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wendy rogers rep

sitting rep? wacko oathkeeper (beat townsend fake elector in redistr fight, she had trump endorse and $]

rw wackos in 2026 midterm az

07/28/2026 rww

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Kyle Mantyla

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rww

02/03/2025

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Kyle Mantyla

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tex obs

These accounts have drawn the attention of conservative commentators, activists, and even elected officials. The X account belonging to Republican U.S. Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky follows three of the four neo-Nazi accounts, while the account belonging to GOP Arizona state Senator Wendy Rogers follows two. The account belonging to Sebastian Gorka, former and future deputy assistant to Donald Trump, follows 9mm_smg, and the account belonging to Chuck DeVore, an executive at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, has retweeted one of 9mm_smg’s posts.

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an 9 24 joe conasan

How unsurprising is it that former President Donald Trump appeared recently at an event supposedly devoted to opposing antisemitism -- and proceeded to deliver a speech dripping with antisemitic innuendo and contempt for American Jews?

Like so much of what Trump says and does, his remarks at the "Combating Antisemitism" affair in Washington, D.C., expressed a bitter grievance. He resents the fact that Jewish voters in the United States remain overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic, which means only a minority of them vote for him. He bluntly argued that his support for Israel's right-wing and bloodstained government somehow entitles him to Jewish votes, even though many Jews are critical of Israeli policy and political leadership.

Hours later, at an event for Israeli Americans, he expanded on the same themes but went much further, seeking to scapegoat the entire Jewish community for the electoral failure he now fears:

"If I don't win this election, and the Jewish people would really have a lot to do with that if that happens, because at 40%, that means 60% of the people are voting for the enemy ..."

Aside from his noxious description of his political rivals as "the enemy," Trump's attempt to blame Jews in advance for a Republican defeat at the polls is both absurd and sinister. Absurd because Jews are a tiny fraction of the electorate, mostly concentrated in states where he has no chance to win anyway. Sinister because the MAGA movement that Trump has spawned is crawling with neo-Nazis, white nationalists and antisemites who are already primed to spread hatred of Jews and other forms of racism.

ALSO READ:**Trump has a brand new front in the Haitian conspiracy push**

And he knows it.

Trump's rise over the past decade has seen the mainstreaming of every extremist ideology on the right -- a category that encompasses antisemitism along with racism, homophobia, misogyny, Islamophobia and the violent antagonism toward immigrants that he and his vice presidential nominee JD Vance now encourage routinely. As the Republican Party moved sharply rightward under Trump's leadership, the most vicious hatemongers have sprung up to proclaim their bigotry loudly, while proudly identifying as MAGA.

The latest mortifying episode involves Mark Robinson, the GOP candidate for governor of North Carolina, a pious moralist whose raunchy online persona was suddenly exposed by a CNN investigative team. Much of what Robinson wrote on the "Nude Africa" porn site is too scandalous to be recounted on television, including his sexual encounters with his sister-in-law. What could be reported in full were his viciously bigoted screeds. "I am a black Nazi," he wrote, declaring his admiration for Hitler and the genocidal murderer's autobiography, "Mein Kampf."

But here's the problem for Republicans and especially Trump, who endorsed this weirdo fulsomely while comparing him favorably to Martin Luther King Jr.: Unlike Robinson's strange sexual preoccupations, his antisemitism was no secret. He openly posted anti-Jewish and conspiratorial material on social media for many years, and refused to disown or apologize for those offenses. And by now nobody should be shocked that Trump and the MAGA Republicans, including his media claque, have lionized a Black Nazi.

The proliferation of white nationalist and Nazi-adjacent personalities at the highest levels of the Republican Party, directly attributed to MAGA and Trump, is pervasive. Candace Owens, a commentator dismissed from a right-wing website for her antisemitic ravings, was recently invited to headline a campaign fundraiser with Donald Trump Jr. Jack Posobiec, a right-wing operative repeatedly promoted by Trump, has collaborated with neo-Nazis and distributed antisemitic posts on social media. Wendy Rogers, an Arizona GOP state senator, just recently posted Nazi song lyrics on X, which was only her latest antisemitic emission.

The list goes on, including the nasty little pro-Hitler podcaster Nick Fuentes, who dined at Mar-a-Lago with Trump, as well as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the "Jewish space lasers" theorist.

And then there's Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host and close Trump confidant, who not long ago aired a show with a pseudo-historian whose work aims at absolving the Third Reich of responsibility for the Holocaust and whitewashing Hitler. Carlson, long a fan favorite of neo-Nazis here and abroad, approvingly echoed the recitation of revisionist lies.

This is a sickening phenomenon from which most Republicans -- and too many in the media -- have long averted their eyes. Trump may be the most reliable ally of the far right in Israel, but he represents a growing danger to American Jews.

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Arizona is no stranger to election interference tactics, as 18 of Donald Trump's MAGA allies in April were "charged with using false or unproven claims about voter fraud related" to the 2020 presidential election, according to The Associated Press.

Two years later, NBC News reported that a pair of "Republican supervisors in Cochise County, Peggy Judd and Tom Crosby, County — were charged for allegedly conspiring to interfere with the county’s midterm election — in part by pushing for a full hand count of ballots."

Now, according to a Tuesday, July 16 report published by Votebeat, "previously unreported text messages" reveal that Arizona Republican officials' "privately pressured county leaders across the state to count ballots by hand instead of using machines."

READ MORE:'Out of control': Ex-AZ Republican governor slams MAGA election deniers for 'destroying' GOP

Votebeat reports that "newly obtained text messages from Cochise County, which American Oversight fought for in court and shared with Votebeat, show that a state senator was trying to pressure Judd during the public meeting when the supervisors held the key vote on hand-counting ballots."

Cochise County-based state Senator David Gowan (R), according to the report, "texted Judd just as the meeting began," writing, "Does the Cochise bos know there is no law prohibiting them from hand count? From President Fann" — "referring to the county supervisors."

Votebeat reports, "In Pinal County, the day supervisors discussed hand-counting ballots in this year’s election, state Sen. Wendy Rogers, a Republican who represents parts of Pinal County, texted Supervisor Kevin Cavanaugh, also a Republican, to assert that hand-counting all ballots was legal — something the Secretary of State’s Office and state Attorney General’s Office have said is not true."

Rogers typed, "Don’t let them lie today."

READ MORE:Mayor of AZ border town who shared stage with Kari Lake now endorsing Democrat Ruben Gallego

NBC News last year reported:

:{*:{After the 2020 election, the Arizona state Senate authorized a controversial hand-count audit of two races. The audit took months and cost millions, and — by its leadership’s own account in text messages obtained by The Arizona Republic — failed to result in an accurate count.}:

Furthermore, Votebeat notes:

{The issue with hand-counting ballots is not just the law. Multiple studies, trials, and attempts to hand-count ballots across the country — including in Pinal and Mohave counties — have proven that hand-counting instead of using machines would cost more money, require hundreds to thousands more workers, lead to inaccurate results, and potentially delay or disrupt the certification of results. Yet the conversations about instituting hand counts continue in Arizona, especially as many of the county supervisors run for reelection this year.*}:

The Guardian reported in May that "Judd told Votebeat that she wasn’t a driving force for a hand count in the first place and voted for it because of what she was hearing from constituents."

The GOP county supervisor said, "You can ask anyone. I never pushed for it."

READ MORE: 'I would lynch him': Arizona GOP leader threatened to murder top election official

Votebeat notes that "supervisors ultimately rejected" the requests from Senator Rogers and Supervisor Cavanaugh. "So far, all Arizona counties plan to use machines to count ballots for the upcoming election. The supervisors in Pinal and Mohave, specifically, decided against a hand count after the counties’ lawyers told them they would potentially be violating state law and could be held personally liable if they went ahead with it."

*Votebeat Arizona's full report is available at this link.

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tEMPE, Ariz. — At the local discount cinema in this Phoenix suburb this winter, a crowd of about 100 took their seats for something different from the typical Sunday matinee.

The man standing in front of the big screen, Mark Cook, packed up his life months ago to drive around in an RV for a mission he said he was called to by God. Their elections had been stolen from them, he told the crowd, and it was time to take them back. He dubbed his cross-country venture the “hand count road show.”

“Elections belong to us,” he said, emphatically. “Say it!” a woman in the front of the theater yelled out.

The ultimate solution he offered the crowd: Eliminating mail-in voting, counting all ballots cast at polling places on the night of the election, and, most importantly, doing the counting by hand.

Cook is one of several quasi-disciples of Mike Lindell and other big-name election influencers who have been spreading the hand-count gospel around the country since 2020, when Donald Trump began claiming without evidence that ballot tabulating machines were rigged against him.

The push to hand-count ballots is ramping up, albeit with spotty success, as the 2024 election nears, according to a review by The Guardian and Votebeat. If more localities decide to try hand-counting in the November election, results could be inaccurate, untrustworthy, or delayed, fostering more distrust in elections. In places that opt not to hand count, supporters of the practice could use this choice as a reason to question or refuse to sign off on certification.

Either way, it raises the risk of throwing the 2024 election into chaos.

“It just gives additional grounds for calling into question the results of elections when there are no valid grounds,” said Heather Sawyer, executive director at American Oversight. “There’s no good reason to do it. And there’s lots of room for mischief and problems.”

The push hasn’t gained much ground in the large swing counties where Trump claimed votes were stolen from him. It’s been more effective in small or rural counties that voted heavily for Trump, where conservative activists havelined up at public meetings to repeat the conspiracies of Cook, Lindell, and others. There — in Missouri, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin — local officials voted to give hand-counting ballots a try in either their midterm or presidential primary elections.

These attempts have proven what election experts have long understood: Ditching machines and exclusively hand-counting ballots is time-consuming, expensive, and more prone to human error. It’s also unnecessary. Election officials routinely verify that machines are counting votes properly by hand-counting the results on a portion of ballots after each election.

Most recently, in Gillespie County, Texas,errors were discovered in nearly all precincts after the county tried to hand-count its Republican presidential primary election.

Nevertheless, Gillespie County still plans to hand-count its local runoff election in May. In South Dakota, there are efforts to get hand-counting through local initiatives. And in New Hampshire, one town voted to count ballots by hand after a concerted push by local activists.

This seemingly grassroots effort has sometimes been backed by outside funding and promises of financial support, some from Lindell and others from unknown sources, according to public records and statements reviewed by The Guardian and Votebeat.

Before a California county voted to get rid of its tabulation machines, Lindell wrote to a supervisor that if they “have any pushback, including lawsuits against you or your county, I will provide all of the resources necessary (including both financial and legal) for this fight,” according todocuments obtained by American Oversight, a watchdog group that has tracked the hand count movement across the country, and shared with The Guardian and Votebeat.

Lindell told The Guardian he has contributed money to efforts in South Dakota and New Hampshire, but he wasn’t sure how much or how exactly the funds were used. He also features hand-count activists on his online video programs and helps them find donations that way. “Any way I can to get the word out,” he said.

Money wouldn’t come from him personally, but from an affiliated fundraising outfit, the Lindell Offense Fund, he said. His personal financial issues, stemming from lawsuits he faces, are well documented: He couldn’t pay his lawyers in defamation cases brought by voting machine companies.

“I don’t have money to stick in there myself. I’m reaching out to the public. … I’m not a grifter. I’d be the worst grifter that ever lived,” he said.

In Arizona, the push to hand-count ballots has mysterious benefactors, with an unknown source offering money for the legal defense of county supervisors who take on the fight to hand-count ballots, defying state law. Most recently, an elected official in rural Mohave County sued the attorney general, an effort to obtain a court ruling saying that hand-counting ballots is legal. The supervisor, Ron Gould, said in an interview he doesn’t “have permission” to disclose who is paying his legal costs — but so far, it isn’t him.

Mike Lindell influences hand-count push

Inside Pollack Cinemas in Tempe, road show attendees munched on popcorn and sipped sodas as Cook told them about a story he heard from a Texas poll worker. The poll worker told him they watched as a ballot counter on a tabulation machine ticked up one by one, but no one was inserting ballots at the time.

Many in the crowd gasped. “Oh my gosh,” one said.

This claim could have been referencing a viral video which showed an electronic pollbook in Dallas County adding voters after polls closed, which county officials have explained was simply a delay in the system.

Like many who promote hand-counting ballots, Cook subscribes to wide-ranging conspiracy theories about voting, and he told the crowd all about them. Their election officials in Maricopa County, he told them without offering proof, had caused problems during the midterm election so they could “pepper in ballots.” Election officials across the country used messy voter rolls to “inject” “phantom” voters, he said, again without evidence. And COVID-19 was born as a way to increase vote-by-mail across the country, he said falsely, just so the 2020 election could be stolen from Donald Trump.

The solutions he offers are familiar talking points among the Republican leaders who promote hand-counting ballots. They would restrict voting access, such as ending all early and mail-in voting, and purging voter rolls.

Cook credits Lindell with influencing his beliefs. He attended Lindell’s infamous “cyber symposium” in 2021, where Lindell said the “seeds were planted” for people to go back to their states to advocate against machines.

With Lindell’s assistance and coordination, the hand-count pushes have become more systematic.

He tried to rally the troops at a summit in Missouri last August, where he detailed “The Plan,” his step-by-step guide for grassroots groups and activists to convince their local elected officials to ditch machines. He advises them to talk about machine vulnerabilities, voter roll issues, internet connections, and other frequent talking points of the far-right election activist movement. Then, “call for the implementation of hand counts” and prepare to respond to objections.

Cause of America, one of several organizations affiliated with Lindell, says it has “over 300,000 volunteers on the ground going county by county to change laws, remove machines, teach hand count voting and more.” Lindell said he hosts a weekly call with activists across the country to talk about the plan.

Lindell held the 2021 cyber symposium in South Dakota, where activists are now working on gathering petition signatures to put the idea of getting rid of voting machines before voters in two dozen counties. Proponents have so far convinced two counties, Fall River and Gregory, to adopt full hand counts.

Some counties have objected to the petitions, saying the change could violate state and federal law.

“If the voters vote for this ordinance, we will have lawsuits,” McPherson County Auditor Lindley Howard told South Dakota News Watch. “If we illegally deny the petition, then the petitioners will file a lawsuit. I feel like counties were left swimming in an ocean without a lifejacket.”

In New Hampshire, a group used many towns’ “warrant articles” process to try to get rid of machines, filing petitions in nearly two dozen towns to call for a vote on machine tabulation. Activists in the state tried a similar push in 2022, but didn’t get much traction.

Lindell and New Hampshire organizers hoped for a landslide of towns moving to hand counts.

“Imagine the impact for the rest of the state.... Imagine the impact on the rest of our country! God willing, this will be our generation’s ‘shot heard around the world,’” a crowdfunding site for the New Hampshire push says. The crowdfunding page notes that Lindell funded a “digital mobile truck” to advertise for the campaign for six days at $20,000.

But so far just one town, Danville, has approved the petition to hand-count ballots in presidential elections. The town’s attorney told the Associated Press he doesn’t believe the change will stand because it may violate state law.

New Hampshire organizers didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Lindell has featured both the South Dakota and New Hampshire efforts on his online show.

‘No upside’ to hand-counting ballots

There’s a side benefit to the hand count fervor for the broader rightwing election movement: It serves to keep local activists engaged in the leadup to the 2024 election, notes Emma Steiner, who has followed the hand count push for Common Cause.

“It’s basically an objective that they can organize around, that they can lobby their local legislators and officials about, and something that keeps them motivated and their eye on the ball so that they will be available in the game for November,” Steiner said.

In Arizona, far-right lawmakers Sonny Borrelli and Wendy Rogers have traveled the state to spread the word about hand counts. The anti-machine sentiment is still running strong in the swing state, which could decide the 2024 election.

Before Borrelli and Rogers’ tour, Cochise County notably attempted to move to a full hand count, despite a warning from the secretary of state at the time that the move would be illegal. An unnamed source paid a $10,000 legal retainer for two Republican supervisors who had voted for the hand count to happen, according to their statements at public meetings.

Those two supervisors, Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd, then later refused to certify the election, which required court intervention. Crosby and Judd were recently charged by the state for their role in delaying certification.

Judd said in an interview that she wanted to hand count ballots only to appease the crowds that had been showing up to board meetings.

“It was just to show them we have good machines, we have a good elections director, we have a good system here, you don’t have to be worried about Cochise county,” she said.

Judd said she didn’t know who paid the $10,000 legal retainer for the related case.

When asked if he paid the Cochise retainer, Lindell said, “I don’t believe so.”

In Cochise and elsewhere, the hand count push has driven out some elections officials, who have found themselves at odds with their county boards over the practice. Cochise’s seasoned elections director, Lisa Marra, left her job after suing the county for harassment. She eventually received a $130,000 settlement.

When Mohave County, a heavily Republican part of the state, was considering a full hand count of ballots cast in 2024 elections, Borrelli told the local supervisors that unnamed hand count supporters had promised him they’d financially support the county if there was any legal pushback.

Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, sent a letter warning the supervisors they could be prosecuted for hand-counting all ballots, and the supervisors voted not to move forward. That spurred Gould’s lawsuit against Mayes, asking the court to rule on whether hand counting is legal in the state. In the suit, Gould says that he faced “potentially losing his liberty and being jailed as a criminal, if Defendant Mayes is correct, for voting according to his conscience.”

Gould said in an interview that he sued so that the state would “stop threatening him.” He believes hand counting ballots is legal and would improve voter confidence.

Supervisor Buster Johnson voted “no” to stop the switch to hand counting. Borrelli is now challenging Johnson for his seat on the board in the July primary election, which could change the makeup of the board. Borrelli said in a text message that his run for the seat has “nothing to do with elections.”

In a phone interview, Johnson said he voted no on hand counting because, along with the legal reasons, he said, it would be expensive and error-prone, and it attempts to fix a non-existent problem.

“There is no upside to it.”

Borrelli didn’t respond to a question about the identity of the unnamed supporter who had promised to pay legal costs in Mohave County. Judd said that Borrelli has not offered to pay legal costs for her pending criminal case.

Beyond Arizona, places that recently tried hand counting have found out the hard way about its challenges.

Osage County, a small Missouri county outside Jefferson City, hand-counted a local election in April 2023 as a test of the practice, spurred by activists who convinced the county clerk to try it. Lindell and other activists now cite the Osage count as one of their successes.

But, County Clerk Nicci Kammerich wrote in a local newspaper, the process took longer and cost more in the end, even with a group of mostly volunteers who helped hand count.

Kammerich sent the article to The Guardian after an interview request, saying the hand count issue has consumed her office: “I do not have the time to talk. I get calls and email requests on the daily about this hand count and it has been really interfering with my day to day tasks.”

After the hand count, Kammerich heard from election judges who said they wouldn’t work again if they had to hand count.

“After considering all factors of this election and comparing it to other elections that are similar, I fear that if we were to continue hand counting it would cost us more in time, money, losing volunteers, and accuracy of votes,” Kammerich wrote, adding that her office intends to go back to tabulation machines for future elections.

How the U.S. counts votes

Most of the U.S. votes on paper ballots, which then are fed into machines that tabulate the results. Some places use touch screens, where people vote by selecting options on a screen and then cast printed receipts of their votes into machines. Machine-tabulated results are then verified with a hand count of a small percentage of ballots, with only tight races receiving a full hand recount. Some jurisdictions, typically very small, still hand count paper ballots, though these instances are rare.

The widespread use of machines is relatively recent: the Help America Vote Act, passed in 2002, allowed many smaller areas to afford tabulation machines, said Charles Stewart III, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Some of the proponents of hand counting may remember when their local elections were counted by hand.

Proponents of the practice often point to other countries, like France, where hand-counting paper ballots is the norm. But local ballots in the U.S. are often much longer and more complex than those in European countries: Americans vote on far more offices, and elections are frequently consolidated, so a voter will weigh in on federal, state, and local elected officials and ballot questions at the same time. Some of these countries don’t use mail-in voting, a more common voting method in the U.S., and they are smaller than the U.S.

“A voter in San Francisco in the presidential election is going to vote on more things in that one election than a citizen of Great Britain will vote on in a lifetime,” Stewart said.

Moving to hand counts brings not only financial and accuracy questions, but also logistical ones: it takes far more people and space than machine counting. In some counties that discussed the idea of hand counts, finding a place to house a big operation to count ballots presented obstacles.

Cook shrugs off these points. If we found a way to do it in years past, he said, we can do it now.

Lindell’s response to the pushback from elections officials: “They’re all wrong. They’re all wrong. … These election officials, they don’t know what they’re talking about. They absolutely don’t. They’re just putting it out there and you media people put it out there as gospel. It’s not true.”

Proponents of hand counting say it’s one way to restore faith in elections, especially among those who don’t trust the results. But whenever people claim an election reform will restore confidence in the process, the evidence typically shows it doesn’t, Stewart, of MIT, said.

“I don’t see any evidence that something like this would be the silver bullet that would restore confidence among the mass public,” Stewart said.

Correction: This story originally misstated who warned Cochise County officials in 2022 that their hand count plan would be illegal. It was the Arizona secretary of state, not the attorney general.*}:

*Votebeat reporter Natalia Contreras contributed to this report.

*Rachel Leingang is a democracy reporter at The Guardian. Contact Rachel atrachel.leingang@theguardian.com. Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen atjfifield@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

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Arizona Republican Party elected Gina Swoboda its new chair on Saturday. Swoboda, the director of election day operations for former President Donald Trump in 2020, replaces Jeff DeWit, who resigned last week after being targeted by MAGA Senate candidate Kari Lake.

Swoboda’s bid for state party chair was promoted by Lake and endorsed by Trump, Nick Fuentes ally state Sen. Wendy Rogers, and Arizona-based far-right activist Charlie Kirk, head of Turning Point USA. Lake, who has never accepted her loss in the 2022 governor’s race, called Swoboda’s selection a “massive victory” for her campaign and for Trump’s, the Associated Press reported.

Swoboda runs VoteRef.com, which is part of a network of MAGA movement projects to enable challenges to voters’ eligibility, which American Oversight reported in December “could be used not just to compromise individual privacy, but also to intimidate voters, cause mass cancellations of voting registrations, and inundate local elected officials with burdensome, time-consuming, and inaccurate challenges.” Swoboda’s efforts have been funded by far-right megadonor Richard Uihlein.

Swoboda has collaborated with Cleta Mitchell, a former Trump attorney who took part in the notorious call on which Trump tried to bully Georgia’s secretary of state into “finding” him enough votes to overturn the election; Mitchell now runs a coalition of right-wing groups that are working to enable voter suppression in the name of “election integrity.”

A Pro Publica investigation of Swoboda’s Voter Reference Foundation in 2022 reported:

ProPublica contacted election officials in a dozen of the states where VoteRef has examined voter rolls, and in every case the officials said that the methodology used to identify the discrepancies was flawed, the data incomplete or the math wrong. The officials, a mix of Democrats and Republicans, were in Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin…Election experts say the type of work being done by VoteRef risks leading to further misinformation or being weaponized by people trying to undermine the legitimacy of the past election or give the sense that voter fraud is a more encompassing problem than it’s proven to be. Or it could be used to harass or intimidate valid voters under the guise of challenging their legitimacy.

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Fuentes Fan Wendy Rogers Calls Rep. Josh Schriver ‘Michigan’s voice for MAGA’ | Right Wing Watch

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Three AZ GOP Leaders Appear on Bigoted Christian Nationalist ‘CrossTalk’ Program

By Kyle Mantyla | November 7, 2023

Three Arizona Republican officials appeared on a far-right program hosted by racist Christian nationalists on Monday night.

In Florida for the premier of right-wing propagandist Dinesh D’Souza’s latest film, which took place at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property last week, Arizona state Sens. Wendy Rogers and Justine Wadsack and Maricopa County Republican Party Chairman Craig Berland made time to appear on the “CrossTalk” program, hosted by racist conspiracy theorists Edward Szall and Lauren Witzke.

Witzke, a white nationalist who served as the Delaware Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in 2020, and Szall met when both worked for antisemitic conspiracy theorist Rick Wiles at his “TruNews” network. After both were fired, they teamed up launch CrossTalk, which they subsequently used as a platform from which to spread bigotry, conspiracy theories, and Christian nationalism.

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In recent years, Sen. Rogers has developed close ties to Witzke and others in the far-right America First movement, which is headed by racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, homophobicChristian nationalist Nick Fuentes. In fact, Rogers delivered a prerecorded message at a Fuentes event in 2022 in which she heaped praise on Fuentes and his racist, antisemitic followers, declaring them to be “the future” of the far-right movement that will save the nation.

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stew Peters is a far-right virulently anti-LGBTQ bigot who regularly uses his nightly “The Stew Peters Show” program, speeches, and social media accounts to promote white nationalists and antisemites and to spread wild conspiracy theories, bigotry, and calls for violence.Nevertheless, Peters regularly manages to get Republican leaders, elected officials, and candidates for office to appear on his program.

On Wednesday, far-right Arizona stateSen. Wendy Rogers appeared on Peters’ program, where she discussed her good friend Kari Lake’s never-ending effort to overturn her loss in the 2022 gubernatorial election to current Gov. Katie Hobbs.

When Peters declared that he hopes that Lake will prevail and then have Hobbs arrested, Rogers eagerly agreed.

“If she is installed as the legitimate governor, what about Hobbs?” Peters wondered. “Will she be arrested? Will all of the people who committed these crimes actually be held criminally accountable? This is what we need.”

“I want to see that,” Rogers replied. “I want to see that.”

Peters, though, does not have much faith in our political and judicial system, prompting him to declare that Americans should now be exploring “extra-legal options.”

“Speaking of enemy combatants, that’s what these people are,” Peters said. “They have taken over a country. They have affected a Marxist coup d’état.These are the real insurrectionists who have committed sedition.”

“The judiciary has failed us. The legal process has failed us. The voting process has failed us,” Peters continued. “So, I think that right now what Americans need to be exploring is our extra-legal options.”

The term “extra-legal” as Peters used it means “illegal,” of course, and potentially violently so.

“God bless America,” Rogers then responded as Peters ended the segment by expressing his love and appreciation for her.

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Republicans in Arizona are in the midst of an internal battle after they hosted a panel of election conspiracy theorists last week who implicated some of them in a supposed drug cartel bribery scandal.

The Arizona Mirror reports that Republican Arizona House Speaker Ben Toma called out freshman Arizona State Rep. Liz Harris by name in denouncing her role in organizing the hearings, which featured allegations of criminal activity leveled against Mesa Mayor John Giles and Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, both of whom are Republicans.

“What should have been a joint hearing to examine commonsense election reforms devolved into disgraceful fringe theater,” he said. “I’m not alone in believing that it was irresponsible and bad judgment for Ms. Harris to invite a person to present unsubstantiated and defamatory allegations in a legislative forum.”

Republican Arizona State Sen. T.J. Shope endorsed Toma's comments on Twitter and said that the hearing was "a disgrace and an embarrassment to the Arizona Legislature."

While the bribery allegations were initially limited just to Giles and Richer, the man behind them subsequently implicated MAGA favorite State Sen. Wendy Rogers in an interview in the days after the hearing.

Although Rogers was initially supportive of the election conspiracy theory hearings, she put out a statement earlier this week saying that the legislative hearing was not an appropriate place to level allegations of criminality against serving Republican officials.

There is no evidence that any of these officials have taken any bribes from drug cartels.

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It took a few weeks, but One America News Network is finally settled into a predictable reaction to the 2022 midterms: claiming more Democratic fraud. In OAN’s view, no state had it worse than Arizona, a state the network relentlessly targeted with election misinformation, and where voters rejected numerous Republican nominees favored by OAN.

In the immediate wake of the election, OAN figures appeared to urge caution despite voters reporting numerous difficulties on election day; continuing to support GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake but stopping short of declaring fraud. But after the race was called, the floodgates opened for OAN to once again wail about “the biggest experiment in election fraud ever perpetrated on the American public.”

Unlike the 2020 election, some OAN figures are exploring novel solutions to losing elections this time around, like mail-in voting and ballot collecting (also known as “harvesting,”) two concepts that expand voting access, but which OAN alleges allow Democrats to steal elections. The inherent incongruity suggests that OAN is not serious about growing democracy, but only in sniveling resentfully, still captured by a lie partly of its own making.

At first, OAN exercised some caution in its coverage of Arizona’s gubernatorial race, possibly not wanting to sow too much doubt in case the results led to Lake’s projected victory. The day after the election, In Focus host Addison Smith acknowledged Arizona voters’ complaints of long lines and bureaucratic confusion, but said that he’s “not blaming losses from Republicans on a lack of election integrity this time around. You know, all things considered -- we’ll see what happens in Arizona -- but all things considered, I think the races the Democrats won were won pretty fair and square, according to the evidence in front of us.”[vid]

as results began to suggest that Democratic candidate Katie Hobbs might win, hints of fraud crept into OAN’s coverage. Within a week of Smith’s apparent expression of trust in elections, In Focus hosted right-wing YouTuber Drew Berquist, who complained that “whether it’s cameras going down, or a pipe leak, or a this, or the machines, whatever the case might be,” there is always a problem on election day that “gives them ample time to do stuff, and then voila -- the lights come on, the cameras come back on, and we’ve lost the race.”

On November 14, major news networks projected Hobbs’ victory, the dam broke, and OAN began declaring fraud. Real America host Dan Ball said that he’s not calling the race (OAN doesn’t have a decision desk) until “we can confirm every single vote was a legitimate vote and not harvested from, oh I don’t know, people that aren’t registered in Arizona? Dead people? You know, the stuff that always happens in every election, but shhh, we don't talk about it.”

Lake “has not conceded” to “supposed Governor-elect'' Hobbs, Ball later said, “and I don’t think she should,” citing voters’ election day complaints as well as the razor-thin margin. “But that doesn’t matter” to the media, Ball lamented while discussing another close race, “because they’ve got to call [the election for] the Democrat. That’s what they do. That’s just how it goes.”

On November 17, OAN correspondent Pearson Sharp made the calls explicit; in his style reminiscent of a man in a truck, Sharp unequivocally declared that “the Democrats once again stole another election,” and Democratic victors like Arizona Governor-elect Hobbs “just carried out the biggest experiment in voter fraud ever perpetrated on the American public.” Sharp’s segment included video of random Arizonans using ballot drop boxes as he warned of “clearly illegal voting fraud.” (:{2000 Mules:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: director Dinesh D’Souza is currently being sued for defamation over similar conduct.)

Echoing familiar themes to a far-right audience, Sharp pontificated that “the commiecrats used the pandemic as a backdoor to legalize all kinds of illegal voting practices, and now they can drag out an election for weeks, while they quietly fill in the votes wherever they need them.”[vid]

on November 19, soon after Sharp’s broadside, Attorney General Mark Brnovich -- a 2020 election denier and frequent OAN guest -- issued a letter demanding answers on reported voting issues from the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. According to The Washington Post, the letter contains “no findings that would call the outcome into question,” but it did further fuel OAN’s newly revived desire to cry fraud.

OAN reporter Daniel Baldwin aired a segment featuring interview footage with Christina Bobb, the Trumpworld attorney who previously led OAN’s “election integrity” coverage, while also helping the Trump campaign’s fake elector scheme. On OAN, Bobb played up Brnovich’s letter as proof that Brnovich saw a “potential crime there, whether it was intentional conduct or criminal negligence, whatever it is … it was enough to actually publish the letter.” 

In a different Baldwin interview, Arizona State Sen. Wendy Rogers called for a “new election for 2022 for Maricopa County, there are no two ways about it.” Arizona GOP chair Kelli Ward told Baldwin that “once again” Maricopa County “will be certifying an uncertifiable election. They did it in 2020, I think they plan to do it in 2022.” Ward also promised that “we are going through every single legal channel that is available and we are pushing forward to represent we, the people.”

Fittingly, Real America’s Ball injected a touch of inappropriate self-victimization to the frenzy. Ball compared election day issues in Arizona to anti-Black segregation using a clip from Free State of Jones, a 2016 movie starring Matthew McConaughey as a Confederate deserter who leads a rebellion against Confederate Mississippi -- in other words, fighting Democrats who would not allow Republicans to vote.

“Now this all happened hundreds of years ago, right?” Ball cheekily asked, “There’s no way that something like that could still happen today,” as though an unprecedented flood of election-day voting shares any similarities to Jim Crow.

[vid]

Interestingly, some OAN figures -- not all -- have mentioned a degree of openness to mail-in voting, thinking that Republicans could close future vote gaps. However, even this comes not from a place of humility or learning, but vengeance and paranoia. As Smith put it on November 30, either “we make ballot harvesting and mass mail-in voting illegal across-the-board … or we get so good at it ourselves that Democrats want to make it illegal.”

It was only a matter of time before OAN again reacted to a Republican defeat with allegations of election fraud: the network built its present identity out of such claims. OAN would have viewers believe that, in the same election where Democrats mastered the art of election theft, they also lost control of the House of Representatives, and therefore President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda. But perhaps allowing Republicans to block Democratic power for two years is also part of the Democrats’ plan to seize power.

under investig after buff shooter

https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/wendy-rogers/

11 22

rww

wendy Rogers—a far-right Arizona state senator who rose to prominence denying the 2020 election results—announced on Twitter Friday that she has been appointed chair of the Arizona Senate’s election committee.

Her appointment for the upcoming legislative session was confirmed Tuesday byArizona Senate President-elect Warren Peterson,according to a local NBC News affiliate. Petersen supported the Republican-sponsored and Trumpist-led “audit” of Maricopa County’s ballots from 2020—an effort to invalidate the state’s election results for President Joe Biden.

Rogers, a 68-year-old grandmother and Air Force veteran, came to national prominence as a first term state senator alleging electoral fraud in the 2020 election with almost unmatched zeal. Taking her false allegations of fraud to election-conspiracy rally stages across the country, she called for decertifying the 2020 election in Arizona and jailing Arizona election officials. Her baseless accusations got her the attention of former President Donald Trump, who helped push her to MAGA fame.

In April, when Arizona’s Republican attorney general issued a report that there wasno evidence of widespread fraud in Maricopa County, Arizona, during the 2020 election, Rogers continued to call for the arrest of election officials. In a tweet, she said: “I don’t like letters. I like arrests and prosecutions. Criminals don’t respect legal gobbly-gook that just fills pages when really we can use handcuffs, jail cells and jump suits.”

Beyond her election denialism, Rogers has repeatedly expressed adoration for white nationalists of the America First movement, most notably Nick Fuentes, who has compared himself to Hitler. Rogers addressed the white nationalist America First Political Action Conference in February, where she called for more gallows to be built from which to hang their political enemies. “You and your fellow patriots are the future,” she told the white nationalist attendees.

Rogers has also made antisemitic posts on social media and notably said that she was “honored” to have the endorsement of Andrew Torba, the antisemitic Christian nationalist founder of Gab.

While associating with white nationalists and antisemites might make some people persona non grata, that was not the case with the Arizona Republican Party. Ahead of Election Day, Rogers campaigned with GOP candidates Kari Lake, Abe Hamadeh, Blake Masters, and Mark Finchem. “I’ve been of course in the front row of all the recent Kari Lake events,” she said in an interview Wednesday.Charlie Kirk, the founder of the right-wing youth organization Turing Point USA, had Rogers on as a guest on his show multiple times. She posed for photos with both Kirk and onetime Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon, as well as Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona.

On Monday, she joined QAnon conspiracy theorist Ann Vandersteel’s show.

Claiming that she had been in touch with Arizona GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, who has refused to concede since her loss earlier this week, Rogers suggested that voter fraud kept Lake from winning. “Even though it looks like willful incompetence, I think it’s been an orchestrated effort to diminish her in every way,” she said.

Asked whether she had any evidence of fraud in the 2022 election, Rogers suggested Republican voters were targeted:

We have a lot of anecdotal input, a lot of anomalies that people are reporting where they showed up to vote, they were turned away, and in some cases went to three locations to try to vote, and they were turned away. So, this is very, very troubling, so I’ve heard that lawsuits will come out of this. The fact that they ran out of paper, toner, that kind of thing, I think they knew that a lot of Republicans would vote on Election Day. I think they knew were Republicans would go, and these were the locations that were problematic.

Rogers spoke to the QAnon conspiracy theorist again Wednesday, after giving her a tour of the state capitol. She reiterated her close relationship with Lake and said that Lake would fight her loss. “I just talked to Kari at length a few minutes ago. We agree we have to fight irrespective of what we think is fair or not fair. We have to fight very hard because we have to serve good and our country and ultimately truth and justice. We have no other choice but to fight, fight, fight,” she said. On Thursday, Lake said she would not concede and that she had begun assembling a team of lawyers.

Earlier in her conversation with Vandersteel, Rogers discussed the protesters who came to the Arizona state capitol and tried to enter the Senate chambers after Roe v Wade was overturned. That protest ended in the police launching tear gas at some 7,000 protesters. Rogers referred to it as what a real “insurrection” looks like and suggested lawmakers like herself would have shot them had they come in.

“Oh, by the way, Arizona senators and Arizona reps can carry, so if they had come in, it would not have been pretty.” Rogers smiled at the camera. “Yeah, you come against Arizona, were gonna fight back.”

Tags: Ann Vandersteel Charlie Kirk Kari Lake Wendy Rogers Election 2022 Arizona Republican Party

an 11 22 travis raw

MAGA movement is out in force in Maricopa County, Arizona, as votes continue to be counted in last week's midterm elections.

Gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake's allies are questioning the ballots cast outside same-day voting as fraudulent,echoing Donald Trump's lies after his own election loss, and right-wing demonstrators have gathered outside vote-counting centers to denounce election officials and sheriff's deputies stationed outside as traitors, reported The Bulwark.

"PATRIOTS RISE UP to RALLY tomorrow SATURDAY NOON at the Maricopa County Elections office (510 S. 3rd Ave. Phoenix) to pray for the Light to shine in the darkness and for His truth to be revealed!" posted far-right state Sen. Wendy Rogers last week.

A loose confederation of Boogaloo Bois, Christian nationalists and other protesters answered Rogers' call to action, which she described as a "Jericho March" -- in a clear echo of the Jan. 6 insurrection.

"You may remember the organization named Jericho March and its role in laying the groundwork for the January 6th insurrection," wrote Annika Brockschmidt and Thomas Lecaque for The Bulwark. "As God instructed the Israelites to walk seven times around Jericho and blow the shofar (horn) so that the walls would fall and everyone within the city would be slaughtered in God’s name, so believers have taken up the mantle of spiritual warfare and continued Jericho Marches in Maricopa County. The target that they are currently circling, which holds their enemies, is the center in which votes are being counted."

Lake, Senate candidate Blake Masters and secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem all earned Trump's endorsement by backing his fraud claims, and they have followed the former president's playbook in challenging their losses as illegitimate without any evidence.

"It is very unlikely that Kari Lake’s supporters will try to storm the Maricopa ballot center," wrote Brockschmidt, the author of a book on the religious right, and Lecaque, a history professor at Grand View University. "But their ideology isn’t far from the one that drove people to march around the Capitol in the weeks before January 6th and then to attack it: the belief that not just humans but institutions can be possessed by evil spirits, by demons and powers of darkness (Eph. 6:12)—and that they have to be cleansed, purged, defeated by righteous Christians in the cosmic battle between good and evil."

"It is ultimately a totalizing — totalitarian, even — belief system that allows for no nuance, that only knows friend or mortal foe," the pair added. "And, crucially, while this kind of belief can wane for any number of reasons, it has never been swayed by defeat at the ballot box. Rather, it takes defeats and twists them into stories of heroic martyrdom, of promises of revenge and retribution."

http://www**.accountable.us/**wp-content/uploads/2022/01/GroundZero-3.pdf

SUMMARY: In the days leading up to January 6 th , Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers pushed lies about the 2020 election while encouraging supporters to “stand firm” and “defends their rights” in a country “under siege.” After the insurrection, Rogers chose to continue spreading myths about election fraud and blamed “radical Antifa mobs” for the capitol violence. Despite attempts to blame the left, Wendy Rogers is a proud member of the Oath Keepers, a militia that trained for and escalated the violence on January 6th . In addition to their role in the insurrection, Oath Keepers have been aligned with anti-public land militias, supporting the Bundys in their occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge. In addition to the Oath Keepers, Wendy Rogers has aligned herself with extremists who have supported anti-public lands violence to continue to push election fraud myths. Rogers spoke at a QAnon conference with Mark Finchem and works with Phil Lyman on an “election integrity caucus.” Both Finchem and Lymanhave pushed lies about the 2020 election and are active supporters of the Bundys and Hammonds. Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers Is Proudly Aligned With Insurrectionists And Anti-Public Lands Extremists, Drumming Up Violence Leading Up To January 6th And Spreading Conspiracy Theories.

a State Senator Wendy Rogers Is A Proud Member Of The Oath Keepers, A Militia That Has Been A Major Player In Anti-Government Violence Including The Malheur National Wildlife Refuge Occupation And The January 6 th Insurrection.

Wendy Rogers Is An Arizona State Senator Representing The State’s 6

th Legislative District.

[AZ Senate Republicans, Wendy Rogers, accessed 12/09/21]

Wendy Rogers Is A Member Of The Oath Keepers, Praising Their “Dedication To Our

Constitution And To Our Country” After The Insurrection. “Had a great time speaking to the

Cottonwood Oathkeepers tonight. I am a member of the Oathkeepers and I really like their

dedication to our Constitution and to our country. Thank you for having me!” [Twitter,

@WendyRogersAZ, 03/06/21]

● The Oath Keepers Have Been Described By The US Department Of Justice As A

“Militia” Pushing Conspiracy Theories About The Federal Government. “In charging

documents, the U.S. Justice Department described the Oath Keepers as a “large but

loosely organized collection of militia who believe that the federal government has been

co-opted by a shadowy conspiracy that is trying to strip American citizens of their

rights.”” [Salt Lake Tribune, 10/13/21]

Oath Keepers Participated In The Malheur National Wildlife Refuge Occupation Led By

The Bundy Family

Oath Keepers Participated In The Bundy-Led Armed Standoff Against The Federal

Government. “Those feelings changed when armed Oath Keepers flooded into southern

Nevada in a prolonged standoff with Bureau of Land Management agents over ranchland

leased to the Bundy family.” [Buzzfeed, 10/20/21]

Oath Keepers Have Been Accused Of Planning For And Escalating The January 6th

Insurrection, With At Least Two Dozen People Connected To The Group Charged With

Crimes Related To The Capitol Invasion.

Two Dozen People Connected To The Oath Keepers Have Been Charged With Crimes

Related To Their Role In The January 6th Insurrection. “In the months since the Capitol

insurrection, as two dozen people linked to the Oath Keepers have been charged with crimes,

including conspiracy, for their roles, several of those elected officials have continued to voice

support for the organization.” [Buzzfeed, 10/20/21]

● The Oath Keepers Participated In, Trained For, And Helped Escalate The January 6th

Insurrection. “Their leaders sent top-down messages ordering members to protest and

fight. Some trained before they came and brought armor, tools and weapons. They

raised money for protective gear and travel to D.C. Some attacked police. In many cases,

prosecutors say, members of far-right groups helped escalate the rally into a full-on

attack.” [Tampa Bay Times, 09/23/21]

Wendy Rogers Has Perpetuated Election Fraud Myths And Conspiracies

Throughout 2021, Encouraging Supporters To “Stand Firm” And “Defend Your

Rights” In The Days Leading Up To The Insurrection

...

In The Days Leading Up To January 6th

, Wendy Rogers Encouraged Supporters To

“Stand Up” And “Defend Your Rights,” Claiming The Country Was “Under Siege” And

She Would Do “Whatever Is Needed” To Make Trump President.

Wendy Rogers Said She Would “Vote For Whatever Is Needed” To Give Arizona Electors To

Donald Trump Following The 2020 Election. “I will be sworn in soon. When that happens, I

will vote for whatever is needed to award our Arizona electors to @realDonaldTrump if given

the opportunity.” [Twitter, @WendyRogersAZ, 01/05/21]

Wendy Rogers Tweeted There Would Be “A Lot Of Melting Down” Following January 6th,

Encouraging Supporters To “Stand Firm.” “There will be a lot of melting down after January

6th. Be ready and stand firm! Backbones and facts are our friends.” [Twitter, @WendyRogersAZ,

01/02/21]

Two Days Before The January 6th Insurrection, Wendy Rogers Tweeted That The U.S. Is

“Under Siege” And Encouraged “All Patriots To Stand Up” And “Make Sure Your Elected

Officials Defend Your Rights.” “We will prevail. We must prevail. Our nation is under siege. It

is time for all patriots to stand up and be counted. Make sure your elected officials defend your

rights and the integrity of our elections. If they don't, get ready to replace them.” [Twitter,

@WendyRogersAZ, 01/04/21]

Wendy Rogers Spoke At An Arizona “Stop The Steal” Event On January 6th

. “I will be speaking today at the Arizona #StopTheSteal event. Come on down, join us, and save the

Republic.” [Twitter, @WendyRogersAZ, 01/06/21]

Wendy Rogers Has Perpetuated Lies About The 2020 Election, Pushing For Audits And

Spreading Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories.

Wendy Rogers Attacked The Justice Department’s Plans To Scrutinize Post-Election Audits,

Calling The Department “One Of The Most Corrupt Institutions In The USA.” “You will not

touch Arizona ballots or machines unless you want to spend time in an Arizona prison. Maybe

you should focus on stopping terrorism. The Justice Department is one of the most corrupt

institutions in the USA.” [Twitter, @WendyRogersAZ, 01/11/21]

Wendy Rogers Claims George Soros “Spent A Fortune” Regarding The 2020 Election While

Continuing To Push For More Audits And Decertification. “I am fighting hard to audit the rest

of Arizona. I am fighting hard for arrests and perp walks. I am fighting hard for decertification.

I am fighting hard to pass bills that fix 2020. I have called for a special session. I voted against

Sine Die. Soros spent a fortune” [Twitter, @WendyRogersAZ, 11/29/21]

Wendy Rogers Blamed Insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt’s Death On Congress.

Wendy Rogers Blamed Congress For The Death Of Insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt. “Congress

caused the killing of a peaceful unarmed Air Force veteran today because of their ignoring of

the requests from the people. She was shot her in the neck & is now deceased. All they had to

do was allow for an audit of the machines and votes. This could have been avoided.” [Twitter,

@WendyRogersAZ, 01/06/21more

....

Wendy Rogers Has Falsely Blamed “Radical Antifa Mobs” For The Violence On January

6th.

Wendy Rogers Falsely Claimed The Insurrectionists Were “Radical Antifa Mobs.” “I

condemn the radical Antifa mobs for attacking the Capitol and I condemn the Democrats for

wanting to defund the very police who protected them.” [Twitter, @WendyRogersAZ,

01/07/21]

Wendy Rogers Spoke At A QAnon Conference About The Partisan Election

“Audit” With Mark Finchem, An Anti-Government Extremists Aligned With

The Bundys And Hammonds

Wendy Rogers Spoke Alongside Mark Finchem At A QAnon Conference About The Partisan

“Audit” In Arizona Of The 2020 Election. “Biasiucci and Rogers spoke alongside Rep. Mark

Finchem, who is running for secretary of state, and Sen. Sonny Borrelli on a panel discussing the

Arizona Senate’s partisan “audit” of the 2020 election. That self-styled audit was marred by

controversy and conducted by conspiracy theorists who had no background in elections or

knowledge of Arizona election law. It found no evidence of the fraud that the four GOP

legislators and tens of millions of Republican voters nationwide say stole the election from

Donald Trump. Instead, the “audit” concluded that Joe Biden won Arizona.” [AZ Mirror,

10/28/21]

Arizona State Rep. Mark Finchem Is Aligned With Anti-Public Lands Extremists

Including Hammonds And The Bundy Militia, Calling The Bureau Of Land

Management “Bureaucratic Terrorism.” “State Representative Mark Finchem served as

"Arizona Coordinator" for the Coalition of Western States, a group that supported the

infamous armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016.

The Coalition of Western States (COWS) describes itself as a group of elected legislators

and "grass roots leaders" in the Western United States "dedicated to stopping federal

overreach" and the "bureaucratic terrorism" of the Bureau of Land Management,

according to a December 2015 news release from the organization. The group publicly

backed the Hammond family of Oregon ranchers, whose dispute with the federal

government over public land management inspired the armed militia occupation of the

Oregon wildlife refuge. Some members of COWS met with the militia members and fed

them information.” [Phoenix New Times, 10/01/20]

Mark Finchem Attended Pro-Trump Protests In Washington, DC On January 6th

. “"We have substantial evidence that this election was a fraud in six states,"

Representative-Elect Mark Finchem, (R-LD 11) told to ABC15 Arizona, while walking

the streets of Washington DC the morning of the riot. "If there’s violence, it will be at the

hands of Antifa."” [ABC 15, 01/07/21]

The Panel Wendy Rogers’ Participated In Featured Conspiracy Theories And Antisemitism.

“The panel discussion opened up with a video by a company that makes QAnon memes and

videos, many of which center on debunked conspiracies in them or antisemetic messaging.

None of the legislators refuted any of the conspiratorial or antisemitic themes in the video. […]

much more

an 3 22

Conspiracy theorists in the United States and around the world appear to have anew obsession: the "New World Order."

Ever since Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, politicians and political pundits on cable have tossed about the phrase while predicting that Vladimir Putin's war, however it concludes, has reshaped the geopolitical landscape. In their shorthand, that equates to the dawning of a "new world order."

As Vice News points out, President Joe Biden name-checked the “new world order” conspiracy in a mid-March to the Business Roundtable. “Now is a time when things are shifting,” Biden said when asked about the United States’ response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “There’s going to be a new world order out there, and we’ve got to lead it.”

The “New World Order” is solidly ensconced in American conspiracy theory culture. To those who believe, those three words represent a multitude of dystopian horrors, such as forced depopulation programs, a secretive ruling class of reptiles and “elite globalists” on a satanic mission to bring about the “end times.”

References to the “New World Order” have been frequent on some of the large Telegram channels dedicated to the“freedom convoy” movement that started in Canada in January. “Ukraine falls, and it will, it is the end of the New World Order,” wrote someone on that Telegram channel. “Believe it or not, Putin is a white hat and working to take down Satanists, corruption, bioweapons sites, and the New World Order,” wrote another. “Mainstream media is not your friend.” “Vladimir Putin is a traitor to the NWO!” someone else wrote in another convoy channel. “That's why we like him.”

At least one far-right U.S. politician appears to buy into the theory. Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers, who was censured by her colleagues for participating in a white nationalist conference, recently listed the names of people she believes are part of “one big happy New World Order club.” Her list, shared to Telegram on Tuesday, included top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, billionaire philanthropist and Holocaust survivor George Soros, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, Mark Zuckerberg, the Clintons, and the Bush family. She also called the European Union “New World Order tyranny.”

wiki 8 22

wendy Rogers (born July 24, 1954) is an American far-right[1] Republican politician serving as a member of the Arizona State Senate from the 6th legislative district.[2] Elected in November 2020, she assumed office on January 11, 2021.[2] Rogers was an officer in the United States Air Force from 1976 to 1996.

An outspoken supporter of Donald Trump, Rogers led a successful primary challenge in 2020 against incumbent Republican state senator Sylvia Allen and defeated Democrat Felicia French in the general election.[3][4] She had previously made five unsuccessful campaigns for public office.[5]

Since her election, Rogers has emerged as a divisive and controversial figure, embracing inflammatory rhetoric including the white nationalist Great Replacement conspiracy theory and appearing on TruNews.[6] Rogers is a member of Oath Keepers, an anti-government militia whose members took part in the 2021 U.S. Capitol attack.[7] In March 2022, the Republican-controlled Arizona Senate censured her for remarks she made at theAmerica First Political Action Conference, and weeks later opened an ethics inquiry after she suggested the 2022 Buffalo shooting was a false flag operation conducted by the federal government.

Early life and education

Rogers was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky, on July 24, 1954.[8] She holds a Bachelor of Social Work from Michigan State University, a Master of Social Work from the University of Alabama, and a Master of Science in national security studies from California State University, San Bernardino.[8]

Career

Rogers served in the United States Air Force from 1976 to 1996, retiring with the rank of lieutenant colonel.[8] One of the first 100 female pilots in the Air Force, Rogers earned her flight wings in 1981 and went on to fly the C-141 Starlifter heavy military transport aircraft and C-21 "Learjet" transport.[9][10] Rogers was later stationed in Europe.[9] She currently owns a home inspection business.[11]

Beginning in 2010, Rogers ran unsuccessfully for public office five times. In 2010, Rogers ran for the Arizona Senate in the 17th legislative district, losing to Democrat David Schapira in the general election.[12] In 2012, she ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in Arizona's 9th congressional district, losing the Republican primary to Vernon Parker.[13] In 2014, she ran again for the 9th district and won the Republican nomination, but lost to incumbent Democratic congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema.[14]

During that campaign, Rogers used footage of the beheading video of American journalist James Foley by ISIL terrorists in a campaign ad seeking to attack Sinema as weak on national security. Democrats condemned the ad as a "reprehensible" smear tactic, while Rogers's campaign defended it.[15]

In 2016, Rogers unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for Arizona's 1st congressional district; she was one of a five-person field, along with Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, former state Senator and Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett, rancher and businessman Gary Kiehne, and Shawn Redd.[11] During her primary campaign, Rogers was the sole candidate to support Donald Trump's proposal to build a wall on the border with Mexico.[11] She also supported increasing the number of U.S. military personnel deployed to foreign conflicts.[11] Rogers lost, coming in third place behind Babeu, who won the nomination, and Kiehne, the runner-up.[16] In 2018, Rogers ran again and won the Republican nomination for the 1st congressional district, but lost to incumbent Democratic congressman Tom O'Halleran.[17]

State Senate election and tenure

In 2020, Rogers ran for the Arizona Senate in the 6th legislative district, which encompasses Rim Country and the White Mountains, and extends from Flagstaff to the Arizona–New Mexico border.[18] Rogers unseated longtime Republican incumbent Sylvia Allen in a bitterly contested primary election, and defeated Democratic nominee Felicia French in the general election.[19] During the campaign, Rogers made few public appearances and did not participate in debates; she also avoided taking positions on local political issues, such as forest management, education funding, or Arizona's response to the COVID-19 pandemic.[19] Dark money organizations on both sides spent large sums to support and oppose the two candidates.[19] Rogers raised $1 million in campaign contributions, a record for the district.[19]

Rogers is Vice Chairman of the Arizona Senate Judiciary Committee, a member of the Senate's Health and Human Services Committee and Natural Resources, Energy and Water Committee, and a member of the legislature's joint Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Study Committee.[2][20]

Support for overturning the 2020 presidential election

Further information: Attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election

Following the 2020 United States presidential election, in which President Donald Trump was defeated by Joe Biden, Rogers promoted the false claim that Trump had won the election nationally and in Arizona.[21] As Arizona's slate of electors met in Phoenix to formally cast the state's electoral votes for Biden, Rogers tweeted "Buy more ammo."[22][23] Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs condemned Rogers's statement.[23]

After a mob of Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol in January 2021 in a failed attempt to halt the counting of the electoral votes and keep Trump in power, Rogers falsely claimed the attack had been conducted by antifa groups.[21][24] Rogers was one of a number of Republican state legislators in Arizona who either defended and excused the attempted insurrection, or spread disinformation about responsibility for the attack.[24]

Wendy Rogers, along withMark Finchem and Sonny Borrelli explaining the Maricopa County Audit at Mike Lindell's Cyber Symposium in Sioux Falls on August 12, 2021

Rogers strongly supported the 2021 Maricopa County presidential ballot auditinitiated by Arizona Senate Republicans to challenge Joe Biden's victory in the county and the state.[25] She promoted the review extensively on social media, which helped her gain a large following.[26] The results had previously been repeatedly recounted, with no discrepancies found. After the audit found no proof of election fraud, and that Biden's margin of victory was actually larger, Rogers began a campaign to audit elections in all fifty statesand called for each state to "decertify its electors where it has been shown the elections were certified prematurely and inaccurately".[25] She is one of two Arizona legislators endorsed for reelection by former President Donald Trump.[27][28]

Legislation

In 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic in Arizona, Rogers sponsored legislation to declare gun shops "essential businesses" permitted to remain open during emergencies.[29] In February 2021, Rogers sponsored legislation seeking to rename a portion of Arizona State Route 260 as the "Donald J. Trump Highway", which State Senator Martin Quezada, a Democrat from Phoenix, described as "a desperate attempt to really pander to a base of voters even though the state of Arizona rejected Donald Trump".[30] In the legislature, Rogers has introduced anti-abortion measures.[31]

In January 2022, Rogers proposed a bill that, if accepted, would make Arizona the first state to accept Bitcoin as legal tender, though doubts were raised about its compliance with the Contract Clause of the United States Constitution.[32] Rogers subsequently introduced legislation to allow state agencies to accept cryptocurrencies in the payment of debts, and to exclude cryptocurrencies from Arizona taxes.[33][34]

Re-election campaign

Rogers is seeking re-election to the Arizona Senate from the 7th legislative district as a result of a "last-minute change" by Arizona's Independent Redistricting Commission, which altered the district boundaries in Flagstaff, where Rogers resides.[35] Rogers is endorsed by former president Donald Trump.[36]

In January 2022, it was reported that Rogers had raised a "record-breaking" $2.5 million for her re-election campaign.[37][38] Rogers defeated fellow incumbent Arizona Senator Kelly Townsend in the Republican primary by an 18-point margin, receiving 59 percent of the vote to Townsend's 41 percent.[39] Townsend initially conceded to Rogers, before threatening a lawsuit to overturn the election results.[40][41]

Rogers will face Democrat Kyle Nitschke in the general election.[42]

Controversies

Defamation lawsuit

While running for Congress in 2018, Rogers ran ads attacking one of her Republican primary opponents, Steve Smith, calling him a "slimy character" and linking his employer, a modeling agency, to "websites linked to sex trafficking".[43][44] The modeling agency and its owner sued Rogers for defamation in October 2018. The protracted litigation eventually reached the Arizona Supreme Court, and oral arguments were held in September 2021.[45][43] In its opinion issued on February 1, 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that Rogers's ad was protected by the First Amendment, finding that allowing the case to proceed would “inevitably and intolerably chill political speech" by opening the door to lawsuits by "any third party who might indirectly be identified in a passing reference in a political advertisement".[46][47]

Ethics investigations

In January 2021, Michael Polloni, a former legislative aide to Rogers, filed a complaint with the Arizona State Senate Ethics Committee accusing Rogers of abusive workplace conduct. In his complaint, Polloni claimed that Rogers subjected him to verbal abuse, removed and damaged his belongings, demanded that he perform campaign work on government time, and demanded that he work while on sick leave for COVID-19.[48] An investigation by a Senate attorney found that Rogers cursed at Polloni during a heated argument, but found "little evidence" to corroborate other claims. In March 2021, the Republican-led Ethics Committee dismissed the complaint, finding no clear and convincing evidence of an ethics violation. Both Democrats on the Committee disagreed with the decision.[49] Polloni subsequently filed a $500,000 notice of claim (a precursor to a lawsuit) against the state, alleging wrongful termination and harassment.[50] In December 2021, Polloni filed suit in Maricopa County Superior Court, alleging wrongful termination, assault and emotional distress.[51]

Following the May 2022 mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, Rogers suggested on a social media site that the shooting was a false flag operation perpetrated by federal agents.[52][53] The Republican-controlled Arizona Senate voted two days later by a margin of 24–3 to open an ethics investigation of Rogers over the social media comment. Rogers was one of the three Republicans who voted against the investigation.[54][55]

Censure by the Arizona Senate

On March 1, 2022, Republican Arizona Senate Majority Leader Rick Gray moved to censure Rogers for "conduct unbecoming of a senator, including publicly issuing and promoting social media and video messages encouraging violence".[56] The motion was brought in response to Rogers's February 25 speech to the**America First Political Action Conference**, in which she called for the public execution of political "traitors".[56] On the Senate floor, Rogers refused to apologize or "back down" and accused Senate Republican leadership of "colluding with the Democrats".[57] Rogers had previously threatened to "destroy the careers" of any Republican Senators who voted to censure her.[58] The motion passed 24–3, with Rogers and two other senators voting no. Rogers's censure was the first such successful motion in three decades.[59]

Embrace of far-right extremism

In 2018, Rogers claimed to be a "charter member" of the Oath Keepers, a militia group known to promote conspiracy theories and violent, extremist rhetoric, including talk of a new civil war. During her 2020 campaign for the Arizona Senate, she promoted her membership in the group.[18] After the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, which resulted in criminal indictments for 26 members of the Oath Keepers, Rogers stated on Twitter: "I am a member of the Oathkeepers and I really like their dedication to our Constitution and to our country," and included a photo of her speaking to the Cottonwood chapter of the organization.[7]

In December 2020, as a State Senator-elect, Rogers praised Confederate general Robert E. Lee as a "great patriot and a great leader".[60] In June 2021, Rogers appeared on the streaming channel TruNews on a show hosted by white nationalist commentator Lauren Witzke. TruNews, along with its founder Rick Wiles, is known for its promotion of antisemitic conspiracy theories, including a claim Trump's impeachment was orchestrated by "seditious Jews" and that Americans are "oppressed by Jewish tyrants".[61] In July 2021, Rogers claimed that "Americans who love this country" are "being replaced [...] using mass immigration, education, big tech, big corporations" and "other strategies", echoing the Great Replacement conspiracy theory.[62]

In June 2022, QAnon conspiracy theorist Ron Watkins filed a formal ethics complaint against Rogers with the Arizona Senate. In support of his complaint, Watkins cited Rogers' request on the instant messaging service Telegram for the Groypers to "hit" Watkins after he alleged that Rogers had cut a "backroom deal" to prevent election equipment from being examined.[63]

Personal life

Rogers married Hal Kunnen in 1978 and they have two children. Kunnen is a retired Air Force officer.[64]

Bibliography

References

...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/15/magazine/arizona-republicans-democracy.html

terry gross no lnx

The Arizona Republican Party’s Anti-Democracy Experiment

First, it turned against the establishment. Now it has set its sights on democracy — the principles, the process and even the word itself.

A primary eve rally in Phoenix featuring onstage, from left, the former Trump official Richard Grenell, the gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, the state attorney general candidate Abraham Hamadeh and the U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters.Credit...Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times]

By Robert Draper

Aug. 15, 2022

R​​ose Sperry, a state committeewoman for Arizona’s G.O.P., answered immediately when I asked her to name the first Republican leader she admired. “I grew up during the time thatJoe McCarthywas doing his talking,” Sperry, an energetic 81-year-old, said of the Wisconsin senator who in the 1950s infamously claimed Communists had infiltrated the federal government. “I was young, but I was listening. If he were here today, I would say, ‘Get him in there as president!’”

Sperry is part of a grass-roots movement that has pushed her state’s party far to the right in less than a decade. She had driven 37 miles the morning of July 16, from her home in the Northern Arizona town Cottonwood to the outskirts of Prescott, to attend the monthly meeting of a local conservative group called the Lions of Liberty, who, according to the group’s website, “are determined to correct the course of our country, which has been hijacked and undermined by global elites, communists, leftists, deep state bureaucrats and fake news.” That dismal view of America today was echoed by nearly every other conservative voter and group I encountered across the state over the past year.

Arizona has become a bellwether for the rest of the nation, and not just because of its new status as a swing state and the first of these to be called for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. It was and has continued to be the nexus of efforts by former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies to overturn the 2020 election results. At the same time, party figures from Trump down to Rose Sperry have sought to blacklist every Arizona G.O.P. official who maintained that the election was fairly won — from Gov. Doug Ducey to Rusty Bowers, speaker of the state’s House of Representatives. Such leaders have been condemned as RINOs, or Republicans in name only, today’s equivalent of the McCarthy era’s “fellow travelers.”

The aggressive takeover of the Arizona G.O.P. by its far-right wing was made manifest on primary night earlier this month, when a slate of Trump-endorsed candidates — the gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, the U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters, the state attorney general candidate Abraham Hamadeh and the secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem — all prevailed. As a group, they maintain that the 2020 election was stolen, have promoted conspiracy theories about Covid and have vowed to protect Arizona’s schools from gender ideology, critical race theory and what McCarthyites denounced 70 years ago as “godless communism.”

They have cast the 2022 election as not just history-defining but potentially civilization-ending. As Lake told a large crowd in downtown Phoenix the night before the primary: “It is not just a battle between Republicans and Democrats. This is a battle between freedom and tyranny, between authoritarianism and liberty and between good and evil.” A week later, in response to the F.B.I.’s executing a search warrant at Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, Lake posted a statement on Twitter: “These tyrants will stop at nothing to silence the Patriots who are working hard to save America.” She added, “America — dark days lie ahead for us.” Far from offering an outlier’s view, Lake was articulating the dire stance shared by numerous other Republicans on the primary ballot and by the reactionary grass-roots activists who have swept them into power.

Whether that viewpoint is politically viable in a swing state is another question. Arizona’s two U.S. senators, Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema, are both Democrats. The tissue-thin Republican majorities in Arizona’s State Legislature — 31 to 29 in the House, 16 to 14 in the Senate — are the most precarious the G.O.P. has experienced in over a quarter-century as the ruling party. And, of course, Trump lost Arizona in 2020, in large part by alienating the college-educated suburbanites who have relocated to the Phoenix metropolitan area of Maricopa County in increasing numbers.

Arizona has thus become what the state’s well-regarded pollster Mike Noble characterizes as “magenta, the lightest state of red.” In the face of this shift, the state’s G.O.P. has aggressively declined to moderate itself. Instead, it has endeavored to cast out some of its best-known political figures. Last year, it censured its sitting governor, Doug Ducey; its former U.S. senator Jeff Flake; and Cindy McCain, the widow of the U.S. senator and 2008 G.O.P. presidential nominee John McCain, arguably the state party’s second-most-famous elected official, after Barry Goldwater.

In the weeks leading up to its Aug. 2 primary, and now as it turns toward the general election in November, Arizona has presented an American case study in how backlash to demographic and social change can cause a political party to turn on itself,even at its own electoral peril. “The fact that so much energy is being spent RINO-slaying and not beating Democrats is not a healthy place for our party to be in the long run,” one political consultant who works in multiple Western states including Arizona (and who requested anonymity to not alienate current and potential clients) observed fretfully.

When I recently spoke by phone with the state G.O.P.’s chairwoman, Kelli Ward, and shared this consultant’s concern, she offered a defiant laugh. “That’s the same argument that they’ve been making again and again and again, decade after decade,” Ward told me. “And they deliver us these spineless weaklings who cave in like rusty lawn chairs at the snap of a Democrat’s finger. I’m sick of it, and the people are sick of it.” A day after we spoke, Ward announced on Twitter that party officials had voted to censure yet another of their own: Bowers, the sitting House speaker, one of the few state Republican leaders who had remained steadfast in publicly saying that Trump lost Arizona fair and square, and had recently testified to the Jan. 6 House committee that vengeful opponents had driven a van through his neighborhood with a video screen calling him a pedophile. Bowers, Ward proclaimed in her tweet, “is no longer a Republican in good standing & we call on Republicans to replace him at the ballot box in the August primary.” (Bowers was defeated.)

But there is more at stake than the health of the Republican Party when its core activists, as well as a growing number of officials and those campaigning for governmental positions, openly espouse hostility not just to democratic principles but, increasingly, to the word “democracy” itself. It has long been a talking point on the right — from a chant at the 1964 Republican convention where Goldwater became the G.O.P. nominee to a set of tweets in 2020 by Senator Mike Lee of Utah — that the United States is a republic, not a democracy. The idea, embodied by the Electoral College’s primacy over the popular vote in presidential elections, is that the founders specifically rejected direct popular sovereignty in favor of a representative system in which the governing authorities are states and districts, not individual voters. But until very recently, democracy has been championed on the right: President George W. Bush, a subject of two books I’ve written, famously promoted democracy worldwide (albeit through military aggression that arguably undermined his cause). For that matter, in Trump’s speech at the rally on Jan. 6, he invoked the word “democracy” no fewer than four times, framing the attempt to overturn the 2020 election as a last-ditch effort to “save our democracy.”

What is different now is the use of “democracy” as a kind of shorthand and even a slur for Democrats themselves, for the left and all the positions espoused by the left, for hordes of would-be but surely unqualified or even illegal voters who are fundamentally anti-American and must be opposed and stopped at all costs. That anti-democracy and anti-“democracy” sentiment, repeatedly voiced over the course of my travels through Arizona, is distinct from anything I have encountered in over two decades of covering conservative politics.

It’s the failure to reinstall a legitimately defeated president, under the misguided belief that victory was stolen from him, that seems to have ushered in the view among Arizona Republicans — and many more across the nation — that democracy itself was at fault and had been weaponized by the political left, or the “enemies from within,” as McCarthy once put it. As it happened, Rose Sperry wasn’t the first person to invoke the Wisconsin senator at the Lions of Liberty event. “I had a weird dream last night about Joseph McCarthy,” said one of the morning’s featured speakers, Jim Arroyo, the head of Arizona’s biggest chapter of the Oath Keepers, a far-right paramilitary group made up largely of current and former members of the armed forces and law enforcement. McCarthy, he said, “was not only right — he understated the seriousness of it.”

Arroyo’s eschatological rhetoric was echoed by the down-ballot Republican candidates who spoke to the group. One of them was Selina Bliss, a precinct committeewoman and nursing teacher at Yavapai College who was running for a State House seat. (On Aug. 2, she was defeated by the G.O.P. incumbent, Quang Nguyen, who earlier this year authored legislation, later signed into law, requiring that Arizona high school students receive anti-Communist civics instruction.) Bliss reminded her friends and neighbors that they belonged to a thriving activist movement: “We Republicans, we conservatives, we’re the grass roots, we come from the bottom up.”

Image Blake Masters, in white shirt, outside a campaign rally in Tucson, Ariz., in July.]

But after the seeming paean to political participation, she took a turn. “I want to address something that’s bugging me for a long time,” Bliss said. “And that’s the history and the sacredness of our Constitution and what our founding fathers meant.” She then said: “We are a constitutional republic. We are not a democracy. Nowhere in the Constitution does it use the word ‘democracy.’ When I hear the word ‘democracy,’ I think of the democracy of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That’s not us.”

It once would have been jarring to hear a candidate for state legislative office ignore the usual parochial issues — property taxes, water access, state funding for universities — and instead repudiate the very idea of democracy in America. But Bliss’s view was hardly out of place here. Sperry, the activist sitting in the audience, had posted on Facebook a few months before: “Please strike the word democracy from your vocabulary! WE ARE A REPUBLIC!!!”

The Republican activities across Arizona before its primary could have been mistaken, at first glance, for a collective celebration of democracy rather than a threat to it. Rows of yard signs, nearly all of them for G.O.P. candidates, stretched along highways from Maricopa County to the northern conservative strongholds of Mohave and Yavapai Counties. Candidate meet-and-greets, held in coffee shops and strip malls and V.F.W. halls, were hosted by activist groups like the Granite Mountain Republican Women and United Patriots AZ. Among the candidates, the closest thing to an entrenched party war horse was two six-term congressmen from the 2010 Tea Party class, Paul Gosar and David Schweikert, each of whom were now, because of redistricting, having to sell themselves to voters in newly drawn but still red districts. (Both incumbents won.) Otherwise, the field was replete with political novices, suggestive of what Selina Bliss, at the Lions of Liberty meeting, referred to as a seeming “bottom up” democratization of the Republican Party.

But most of the G.O.P. candidates seemed to share Bliss’s fears of majority rule as well as a desire to inflict harsh punishment on those they perceive as threats, deviants and un-American. Possibly the most notorious Arizona Republican to appear on the primary ballot was State Senator Wendy Rogers. She was censured in March by her fellow state senators for telling a white-nationalist group, referring to state and federal officials who had enacted Covid vaccine mandates, “If we try some of these high-level criminals, convict them and use a newly built set of gallows, it’ll make an example of these traitors who betrayed our country.”

Yet Rogers would go on to win her primary, easily defeating a fellow G.O.P. state senator, Kelly Townsend, whose communications with Trump lawyers have been subpoenaed by the F.B.I., presumably for information she might have about the plot by Trump allies to replace Arizona’s legitimate electors with fake ones. No moderate herself, Townsend recently vowed that vigilantes at primary polling stations would monitor voters they deemed suspicious: “We’re going to have people parked out there watching you, and they’re going to follow you to your car and get your license plate.”

The leading name in this new Republican wave is that of Lake, the gubernatorial candidate, who was a well-known personality on Phoenix’s Fox affiliate for over two decades. At a Trump rally in Arizona I attended in January, she called for the arrest of illegal border-crossers and also of Dr. Anthony Fauci for unspecified Covid-related offenses, as well as unspecified conspirators “in that corrupt, shady, shoddy election of 2020.” To this litany of suspected criminals, Lake has also added teachers. “Put cameras in the classroom,” she told the Arizona conservative talk-radio host Garret Lewis last November, arguing that parents should have access to video evidence of “something being taught in the classroom” that they might deem objectionable.

Lake neatly if hyperbolically described the Arizona G.O.P.’s us-versus-them outlook on Twitter in June: “They kicked God out of schools and welcomed the Drag Queens. They took down our Flag and replaced it with a rainbow. They seek to disarm Americans and militarize our Enemies. Let’s bring back the basics: God, Guns & Glory.” On her campaign website, Lake describes the media — her former profession — as “corrupt” and “the enemy of the people.” A campaign video displays her bashing televisions to bits with a sledgehammer and a baseball bat. At a rally the night before the primary, she directed her audience to turn around and “show these bastards” — referring to the camera crews positioned on a riser — their disapproval, which they proceeded to do with loud jeers.

Lake has said she decided to leave journalism in 2021 because of disenchantment with the news media’s liberal bias. In fact, Lake herself donated to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008. A decade later, Lake’s preference had changed. She visited the White House in June 2019 to do a story for the local Fox affiliate on Stephanie Grisham, who years before served as the press secretary for the Arizona House Majority Caucusand who had just been named communications director for the first lady, Melania Trump. “What got me was how much of a fangirl for Donald Trump she was,” Grisham told me. “When she got there, she was absolutely gushing about him. I remember thinking, Even for Fox, this is a bit much.”

Trump endorsed Lake last September, a few hours after she wrote on Twitter that the likeness of the former president should be chiseled into Mount Rushmore. Trump also endorsed Blake Masters, now the Arizona Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate against the incumbent Democrat, Mark Kelly. Masters, the 36-year-old former C.O.O. of Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm, embraces the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. “If you say as a candidate, ‘Obviously, the Democrats, they hope to just change the demographics of our country, they hope to import an entirely new electorate,’ they call you a bigot,” he told Rob Hephner, who goes by Birdman, on the “Patriot Edition” podcast in April. Such views are in alignment with those of Andrew Anglin, the publisher of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, who gave Masters his “forceful endorsement.” (Masters rejected the endorsement.) The campaign yard signs for Masters that I saw festooning Arizona’s highways bore pledges like “Blake Masters Will Prosecute Fauci” and “Blake Masters Won’t Ask Your Pronouns.”

Trump’s interest in Arizona officeseekers like Masters and Lake is anything but casual. For nearly two years running, he has repeatedly cited both his continuing desire to overturn the 2020 presidential election and Arizona’s centrality to that effort. At a rally in Prescott Valley on July 22,Trump spoke glowingly of the G.O.P. state chairwoman, Kelli Ward — “she’s winning so much.” Ward has championed the State Senate’s election audit of Maricopa County, calling it “America’s Audit.” (Arizona election officials had already conducted a succession of recounts and audits before this one by an outfit called Cyber Ninjas, headed by a conservative election denier named Doug Logan, which found in the end that Biden had won 99 more votes and Trump 261 fewer than originally recorded.)

A primary eve rally in Phoenix, in August.

The most telling among Trump’s Arizona endorsements is that of the secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem, whom Trump has described in an official statement as “a true warrior” who took an “incredibly powerful stance on the Massive Voter Fraud that took place in the 2020 Presidential Election Scam.” Indeed, Finchem, as a state representative, was one of Arizona’s first public officials to baselessly claim that the state’s voting machines had been corrupted in Biden’s favor. At a candidate forum I attended in mid-July, Finchem disclosed to the audience that he had charged $5,000 to his personalAmerican Express card to rent out a Phoenix hotel conference room where, on Nov. 30, 2020,he and Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani staged a multihour presentation to Finchem’s fellow state legislators of supposed fraud in Arizona, even as state officials were certifying the election for Biden a few miles away. As secretary of state, Finchem would be Arizona’s top election official during a potential rematch of Trump and Biden in 2024 and could work to invalidate the results, which the current secretary of state, the Democrat Katie Hobbs, now running for governor, refused to do in 2020.

The enmeshment of Finchem and other Arizona Republicans in the tumultuous final weeks of Trump’s presidency is remarkable in its depth and complexity. On Nov. 4, 2020, the day after the election, Representative Paul Gosar conceived the first protest of the results anywhere in the United States, marching to the Maricopa County recorder’s office in Phoenix, where the ballots were still being tallied. Joining Trump’s lawyer Sidney Powell in a postelection lawsuit seeking to invalidate Arizona’s results, on the factually unsupported grounds that “old-fashioned 19th-century ballot stuffing” had occurred there, was the Phoenix lawyer Alexander Kolodin, who on primary night won a seat in the State Legislature (no Democrat will oppose him in the general election). As the flurry of Arizona lawsuits failed one by one, the state’s G.O.P. chairwoman, Ward — who had also filed an unsuccessful election lawsuit — maintained a weekslong pressure campaign against the Republican-controlled Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to throw out the results, saying in one ominous text message (among many that were obtained by The Arizona Republic), “I know you don’t want to be remembered as the guy who led the charge to certify a fraudulent election.”

Two weeks after the Nov. 30 election-fraud hearing convened by Finchem and Giuliani, while state officials were certifying the Arizona results, the official state G.O.P. Twitter account posted a video of Ward and 10 other Republicans signing documents falsely proclaiming themselves to be the state’s electors and declaring the election results illegitimate. Among the phony electors were three Republicans who would later appear on the 2022 primary ballot: the U.S. Senate candidate Jim Lamon and the State Senate candidates Anthony Kern and Jake Hoffman. (Lamon was defeated by Masters; Kern and Hoffman won.) This fake-elector scheme had been in the works for over a month and involved Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who in emails obtained by The Washington Post urged two Arizona lawmakers, Speaker Rusty Bowers and State Representative Shawnna Bolick, to “take action to ensure that a clean slate of electors is chosen.”

When that maneuver also failed to bear fruit, several Arizona Republicans joined with Trump in attempting a final desperate postelection measure. On Dec. 21, 2020, Gosar and his fellow Arizona congressman Andy Biggs, then the head of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, were among a group of G.O.P. House members who met with Trump in the White House to discuss actions including calling on Vice President Mike Pence to decertify the election results unilaterally.Two weeks later, on Jan. 5, 2021, 16 Arizona legislators — Bolick, Kern and Finchem among them — signed a letter to Pence that was also signed by Republican legislators in four other contested states, urging him to delay certifying the election results for 10 days. Pence refused to do so, and on Jan. 6, Kern and Finchem were among the Arizonans who descended on the Capitol. Finchem photographed the riotous mob and posted it on Twitter with the caption, “What happens when the People feel they have been ignored, and Congress refuses to acknowledge rampant fraud.”

As a result of their involvement in Trump’s efforts to steal back the presidency, Finchem, Ward, Biggs and other Arizona Republicans have been issued subpoenas by the Jan. 6 committee. (Though Ward taunted Democrats last year for their resistance to the State Senate audit in Arizona — “What are they hiding?” she demanded at the time — she has since sued to block the committee from obtaining her cellphone records.) Back home in Arizona, however, they have faced no reprisals within their party. Far from it: Their willingness to assist Trump in overturning the 2020 election was rewarded across the boards on primary night.

There was no mystery as to why. According to a state survey of Arizona voters last year, 61 percent of Republicans believed the 2020 election “was stolen from President Trump.” Perhaps not by coincidence, the G.O.P. primary candidates who spoke the most vociferously about fraud in the 2020 elections were those like Kari Lake and Blake Masters, who were not in Trump’s trenches back then and now had to work overtime to prove themselves fit for combat against the enemy.

“We are a Wild West state,” Lake proudly declared to a cheering audience at the Trump rally I attended in January. She was saluting her state’s undomesticated spirit and distinguishing it from what she termed the “socialist garbage” prevalent in California. Much like Texans, residents of the last contiguous state to enter the Union have long evinced a certain pride in their nearly uninhabitable territory, insofar as doing so confers a toughness that their effete neighbors to the west may lack. Lake was no doubt also nodding to the worrisome demographic reality that some 60,000 Californians relocated to Arizona in 2020. What some activists on the right derisively refer to as the looming “Californication” of Arizona — high taxes, increased gun restrictions and liberalization of social values — ranks high on the list of existential anxieties among the state’s conservatives. “They don’t win with their ideas,” Lake said of progressives to her supporters the night before the primary, “because their ideas are what sunk California.”

Roughly 39 percent of Arizona’s land is federally owned. The local hostility to government control, combined with the sense of rough-hewn independence fostered by its desert climate, has meant that conservatism in Arizona has long possessed an extremist underbelly. One former longtime state G.O.P. operative brought up the congressional district long represented by Gosar, which includes most of Mohave and Yavapai Counties, two of the two most conservative in Arizona. (The home page for the Mohave County G.O.P. contains the banner headline, “Protecting Our Republic ... One Voter at a Time.” The Yavapai County G.O.P.’s website includes links to the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s podcast as well as to the Gateway Pundit website, which has been banned on Twitter and demonetized by Google for promoting ludicrous conspiracy theories.) “These are the ranchers of the West,” the former operative told me. “They literally will meet you with a gun at their door if you try to say hello. It makes canvassing very difficult.” This person noted that Kingman, a town in Mohave County, was where Timothy McVeigh spent several months discussing with fellow extremists his plans to bomb a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. As the former operative told me, “This is the part of the country where they believe Timothy McVeigh was right.”

Other political observers in Arizona point to Gov. Evan Mecham, elected in 1986 and impeached and removed from office only 15 months into his term (for obstruction of justice and misusing public funds to prop up his ailing auto dealership), as an early sign of a far-right base that Trump would later exploit. Mecham, who rescinded the state holiday honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. while blaming America’s high divorce rate on women’s entering the labor force, vowed to his death that his political career had been undone by a vast conspiracy.

The bridge between Mecham and Trump would prove to be Joe Arpaio, who took office as Maricopa County sheriff in 1993, five years after Mecham’s removal, and stepped down in 2017 after losing his latest re-election bid. Styling himself as “America’s toughest sheriff,” Arpaio achieved notoriety for his barbaric attitude toward county inmates before later refashioning himself as Arizona’s foremost proponent of strict border-enforcement measures and, later still, as a pioneer of the “birther” conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was born outside the United States. Arpaio became an early spokesman for candidateTrump, who as president would pardon Arpaio after he was found guilty of contempt of court. Arpaio, now 90, was also on the ballot for the Aug. 2 primary, barely losing a campaign to be mayor of Fountain Hills, an affluent town in Maricopa County with a population of some 24,000.

Of course, Arizona’s dominant modern-day political figures — the Democrats Carl Hayden and Morris Udall, the Republicans Goldwater and McCain — have shaped the state and its national standing in ways that Arpaio and Mecham never could. But it’s also the case that McCain, the state’s most powerful Republican for the past quarter-century, commanded as much distrust as he did allegiance from the grass roots. Conservative Christians in Arizona did not readily forgive McCain for denouncing Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as “agents of intolerance” during his first presidential run in 2000. McCain’s partnership with the Democrat Ted Kennedy to reform the nation’s immigration system in 2006 further alienated his conservative constituents. Another grudge was the senator’s opposition to a 2014 Arizona bill that would permit businesses to deny service to gay customers on religious grounds, insisting that in Arizona, “We welcome all people of all persuasions.”

That year, despite McCain’s status as a war hero, the Arizona G.O.P. censured him “for his continued disservice to our state and nation,” in essence accusing its best-known Republican — and the 2008 G.O.P. presidential candidate — of being a RINO. Following the censure, several McCain associates set up a political action committee called Arizona Grassroots Action and aggressively filled vacant precinct committee seats with loyalists, who in turn voted for like-minded party chairs.

Among the precinct committeemen who continued to view McCain with disfavor was a libertarian-leaning engineering technology professor at Mesa Community College named Joe Neglia. In 2012, Neglia attended the state party convention and watched with chagrin as the Republican establishment used delay tactics to deprive Ron Paul of any delegates and ensure victory for the presidential nominee Mitt Romney. “It was a day that really changed my life,” he told me in mid-July over breakfast in Tempe. “Because I thought: This can’t possibly be right. This can’t possibly happen.”

Neglia began to catalog the means by which the party establishment maintained the upper hand: how, in 2015, they brought in busloads of McCain supporters to a party meeting so that the senator would not be greeted entirely by boos; how, in 2016, they invoked an obscure rule to shut down an “Endorse Anyone but McCain” resolution. “That’s when I started studying to become a parliamentarian,” Neglia told me. “Now I’ve got the RINOs running scared, because every meeting I go to, they see me, and they know they can’t get away with anything anymore.”

A former Maricopa County G.O.P. chairwoman, Rae Chornenky, ruefully described to me how Neglia turned the tables at the state party meeting in January 2019. “We were deciding who the next state chairman would be, and Neglia threw a bomb in the middle of it,” she said. “He insisted on a roll-call vote, so that people would have to say out loud who they voted for. In politics, you don’t always want to have to do that. It’s because of that procedure that many people feel she was able to eke out her win.”

A Republican precinct committeeman outside his home in Tempe, Ariz., in July.

“She” was Kelli Ward, an osteopathic physician, Tea Party activist and state senator who unsuccessfully challenged McCain in the 2016 Senate primary and subsequently failed to win a Senate primary in 2018.(Ward would later suggest in one of her books that her loss to McCain may have been due to fraud.) “McCain was like a Mafia don,” Ward told me, “whose henchmen were willing to take out people who wouldn’t kiss his ring. That’s why it’s so painful now for his cronies, because they’re used to being rewarded for their loyalty, just like in the mob. And we are seeing a resurgence or a surge of populist grass-roots people who understand how our country was founded and are tired of that kind of machinery controlling the Republican Party.”

Ward’s evocation of mobster fealty in McCain’s circle might strike some as ironic, given her unyielding fidelity to Donald Trump, whom she first met at Mar-a-Lago in December 2017, tweeting seven months later, “Every day I thank God for @realDonaldTrump & the amazing job he is doing to #MakeAmericaGreatAgain both here at home & across the world.” In February, Ward self-published a book about the State Senate audit titled “Justified: The Story of America’s Audit” and dedicated it “to President Donald J. Trump, the 45th president of the United States of America, who should still be president today.” Though the audit failed to achieve the objective of demonstrating fraud, the taxpayer-funded exercise counted as a huge win for Ward’s party organization, which raised over a million dollars during the time of the audit, far more than it did the previous year. As the G.O.P. consultant who works in Western states told me, “The audit was a tremendous windfall for the party, it was good business, the small dollar donations went through the roof.”

Ward now sits atop the state G.O.P. hierarchy, which has made her an object of carping from the grass roots, who wonder whether she is drifting away from their ideals. “Even she will violate the rules that we have,” Neglia told me, and he then went on to describe how Ward defied “Robert’s Rules of Order” in abruptly shutting down a party meeting this past January just as Neglia was trying to argue for a transparency measure. Still, Neglia remains an ally of Ward’s — “She’s definitely not a RINO,” he said — and now shares with her the view that widespread fraud tainted the 2020 election.

What persuaded Neglia, he said, was the stolen-election film polemic “2000 Mules,” directed by Dinesh D’Souza, whom Trump pardoned four years ago after D’Souza pleaded guilty to making illegal campaign contributions. Neglia told me that he met D’Souza in May at the Maricopa County G.O.P.’s annual Lincoln Day lunch. “Very nice, reasonable guy,” he said. “I don’t think he has a dishonest bone in his body.”

“So I was in the movie ‘2000 Mules,’ and I’ve been on that issue nonstop,” said Charlie Kirk as he stood before a gathering of fellow Republicans at a restaurant in the Maricopa County town Goodyear on a Thursday night in July. Kirk, 28, is the leader of the Phoenix-based conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, arguably the nation’s most high-profile Trump-adjacent activist group. He was there to raise campaign funds on behalf of his Turning Point lieutenant Austin Smith, who was running in a State House primary, which he would go on to win on Aug. 2. (Smith, in his brief stump speech that night, paid tribute to Trump announcing his presidential bid in 2015 as “a guy with golden hair coming down a golden escalator to save our country.”) But after a few perfunctory words of support for Smith, Kirk — an accomplished orator who combines earnestness, comic timing and doomful soothsaying in one smooth and youthful package— proceeded to describe, unhinged from the fact-based world, how America in general and Arizona in particular rested on a knife edge of anarchy.

“We’ve taught our kids to hate themselves, hate the country and believe there is no God,” Kirk told the audience. “And we wonder why our country’s falling apart.” Kirk told the crowd he knew who was responsible: the Democrats. “They want 7,000 illegals across the border to come into our country every day. They want C.R.T. They want this graphic transgenderism in our schools.” As with Kari Lake’s good-versus-evil formulation, Kirk went on to describe the stakes in zero-sum terms: “There’s no compromise when you want to teach 8-year-olds transgender sexual education. I’m sorry, there’s no bargaining. There’s no compromise here. I’m just going to have to get more votes than you, and we’re going to have to defeat you.”

Kirk helped start Turning Point USA in 2012. His organization did not take long to become one of the nation’s leading promoters of political disinformation. During the 2016 presidential election, a study conducted for the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found, memes created by Kirk’s group were amplified by the Russian troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency as part of Russia’s effort to aid Trump’s candidacy. Two years later, according to an investigation by The Guardian, Kirk’s organization contracted an Arizona digital marketing firm, Rally Forge, to promote deceptive messages on Facebook with the apparent objective of persuading some Democratic voters to peel away and side with Green Party candidates, as was the case in 2016, when Jill Stein’s vote totals in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin exceeded Trump’s margin of victory in those three swing states.

‘In my lifetime, I never imagined this attack on democracy. I’ve been asking myself: Will this movement die out with Trump? Or are we the ones that will die out?’

In 2020, The Washington Post reported that Turning Point Action (an affiliate of Turning Point USA) commissioned Rally Forge to churn out disinformation about Covid and election security, using a Phoenix-based campaign likened to a troll farm that included teenagers as employees. That same year, Rally Forge’s chief executive, Jake Hoffman, was banned from Twitter. He was also elected to Arizona’s Legislature and was among the group of Arizona Republicans who, with Kelli Ward, proclaimed themselves to be electors in seeking to overturn Trump’s defeat. Hoffman is now vice-chairman of the state’s House Committee on Government and Elections and on primary night became a G.O.P. nominee for the State Senate.

The effect of disinformation on the growing extremism of Arizona’s conservative activist community was described to me by a former state Republican operative who asked not to be named so that he could speak candidly about a trend he found to be disturbing. He told me that he frequently received emails from several of the state’s conservative precinct committeepersons. “I’ve never known a group of people, many of whom I genuinely liked, to be so misinformed,” the former operative told me. “I wish I could send you a file of memes that I’ve seen from them over the years. They’re lies or half-truths designed to incite rage. So, what ends up happening is you start to get all these clustered groups that start to spread disinformation, but they’re also the same people that are the root source of power in Arizona’s political system, which is the local precinct committee.”

Arizona, the former operative said, is particularly susceptible to the churn of disinformation, owing to its large population of retirees. “These are all folks that have traded in their suit pants for sweatpants,” he said. “They’re on the golf course, or they’re in hobby mode. They have more than enough time on their hands. They’re digesting six to 10 hours of Fox News a day. They’re reading on Facebook. They’re meeting with each other to talk about those headlines. And they’re outraged that, ‘Can you believe that the government is lying to us about this?’”

At the event held in Prescott by the Lions of Liberty, I asked Rose Sperry, the G.O.P. state committeewoman, which information outlet she most trusted. She immediately replied, “OAN” — One America News, the Trump-touting network that provided daily coverage of “America’s Audit” in Arizona even as one of its show hosts, Christina Bobb, was helping to raise funds for and directly coordinate the operation between the Trump team and state officials.

One guest on OAN’s heavy rotation over the past year has been the secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem, who appeared on a broadcast last September to discuss the State Senate audit of the 2020 election, accompanied by a chyron that read, “Exposing the Crime of the Century.” In July, I drove to Fountain Hills, where Finchem was speaking at a candidate forum hosted by the Republican Women of the Hills. Finchem sidled up to the microphone with a pistol conspicuously strapped to his right hip. After describing his work history in law enforcement, the private sector and Arizona politics, he then offered a different sort of qualification. With a grin, Finchem said, “The Atlantic put out a piece yesterday: I’m the most dangerous person to democracy in America.”

The article Finchem was referring to did not designate him “the most dangerous person” — but rather as one of “dozens” of election-denying candidates who “present the most significant threat to American democracy in decades.” Regardless, the notion of Arizona’s G.O.P. secretary of state front-runner as a threat to democracy was received rapturously. Several women in the audience yelled out “Whooo!” and applauded.

Throughout Arizona’s 2022 political season, the proactive denigration of democracy among Republicans became a chorus that was impossible to ignore in meetings, speeches and rallies across the state. “By the way,” Charlie Kirk made a point of saying at the fund-raiser in Goodyear, “we don’t have a democracy. OK? Just to fact check. We’re a republic.”At a gathering in Mesa that I attended in July, held by the conservative group United Patriots AZ, the evening’s host, Jeffrey Crane, asked the audience, “Are we a democracy?” They responded loudly: “Nooooo! Republic!”

In each case, the very notion of democracy was raised not so much to win a scholarly point but rather to shine a spotlight on it as an offending object. When I mentioned this emerging antagonism to McCain’s longtime state director, Bettina Nava, she was genuinely stunned. Reflecting on her former boss’s brand of conservatism, Nava told me: “At the root of it all was his deep belief in the experiment of democracy. When I was his state director, we met with everybody. And there were times when it was perfectly friendly and others where it was contentious. But he never shied away from it, because disagreement didn’t equal hate.”Nava feared for the Republican Party she once served. “In my lifetime, I never imagined this attack on democracy,” she said. “I’ve been asking myself: Will this movement die out with Trump? Or are we the ones that will die out? Are we the Whigs?”

Nava was describing a democracy reliant on a notion of comity that was no longer in evidence.As McCain’s grip on Arizona waned, Arizona conservatives began gradually to part ways with his beloved democratic experiment. That experiment had worked in the past, so long as the democratic principles in question redounded to the benefit of the state’s ruling conservative base. Arizona Republican legislators led the way three decades ago in championing early voting, and Republican voters overwhelmingly chose to cast their ballots by mail, at least until the 2020 election. But by Primary Day in August, many Arizona Republicans had come to view such conveniences, against all evidence, as a trap laid by a wily leftist conspiracy bent on engineering Democratic victories.

I spent that morning visiting about a dozen voting centers throughout deeply conservative Yavapai County, from Black Canyon City to Yarnell to Congress. Outside the Cottonwood Bible Church, a young bearded man in a camouflage shirt politely greeted every voter with a fistful of ballpoint pens he had purchased for the occasion. “I know they were passing out the felt-tip pens last election and not all the votes counted,” the young man said, referring to the disproved claim that election workers in Maricopa County sought to invalidate Republican ballots in 2020 by forcing voters to use Sharpies. “I just wanted to do my part.”

At a voting center in Clarkdale, three senior citizens, all G.O.P. precinct committeepersons, sat in folding chairs directly in front of the town’s only voting drop box a few yards away. When a car idled up, they craned their necks to see whether the driver was trying to stuff the box with multiple ballots, which “2,000 Mules” claimed was a frequent tactic. Two hours into their vigil, there had been no suspicious activity.

One of them, a woman named Sandy Jenocovich, led me to a nearby booth they had set up. It included leaflets for the conservative candidates they favored, as well as free copies of the Constitution, “in case anybody wants one, not that the Democrats go by it, because they certainly don’t,” she snorted. I asked Jenocovich about the hostility toward democracy I had heard voiced throughout Arizona. Nodding, she replied: “Well to me, what a democracy is, is like 51 percent of the people can decide that they want my property, and they can take it. Where a constitutional republic is: No, you can’t do that.” The three precinct committeepersons agreed that Republicans needed to “take it back” in 2022, lest critical race theory become embedded in school curriculums and children be urged to change their gender on a whim.

That evening, at Lake’s election-watch party in Scottsdale, the ebullient gathering — many of the attendees young and wearing date-night attire — grew restive as her opponent, Karrin Taylor Robson, held onto a commanding lead for several hours. Having been told for the past two years that early voting was rife with corruption, Lake’s supporters had mostly cast their ballots on Primary Day, and the totals were slow to come in. The candidate finally emerged onstage at close to 11 to assure the crowd that Primary Day’s voters were breaking her way — adding, “There is no path to victory for my opponent.”

Then Lake’s speech took a conspiratorial turn. “This is how they do it. They want to try to take you down in this movement. They don’t want you to celebrate.”

It wasn’t clear who “they” were in Lake’s scenario. By that point, there were news reports of widespread problems in Republican-dominated Pinal County, just to the south of Maricopa County. A miscalculation by election officials there had resulted in a shortage of ballots in several precincts, with some 750 voters being turned away (though most if not all were given the opportunity to vote later that day). “What in the hell is going on?” Lake exclaimed. To many in the audience, the question itself was enough and did not require an answer. Any glitch or ambiguity on voting day would be sufficient to dispute any future election results that did not emphatically produce the outcome desired by the ascendant reactionary right.

“That’s a compromised election,” Mark Finchem, the secretary of state candidate, said to me of Pinal County. “These are people who were disenfranchised.” He had arrived at Lake’s party after his own victory was all but assured. I approached him after he finished an interview with a reporter for the far-right outlet Real America’s Voice.Finchem told me that he had spent part of the day monitoring a voting center. I said that I had encountered other such monitors north of here. Given their prevalence, I asked him, was there any reason at all to suspect anything more devious than human error in Pinal County? Finchem thought for a second as beads of sweat rolled down from underneath his cowboy hat. Then, grimly, he answered.

“Everything is suspect right now.”

Robert Draper is a contributing writer for the magazine. He is the author of several books, most recently “To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq,” which was excerpted in the magazine. Peter van Agtmael is a Magnum photographer. His latest book, “Sorry for the War,” is about the American disconnect with war.

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Marjorie Taylor Greene asked journalists to judge her by her own words — and this one accepted the challenge

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia speaking at the 2021 AmericaFest at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona, ]

Alex Henderson March 01, 2022

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia is being slammed by her critics for speaking at the America First Political Action Conference — an event organized by White nationalist and anti-Semite Nick Fuentes — on Friday, February 25. Greene, in response to the criticism, has challenged journalists to judge her by her own words. And Washington Post opinion writer Catherine Rampell, in her February 28 column, accepts the challenge and describes some of the many appalling things that Greene has said since being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2020.

“Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) doesn’t want to be held accountable for the White supremacists she pals around with,” Rampell explains. “Judge her instead by her own words, she pleads. Sure thing, Congresswoman. Challenge accepted.”

Greene wasn’t the only far-right MAGA Republican who spoke at the America First Political Action Conference, described by Rampell as a White nationalist equivalent of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Others includedArizona State Sen. Wendy Rogers, Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona and Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin. All of them were welcomed by Fuentes.

“Minutes before Greene addressed the crowd,” Rampell notes, “Fuentes crowed that ‘our secret sauce here, it’s these young White men.’ He declared that the January 6 insurrection was ‘awesome.’ He solicited a ‘round of applause for Russia,’ to which the crowd chanted ‘Putin! Putin!’ And he seemed to suggest that attempts to compare Russian President Vladimir Putin to Hitler are flattering.”

After the event, a defensive Greene tweeted, “I am not going to play the guilt by association game in which you demand every conservative should justify anything ever said by anyone they’ve ever shared a room with…. I’m only responsible for what I say.”[atom/ frag/libtard]

Rampell, in response, writes, “Well, we at least agree on that last part. Greene should be held responsible for what she says, at a neo-Nazi confab or elsewhere. For instance, Greene should be held accountable for continuing to compare every Democratic policy she opposes — whether mask mandates, vaccination requirements or January 6 responses — to the Holocaust…. She has shared other anti-Semitic garbage over the years.”

The Post columnist continues, “These include claims about Jewish space lasers supposedly sparking California wildfires. And how ‘Zionist supremacists’ are conspiring to replace the West’s White Christian population with non-White Muslim immigrants, an endorsement of the ‘Great Replacement’ theory that was also voiced by other speakers in Orlando.”

Other offensive things Greene has said, Rampell observes, range from “her remarks that Muslims do not belong in government” to “her claim that 9/11 was an inside job, with no plane ever crashing into the Pentagon” to saying “that leading Democratic officials should be executed.”

Many Republicans are afraid to saying anything against Greene, as former President Donald Trump likes her and they dare not offend Dear Leader. But Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah isn’t afraid to call Greene out. When Romney was asked about Greene and Gosar appearing at a White nationalist event, he responded, “I’m reminded of that old line from the ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ movie, where one character says: ‘Morons. I have got morons on my team.’”

Rampell writes, “She has been denounced by some of the few Republicans who still have principles…. Most Republicans, it seems, would prefer to keep the morons on their team.”

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/az-state-rep-wendy-rogers-is-pushing-right-wing-conspiracy-theories-to-move-the-overton-window/

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arizona’s political landscape has changed considerably from what it was 30 or 40 years ago. On one hand, Arizona — once a deep red state that was synonymous with the GOP conservatism of Sen. Barry Goldwater and his successor, Sen. John McCain — has evolved into a swing state. But on the other hand, Arizona’s far right has become increasingly dangerous. And Arizona-based journalist Katya Schwenk describes some of those dangers in an article published by the Phoenix New Times on January 11.

The fact that Arizona has become more Democrat-friendly than it was in the past is evident in some statewide victories of the late 2010s and early 2020s. The state now has two Democratic U.S. senators: Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and Sen. Mark Kelly. And President Joe Biden won Arizona in 2020’s presidential election. But Arizona still isn’t a deep blue state like California or Massachusetts. Gov. Doug Ducey is a conservative Republican, and Sinema and Kelly are centrists. Sinema, a frequent source of frustration to Democratic progressives, has often praised McCain as her hero and is on very friendly terms with his daughter: GOP activist Meghan McCain, formerly of the popular ABC talk show “The View.”

Meanwhile, the chair of the Arizona Republican Party is Kelli Ward, a far-right MAGA extremist who hated John McCain and considered him a RINO: Republican In Name Only. Ward is so far to the right that if Goldwater were a young Republican in 2022, she would surely consider him a liberal or a RINO — which is ironic in light of the fact that during the 1960s and 1970s, Goldwater was considered an arch-conservative.

Ward is hardly the only MAGA Republican in Arizona who is pushing an extremist agenda. Anti-vaxxer Kari Lake, who appears to the frontrunner in Arizona’s 2022 GOP gubernatorial primary, is right out of the Marjorie Taylor Greene/Lauren Boebert school of MAGA lunacy. And as Schwenk’s article shows, some Republicans in the Arizona State Legislature are becoming increasingly unhinged.

Schwenk explains, “Felony charges for providing healthcare for transgender youth, a statewide ‘Donald J. Trump Day’ holiday, hundreds of millions in funding for the U.S.-Mexico border wall — these are just a few bills that the Arizona legislature will be considering in the coming months…. Whether such legislation will successfully wind its way through House and Senate committees is more of an unknown. Although Republicans hold a trifecta in Arizona — control of both chambers and the governor’s office — their majorities in both the House and the Senate are relatively slim.”

Nonetheless, the fact that MAGA Republicans are even proposing such bills in the first place is troubling. Darrell Hill, policy director for the Arizona American Civil Liberties Union, told the Phoenix New Times, “We’re seeing a lot of ‘culture war’ bills, a lot of bills that would impact the civil rights of Arizonans — and we’re worried.”

Democrat Rebecca Rios, former minority leader in the Arizona House of Representatives, told the New Times, “The current Arizona GOP have turned into extremists who care more about attacking democracy, attacking our teachers and schools, and working on bills like ‘Donald Trump Day.’”

One of the extremist bills sponsored by Arizona State Sen. Wendy Rogers, a MAGA Republican and member of the far-right militia group the Oath Keepers, is Arizona Senate Bill 1047. If it passed, Schwenk notes, “Schools could face thousands in civil penalties if they do not display American flags in every classroom and recite the pledge of allegiance.”

“It’s already law in Arizona that public schools must display a large American flag in each classroom and display, next to it, a copy of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights,” Schwenk observes. “Schools must also set aside time to recite the National Anthem each day. But SB 1047…. would cause schools to face thousands of dollars in fines for violations of any of those requirements. The Arizona Attorney General would be directed to collect up to $1000 in civil penalties from schools — for every violation identified.”

Under the Rogers-sponsored Arizona Senate Bill 1045, Schwenk notes, “Any health professional that provides gender-affirming care to trans youth could be charged with a felony.”

==

vice

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QAnon Is Becoming Even More Antisemitic

One of the movement’s biggest influencers just encouraged his followers to watch a 10-part neo-Nazi film.

By David Gilbert

October 18, 2021,

[A man wearing a 'Defund the Media' QAnon shirt is seen at a "Stop the Steal" rally against the results of the U.S. Presidential election outside the Georgia State Capitol on November 18, 2020 in Atlanta, Georgia. ]

[Disinfo Dispatch Padding

Unraveling viral disinformation and explaining where it came from, the harm it's causing, and what we should do about it.]

The organizer of a major QAnon conference in Las Vegas later this week, where at least four sitting GOP lawmakers speak on stage, shared a neo-Nazi film with his 70,000 followers on Sunday evening.

John Sabal, who’s known online as QAnon John, is preparing for Thursday’s “For God and Country: Patriot Double Down” conference, but on Sunday night he took time out of his busy schedule to share a post about people who had praised “Europa – the Last Battle.” It’s a 10-part film that claims Jews created Communism and deliberately started both world wars as part of a plot to found Israel by provoking the innocent Nazis, who were only defending themselves. 

“If you want to know the truth, well look no further. Here it is, escape the matrix and watch it today,” the post Sabal shared said.

Moments later, Sabal shared a direct link to allow his followers to watch the film on the alternative video-sharing site Rumble.

While this film has been shared by some of QAnon’s more fringe and extremist figures, the fact Sabal feels emboldened to share it so publicly is a testament to how antisemitic thinking has become normalized within the movement.

This was reflected in the comments under the posts from Sabal’s followers who offered no pushback against his support of such antisemitic content.

When one follower did attempt to criticize Sabal for posting the link, other members of the channel quickly attacked that user, claiming they were some sort of undercover agent of the “deep state.”

Others credulously claimed the user criticizing Sabal had misunderstood the film: “I'm sorry that's what you took away from our neo-Nazi film. It's really about how killing the Jews is necessary and good because they're not real Jews,” one of Sabal’s followers wrote.[CUFI red calf bs?]

After Sabal’s comments were highlighted by extremist researchers on Twitter, the posts mysteriously disappeared from his channel.

The video series is very well-known in extremist circles, yet apparently Sabal shared it completely innocently with his tens of thousands of followers.

“He had no idea that there was any anti-Semitism connected to that film,” Sabal’s partner Amy told VICE News in a message. “He has never even watched the movie. It was referred to him by a supposed ‘trusted’ source.”

Later this week, Sabal will host a raft of GOP lawmakers, including sitting Arizona Reps. Wendy Rogers and Sonny Borrelli. Also scheduled to speak are multiple Republican candidates running for secretary of state, including candidates in the swing states of Michigan KEVARO SP?, Arizona FINCHEM, and Nevada. CA HAMM AND MARCHANT

Despite calling himself “QAnon John,” and even though many of the movement’s biggest influencers will be sharing speaking time with members of the Republican Party, Sabal has in the past claimed this is not a QAnon conference. Among them will be Ron Watkins, who facilitated the rise of QAnon and who last week announced his plan to run for Congress.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/steve-bannons-use-of-private-jet-linked-to-chinese-businessman-could-violate-campaign-finance-law/

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Steve Bannon’s use of private jet linked to Chinese businessman could violate campaign finance law

Written by Justin Elliott / ProPublica February 26, 2020

Former Donald Trump campaign CEO and chief strategist Steve Bannon used a private jet apparently owned by a wealthy Chinese businessman to fly to events to promote Republican congressional candidates in 2018.

The previously unreported flights could run afoul of a campaign finance law that bars foreign money from U.S. elections, according to campaign finance experts, though it depends on several factors that are not known. One of the unknowns is whether Bannon paid Guo Wengui — the Chinese businessman, who is a vocal critic of the Chinese regime, and with whom he has other reported financial ties — for the use of the jet.

Bannon flew on the jet, a Bombardier Global Express that can seat up to 13 people, to 2018 events supporting Republican candidates in New Mexico and Arizona. He also flew on it to Mexico City and New York, and possibly to other cities. The flights were confirmed by footage taken for “The Brink,” a 2019 documentary about Bannon, and by videos of Guo on the plane, interviews and FAA flight records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

“The foreign-national prohibition is the broadest prohibition in the Federal Election Campaign Act,” said Brett Kappel, a government affairs partner at the Akerman law firm, speaking generally. “It prohibits foreign nationals from making any contribution or donation in connection with any election in the United States. It also precludes foreign nationals from making in-kind contributions, such as paying for campaign-related travel.”

The same law also prohibits receiving such a donation. Bannon’s one-way trip from New York to New Mexico alone would be worth around $35,000, according to public jet charter rates.

Lawyers for Bannon and Guo (who is also known as Miles Kwok) did not dispute that Bannon used the Chinese businessman’s plane for trips. But Cleta Mitchell, an attorney representing Bannon’s nonprofit, Citizens of the American Republic, wrote in an email, “The meetings and rallies hosted by COAR in 2018 were to promote thefilm, Trump\@War, and to encourage Trump supporters to vote in 2018. These were not candidate or campaign rallies.” Guo’s attorney said in a statement that “Mr. Guo has not participated in or supported, directly or indirectly, any political activity or party in the United States or elsewhere. To the contrary, Mr. Guo has consistently emphasized that he has no desire to participate in politics anywhere.”

Nothing about the trips appears to have been disclosed to the Federal Election Commission, either by Bannon or the congressional candidates he traveled to support.

Guo told Vice in 2017 that he owns two private jets. Han Lianchao, a Guo associate, told ProPublica, “I know he allowed Steve to use his private jet from time to time.” Han said he did not know the specifics of their arrangement. A Bannon aide also told Alison Klayman, the filmmaker who made “The Brink” and flew on the jet, that it belonged to Guo, Klayman told ProPublica.

In one scene in the film, Bannon is shown on the plane praising Guo’s analysis of Chinese politics while on a flight from New York to Dallas in October 2018.

Official records don’t identify the ultimate owner of the jet, which bears the tail number T7-GQM. The jet is registered in the tiny Republic of San Marino to Whitecroft Shore Limited. That, in turn, is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, an offshore dominion known for secrecy. There are multiple videos online of Guo that appear to be taken on the plane that match independent photos of the interior and exterior of the jet with the same tail number. Other articles link the jet to Guo.

Bannon left the Trump White House in the summer of 2017 and has spent the past couple of years jetting around the country and the globe to promote right-wing causes, candidates and his own brand. It is a continuing mystery who is supporting his efforts. His use of the Guo plane helps fill out the picture.

The unlikely relationship between Bannon and Guo is one of the defining features of Bannon’s post-White House career. It continues through the present, with Bannon and Guo frequently appearing together on Bannon’s podcast and Guo’s news site commenting on Trump, China and the coronavirus, among other topics.

Guo, who has described himself as a successful real estate developer and investor, left China for the U.S. in 2015 and is reportedly seeking asylum. He is a critic of Chinese leaders, churning out a stream of online videos commenting on the news of the day, from the coronavirus to his “crusade against communism.” The Chinese government has, in turn, sought Guo’s arrest on corruption allegations, which he has denied. Guo frequently appears in videos with Bannon, who has predicted a war between the U.S. and China and says he is currently producing a “takedown” film about Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The New York Times recently reported that Bannon’s relationship with Guo began with a $150,000 loan to Bannon shortly after his 2017 departure from the Trump administration. Axios reported that a company linked to Guo had contracted with Bannon for at least $1 million for “strategic consulting services,” beginning in August 2018. (A Guo spokesman told Axios that the contract was for media investment and other consulting, and that Guo “had no involvement in [Bannon] being retained.”)

In fall 2018, Bannon and his dark money organization, Citizens of the American Republic, were pushing to keep Republican control of Congress during the midterm elections. A Bannon aide told ABC at the time that the group had an election war room focused on “explaining that a vote for any House Republican is a vote to stop the Democrats.”

Bannon made the trips to promote GOP candidates on the Bombardier jet in October 2018, under the aegis of Citizens of the American Republic. (The organization raised a total of $4.5 million in 2018 from a handful of donors, according to its filing with the IRS. But as a “social welfare” nonprofit organized under section 501(c)4 of the Internal Revenue Code, it is not required to reveal its donors.)

One of the trips was to Arizona in support of congressional candidate Wendy Rogers. Bannon told the Arizona Daily Star at the time: “If she can beat [Rep. Tom] O’Halleran, we’ll hold the House. We’ll hold the House by one or two seats. And that’s why it’s so important, and that’s why I wanted to come down here.”

Rogers, who ultimately lost the race, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The trip to Roswell, New Mexico, featured U.S. Senate candidate Mick Richand a screening of Bannon’s film “Trump\@War.” According to video from the Roswell event viewed by ProPublica, Bannon and Rich strategized about the campaign before Bannon’s public remarks. “Tell me about this race,” Bannon said in the video. “How are we going to win this thing? I’ll come back here as many times as — ” Rich interjected: “Getting you out here is number one.” Rich also asked if Bannon could get President Trump to tweet about the race, and Bannon said he would try.

During the public event, Rich introduced Bannon, who in turn praised the Senate candidate as a “real populist.” Bannon urged the audience members to vote for pro-Trump candidates.

Rich lost the 2018 race and is running again this year. A spokesman told ProPublica in a statement that “Mick and his campaign had no knowledge of Bannon’s transportation to or from the event. Mick and his campaign had no coordination of any kind with Steve Bannon or any Steve Bannon group before, during, or after this event.”

Craig Holman, a campaign finance expert at Public Citizen, said that the New Mexico event “could well implicate Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui for violating the law that prohibits foreign nationals from paying for campaign activities,” if the Federal Election Commission deemed the event to be an “independent expenditure” by Bannon’s group, or a Rich campaign event.

The FEC doesn’t currently have a quorum and it, along with the IRS, have historically done little to scrutinize political nonprofits like Bannon’s.

Apart from the use of the jet, there’s also the question of whether the event would run afoul of the rules barring an outside group like Bannon’s from coordinating with the candidate, Rich.

Adav Noti of the Campaign Legal Center said political nonprofits are operating in a grey area because of the FEC’s failure to outline rules for what sort of contact they are permitted to have with a candidate. “To any rational person that looks at this, of course it’s a campaign event. But it might be allowed, which is the scandal.”

In a March 2018 filing in an unrelated lawsuit, an attorney for Guo noted the prohibition on Guo making expenditures in connection with U.S. elections. He wrote that “Because Plaintiff Guo is a foreign national, he is prohibited, by 52 U.S.C. 30121, from making any contributions, monetary donations or expenditures in connection with any federal, state or local election in the United States.”

all trumpista won az? well not townsend

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Townsend concedes victory to Senator Wendy Rogers

Townsend announced on Wednesday that Rogers beat her in the Republican primary, but it came at a steep price.

Author: 12News

Published:  August 3, 2022

PHOENIX — After a tight race, State Senator Kelly Townsend has conceded to her opponent, Senator Wendy Rogers. But Townsend said it came with a steep price tag.

"It took $1,732,200.27 to beat me," Townsend said in a post on Twitter.

The two had been running in the Republican primary for District 7 State Senator. According to the Secretary of State website, Rogers had pulled ahead with an 18 percent lead over Townsend.

Out of 28,678 votes, 16,929 have gone to Rogers, and 11,749 to Townsend.

The Associated Press called the race in Rogers' favor Wednesday morning.

The two candidates are both major supporters of former President Donald Trump and have embraced his unfounded claims that he lost in Arizona due to voter fraud. But Rogers has the president's endorsement for reelection and Townsend had been seeking the same.

Wendy Rogers recently faced an inquiry for comments made about the Buffalo shooter that appeared to blame the federal government for the massacre.

Likewise, Rogers had previously been censured for "unbecoming conduct" by the Arizona State Senate.

Townsend has had her own share of controversies, previously making comments signaling her stance against COVID-19 mitigation efforts and vaccinations of any kind, previously comparing mandatory vaccines to "communism" during a 2017 Sunday Square Off segment.

The two squared off after redistricting following the 2020 census put them in the same district. But now, it seems the district could go to Rogers.

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Militia groups expected to be focus at Jan. 6 hearing: What to know about Arizona's connection

Richard Ruelas

Arizona Republic

As a group of Oath Keepers joined the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, one that eventually would use a standard military formation to break through the crowd and breach the building, a 63-year-old man from Phoenix was in a Virginia hotel packed with weapons awaiting his orders.

“Vallejo back at hotel and outfitted," the man, Edward Vallejo, messaged to other Oath Keepers at 2:24 p.m. that day, according to court records.

"Have 2 trucks available. Let me know how I can assist."

Prosecutors contended that Vallejo and the other Oath Keepers were amassing an arsenal and supplies that could last 30 days. If President Donald Trump would declare martial law, the prosecutors’ theory went, they would be ready.

The scheduled 10 a.m. Tuesday hearing of the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol was expected to look at the role of militia-style groups such as the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys and Three Percenters in the riot.

[When is the next Jan. 6 hearing? What to know and how to watch

In an interview on CNN, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., the chairman of the committee, suggested evidence exists of people in Trump’s inner circle speaking with members of the militia groups.

“We have a number of witnesses who have come forward that people have not talked to before, that will document a lot of what was going on in the Trump orbit while all of this was occurring,” Thompson said.

Ariz. man charged with seditious conspiracy

Ed Vallejo

Vallejo was charged with seditious conspiracy in January, in an indictment that included 10 other Oath Keepers members, including the group’s leader, Stewart Rhodes.

Vallejo split with the group in 2014 but somehow decided to join Oath Keepers in D.C., traveling in a vehicle loaded with food and kitchen equipment.

Vallejo said he thought he would be cooking for forces who might camp out and picket up until the inauguration day a few weeks later.

Prosecutors contend that Vallejo was part of a so-called “quick reactionary force” and was poised to deliver weapons to Oath Keepers if need be.

Rhodes sent a group message on the morning of Jan. 6 that described several “QRFs outside DC.” Who would be “watching and waiting on the outside in case of worst case scenarios.”

Vallejo used the term QRF himself in a text message sent on Jan. 6. “QRF standing by at hotel,” he wrote. “Just say the word.”

More: How an Arizona man was charged with seditious conspiracy

A documentary filmmaker captured footage of the leaders of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys meeting in a parking garage on Jan. 5, 2021, the night before the riot. The head of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, was ordered out of the city after an arrest. Video of the apparent first meeting between the two men was played during the initial prime time Jan. 6 committee hearing.

A group of Proud Boys from Arizona, clad in orange caps and armbands, were among the first wave of rioters to breach the barricades outside the U.S. Capitol. A Capitol police officer testified during the first public hearing on June 9 that the situation grew more dire when the Arizona contingent of Proud Boys joined the crowd at the barricades, with verbal attacks starting to be aimed at officers.

One man, Micajah Joel Jackson, was sentenced to 36 months probation after he was seen marching with the orange-clad Proud Boys. Jackson said he was not a memberbut simply marched with fellow Arizonans who were kind enough to gift him an orange armband.

The other orange-clad Proud Boys from Arizona have not yet been identified, nor arrested.

Democracy in doubt: The origins of the Arizona election review

Arizona lawmakers who support Oath Keepers

At least three Arizona lawmakers have shown support for Oath Keepers, including at least one who has also drawn attention from the Jan. 6 committee.

Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem has called himself an Oath Keeper on social media, has spoken to Oath Keeper chapters and called himself a member when he first ran for the House in 2014.

“I’m an Oath Keeper committed to the exercise of limited, constitutional governance,” he wrote in response to a candidate questionnaire sent out by the community news website inmaricopa.com.

Finchem planned an unofficial legislative meeting at a downtown Phoenix hotel that featured Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and presented hours of purported evidence of election fraud.

[Cyber Ninjas CEO faces criminal probe in Michigan voting plot

Maricopa County seeks sanctions against Lake, Finchem

Donald Trump's scandals are unique in history. Here's how.

Alex Jones' texts could shed light on 'Stop the Steal' protests]

Finchem was in D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021, for a rally he planned alongside Ali Alexander, an activist who spearheaded the Stop the Steal movement.

State Sen. Wendy Rogers also has claimed membership to the Oath Keepers.

State Sen. Kelly Townsend posted on Twitter that she was an Oath Keeper but later seemed to hedge that it didn’t mean she belonged to a group, but that she just kept her oath of office.

Rogers and Townsend are running against each other for a state Senate seat.

The Proud Boys do not have any advertised meetings where politicians are invited. But members were often seen at the Arizona State Capitol during various protests. They also have attended rallies and speeches where speakers claimed election fraud.

duck 8 22

Arizona election denier Wendy Rogers thinks Alex Jones is the victim

Raw Story on MSN.com|4 days ago

Arizona GOP state Sen. Wendy Rogers is known for peddling conspiracy theories, has ties to the right-wing militia group the Oath Keepers, and even pals around with white nationalists. Now, she's lamenting the fact that Alex Jones was held accountable to spreading vile conspiracy theories about children killed in the Sandy Hook mass shooting.

Mark Finchem and Wendy Rogers are 'honored' to be endorsed by Gab founder, a prominent antisemite

Arizona Mirror|14 days ago

Two Arizona Republicans are trumpeting an endorsement from Andrew Torba, the CEO of far-right social media platform Gab, who said earlier this month that Jewish people aren't welcome on Gab — and should be exiled from the conservative movement altogether.

Townsend concedes victory to Senator Wendy Rogers

KPNX|9 days ago

Townsend announced on Wednesday that Rogers beat her in the Republican primary, but it came at a steep price. PHOENIX — After a tight race, State Senator Kelly Townsend has conceded to her opponent, Senator Wendy Rogers.

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Aug 29, 2021Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers laid some smack on Bret Baier who fraudulently declared the election results in Arizona before the polls were even closed. There was fraud and it will be proven, but the media was in on the steal and they still are today.

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Jul 21, 2021State Sen. Wendy Rogers has been leading the effort for a recall of fraudulent electors. Rogers herself is demanding that the current results be decertified in Arizona and has asked that other leaders take a page from their playbook and start forensic audits of their own in their states....

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Legal Opinion Re: Authority Over Elections and Electors The following is a legal opinion submitted to Sen. Wendy Rogers by attorney Matt DePerno, in response to her question "Can a State Legislature recall the state electors to decertify a national election upon proof of fraud in the election?" DePerno concludes that " The Answer is 'Yes.' […]

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:{Arizona election denier Wendy Rogers thinks Alex Jones is the victim ...:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

4 days agoArizona GOP state Sen. Wendy Rogers is known for peddling conspiracy theories, has ties to the right-wing militia group the Oath Keepers, and even pals around with white nationalists. Now, she's ...

:{https://www.tucsonsentinel.com:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}::{ › nationworld › report › 063022_fake_electors › trumps-fake-electors-heres-full-updated-list:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}:

:{Trump's fake electors: Here's the full updated list:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

Jun 30, 2022In January, the Congressional Select Committee on January 6th announced it had subpoenaed 14 of the counterfeit electors who it believes have information about how they met and who was behind the...

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:{Fake Trump electors from Arizona subpoenaed by Congress:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

Jan 28, 2022A fake, pro-Trump slate of 2020 electors sent their votes to Congress In a previous January interview, Pellegrino told the Republic that she didn't like being called an alternate elector. She said...

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Jul 14, 2022Like Rogers, Townsend believes in the unproven claims of fraud in the 2020 election. But unlike her opponent, Townsend is willing to call out extreme and violent speech.

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:{Did Sen. Wendy Rogers just get an illegal election boost?:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

Apr 11, 2022The Arizona Democratic Party on Monday asked Attorney General Mark Brnovich to investigate how commissioners decided to move Rogers and two other Republican state legislators - Sens. Sine Kerr of...

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