Guests - Jay Tolkoff, Jack Dona
A new week of general-election season opened at 114 degrees and with a deadline. Kathleen Winn spent Monday's first hour on Proposition 425 — the Pima County spending measure whose window for public comment closes Wednesday at 5 p.m. — and its second on the ideology she says is now organized and funded inside Arizona. Two guests carried the load: a former city council candidate who walked through the fiscal mechanics of the ballot measure, and a retired Army master sergeant who used his own father's escape from Nicaragua to argue that what looks remote is already here.
Jay Tolkoff: The History and the Trap of Proposition 425
Jay Tolkoff, a precinct committeeman and former candidate, joined to explain why a measure most voters won't see until November demands attention now. The exact figure at stake, Winn said, is a capacity increase of $610,086,481 — a roughly 75 percent jump over the base, which the county argues hasn't been adjusted since 1980.
Tolkoff supplied the history. The limit dates to a 1980 amendment to the Arizona Constitution, which he said the legislature referred to voters in the wake of California's Proposition 13 — the taxpayer revolt against runaway spending and property taxes coming out of Sacramento. Fearing the same backlash in Arizona, lawmakers headed it off with a two-part guardrail: a base expenditure limit (the part the Board of Supervisors now wants to amend) and a tax levy limit governing how much property taxes could rise off the 1980 numbers, with a formula to account for new construction and development. Both, he said, remain in place.
The reassurance some people draw from that — that the county "can't spend money it doesn't have" — is, in Tolkoff's telling, exactly the trap. The real damage, he argued, is that the measure is "an end run around we, the people." Under the current cap, a major project costing hundreds of millions requires the county to come to voters through a bond or a new tax district, giving residents a yes or no. "Now in one year, a mere three people sitting on the Board of Supervisors will be able to decide for us," he said — approving a half-billion-dollar indoor soccer arena, or whatever they choose, without another vote. And permanent commitments, he warned, behave like a bigger mortgage: fixed, inescapable, and followed inevitably by a return trip to raise the tax levy limit. "We are one of the highest-tax counties in the state."
Winn pressed the numbers into plainer terms. The $70 million the county cites is in 1979 dollars; run through the formulas, the original $93.7 million base has already grown to more than $800 million, and it climbs automatically each year without any rule change. The requested adjustment, Tolkoff calculated, works out closer to 79.9 percent — "almost doubling." His analogy: a boss announcing an 80 percent raise. Maricopa County, by contrast, asked for an 11 percent adjustment in 1998 as its population exploded — "that probably would be reasonable." The county's defense, that it doesn't want to return to voters for another 20 years, struck both as an argument against itself. "What if their projections are wrong?"
The affordable-housing justification drew the same objection Winn and Brenda Martz had raised the previous Friday: raising property taxes to subsidize housing simply raises what landlords must charge. Winn pointed to her own history founding New Beginnings in her 20s, and to Gospel Rescue Mission and Lisa Chastain's work — programs she said succeed precisely because they take no government money. Tolkoff added a fresh detail to the county's spending record, citing receipts he said showed Supervisor Jen Allen spending $28,000 to remodel her office, including $1,800 end tables. "While we're out here worrying about whether we can put food on the table or gas in our gas tank," he said, the county wants authority over a larger pool of money it has not been a good steward of.
Both landed on the same distrust of projection and permanence. Tolkoff cited former Pima County Treasurer Beth Ford — 24 years in the office, and initially open to some adjustment — as coming around to the view that the ask is "way above what it should be." He and Winn tied it to the RTA roads plan, where voters felt the results never matched the promise, and to the city of Tucson's newly balanced budget, which Tolkoff said was balanced by pulling $61 million from reserves while overall spending rose $50 million. "Temporary money can't be used for permanent entities," he said — the same mistake, in his view, the county made with COVID funds.
The call to action was specific and urgent. Voters have until 5 p.m. Wednesday, August 5th, to submit a written argument — 300 words or fewer — against Proposition 425 for the voter pamphlet, through the county's ballot-measure argument portal, selecting the "permanent base adjustment" proposition and choosing "against." Submissions cost $25. Winn said the Pima County GOP site offers eight sample arguments to adapt, and stressed the pamphlet effect: a lopsided count of "against" arguments over "for" shapes how undecided voters read the measure. "This is like pre-voting," Tolkoff said. Winn's framing was blunter: "Get your hands off our money. It's our money, it's not your money."
She also noted the process itself. The county held two public hearings that, she said, no one attended — evidence to her that they weren't meant to be found. Tolkoff recalled that at the first, back in March, the only person who spoke was Supervisor Andrés Cano, the appointee filling Adelita Grijalva's seat, whose explanation — comparing the increase to putting money in a bank account — struck Tolkoff as describing the opposite of what the measure does. His closing verdict: "In the 50 years I've been here, I can't think of any bigger proposition that has affected the people of Pima County. This is theft in full daylight."
Jack Dona: The Three Legs of a Revolution
Master Sergeant Jack Dona, U.S. Army retired and an Army intelligence veteran living in Sierra Vista, joined for the second hour to argue that organized socialist and communist movements are operating openly in Arizona — and to explain, through his father's firsthand account of Nicaragua, how a nation topples.
He opened by naming the groups. Winn noted the Revolutionary Communists of America and the Communist Party USA both have a presence in the state, and that her own alma mater, the University of Arizona, hosts a Marxist-Leninist student organization alongside its Turning Point USA chapter. Dona pointed to the Phoenix Instagram page of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which he said carries some 35,000 followers — more than the entire population of his city of Sierra Vista. The difference between now and the campus radicals of the 1960s, he argued, is money and organization: "These groups are very, very heavily funded and they're very, very organized." His material came from an article by Rachel Alexander in the Arizona Sun Times and the Arizona edition of the Epoch Times, to which he contributed.
Dona's framework, which he attributed to his father, held that three conditions let communism take root and topple a nation within a single generation.
The first is crushing, generational poverty — which he traced to 2008. The bank and insurance bailouts, in his argument, should never have happened; the system should have been allowed to fail through two or three years of pain rather than shifting the burden onto the middle class and the poor. The propping-up of the banks by the taxpayer was, he said, "actually a form of communism." The result is a generation that came of age working multiple jobs, buried in student debt, living with their parents — and looking at an older, more affluent generation with resentment. "That is what the communists are doing," he said, "and very successfully." Winn added the external dimension: messaging from the CCP, Russia, and North Korea reinforcing a single theme — "our model works, your model doesn't" — that she said is beginning to sell.
The second is the capture of education. Dona argued that those in power "abandoned our public education system to one particular party," while the right consoled itself with think tanks like Brookings and Cato — a solution that fails, he said, because not everyone can get into a think tank, and because the system itself has been "dumbed down." The deeper mechanism is emotional. Dictators from Chávez and Ortega to Castro and Hitler, he argued, all play on emotion "because when you're emotional, it shuts off your ability to use critical thinking" — a faculty he said schools no longer teach. The appeal to today's youth, many of them isolated by the COVID years and looking for belonging, is "hypnotic": a sense of purpose, a community, and "a focus point for your anger." What they aren't taught, he said, is the ideology's body count — Mao's Great Leap Forward, Pol Pot's killing fields, Castro and Che Guevara's Cuba. "Socialism is just a speed bump on the way to communism."
Winn and Dona connected the pattern to current events, from the mass border crossing at Ceuta, Spain — which Dona argued could not have happened without the complicity of the Spanish and Moroccan governments, the same model, he said, as the Darién Gap route to the U.S. southern border — to the anti-colonial rhetoric he says would, taken to its end, "dissolve the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and give back Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and California." On the Democratic Party's internal collapse, Dona borrowed a Victor Davis Hanson image: a monster the party fed and nurtured now devouring its aging leadership. His example was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's 2018 primary upset of longtime Congressman Joe Crowley — a warning shot, he said, that the establishment failed to heed. The party's bet that it could harness the Democratic Socialists and radical figures "on a leash," he argued, has failed: "They're not leash friendly."
The third leg is good people doing nothing — out of fear, out of hopelessness, or out of the indifference of the comfortable. Dona's sharpest words were for the last group: the affluent in gated communities who assume the turmoil won't reach them. "You will not be able to escape this," he said. The billionaires fleeing New York, in his view, have the wrong instinct: "That is not the solution. They must stay and fight." Flee to Florida, and if the movement sweeps the nation, "there's no place left in the world to go." He returned to Nicaragua as the end state — Daniel Ortega declaring himself president for life, his wife vice president, elections abolished, religion outlawed, churches burned and priests hunted. The wealthy and middle class there in the 1930s, his father told him, said the same thing Americans say now: it couldn't happen here. "And it did. And it happened real fast — a matter of weeks."
On guns, Dona argued disarmament is always the precondition. He cited his father's account of weapons confiscation in Nicaragua, the scenes he says he's watched from Ceuta of residents unable to defend themselves against roving bands, and the Bolshevik practice of billeting strangers in private homes at gunpoint. "If you cannot defend yourself, then you are a slave to the state." Both objected to the invocation of Gabby Giffords in gun-control campaigns, arguing she had been pro-gun and pro-military before she was shot. And both tied it to the downtown Tucson shooting: nine people wounded, the violence stopped by an officer with a gun from an underfunded department, followed by the mayor calling for gun restrictions.
Winn's throughline was that the threat is internal and requires no invasion. "Our own people are doing this to us, our own politicians," she said, naming Adelita Grijalva's advocacy for those here illegally, JoAnna Mendoza's alignment with the DSA in her race against Juan Ciscomani, and Mayor Regina Romero's response to the shooting. Her message to traditional Democrats was that the party has been "co-opted, corrupted." Dona's closing appeal was to the disengaged: young people are "thirsting for leadership," and the antidote to the third leg is participation. "Get off the bench and get involved."
Winn ended where she has all season — on the county's own turnout as proof it can be done. Tucson, she noted, ran well above the state average in the primary even as turnout collapsed elsewhere, the product of groups like Turning Point and American Majority working together. "Tucson is at stake right now. We can save her — and we're going to do it by making people smart." She previewed Tuesday's show: America First Legal's lawsuit against Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, "one of my favorite things to do."