Guest Host - Dave Smith; Guests - Kathleen Winn, Betsy Smith, Jeff Rhodes
Breaking: A Federal Court Victory for Uniformed Voters
The show opened not with its regular host but with the news that pulled her off her planned day of rest. Kathleen Winn called in from what was supposed to be a family celebration to announce that the Oversight Project had secured a preliminary injunction in federal court — a ruling by Judge Michael Liburdi blocking Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and Attorney General Kris Mayes from enforcing a provision of Arizona's Elections Procedures Manual that would have allowed election officials to remove or contact law enforcement officers and military personnel simply because their uniform or official-looking attire was deemed intimidating to other voters.
"Yesterday the Oversight Project secured our victory for law enforcement and military voters in Arizona," Winn said, noting it wasn't a complete win — the electioneering distance provision the lawsuit also challenged was not addressed in their favor — but that the core of what she and her legal team had been fighting for was now protected by court order. Jeff Clark, who represented Donald Trump in prior legal proceedings, served as the lead attorney alongside Neil Cornett. Dave Smith, filling in for Winn as guest host while she celebrated her husband Al's 80th birthday, was himself a named witness in the case — one of several hats he'd worn in service of the same fight.
The Tucson Police Department's internal memo — issued the day after testimony concluded, directing officers to give 24 hours notice before voting and to store their duty weapons before entering a polling place — was the most vivid illustration of exactly why the lawsuit was necessary. "Only in Tucson would they have a police officer in uniform take their weapon off and store it," Smith said. "Why would you tie a police officer's hands behind his back when he or she is on duty?" The memo's operational absurdity was not lost on law enforcement contacts across the country, who reacted with uniform disbelief when Smith circulated it. The legal framework supporting the injunction was equally clear: Arizona Revised Statutes Title 13, Chapter 4 — the justification statutes — grants law enforcement officers the right to use the full spectrum of authorized force, including deadly force via their firearm. A policy requiring disarmament before voting severs the officer from the very equipment their legal authority to act depends on.
Smith's testimony on the stand had included a pointed exchange with the state's attorney, who asked whether Smith would feel reassured to know the Secretary of State actually wants law enforcement officers to vote. "I said to the judge: I'd like to see that in writing," Smith recounted. "Because what's in writing gives others the right to deny that person the vote." The Elections Procedures Manual is that writing. And under the now-enjoined provision, any poll worker who subjectively concluded a uniform was intimidating had the authority to act. "The Arizona Secretary of State's office — in their own document — gave those workers the right to say, you can't vote," Smith said. "And they know statistically that military and law enforcement vote 65% Republican. So they're willing to give up that little 35% because they figure they can make it up elsewhere."
Winn's parting message before returning to her family: any law enforcement officer or military member should now vote in uniform without hesitation. The court has spoken. "You are not disenfranchising other voters. As a matter of fact, most voters are happy to see law enforcement and military. We respect the uniform." The Oversight Project's formal statement was pending publication as she spoke. The fight over the electioneering distance provision will continue.
Dave Smith: Learned Helplessness, Teen Riots, and the Psychology of Entitlement
With Winn off the line, Smith turned to the broader landscape — and to a framework he's spent fifty years building that ties the week's news together into a single diagnosis.
Why Republicans Stay Home
Smith opened with a concept from the University of Pennsylvania's Dr. Martin Seligman, whose foundational work on positive psychology originated in his studies of learned helplessness: the condition that results when a being is shocked repeatedly until it stops trying to escape the shock, and then — even after the shock is removed — remains passive because it has been trained to believe action is futile. "That's what I think so many Americans are today," Smith said. "They've been taught they cannot make a difference."
The political application is direct. When elections produce results that don't seem credible — and Smith cited the anomalies documented by Seth Keshel going back to 2016, accelerating through 2020 — a portion of the electorate concludes the system cannot be moved and stops trying. That passivity is then celebrated by the people who benefit from it. The antidote, Smith argued, is not optimism as a performance but as a decision: to fill out the ballot because it is the only available nonviolent mechanism for change, and to do it regardless of whether the surrounding narrative has convinced you your vote won't count. "You are the only person who's gonna cast your vote. Period. If you don't sit down, open up that envelope, fill it out, you haven't done your part."
He referenced political scientist Ted Robert Gurr — author of Why Men Rebel — whose research on political violence identifies the precise conditions under which populations shift from civic engagement to rebellion: when the legitimate process is no longer perceived as capable of producing meaningful change, and when the gap between what people expect and what they experience becomes large enough that they feel the only recourse is something other than voting. Smith's warning was not a celebration of that possibility but a caution: the conditions Gurr described as prerequisites for revolt are advancing in the American middle class, and the Republican establishment's repeated failure to act decisively on what voters send them to do is a significant part of why.
The Media's Constitutional Failure
Smith took up the First Amendment not as a shield for the press but as a job description it has abandoned. The founders protected a free press because they expected it to question power, not to amplify it. What mainstream media now does — issuing no meaningful follow-up questions, accepting activist politicians' claims without challenge, and amplifying a carefully curated emotional narrative — is, in his reading, constitutionally inverted. It is the behavior of propagandists, not journalists. "They not only deny us what's happening, they create a populace that has misconceptions or outright lies." The consequence is a feedback loop in which misinformed voters make decisions based on narratives that bear no relationship to the data, the budget figures, or the service-delivery failures visible to anyone who actually pays attention to local government.
TUSD, he noted as a local case study, has a 40-plus percent absentee rate — four out of ten enrolled students don't show up to school — while Arizona ranks 47th or lower nationally in educational outcomes despite spending more per student than most other states. That story gets no coverage in local media. The Board of Supervisors' decisions to assist 517,000 illegal immigrants with housing, food, and transportation in a county of one million residents gets no sustained scrutiny. The city council's self-awarded pay raise for what Smith characterized as extraordinary incompetence generates no accountability journalism. The Tucson free bus system, which functions primarily as a mobile platform for drug dealing and shelters those causing harm to other riders and to the surrounding commercial areas, is covered as a compassion initiative rather than an operational catastrophe.
Teen Takeovers Are Riots
The summer's wave of "teen takeover" incidents — at beaches, malls, and urban centers across the country — was, for Smith, a naming problem as much as a policing problem. Calling them teen takeovers, he argued, is the same rhetorical move as calling homeless encampments "unhoused communities": it drains urgency from the description and forecloses the kind of clear-eyed response the situation demands. They are riots. They involve organized violence, assaults on law enforcement, looting, and in multiple recent cases, shootings and deaths. Ten young people were killed by other young people over the July 4th weekend alone.
The deeper structural cause, Smith argued, traces to a generation raised without moral formation, without economic purpose, and without consequences. He referenced criminologist John DiIulio's concept of the "super predator" — developed at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1990s when the urban crime rate reached its apex — and the sociological research showing that criminal behavior typically diminishes after age 45, making incarceration a functionally effective intervention even for those who dismiss it as mere warehousing. "The only way to solve criminal behavior is punishment," he said. "I'm sorry. That's just the truth." What cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and now Tucson have built instead is a county attorney infrastructure based on social conflict theory — the Marxist-derived premise that crime is a form of rebellion by people oppressed by unjust systems — which produces prosecutors who see criminals as victims, law enforcement as antagonists, and punishment as the real injustice. "Our county attorney comes from that school of thought," Smith said. "Criminals are not criminals. They are victims of a social construct."
The result is that Tucson residents whose homes are burglarized are told to file an email report because there are no officers available to respond. The officers who are on duty are being dispatched to teen takeover incidents that consume entire shifts, removing them from proactive patrol. And the proactive patrol capacity that once existed — the "hunting for bad guys," as Smith put it, that he and his generation practiced — has been systemically dismantled by a combination of undermanning, legal exposure, and an administrative culture that has made decisive police action a career risk.
The Psychology of Free
Smith devoted a substantial portion of the second hour to what he identified as the core psychological flaw in progressive social policy: the failure to understand what happens to human behavior when something is made an entitlement rather than an exchange.
His framework, drawn from Seligman's positive psychology research, is blunt: when a benefit requires effort or contribution from the recipient — skin in the game, in his phrase — it produces commitment, appreciation, and the kind of ownership that leads to maintenance and improvement. When it is declared an entitlement — something owed rather than earned — the psychological effect is precisely the opposite. The recipient does not feel grateful. They feel that the benefit was withheld too long. They feel that the fact of having to receive it is itself an indignity. "When you take something and say I'm going to give it to you at a discount, you're going to have skin in the game and you're gonna have an emotional commitment to acquire that benefit. But if I translate it to an entitlement, not only does it have no value, the fact that you denied it from me for so long means I'm angry about it."
This is why the free bus system produces riders who abuse the buses and the people around them — not because people are inherently ungrateful but because the system has been designed to produce ingratitude by framing the service as owed rather than provided. It is why free housing programs, in city after city, produce encampments where residents destroy the property, resist services, and generate crime in the surrounding blocks. "The homeless people will not appreciate a free house. The drug addicts and burglars jumping on the bus for a free ride see it as an entitlement. You should have given it to them sooner. It was unfair of you to charge for it in the past."
The political version of this dynamic, Smith argued, is the Democratic Party's systematic cultivation of envy — which he carefully distinguished from jealousy. Jealousy wants what the neighbor has. Envy simply doesn't want the neighbor to have it. "That's the difference: joy at others' suffering, suffering at others' joy. That's envy. And when you listen to the Democrats today, they hate what you have." The board of supervisors' spending record, the city council's fee and tax structure, the budget decisions made by officials who have exempted themselves from the consequences — all of it, in Smith's reading, is the institutional envy machine.
Betsy Brantner Smith: Teen Violence, a Stabbing, and What Parents Need to Hear
Betsy Brantner Smith, national spokesperson for the National Police Association, joined her husband Dave's show briefly between her own media appearances — she was called to the Laura Ingraham show while still on the line — but packed several important observations into the time she had.
On the teen takeover wave, she reinforced the reframing her husband had been making all morning. Raleigh, North Carolina's July 4th incident involved shootings and stabbings, with roughly 24 arrests. Washington, D.C., Florida's Gulf Coast cities, Chicago — the pattern is accelerating geographically and in intensity. "We're seeing them in places where they've never happened before," she said, noting that Florida's response — which does not tolerate the events the way Chicago's mayor does, calling them "teen gatherings" — has so far kept the worst outcomes from repeating there, but the pressure is building. In jurisdictions where law enforcement is given authority to act decisively and early, the events remain manageable. In jurisdictions where officials describe the violence in sanitized language and resist enforcement, they escalate.
The specific case she had just discussed on Newsmax: Samantha Bakers, a 37-year-old mother married to an Army colonel, stabbed to death by her 16 or 17-year-old son. She had a habit of posting critical comments about him on Facebook — not parent of the year, Brantner Smith acknowledged, and a psychologist co-panelist on the Newsmax appearance had leaned into blaming the mother. Brantner Smith's response was measured but firm: bad parenting does not create a right to commit murder. "Just because you don't like your mom doesn't mean you get to stab her to death." The mental health crisis among young people is real and severe. It cannot be addressed by locating moral responsibility anywhere other than with the person who committed the act. A culture that reflexively excuses the perpetrator and interrogates the victim — even a parenting victim, even a complicated domestic situation — is a culture that has lost the capacity to deter the next act of violence.
Jeff Rhodes: A Write-In Candidacy Built on Accountability
Jeff Rhodes, the Republican write-in candidate for Pima County Board of Supervisors District 5, called into the show to make his case to the Friday audience in what may be the final opportunity to reach voters before the July 21st primary closes the write-in qualification window.
Rhodes's pitch was stripped to its essentials. He's been watching Pima County go downhill since he arrived in Tucson in 2012. Crime up. Taxes up. Government unaccountable. A county with a million residents that spent public resources assisting 517,000 illegal immigrants with food, housing, and transportation — while those same resources were unavailable for the county's own working families. "Why didn't they help 517,000 Pima County residents?" he asked. His answer: because the decisions being made at the board are driven by what makes officials look compassionate in front of their political base, not by what actually serves the county's population.
The double-hit property tax mechanism he described — home values rising automatically, generating more revenue, and the board then imposing a rate increase on top of that windfall — illustrated his broader critique precisely. Officials already getting more money from growth chose to extract additional money anyway. "Eventually they're just going to try to own all the property," Rhodes said. "There's no way I would have a tax increase."
The immediate structural value of his potential win is not a board majority — Democrats hold four of the five seats — but the end of Supervisor Steve Christie's isolation. Currently, Christie cannot get a second on any motion he introduces. Nothing goes to a vote. The Democrat supermajority can operate without a recorded vote, without a public debate, without going on the record on anything. A second Republican changes that entirely. "Every motion gets a second. Every action gets a recorded vote. Every tax increase or spending decision becomes publicly attributable." That accountability is the first step. Rhodes also noted that some of the Democratic supervisors — not all of them, but some — might occasionally support a genuinely good idea if it reaches a floor vote, something that's impossible when Christie can't even get a second to bring it there.
Smith connected Rhodes's candidacy to his own experience attending Board of Supervisors meetings and watching Christie fight alone — raising questions about immigration expenses, demanding accountability for where federal pass-through money actually went, pushing back on what he characterized as a county staff that functions more as an activist enterprise than a public administration. "That's the kind of leadership I want," Smith said. "Someone holding the government's feet to the fire. Husbanding our resources."
The mechanics one final time: voters in Supervisor District 5 can confirm their district by checking their voter registration card — BOS district number is printed at the bottom. Any voter in District 5 holding a Republican primary ballot should write in Jeff Rhodes — J-E-F-F R-H-O-D-E-S — and fill in the accompanying bubble. Both steps are required; either alone is insufficient. Independents may request a Republican ballot to participate in the write-in. Roughly 150 valid write-in votes are required to qualify for the November ballot. RhodesForDistrict5.com.
Dave Smith: The FIFA Moment, America's 250th, and Why We Need to Stop Apologizing
Smith used the show's closing segment to argue that the summer of 2026 has produced an unexpected corrective to the anti-American cultural project that has dominated the past decade — and that Republicans are missing it by not talking about it more loudly.
The FIFA World Cup brought hundreds of thousands of international visitors to American cities across the country, and their reaction — documented in a flood of social media posts that went viral globally — was uniform astonishment. Clean stadiums. Abundant food. Enormous diversity of people living and celebrating together without notable incident. Ranch dressing and Buc-ee's jerky becoming subjects of international fascination. Free refills. Grocery stores with a hundred varieties of bread. People of every conceivable national origin and ethnicity, in one place, getting along. "That's what America is," Smith said. "It's that broad spectrum of humanity that's come together in the name of freedom."
The contrast between what international visitors discovered and what American leftist media told them to expect was, in Smith's reading, the most powerful political advertisement for the American way of life that no Republican strategist could have paid for. "The rest of the world approves of America." The mainstream left, confronted with this reaction, has predictably begun amplifying the handful of dissenting voices — the one German who didn't enjoy it, the one French woman who found it too commercial — precisely because the weight of testimony is running in the wrong direction for their narrative.
Smith drew on Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America — written after the French nobleman toured the country in the 1830s — to frame what he sees as the core constitutional question underlying all of it. De Tocqueville warned specifically about the tyranny of the majority: the tendency of democracies to let majority preference override individual rights, producing a form of soft despotism that is no less dangerous for being democratic in its origins. "The Constitution is designed to protect you and me as individuals. Not the majority." The current Democratic push to expand the Supreme Court until it produces preferred outcomes is, in Smith's framing, precisely the tyranny of the majority that de Tocqueville warned America must guard against: not a revolution from outside the system but a corruption from within it, using the language of democracy to dismantle the constitutional constraints democracy was designed to operate within.
Smith's closing argument was simple and direct: the people who came from all over the world to watch soccer this summer, who posted their delight at American grocery stores and American hospitality and American abundance — they saw something that the people who live here have been trained by an ideological media apparatus to be ashamed of. "What this July 4th — the 250th — should have been was a celebration as big as 1976. Instead the media was mostly busy denigrating it." The antidote is not to out-argue the left on their terms but to insist, loudly and repeatedly, on the lived reality: this country is the most remarkable human achievement in history, its poor live better than the wealthy in most of the world, and the people who hate it are doing so on behalf of ideological projects that have failed wherever they've been tried. "You've got to decide you love this country, flaws and all," Smith said. "Because if you don't, you're going to lose it — and that's exactly what they're counting on."