Guests - Dave Smith, Jeff Rhodes, Laurie Moore, Alex Kolodin
Kathleen Winn's Friday opened on breaking news out of a New York federal courtroom and closed on the Arizona ballot, but the week's closing argument was consistent throughout: that a culture willing to lionize a killer is the same culture producing the policies that landed Pima County near the bottom of a national campus-safety ranking — and that the only remedy left is the vote. Four guests carried it: former Pima County Republican chair Dave Smith, supervisor candidate Jeff Rhodes, returning friend of the show Laurie Moore, and Secretary of State nominee Alex Kolodin.
Dave Smith: A Guilty Plea, and the Cult Around a Killer
The news that reordered the morning was Luigi Mangione's guilty plea in federal court to the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, gunned down on a New York street on December 4, 2024. Dave Smith — the former Pima County Republican chair whose recurring segment with Winn runs under the banner "Smith and Winn" — read the plea not as justice but as its avoidance. Because Mangione allocuted and the judge accepted the plea, Smith argued, he sidesteps the ancillary charges, including the terrorism counts, and forecloses a state prosecution that New York's double-jeopardy protections would otherwise have permitted. "This is not justice," he said. "This is just" frustration.
Winn, who listened to the proceeding on her drive in, added the procedural detail: the judge established on the record that Mangione was not under the influence, had consulted his attorneys, and could not later withdraw the plea, and signaled a likely life sentence. Both worried about the door left open. With state charges gone, Smith argued, Mangione becomes "subject to the whims of a future" president's pardon — a risk they tied to the roughly 1,500 people they said were released under President Biden's clemency actions.
The deeper alarm was cultural. Both described a movement treating Mangione as a folk hero — receiving fan mail and admiration — which Smith compared to the lionizing of past figures and called "mental illness at its worst," given that the victim was, in his telling, stalked and shot in the back in "the most cowardly form" of murder. Smith placed it in a pattern he finds ominous: the embrace, on the left, of political violence and of online figures like Hasan Piker, whom he characterized as trafficking in anti-American vitriol while drawing a large audience. His prescription was moral rather than legal: "We've got to start stigmatizing criminality." A civil society, he argued, has to condemn and punish such behavior rather than normalize it — and a media unwilling to do so at "four, six and ten" is, in his view, complicit.
Dave Smith: A National Ranking, and Who Earned It
Smith and Winn turned to a report from the Center for Renewing America's campus-safety tracker, which ranks universities by students' vulnerability to violent crime. The University of Arizona, Winn said, was rated tied with Duke for the worst in the nation — a 17 on a 20-point scale where a higher score is worse.
Winn walked through the report's components as she read them: sanctuary status, a high crime rate, a political climate the study labels anti-enforcement, non-participation in the federal 287(g) program that trains local officers to assist immigration enforcement, a large student population that widens the pool of potential victims, and what the tracker calls a progressive district attorney. Its summary, she said, placed the university in a county that "actively embraces sanctuary policies" alongside a county attorney's office it characterized as among the worst in the nation — naming Laura Conover. She and Smith attributed the ranking to recent local headlines: nine wounded in the downtown shooting, the still-unresolved Nancy Guthrie case, and a U of A student killed by her ex-boyfriend. The report, Winn noted, also cited the conviction of a U of A student working with Mexican cartels to traffic drugs and smuggle people, a high-profile campus rape-and-robbery attempt, and the murder of a community college student on a campus volleyball court.
Both, self-described proud Wildcats, framed it as a self-inflicted wound with real economic consequences — enrollment down roughly 20 percent, businesses near campus suffering, and parents choosing other schools. Smith, drawing on his criminology background, argued campus crime is badly underreported — he put the reported share at around 14 percent — meaning the real picture is worse than the ranking suggests. His broader critique was of a university culture he called captured by dogma and indoctrination, and of a criminal-justice philosophy he traced to "social conflict theory," which he said treats law as an instrument of oppression and, in practice, declines to punish. "Crime that's punished diminishes; crime that's not punished increases," he said. "Tucson is a crime not punished."
Their shared conclusion was electoral. Winn ran through the county's leadership — a sheriff under investigation, a treasurer who had to resign, a county attorney who she said doesn't prosecute, and a mayor she called anti-gun and anti-law-enforcement — and argued the only lever left is the ballot. She credited Republicans for turning out in the primary at their highest rate in years and vowed to keep "beating that drum." She also made it personal: her oldest granddaughter, Michaela Guadalupe, who just turned 16, hopes to attend U of A to become a bilingual teacher — and the report, Winn said, is exactly the kind of thing that now gives a family pause.
Jeff Rhodes: 'The Worst Is Not a Prize'
Jeff Rhodes, the Republican nominee for Pima County Supervisor in District 5, came on to the same report and to his signature fiscal argument. "If being the worst is like a prize, we're winning it hand over fist," he said, noting the campus ranking was the third incident in a month in which someone with a prior criminal history who should have been prosecuted was instead released, followed by a shooting or a killing.
Asked what he could actually do with only a second conservative on a five-member board, Rhodes was specific: force votes. Two members can put a motion on the floor and compel the other supervisors to justify their positions on sanctuary policy in public, rather than blocking discussion. He proposed applying the same pressure to the county attorney through the budget — "if the county attorney is only going to prosecute 40 percent of the crime, I say she gets 40 percent of her budget" — while acknowledging that removing an elected prosecutor requires a recall or the next election.
On Proposition 425, Rhodes was blunt: "425 is a joke." He said the county's own website justifies the measure by explaining it would otherwise be legally limited from spending all the money it raises — which he turned back on its authors. "They're going to raise more money than the law allows them to spend," he said. "If they're raising more money than they're allowed to spend, why do they keep raising taxes?" The county, he argued, is running a surplus off one of the highest tax burdens in the state, and the 1980 expenditure cap is precisely the protection voters should not surrender. His analogy: handing "the keys to your Rolls Royce to your 15-year-old student driver."
Rhodes cited spending he wants to scrutinize — a $7.17 million remodel of the Richard Elías library in Ajo, and office-furnishing expenses by Supervisor Jen Allen. He also raised Supervisor Andrés Cano's purchase of "walking desks," a figure he said he was still researching; after a listener supplied the retail price, both corrected the record on air that such desks run roughly $150 to $450, with Rhodes noting only that county procurement tends to inflate costs. He said public-records requests concerning Cano were being slow-walked.
The sharpest exchange concerned Cano's exit from the legislature. Rhodes said that, according to reporting by the outlet Three Sonorans, Cano resigned under duress amid an ethics complaint alleging bullying and harassment — rather than, as Cano stated, to pursue a master's degree at Harvard — and both Rhodes and Winn said the reporting had been independently verified. Rhodes argued the pattern of "avoiding consequences" runs through the party he opposes, and drew a hard line for his own race: unlike Wisconsin's primary between two candidates on the left, "we have a conservative and we have a" socialist. He pointed listeners to rhodesfordistrict5.com and credited his wife, Vonda, who he said had encouraged him to run for a decade.
Laurie Moore: The Fight Over ESAs, and a Teacher's View of the Culture
Laurie Moore — a friend of the show and a 30-year classroom teacher, calling in from the East Coast — joined to discuss the legal battle over Arizona's Empowerment Scholarship Accounts. An effort is underway, she and Winn said, to knock the ESA-related measure off the ballot, which Winn tied to a turnout calculation: Governor Katie Hobbs, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, and Attorney General Kris Mayes, she argued, don't want a school-choice question drawing Republican voters to the polls. Arizona's program, Winn noted, has grown from about 11,000 to more than 115,000 users.
Moore's broader reflection was cultural, drawn from the classroom. She argued modern abundance — food delivered, no firewood to chop — has left people "a lot of time on our hands" to elevate "touchy-feely" concerns, amplified by technology. She recalled assigning seventh-graders researching electric cars to also price them against a used-car magazine; the students concluded they could buy two used cars for the price of one electric vehicle. "The teacher wasn't real thrilled about that part of their report," she said, "but it was all true." She made the case for practical education — high schoolers mentored in several trades and leaving with both a diploma and job prospects — and for a curriculum that is "wholesome, robust, and really gets them ready for the job market." Winn folded it into her recurring theme: "This is where mom and dad take back the checkbook," refusing to keep paying for a system that isn't delivering. On U of A, Moore agreed with the show's warning: until the campus is made safer, families should think twice.
Alex Kolodin: The Courts, the Polling, and Prop 144
Alex Kolodin — the LD3 representative and Republican nominee for Secretary of State — called in to update the litigation against his opponent, Adrian Fontes, over ballot language. Multiple courts, Kolodin said, have ruled in just the past 10 days that Fontes wrote ballot descriptions "calculated to mislead" voters — omitting or mischaracterizing material provisions of measures the legislature referred to the ballot, including the girls'-sports measure and a measure protecting military families' benefits. Fontes is appealing to the Arizona Supreme Court, an outcome Kolodin doubts will favor him.
The core problem, Kolodin argued, is that Fontes "is essentially writing the language that goes on your ballot as advocacy against the measures" — something he said no prior secretary of state has done. On Kolodin's own measure, which he said would speed up election results, he charged that Fontes entirely omitted its central provision: that a person must be a citizen to register to vote and that non-citizen votes cannot be counted. If Fontes wants to argue against a measure, Kolodin said, an op-ed is his right; the neutral ballot summary, discharged as an official duty on behalf of all voters, is not.
The number that closed the segment came from an unlikely source. A pro-Fontes group, Kolodin said, released a poll that morning using Fontes's own skewed ballot language and a sample that leaned toward Kamala Harris voters by a point in a state Trump carried by six — and even so, the citizenship measure passed by double digits. That measure, both confirmed, is Proposition 144. "We as a state are the first people to be able to pass this SAVE Act," Winn said, framing it as a chance to turn Arizona's elections "from being a national embarrassment to being a national model." Kolodin credited the collaborative work in Pima County — restoring lawful observers to early-voting locations and protecting police officers' right to vote — with rebuilding voter confidence, and praised the county's reversed turnout trend, citing Green Valley's roughly 50 percent primary turnout despite its polling places being cut from 13 to three.
Winn closed the week where she always does — on the stakes and the ask. She named the down-ballot socialism she sees in Adelita Grijalva, JoAnna Mendoza, and Mayor Regina Romero, and pointed to the District 5 supervisor race as southern Arizona's chance to register dissent, noting the party had re-registered about 50 Democrats that week alone. "Your vote is your voice," she said, "and we have to speak clearly and loudly that we want our state — and we want to protect it from those who want to break the law and thwart our election system." She sent listeners into the weekend with the reminder that the hundred-day window to November 3rd is the whole game.