Tucson’s Conservative Talk

Friday's broadcast ranged from a Caribbean island a few miles off Florida to a courtroom in Maricopa County, but Kathleen Winn tied every segment to the same argument she has pressed all season: that freedom is fragile, that elections are where it is defended, and that Arizona's is now on the line. A Cuba policy expert opened with a portrait of what communism does to a country over decades. An election attorney explained the lawsuit he filed that week over Arizona's SAVE Act ballot language. The state party chairman went after the governor's running-mate rollout. And a journalist introduced voters to the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor.

Ninety days from Arizona's general election, Kathleen Winn devoted Thursday's show to a single argument built from three directions: that Tucson and Pima County are being run into the ground by the people in charge of them, and that the fix runs through the ballot. A crime-policy advocate laid out the local failures case by case. A national police spokesperson widened it to the state and to the federal help she says other cities have accepted. And a psychiatrist weighs in on New York's mayor.

Wednesday's broadcast split cleanly in two. The first hour was China Watch Wednesday, where co-host Ava Chen used a fresh New York Times report on Chinese surveillance to argue that what the mainstream press is discovering now, the whistleblower movement she belongs to documented a decade ago. The second hour set politics aside entirely for a former national-champion rugby player who broke his neck, was told he would never move his hands again, and walked out of the hospital a year later. The bridge between them was a theme Kathleen Winn returns to often: that character is revealed in the moments when everything is on the line.

A day after America First Legal sued Arizona's Secretary of State over ballot language, Kathleen Winn spent Tuesday's show connecting a single thread across three very different guests: the fight over how measures and candidates are described to voters, and what she argues is at stake if the descriptions win. The Republican nominee for Secretary of State explained the lawsuit. A former county chair turned to the sheriff, the courts, and Proposition 425. And a retired brigadier general widened the lens to Iran, the munitions supply, and the economics that, in his telling, socialism never accounts for.

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.

The Andy Biggs campaign opened Kathleen Winn's Friday with news: Biggs had named former state senator Sine Kerr as his running mate, making her Arizona's first Republican nominee for the newly created office of lieutenant governor. Winn described Kerr as the daughter of an Army combat veteran and a naturalized citizen from Mexico, a Buckeye dairy farmer of more than 40 years who represented Maricopa and Yuma counties in the state Senate, married 46 years to her husband Bill, with four children and 12 grandchildren in the West Valley. "Arizona is going to win big this November with Biggs and Kerr," she said, noting she had already put in an early request to get the ticket down to Pima County, and that the praise for Kerr was coming from both sides of the aisle — "already a good sign." With that, the show turned to its dominant subject: a county spending measure Winn wants voters to reject, and the ground game she says will decide whether Pima County matters in November.

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.

The morning Dr. Anthony Fauci sat before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right, Kathleen Winn built her Wednesday broadcast around a single claim she and her guests have pressed for years: that the origins of COVID-19, and the response to it, were neither accidental nor benign. The hearing supplied the hook. What followed was two hours of argument — first a sweeping account of the pandemic's origins from the movement that says it warned the world in 2017, then a blistering local turn on crime, prosecution, and the Tucson officials her second guest holds responsible. Much of what was asserted across the morning is contested, unproven, or a matter of the speakers' opinion, and it is presented here as such.

Ava Chen: The Hearing, and a Claim of Vindication

Ava Chen of the New Federal State of China joined for the show's standing China Watch Wednesday segment, and both women treated the Fauci hearing as confirmation of what they had said before the mainstream press. Chen said she watched the second half and wanted to bang her head against the wall as Fauci pleaded the Fifth; Winn caught the first half before a dentist appointment. Both praised the senators — Chen singling out Josh Hawley, who she said asked Fauci what day of the week it was and what color tie he was wearing to underscore the blanket refusal to answer.

Winn's framing was that a presidential pardon may shield Fauci on federal ground but not from state-level consequences flowing from what she called his "expert advice," in air quotes. Her recurring point: "We called this out with Wuhan long before the mainstream media." Chen agreed the day was "a great validation."

The status of these claims should be clear to readers from the outset. The lab-leak and deliberate-release theories Chen advances are disputed. U.S. intelligence agencies remain divided on COVID-19's origin, with some favoring a laboratory-associated incident and others a natural spillover, and there is no consensus that the virus was an engineered bioweapon deliberately released. What follows is Chen's account, offered in her voice and attributed throughout.

Ava Chen: The '13579' Timeline

Chen's central narrative is built on the whistleblowing of Miles Guo — the movement's founder, now in federal prison following a fraud conviction, which Chen characterizes as persecution rather than a legitimate verdict and which readers should understand as a contested framing. She laid out a chronology.

In 2017, she said, Guo turned over to the FBI a document describing a CCP program she calls the "13579 plan," which the bureau authenticated but, in her telling, acted on. Guo did not share it publicly, she said, until September 5, 2020, in a livestream with Steve Bannon. The numbers, as she decoded them in a prior episode, describe a single engineered bioweapon, a release, sustained social effect, seven target economies, and — the "9" — a vaccine launched within nine months to shift global dependency onto China. "These are long-plotted, dark, evil plots," she said, "against humanity basically."

She dated Guo's warnings to the Hong Kong uprising of June 2019, when he cautioned that the CCP might resort to biochemical weapons to crush the protests, escalating through the fall to a late-December 2019 warning of an outbreak. She tied this to Peter Navarro's account, in his book, of January 2020 conversations with Guo and Bannon that she says informed the White House travel ban — Guo's purported intelligence being that the virus aimed both to crush Hong Kong and to derail President Trump's reelection. "The economy was booming and the Chinese did not want four more years of Trump," Winn said.

Ava Chen: 'Three Attempts'

The segment's most detailed and most contested passage was Chen's claim that the CCP tried three times to release the virus. She attributed this to the private European testimony of a PLA general and bio-defense scientist who she says fled China, and to directives she says Guo has produced signed by Xi Jinping. She was explicit that she could not force anyone to believe it: "It's up to you whether you want to believe or not. I'm not forcing that theory on anybody, but I'm just sharing the information."

Her sequence: a first attempt in rural Guangzhou in September 2019 that failed to spread; a second at the October 2019 Military World Games in Wuhan, which drew delegations from more than a hundred countries and which she called a "perfect launch pad"; and a third, successful release tied to the Huanan seafood market. As corroboration for the second, she pointed to a 2025 report she said was published by The Hill, describing seven U.S. service members who developed COVID-like symptoms after the 2019 Wuhan games. These claims are unverified and run contrary to the prevailing scientific account, which traces the earliest known cases to the Wuhan market in late 2019; they are recorded here as Chen's assertions.

Chen argued the CCP then locked down Wuhan domestically while keeping international flights open during the Chinese New Year travel season — in her framing, deliberately seeding the virus abroad while its own people traveled home. Winn recalled the early Seattle-area outbreak and the deaths at a senior facility. Chen put the direct Chinese death toll "over 10 millions" in the first three months and cited a mobile carrier's reported loss of subscribers, along with accounts of crematoria emissions turning satellite images orange — figures that are unverified and far exceed official tallies, offered here as her claims. "What kind of government is that?" she asked. "It's not a legitimate government."

Ava Chen: The Broader Thesis — Labs, Elections, and 'Soft Power'

From origins, Chen widened to the movement's global thesis. She warned that thousands of pathogen strains sit in Wuhan's P3 and P4 labs, and claimed the CCP has established such labs in Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Turkey, and Pakistan, and expanded biochemical infrastructure across Africa and the Middle East — sending PLA researchers wherever the labs go. Her conclusion was a call to action: "You have no choice but to take down the CCP, because if you don't take them down, it's going to come back to you."

She described the vaccine as "attack number two," designed from the outset to pair with the virus — a claim about the vaccines' intent that is unproven and contrary to the medical consensus, and recorded here as her assertion. She named Dr. Li Wenliang, the Wuhan physician who warned colleagues in December 2019, was detained for "spreading rumors," and later died of the virus, calling him a hero. She alleged that Chinese scientists' warnings emailed to the CDC and Fauci in late 2019 were ignored and the warners reported back to the regime. She revived a claim, which she noted the show had discussed before, that Guo has asked whether Fauci received Bitcoin from the CCP — an allegation offered without substantiation and recorded as such.

Chen's closing frame connected the pandemic to what she calls a pattern of CCP infiltration: intelligence agencies first, then media, then Wall Street, then the judicial system — "a country run by lawyers." She argued the CCP corrupts national leaders into "kleptocrats," steals elections, and installs one-party rule, treating nations as provinces. Winn tied it to her recurring domestic warning, citing New York's mayor Zohran Mamdani as an example of manufactured chaos and his stated intent to have Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrested — "that's not going to happen," she said, "but it distracts from what really needs to be done." Both landed on the same note Winn returns to weekly: "For me, I know God's in control. But if we leave it to men, we will fail."

Betsy Brantner Smith: Fauci, Accountability, and 'The Process Is the Punishment'

Betsy Brantner Smith, spokesperson for the National Police Association, called in from the road for the "Smith and Winn" segment and picked up the Fauci thread from a law-enforcement angle. On whether Fauci faces real consequences, she made the legal observation that a presidential pardon can strip the ability to plead the Fifth — a point of live legal debate rather than settled law, worth noting for readers. Absent that, she argued, "the process is the punishment": Fauci has been embarrassed worldwide.

She and Winn had sport with the 1,141-page set of Fauci's writings released by Senator Rand Paul, incredulous that a man in his seventies kept a diary preoccupied with his own fame while people were dying. Smith's sharper point was about consistency: Democrats who defended Fauci's decades of public service, she argued, deny that same status to ICE agents and police officers. "The hypocrisy of the left truly knows no bounds."

Smith's substantive historical claim concerned Fauci's AIDS-era record — that early government messaging he was associated with overstated casual transmission risk — which she used to argue a pattern of costly error. She also asserted, citing a book by Dr. Deborah Birx, that about a week before the national shutdown Fauci met with Barack Obama and later said he could pressure Trump into shutting down the country. That characterization rests on Smith's reading of Birx's account and should be weighed as such. Her throughline back to the show's core subject was mass mail-in voting: "That's why we have to bring it all back to Pima County."

Betsy Brantner Smith: The Downtown Shooting and the Prosecutor

The segment's hardest edge was local, and it named names — so the article should be precise about what is fact and what is characterization.

On the downtown Tucson shooting that wounded nine, Smith and Winn returned to a point they consider settled: the shooter was a convicted felon and prohibited possessor who, on the facts they cited, should not have had a gun and should not have been free, having received a plea deal on a prior felony offense involving a rifle that carried no jail time. Winn faulted Mayor Regina Romero for responding to the shooting by calling for gun restrictions rather than commending the officers who ran toward the gunfire. Smith argued the shooter should be charged with attempted murder and had instead been charged with lesser crimes by County Attorney Laura Conover — and suggested federal prosecutors step in. Readers should note the specific charging claims are checkable in court records and worth confirming before relying on them.

Smith made a legal point that is accurate and worth preserving: prosecutors and judges hold absolute immunity from civil suit, while police officers hold only qualified immunity. It framed her broader complaint — "rules for thee but not for me" — but it also means her call for the nine victims to sue would run into that immunity where the prosecutor's office is concerned; she acknowledged as much.

The most pointed passages concerned Tucson Police Chief Chad Kasmar's successor, Chief Monica Prieto, and here the article draws a firm line: Smith's characterizations are her opinion, sharply worded, and not established fact. Smith, a 29-year city police veteran, said she was "wildly frustrated" and floated two possibilities — that the chief is willingly aligned with the mayor's politics, or that she is allowing herself to be used as a "prop." She invoked a "communist cabal" framing that is rhetoric, not reporting, and it should read that way. Winn was somewhat more sympathetic, casting Prieto as "caught between a rock and a hard place," noting the chief ultimately works for the mayor, and saying she knows Prieto personally and believes she is "doing a lot of things right." The concrete, checkable fact underneath the heat: after testimony in Winn's suit against the Secretary of State and Attorney General, a police captain directed rank-and-file officers to give 24 hours' notice before voting and to change out of uniform — a directive Winn says a court then found unlawful. That court ruling is the factual anchor; the reads on the chief's motives are opinion.

Smith also faulted anti-gun advocacy tied to former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, arguing Giffords's charity frequently criticizes law enforcement — a characterization readers can check against the organization's own public statements, and one Winn softened by noting Giffords "was, for a Democrat," supportive of law enforcement in her time.

Betsy Brantner Smith: Seattle, Connecticut, and the Immigration Argument

Smith drew a national through-line on crime and immigration, and these passages mix reported incidents with contested framing.

On Seattle, she described a mass shooting at a food festival near the Space Needle and criticized the city's leadership for hesitating to call two armed groups a gang conflict — noting the police chief there previously led Madison, Wisconsin, and lives in Chicago. The mockery of Seattle's city council honoring an internet-famous raccoon, and of New York's mayoral politics, is opinion and color rather than substance.

On Connecticut, she recounted the deaths of off-duty Bridgeport police officer Cooper Whiteside and his girlfriend, killed when a driver Smith identified as Melissa Ramirez — allegedly nearly twice the legal alcohol limit and in the country illegally — crossed into their lane. A Democrat-appointed judge, they said, reduced her bond, citing community ties and two young children, and the open question is whether local authorities will honor an ICE detainer. The core incident is a reported tragedy; the political inferences drawn from it are the speakers'. Smith's broader claim that illegal immigrants vote — citing roughly 6,000 Virginia registrations she attributed to that state's motor-voter system, and the governor's "software glitch" explanation — is a contested characterization of a disputed episode, offered as her argument.

Her constructive close was electoral: judges appear on the November ballot, and organizations like the Pima County GOP research which to support. "This is why it is so important, Tucson, for you to get involved and to vote."

The Numbers, and the Argument for Turnout

Winn closed both hours where she always does — on Pima County's primary turnout and what it portends. She read the results as of Monday: 646,190 registered voters, roughly 186,000 ballots tabulated, 175,956 early ballots returned, 19,315 cast on Election Day, and 268 provisional ballots. Republicans turned out at nearly 42 percent, Democrats at 46 — a margin under four points, which she treated as a breakthrough given the county's Democratic registration edge. In raw numbers, 75,262 Republicans voted against roughly 108,000 Democrats, but the closeness of the rate, she argued, is why Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva was "sounding the alarm bells." She confirmed Jeff Rhodes made the November ballot as a write-in in Supervisor District 5.

She flagged again the 8,679 undeliverable ballots — with 14 deceased voters and two who had moved removed — as evidence the rolls need cleaning, and tied it to the fight over the Arizona SAVE Act that Alex Kolodin referred to the November ballot. Her charge against Secretary of State Adrian Fontes was specific: that in the measure's official write-up he resisted language distinguishing legal from illegal voters, and that he won't give the Department of Justice access to Arizona's voter rolls. "He's trying to protect the Democrat vote," Smith said. Both cast the SAVE Act as essential and pledged to "fight like hell to get it across the finish line."

By district, Winn credited her own LD17 — about 64,000 registered Republicans, 30,456 of whom turned out, near 48 percent — while conceding LD19 and Eileen Wilson's team edged them out on rate. She thanked the observers, volunteers, board members, LD chairs, and precinct committeemen by role, and set the frame for the fall: "We've got another job to do, and it's going to be a heavy lift, and we're going to have to come together."

Her sharpest line captured the argument running under the entire broadcast — that the direction of a city is a choice voters still hold. "It's like a prescription for death, and you are watching the death of a city and a county," she said. "It is why we are standing up and fighting back. There are 80-20 issues — public safety, securing the border, only citizens vote — and reasonable people, whatever your party label, agree on them."

A week past the primary, the general election came into focus around a single dynamic: two parties both trying to hold themselves together. Kathleen Winn spent Tuesday's broadcast on the Republican side of that problem and the Democratic side of it — first with a congressional challenger absorbing an early attack from his opponent without swinging back, then with a wide-ranging conversation about the COVID reckoning set to unfold the next day on Capitol Hill. Underneath both ran the argument Winn returns to every show: that turnout, not affection, decides everything, and that a party which purges its own hands seats to the other side.

The primary is certified in all but name, and Kathleen Winn spent the last Monday of July setting the table for the hundred days ahead. The message she kept circling was turnout — Pima County Republicans came in at nearly 42 percent, above the state average, while Democratic turnout collapsed to 28 — and the argument that the county long treated as a lost cause is now the state's swing. Around that spine, the show made room for a subject with no party attached: a former big-city fire commissioner making the case that the country can track an Amazon package but not a firefighter inside a burning building. And it closed on the ballot measure Winn intends to fight all fall, a Pima County spending cap she wants voters to reject.