican showing in the primary signals to the general electorate that the race is competitive. Gutierrez's campaign website is ButtierezForCongress.com — spelled D-U-T-I-E-R-E-Z, he noted: "just like Gutierrez except with a B and one R. B for better."
Eileen Wilson: The Fourth of July Gala and Green Valley's Ground Game
Eileen Wilson, who chairs the Pima County Republicans' ground operation in Green Valley, joined the show to share details of the upcoming Fourth of July Gala and provide a ground-level update on Republican voter outreach. The event is being held at Star Pass, starting at 7 p.m. on July 4th, with open seating still available through PimaGOP.org. Wilson described the evening's programming: a reading of the Declaration of Independence moderated by Charles Heller, with 26 guests drawn from the crowd to each read a section; a pin-the-tail-on-the-jackass board featuring well-chosen photos of current political figures; and food, drinks, and a celebratory atmosphere leading into the sunset and fireworks.
On the ground campaign, Wilson reported that Pima County Republicans in Green Valley have knocked more than 5,000 doors in the lead-up to the primary, working out of a Republican office at the Continental and La Cañada shopping center. She noted the office has become a resource hub — not only for Green Valley residents but for Republicans from across southern Arizona who are stopping in to review candidate materials and get help with their ballots before returning them. "I see a lot of people looking at their ballots, wanting to be educated," Wilson said.
Wilson flagged a specific operational frustration: the county reduced polling locations in the district from 13 to just 3, with no mobile voting center scheduled to visit Green Valley despite the community's historically high turnout — 85 to 87 percent among Republicans in some recent cycles. Wilson found the absence pointed, drawing a contrast between officials who claim Green Valley is too dangerous for officers to vote armed but don't find it dangerous enough to warrant enhanced voting access. "It's highly suspicious — I don't believe in coincidences," she said. Her practical response: she's running a driver service for voters who show up at no-longer-operational poll sites and need transportation to an active one. A pre-celebration open house with Charles Heller and a backyard grill-out is also planned Thursday at the Green Valley Republican office, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., open to all with no reservation required. Wilson's direct contact for event logistics and ballot assistance is 520-940-0709.
Michael Letts: Team Takeover, Terror Intel, and the Five-Step Plan to Disarm America
Michael Letts, CEO of InVest USA, U.S. Army veteran, and nationally recognized law enforcement and public safety expert, returned to the show to address the Second Amendment dimensions of the day's unfolding legal and political stories. Letts used his segment to lay out what he described as a five-step strategy being actively pursued to neutralize law enforcement and erode the Second Amendment — not as speculation, but as a framework he said is visible in real-time policy decisions and which he tracks through intelligence operations in his professional capacity.
Step one, he said, is the public-opinion campaign: defund the police, Black Lives Matter, anti-ICE sentiment, and Antifa operations, all designed to turn public perception against the people charged with enforcing order. Step two: once sentiment is poisoned, cut funding. Don't defund — that's too visible — but systematically underfund, removing equipment and resources while preserving the appearance of support. Step three: regulatory strangulation. Change policies to make the job functionally impossible. Letts cited the specific example of restricting officers to only one hand in a use-of-force situation as a literal instantiation of this principle — making it legally safer to do nothing than to act. Step four: firearms restrictions, the subject of the day's most urgent discussion. Step five, left mostly unstated: once those four are in place, the government moves in as the solution to the crime wave the prior four steps created. "They're already on record as saying this," Letts said, describing the endpoint as door-to-door firearm confiscation followed by the elimination of any means for citizens to resist. He cited Chicago — with its extreme gun restrictions and persistent violent crime — as the proof of concept already running in plain sight.
On the immediate tactical threat, Letts disclosed what he described as active intelligence intercepts showing foreign entities embedding themselves within the "team takeover" movement — domestic social media-organized mall riot flash mobs that have grown in frequency — and recruiting participants into actual terrorism planning. "We have foreign entities contacting them and saying look, hey, you want to go to the mall, that's great, but you want to really make an impact? We're planning a terrorist attack. We need some help. You care to join us?" He said this is not conjecture but active intelligence being tracked and passed to appropriate authorities. He added a specific warning about the Fourth of July: Iran's calendar marks July 4th as the start of a mourning period tied to the death of the Ayatollah, and he noted significant increased chatter involving sleeper cells already inside the country. His public safety advice for the holiday: carry your firearm if you are legally permitted to do so, stay situationally aware, and take your family to a shooting range as a preparation and normalization exercise rather than treating self-defense as something that only happens to other people.
Letts connected the uniformed voter litigation directly to his broader strategic framework, arguing that every incremental restriction on armed law enforcement and military personnel in public settings is a tile in the same mosaic. He credited Winn's federal court fight as a nationally significant action, noting he had contacts working behind the scenes at the UFC event where the foiled drone-sniper plot was uncovered. He cited 23 conspirators in that plot with seven arrests completed so far — calling it "a well-coordinated attack on American soil" and "the tip of the iceberg." On President Trump's assassination attempts, both Letts and Winn noted the public has been told of at least five, while suggesting the actual number is higher. "You won't have a place to go to work and you won't have a place to live if America falls," Letts said, framing active civic engagement — not just voting but pressuring Congress and the White House to hold people accountable — as the non-negotiable baseline response.
He closed with a pointed observation about Zohran Mamdani: that his 2025 New York City mayoral campaign was run by the same political operatives who ran Barack Obama's campaign, with outside money flowing in from entities that should trigger federal campaign-finance scrutiny. "He should be in jail," Letts said, "not behind the podium of the mayorship."
Jeff Rhodes: The Write-In Case for Pima County Supervisor District 5
Jeff Rhodes, the write-in candidate for Pima County Board of Supervisors District 5, joined the show in the final segment to make his case to district voters ahead of a primary in which every vote will require not just a filled-in bubble but a correctly hand-spelled name. Rhodes — R-H-O-D-E-S — is running for the seat vacated when Adelita Grijalva resigned to run for Congress. Her replacement, Andrés Cano, was appointed rather than elected, meaning the seat is up for a special election in November. But qualifying that write-in path requires signatures from registered Republicans in the district, and Rhodes confirmed that effort is actively underway through social media outreach, door-knocking, and coordination across the four legislative districts — LD16, LD18, LD20, LD21, and LD23 — that overlap with Supervisory District 5.
Rhodes made no bones about what's driving his candidacy. He said he's been personally assaulted twice — both incidents involving weapons — and in both cases the Pima County Attorney's office declined to prosecute after police took reports and referred the cases. "Now if that's happening to me, it's happening to other people too," he said, and framed prosecutorial accountability as the single most concrete lever for reducing crime in the county. "When we start prosecuting crimes, you'll start seeing crime go down." He described the county government's current spending priorities as structurally inverted: too many people in high-paying administrative positions, not enough delivering actual services, and a tendency to label every new expenditure as compassion in order to insulate it from scrutiny. He was particularly pointed on the county's $250 million affordable housing initiative — calling it a project where individual one-bedroom units would cost more than his own four-bedroom house — and argued that the same amount of money spread through direct rental assistance would house far more people at far lower overhead, without creating the kind of government-owned housing projects he said produce the crime conditions familiar from Chicago and New York.
Rhodes's campaign priorities distill to three: fiscal responsibility, law and order, and holding county government accountable to the people who elected it. He noted that the district has gone without a contested race for many election cycles — Adelita Grijalva ran uncontested for years — leaving voters without any meaningful voice over who represents them. "The people I'm talking to are really enthused about having somebody run against all that," Rhodes said. He acknowledged that even a successful write-in campaign won't give Republicans a board majority — Democrats currently hold four of five seats — but argued that a second Republican voice would force motions to receive actual seconds before dying in silence, put votes on the public record, and create the kind of accountability that comes only when people know they're being watched. Winn added the pointed geographic detail: Adelita Grijalva now lives in a heavily Republican neighborhood within District 5, no longer representing the constituents whose seat she vacated — a fact that, in Winn's telling, the representative does not appear to dwell on. "It's not Mr. Rogers' neighborhood," Rhodes said. "It's Mr. Rhodes' neighborhood."
For voters in Supervisor District 5: write in Jeff Rhodes, fill in the bubble, and get it right. His website is RhodesForDistrict5.com — R-H-O-D-E-S-F-O-R-District-5.com — and he is also on Facebook at RhodesForDistrict5.