I’m writing this one especially for all the Arizona people of good faith, courage & character; I know you’re out there.
At the end of World War II, as he relates in his history of Phoenix, author Bradford Luckingham notes the City had become a post-war, modern day Gomorrah; a wide open, venal and corrupt urbanity. Las Vegas hadn’t been invented yet, and the US Supreme Court hadn’t ruled California was stealing everyone’s Colorado River water, thus creating the Central Arizona Project. Tucson was a hidden Hollywood & Jewish retreat, and a tweedy University town with an airbase.
Back in a newly formed ‘Civic Phoenix’, Goldwater, Pulliam, Snell, the Rosenzweig Brothers, and other disgusted prominent citizens had reached their outrage-limit; it was time for some action. Defying all the local pimpmasters, gambling kingpins, loan sharks, bootleggers, and courthouse crooks, they discreetly met, conspired, and went to work. But it took 10 years to come to fruition, and another 20 yrs to get up to speed.
They created, pretty much without Mother Nature’s role (i.e. harbors, rivers, farming, oil & gas, etc.), in building great cities, what modern observers’ term, an urbanity’s basic value proposition(BVP). And it’s always a work-in-progress (i.e. growing, adapting, aspiring, or rotting).
But those 1940’s & 1950’s Phoenicians of courage and vision went to their graves truly “accomplished people”; ditto those who stood beside them. Individuals whose memories evoke the Biblical verse from Matthew 5, “so let your light shine before the people, that they may see your good works, and glorify the Father….” That corrupt Phoenix of old was a different kind of Gomorrah vs. the current Tucson mental-maelstrom with zero BVP.
Control of Arizona’s 2nd largest Metro has become very radicalized, almost top-to-bottom, mainly thanks to an ossified University and dominant print media, institutions every bit the desired culmination of the City’s first post-Cold War Mayor; i.e. a crypto-commie Hungarian émigré and UA Political Science professor, who created today’s local government-university template.
Now it’s always angry, self-entitled & sanctimonious; full of identity anguish, enviro doom & gloom, and perceived racial humiliations. Hardly anything productive or innovative can get done in Tucson; routinely consumed by an angry political undercurrent of “We gonna get ours.” IMHO, they deserve an entirely new name, especially in an upbeat, techno-dynamic Arizona.
Broadly reflected in a variety of ways, and all disturbingly Piscean, is their tolerance for an absolute menagerie of urban pathologies. Seriously crazy stuff of every dysfunctional stripe; while the dominant print media, appropriately nicknamed “RedStar”, is a constant 24/7 pander. And they deliberately strive to attract these kinds of people to Arizona.
While I am definitely not homophobic or misogynistic, what runs Pima County & Tucson now is an enviro-academic, gay & lesbian gynocracy of grifters, poseurs, and doo-doo brains. Sadly, unlike postwar Phoenix, there is no emergent civic leadership to bravely confront them, let alone stop the predations.
If you allow it, they fully intend to spread this urban dystopia to all of Arizona; you’re already seeing what they can do with Mayes, Hobbs, public education, development policies, and the Water Commissars. In my opinion, the only way to stop it is to defund as much as you can of Pima County and urban Tucson. Technology, trade, and America’s clearly renewing identity is on your side, and it’s unfolding by the week.
Should you want to know more about why all this has happened, I highly commend this early 2025, 11+ min. video from the (younger) ‘William F. Buckley of Great Britain’, i.e. Carl Benjamin, entitled “Sow the Wind, Reap the Whirlwind.”
As for Tucson, it’s too far gone; the patient cannot be saved; time for some serious urban triage from the Arizona Legislature. Defund it; build a bypass around it.
Sellers is a Southpark, Roosevelt-Republican (TR) living in incorporated Oro Valley; his background is federal technology commercialization, and administers the private group, Tucson E-P-T News, on Facebook