Guests - Brad Thayer, Jeff Rhodes, Mark Lewis, Kelly Walker
On the last Thursday of July, a day after Dr. Anthony Fauci sat before a Senate committee and repeatedly declined to answer, Kathleen Winn built her show around a single organizing idea: that the contest Arizona voters are about to enter is not ordinary politics but a fight over the country's identity. A political scientist opened the hour with a book-length argument that communism never went away. A county supervisor candidate, a 48-year party veteran, and a former Tucson coffee-shop owner turned activist filled the rest — each circling back, from a different direction, to the same claim that local elections carry national stakes.
Brad Thayer: 'One Election Away'
Dr. Bradley Thayer — political scientist and author of America's Hundred Years' War: How to Win Against Communism, with a foreword by Steve Bannon — joined to argue that the West's victory over the Soviet Union was never a victory over communism itself. A Tucson native who came up in the city a half-century ago, he framed his thesis bluntly: "We defeated the Soviet Union, but communism is alive and well in the United States, operating in the Democrat Party, as well as their front organizations and allies, but also in Chinese Communist Party."
The reason it feels stronger now, he argued, is that it has captured what he calls "the ideas industry" — universities, K-12 education, media, think tanks, and Hollywood, where he said figures now proclaim themselves communists openly. "So it's a revolutionary time in the United States," he said. "We have this ideological upheaval because communism has continued to grow in strength."
Thayer located the stakes in a contrast he drew from July 3rd, characterizing two speeches: New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, he said, recast Independence Day in the language of the left, while President Trump at Mount Rushmore delivered "a full-throated embrace" of American identity. His conclusion was stark: "We're really at this point in time where we are one election away from losing the United States as a constitutional republic." He warned that a different 2024 outcome — or 2028 — would reopen the borders and restore DEI programs "tenfold."
His antidote was identity itself. "The stronger American identity, the weaker communism," he said, which is why he sees attacks on that identity everywhere — the 1619 Project he called "a classic communist tactic" to remake American history. He argued the remedy is for Americans to know their history and institutions, and to recognize that communism's record — he cited more than 100 million killed since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution — betrays its promises. "It never works in theory. It never works in practice. And it always ends the same way, in blood and in tears."
Winn tied it to her own recurring themes, noting the show's weekly China Watch Wednesday segment and describing CCP influence as "death by a thousand paper cuts." She also raised the difficulty of Trump being conflated with the country: "They have done a very successful job about hating Donald Trump. So if you hate Donald Trump, you should hate this country." Her proposed correction was for citizens to "take ownership" of the nation's identity independent of any one figure.
On Fauci, Thayer called the previous day's hearing "a positive step, to be sure, but it's not enough," arguing that exposure must be followed by accountability — not only for Fauci but for the Chinese Communist Party, which he said should be "presented with a bill" of $15 trillion when Xi Jinping visits in September. Readers should note this is his political proposal and framing, not an established finding of fact; the origins of COVID-19 remain formally unresolved, and the deliberate-bioweapon characterization is disputed.
Winn closed the segment on a personal note, sharing that one of the founding fathers, James Wilson, is her husband's great-great-grandfather — "so we take this very personally, that this was a family document, the Declaration, the Constitution." Thayer's book, he said, is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and elsewhere, and offers "a path forward" toward what he called a renaissance of American identity.
Jeff Rhodes: Fiscal Responsibility as the Whole Argument
Jeff Rhodes, now on the November ballot for Pima County Supervisor in District 5, returned to make the case that the county's problems are, at root, problems of stewardship. Winn set him up as the counter to the "bureaucrats" she says fill county government with no relationship to its financial health — a distinction that matters, she noted, with Proposition 425's spending question looming.
Rhodes named three priorities: roads, spending, and crime. On roads, he blamed "a lack of concern and not being responsible with the funding." On spending, he returned to a figure he has used before — that Pima County's four highest-ranking administrators earn nearly $1.5 million combined. "Why does our county administrator make more than the president of the United States? That's insanity," he said, especially "in a county that's got way below the national average of service." On crime, he put the pressure on the prosecutor: "That's putting pressure on the prosecutors to actually do their job, because she's not doing her job."
He was careful to credit Supervisor Steve Christy as "trying his best" while outnumbered — a lone conservative whose motions die without a second unless another supervisor happens to bring the matter forward, as occurred with the referral concerning Sheriff Chris Nanos. What Rhodes wants is a second conservative voice to force votes onto the public record and open dialogue.
Asked what he hears at the doors, Rhodes said the most common reaction is surprise that a candidate is knocking at all, followed by a sense of being ignored — "that nothing that we do matters." His counter is that their vote does matter, and his pitch is to look past the party label: "Don't look at whether there's a D or an R next to the name. Look at the individuals, research those people, vote your values." Many voters, he argued, would find that candidates they've long supported "have nothing to do with the values that you hold dear."
On the downtown shooting, Rhodes and Winn returned to the argument they consider decisive: the shooter was a prohibited possessor who should not have had a gun, making new gun laws beside the point. "How's that working out for Chicago?" Rhodes asked, arguing the cities with the toughest gun laws carry the highest crime rates. He noted the shooter had allegedly fired at someone a year earlier and received probation with no jail time — "a failure of the prosecutor's office" — and criticized County Attorney Laura Conover for, in his telling, blaming first the judge and then the victim. Readers should treat the specific charging and plea claims as assertions checkable in court records. He also cited a figure attributed to a former Tucson police chief: that 60 percent of felony cases go unprosecuted — a secondhand statistic worth verifying. Winn praised Empire Pizza for speaking out and faulted the mayor for accusing the business of lying, while noting the officers and first responders who stabilized all nine victims so that none died. She also flagged, in passing, that the Nancy Guthrie missing-person case remains unresolved.
Rhodes's campaign work continues alongside the Andy Biggs canvassing effort the coming Saturday. His closing framing matched Winn's: "We need more problem solvers," not more politicians.
Mark Lewis: The 'Golden Ticket' and the Power of Ballot Measures
Mark Lewis — a utility-industry veteran who says he served 24 years as the longest-serving member of the Central Arizona Water Conservation District board, and who was just reelected to what he counts as his 48th year as a precinct committeeman — brought the long view on unifying a party after bruising primaries.
His answer was structural. "The image that focuses the mind is the golden ticket and slate of Republicans versus Democrats," he said — a comparison document being assembled that he expects within about ten days to refocus voters on what he characterized as "super radical, Bernie Sanders socialists" winning urban primaries. Even moderate Democrats, he argued, are recognizing "this is not the party of my parents." His theory of political appeal was combative in the literal sense: "Americans love to fight," and voters reward candidates willing to take on what he framed as the everything-is-free promise of socialism. His metaphor for that promise: "Socialism is like a mousetrap. The mouse never figures out it's a problem until it's too late, and the cheese is not free."
On the top of the ticket, Lewis — who says he worked on Andy Biggs's first campaign in the early 1990s — predicted a contest of "two demure personalities" between Biggs and Governor Katie Hobbs, each calling the other radical, decided by track records. He offered a pointed characterization of Hobbs's tenure as Secretary of State, claiming he "found 51 violations of federal law" in the elections procedures manual — a figure attributed to him and worth noting as his assertion.
Lewis's real enthusiasm was for ballot measures, which he argued turn out more voters than candidates do. He recalled that in 2002, medical marijuana drew more votes than a gubernatorial candidate, "because more people turn out for issues than turn out for candidates." His personal favorite this cycle is a measure to hold cities accountable for traffic cameras — he disclosed his own stack of Paradise Valley camera tickets and noted, with some delight, that the camera vendor is based in Mesa. The measure he called most important is a mandate that 60 percent of school funds be spent in the classroom "so we can educate the next generation and not subsidize bureaucrats." He also flagged a court loss the prior day on a measure that would have barred schools from collecting union dues, struck as overly broad.
Both agreed the through-line is voter education, and Winn floated making it a recurring franchise — "ballot measure Thursdays." Lewis and Winn also marked the superintendent of public instruction race, with Winn praising Tom Horne's gracious concession and endorsement of Kimberly Yee, and both acknowledging Yee faces a competent Democratic opponent less known in Tucson.
Kelly Walker: The COVID Reckoning, Told From the Inside
Kelly Walker — founder of Real Freedom Talk and a former Tucson coffee-shop owner who has since left Arizona to be closer to Washington — returned for the show's most personal segment.
Walker said he was heading onto Mike Lindell's show later that day and had been working with attorney Peter Ticktin — who he noted represented Tina Peters — on what he described as a possible federal tort path for parents targeted during the Biden administration's Department of Justice actions, which he attributes to a federally led effort under Merrick Garland. These are Walker's legal theories and characterizations; they are contested and unproven.
The segment's sharpest passage was a side-by-side Walker said he would present: the downtown Tucson shooting, in which he named the shooter and the sentencing judge, against his own 2021 case — 100 days in jail and a fine from a named Tucson magistrate for what he described as peacefully speaking at a school office meeting, on a class-three misdemeanor trespassing charge. Because these passages name a shooter, two judges, and a magistrate and characterize their decisions, the article omits the specific names and leaves the comparison as Walker framed it: his contention that Tucson's justice system treated a violent offender more leniently than it treated him.
On COVID, Walker said he had "been sitting on information for six years," describing intelligence he gathered while working for a Seattle-based medical-education company from a Fauci colleague he named, concerning early praise for hydroxychloroquine that he says later became politically inconvenient. He argued the virus was always going to be low-mortality and concentrated among the elderly and those with comorbidities, and less dangerous to children than influenza — claims that are contested and that readers should weigh against medical consensus and their own physicians rather than a radio segment. He tied school-shutdown policies to youth suicide, saying districts received large sums to keep CDC guidance in place, and described his coffee shop as a haven for people opposed to the lockdowns — and himself as a target of local officials as a result.
The rawest material was a series of personal losses. Walker described a friend, a former Border Patrol agent, whom he says was put on a ventilator and the drug remdesivir and died — an outcome Walker characterized in the harshest terms and attributed to deliberate policy. Winn shared her own memories: a son hospitalized for months and nearly lost, dropping her injured husband at a hospital door she was barred from entering, family members turned against one another over vaccination, and Marines she says were denied law-enforcement jobs after less-than-honorable discharges for refusing the vaccine.
Both reached for extreme language about Fauci. Walker said he believes "justice would be capital punishment for Fauci," comparing him to a Nazi doctor; Winn called him "a mass murderer" who "conspired with the CCP, in my estimation." The article preserves these as the speakers' stated opinions, sharply worded and explicitly framed by both as personal judgment rather than fact, and does not adopt them. Walker's more conciliatory close is worth preserving alongside them: his hope that "not only Republicans, but Democrats will see this too, and people will just recognize our common humanity," setting aside partisanship "and start looking at each other as human beings again."
Walker also pointed to Matthew Lohmeier — the officer who lost his rank over a book on Marxism in the military and was later named an under secretary of the Air Force — as a story of vindication he hopes others, including his own family, will share.
Kathleen Winn: The Hundred-Day Argument
Threaded through the day and gathered at its close was Winn's standing case for the general election. Republicans need at least 16 state Senate seats to hold the chamber and to give a potential Governor Biggs a working majority. The registration advantage is real, she stressed, "but it makes no difference if you don't turn out to vote."
She ran the statewide ticket as she sees it — Biggs for governor, Warren Petersen for attorney general (with Rodney Glassman's gracious endorsement after their primary), Elijah Norton for treasurer, Kimberly Yee for superintendent, and Alex Kolodin against Adrian Fontes for secretary of state, a race she expects to be fought hard given Kolodin's courtroom record against Fontes. Her charge against Fontes was the familiar one: continued resistance to transparency on voter registration and records, and the roughly 8,500 undeliverable ballots that recur every election and, in her view, signal rolls that need cleaning.
Her economic argument was that Arizona has fallen "from fourth to 47th" and that mismanagement she expects to surface during the campaign — she noted Hobbs is under investigation, while cautioning that "being investigated doesn't mean you're guilty." Her prescription was civic rather than merely partisan: to "go beyond our precinct clubs" into neighborhoods for what she called community education sessions, and to judge candidates on fiscal and economic direction rather than likability. "You're not voting for prom king or queen."
She invoked 2010 as her model — the year Republicans "swept everything from the governor on down" and, in her telling, produced four economically strong years — and cast 2026 as a comparable hinge for the state. Between the heavier themes, she paused to wish a happy 10th birthday to one of her granddaughters, Addie, a Vail schools student, before signing off toward a Friday show promising more on Proposition 425 "and other things your city officials and county officials want to do — not for you, but to you."