Guest Host - Dave Smith, Guest - Bob Dohse
Good News the Media Won't Celebrate, and the Radical Playbook They Don't Want You to Read
Dave Smith, Guest Host, Winn Tucson | KVOI 1030
A Friday Morning the Media Didn't Predict
The Strait of Hormuz is open. Oil prices have dropped from over $100 a barrel to around $83. The stock market is surging — the NASDAQ is dramatically up. Iran has signaled a desire for peace, a development the press was certain would never come.
"The world's not ending," said guest host Dave Smith, filling in for Kathleen Winn on Winn Tucson. "Trump isn't an idiot. Biden's still a vegetable, and everything in the world is actually looking pretty good. I don't know how to explain it, other than maybe what you've been told are lies."
That framing — the gap between what the media predicted and what is actually happening — ran as the central thread of Friday's show. For Smith, the positive headlines aren't just good news. They're evidence of a years-long pattern of deliberate misdirection, one with an identifiable playbook and identifiable architects.
The Open Border Was Never an Accident
Before the show's guest joined, Smith spent considerable time laying out what he believes was the strategic purpose behind four years of open southern border policy. His argument was blunt: the goal was demographic and electoral.
"To undermine our nation, to reestablish a whole new demos," he said. "For the democracy part of our government, they want to have a whole new voting block. And it was a great idea because if you're going to ignore the rule of law, it's going to work pretty well."
Smith recalled being labeled a conspiracy theorist for making exactly these predictions. Critics assured the public that illegal border crossers would not receive welfare, driver's licenses, or access to the ballot. The reality, he argued, was the opposite.
"They were hypnotizing their people," he said. "We weren't under their spell, and we were like, no, that's not right. And so what do they do? They demonize."
He was equally pointed about the nature of immigration enforcement. When Democrat-aligned local officials attempt to obstruct ICE operations, Smith sees a fundamental misunderstanding — or deliberate manipulation — of jurisdictional authority. "The federal government still is the supreme ruler when they come in," he said. "Not you folks here in our county board of supervisors."
His critique of local government extended to Tucson specifically, where he said partisan city elections have allowed the left to hold power while hiding what they actually believe. "These people truly never tell you what they believe. They'll allow themselves to be labeled a little bit. But they don't tell us — what was the intent of open borders for four years? Can anybody tell me?"
Saul Alinsky's Thirteen Rules — and How to See Them Live
The most substantive portion of the first hour was Smith's extended breakdown of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, which he argued remains the operational manual of the modern left — even if most Americans have never read it.
"Whenever possible, go outside your enemy's expertise," Smith said, walking through each rule and identifying its live expression in today's political media. "The left is all emotion. We use reason. And here's number four: always make your enemy live up to their own book of rules. They use the Bible against us. They use the Constitution against us. Because they say, 'That's your book of rules.' Yes it is, folks. And never deny it — explain it."
He walked through all thirteen rules:
Rule 1 — Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have. "The left is constantly talking as if they have some influence," Smith observed. "In the Senate, they bombast constantly, talk as if they're the ones actually in charge." He cited Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as a living example.
Rule 2 — Never go outside the expertise of your people. The application here, he argued, is the left's mastery of emotional language. "One of the problems Republicans don't understand is we talk policy, we talk data, we talk numbers. You've got to talk emotion. They tested the word 'affordability' with focus groups. Out goes the word to everyone — because it works."
Rule 3 — Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of your enemy. "We can't feel like they feel because they're all emotion. We use reason. They go outside that expertise by calling us troglodytes, cavemen, people who don't care."
Rule 4 — Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. A tactic used constantly. "They use the Constitution against us. They use the Bible against us. Learn it. Find out what the Bible says, what the Constitution says, what freedom is about."
Rule 5 — Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. This one, Smith said, cuts deeply. "The left hides their ridicule in a news bundle. They hide it in a commentary by a quote expert. That's so important to them." He cited late-night television as a delivery system — not for comedy, but for systematic mockery. "When you watch Jimmy Kimmel, that's all it is. It's just ridicule. It's mean, nasty stuff. But it's all emotional." He contrasted this with Greg Gutfeld's show, which draws larger audiences than most cable news networks combined, precisely because it converts ridicule into actual humor.
Rule 6 — A good tactic is one your people enjoy. "They look at X, Instagram, TikTok — instant feedback on how a tactic is landing. If people enjoy it, they keep it up. This is why the meme war is going to be so powerful this election cycle."
Rule 7 — A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. The left constantly churns — new crises, new targets, new outrages. "They realize they have to constantly rotate who they attack, how they attack. They love asking: who's going to be the next George Floyd? Who's the next crisis?"
Rule 8 — Keep the pressure on; never let up. "Even if they're doing a compromise with a Republican, the left has to criticize, judge, ridicule, and denigrate. The pressure never lets up."
Rule 9 — The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself. "Schumer and Elizabeth Warren extrapolate these horrific ends. Trump's going to put people in camps. Trump's never said anything about concentration camps. The only government that ever put people in a concentration camp in this country was the Democrats."
Rule 10 — Maintain constant pressure on the opposition. "If the Democrats make a compromise, they always wrap it in coercion or tragedy. This is why we get Senate leadership that won't pull the trigger on things we need done."
Rule 11 — If you push a negative hard enough, it will break through into its counter side. This one the left hasn't fully mastered, Smith noted. "They get a bone and chew it till it's gone. Once it gets to the counter side — when the Me Too movement became a weapon that could turn back on them — it gets interesting."
Rule 12 — The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. "It's easy to criticize. It's really hard to bring up a good solution. This is something the left has not done well."
Rule 13 — Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. "Think about this during the upcoming news cycle. Watch how they personalize every issue. Watch how they freeze an individual as the symbol of everything wrong."
Smith urged listeners to look up the rules themselves — using AI tools if necessary — and apply them as a filter when consuming news. "Propaganda isn't just what they tell you. It's what they don't tell you."
The Unpersoning of Inconvenient History
Smith spent time on what he called "unpersoning" — not mere discrediting of a person or idea, but the act of erasing someone from history entirely.
His primary example was César Chávez, the labor activist who once had a Tucson day in his honor. "He's now being unpersoned by the left," Smith explained. "His longtime partner, Dolores Huerta, is now being repositioned as his victim — even though she had two of his children and was his partner for decades. He just… never existed. History is quickly being rewritten."
The value of this tactic, he explained, is ideological convenience. "You don't have to explain why you loved a guy if he never existed. You don't have to explain how you accidentally revered him, built statues about him, if he just never was."
He drew a parallel to Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell, whose ethical controversies — long known to the media, he argued — have now made him politically radioactive. "The media knew. The other politicians knew. Everybody knew. But everybody pretended it didn't exist. And now he's been vaporized in the political world. He never will have been."
Emotion, Reason, and Winning Elections
One of Smith's recurring themes was the Republican Party's persistent failure to understand how people actually make decisions. Drawing on cognitive psychology and referencing Scott Adams' book Win Bigly, he argued that most voters make choices based on emotion first.
"People vote with their emotion. Trump's intuitive ability to use emotion is one of the key reasons he's won. Republicans have still never fully learned that."
This doesn't mean abandoning reason. It means packaging reason inside emotional context. "Yes, we're right and the Democrats are wrong on borders. But tell people: your grandchildren will thank you. They will live safely. They will be able to play in parks again. They won't be afraid on college campuses. Add the emotional component."
He applied the same logic to candidate support: "I tell people — look, if you like a candidate, put the sign in your yard. Don't tell me your HOA won't let you. By law, your HOA cannot stop you from putting a sign in your yard within a certain number of days of an election."
And to the broader two-party reality: "You can be angry at the Republican Party. But when election time comes, if you don't give them the consolidation of power they need, you have no power. That's rational."
Bob Dohse: From West Africa to West Tucson
The second hour brought in the show's guest: Master Sergeant Bob Dohse (U.S. Air Force, retired), who is currently running for the Arizona State Legislature in LD-18.
Dohse's biography is not that of a typical politician. He enlisted in the Air Force in 1976, trained as an aircraft mechanic, and quickly distinguished himself in logistics — helping engineer what he described as the best operational readiness inspection in the history of Tactical Air Command. His method involved an unconventional approach to an IBM 370 mainframe.
"I hacked the IBM 370 with keypunch cards to make things work the way the maintenance complex wanted it to work," he said with understated matter-of-factness. "And I got caught — back when it wasn't illegal to hack. So I was persona non grata and got traded essentially to the Defense Intelligence Agency for a few years until the dust settled."
That reassignment sent him to West Africa, where as the only enlisted man among military attachés, his role was to move among common people — the laborers, the street-level workers, the "peons," as he put it — gathering the kind of ground-truth information officers couldn't access.
From Africa, he moved into Air Force Special Operations. After retirement, he turned to Christian humanitarian work in conflict zones: running a refugee camp in Albania for Kosovan refugees, helping rebuild Kosovo, working in Turkey, Iraq, and Afghanistan. His specialty was community development — helping people from opposing sides build functional societies together.
"As a Christian working in Muslim communities, I had to figure out how to communicate without compromising my values," he said. "A lot of that was helping people merge differences and not kill each other."
Smith drew the obvious comparison: "So you moved to a new conflict zone here."
Dohse laughed — and agreed.
What Tyranny Actually Requires
Dohse's most pointed contribution to the broadcast was a structural analysis of how authoritarian systems sustain themselves. He wasn't theorizing. He had observed it from the inside, in multiple countries, across multiple decades.
"It doesn't matter what you call it — dictatorship, communism, military rule," he said. "If you're trying to oppress people, there are a few things you have to have. You have to have laws you don't enforce equally, so you can beat your enemies with enforcement while giving your friends a pass. You have to have secret police. And you have to have your neighbors turning on each other — people paid to report on dissent."
He paused, then connected the thread to the present. "You create a system that supports tyranny. And if you don't have any of those components, you can't maintain it, because the people will rebel."
The parallel to what he sees happening in U.S. political institutions was not left implicit. The selective enforcement of law, the use of government agencies as weapons against political opponents, the social pressure to conform — these were not abstractions to someone who had watched the same machinery operate under different flags in different countries.
"There's really only two ways to go," he said. "One is transparency and openness. The other is lies and sleight of hand."
The Republican Strategic Blindspot
Both Smith and Dohse returned repeatedly to what they see as the Republican Party's most self-destructive habit: mistaking tactics for strategy.
Dohse recalled a 2024 Arizona Republican Party state meeting where he stood up and asked leadership to focus on election strategy for the upcoming cycle. The response was telling.
"We were busy talking about bylaws," Smith said. "Process was eating up the goals of the organization. When Bob asked us to develop a strategy, the chair never forgave him for it."
Dohse framed it in military terms he knew well from Special Operations: "Pearl Harbor was tactically brilliant. Strategically catastrophic. The Japanese executed a beautiful battle and lost the war. You have to win the war. That's strategy. Winning a battle is just a tactic."
He praised election analyst Seth Keschel — husband of LD-17 legislator Rachel Keschel — for applying this kind of rigorous, data-driven strategic thinking to Arizona politics. Keschel's book, The American War on Election Corruption: The Crusade to Restore Trust in Voting, was recommended by both men without reservation.
"Seth is an analyst who says: here are the facts. You may not like me or my presentation, but here are the facts, here's the voter registration data, here's what it says. Now let's analyze it and come up with opinions — but let's start with the same facts."
The book features a foreword by Newt Gingrich, who also recorded his section of the audiobook. It's available on Amazon in hardcover, paperback, and audio.
What the 2026 Election Actually Means
Dohse spent the closing portion of the broadcast making the case for why the 2026 election cycle in Arizona is among the most consequential in a generation — and why it's not abstract.
"In 2030, we have a census," he said. "That gets implemented in the 2032 elections. In 2028, we need a Republican president who says illegal aliens shouldn't be counted in the census because they shouldn't be here. But before we get there — 2026 is the election for governor, attorney general, secretary of state. All the people who run the state and enforce the laws our elected legislators create."
Arizona, he noted, has no "off years." In odd-numbered years, city elections for mayor and city council take place. In even-numbered years, state and federal races. "In Tucson, we have no years off. So there's never an excuse to stay home."
The strategic picture he painted was sobering. Republicans currently hold no statewide office in Arizona besides the legislature. Rachel Keschel is the only Republican elected official at the state level in Pima County. The governor vetoes Republican bills routinely. The board of supervisors, with the exception of Steve Christie, operates with what Dohse described as a socialist-leaning majority.
"Steve Christie can't even get a second on some of his motions," he said. "We spend more money on taking care of the homeless than on taking care of our police. And those are choices — deliberate choices."
Smith pointed to the concrete consequences. He called 911 for a trespasser who wouldn't leave his property — a solicitor who ignored a no-soliciting sign and stayed at the door for an extended period. He was on hold for ten minutes. When he finally reached an operator, the response was that he was no longer in immediate danger.
"When I was a city cop here, we were so proud of our two-and-a-half-minute response time," he said. "We were one of the top agencies in the nation. And now you're ten minutes on hold. What kind of policing is that?"
Dohse connected the policing issue to a broader principle he had seen hold true in every country he'd worked in — from Kosovo to Afghanistan to southern Arizona.
"The number one thing for any development — economic or otherwise — is security," he said. "If you don't have security, nobody has confidence in whatever they invest. They won't invest time or energy or money if they don't believe it'll be returned to them tomorrow. Make people feel secure. That is job one for city government, period."
The comparison between Marana and Tucson made this tangible. Marana, he noted, explicitly built its economic development strategy around lower taxes and better services than neighboring Tucson. The results speak for themselves: Marana is growing. Tucson, in places, is deteriorating.
"You drive down the road to the city of Tucson and it's like — oh my God, what happened? It starts to feel like the worst parts of Detroit during Detroit's worst years."
Rachel Keschel and the Case for Supporting Your Own
Before closing, Dohse made a personal case for LD-17 Representative Rachel Keschel, with whom he has collaborated across legislative district lines.
"When I first met Rachel, the first political thing she talked about was CPS — foster care, adoptions, child welfare," he said. "She had adopted three foster kids herself, plus two biological children. She walked the walk."
Keschel has focused her legislative work on child protective services reform — specifically pushing Arizona toward a model where government assists families in crisis rather than removing children into a system that can itself become harmful. Several of her bills have been bipartisan, and even Governor Katie Hobbs has signed some of them.
"She is the only Republican elected official at the state level in Pima County," Dohse said. "So even if you're not in LD-17, her reelection matters. If I get elected, I want to work with Rachel."
The Southern Arizona Conservative Association will be holding an event at Whiskey Roads — the second Saturday from the time of broadcast, from 1 to 4 p.m. — featuring local candidates including Dohse and Rachel Keschel. Seth Keschel will also be present, and will sign copies of his book for anyone who brings one. The book is available on Amazon.
The Couch or the Fight
Smith closed by asking the question he said is sitting in the back of every listener's mind: why bother?
"Let's talk about why you should get up off the couch and get involved. Why 2026 is so important."
Dohse answered the way he answers most questions — by pointing to the structure underneath the surface, to the forces at work that most people don't notice until they've already done their damage.
"One of the problems the Republican Party has is we think for the immediate," he said. "We don't think for the long term. With good data and an understanding of what it says about the battlefield, you're able to make a good battle plan. Republicans need to be that strategic."
His message to those still weighing whether to get involved was grounded in something he had seen work in Kosovo, in Albania, in Afghanistan, and now in Arizona: communities that are built on values hold. Communities built on division collapse.
"If you're going to divide, you can't build," he said simply.
Kathleen Winn returns Monday, 9 to 11 a.m., on Winn Tucson, KVOI 1030.
Bob Dohse is running for Arizona State Legislature in LD-18. Spell it: D-O-H-S-E. Pronounced "Dohse," like dosey-doe.
Seth Keschel's book, The American War on Election Corruption: The Crusade to Restore Trust in Voting, is available on Amazon in hardcover, paperback, and audio.