Guests - Betsy Smith, Greg Wrightstone, Rodney Glassman, Joel Strabala
The day before Arizona's primary opened with news from 2,400 miles away: an explosion at the Manhattan federal building housing ICE, the FBI, and other federal offices. Kathleen Winn scrapped her planned opening and called the National Police Association's Betsy Brantner Smith, who traced a line from that attack to the rhetoric being used in Pima County's own races. From there, the morning ranged across a downtown Tucson mass shooting, the Canadian smoke drifting over half a continent, the science being invoked to explain it, an Air Force reflagging at Luke, the attorney general's race, and — running underneath all of it — the mechanics of getting a ballot counted before polls close Tuesday night.
Betsy Brantner Smith: The Manhattan Attack and the Anti-ICE Campaign
Betsy Brantner Smith, spokesperson for the National Police Association, joined from an RV somewhere in central Illinois with the details still coming in. The target was the Manhattan federal building, which houses not only ICE offices but the FBI and other federal operations — a building Smith noted some of her media colleagues had been assigned to during their time on the Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Her characterization of the suspect was immediate and unsparing. "I'm going to call him a terrorist," she said, contrasting that with the coverage already forming around him: "People are calling him an activist, and that's kind of his thing. It's New York City, so of course he's an activist." He approached the building armed with flammable liquid and fireworks used to detonate it, with a handgun found nearby and a stack of pre-printed anti-ICE signs. Eyewitnesses described him wheeling a cart containing fireworks and airsoft rifles toward the building before the detonation. Smoke and flames were captured on video and posted online. Police had him in custody quickly. Two minors and three civilians suffered minor injuries; there were no fatalities. The FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force took the suspect, who Smith said has a long history in anti-ICE protests, though authorities had not yet released his identity.
Winn's read was that the planning matters more than the moment. "This was not just some New York tourist who had a bad hair day and decided to go after ICE agents," she said. "This was planned, this was organized — and when they start popping up all over the country, there's a bigger scheme going on."
Smith's central argument was that the anti-ICE campaign is a rebranding. "What the left has done is they have taken this anti-ICE narrative, and all it is is the defund-the-police narrative of 2020 and 2021, now directed onto ICE." She refused to grant the distinction people draw to make it comfortable: "Anyone listening who says, 'Well, I'm pro-law enforcement but I'm anti-ICE' — you're an idiot. I only like cops that wear blue uniforms? Come on, stop it." ICE agents, she said, don't do anything other law enforcement officers don't do, use the same tactics, and are "part of the fabric of American law enforcement."
For the historical counterweight she pointed to Tom Homan, a figure she noted was demonized only recently. Barack Obama, she said, awarded Homan the highest civilian honor available, and ICE under the Obama administration deported far more people than the Trump administration has yet. The difference, in her telling, was political convenience: back then "nobody even paid attention, the media didn't care," and Obama and his Secretary of State warned people not to come illegally — until, as Winn put it, "they realized they needed all these illegals to continue to get elected."
The local stakes were the point of the whole segment. Smith named Adelita Grijalva, JoAnna Mendoza, and Regina Romero, along with the slate running for Marana mayor and town council, as figures who "continue to spew all of these lies about what ICE does — talking about disappearing people, murdering people." That rhetoric, she argued, is what convinces "nuts like this terrorist this morning in Manhattan" to take matters into their own hands. Nor is it hypothetical locally: the FBI is still investigating a shooting at the ICE office in Phoenix, and Smith cited attacks on ICE personnel in Houston and in a small town in Maine within recent weeks. "These activists are trying to murder ICE agents," she said. "It's got to stop." President Trump briefly asked ICE to slow operations, she noted, then reversed himself: "Nope, we're going to keep it going. This is an 80-20 issue. This is what Americans want."
She also flagged the response from New York's mayor. Zohran Mamdani called the incident "deeply disturbing," Smith said, but emphasized that no one was seriously injured and the suspect was in custody. Her observation was procedural: because the suspect is in federal custody rather than facing a far-left Manhattan prosecutor — the sort Winn compared to Pima County's own county attorney — "I think he is going to be in custody for quite some time."
Betsy Brantner Smith: Nine Shot Downtown, and a Police Department Left Short
The reason Winn had reached out that morning was closer to home: a shooting near Empire Pizza in downtown Tucson at roughly 2 a.m. over the weekend that left nine people wounded, with the shooter himself shot by police and hospitalized in critical condition.
Smith described the sequence and the euphemism around it. Two groups got into an argument and one started shooting — "that's generally what we call some sort of gang activity," she said, noting how reluctant local media are to say so. Street gangs, she added, are not a New York or Chicago import: "They've been here in Tucson since my husband was a cop in the '70s," and at certain hours in certain parts of the city, "the gangs ruled." Tucson Police officers on foot patrol downtown heard the gunshots and ran toward them. The fire department responded to nine victims, exposed to real risk of their own, since responders can't know whether more than one shooter is active. An officer, not yet identified, shot the suspect and, both agreed, prevented something far worse.
The complication Smith flagged is that early reports describe the suspect being shot while running from the scene, with the Pima County Sheriff's Department — not TPD — investigating the officer-involved shooting. She expects that framing to be used. "We'll see how that shakes out for the officer," she said. Winn's answer was blunt: "You don't want to let an active shooter continue down the street where he has no remorse or regard for the nine people he just put down. So the fact that he was running away — he should run away into a prison cell, which is where he is now, because they did their job." Investigators are asking anyone with video from Saturday night to contact 88-CRIME and reference the Pima County Sheriff's Department case number, 260719048. Winn expects the footage to vindicate the officers.
Both women predicted the political response before it arrived. "Regina Romero and our governor Katie Hobbs are going to want to talk about how no one should have to deal with gun violence, because it's the fault of the gun," Smith said. Her prediction for the next Board of Supervisors meeting was specific: Jen Allen and her allies will attempt "some sort of resolution" on guns that carries no legislative teeth, while the mayor "runs her mouth about gun violence." Winn's rebuttal was that the laws already exist: "There are state, local and federal laws against shooting people in a pizza place." Neither the Board of Supervisors nor the city, Smith noted, has had much success affecting state or federal gun law in a constitutional-carry state — but that won't stop the attempt.
The staffing problem drew the sharpest analysis. Tucson PD is "woefully understaffed," Smith said, which is why it can't run the preventive patrols that stop this kind of violence in the first place — "and why is TPD short staffed? Because those cops are underpaid and they're tired of working for people who don't particularly support them." She rejected the claim that crime is falling: Tucson is now, statistically, the most dangerous city in Arizona, more dangerous than Phoenix, and the shooting is not a random event but part of a pattern that includes homeless encampments, drugs, and the far-left policies of the mayor, council, and county prosecutor.
That connected directly to Winn's federal court victory on uniformed voting. She and Smith walked through the aftermath: an internal memo went out through a captain — not, they believed, originating with the new chief — instructing officers to notify a supervisor 24 hours in advance and change out of uniform before voting. "Shame on them for leaving us as sitting ducks," Smith said. Winn's point was practical: after a weekend like this one, seeing an armed officer or service member at a polling place makes people feel safer, not disenfranchised. "Tomorrow, if you see someone voting in uniform — military or police — thank them."
Winn allowed that downtown's revival is real and worth protecting, with Grant Krueger preparing to open a restaurant there in coming weeks. But she drew on her Mesa experience for the principle: she once campaigned to shut down all-night massage parlors, arguing "if you need a massage at 2 a.m., you've got bigger problems." The same logic applies here. "You don't need to shoot people at two in the morning either. People need to be held accountable for their actions."
Betsy Brantner Smith: Self-Deportation and the Welfare Question
Smith turned to a policy shift she considers underreported. With temporary protected status revoked for nationals of Syria, Haiti, and other countries, the Department of Homeland Security has begun offering people covered by TPS $2,600 in cash and a plane ticket home to self-deport. The result, she said, is already visible in Springfield, Ohio — the town at the center of a Trump-Biden debate exchange after the Biden administration resettled large numbers of Haitians there. "They are massively self-deporting now," she said, "because they lost their temporary protected status, and so they are no longer getting their Medicaid and their SNAP." Encouraging self-deportation, in her view, is the fastest available lever.
That led to the claim she wanted to correct. "Our leadership in Arizona keeps telling us no illegal aliens are getting any kind of welfare. That's just a lie." People here under TPS, under DACA, or holding green cards do receive public aid, she argued, and Arizonans are paying for it through rising taxes. Her standard was categorical: "If you come to the United States and you want to work, you want to get a green card, you want to work toward citizenship, you should not be on any kind of public aid whatsoever." The reciprocity test she offered was that neither she nor Winn could cross at Nogales into Sonora, walk into a welfare office, and demand benefits. "It's not up to us to support the world."
Betsy Brantner Smith: A Sky Full of Canadian Smoke
Smith was calling from a campground outside Champaign, Illinois, following a Brantner family reunion held at the University of Illinois football stadium where her uncle coached for years. The night before, driving out from her aunt's house, the sky changed. "It was like a curtain went down and you couldn't see the sun as it was setting," she said. The haze looked like fog rolling off a lake but tasted like a campfire; her husband woke coughing.
Her explanation was a management failure, not a climate one. Canada has more than 600 wildfires burning, she said, and "Canada doesn't really fight them, and they don't do much in the way of forest fire mitigation like we do in Arizona." She credited that difference to the Forest Service, and noted it has survived Arizona's own politics: "One of the good things about Arizona is even the Democrats have kept up" the mitigation practices in place since her husband worked a hotshot crew fifty years ago — crews going in between fires to clear brush and fallen branches so that a lightning strike can be fought effectively. Canada, in her telling, mostly lets fires run "because, you know, climate change" — and the prime minister has blamed climate change for the smoke. She cited over 3,500 wildfires with 700 burning out of control, 2.9 million hectares consumed, and Toronto recording the world's worst air quality on July 15. President Trump, she noted, has raised making Canada pay for the damage, and Winn — whose father fought fires while in college near Buffalo — wondered what the border towns must be like right now.
Smith's respect for the people who do this work was personal. Two American hotshots were killed a few weeks ago fighting fires near Colorado, one of them a woman. Her husband once had a tree fall on him and was burned. "We have very robust hotshot crews and smoke jumpers," she said. "It's a very dangerous job."
Betsy Brantner Smith: The DSA Problem, Local and National
The conversation widened into what Smith sees as an ideological drift she encountered firsthand on a recent cruise along Canada's east coast, where she said the conversation never moved off transgender issues, climate change, and indigenous politics.
Nationally, she and Winn tracked the fallout in Maine, where Democrats moved on from Graham Platner and turned the choice over to a large body of delegates. Both read the party's ultimate pick as an implicit admission — the delegates declining to go with the most ideologically extreme option available, which they took as evidence that even Democratic insiders now recognize the electability problem their left flank has created. Winn's assessment was that the correction came far too late: the party spent a year and a half tolerating the radicalism because it was useful against the Trump agenda. "You let this cancer in, and now it's too extreme, it's too radical," she said — pointing to the movement's stated goals of abolishing ICE, the Senate, and the Supreme Court. "You said it out loud."
Locally, Smith's warning was that no one should imagine this is somebody else's problem. She named Jen Allen on the Board of Supervisors, the Democratic slate for Marana town council, Mayor Regina Romero, and Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva as the local face of the same politics. "Don't think it's not here," she said, expressing hope that mainstream Tucson Democrats are waking up and will cross over in November.
Betsy Brantner Smith: CD6, and What a Precinct Committeeman Actually Does
Smith directed listeners to video circulating on her X account and the Pima County GOP's, in which JoAnna Mendoza — running to unseat Congressman Juan Ciscomani in CD6, where both Smith and Winn live — discusses her support for defunding the police. Ciscomani, by contrast, supports law enforcement, including, Smith said, a body of federal legislation the National Police Association backs that he has supported without publicizing it. She framed it in personal terms: he has six small children, "he wants them to be safe, and he wants you to be safe."
Winn added the fiscal case — Ciscomani sits on Appropriations and has brought millions back to Arizona — and flagged what she sees in his social media replies. "I go check out these people. They're saying all kinds of not-nice things on his posts, and they're not real people. They're bots." Her conclusion: if actual voters turn out, the seat holds. Ciscomani has no primary, but Winn wants a strong showing anyway, as a signal to national Democrats "that they need to fight someplace else."
Asked whether she had voted before leaving town, Smith said yes — and described the work that filled the days before. Her husband works with candidates; she spent her time helping friends who had been dropped from the Republican rolls after address changes get re-registered, and helping elderly neighbors vote. "That's what you do as a precinct committeeman," she said. People follow the presidential and congressional races, but "a lot of people didn't know, for example, in Marana and Oro Valley and Sahuarita, that these are town elections," or understand what the Corporation Commission does. That gap is the job.
Greg Wrightstone: What the Fire Data Actually Shows
Greg Wrightstone — geologist, executive director of the CO2 Coalition in Arlington, Virginia, and bestselling author of A Very Convenient Warming: How Modest Warming and More CO2 Are Benefiting Humanity — took the Canadian smoke story and ran the numbers on it.
His first point was historical. Canadian fires are not new, and neither is the smoke reaching American cities. Native peoples burned prairies and forest undergrowth for thousands of years, typically in the fall, so new spring growth would draw buffalo. He cited a 1910 New York Times article cataloguing what were called "dark days" going back to 1706 — years when Canadian smoke swept over the northeastern United States and the northern reaches of the country, "long before there were any gas-guzzling SUVs or coal-fired power plants."
His second point was that the trend runs the wrong way for the crisis narrative. Reviewing Canadian Fire Service records, Wrightstone said the number of fires in Canada has been decreasing since the beginning of the 20th century. Area burned varies year to year, but shows no overall upward trend. He noted a recent Canadian Fire Service study confirming the decline — and pointed out the irony that the researchers attribute it partly to warming and higher CO2. Globally, satellite measurement shows the same thing: "Fires globally have definitely been declining over the last 40 years." He invited listeners to check for themselves: search "Canadian Fire Service" and look at the chart.
The mechanism, he explained, runs through basic plant biology. Photosynthesis needs water, sunlight, and CO2. With more CO2 available, plants don't have to transpire as much to get it, so they lose less water to the atmosphere — which means more soil moisture and greater drought resistance. "Carbon dioxide, that we call the miracle molecule and they call the demon molecule, is actually leading to this reduction in fires."
He also corrected Winn on cause. When she attributed the current fires to lightning plus missing mitigation, Wrightstone stopped her: the Canadian Fire Service attributes roughly half of fires to lightning and the remainder to arson. He then relayed the explanation he attributes to that agency — that in Manitoba and Alberta, hiring rules give first preference to indigenous workers for firefighting duty, which pays well in regions with few other job opportunities, and that a substantial share of the arson fires are set by people seeking that work. Either way, his conclusion was the same: attributing the season to climate change is "disinformation, misinformation. They're lying to you."
On the health alarm, Wrightstone offered a comparison he clearly enjoys. The smoke is fine particulate matter, PM2.5. He said he checked New York City emergency room numbers across the five- or six-day episode and found them essentially flat — no increase, despite officials "screaming bloody murder, get inside, get inside." Meanwhile, he noted, many of the same northeastern states have legalized marijuana and permit smoking lounges, where he cited ambient readings around 850 micrograms — many times the level being called dangerous outdoors, and that's only the ambient air, not what a user inhales directly. "So they're encouraging people to stay inside and get high."
Greg Wrightstone: 'The Greatest Untold Story of the 21st Century'
Wrightstone's larger argument is that the good news about a warming, CO2-enriched world simply doesn't get told. "It's getting better. Life is good and getting better," he said, "and it's partly due to rising temperatures and more CO2."
The clearest evidence, in his view, is agriculture. Higher CO2 is "just turbocharging plant growth," and growing seasons in the United States have lengthened by nearly two weeks since 1900 — killing frosts ending earlier in spring and arriving later in fall, allowing more plantings. He put the question to Winn in practical terms: what does an apple orchard in Michigan fear most? A late spring freeze. Corn, he said, is the crop that responds most dramatically, with corn and soybeans the two largest U.S. crops, and the world's top eight crops breaking production records year after year. The downstream result is the one that matters most: famines are in steep decline, agricultural productivity is outpacing population growth, and famine deaths — once catastrophic, particularly in India — are now near zero.
On the temperature targets themselves, he did the arithmetic out loud. Warming since the mid-1800s is about 1.2 degrees Celsius; the target everyone invokes is 1.5. "So they're warning us that we dare not let it warm up by three-tenths of a degree Celsius or the jig is up, we're all going to die, climate crisis." Three-tenths of a degree Celsius is roughly half a degree Fahrenheit — less than the swing between 11 a.m. and noon on an ordinary day, and less than the dead band on a home thermostat before the heat or air conditioning kicks on. "You'll never notice that half a degree." What drives the alarm, he argued, is "huge amounts of misinformation and disinformation from the climate industrial complex. There's a lot of money out there to be made, and they're making it."
He extended that to the modeling. Many catastrophic projections rest on RCP 8.5, a high-emissions concentration pathway that Wrightstone and his colleagues have long called unrealistic. About a month ago, he said, the United Nations acknowledged the highest model it uses is "implausible" — their word; "we would call it impossible." Yet those scenarios are still being used to set climate policy and justify spending trillions "to solve a nonexistent climate crisis."
His historical section makes the same case in a different register: the Minoan, Roman, and Medieval warm periods were all warmer than today, and each saw great civilizations rise. "It was the cold periods that were horrific."
The CO2 Coalition's current fight is legal. In February, Wrightstone said, the EPA rescinded the 2009 Obama-era endangerment finding that declared CO2 a pollutant subject to regulation — a finding used, in his view, "to systematically strip freedoms away." Environmental organizations appealed the repeal the same day; the Coalition retained a top legal firm and has intervened in the case, now before the D.C. Court of Appeals. His hope is that it reaches the Supreme Court, "where we can argue the science." He also told Winn he has an Arizona-specific report in progress, examining actual state climate data — an offer she took him up on, asking him back after the primary and hoping to get him in front of the state's next governor.
Winn's own framing was about the difference between instinct and evidence. Conservatives are already skeptical of climate alarm, she noted, "but it's one thing to know something anecdotally — when you have the actual facts, I think it's wonderful." She mentioned a son-in-law working in agriculture with a product that retains moisture in grass and crops, who reads the same trend as good news.
Rodney Glassman: A Reflagging at Luke, and the Case for the Attorney General's Office
Rodney Glassman called in as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force JAG Corps Reserve — 17 years in, beginning at Davis-Monthan in 2009 — and now assigned as the individual mobilization augmentee to the staff judge advocate at Luke Air Force Base, backfilling as the base's general counsel and running an office of some 25 JAGs, paralegals, and support staff.
Two things happened at Luke on Friday. The first was a change of command, with the outgoing one-star reassigned to Texas and a new colonel taking command. The second was structural and, in Glassman's telling, more consequential: Luke was reflagged out of Air Education and Training Command and into Air Combat Command — the same major command as Davis-Monthan and its 355th Fighter Wing.
Winn asked him to explain what reflagging actually means. "It means that we will now have more deployments out of Luke Air Force Base," Glassman said. Historically, roughly 75 percent of the world's F-35 pilots have trained at Luke and then gone elsewhere — to Hill in Utah, or to a base outside Fairbanks — to deploy from. Now Luke gets into the deployment business itself. The major command designation, he explained, "tells you the mission that we're going to be involved with." At the ceremony, a two-star came out from Air Combat Command, the outgoing commander received a farewell salute, the new commander was saluted, "and then we literally all changed the patch on our shoulders." Congressman Paul Gosar's district director was there, and Glassman — in uniform — got a hug.
Being in uniform that day, he said, made him think of Winn's federal court win. "It's a big enough hardship to be in uniform, to be away from your family, to be risking your life to do all the things that our active duty members do," he said. "And for the Democrats down in Pima County and Adrian Fontes to try to make it more difficult for active duty members in uniform to be able to vote was just disgusting." He thanked her for taking it to court and winning, adding the principle underneath: "We need to make it easier for people who have IDs and are U.S. citizens to be able to vote in our elections, not more difficult." His message to service members in Tucson was direct: show up to vote in uniform. "We fought for that right, and you should have that privilege."
That fed his argument for why the attorney general's race matters. His phone, he said, has been blowing up over Democratic electioneering — closed drop box locations, locations moved around. "That's why a good attorney general will matter if we want to preserve Arizona's elections going forward," he said, because "it's the attorney general who's in charge of investigating and prosecuting election fraud and enforcing the laws of our state. I plan on doing that."
On the incumbent, Glassman was pointed. Kris Mayes has now filed something on the order of 44 lawsuits against the Trump administration while continuing to indict the president's allies, he said — activity he characterized as building "a resistance résumé and raising money." New campaign finance reports, he noted, show Mayes receiving money from teachers unions at the federal and local level and from the Soros family. That's precisely why, he argued, Republicans need to nominate the candidate with the experience to beat her in November.
Winn raised the pending question of whether Mayes will act on the referral concerning Sheriff Chris Nanos — sent to her by Pima County's own Democratic Board of Supervisors to investigate his conduct toward a previous primary opponent. Mayes, she said, has kicked that can repeatedly. Glassman's prediction was purely political: "If it's in Kris Mayes's best political interest to go after the sheriff, that's what she's going to do."
Winn, who worked in the attorney general's office under Tom Horne — who has endorsed Glassman — framed the office as foundational. "This is such a critical office if we're going to have law and order in this state."
Joel Strabala: Where to Vote, and What Happens Saturday
Joel Strabala — LD17 chair, the largest legislative district in Pima County, and a member of the election integrity commission — closed the show with logistics, and with a request.
Monday, the day before. Roughly 17 early voting sites across Pima County were open from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., including the Oro Valley Library, the Wheeler Taft Abbett Library, Woods Memorial Library, Kirk-Bear Canyon Library, several other branches, the recorder's office downtown, and the Ward 2 office on the east side. The mobile voting center — the purple, orange and yellow unit — was parked at the Marana Aquatic and Recreation Center, 13455 North Marana Main Street, running 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. rather than the 9-to-3 schedule of the fixed sites.
Tuesday, Election Day. All 120 Pima County voting centers open at 6 a.m. and stay open until 7 p.m., and voters may use any one of them. "You don't have to go to the one nearest to you," Strabala said. "Go the one nearest to work, or on your way to shopping." To find the closest, he recommended searching "Pima Votes," which pulls up an interactive map keyed to an address or zip code.
If you're holding a mail ballot. Sign it, bring your ID, and take it in person to any early voting center rather than dropping it in a box. With ID verified on the spot, it skips signature verification entirely — extracted from the envelope Wednesday morning and tabulated Wednesday afternoon, rather than waiting a week.
If your registration changed. Winn returned to a problem she has fielded all week. Many voters believe they're on the early ballot list because they received mail ballots repeatedly last year — but 2025 had five elections, several of them conducted entirely by mail, and March's RTA election was 100 percent mail as well. "That would give you the illusion that you're on the early mail-in ballot list when in fact you may not be." She had taken 15 such calls that day alone. Separately, voters who've interacted with the DMV may have been reclassified as PND — party not declared — without realizing it, because the re-assertion of party registration requires a click most people don't know to make. Those voters can still request a Republican ballot at the polls. "Fix this," Winn urged. "It's going to be very important in the general election. Do it now, so you don't have to panic."
Saturday's hand count. Strabala's ask was for six more volunteers for the post-election hand count audit, which verifies that the machines tabulated correctly. Sign up at PimaGOP.org — click Elections 2026 and scroll to the bottom of the page. The shift pays $75. "That's the whole reason to show," Winn joked, before adding that she'll be there regardless: "There's no other place to be on Saturday."
He closed with gratitude rather than a pitch. "I'd like to thank the roughly 200 volunteers that have covered over 300 observer shifts over the last month," Strabala said. "Thank you very much for helping to ensure we have free and fair and transparent elections. And if you haven't voted, vote in person either today or tomorrow. It's the one thing you can do to influence our political landscape."
Winn's own closing note was about the observers, and about how recently this access didn't exist. Reports have come in about things that don't look right; the instruction has been to document rather than argue. "Some people aren't happy that we're there, but we're showing up, we're being professional, we're being respectful, and we're getting eyes on the election," she said. "Pima County was very different just two years ago. We didn't have this advantage."
And on the party's own divisions heading into Tuesday: "We don't have an identity problem. We know who we are, we know what we stand for. We do have infighting, because we're Republicans and we don't just walk in one direction. But tomorrow we'll resolve that, and we'll know who our candidates are, and we will unify. You don't have to like the person — we're going to stand with our conservative choices and move forward from here. Because Arizona is worth saving, and Pima County is worth changing."