The teachers’ unions and their allies at Save Our Schools (SOS) have proven time and time again that they will do anything to kill universal school choice in Arizona.
They’ve fought expansion of the program. They’ve pushed to cap it. They’ve worked with activist reporters in the legacy media with ties to the Red for Ed teachers’ union to push false claims about it. And we all witnessed it four years ago when they made their not-so-triumphant proclamation that they had enough signatures to repeal the program—only to discover they had miscounted by more than 50,000 signatures.
But their latest attempt to overturn the program is their lowest yet.
Earlier this month, the teachers’ unions and SOS announced they had submitted more than 420,000 signatures for a ballot initiative that would end the universal eligibility of Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA) program.
Given their track record, the Arizona Free Enterprise Club worked closely with the Goldwater Institute and other school choice advocates to review the petitions. What we found was far more disturbing than another failed signature count.
Dozens of Convicted Felons—Including Registered Sex Offenders—Hired to Collect Signatures
The teachers’ unions and SOS want Arizonans to believe that their “Protect Education Act” campaign is a grassroots effort led by concerned parents and educators. But they made a very different choice when it came time to build their campaign…
The prediction markets say Katie Hobbs is a heavy favorite. The pundits agree. I’ve heard long odds before — I heard them in combat, and I heard them in January when I ran for Party Chair. Here’s what the gamblers and pundits are missing.
This election comes down to one thing: who shows up. And I like our side of that math.
Republicans are the largest voting bloc in Arizona — 1.54 million strong, per the Secretary of State, a 321,000-voter lead over the Democrats. That lead has grown by more than 170,000 voters since 2022: we’ve added nearly 110,000 registrants while Democrats have lost more than 60,000. Their own DNC chair admits Democrats have “been getting our butts kicked” on registration — his words — shedding 2.1 million voters nationwide from 2020 to 2024. He’s right.
Republicans are the most reliable midterm voters in this state — we show up, every cycle, like clockwork. Independents don’t, not in midterms, and 2026 has no presidential race and no Senate race. Governor is the top of the ballot. Hobbs’s entire polling lead is parked with the voters least likely to vote. Ours is built on the voters most likely to show. Monster Republican turnout, uninspiring veto queen, low-turnout independent voters — and her lead evaporates.
And this time, no one has to guess whether their vote counts. The days of Republicans sitting home because they don’t trust the process are over. The RNC and AZGOP already have boots on the ground — Arizona is a priority state in the RNC’s multimillion-dollar election integrity operation, with a state director in place and thousands of trained poll workers, poll watchers, and observers being recruited right now. Eyes and ears on every vote cast and every vote counted. And because we’ve learned the Left doesn’t just campaign — they litigate — our attorneys are on offense: the RNC’s legal team is waging more than 130 election integrity lawsuits across the country, including here at home, where we’ve gone to court to defend Arizona’s early-ballot list maintenance laws and hold Secretary Fontes accountable. Leftist lawfare doesn’t get a free shot at this election. Not on my watch.
Trust the process, bank your ballot early, bring your neighbor. That’s the whole playbook.
Meanwhile, look at the incumbent. Hobbs’s disapproval has climbed to 43% and rising. Most Arizonans have never once said the state is on the right track under her. She squeaked by in 2022 by 17,117 votes. And she’ll spend this fall dodging questions about four separate pay-to-play inquiries — including a criminal probe by her own Party’s attorney general, whose investigators have asked to interview her as they close out a two-year investigation. Hobbs is uncomfortable talking about it. She’s nervous. She vetoed transparency legislation. Twice. Arizonans notice.
Andy Biggs doesn’t have her problems. He has a united party standing fully behind its nominee, the biggest voter bloc in Arizona, and a turnout machine that’s already running.
The gambling markets say Katie Hobbs. I’m the chairman of 1.5 million people who’d like to say otherwise. A lot of people are about to learn that they shouldn’t gamble against Arizona voters.
Sergio Arellano serves as Chairman of the Arizona Republican Party.
Every time you think the energy policies pushed by the Democratic Party can’t possibly get any crazier, they go and fool you again.
Politico’s E&E News published an article Friday with a headline that should scare the bejeebers out of anyone who hopes for sanity in energy policy: “Progressives look to recharge the Green New Deal for the AI era.”
The piece quotes Melat Kiros, the socialist who unseated longtime incumbent Democratic Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette in the party’s recent Colorado primary as saying, “The Green New Deal, frankly, is a floor now, not a ceiling, for what we need to actually be looking at doing.”
This, of course, parrots the classic mantra of every generation of new socialists, who, when presented with the reality that socialism fails disastrously everywhere it is tried, invariably claim that it just hasn’t been done the right way, and they know better.
But they never really do know better.
Let’s be clear: what any version of the Green New Deal introduced by Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Democratic Massachusetts Sen Ed Markey in 2019 would kill the AI era. Why? Because it is a classically socialist program by its very nature. It is a program which would seize the means of production through the central government, invoke a gigantic array of top-down command-and-control regulatory structures and utterly destroy the spirit of human initiative and innovation that leads to human flourishing and prosperity.
All the various socialist candidates quoted in the E&E piece are supported by The Sunrise Movement, a far-left activist NGO funded mainly by leftwing billionaire interests like the Rockefeller Foundation, the Tides Foundation and the Soros-affiliated Open Society Policy Center. What a surprise – it’s like a who’s who of far leftwing astroturf protest funders who have been behind every U.S. protest movement since Occupy Wall Street.
The Green New Deal as proposed by AOC and Markey seven years ago involved ending discretionary air travel; heavily restricting all other travel; heavily restricting personal driving; de facto banning oil, natural gas, and coal; building a vast network of high-speed rail lines which would cost trillions of dollars and take a century or more to develop (assuming the economy didn’t enter a major depression in the meantime); and destroying power grid reliability by forcing mass adoption of wind and solar.
To this new generation of Sunrise-supported socialists, that array of destructive and frankly impossible options is now the “floor” for what really needs to be done. You just can’t make this stuff up.
“The Democrat Party – the socialists, the Marxists – have nominated some of the most radical candidates to ever run for office, and they’re running for Congress. The insurgent left is on the rise,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said after New York voters nominated three socialist candidates.
The speaker isn’t wrong; in fact, he’s a master of understatement. The insurgent left is not just on the rise, it is being funded by the same leftwing billionaire interests who funded the destruction of America’s coal industry, the anti-fracking movement and the effort to kill the shale revolution that has generated hundreds of billions of dollars in economic growth and made the United States the world’s dominant energy powerhouse.
Any revitalization of the Green New Deal would be intentionally designed to destroy all of that and much more. Any effort to apply a renewed Green New Deal to the AI industry would be designed to destroy it, too. Because socialism at its base is never about building anything, but about destroying things, with human flourishing being its main target.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
Cecily Myart-Cruz, the immediate past president of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), carried almost 70% of the vote, a signal that the NEA is likely to double down on its leftwing political power play and far-left social justice activism.
This is hardly breaking news. It reflects the union’s longstanding trajectory and echoes outgoing NEA President Becky Pringle’s recent call for a “political revolution.”
For decades, the teachers unions have built a political machine that channels members’ dues into political campaigns, activist organizations and ballot initiatives. Since 2016 alone, the NEA, AFT and their affiliates have directed more than $1 billion to political groups and activist organizations.
Despite the unions’ constant drumming on about protecting “democracy” from “fascists,” the virtue signaling is nothing more than cover for their Machiavellian-light tactics.
So, it should not come as a surprise that the NEA’s Representative Assembly (RA) just adopted a bylaw to increase yearly member dues by $10 to be directly “allocated to the Ballot Measure/Legislative Crises and Media Campaign Fund.” That means an additional $20 million per year will be injected into state and local politics to advance the NEA’s agenda.
To understand how this functions in practice, look to the current school choice fight in Arizona over the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program. Through astroturf proxies, the NEA is attempting to stop or handicap Arizona families’ ability to choose the best school for their children.
Leading the current anti-school choice movement in The Grand Canyon State is Protect Education, Accountability Now, a recently registered Political Action Committee (PAC) that took in almost $4.5 million from the NEA in the first three months of 2026.
It is more than a union-funded PAC — it is run by union leadership. In fact, the chairman of the PAC, Delia Lynding, is the president of the Kyrene Education Association and a highly active union member. At a No Kings rally this past March, Lynding parroted national leadership rhetoric by declaring that the “unions are the antidote to fascism.”
Apparently, we do not share the same understanding or definition of “fascism.”
But this is not an isolated case of the unions wielding their collective power and resources to influence and control state and local policy and legislation. Over the last few years, the teachers unions have dumped tens of millions of dollars into activist nonprofits to stop or challenge school choice measures in states like Colorado, Kentucky, Maine and Nebraska.
Expanding this political hydra, the NEA has partnered with Public School Strong, an “organizing and visibility campaign of Race Forward’s HEAL Together initiative” that is headed up by a lead organizer with a lengthy history of antisemitic posts and statements. The initiative’s expressed purpose is to support “equity” and protect schools from the “rising tide of extremist attacks against public education” by training up students, parents, and community members as local activists for the union’s interests. In 2024, the NEA gave Race Forward over $300,0000.
At this year’s NEA annual meeting and assembly, the Representative Assembly has reaffirmed the future direction of the organization – the nation’s largest teachers union wants more power and control over schools and culture, and they are willing to use the education system to achieve it.
In order to thwart these efforts, we need to continue to expose their tactics and agenda to the public, offer up alternatives like the Teacher Freedom Alliance, and promote legislation that neuters and defunds this far-left political monstrosity.
It is way past time that we end the teachers unions’ professional activist funding pipeline.
Rhyen Staley is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation and a researcher for Defending Education. He holds a master’s degree in elementary education and has over a decade of classroom experience in both public and private schools. He has over 25 years of coaching experience from junior high to Division I.
Arizona taxpayers can’t catch a break from their local governments. From water rates and utility bills to property taxes and sales taxes, city councils have spent the last several months approving one increase after another. No matter the justification, the result is always the same: higher costs for the people paying the bills.
Here are some of the top offenders of the last couple of months:
Florence
In the Town of Florence, the town council approved a multi-year water and wastewater rate hike plan that starts with roughly 6–8% increases but compounds over several years into what many residents estimate will amount to around a 64% increase in total utility costs. At a time when families are already struggling with affordability, approving rate hikes of that magnitude is a serious burden on Florence residents. With increases that steep, one would think they’re trying to compete with Gilbert (100%+ increase over 3 years). The increases will start on July 1st, just in time for summer, so get your pocketbooks ready, Florence residents.
Tempe
Tempe has their own slew of problems that deserves an article of its own, self-imposed by mismanagement, obviously. The Tempe City Council recently voted on sending a 0.5% sales tax increase to the ballot for voters in November. This will tax all non-grocery food and is said to give 0.3% to public safety, 0.1% to transit such as light rail and buses and 0.1% to Tempe PRE, a city run free preschool.
As usual, local leaders are putting all blame on the legislature. One Tempe councilmember said, “Let me remind you what we set out to do with this initially: to address a … deficit that was created not by us but by the Arizona Legislature and the federal government.”
Meanwhile, this is occurring while the council has decided on things like a $2 million “Mill Ave” sign. Just plain, silver metal. Nothing special or aesthetic and $2 million is going towards this thing? Right, and it’s the legislature’s fault that they are in a budget deficit of about $24 million. It’s almost as if they didn’t spend your tax dollars on stupid things, they wouldn’t need to keep raising taxes…
As we celebrate America’s 250th birthday, one of the finest blessings our Founders gave our nation stands out with particular clarity: the system of free enterprise. That system did not merely enable liberty and prosperity in the abstract.
It unleashed the human ingenuity, risk-taking, and capital allocation that turned America into the world’s unrivaled energy superpower.
From the coal age that fueled the Industrial Revolution, through the oil age that powered the 20th century, to the LNG age we now dominate, American free enterprise has repeatedly delivered technological leadership and abundance. No central planner designed these revolutions.
Entrepreneurs, engineers, and investors did, operating in a system that rewards results above political connections.
Today that legacy is unmistakable. The United States leads the world by a wide margin in the production of both oil and natural gas. We have also become the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, shipping reliable energy to allies across Europe and Asia who once relied on less friendly suppliers.
While some critics like to call this an accident of geology, they’re wrong. America’s LNG dominance is the direct result of the shale revolution, advanced drilling techniques, and a policy environment that, when properly structured, lets markets work.
America once held a similar commanding position in nuclear power. We built the world’s first commercial reactor and led in reactor technology for decades. Then came the 1979 Three Mile Island incident. Irrational fears, amplified by media and activists, led to a bureaucratic paralysis in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission which stalled new construction for two generations. Promising projects died in paperwork as existing plants faced endless regulatory hurdles. America fell behind while other nations pressed forward.
Today, that era is ending. The Trump administration is delivering a major push to revitalize America’s nuclear power industry. Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum have announced major project milestones in recent weeks, including new loan programs to support large-scale reactors and breakthroughs on advanced designs such as microreactors that have already achieved criticality.
These steps signal a return to regulatory sanity and a recognition that abundant, reliable, carbon-free baseload power is essential for both economic growth and national security.
Wind and solar have also established a robust presence on every major U.S. regional grid. These intermittent sources now deliver meaningful power to homes and businesses when the weather cooperates. American companies and workers have built real expertise and infrastructure in these sectors. Yet the United States remains far behind China in manufacturing scale and deployment speed, and subservient to the Chinese Communist Party for the raw materials that make them work.
As Secretary Wright posted on X this week, the massive Biden-era subsidies that distorted markets and enriched foreign supply chains begin phasing out this month. That transition will test the true competitiveness of these technologies without artificial support. Their future contribution will depend on genuine cost reductions and technological improvement, not ever-rising subsidies from taxpayers and ratepayers.
America’s dominant position across fossil fuels, its returning strength in nuclear power, and its established role in renewables together form an unmatched energy portfolio. This abundance has been no small factor in making the United States the world’s dominant geopolitical power. Reliable, affordable energy underpins manufacturing resurgence, data-center growth, and an enduring military edge that deters adversaries. It keeps our economy the envy of the world, with lower energy costs than most competitors and the flexibility to adapt to new demands.
Most importantly, energy dominance sustains the God-endowed freedoms our Founders secured. Cheap, reliable power frees families from energy poverty. It powers the innovations that improve daily life. It supports the industries that create the jobs and wealth that let individuals and communities flourish according to their own lights rather than government dictates.
On this 250th anniversary, we should give thanks not only for the Declaration of Independence and the visionaries who created it, but for the practical system of ordered liberty that turned a resource-rich continent into the engine of global progress.
Free enterprise did not merely discover America’s energy wealth. It developed it, refined it, and continues to expand it. That is a blessing worth celebrating not just this weekend, but every day.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
