The Show for Sept. 16, 2026: Utah's national monument fight, PHX Hip-Hop and more

The Trump administration slashed two major national monuments in Utah to less than a quarter of their original size. Why two-thirds of Utah voters say they want them back. Plus, a look inside Phoenix’s thriving and underground hip-hop scene.

Transcript

ANNOUNCER: KJZZ’s original production, The Show, is supported by Banner Health, Arizona’s largest nonprofit healthcare system. Last year, Banner reinvested more than $1.1 billion in community health and charity care. Banner Health, nonprofit for Arizona. bannerhealth.com/nonprofitforaz.

LAUREN GILGER: Hi, I’m Lauren Gilger, co-host of The Show, an original production from KJZZ. Every weekday, we bring you the latest news and culture from across the state. You can find much more at theshow.kjzz.org. Here’s today’s episode.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning and welcome to The Show here on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix. I’m Lauren Gilger.

Coming up, why private equity firms are buying up childcare centers. And curating a list of the 75 best rappers in Phoenix. That’s right, there are 75.

But first, the Trump administration is facing a slew of major lawsuits over its cutback to the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments to more than a quarter of their original size. And now, a new poll shows even in conservative-leaning Utah, two-thirds of voters support the restoration. The poll was commissioned by the Grand Canyon Trust and comes as the move is being challenged by those lawsuits from conservation groups, environmental organizations, and the outdoor clothing company Patagonia, which has taken a public stance against this move.

Wyatt Myskow has the story for Inside Climate News, and he joins us now to tell us more. Good morning, Wyatt.

WYATT MYSKOW: Good morning. Thanks for having me.

LAUREN GILGER: Thanks for coming in. So, back up for us a moment and just describe Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. How big were these to begin with to be cut back so much?

WYATT MYSKOW: Yeah, up until this July when two executive orders downsized these, these two monuments stretched over 3 million acres of public lands located in southern Utah. And they kind of formed this giant wildlife and conservation corridor that really stretches from Arches National Park over to Zion. Really, if you take that drive across southern Utah, it’s incredibly scenic. Red rock country, canyons everywhere you look, a very lush desert in the sense of colors, maybe not in plant life ... but gorgeous, gorgeous country.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. OK, so that was all national monument. It was stripped back by the president significantly. And why? I mean, major mining interests have had a stake there, wanted to have a stake there for some time. Was that the president’s motivation?

WYATT MYSKOW: Yeah, I’d say that extraction ultimately comes down to what the motivation was and what even President Trump said when he signed those executive orders. Grand Staircase-Escalante, for example, holds the last major coal deposit in the country. There’s been some interest in mining that. As soon as those monuments were rescinded, both — so this isn’t the first time these monuments have been rescinded. In the first Trump administration in 2017, they also downsized these monuments, not as drastically, but that led to lawsuits and obviously pushback as well.

That time, as soon as those protections were stripped back, small mining companies came in and staked claims to begin the process, in theory, of potentially mining in these areas. That has happened again, though not legally, because at the time those claims were staked, the monument still technically had their protections. The clock hadn’t ticked for those to go away yet. There’s also been a lot of interest from local ranchers in southern Utah who have ranched that area for a long time, that some of those monument protections were too strict for ranching. And so this removes, obviously, some of those restrictions. But yeah, it ultimately boils down to mining and ranching was the main goals here of downsizing these monuments.

LAUREN GILGER: Mining and ranching. And we should say under President Joe Biden, he restored these monuments after the first Trump administration. Now they’re stripped back again. Tell us more about this poll in Utah. Is this surprising? Two-thirds of voters want the monuments restored. Utah is a state that voted for Trump.

WYATT MYSKOW: Yeah, it is, but I do think across the West, polling year after year has shown that even in red-leaning states, citizens like their public lands. It’s one of the few bipartisan issues in this country, is that people really don’t like the idea of taking national parks, national monuments, protected areas and stripping those back and opening them up for extractive purposes. It’s just not terribly popular stuff.

And so even in Utah, this decision to downsize both these monuments yet again has not been popular. It’s two-thirds of Utah voters don’t ... support this and think those protections should be gone back. That’s up to 95% of Democrats in the state in the poll, 77% of independents and 52% of Republicans. ... Still, even a majority for Republicans.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. There’s a stat in this poll: 81% of Utahns ... opposed selling public lands to private interests, which is something that Utah Republicans have advocated for, you report.

WYATT MYSKOW: Yeah, for years, Sen. Mike Lee, Utah’s senator, has proposed essentially sell-offs of public lands, both in southern Utah, but elsewhere in the country. Republicans and Sen. Mike Lee have framed it kind of as a way to make more affordable housing in this country. That could maybe be a solution if it was done really right in very specific places.

But in places like this — like in Grand Staircase, Bears Ears — I mean, these are some of the last really remote places in this country. This last May, I drove through southern Utah and really spent some time there because we knew this was coming. This is not a surprise that these monuments were rescinded. And there really is nothing out there except wide open spaces. It’s not a place where affordable housing is going to go.

LAUREN GILGER: Trump’s executive order that scaled back these monuments also terminated the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal [Coalition]. The poll also found most people thought that was a bad idea. Talk a little bit about the importance of tribal voices in this region and in these monuments, Wyatt.

WYATT MYSKOW: Yeah, Bears Ears was formed at the end of the Obama administration, and it was really led by local tribes in the area, the Navajo, Hopi, Ute Mountain, Ute, etc., to protect these lands. This is ancestral land for them. This is where a lot of archaeological sites are, important religious and cultural sites ... some of the folks who’ve advocated for these lands for a long time, this is their medicine cabinet. It’s their food source. It’s the place they call home. And so they pushed really hard to get that monument protected, and they got that.

Part of that led to it being, at least in the Bears Ears case, being co-managed by the local tribes, therefore the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition. They were actually part in the resource management plan, which kind of guides how the monument is ran and protected. The tribes were part of that, and they had actual roles of protecting and incorporating those new rules in those planning documents. And so they were really integral for that monument, and also in Grand Staircase, too. A little bit less, for example, but still very important. Their voices ultimately were kind of the lead ones of getting these places protected.

They’ve been outraged about what has happened and calling ... these sites: "We were not consulted on these rollbacks and that we should have been." ... In the poll, 82% of Utah voters say it’s important for Native American tribes to have a role in the management of these lands, especially when they contain sacred and culturally significant sites like these ones do.

LAUREN GILGER: Such a huge number. OK, let me ask you lastly in the last minute or so here, Wyatt, about other monuments that environmentalists, conservationists are concerned about that could be under threat for similar kind of mining or ranching interests. Some of those are in Arizona.

WYATT MYSKOW: Yeah, that’s right. There are six national monuments that have been really targeted that environmentalists fear might be rolled back. Two were formed at the end of the Biden administration in California: Chuckwalla and Sattítla-Highlands national monuments. And then there’s two here in Arizona that have also gotten a ton of threats for years now: Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni — Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon, this is just a little bit south of the Grand Canyon National Park, and then Ironwood Forest National Monument, which is just north of Tucson.

Both of those monuments have been — same reasons as Grand Staircase and Bears Ears, there’s mining interests. One of the few uranium mines operating in this country is actually currently operating in the ancestral footprints of the Grand Canyon. Right next to Ironwood Forest is ASARCO’s Silver Bell Mine. It’s one of the smaller copper mines here in Arizona. They would like to expand that mine. They’ve been wanting to expand that mine for years, but where they want to expand is currently national monument land. They can’t do that, they can’t expand there. And so they’ve been pushing for years to roll back some of those protections. ...

Yeah, I think it’s really important to note, these might seem distant, Grand Staircase, Bears Ears. But one, they’re only a six-hour drive for Arizonans, and they’re a great weekend trip if you want to go out there. But two, as you know, the environmental coalitions who have said filed lawsuits over these rollbacks is that ... an attack on one national monument is an attack on all of them.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, so concerns are still there. Wyatt Myskow, Inside Climate News, joining us. Wyatt, thanks so much.

WYATT MYSKOW: Thank you.

LAUREN GILGER: Over Labor Day weekend, President Donald Trump went to social media to float a new idea: renaming our neighboring state of New Mexico to “New America.” It’s not the first time, of course, the president has suggested something like this, and in some cases, he’s carried it through. He’s taken aim at the Gulf of Mexico, which if I look on my map on my phone right now says “The Gulf of America.” And more recently, as his trade war with Canada has heated up, the president officially renamed Lake Ontario to “Lake America.”

But for our next guest, the suggestion of renaming New Mexico hits home. Elvia Díaz is the former editorial page editor for The Arizona Republic. She now writes about her views on Substack, and she’s on the line now to tell us more. Good morning, Elvia.

ELVIA DÍAZ: Good morning. Thank you for not forgetting about this.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. I mean, this was one of those stories that pops up, grabs a lot of headlines, and then people kind of moved on. But you lived in New Mexico for a good part of your career, you worked at the Albuquerque Journal, and you write that New Mexicans are kind of uniquely proud of their land, the kind of distinct cultures and heritage there. Tell us about that.

ELVIA DÍAZ: Yeah, you know, the first thing that caught my attention when I saw the president float that idea is the fact that he described this new name, New America, as more prestigious and more beautiful. And I immediately recalled my days in New Mexico. I lived in northern New Mexico, in Santa Fe specifically, and the melting pots of cultures there is so evident.

So to me, I imagine the president thinking that this diversity of people, of culture, of food, of art is not beautiful, and therefore we need to change it to New America. And in that case, he’s trying to define what America means for him anyway, and it’s certainly not this melting pot that I saw and lived in New Mexico.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, and the history there is so interesting. There’s Mexican, Spanish, Native American traditions all in one place that have a very long history in this part of the country in particular. And it sounds like, you know, for lots of people in New Mexico, this was different than some of the president’s other attempts at changing names like this. You view it essentially as an attempt to quash diversity.

ELVIA DÍAZ: Yeah, no, exactly. The history of New Mexico is so unique. I’m imagining that the president associates New Mexico with Mexico, and there’s some truth to that. But the state —

LAUREN GILGER: Seems like we are losing the connection with Elvia Díaz, who’s joining us to talk about this story. We will return to that segment when we have a better connection. You’re listening to The Show.

LAUREN GILGER: And now let's return to our conversation with Elvia Díaz, former editorial page editor of The Arizona Republic, who now writes on Substack. We were talking about President Trump's suggestion that New Mexico be renamed New America. We got you back on the line, Elvia?

ELVIA DÍAZ: Yes, I'm here. You can always count on technology to fail us.

LAUREN GILGER: It's the way it goes. So let's take a few minutes to talk a little bit about your point of view on this. You write that this is one of those stories about what President Trump posts on social media that we might all dismiss — he posts a lot of things — but this one caught your attention. Tell us why you think it's worth talking about for a minute.

ELVIA DÍAZ: Well, because it's not in a vacuum. I believe the New Mexico governor said, you know, this is not up for debate. And also she mentioned that possibly President Donald Trump was doing this as a distraction because he doesn’t want the American people to talk about the war in Iran and so many other, you know, the trade at the time, the trade deals. And so I think it’s part of that.

It is a distraction, in fact, but it’s also, just like I mentioned, it’s not in a vacuum. He’s been saying this for a long time. He’s been attacking Mexico since the beginning of his campaign, and so he associates, I presume, you know, New Mexico with Mexico. He’s been talking about invading that country, and now all of a sudden, he’s into name-changing, and he just doesn’t like the word "Mexico." So that’s why he’s suggesting to change it to New America to a more, you know, prestigious and beautiful than it is right now.

LAUREN GILGER: So when President Trump did this before, right, he wanted to rename Lake Ontario to, you know, Lake America, he wanted to rename the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America, he did that. He issued executive orders, now those names are different on your map, right? But the situation is different for states, right?

ELVIA DÍAZ: Yeah, it is. He cannot legally change New Mexico to America. You know, that will have to go through a congressional process. New Mexico became a state in 1912. But this is the thing, Lauren, that he doesn't really care about the laws sometimes. We have seen that throughout his presidency.

I mean, who’s to say he’s not going to sign an executive order just changing the name like he has done, you know, to other places, and then, you know, there will have to be legal challenges to say, "No, you can't do that. You know, that's illegal," and then it will have to go through the courts in order to tell him, "No, you can't do that."

So that's why I think it's not a laughing matter, and it's certainly not a laughing matter for the people of New Mexico. We were talking about the melting pot there. They're not laughing about this.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, and you talked about the kind of reaction from the governor there. You write, "I think it is Trump's calculated message about whose history counts, whose culture belongs, what kind of America he still wants." I think this is interesting in light of what happened in the last election, though, Elvia, where we saw record numbers of Latino voters voting for President Trump.

ELVIA DÍAZ: Yeah, I mean, he’s trying to define America and New America as one people, meaning Anglo-Saxons, the way that he sees it, and he doesn’t really care for the melting pot of America, for, you know, the Native Americans in New Mexico, their 23 Pueblos and Nations, and then, of course, there’s the Spanish connection there, the Mexican connection.

But he is just talking about redefining who is America, and he has done it. And Latinos, you are correct, many Latinos, and especially Latino men, voted for him in the last election. And according to new polls, at least the ones that I have seen, a lot of them are changing their minds, and I think it’s precisely not just because of immigration, but also because he’s been doing nothing but attacking anyone who’s not Anglo-Saxon.

LAUREN GILGER: There's probably not much political risk here for President Trump, Elvia. New Mexico is a solidly blue state. You mention, though, that you think this is a distraction. Do you think these distractions work, in the last minute or so here?

ELVIA DÍAZ: Well, I think it works for people who are not paying attention. I mean, I am grateful that you are still talking about it when there are so many things going on, but I think it will backfire, especially with Latinos who still have deep connections to their culture back in Mexico and Spain, Native Americans.

That's definitely not going to help in New Mexico, and he doesn't need New Mexico, but elsewhere, like in Arizona, California, and so many other places where Latinos voted for him and now are having second thoughts.

LAUREN GILGER: All right, we'll leave it there. Elvia Díaz, former editorial page editor for the Arizona Republic, now writes on Substack. Elvia, thanks so much.

ELVIA DÍAZ: Thank you.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning. It is The Show here on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Lauren Gilger.

Coming up, Arizona’s not exactly a bastion of hip-hop music, but one local aficionado says we’ve got a lot of talent here if you know where to look.

COBY MONTOYA: It’s really something where you have to kind of look for it, but once you realize what’s in your backyard, you quickly realize how big it is.

LAUREN GILGER: We’ll hear from a local fan turned documentarian working with other artists to put together a list of Arizona’s top 75 rappers of the year.

But first, private equity is buying up a lot of industries these days, including childcare centers. And Arizona is full of them. We’re second on the list, in fact, of states with the highest concentration of private equity-owned daycares in the country, according to our next guest.

Chris Herbst is an ASU Foundation professor in the School of Public Affairs there, and he and his colleagues are out with a new study titled Big Daycare: The Growth of Private Equity in the U.S. Childcare Market. He came into our studios recently to tell me more about it and said nationally, private equity ownership in this industry has gone up from about 1% in the late 1990s to about 8% today. In fact, he found nine of the 11 largest childcare chains in the country are currently or have been owned by private equity firms.

CHRIS HERBST: The largest private equity-owned chain in the country is KinderCare, followed closely by a parent company called The Learning Care Group. They own and operate 11 different childcare center businesses. Some of those include Childtime, Tutor Time, and La Petite Academy. Listeners in Arizona will probably be most familiar with programs like Primrose and Goddard Schools. These are schools that exist in large numbers in Arizona.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, definitely see those around. Let’s back up, Chris, and just talk about what private equity is. Like, I think we get this sense that, you know, it’s Wall Street, quote-unquote, but they own a lot of things. Like, there are private equity investors, buyers, owners in many, many industries these days, right?

CHRIS HERBST: That’s correct. So the way that private equity firms operate is they gather funding, they gather money from wealthy individuals and institutions, and they use that money to purchase and, in many cases, manage mature or already existing businesses with the goal of increasing efficiency, increasing profits such that they maximize the short-run returns for their investors. And it is, in fact, the case that private equity owns today everything from restaurants and shoe stores to nursing home facilities as well as childcare increasingly.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. OK, so why childcare? Like, that seems counterintuitive to me. Like, it doesn’t seem like it’s a money-making industry to get into.

CHRIS HERBST: It is a bit counterintuitive, but I think there are some clues as to why private equity is attracted to childcare. Number one, I think it’s important to note that private equity-owned childcare businesses don’t exist everywhere. They exist in very select communities, and that is largely high-income communities where they can charge, not always, but sometimes premium prices to a relatively wealthy consumer base, and that allows them to maximize profits in these communities. So they are profit-driven in childcare as they are in other industries.

The other clue, I think, is that perhaps they are setting themselves up to leverage public dollars in childcare sometime in the future. I think they’re making a bet that childcare nationally will become heavily subsidized, and they’re positioning themselves to take advantage of those public dollars in the future.

LAUREN GILGER: That’s interesting. We’ve seen that happen just next door in New Mexico, yeah. OK, so you talked about the neighborhoods, the kind of communities these places tend to pop up in, but what about in certain states? It sounds like Arizona is at the top of the list you found.

CHRIS HERBST: It is certainly the case that private equity is not everywhere, and it’s concentrated in a relatively small number of places. So the top sort of four or five states in which private equity has a presence in childcare are Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and New Jersey. In Arizona and in Nevada, one out of every five childcare centers is private equity-owned.

LAUREN GILGER: Wow.

CHRIS HERBST: I will also say just to sort of speak to the geographic clustering of these businesses, 82% of U.S. counties does not have a single private equity-owned childcare center.

LAUREN GILGER: The vast majority, OK.

CHRIS HERBST: The vast majority. 75% of all private equity-owned centers exist in just 5% of all U.S. counties.

LAUREN GILGER: Wow, and apparently here.

CHRIS HERBST: And here. As a state, there are a large number of these sorts of providers, but they are not scattered throughout the state. They exist primarily in Maricopa County and close to Tucson.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so you mentioned they tend to be in sort of higher-income communities. What does that mean about what kinds of programs these are? Like, should parents avoid them, should they look for them, are they good, are they bad?

CHRIS HERBST: Well, I think the most important comparison we make in the paper is the difference in quality between private equity-owned centers and non-private equity centers. And the story here is a bit mixed. So on the one hand, private equity-owned centers are more likely to be accredited through state-owned quality accrediting bodies. They’re also more likely to be accredited by a nonprofit organization called the National Association for the Education of Young Children, and they run what is sort of the gold standard quality accreditation program. So private equity, more likely to be accredited by these bodies.

It is also the case that child-to-staff ratios across PE and non-PE centers are about the same, so they’re not doing worse on that metric. On the other hand, we do find evidence that things like staff turnover rates and child turnover rates, which are seen as being important components of quality, that private equity firms do worse on these things. So staff turnover is higher, child turnover is higher in these PE-backed centers. And again, we think that this is correlated with quality for the sort of obvious reason that the more churn there is on the client side and the teacher side, that this sort of undermines quality in childcare classrooms.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, interesting. So this also comes, Chris, as there’s been a big increase in the cost of childcare around the country, here as well for sure. I think every parent knows that. Are these things related?

CHRIS HERBST: We conclude that overall private equity is, generally speaking, not the reason why childcare is so expensive in this country. Because their presence is very localized, as we spoke about, for the average community, private equity is not driving up your children’s childcare costs.

We conducted a direct comparison. We look at what private equity is charging relative to non-private equity, and we find that private equity does in fact charge substantially more. But when you conduct the comparison against non-private equity chains, it is actually the case that private equity childcare centers charge slightly less than non-private equity chains.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so not a cost factor in that way. What about regulation here? Like when it comes to private equity Wall Street investors, quote-unquote, buying up other slices of the pie, right, when I’m thinking of housing in particular, we’ve seen people suggest, the president included, that that needs to be reined in. Is that happening in childcare?

CHRIS HERBST: Not so far, although discussions, I think, are underway to try to rein in private equity. My colleague and I on the paper, I think, conclude that if you’re worried about private equity in the childcare market, you should probably also be concerned about chains, national chains, writ large, because we find that the behavior of private equity really sort of mirrors broader trends within for-profit chains. And so maybe there’s a conversation to be had about regulation as it relates to chains. It doesn’t seem to us to make a whole lot of sense to target regulation specifically at private equity.

LAUREN GILGER: That’s interesting. So it’s sort of become a boogeyman in a way, but maybe it’s not any worse off than some of these major chains in terms of actual quality.

CHRIS HERBST: I think that on average that observation is correct, although the story is complicated. They seem to do better on some dimensions and maybe slightly worse or the same on other dimensions.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. OK, Chris Herbst, ASU Foundation professor in the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University joining us. Chris, thanks so much for coming in, thanks for the research here, appreciate it.

CHRIS HERBST: Thanks for having me.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, it is The Show on KJZZ 91.5, I’m Lauren Gilger.

A new nonfiction book tells the story of a young woman who escaped a cult based in rural New Mexico. But the person who left wasn’t just any member, she was the daughter of the group’s leaders. The Oracle's Daughter: The Rise and Fall of an American Cult delves into the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps, which was located in a small community called Fence Lake, New Mexico, about 2.5 hours southwest of Albuquerque and an hour and a half from Springerville in eastern Arizona.

Harrison Hill is the book’s author. He spoke with my co-host Mark Brodie more about it, and they started with this group, the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps, and what they were all about.

HARRISON HILL: So the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps was founded by a pair of ex-hippies named Jim and Deborah Green, who following their time in the counterculture, they became Christians. And in the years that followed their conversion in the 1970s, they became kind of convinced that the churches they were visiting were not sufficiently intense or as aggressive as they wanted them to be. And so as a result of that, they founded a group that eventually became known as the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps, which was really a kind of, I call them pseudo-Christian group, a kind of group that just dialed their faith up to an 11.

And they began in Sacramento in an ordinary-looking neighborhood. They recruited members from all over the city. When they ran into a little bit of trouble, they ultimately had to flee to New Mexico, where they lived for many years until in 2017 there was a major raid conducted for alleged abuses and the group kind of collapsed from there.

MARK BRODIE: So what kinds of things did they believe in, and sort of what were their actions like?

HARRISON HILL: So they were really obsessed with a practice that they called deliverance, which was a kind of exorcism where they would say that people were possessed of kind of ordinary sins like lust and hatred and all that kind of thing, but then also things like caffeine or nicotine, things like that. They said that people could have up to 6,000 demons in themselves at a time.

So yeah, they were really into this idea of spiritual warfare. A lot of it was based in a kind of recognizable Christianity, but they just torqued it up so far beyond anything that’s kind of recognizable that it really did, to my mind at least, become something kind of different.

MARK BRODIE: And you mentioned that they had to flee, they ran into some legal trouble. These were some pretty serious things that they were involved in, it sounds like.

HARRISON HILL: Yeah, the original allegations that led to the downfall of the group involved a lot of child abuse, both physical and sexual. They’d had a lawsuit that they’d dealt with years prior in the 1980s where a woman alleged that she’d been forced to do all this kind of forced labor and just all kinds of mistreatment.

And then just beyond the kind of obviously identifiable crimes like those, there was also just this kind of an oppression of their members, a kind of spiritual — I mean, I would call it spiritual abuse in terms of the way that they made people cut themselves off from their families or leave their jobs or all that kind of thing, take vows of poverty. You know, it’s not sort of illegal in the same way that some of those other crimes are, but to me it has, you know, that’s part of the portrait of the group that I think makes it especially damaging.

MARK BRODIE: So let me ask you about Sarah Green. She is one of the main characters of your book and the daughter of the founders of this organization, and also somebody who left, right?

HARRISON HILL: Yeah, so the book is called, as we said earlier, it’s called The Oracle's Daughter, and the daughter herself is Sarah Green. Her face is really big on the cover of the book. Yeah, her parents were Jim and Deborah Green. She grew up in the group, you know, from the 1980s onwards.

She had lived a little bit of a life outside of the group before her parents kind of — before they became sort of extreme. And so because of that, she really had an idea of what she was missing when she was in this group that had just removed itself from the regular world. The result of that was that by the age of 26 in 1999, she was just desperate to leave and start over. And so she managed to do that. That’s where my book begins, with this escape in the middle of the night.

MARK BRODIE: How did she actually go about leaving? I guess both emotionally and logistically.

HARRISON HILL: Yeah, you know, emotionally, the emotional part of it was significantly more difficult than the logistical part. Logistically, it was just that she woke up in the middle of the night, pulled herself out of her sleeping bag, packed some granola bars and a water bottle in a backpack and just headed out and started hitchhiking her way to the West Coast. It’s a pretty remarkable moment. That’s why I chose to begin the book with it.

But then spiritually and emotionally, it was extraordinarily difficult, and it was difficult for many years. You know, she had wanted to leave, she was frustrated and overwhelmed by the teachings of her parents and wanted to in some sense reject them, but they were also part of her. And so this was this kind of conflict that was at the center of her. You know, she wanted to start over, she wanted to be working as a midwife in the Pacific Northwest, she wanted to have boyfriends and experiment and just live life like anybody. But she also was just haunted by these sermons and kind of screeds that her parents had implanted in her basically.

And how she dealt with it was really just by putting one foot in front of the other, by slowly getting a job, getting a bank account, getting an email address, all these kind of everyday little things. That increased exposure was what was able to eventually create enough of a scaffolding for her to say, "No, this is my life, I am permanently out here, and that life I lived in the group is over."

MARK BRODIE: That just sounds like it would have been such a difficult sort of internal wrestling match to, as you say, put one foot in front of the other and actually do it.

HARRISON HILL: Yeah, and the other factor that I haven’t mentioned is that she was actually leaving three children behind. She intended at the time that she left, she intended to come back and get them out, and I won’t say too much more about what happened there, but that tension of being a mother, being devoted to her children, which there absolutely was, and being a mother was at the center of her sense of herself, that was just completely in conflict with what she wanted out of her life, or I shouldn’t say completely, it was partially in conflict with it. And that tension, that kind of impossible knot, was actually part of what made me really interested in writing this project. There’s a kind of human complexity there that, yeah, a lot of us have not been in that similar kind of situation, but the feeling of being caught, of being in a kind of impossible circumstance, I think that is something that a lot of us can identify at least on some level.

MARK BRODIE: Sure. So I want to ask about the process of reporting this story and reporting this book, because it sounds like there wasn’t necessarily a whole ton to go on. You kind of had to look through public documents and other kinds of records like that. Is that a fair assessment?

HARRISON HILL: Yeah, that’s very fair. You know, it’s funny, when I start telling people about this project, they’re often like, "Oh, you know, I’ve never heard of that group before." And I always sort of jokingly say, "Yeah, that’s why I wanted to write a book about it." But yeah, because of that absence of public coverage, I had to do a lot of digging.

I traveled around California, New Mexico. I got tens of thousands of pages of legal documents. I interviewed, I conducted over 200 interviews in the course of the book. I was reporting it for several years. I spent the night out near where the compound was located in New Mexico just to try and get a feel for like, what was it like, if you’d been escaping in the middle of the night as Sarah was doing, what did it feel like, what did it smell like, what were the sounds?

And so it was really important to me to kind of bring that texture, that kind of sensorial richness to it, which meant that it wasn’t just about figuring out the precise legal machinations of it, which were very complicated and which were totally fascinating and anything dramatically dynamite. It was also about finding those little details that make something feel real and human. And my goal really was to make this read like a novel.

MARK BRODIE: All right, that is Harrison Hill, author of the book The Oracle's Daughter: The Rise and Fall of an American Cult. Harrison, thanks so much for the conversation, I appreciate it.

HARRISON HILL: Thanks so much, Mark, a pleasure.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning. It is The Show on KJZZ 91.5, I’m Lauren Gilger.

Think of hip-hop meccas and Phoenix is probably not the city that comes to mind. New York, LA, Atlanta, sure, but Phoenix is probably not at the top of that list. Well, my next guest this morning says that doesn’t mean there isn’t a thriving hip-hop scene here in the Valley and a whole lot of talent.

Coby Montoya is the founder of the social media collective Phoenix Hip-Hop. He calls it a fan-first front page to the Phoenix hip-hop world. And now, he’s out with a list of the top 75 — yes, 75 — rappers in Arizona. A painstaking and somewhat controversial project that’s gotten a lot of attention from all sides. Montoya came into our studios to talk to me about it all, and he told me he has always been into hip-hop, ever since he was a kid.

COBY MONTOYA: I just really connected with the lyricism part of it. Hip-hop is, and rap from a genre perspective, it has the most words per song, you know?

LAUREN GILGER: I can guess that would be true, yeah.

COBY MONTOYA: But by the nature of the speed of it, and so because I’m just very into lyricism, I gravitated towards it.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so a hip-hop guy from a young age. You came to Phoenix, did you realize, try to find a hip-hop scene here quickly?

COBY MONTOYA: I really didn’t. It took a while, but eventually I found this store called Trill, which is in downtown Phoenix. Trill is a very unique place. It’s a hip-hop shop, it’s almost like a museum. It has a lot of memorabilia, and they have a lot of shows and performances, where it’s artists that I grew up listening to in the early 2000s. And living in Florida, I had no access to see them live, and so that sort of was my connection to the broader hip-hop and rap scene here.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so Trill, you go there, you start seeing people perform. Did you learn that there were local rappers, local hip-hop artists here quickly? When did you kind of discover the local scene?

COBY MONTOYA: Yeah, so that was — really, it’s fairly recent, actually. 2023, I went to something called the Arizona Hip-Hop Festival. So I was at First Friday, and someone was just giving away free tickets. So I was like, “OK, I’ll check this out.” And I went, and it was like over a a hundred local rappers. I was like, “How is this possible?”

LAUREN GILGER: A hundred?

COBY MONTOYA: Yeah. And so I’m a very, I’m a naturally curious person. I want to understand the context of everything. And so from that day, I was like, “OK, I want to better understand this local community.” And so I started prioritizing going to local shows and documenting them.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so you started documenting them, you make this kind of social media account, PHX Hip-Hop. But it has evolved into something much more than an Instagram account, right? Like, this is a collective really now. What’s it like?

COBY MONTOYA: Yeah, I look at it as a portal to the artistic community when it comes to hip-hop and rap. So if someone wants to understand what the community looks like, it’s kind of like the front page of the community.

LAUREN GILGER: Who’s involved with you? I mean, this has grown for sure.

COBY MONTOYA: Yeah, so actually I have a team that’s, most of them are also artists. I’m not someone that likes to be front and center of things, right? I’m more of a behind-the-scenes type of person. And so I wanted to enable artists to gain more exposure, so I have artists that interview other artists. So it’s almost like if you think about the old-school MTV VJs and stuff like that, they had these personalities. That’s been sort of my goal, is to help them develop their own brand and that way they can also connect to their music.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so 100 Phoenix rappers at this hip-hop festival you go to, right? You’re like, “What is this?” How big is the hip-hop scene in Phoenix? Like, it’s not one we hear about all the time.

COBY MONTOYA: Yeah, no, that’s a great point. I mean, it’s practically invisible unless you’re looking for it. But, you know, First Friday has evolved as of recently, but First Friday was a great place to see local artists, and there’s a number of open mics as well. There’s like a whole open mic circuit.

[CLIP OF J. GALLANT RAPPNG AT AN OPEN MIC IN SCOTTSDALE]

It’s really something where you have to kind of look for it, but once you realize, you know, what’s in your backyard, you quickly realize how big it is.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, OK. So every year now, it seems, you’re going to be and are making this list, right? This is 75 — which is a massive number really if you think about it — of the top hip-hop artists in Phoenix. You rank the top five. It sounds like you started this last year as sort of a whim, right?

COBY MONTOYA: Yeah, I sat down one day and just, I wanted to acknowledge artists that I appreciate and that I saw that year. And so I started with a top 25, and I’m like, “Yeah, but what about this person? What about that person?” I’m like, “All right, I’ll make this a top 40.”

I got to 40, I’m like, “This person’s not going to like that I left them out.” And eventually I got to 75, and I still could think of more. I was like, “I have to cut this off because it’s going to be too long,” yeah.

LAUREN GILGER: Seventy-five! OK, so what was the reaction when you dropped that first list?

COBY MONTOYA: The reaction was very significant, yeah. So a lot of people were upset because so-and-so was not on this list, or “I’ve never heard of this artist.” But really the list was not to say these artists are better than you, it’s really just to acknowledge the artistry of these specific artists. And so because of the response I got the first time around, the second time around I approached it a little bit more objectively, did a little bit more professionally.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so people took it seriously, so you took it seriously.

COBY MONTOYA: Exactly, yeah, yeah.

LAUREN GILGER: And you, it sounds like, brought in other voices to help you make this list this time?

COBY MONTOYA: I did, yeah. So I’m definitely not naive to the fact that hip-hop is Black culture, and being a white person, I think it’s important to include persons of color. And so this time around, I had five other people contribute to it. And they selected kind of their picks, I selected my picks, and we kind of combined it all.

The barrier to entry to be an artist is very low, but because of that, there are so many artists, right? I mean, you’re like, “100 rappers?” And so there’s, at this time, there’s kind of oversaturation when it comes to art because of the low barrier, yeah. And so there are many artists that, they may be amazing, but they don’t have financial resources, or they don’t know so-and-so.

And so this list is not to acknowledge who has the most money to invest in marketing, who has a connection, although some of them do. It’s to acknowledge kind of raw talent.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, OK. So let’s talk about at least the first couple on this very long list. Who’s No. 1?

COBY MONTOYA: Yeah, No. 1 is an artist called Murkemz, and he’s been in Phoenix for quite some time now.

[“PHX” BY MURKEMZ BEGINS]

LAUREN GILGER: He’s got some celebrity connections, it sounds like?

COBY MONTOYA: Yeah, yeah. So he did a song with a member of the Wu-Tang Clan, Inspectah Deck. He has a co-sign from Ice-T, who lives in Chandler, I don’t know if you knew that.

LAUREN GILGER: I did, actually!

COBY MONTOYA: He did a song called “PHX” recently, which is like a West Coast style. He’s from the East Coast, so he kind of has like an East Coast background as well. So he does multiple styles, but his talent, he’s very good at like braggadocio rhymes and very complex wordplay and things like that.

[MURKEMZ CLIP FADES OUT]

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. OK, who’s number two? We’ve got Maze Overlay. Tell us about him.

[“COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS” BY MAZE OVERLY BEGINS]

COBY MONTOYA: Yeah, Maze Overlay is a Phoenix native, and he’s been an artist for a number of years, and he’s put out, I think, like over the past three years something like six albums a year.

LAUREN GILGER: Wow, a year?

COBY MONTOYA: Yeah, and yeah, he’s also just a very top-tier lyricist. So I mean, he can rap about mindfulness and, you know, things like that, or he could rap about more like experiences he’s had. And so, yeah, he’s a very top-tier artist.

LAUREN GILGER: I mean, he’s wearing a Suns jersey in one of these videos. I mean, it sounds like, and, you know, you mentioned Murkemz has a song called “PHX,” like how much are many of these rappers talking about Phoenix?

COBY MONTOYA: I think a lot of the artists are very proud, you know, to be a part of the Phoenix community. And, you know, they’re trying to, there’s this idea that, hey, when people talk about hip-hop, they don’t talk about Phoenix. And so there’s a drive in many of these artists to kind of put Phoenix on the map.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, absolutely. So is there a Phoenix sound? You mentioned a West Coast hip-hop sound, the East Coast hip-hop sound, there’s Atlanta obviously, like what about Phoenix?

COBY MONTOYA: Yeah, it’s interesting. Everyone has a different opinion. If you ask some of the old-school folks that have been around for a long time, they’ll say it’s a more West Coast sound. My personal opinion, because it’s a melting pot, I don’t think there necessarily is a regional sound just because there’s lack of regional culture here collectively, because half of the people that live here aren’t from here, you know, it’s very much a melting pot.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, I think that makes sense. So let's talk about the scene in general and what you would like to do for it or where you would like to see it go, right? Like, I think the Arizona music scene more broadly, has been an interesting one to watch over the years because it's always kind of an underdog kind of mentality. We're not LA, we're not New York, we're not Chicago, we're not Atlanta. Where do you think in its evolution the Phoenix hip-hop scene is right now? Do you think it has a long way to go?

[MAZE OVERLAY CLIP FADES OUT]

COBY MONTOYA: Yeah, I mean, I'm just spitballing with you, but it seems like it's kind of in a midpoint. It's been very fragmented in the past where you have these different pockets and kind of segments of artists and they don't really communicate. And so I've tried to be a bridge to connect those different pockets and segments, because I really do believe there's power in unity. And collectively, I think if folks were less competitive and kind of more collaborative, it will mature to a state where Phoenix will be more well-known for hip-hop.

[“PHX” BY MURKEMZ PLAYS]

LAUREN GILGER: OK. Coby Montoya, founder of Phoenix Hip-Hop, joining us. Coby, thank you so much for coming in. Appreciate it very much.

COBY MONTOYA: Thanks for having me.

LAUREN GILGER: And now let's return to our conversation with Elvia Díaz, former editorial page editor of The Arizona Republic, who now writes on Substack. We were talking about President Trump's suggestion that New Mexico be renamed "New America." We got you back on the line, Elvia?

ELVIA DÍAZ: Yes, I'm here. You can always count on technology to fail us.

LAUREN GILGER: It's the way it goes. So let's take a few minutes to talk a little bit about your point of view on this. You write that this is one of those stories about what President Trump posts on social media that we might all dismiss — he posts a lot of things — but this one caught your attention. Tell us why you think it's worth talking about for a minute.

ELVIA DÍAZ: Well, because it's not in a vacuum. I believe the New Mexico governor said, you know, this is not up for debate. And also she mentioned that possibly President Donald Trump was doing this as a distraction because he doesn’t want the American people to talk about the war in Iran and so many other, you know, the trade at the time, the trade deals. And so I think it’s part of that. It is a distraction, in fact, but it’s also, just like I mentioned, it’s not in a vacuum. He’s been saying this for a long time. He’s been attacking Mexico since the beginning of his campaign, and so he associates, I presume, you know, New Mexico with Mexico. He’s been talking about invading that country, and now all of a sudden, he’s into name-changing, and he just doesn’t like the word "Mexico." So that’s why he’s suggesting to change it to New America to a more, you know, prestigious and beautiful than it is right now.

LAUREN GILGER: So when President Trump did this before, right, he wanted to rename Lake Ontario to, you know, "Lake America," he wanted to rename the Gulf of Mexico to "Gulf of America," he did that. He issued executive orders, now those names are different on your map, right? But the situation is different for states, right?

ELVIA DÍAZ: Yeah, it is. He cannot legally change New Mexico to "America." You know, that will have to go through a congressional process. New Mexico became a state in 1912. But this is the thing, Lauren, that he doesn't really care about the laws sometimes. We have seen that throughout his presidency. I mean, who’s to say he’s not going to sign an executive order just changing the name like he has done, you know, to other places, and then, you know, there will have to be legal challenges to say, "No, you can't do that. You know, that's illegal," and then it will have to go through the courts in order to tell him, "No, you can't do that." So that's why I think it's not a laughing matter, and it's certainly not a laughing matter for the people of New Mexico. We were talking about the melting pot there. They're not laughing about this.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, and you talked about the kind of reaction from the governor there. You write, "I think it is Trump's calculated message about whose history counts, whose culture belongs, what kind of America he still wants." I think this is interesting in light of what happened in the last election, though, Elvia, where we saw record numbers of Latino voters voting for President Trump.

ELVIA DÍAZ: Yeah, I mean, he’s trying to define America and New America as one people, meaning Anglo-Saxons, the way that he sees it, and he doesn’t really care for the melting pot of America, for, you know, the Native Americans in New Mexico, their 23 Pueblos and Nations, and then, of course, there’s the Spanish connection there, the Mexican connection. But he is just talking about redefining who is America, and he has done it. And Latinos, you are correct, many Latinos, and especially Latino men, voted for him in the last election. And according to new polls, at least the ones that I have seen, a lot of them are changing their minds, and I think it’s precisely not just because of immigration, but also because he’s been doing nothing but attacking anyone who’s not Anglo-Saxon.

LAUREN GILGER: There's probably not much political risk here for President Trump, Elvia. New Mexico is a solidly blue state. You mention, though, that you think this is a distraction. Do you think these distractions work, in the last minute or so here?

ELVIA DÍAZ: Well, I think it works for people who are not paying attention. I mean, I am grateful that you are still talking about it when there are so many things going on, but I think it will backfire, especially with Latinos who still have deep connections to their culture back in Mexico and Spain, Native Americans. That's definitely not going to help in New Mexico, and he doesn't need New Mexico, but elsewhere, like in Arizona, California, and so many other places where Latinos voted for him and now are having second thoughts.

LAUREN GILGER: All right, we'll leave it there. Elvia Díaz, former editorial page editor for the Arizona Republic, now writes on Substack. Elvia, thanks so much.

ELVIA DÍAZ: Thank you.

LAUREN GILGER: Thanks for listening to The Show’s podcast. The Show is produced by Sativa Peterson, Nick Sanchez, Amber Victoria Singer, Athena Ankrah, and Akeyana Hamilton. The Show was created by John Hockenberry, and our executive producer is Amy Silverman. You can find more of The Show and sign up for our newsletter at theshow.kjzz.org. You can also find us on Instagram @kjzztheshow.