Kari Lake Bak

kari1123 bak no lnx

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WOD3 TheBrain (https://app.thebrain.com/brain/52f2088d-af63-4929-9849-0e654aec699b/d17ba6c9-fc80-4c60-a260-d44249a87d9b)

see violent rhet hype fear they are coming for you

barely won primary, complained about slow results

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President Donald Trump had big plans for outspoken MAGA ally Kari Lake, but with those plans having thoroughly imploded, a new MS NOW analysis explained how she has been given a familiar "consolation prize."

Lake first emerged as a news anchor in Phoenix, Arizona, before making the jump to politics as an avowed supporter of Trump and the MAGA movement. Despite high hopes for her as a future star for the Republican Party, the transition largely flopped, as she lost the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial race to Democrat Katie Hobbs and the 2024 Senate race to Democrat Ruben Gallego.

With no actual electoral success to her name, Trump attempted to install her as the next director for Voice of America, the international broadcaster funded by the U.S. government, amid plans to gut the institution and reshape it into a more right-wing form with the help of One America News. This effort, too, fell flat after a judge ruled that she was ineligible to serve at the head of VOA, invalidating her tenure and reversing the mass layoffs she had overseen.

In the wake of all that failure, Trump on Monday nominated Lake to serve as the new ambassador to Jamaica, echoing an emerging pattern of the president placing close alliesin key diplomatic roles.

"President Trump on Monday appointed Kari Lake, a fierce ally of the president who had led the administration’s efforts to shutter Voice of America and other federally funded news groups, as the next ambassador to Jamaica," the New York Times reported this week. "Her appointment, if confirmed by the Senate, would end her tumultuous time at the parent agency for federally funded news groups that broadcast to countries with limited press freedom, such as China, Russia and Iran."

Writing about the development on Tuesday, Steve Benen, a longtime contributor and producer for MS NOW, wrote that the appointment of Lake fit a growing pattern from the administration and its handling of MAGA allies with failed political ambitions.

"Lake’s nomination coincided with the president also tapping Pennsylvania’s Doug Mastriano — another prominent Republican election denier who launched a gubernatorial campaign that failed — to serve as U.S. ambassador to Slovakia," Benen wrote. "The far-right state senator will also need to be confirmed by the Republican-led Senate. Time will tell when and whether Lake and Mastriano receive the support they’ll need on Capitol Hill, but their nominations are emblematic of a larger pattern: The White House sure does like to hand out ambassadorships to those whose earlier political plans didn’t quite work out."

Benen further detailed the various names who received a similar parachute from Trump: Mike Waltz was named U.N. ambassador after being ousted as White House national security adviser; former GOP Rep. Billy Long went from an "incredibly short tenure" leading the IRS to serving as ambassador to Iceland; and, John Giordano went from a failed interim U.S. attorney for New Jersey to serving as the ambassador to Namibia.

"Even Kristi Noem, after her many failures as the head of the Department of Homeland Security, made the transition to a diplomatic role as 'special envoy' to the Shield of the Americas, a poorly defined security initiative for the Western Hemisphere," Benen concluded. "As an Associated Press report summarized last year, 'Diplomacy may be soft power, but in President Donald Trump’s administration, it’s also lately a soft landing.'

aha hmmn do they look for cidgel before cop eg UK server -gate?

mma

Ahead of COP30, right-wing media misrepresented Bill Gates' memo to declare climate change is over

Climate scientists question why Gates is pitting poverty reduction against climate action

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Allison Fisher

Research contributions from Ilana Berger

Published 11/14/25

Ahead of COP30 — the United Nations climate summit which began November 6 in Brazil — Bill Gates released a memo targeted at the international climate community which argued that “although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise” and called for a “strategic pivot” on climate change to prioritize “human welfare.”

Bill Weir, CNN’s chief climate correspondent, correctly predicted how right-wing media would respond: “This will be used by detractors and denialists to say that the story is shifting.”

On *CNN News Central’*s day one coverage of COP30, Erica Hill laid out some of the impact of Gates’ memo at a time when the United States is already turning its back on the “world’s largest climate summit”:

> President Trump, of course, has called climate change a, quote, con job. That's despite the overwhelming evidence of its reality and the very real threat it poses. President Trump seemed to get an assist recently from Bill Gates, who argued that resources actually should be shifted away from the battle against climate change. It's a move that experts have said is just flat out wrong.

In fact, in response to Gates' memo, Trump posted on Truth Social that “I (WE!) just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax” because Bill Gates had “finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue.” Gates said that Trump and other right-wing media reactions that echo his remarks are a “gigantic misreading of the memo,” while he has also pushed back at “climate scientists who said he was setting up a false dichotomy pitting climate efforts against foreign aid.”

## Right-wing media celebrate Bill Gates’ shift on climate, misrepresent his memo to downplay the climate crisis

The Associated Press reported that Bill Gates remarked: “If you think climate is not important, you won't agree with the memo. If you think climate is the only cause and apocalyptic, you won't agree with the memo.”

But there it seems Gates was wrong. Right-wing media figures, who regularly downplay the climate crisis are likely among those who “think climate is not important,” and they are not disagreeing with the memo. They have celebrated it and used it to further downplay the climate crisis, attack climate science as “fraudulent,” and advance right-wing narratives and misinformation related to global warming, including denying sea level rise, suggesting that current climate change is unremarkable because the climate has been changing for billions of years, and pushing the “global cooling” myth.

- The New York Post editorial board concluded, “If Gates wants any credit for belatedly seeing the light, he needs to put maximum effort into getting the left’s climate warriors to wake up, too.” NY Post, [10/28/25]

- Former Fox News host John Stossel used Bill Gates’ memo to push his climate change denial content on social media, writing, “Welcome to the club, Bill. Here 3 climate scientists debunk several of the doomsday myths.”Stossel shared one of his videos featuring three climate skeptics, Willie Soon, David Legates, and Patrick Michaels, from an event at The Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank that has received funding from fossil fuel interests. Twitter/X, [10/28/25; Media Matters, 1/16/24, 8/14/25; NPR, 9/12/20; Desmog; accessed 11/10/25]

- Hannity.com: “CLIMATE KOOK FLIPS! Bill Gates Suggests Rethinking Climate Change 'Doomsday Outlook'”Hannity.com, [10/28/25]

- Fox host Jimmy Failla claimed that Gates’ memo proves climate change is a “grift” and pushed the misleading narrative that the climate is always changing. Failla continued:“What an about face. And it really gives up the whole entire grift we always knew it was. It drives me crazy because, you know this, the movement has not only changed again but changed in name three times before we got here. We were going to freeze to death in the ‘70s. Can you give me some money? We were going to melt in the ‘80s. Can you give me a few bucks? Then they were like, we're not freezing or melting, but the weather changes every day. How about a couple of bucks.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [10/29/25; climatefactcheck.org,

6/22/22]

- Glenn Beck, founder of TheBlaze, wrote on his website that Gates did a “strategic pivot” because “the ruling class” finds AI “more useful than fear of the weather.”“Climate alarmism gave elites a pretext to centralize power over energy. Artificial intelligence gives them a mechanism to centralize power over people,” he later wrote. [Glennbeck.com,

10/29/25]

- In an interview with Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt, conspiracy theorist and U.S. Agency for Global Media senior adviser Kari Lake said, “When we get documents declassified on the climate hoax, he’s probably trying to get ahead of what happens then.”Newsmax, *Rob Schmitt Tonight,* [10/29/25; Media Matters, 12/12/24]

- OnAmerica’s Newsroom, co-host Bill Hemmer used the memo to falsely claim that “rising sea levels just ain’t happening.” “He says it will not lead to the humanities demise. … Maybe an asteroid will, but the rising sea levels just ain’t happening as Al Gore warned us back in 2005.” The World Economic Forum has said that “rising sea levels caused by climate change are impacting 1 billion people worldwide,” while “2024 saw an unexpectedly fast rising of sea levels, which are already unprecedented.” Fox News, *America’s Newsroom*, [10/29/25; World Economic Forum, 3/25/25]

- OnOutnumbered, Fox News contributor Kaylee McGhee White said “climate change doomerism” was a ploy to “drive young adults … to leftist activism.” “This is the least surprising development ever. I think that the climate change doomerism, it was always a ploy, the real purpose of which was to drive young adults my age into leftist activism, that is all it was a vehicle for. And you know, what’s frustrating about this is Bill Gates is suddenly switching his position, but there is no new science behind." Fox News, *Outnumbered*, [10/29/25]

- Fox’s Will Cain hosted Alex Epstein, author of the petroleum-promoting bookFossil Future, and suggested that fossil fuel advocacy is the “potential explanations for the change of heart of Bill Gates.” He claimed, “It is really most of the thoughtful scientists and thinkers through the last several hundred years who have understood the power of fossil fuels and economic growth in helping the vast majority of people across the world. Maybe that finally broke through to Bill Gates. Maybe just seeing the writing on the wall in modern America and under President Donald Trump.” Fox News, *The Will Cain Show*, [10/29/25; Media Matters, 11/4/25]

- OnThe Five, Greg Gutfeld claimed that “people were told to stop having kids” and that Gates' shift is akin to admitting the “climate models … are fraudulent.”Gutfeld said, “It was a lie that impacted the mental health of generations and the physical health of a civilization. People were told to stop having kids. If you had kids you were hurting the planet. But it is hopeful that Gates and others are ceding to reality. We saw it happen already. Nobody is talking about data anymore because the data, the climate models, they are finally admitting are fraudulent, they were retrofitted so that they matched the results they were getting, and now that is out in the open.” Fox News, *The Five*, [10/29/25]

- Fox host Joey Jones claimed that Gates’ memo meant that Trump “won the climate change war.”“I think Trump has won another war. He won the climate change war now. Americans are coming around. You want to talk about petroleum products, think about how much oil is used to make all of those syringes for all of those vaccines during Covid. I mean just the impact and imprint of petroleum on our lives is endless,” Jones claimed. Fox News, *The Five*, [10/29/25]

- Contributor Katie Pavlich told Fox Business’Kudlowthat she wants “reparations for damage this guy [Bill Gates] did on the climate change front.”She claimed, “There were years of groups that were funded by Bill Gates, foreigners doing fact checks on conservative web sites like TownHall, demonetizing us for talking about climate change and that it’s not going to destroy humanity and in fact a lot of the science has been bought and paid for and has been debunked on this issue. I would get laughed at when I would point out I am from Arizona, and you can find sea shells, fossils at the top of the Grand Canyon because yes, climate change has been happening for billions of years.” Fox Business, *Kudlow*, [10/29/25]

- Frequent Fox guest and climate denier Marc Morano on Fox Business’The Evening Editsuggested that Bill Gates “knew” all along that climate change was nonsense.“Bill Gates knew in the year 2000 that the climate agenda was complete bleep. He knew in 2010 it was nonsense, he knew in 2020 it was nonsense, but only in 2025 is he willing to tell the truth. And the reason is he needs connections. He needs energy.” [Fox Business, The Evening Edit,

10/30/25; Washington Post, 9/16/16; Media Matters, 12/17/12; 5/22/19]

Newsmax host Rob Finnerty falsely claimed that Gates is “saying that it’s [climate change] not real.Finnerty said, “Now think about what Democrats have done to all of us in reaction to the climate hysteria created by people like Bill Gates over the last five decades: wind farms, electric cars, carbon footprint, bike lanes, electric buses, eating less meat, renewable energy. We could go on all night and all of it was total garbage. … Bill Gates, who's been right there with always-wrong Al Gore warning us of impending doom for years now, saying that it's not real.” Newsmax, *Finnerty*, [10/31/25]

Right-wing streamer Zack Hoyt, known online as Asmongold, told his audience that Bill Gates no longer believes in climate change and quotes Trump’s Truth Social Post.“You know who else doesn't believe in climate change recently? Bill Gates. Bill Gates has dramatically changed his position on climate change, acknowledging for the first time that there is no doomsday risk for, of global warming. … We just won the war on the climate change hoax. Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely wrong on the issue.” [YouTube, AsmongoldTV,

]}:

- Fox & Friends Weekendguest and Republican strategist Mehek Cooke claimed Gates shifted on climate change because he realized “we're not going to pay for this green climate change hoax.” She said, “We're not all going to die at the end of the day. So farmers can increase their herd share, I can eat more meat. I mean, all the things that Bill Gates said to the American people, he realized he was losing because we're not going to pay for this green climate change hoax. I also think he's listening to President Trump. It's about innovation and not more regulation.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends Weekend*, [11/2/25]

- Power The Future Founder and frequent right-wing media guest Daniel Turner wrote that Bill Gates’ “climate crusade was always a grift.” Twitter/X, [11/3/25; Media Matters, 5/8/24;

3/25/24]

## Climate scientists push back on Gates pitting poverty reduction against efforts to reduce carbon emissions

During a segment on CNN News Central, Bill Weir highlighted concerns from “the chorus of top climate scientists who spent the week trying to debunk the billionaire's confusing new message that rich cities will be immune from the worst effects and that technology can save us.”

Additionally, The Guardian pointed out that a number of climate scientists have criticized Gates for using “‘straw man’ arguments about the threat to humanity and ‘false dichotomies’ between spending on climate or aid for the poor.”

- In comments to NBC, Jeffrey Sachs, who leads Columbia University’s Center for Sustainable Development, “called the memo ‘pointless, vague, unhelpful and confusing,'" adding that there’s “no reason to pit poverty reduction versus climate transformation.’" NBC, [10/28/25]

- Climate scientist Michael Mann has been outspoken about Gates’ memo, pointing out that it coincided with the landfall of the climate-driven Hurricane Melissa and that it was defended by former Fox News star Megyn Kelly. Mann also wrote a rebuttal of the memo in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, making the point that “Gates’ latest missive … plays like a game of climate change-diminishing bingo, drawing upon nearly every one of the tropes embraced by professional climate disinformers.” Twitter/X, [10/28/25, 10/29/25; The Bulletin, 10/31/25; The New York Times, 11/6/25]

- Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Los Angeles, said of the memo: “Despite agreeing with some points therein, I still think its framing is fundamentally flawed and thus also its key conclusions.” Twitter/X, [11/3/25]

- Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather wrote: “There are a lot of things I agree with in Bill Gates’ new memo on climate change. … But in other areas I feel that it needlessly sets up a conflict between laudable goals.” Hausfather said that “we can both mitigate emissions and alleviate poverty, disease, and hunger. While there are some tradeoffs it is more a question of policy priority than a zero sum game. Similarly, I feel that Gates is a bit too cavalier in his treatment of climate risk.” The Climate Brink, [11/5/25]

- Katherine Hayhoe, chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, also criticized Gates’ memo. She said, “‘I have not seen a single scientific paper that ever posited that the human race would become extinct … it’s a straw man, the way he’s proposing it.” The Guardian, [11/6/25]

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an 8 25

Former gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake is trying to shut down government-funded media outlets she was tapped to lead, but NPR reports challengers want her to define her job title before she does it.

"The government does not operate on the whims of a ‘Kari Lake’ or even of a ‘Donald Trump’," said Democracy Defenders Fund attorney Norman Eisen, who is representing press advocacy groups in lawsuits against Lake over her effort to shutter Voice of America. "If you have a role in government, it has to be defined and documented," Eisen told NPR. "Who knows if that's a self-anointed title? One way or the other, this raises the most profound legal questions."

NPR reports the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) has recently called Lake its acting CEO, but Lake may not be legally eligible for the job. That question could hold weight considering a federal judge voided directives affecting asylum rules in 2020 after finding Trump's appointment of the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was unlawful.

NPR said it has “repeatedly asked the White House press office, Lake and another senior agency official” for documentation of Lake’s current role in the Trump administration, but has received no replies.

IFrame Content

"It's important to find out — is she really the CEO? How did she arrive there?" asked Grant Turner, who served as chief executive of USAGM during Trump's first term. "If she doesn't have that authority — and she's claiming to have the authority — then it's really just invalid. There's so many things that may come back to haunt Kari Lake and USAGM."

"Maybe she just wants to have a cool title to wave around," Turner says, "but if she really doesn't have true legal authority to have that title, then they're really just begging for problems."

Lake was a two-time unsuccessful MAGA candidate for senator and governor in Arizona before Trump announced his plan to appoint her director of Voice of America. The problem with that, said NPR, is federal law does not allow a president to unilaterally appoint a director over the agency. So Trump essentially dissolved the government advisory board set up by Congress to oversee Voice of America’s international networks and named Lake a “senior adviser” to run it.

The Atlantic reports Lake is now working to deport non-citizen Voice of America employees who hold J-1 visas.

Read the full NPR report at this link.

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an 11 24

Democrats may have lost the White House and their U.S. Senate majority, but one silver lining is that in nearly every battleground state, Republicans lost close Senate races.

According to USA TODAY, almost all of the Senate races in the states that decided the Electoral College majority — like Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — broke for Democrats. The lone exception is Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pennsylvania), with the Associated Press (AP) calling the race for Republican Dave McCormick. This may change, however, as NBC News has yet to call the race and Casey has yet to officially concede. With 126,000 more votes that have yet to be counted, Casey is only behind McCormick by 41,000 ballots.

While the AP has yet to call the Arizona Senate race, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona) currently leads Republican Kari Lake by roughly 30,000 votes. There are roughly 622,000 more outstanding ballots remaining. The bulk of those votes are in reliably Democratic Maricopa County, which houses Phoenix.

Some of the marquee Senate races that ended up in Democrats' favor include Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Michigan) defeating former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Michigan) in the Mitten State, Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin) winning a third six-year term over Republican businessman Eric Hovde in the Badger State and Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nevada) prevailing over Republican Sam Brown.

While red-state Democrats like Sens. Sherrod Brown (R-Ohio) and Jon Tester (D-Montana) lost their reelection battles, they still outperformed Vice President Kamala Harris by eight percentage points and 13 percentage points, respectively. And control of the House of Representatives still has yet to be determined, with neither party currently clinching the 218 seats needed for a majority in the lower chamber of Congress.

Democrats' strong performance in down-ballot races is particularly surprising given that President-elect Donald Trump swept Vice President Kamala Harris in almost all of those states (Arizona ballots are still being counted, but Trump is ahead). USA TODAY reported that even though Senate races are for federal office, voters often split tickets as they feel more personally connected to Senate candidates given their strong relationship with their home states.

"[V]oters in some places are making real distinctions to say this is not somebody who is aligned with Trump or represents him in the same way, or this is someone who has the state’s interest in mind in a way that other candidates don’t,” University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Barry Burden told the paper. “And that really is a different story from one state to the next.”

Democratic Senate candidates' success could also be chalked up to candidates staking out their own positions independent from President Joe Biden, whose popularity rating has been underwater for several years. While Gallego touted his positions on border security, Slotkin emphasized her pro-manufacturing industry positions, Rosen talked up her work with Republicans to improve Nevada's infrastructure and Baldwin embraced Wisconsin's farmers.

"[Swing state voters are] much more responsive to who the individuals are and to their performance in office and much less susceptible to the Washington style of defining politics," Burden said. He described voters who split their tickets between both parties as "more casual voters," though he observed that "they end up being the ones who make a big difference."

Click here to read USA TODAY's article in its entirety.

READ MORE:[Kari Lake gave election-denying speech in front of Confederate flag

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an 1 24

earlier this week, Arizona GOP Chairman Jeff DeWit abruptly resigned after failed gubernatorial candidate and 2024 US Senate hopeful Kari Lake threatened to "leak additional recordings of their private conversations."

In a statement released via X/Twitter on Wednesday, January 24, Dewit commented on the single recording Lake had already released, in which the Republican chair can be heard telling Lake "that he spoke with associates 'back East' who asked about 'any companies out there or something that could just put [Lake] on the payroll to keep her out [of the 2024 US Senate race],' and that there were 'very powerful people' who wanted her to stay on the sidelines."

On Saturday, according to the Daily Beast, "Lake nominated Gina Swoboda, another right-winger who was endorsed by Donald Trump, on Saturday at a GOP meeting in north Phoenix, where she was reportedly met with boos and jeers as she took the stage."

Swoboda won the title by a "landslide," The Daily Beast reports, even as someone who "spread false claims about the integrity of the election system" as the "Trump campaign’s state Election Day director in 2020."

In his statement, Dewit emphasized, "Lake has a massive megaphone that I cannot compete with. I question how effective a United States Senator can be when they cannot be trusted to engage in private and confidential conversations."

*The Daily Beast's full report is available at this link (subscription required).

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nation mag

no lnx pix

POLITICS / AUGUST 29, 2023

The War Within the Young Republican Party

At the Young Republican National Convention, far-right figures made few inroads—but they did read my Nation investigation.

AMANDA MOORE

Gavin Wax, president of the New York Young Republican Club, speaks to members of the media during a rally outside the New York County Criminal Court in New York City on Monday, March 20, 2023.

On August 19, The Nation released my article to subscribers detailing some of what I saw during my 11 months undercover in far-right circles. By chance, the article’s publication coincided with the Young Republican National Convention in Dallas, Tex., an event I had long planned to cover. I knew that Gavin Wax, one of the figures mentioned in the piece, would also be there in his role as the president of the New York Young Republican Club.

During the convention, my investigation was only available to subscribers—it wasn’t pushed in front of the hard paywall until Tuesday, August 22, so I figured no one would read it at the Omni Dallas Hotel. After all, how many subscribers to The Nation could possibly be at a Young Republican event?

Read the Article that Enraged the Right

Undercover With the New Alt-Right

AMANDA MOORE

On Saturday morning, Wax greeted me with an over-the-top hello and a joke about the far right taking over. I had written about Wax twice before, and one of those times he worked to mass report both my Twitter account and my editor’s in retaliation for my coverage of him. I assumed his sarcastic acknowledgment was related to my prior work. By that night, things changed.

Saturday evening was the National Awards Gala. After the event, I ran into Wax in the hallway. The NYYRC and New York State Young Republican Club had won an award for outstanding recruitment, which Wax was holding. Wax and Chelsea Hall, the NYYRC’s communications director, announced that Wax had won an award, and told me I should write about that next time. Not realizing they had read the undercover piece, I was confused. I congratulated Wax on doing such a good job. “He did do a good job,” Hall yelled, and I promised to mention the award next time I wrote about him. (Promise kept.)

I made my way over to a group of Young Republicans who were aware that I was a journalist. NYYRC Vice President Nathan Berger walked up to us, and aggressively asked who I was and why I was there. At that moment, I couldn’t place his face, though I was pretty sure he was a member of NYYRC.

“Do you know Gavin Wax? I’m a journalist, and I write about him,” I said, then told Berger he looked familiar. He assured me that I didn’t. Someone asked what club he was from, and when he said New York, one gestured to me and said that he must know who I was.

Berger snapped that he did not know me, then immediately announced that I had just written a piece for The Nation, and everyone should read it.

“Sounds like you know who she is!” someone replied to Berger.

Uncomfortable with Berger’s temper and bizarre confrontation style, we made our way downstairs, where we ran into Wax and Hall. Wax began yelling at the person next to me, screaming that I was antifa and demanding to know why he was talking to me. This was a Young Republican event, he said, and I was not a Republican. “Did you know that she’s antifa?” he asked.

The YR being yelled at told Wax that he didn’t know who he was, but his angry, loud demeanor did not make him seem particularly credible. Wax announced that I was secretly recording everything everyone said to me, and it dawned on me that I probably should record this interaction. When I pulled out my phone, Hall pointed out what I was doing.

“Yeah, I know that she’s recording,” Wax replied. “And I love that you admitted that you committed multiple felonies in Florida.”

When I countered that the places were public—or at least not venues where you’d have an expectation of privacy—Wax smirked. “OK, you can argue that in court. I cannot wait for the arrest warrants.” He turned back to the YR who was talking to me. “But anyway! Good luck, she’s recording everything you’re doing, and have the best time here.”

While Wax was happy to cause a scene, most of the YRs just avoided me, though a few were willing to talk. Wax is brash and aggressive on Twitter, and he will leverage his followers against outspoken YRs whom he considers RINOs. At YRNC, that brutish, Trumpian approach to politics was not the norm. Multiple people who heard Wax confront me apologized for his behavior later.

As with the larger GOP, Donald Trump has divided the YRNF. On August 19, the YRs voted on their new national leadership. There were two coalitions to choose from: the more moderate Grow YR and Ascend, who largely represented the MAGA wing of the YRs. (A representative from Ascend told me the group does not want to make YRNF a MAGA populist organization, though nearly every person I talked to supporting Grow disagreed.)

Popular

We Have Mounting Proof That Cruel Men Control Women’s Bodies in Red StatesWe Have Mounting Proof That Cruel Men Control Women’s Bodies in Red States

JOAN WALSH

Grow’s candidate for national chair was Hayden Padgett of the Texas Young Republicans. In 2020, Padgett released a video saying that George Floyd was murdered and that Black lives matter. Padgett’s message in the 2020 video was not an endorsement of the Black Lives Matter protest movement but of the idea that everyone is created equally and in God’s image.

Some of his detractors spent a year and half using the video to discredit him, even buying the URL www.haydenpadgett.com and redirecting it to a clip of him acknowledging anti-Black racism.

But the campaign didn’t work, and Padgett won with overwhelming support, pulling in 575 votes to his opponent’s 127. As it turns out, the Trumpian wing of YRNF does not have the same pull within the organization that they have on social media.

Kari Lake was the keynote speaker for the awards gala, and there had been rumors of a walkout. And when she went up to speak, a few people did leave the room. Some YRs complained about her lies over the election. One person said they didn’t want to hear about Ukraine, saying that Ukrainian immigrants in their district were reliable Republican voters and that the US was right to defend the country’s sovereignty.

The last day of the convention, the Texas YRs de-federated the Dallas Young Republicans, removing the chapter from Texas Young Republican Federation and stripping them of the right to use the Texas Young Republican name. The Dallas YRs have a reputation for being “based,” which in this context means they embody some of the worst characteristics of Trumpian politics. The group’s chair, for instance, has an event next month featuring John Doyle, who planned a Stop the Steal rally with Nick Fuentes and is a proud Christian nationalist.

“The Dallas YRs were removed, because they have refused to engage with the parent organization for a very long time,” said Matt Wiltshire, the YRNF’s finance director. “They don’t talk to us or communicate. They have not cared about rules for years. They allow expelled Texas YRs to attend their events.” (Dallas YRs have since spent their time on Twitter, insisting they quit before they were voted out.)

The Texas YRs also voted to separate themselves from the Republican Party of Texas, due to their strained relationship with Matt Rinaldi, the Texas GOP chairman. In the lead-up to the election, Rinaldi refused to endorse Padgett, a fellow Texan who was almost unanimously supported by the Texas YRs, or even to remain uninvolved. Instead, Rinaldi endorsed Padgett’s more MAGA opponent, whose brand of Republicanism was more in line with his own.

“Rinaldi came to the convention not to spend time with the Texas YRs, but to go to the New York State Young Republican meeting,” Wiltshire explained. The meeting had “people who have been cruel to many members of our organization,” and Rinadli went “in order to disparage the Texas YRs and Hayden.”

Just before the cote, a representative from Ascend had told me, “Even though it’s the last thing we want, I assume there will be splinter organizations. This could be the last large YRNF convention ever.” This may already be playing out.

On Sunday, the Rockwall County YRs voted to leave the Texas Young Republican Federation, citing TYRF’s decision to end their partnership with the Republican Party of Texas. Like Dallas, Rockwall has a reputation for being a based club, one that is not in lockstep with TYRF’s leadership. In their release, they wrote that they “are proud to form a coalition with the Dallas Young Republicans.”

While the MAGA populists might often be the loudest voices from YRNF, they appear to be losing the internal struggle for power. Much like within the GOP, the rift over is likely to grow wider and deeper in the lead-up to the 2024 election.

Amanda Moore is a writer and researcher who focuses on far-right extremism. }}}

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an 11 23

lINCOLN — The first Nebraska Republican Party fundraiser of 2024 features former television reporter, U.S. Senate candidate and election denier Kari Lake of Arizona. She visits Omaha on Jan. 5, the eve of the third anniversary of the storming of the U.S. Capitol.

Omaha’s CHI Health Center, an arena and convention center, is shown. (Courtesy of Metropolitan Entertainment & Convention Authority)

Lake, a Republican who lost her 2022 gubernatorial election to Democrat Katie Hobbs in Arizona, is running a 2024 race (https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/elections/2023/11/01/arizona-senate-polls-whos-leading-between-sinema-gallego-and-lake/71400431007/) against Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who left the Democratic Party in December. Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., is running as well.

Like a man she calls her political muse, former President Donald Trump, Lake denies losing her race. Lake rose to national prominence by embracing Trump’s rejection of his 2020 loss to President Joe Biden. She sharply criticized Republicans who acknowledged his defeat.

She is visiting Nebraska during an Iowa campaign trip for Trump. Her event is the latest push to excite the base by new leadership of the Nebraska GOP, which in July 2022 ousted a team (https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2022/07/09/old-guard-conservatives-and-trump-populists-take-nebraska-gop-from-ricketts/) loyal to then-Gov. Pete Ricketts. The new team includes similarly Trump-focused Republicans.

Party spokeswoman Dawn Liphardt said Nebraska conservatives are interested in Republicans retaking the Senate and are interested in Arizona’s race. She called Lake “a strong speaker” who will “get Republicans excited” about the 2024 elections locally, which include two Senate races.

Lake is well-liked among some conservatives for aggressively critiquing members of the press and for her loyalty to Trump and his populist approach to politics. Like him, she emphasizes border security.

The Nebraska GOP announced the event by email, selling $50 general admission tickets, $25 tickets for booster club members, $600 for a book signing with Lake, and a $10,000-per-person VIP event before the candidate speaks at 7 p.m. at CHI Center Omaha.

‘Doubling down’

Nebraska Republican Party Chairman Eric Underwood speaks as former GOP gubernatorial candidate Charles Herbster and former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway listen in August 2023 in Norfolk, Neb. (Aaron Sanderford/Nebraska Examiner)

Nebraska Democratic Party chair Jane Kleeb said the Lake fundraiser shows the Nebraska GOP “doubling down with their election denying and reproductive rights denying strategy.”

That, Kleeb said, risks turning off voters and flipping more seats the Democrats’ way.

GOP-led Nebraska is no swing state. Trump won the state easily in 2020, beating Biden in two of the state’s three congressional districts. But Trump lost an Electoral College vote to Biden in the Omaha-based 2nd Congressional District.

Nebraska, like Maine, awards a single electoral vote to the presidential popular vote winners in each of the state’s three congressional districts. The Nebraska Legislature has been discussing moving back to winner-take-all elections.

Omaha-area state senators and voters have pushed back against such proposals, arguing that the state benefits economically from the spending by both presidential campaigns competing for the electoral vote that might prove vital in a close race.

Nebraska Examiner (https://nebraskaexaminer.com/) is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nebraska Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Cate Folsom for questions: info@nebraskaexaminer.com. Follow Nebraska Examiner on Facebook (https://facebook.com/Nebraska%20Examiner) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/NE_Examiner).

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Trump’s 'carnivorous pack of followers' will 'eat their own' in 2024: Arizona columnist - Alternet.org (https://www.alternet.org/kari-lake-2666106265/)

an ah 1023

arizona's political landscape is radically different from what it was 30 or 40 years ago. The Arizona of the past was a deep red state that was synonymous with the GOP conservatism of Sen. Barry Goldwater and his successor, Sen. John McCain.

In 2023, Arizona is a swing state with a Democratic governor (Katie Hobbs), a Democratic U.S. senator (Mark Kelly), an independent U.S. senator who used to be a Democrat (Kyrsten Sinema), and a Democratic attorney general (Kris Mayes). The Arizona GOP, however, has taken a far-right ultra-MAGA turn and moved away from the traditional Goldwater/McCain conservatism of yesterday.

In a biting opinion column published on October 30 (https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/ej-montini/2023/10/30/kari-lake-paul-gosar-endorsements-arizona-house-race/71381942007/), the Arizona Republic's E.J. Montini argues that Donald Trump's "carnivorous pack of howling, growling, backbiting followers" are getting ready to "cannibalize" each another in 2024.

"It shouldn't surprise anyone that MAGA sycophants like Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar and failed governor candidate and current U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake, who supported one another in previous elections, are at loggerheads when it comes to who should replace retiring Rep. Debbie Lesko in Arizona's heavily Republican Congressional District 8," Montini explains (https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/ej-montini/2023/10/30/kari-lake-paul-gosar-endorsements-arizona-house-race/71381942007/). "Gosar is backing failed Republican U.S. Senate candidate Blake Master…. Lake, on the other hand, is backing failed Arizona attorney general candidate Abe Hamadeh."

Montini argues that (https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/ej-montini/2023/10/30/kari-lake-paul-gosar-endorsements-arizona-house-race/71381942007/) Lake's endorsement of Hamadeh "doesn't come because she particularly likes Hamadeh, but because she did not like the fact that Masters thought of challenging her for the Senate nomination."

"The competition must seem odd to casual observers," Montini writes (https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/ej-montini/2023/10/30/kari-lake-paul-gosar-endorsements-arizona-house-race/71381942007/). "Masters and Hamadeh are of the same stripe, the same breed. Essentially, they're the same person. They share a lack of qualifications, a fealty to Trump and a history of losing. But this is a different kind of pack. They eat their own."

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Kari Lake has embraced numerous antisemitic media figures in recent years | Media Matters for America (https://www.mediamatters.org/diversity-discrimination/kari-lake-has-embraced-numerous-antisemitic-media-figures-recent-years)

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Federal court hands major loss to Arizona Republican election deniers - Alternet.org (https://www.alternet.org/court-arizona-election-deniers/)

arizona Republicans Kari Lake and Mark Finchem — who both ran in 2022 for Governor and Secretary of State, respectively — just had their case challenging the use of vote tabulation machines dismissed by a federal appeals court.

The Arizona Daily Star reported (https://tucson.com/news/state-regional/government-politics/arizona-election-2022-2024-kari-lake-mark-finchem-voting-machiens-courts/article_a42ad420-6c49-11ee-ac55-6b308b6dde58.html) that a three-judge panel for the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the case brought by Lake and Finchem lacked any evidence to back up claims that their constitutional rights were violated. Notably, the panel stated in an 11-page opinion (https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2023/10/16/22-16413.pdf) that both Lake and Finchem "conceded that their arguments were limited to potential future hacking, and not based on any past harm."

"[E]ven assuming Plaintiffs could continue to claim standing as prospective voters in future elections, they had not alleged a particularized injury and therefore failed to establish the kind of injury Article III requires," the ruling read. "None of Plaintiffs’ allegations supported a plausible inference that their individual votes in future elections will be adversely affected by the use of electronic tabulation, particularly given the robust safeguards in Arizona law, the use of paper ballots and the post-tabulation retention of those ballots."

This is not the first loss both Lake and Finchem have had in the courts. In March, Finchem, who lost the 2022 race for Secretary of State by more than 120,000 votes, was sanctioned (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2022-election/election-denier-mark-finchem-sanctioned-arizona-judge-rcna73671) by Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Melissa Iyer Julian for bringing a "groundless" case before her court.

"None of Contestant Finchem’s allegations, even if true, would have changed the vote count enough to overcome the 120,000 votes he needed to affect the result of this election," Julian wrote. "The Court finds that this lawsuit was groundless and not brought in good faith."

Lake, for her part, was sanctioned in May for making "false factual statements" before the court regarding her loss to Democrat Katie Hobbs in the gubernatorial race. Her legal team was ordered to pay $2,000 (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/04/kari-lake-lawyers-fined-false-factual-statements) for falsely stating that 35,000 ballots in Maricopa County — which houses approximately 60% of Arizona's registered voters — were improperly added to the total count.

Both Lake and Finchem continue to stand by their false claims that former President Donald Trump was the winner of the 2020 presidential election. As a state lawmaker, Finchem sponsored several resolutions (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2022-election/election-denier-mark-finchem-loses-secretary-state-race-arizona-rcna56880) attempting to decertify Biden's electoral college victory in Arizona. Lake, who is currently running (https://apnews.com/article/kari-lake-senate-arizona-f72b3b4081996ed83a7bb3331ca1b1f3) for the US Senate seat currently occupied by Senator Kyrsten Sinema (I-Arizona), still has yet to officially concede that she lost in 2022.

READ MORE:'Very concerned': Analyst predicts dangers of election deniers leading 17 states (https://www.alternet.org/dangers-election-deniers-17-states/)

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[Morning Digest: Arizona's fake governor launches a real bid for Senate (https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/11/2198624/-Morning-Digest-Arizona-s-fake-governor-launches-a-real-bid-for-Senate?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=top_news_slot_8&pm_medium=web)Morning Digest: Arizona's fake governor launches a real bid for Senate]

(https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/1

1/2198624/-Morning-Digest-Arizona-s-fake-governor-launches-a-real-bid-for-Senate

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orban

https://www.alternet.org/kari-lake-2664699441/

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rww 8 23

stew Peters is a far-right (https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/stew-peters-demands-red-states-treat-the-federal-government-as-an-occupying-force-in-response-to-trumps-latest-indictment/) virulently (https://gab.com/RealStewPeters/posts/109499282180533013) anti-LGBTQ (https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/right-wing-bonus-tracks-super-bowl-spiritual-warfare/) bigot (https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/right-wing-bonus-tracks-no-pagans-atheists-or-jews/) who (https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/stew-peters-says-ugandas-harsh-anti-lgbtq-legislation-is-100-percent-awesome/) regularly uses (https://gab.com/RealStewPeters/posts/109499282180533013) his nightly “The Stew Peters Show” program, speeches (https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1522602201880973320), and social media accounts (https://t.me/stewpeters/20104) to promote white nationalists (https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1691123508774916096) and antisemites (https://rumble.com/v360zf9-jamie-foxx-grovels-to-the-zionist-mob-actor-compares-fake-friends-to-crucif.html) and to spread (https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-king-cobra-venom-pandemic-stew-peters-unveils-a-new-covid-19-conspiracy-theory/) wild (https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1408120669712306186) conspiracy theories (https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1395024111483727876), bigotry (https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/right-wing-bonus-tracks-no-pagans-atheists-or-jews/), and calls (https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/right-wing-broadcaster-stew-peters-again-says-dr-anthony-fauci-should-be-executed/) for violence. (https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1497655719801368585)Nevertheless, Peters regularly manages (https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/rep-paul-gosar-cozies-up-to-far-right-conspiracy-theorist-stew-peters/) to get Republican leaders (https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1416417752139632646), elected (https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1505960169511006208) officials (https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/rep-pete-sessions-agrees-that-the-democrat-party-embraces-racism-against-white-people/), and candidates (https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1499761862002495496) for office (https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1521516934516330496) to appear (https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/kari-lake-makes-the-round-of-radical-right-wing-programs/) on his program.

On Wednesday, far-right (https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/wendy-rogers-tells-white-nationalist-afpac-conference-you-and-your-fellow-patriots-are-the-future/) Arizona stateSen. Wendy Rogers appeared on (https://rumble.com/v3aygwt-trumps-immigration-plan-to-end-birthright-citizenship-creates-assembly-line.html) Peters’ program, where she discussed her (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=791480632337598&set=pb.100044270057513.-2207520000&type=3) good friend (https://t.me/wendyrogersaz/6862) Kari Lake’s never-ending effort (https://tucson.com/news/state-regional/government-politics/arizona-election-courts/article_ecf96844-2bec-11ee-8f99-df8a9de5224f.html) 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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mma 8 23

right-wing media this week responded to former President Donald Trump’s fourth criminal indictment — this time, for conspiring to subvert the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia — by arguing that the charges signal the end of American democracy and the start of a potential civil war.

On August 14, Trump and 18 of his allies were indicted in the state of Georgia on charges of felony racketeering and conspiracy for their attempts to subvert the 2020 election. The 98-page indictment (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-indicted-georgia-racketeering-rcna74912) was handed down by a grand jury that reviewed evidence gathered during a two-and-a-half year investigation (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/15/us/fani-willis-donald-trump-georgia-investigation.html) headed by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

Right-wing media have defended Trump using inflammatory rhetoric, accusing Democrats of sedition and totalitarianism. The extreme reactions from the right echo (https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/right-wing-media-figures-respond-trumps-latest-indictment-calls-political-1) previous (https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/right-wing-media-scramble-defend-trump-ahead-potential-indictment-and-arrest) attempts (https://www.mediamatters.org/mar-lago-search/right-wing-media-melt-down-after-trump-becomes-first-former-president-be-federally) by conservative media (https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/how-right-wing-media-are-responding-trumps-arraignment) to shield (https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/right-wing-media-continue-provide-cover-trump-amid-new-charges) the former president from accountability for his various charges.

Right-wing media bemoaned the indictment as an attack on democracy, a display of tyranny, and a constitutional crisis

Right-wing podcaster Tim Pool responded to a post claiming that the “Fulton County DA went insane” with the comment “Civil war.” He later posted that “the only path forward is escalation. Either Trump is a cult leader trying to overthrow the US Or Democrats are engaged in seditious conspiracy to steal power.” Twitter/X, \8/15/23 (https://twitter.com/Timcast/status/1691320254390059008), [8/15/23 (https://twitter.com/Timcast/status/1691449987077713921)]

On Hannity, Fox News contributor and former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich decried the consequences of the indictment for the future of the country, comparing it to “the rise of secession and the Civil War.” He said, “I think what you're seeing tonight is one tree in a forest and I think we are drifting toward the greatest constitutional crisis since the 1850s and the rise of secession and the Civil War. I don't mean that as hyperbole.” Fox News, Hannity, [8/14/23 (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4010146)]

Article III Project founder Mike Davis argued on Steve Bannon’s War Room that “there's no way they can come up with this before the election if he’s going to get a fair trial.”He then claimed that “this is going to have a very chilling effect on democracy” because “you can't get more dangerous than telling people if you dare to question elections in America, you face going to prison for many, many years.” Real America’s Voice, War Room, [8/15/23 (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4010160)]

Fox News host Mark Levin said indictments of Trump are “an attack on the people. Every indictment is an attack on our freedom, our ability to vote.” Levin claimed, “Every indictment is an attack on our freedom, our ability to vote. The Democrats don't care about voting. They care about winning at all costs. The Democrat Party wants to be the monopoly party in this country.” Fox News, Hannity, [8/15/23 (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-host-mark-levin-says-indictments-trump-are-attack-people-every-indictment-attack)]

Far-right troll Mike Cernovich claimed the indictment was evidence that Democrats are forming “a totalitarian regime.” He posted, “We are occupied by the same totalitarian regime that we used to read about. It’s here. They are emboldened. Evil never stops. It’s going to get worse.” Twitter/X, [8/14/23 (https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/1691259468359901184)]

Levin similarly claimed that “Stalin would be proud. I'm sure Putin’s proud. I’m sure our enemies are celebrating.” He continued, “Congress is supposed to make all these final decisions. You're not supposed to criminalize the challenging of electors or dual electors or counting of votes and that sort of thing." Fox News, Hannity, [8/14/23 (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-host-mark-levin-launches-unhinged-rant-over-georgia-indictments-stalin-would-be)]

Breitbart Senior Editor-at-Large Joel Pollak decried the indictment as “political persecution of the opposition.” He posted that the indictment “recalls trials by totalitarian regimes” and that prosecutors are “doomed to fail.” Twitter/X, [8/15/23 (https://twitter.com/joelpollak/status/1691551402613699055?s=20)]

Daily Wire host Ben Shapiro posted, “Whatever you think of the Trump indictments, one thing is for certain: the glass has now been broken over and over again.” Shapiro added, “Political opponents can be targeted by legal enemies. Running for office now carries the legal risk of going to jail -- on all sides.” Twitter/X, [8/15/23 (https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/1691431356448845824?s=20)]

Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk labeled Trump’s indictment as “an attempt to nullify the United States Constitution.”He also called the charges “psychological warfare.” Salem Media Group, The Charlie Kirk Show, [8/15/23 (https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-trump-conspiracy-indictment-attempt-nullify-united-states-constitution)]

Former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs labeled prosecutors as “Marxist” and claimed that they have “trampled President Trump's rights and the Constitution.” He then argued that “the Left is an evil force that must be held accountable.” Twitter/X, [8/15/23 (https://twitter.com/LouDobbs/status/1691579164787134470?s=20)]

Failed Arizona GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake said on Steve Bannon’s War Room, “I think we’ll end up seeing another indictment,” before claiming that “they’ll eventually come for you.” She continued, “They’re going to go after grandmas and grandpas and people who were these alternate electors. This is political persecution of people who support America. … And if you don't think they'll eventually come for you, you are living in a fantasy land. They will eventually be coming after all of us.” Real America’s Voice, War Room, [8/15/23 (https://www.mediamatters.org/%E2%80%9Dhttps%3A//www.mediamatters.org/media/4010149%22)]

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https://www.mediamatters.org/rumble/kari-lake-and-pro-assassination-antisemite-muse-about-using-second-amendment-stop-tyrants

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7 23

https://www.alternet.org/Bank/trump-reportedly-turning-against-spotlight-hound-kari-lake-as-possible-2024-running-mate/

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5 23 an

several ct beats? djt teaser

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https://www.rawstory.com/kari-lake-moves-in-to-mar-a-lago/

auditions for vp

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an 6 23

Failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake (https://www.rawstory.com/kari-lake-book/) is facing a defamation lawsuit fromMaricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer (https://www.rawstory.com/kari-lake-defamation-lawsuit/) -- and Los Angeles Times columnist Mark Barbarak thinks that she's got a good chance of losing.

In his latest column (https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2023/jun/29/opinion-kari-lake-is-a-deceitful-fraud-now-shell/), Barbarak accuses Lake of being a "deceitful fraud" who disgracefully refused to accept her defeat at the hands of Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs and then filed a seemingly endless stream of lawsuits loaded with "conspiratorial flimflam" aimed at overturning results, all of which crashed and burned upon contacts with courts.

The columnist then went through the merits of Richer's lawsuit, and recounted how Lake has made him a central villain in her stolen-election mythology, despite the fact that Richer is a lifelong Republican.

"Lake's phony claims were repeated numerous times, the lawsuit documents, at political rallies, during podcasts and on social media," he notes. "Richer seeks unspecified monetary damages as well as a court order determining Lake's statements were false and requiring her to delete them."

The columnist concludes by noting that, although the bar for winning defamation lawsuits as a public figure is high, Dominion Voting Systems' massive settlement with Fox News shows that it can be overcome.

"Richer may not prevail in his defamation suit against Lake," he writes. "But if it deters other prominent personalities from hustling election-fraud fakery — when they know better — it will have served a fine purpose."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Watch: Kari Lake threatens to cancel the Super Bowl if the NFL objects to her immigration policies › (https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/kari-lake-threatens-super-bowl)

'Do you need a timeout?' Journalist tells Kari Lake to 'grow up' after she calls Arizona a 'banana republic' › (https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/do-you-need-a-timeout)

Kari Lake goes off the deep end in latest rant about the Arizona gubernatorial election being stolen from her › (https://www.alternet.org/kari-lake-2658978308/)

Kari Lake encourages her voters to get arrested in order to help her become Arizona's governor (video) (https://boingboing.net/2022/12/01/kari-lake-encourages-her-voters-to-get-arrested-in-order-to-help-her-become-arizonas-governor-video.html)

Straight from the Donald Trump insurrection playbook, Arizona's Kari Lake encourages her GQP base to break the law if that's what it takes to install her as governor. "I wish that somebody would say, 'You know what? Arrest me then. I don't care,'" the desperate midterm loser suggested on Steve Bannon's War Room podcast (see…READ THE REST (https://boingboing.net/2022/12/01/kari-lake-encourages-her-voters-to-get-arrested-in-order-to-help-her-become-arizonas-governor-video.html)

Governor-elect Katie Hobbs sues Arizona county that refuses to certify election results (https://boingboing.net/2022/11/29/governor-elect-katie-hobbs-sues-arizona-county-that-refuses-to-certify-election-results.html)

Republican officials in Arizona's Cochise County refused to certify midterm election results after the candidates of their choice did not win. So, after the rural county missed Monday's state deadline to approve the final vote tally, governor-elect Katie Hobbs, who is currently Arizona's secretary of state, sued the GOP-controlled community. From The Guardian: In a…READ THE REST (https://boingboing.net/2022/11/29/governor-elect-katie-hobbs-sues-arizona-county-that-refuses-to-certify-election-results.html)

Arizona elections official goes into hiding after post-midterm threats (https://boingboing.net/2022/11/21/arizona-elections-official-goes-into-hiding-after-post-midterm-threats.html)

Chair of Maricopa Elections Department Bill Gates has reportedly gone into hiding after alleged threats by MAGA voters and officials whose GOP candidates — such as election-fraud promoter Kari Lake — lost in Arizona's midterm elections. After Lake lost to governor-elect Katie Hobbs, she tweeted, ...

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an 12 22

Kari Lake, who was Arizona's Republican gubernatorial candidate, is vowing to push back (https://www.mediaite.com/politics/they-messed-with-the-wrong-btch-kari-lake-vows-retaliation-against-evil-bastards-she-claims-stole-her-election/) against the so-called “evil b--tards” who she believes stole the governor's election from her.

According to Mediaite, footage of Lake's recent speech at former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate has emerged. The clip, which was obtained by The Republican Accountability Project, features Lake claiming the election was successfully stolen. Now, the footage is circulating on Twitter.

Speaking to the crowd of attendees, Lake said, “We just had such a huge movement going into election day, so to watch these people – these evil b--tards.”

READ MORE: 'This is who they are': Critics blast Kari Lake for mocking Paul Pelosi after violent assault (https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/kari-lake)

:{:{She continued, “Can I say that here, is that alright? To watch them steal this in broad daylight, and if they think they are going to get away with it, they messed with the wrong b---h, ok?}::{”}:

The crowd responded to Lake in a receptive manner.

Lake's latest rant follows her refusal to concede the race. The angry gubernatorial candidate has also filed court documents challenging the election results due to speculation of voter fraud.

"Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state, is scheduled to take the oath of office as Arizona’s governor on Monday, Jan. 2. Lake lawyer Bryan Blehm, who was the attorney for the Cyber Ninjas’ partisan election review last year, had asked the judge for a three-day hearing on Lake’s election claims," KPNX reported (https://www.12news.com/article/news/politics/lake-lawsuit-could-extend-beyond-hobbs-swearing-in/75-3791c7c0-4b31-4fa6-b221-93dd65fb0e83). "Hobbs’ attorney warned during Tuesday’s court hearing that dragging out the case could cast a pall on the January inauguration."

READ MORE: Kari Lake declares herself a victim of 'clowns running a circus of elections' in a 'shady and shoddy way' (https://www.alternet.org/kari-lake-clowns-circus-elections/)

Watch the video below or at this link. (https://www.alternet.org/kari-lake-2658978308/)

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https://www.mediamatters.org/voter-fraud-and-suppression/kari-lake-and-supporters-storm-right-wing-media-hype-her-flimsy

no lnx vid

Kari Lake and supporters storm right-wing media to hype up her flimsy election lawsuit

WRITTEN BY JACINA HOLLINS-BORGES

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM SOPHIE LAWTON

PUBLISHED 12/14/22

On December 9, failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake filed an election contest complaint against Secretary of State and Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs and various Maricopa County officials, alleging that the 2022 general election in the county was fraudulent for a host of reasons, and demanding either that the election be redone or that Kari Lake be installed as the rightful governor of Arizona.

:{:{}:

Once the lawsuit was filed, Lake; her lawyer, election denier Kurt Olsen (who was just sanctioned for false claims in a different election lawsuit on Lake’s behalf); War Room host Steve Bannon; and Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft immediately launched an effort to promote the complaint and twist its evidence to say it proves more than it does. In actuality, the 70-page lawsuit requires readers to extrapolate most of its accusations based on flimsy evidence from the 2020 election and thus assumed to be true of 2022.

Generally, these figures erroneously claim that the complaint provides proof that that nearly 130,000 ballots have unverified or unverifiable signatures, that nearly 300,000 illegal votes were cast in Maricopa, that 72% of voters agree there was election interference in the county, and that 59% of the voting machines were down in Maricopa County.

Here are their claims and the facts that counter them:

Claim: Signature verification did not happen in Maricopa County

Hoft claimed on December 10 that in the lawsuit, “they speak about mail-in ballot signatures, and they include some examples in the filing, which is basically just scribble.” According to Hoft, this means “there's basically no signature validation going on in Arizona.”

Video CitationFrom the December 10, 2022, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

On December 12, Lake said, “We believe more than 130,000 votes possibly have terrible voter verification and shouldn’t have been counted. We have whistleblowers who were part of that signature verification who said everyday, they were churning out tens of thousands of ballots that should not have even been in the system. They had fake or no signatures or scribbles, but they were somehow pushed through by somebody in the verification process.”

In an interview with the Gateway Pundit published December 12,Olsen said, “We have actual ballot — the ballot signature images — and the control signatures that are used to validate those signatures.” He claimed that this visual evidence was very strong and presented a hypothetical: “If I am to say to you that we have, you know, 100,000 ballot envelope images, and of that, 17,000 we can show that the signatures are a complete mismatch.”

Video CitationDecember 12, 2022, streamed on The Gateway Pundit

Olsen claimed that they have identified “tens of thousands of mismatched signatures from 2020. We have whistleblowers from MTEC doing signature verification in 2020, who say the same thing is happening in 2022,” referring to the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center. He added: “Either the signatures that are on file with the state as the control group are fake, or the ones on the ballots, the ballot envelopes are. There’s no in between — the mismatch is so stark.”

Olsen also appeared on War Room to defend the lawsuit, arguing that articles pointing out weaknesses in the lawsuit are “gaslighting” people in order “to keep people from looking, themselves, at the evidence,” particularly on the signature verification issue: “We put an image of the two signatures side by side. There are tens of thousands of those.”

Reality: The lawsuit includes only one example of a “scribbled” signature

The lawsuit includes only one example of an allegedly mismatched signature, and it is an example from 2020. It uses this to claim that “tens of thousands of ballots with signature mismatches” were allowed in 2020, and extrapolates this to mean “they did the same thing with the 2022 general election.”

This allegation is furthered by more claims that ballots with unverifiable signatures were accepted in the 2020 general election. The lawsuit says this also must have happened in 2022, noting that some of the same people with questionable signatures from 2020 also voted in 2022.

The lawsuit also cites statements from multiple election workers from Maricopa County claiming that in the 2022 general election, they and their co-workers did not reject as many ballots as they expected to, and the “most likely explanation” was that “the level 2 managers who re-reviewed the rejections of level 1 workers were reversing and approving signatures that the level 1 workers excepted and rejected.”

Outside of an assumed example from 2020 and three Maricopa County election workers saying they did not have as many mismatched signatures as they expected to have, the lawsuit shows no actual evidence that it happened in 2022. As far as one can tell from the lawsuit itself, there are not “tens of thousands” of examples, as Lake’s team would have people believe.

Lake herself admitted on War Room that they don’t have the evidence they claim to; the lawsuit was filed, in part, to get access to it: “We’re looking for relief. We want to take a look at all of the ballots, not the ballots, but the signatures on the envelopes, to compare how many were actually matching. We’d like to take a look at those, and look at the ballots.”

Claim: 300,000 illegal votes were cast in Maricopa County

Lake and her supporters tend to cite this claim as the strongest evidence of fraud in Maricopa. They argue that chain of custody documents, which help track mail-in ballots, were not filled out for nearly 300,000 ballots collected from dropboxes on Election Day, meaning that all 300,000 were illegal and should not have been counted.

Kari Lake said plainly on December 12, “We believe there were hundreds of thousands of illegal votes counted and we believe our lawsuit proves it.” Later on, she added they “threw in about 300,000 ballots with no chain of custody; those are illegal ballots. We have no way to prove where they came from, whose they are.”

Video CitationFrom the December 12, 2022, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

Michael Patrick Leahy, CEO and editor-in-chief of the right-wing organization Star News, said on December 10’s War Room that the claim that “they don’t have chain of custody for 298,000 early votes” on Election Day alone gives the judge “a strong legal reason to grant the remedy,” though he admitted he had not “seen the exhibits that show that.”

Video CitationFrom the December 10, 2022, edition ofReal America's Voice's War Room

Hoftadded that the lawsuit alleged “hundreds of thousands, they said, of illegal ballots, and they're going to prove that in court.”

Olsen said that “there were over 300,000 ballots that don’t have proper chain of security,” which he said means that “there’s no way to tell where those ballots came from.”

Reality: They call all mail-in ballots collected on Election Day “illegal”

Lake’s supporters neglect to mention that they’re referring to all ballots that were collected from dropboxes in Maricopa County on Election Day when they cite the 300,000 figure. They allege, in part, that there must be no chain of custody forms tracking them because their team is personally unable to find them.

Claim: 72% of Democrats and Republicans agree that there was election interference in Maricopa County

On December 10, Hoft said that the lawsuit “opened with the fact that 72% of Democrats and Republicans believe that people were deprived of their right to vote that day” and that voters “understand that there was election interference involved.”

Two days later, Bannon said to Lake, “You know, 72% of the people think that something went on here.”

Reality: The poll they reference is described in the complaint is a poll of “likely U.S. voters,” but the lawsuit text gives no indication of party affiliation.

The poll itself is from right-wing polling group Rasmussen Reports, which surveyed 750 individuals nationwide on whether they agreed with the following Kari Lake statement about Arizona: “This isn't about Republicans or Democrats. This is about our sacred right to vote, a right that many voters were, sadly, deprived of on November 8th.” There was no mention of “election interference” in any of the questions asked.

Claim: 59% of voting machines were down in Maricopa County

According to Hoft, the lawsuit claimed that “59% of the machines” in the county “were not operating that day.” With this established, Hoft asked, “At what point is the election null and void? Is it 40%? Is it 50%? Or do you have to wait until there's 80% of the machines that aren't working? I mean, at what point, how much abuse are we going to take as Republicans and allow this to continue?”

Reality: The lawsuit alleges “widespread tabulator or printer failures at 59% of the 223 vote centers,” not 59% of the machines.

Further, this argument contends that “there were rampant breakdowns at no less than 132” voting centers, rather than the approximately 70 that Maricopa County officials identified. It is supported, in part, by statements in supplementary court documents from the members of the Republican National Committee’s Election Integrity Team, who allege that “Republican poll observer[s]” told them that there had been tabulator issues at their voting site. Many of these statements are not firsthand accounts.

After explaining the allegations in the lawsuit, Lake laundered her image to the War Room audience, implying that the relief they’re seeking is simply for the election to be “set aside or thrown out or redone.” Not once does she state that they ask for her to be unquestionably installed into the governorship via “an order setting aside the certified result of the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election and declaring that Kari Lake is the winner of the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election.”

Video CitationFrom the December 12, 2022, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

This lawsuit relies on a preset acceptance of election denialism and a willingness to accept extraordinary assumptions based on distrust in the current election system. Without these preconceptions, it reads as a flimsy, unsubstantiated mash-up of coincidences and unverified suspicions twisted to declare Lake the rightful governor of Arizona because she did not expect to lose. As such, her supporters must go on right-wing media to push their efforts and lie ever so slightly about the contents of so as to not reveal that it is all a bluff.

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an 12/05/22

Former Arizona candidate for governor Kari Lake (R) on Monday blasted what she called the "sham certification" of her election loss.

During an interview with conservative podcast host Steve Bannon, Lake noted that the certification (https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/2022-arizona-election-results-to-be-certified-on-dec-5) of her election loss was just an hour away.

"The optics of them sitting there and signing their signature — can you imagine — to this sham election," she opined. "We've got more issues than we saw in 2020, in that sham election. We have just blatant sabotaging of election day."

"And if they sit there and sign their names to this sham certification, history will never forgive them," the former candidate added. "They will go down as three of the very worst in history."

Lake tied her election loss to information about the 2020 election that Twitter's Elon Musk shared (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11499511/Elon-Musk-says-Twitters-actions-definition-election-interference.html) recently.

"I don't even know how to describe it other than a festering cabal that's in charge of our government right now," Lake remarked. "And this is our moment to stand up and fight back."

Watch the video below from Real America's Voice.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/12/federal-judge-orders-sanctions-for-kari-lakes-legal-team-in-voting-equipment-lawsuit/

After Democratic Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs defeated far-right MAGA Republican Kari Lake in Arizona’s 2022 gubernatorial election, conservative Republican Gov. Doug Ducey congratulated her and said he looked forward to helping with the transition from a Ducey Administration to a Hobbs Administration. But Lake, a conspiracy theorist and Big Lie promoter who falsely claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump, has refused to concede to Hobbs. And her campaign, in a lawsuit, questioned “the validity of the election results.” (https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/kari-lake-campaign-files-lawsuit-seeking-arizona-election-day-records/)

Lake has also been in court attacking the electronic vote-counting equipment used in Arizona. But a federal judge, John J. Tuchi (https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/63260463/106/lake-v-hobbs/), disagrees with Lake’s claim that the equipment is problematic. And on Thursday, December 1, Tuchi ordered sanctions against Lake’s legal team (https://lawandcrime.com/federal-court/judge-sanctions-kari-lakes-legal-team-which-includes-alan-dershowitz-for-recklessly-filing-false-misleading-and-unsupported-claims-in-election-lawsuit/).

Attorney/journalist Aaron Keller, reporting for Law & Crime on December 1, explains, “The attorneys being sanctioned are not directly named in Thursday’s order, but according to the court docket, Harvard Law School Prof. Alan Dershowitz is Lake’s lead attorney in the matter. Also on her legal team are co-lead attorneys Andrew D. Parker, Jesse Hersch Kibort, and Joseph Alan Pull of Minneapolis. Further listed as a member of her legal team is attorney Kurt B. Olsen of Washington, D.C.Parker, Olsen, and Dershowitz signed the original complaint, an amended complaint, and (an) opposition to a request for sanctions.”

READ MORE: ['The people of Arizona have spoken': Outgoing GOP Governor Doug Ducey congratulates Katie Hobbs (https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/people-of-arizona-have-spoken/)

Another far-right MAGA Republican who lost an election in Arizona, State Rep. Mark Finchem, joined Lake as a plaintiff in her lawsuit attacking Arizona’s voting equipment.In the 2022 midterms, Finchem ran for the position that Hobbs presently holds: Arizona secretary of state. And like Lake, he has aggressively promoted the Big Lie and Trump’s debunked voter fraud conspiracy theories. But Finchem lost to Democrat Adrian Fontes (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2022-election/election-denier-mark-finchem-loses-secretary-state-race-arizona-rcna56880). Arizona was once a deep red state, but in 2023, it will have a Democratic governor (Hobbs), a Democratic secretary of state (Fontes) and two Democratic U.S. senators: Mark Kelly (who was reelected in November) and Kyrsten Sinema.

Dershowitz, however, stressed to Law & Crime that he is not questioning the election results in Arizona. And Keller points out that Lake and Finchem’s initial lawsuit questioning Arizona’s electronic voting machines goes back to April.

Dershowitz told Law & Crime, “I have not challenged the results of any Arizona elections. I have given legal advice about the future use of machine counting by companies that refuse to disclose the inner workings of their machines. I support transparency in elections.”

Keller explains, “The Lake/Finchem lawsuit as a whole, according to its opening salvo, sought to question the Grand Canyon State’s use of electronic ballot-counting devices. The case was filed in April, and — as Dershowitz noted — that was long before the results of the November 2022 midterms…. The lawsuit elsewhere bemoaned what it called ‘glaring failures with electronic voting systems’….U.S. District Judge John J. Tuchi rubbished the lawsuit in August— again, before the midterms — and on Thursday ascertained that sanctions were appropriate. Tuchi, a Barack Obama appointee, noted in August that Arizona election equipment is rigorously tested before it is used to count votes.”

READ MORE: 'Practical Republicans' in Arizona sunk Kari Lake because 'they want government to work': expert (https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/arizona-republicans/)

Tuchi laid out the ways in which Arizona’s voting equipment undergoes extensive testing.

Tuchi wrote, “Before a single vote is cast, Arizona’s election equipment undergoes thorough testing by independent, neutral experts. Electronic voting equipment must be tested by both the Secretary’s Certification Committee and an Election Assistance Commission (“EAC”) accredited testing laboratory before it may be used in an Arizona election…. In addition to the equipment certification process, Arizona’s vote tabulation results are subject to four independent audits — two audits occur before the election, and two audits after.”

The judge continued, “The first of these audits is a logic and accuracy test, which is performed by the Arizona Secretary of State on a sample of the tabulation equipment…. The second required audit also takes place before election day. For the second audit, Arizona counties must perform a logic and accuracy test on all of their tabulation equipment.”

Tuchi wrote that Lake’s claims were “too speculative to establish an injury in fact.” Keller notes that the sanctions Tuchi has ordered only apply to the attorneys, not to plaintiffs Lake and Finchem.

The judge also wrote, “The Court shares the concerns expressed by other federal courts about misuse of the judicial system to baselessly cast doubt on the electoral process in a manner that is conspicuously consistent with the plaintiffs’ political ends.”

READ MORE: 'This is who they are': Critics blast Kari Lake for mocking Paul Pelosi after violent assault (https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/kari-lake/)

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sorta joke paul pelosi (bad sec thus incompetent? shd have a gun?

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/class-what-felony-kari-lake/

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/donald-trump-kari-lake-installed/

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Arizona County Lawyer Contacted Sheriff About Threat From Kari Lake Campaign: Report (https://www.yahoo.com/news/arizona-county-lawyer-contacted-sheriff-161648136.html)

Yahoo (https://www.yahoo.com/news/arizona-county-lawyer-contacted-sheriff-161648136.html)|11 days ago

A top attorney for Arizona's Maricopa County told The Washington Post that he contacted law enforcement authorities about what he considered a threat from the campaign of losing GOP ...

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/gop-megadonors-funding-election-denial/

In an article published on November 3 (https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-gops-biggest-donor-dick-uihlein-has-a-soft-spot-for-election-deniers), the Daily Beast’s Roger Sollenberger reported that “nearly 80 percent” of the $1.7 million that right-wing shipping magnates Dick and Elizabeth Uihlein donated to Republican candidates “between January 7, 2021 and August 31, 2022” went to “campaigns or committees tied to the 147 Republicans who voted, on January 6, (2021), to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory.” But their fondness for MAGA election denialists, according to Sollenberger, goes beyond donations.

Sollenberger, writing for the Beast in an article published on November 28 (https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-the-billionaire-backed-dick-uihlein-hub-for-election-denial-restoration-action?via=mobile&source=Reddit), reports that in 2021, Arizona Republican Party Vice Chair Gina Swoboda [just saw name on some news hist doc]was hired as executive director for “the Uihlein-backed dark money nonprofit Restoration Action Inc.” Her salary was $108,750 per year.

“Swoboda, a former Trump campaign official and the vice chair of the Arizona Republican Party, is now leading a misguided charge against the ballot count in that state on behalf of GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake,” Sollenberger explains. “Swoboda currently serves as ‘election integrity’ coordinator for Lake, whose repeated false claims of voter fraud have ingratiated her to former President Donald Trump and who still refuses to acknowledge her election loss to (Democratic Arizona Secretary of State) Katie Hobbs.”

READ MORE: 'Another criminal voting operation': Donald Trump demands Kari Lake be 'installed' as Arizona governor (https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/donald-trump-kari-lake-installed/?utm_source=push_notifications)

The Beast reporter continues, “After the election, Lake promoted Swoboda’s appearance on a right-wing podcast. In addition to hiring Swoboda, the filing shows Restoration Action’s accounts swelling for the second year in a row. According to the filing, in the 12 months following the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Restoration Action’s revenue topped $20.5 million — double what the group raised in 2020, and light years beyond its $64,000 haul in 2019.”

Sollenberger notes that Restoration Action is “tied to the larger Restoration of America network, funded almost exclusively by the Uihleins.”

Brendan Fischer, who serves as deputy executive director of the watchdog group Documented, told the Beast, “Restoration Action is a hub for election denial, including funding some of the key players pushing election falsehoods in Arizona at the moment. This is a reminder that there’s big money behind the push to undermine democracy. Through Restoration Action and other entities, an array of groups pushing election conspiracy theories are backed by literally tens of millions of dollars from just one billionaire couple.”

Restoration America, according to Sollenberger, “also threw $600,000 to the super PAC affiliated with January 6 rally organizer Tea Party Patriots” and “another $1.5 million…. to the Lawyers Democracy Fund, a conservative dark money group that advocates for changes in election law.”

READ MORE:These GOP megadonors are showing an 'overwhelming' preference for far-right 'election deniers': report (https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/gop-megadonors/)

“The group sent another half a million toFight Voter Fraud,which has also pushed baseless claims of election malfeasance, including in 2021,” Sollenberger reports. “Another recipient, the Liberty Initiative Fund,donated $675,000 to a group fighting for more restrictive voter ID requirements in Michigan. That Michigan group raised $2.2 million total, with $1.5 million coming from Uihlein himself.

READ MORE:'Selling the Big Lie': Reporter unloads on Kari Lake after her campaign ends in defeat (https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/kari-lake-2658650792/)

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danger fascism fox piven

https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/kari-lake-2658779795/

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an 11 22

In Arizona’s 2022 midterms, statewide races did not go well for far-right MAGA election denialists, Donald Trump loyalists and promoters of the Big Lie. GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake (https://www.axios.com/2022/11/20/how-kari-lake-lost-arizona) lost to her Democratic rival Katie Hobbs; Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly was reelected, defeating Republican challenger Blake Masters. Arizona State Rep. Mark Finchem, an ally of QAnon and the Oath Keepers, lost to Democrat Adrian Fontes (https://www.npr.org/2022/11/11/1134934448/arizona-secretary-of-state-election-results-finchem-fontes) in a race for Arizona secretary of state. Lake, Masters and Finchem were all endorsed by Trump.

Critics of Lake and other election denialists warned that if she lost the election, she would be a sore loser and refuse to admit that she lost. And sure enough, Lake has — just as her critics predicted — refused to concede to Hobbs (https://www.cbsnews.com/video/defeated-arizona-gop-gubernatorial-candidate-kari-lake-refuses-to-concede/), making baseless election fraud claims and vowing to fight the election results in court (https://www.cbsnews.com/video/defeated-arizona-gop-gubernatorial-candidate-kari-lake-refuses-to-concede/). Meanwhile, fellow MAGA conspiracy theorist Liz Harris, who was elected to a seat in the Arizona House of Representativeson November 8, has vowed that she won’t vote on any bills (https://www.12news.com/article/news/politics/elections/decision/arizona-republican-liz-harris-says-she-wont-cast-vote-in-house-until-2022-election-is-redone/75-3d4616ed-3dfd-4df1-b7ce-4de7897d408a) unless officials agree to “hold a new election immediately.”

This Friday, November 25, a group of far-right MAGA election denialists and conspiracy theorists, including Harris, are expected to hold a demonstration at the Arizona Capitol Building in Phoenix to demand a revote (https://www.newsweek.com/election-deniers-demand-revote-outside-arizona-capitol-building-1761932?utm_source=push_notification&utm_source=pushnami&utm_medium=Push_Notifications&utm_campaign=fullauto&utm=1669286053355) for all of the midterm elections held in Arizona on November 8, according to Newsweek.

READ MORE: Arizona Republican won’t do her job unless there’s a redo of 2022 election she won: report (https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/loses-blake-masters-2658730952/)

Newsweek’s Zoe Strozewski reports, “An announcement was posted on AZRevote.com calling on attendees to meet at the Arizona Capitol on Friday morning so they can let their voices ‘be heard peacefully, prayerfully.’ The announcement also instructs Arizonians to bring signs and banners for an adjacent #AZRevote Overpass Campaign on Friday and Saturday, and provided overpass location suggestions in Maricopa County and the Tucson area.

In a video posted on Twitter (https://www.newsweek.com/kari-lake-doubles-down-allegations-botched-election-arizona-1761255) on Monday, November 21, Lake claimed that Arizona residents who voted for her were “disenfranchised” and claimed, with no evidence, that the "2022 general election in Arizona was botched and broken beyond repair.”

But not all conservatives are joining Lake and Harris in their bogus election fraud claims. Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and GOP activist Meghan McCain (the daughter of the late Republican Sen. John McCain and his widow Cindy McCain) are among Lake’s most scathing critics on the right and have been celebrating her defeat (https://twitter.com/MeghanMcCain/status/1592334805550927872).

Outgoing Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a conservative Republican, is making it abundantly clear that he believes Hobbs defeated Lake fair and square. In an official statement released on November 23 (https://azgovernor.gov/governor/news/2022/11/governor-ducey-meets-governor-elect-katie-hobbs), Ducey said, “Today, I congratulated Governor-elect Katie Hobbs on her victory in a hard-fought race and offered my full cooperation as she prepares to assume the leadership of the State of Arizona. My administration will work to make this transition as smooth and seamless as possible. Our duty is to ensure that Arizona’s 24th Governor and her team can hit the ground running and continue our state’s incredible momentum…. The people of Arizona have spoken, their votes have been counted, and we respect their decision.”

READ MORE: 'The people of Arizona have spoken': Outgoing GOP Governor Doug Ducey congratulates Katie Hobbs (https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/people-of-arizona-have-spoken/)

Conservative Washington Post opinion columnist Henry Olsen (https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/kari-lake-2658772831/), in a November 22 column (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/22/arizona-midterm-election-denial-fraud-myth/), slammed the false claims of Lake, Harris and other election denialists as ludicrous and stressed that they are hurting the Republican Party and the conservative cause in their state. Olsen has been highly critical of the Biden Administration at times, but he has also been quick to call out the Big Lie as “fiction” and stress that Biden legitimately won the United States’ 2020 presidential election.

Arizona is a swing state that has seen its political landscape change considerably in recent years. Once a deep red state, Arizona was closely identified with the conservative politics of Sen. Barry Goldwater and his successor, John McCain, who had no problem being called a “Goldwater conservative” or “Goldwater Republican.”

But in 2023, Arizona will have a Democratic governor (Hobbs), a Democratic secretary of state (Fontes) and two centrist Democratic U.S. senators: Kelly and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. Kelly will remain in the Senate seat once occupied by Goldwater and later, John McCain. Arizona, in the past, went Republican in one presidential race after another; in 2020, President Joe Biden legitimately defeated Donald Trump in Arizona.

READ MORE: 'McCain Republicans vote too': Liz Cheney and Meghan McCain are savoring Kari Lake’s defeat (https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/kari-lake-2658651303/)

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/do-you-need-a-timeout/

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https://boingboing.net/2022/11/08/kari-lake-threatens-to-reform-the-media-if-she-is-elected-governor-of-arizona.html

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repeated/ anal rape?

https://boingboing.net/2022/11/08/trump-repeats-prison-rape-threat-against-journalists-has-plans-to-brutally-imprison-significant-numbers-of-reporters-says-rolling-stone.html

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not true

https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/kari-lake-lee-zeldin-stabbed/

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no lnx

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/04/arizona-gop-turning-point-usa/

Democracy Dies in Darkness

EXCLUSIVE

How a pro-Trump youth group remade the Arizona GOP, testing democracy

Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point network worked to purge officials who affirmed the 2020 election results

By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Isaac Stanley-Becker

November 4, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk on Tuesday in Chandler, Ariz. (Caitlin O’Hara for The Washington Post)

PHOENIX — The young conservative activist had a plan, and he wanted the veteran Arizona House speaker to push it.

The two men huddled at a barbecue joint in January as the activist — Tyler Bowyer, the chief operating officer of the pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA — unspooled his demands: Republican legislators, he insisted, should carve up booming and fast-diversifying Maricopa County, diluting the power of Democrats in a state that had helped deliver Joe Biden the presidency.

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But the Republican House speaker, Rusty Bowers, ultimately balked at redrawing the state’s map to seize partisan advantage. As the pair’s political differences grew, the activist, who was half the speaker’s age, vowed revenge.

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“Rusty, I will be working toward ensuring you do not win your election in 2022,” Bowyer warned in a March text message obtained by The Washington Post. “I appreciate your service, I will do whatever it takes to ensure you are retired.”

Soon, the state legislator faced a rush of ridicule on social media and in negative ads as Turning Point’s political arm launched a campaign to “Replace RINO Rusty.” The speaker lost his primary for an open state Senate seat in August to a Turning Point-backed Republican who called the 2020 election a “conspiracy headed up by the Devil himself.”

The takedown of one of the most powerful Republicans in the state illustrates the rise of Turning Point USA and its network of affiliates, which have pushed beyond their core mission of energizing college conservatives to turn Arizona into a laboratory for a new brand of Republican organizing. The decade-old nonprofit organization has helped transform the state GOP, seeking to elevate acolytes of former president Donald Trump and purge old-guard centrists who led in the tradition of the late Republican Sen. John McCain.

The group’s success is reflected in the Republican midterm election slate — nearly every statewide candidate and many of those farther down the ballot have embraced Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged. The political career of Kari Lake, the state’s GOP gubernatorial nominee, took off at a Turning Point event last year, and she has filled her campaign staff with former Turning Point employees. Lake has promised, if elected, to overhaul how votes are cast and counted in this pivotal swing state.

“They have a bigger impact than any other Republican group I know,” said Jeff DeWit, a former state treasurer in Arizona who served as chief operating officer for both of Trump’s presidential campaigns. “They’re more powerful than the RNC,” he said, referring to the Republican National Committee.

Tyler Bowyer, a longtime Turning Point leader, speaks in the ear of Austin Smith, a Turning Point Action employee and Republican candidate for the Arizona House, at an October canvassing event in Mesa, Ariz. (Caitlin O’Hara for The Washington Post)

Volunteers at a Turning Point Action get-out-the-vote event in October in Mesa. (Caitlin O'Hara for The Washington Post)

Kathy Pearce, a Republican candidate for Arizona House, speaks at the Mesa event. (Caitlin O'Hara for The Washington Post)]

This account of Turning Point’s quest to remake the Arizona Republican Party is based on audio recordings of private meetings, personal messages and interviews with more than 80 people, including current and former Turning Point employees, public officials and their staffers, political consultants, and state and local party activists who have interacted with the nonprofit’s leaders. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive details or avoid professional reprisal.

The Post review found that Turning Point, which forged an early alliance with the pro-Trump movement in 2016, devised an aggressive strategy to enforce discipline and purity in a divided GOP that was struggling to overcome Democratic gains in the state. The group recruited like-minded activists into the party ranks and often used provocative rhetoric online to pressure old-guard Republicans and “barrage the left,” as one internal document put it, while creating a new political action committee to pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into statewide and legislative campaigns.

Nationally, Turning Point solidified its identity in the MAGA era. Like Trump, Turning Point’s leaders gravitate toward messages primed to go viral on social media, including a recent call for a “hero” to bail out of jail the man accused of assaulting the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

Founder Charlie Kirk, now 29, was the 10th-biggest “superspreader” of misinformation about the 2020 election on Twitter, according to the Election Integrity Partnership, a consortium of researchers. Kirk encouraged his followers to attend the Jan. 6, 2021, rally that preceded the assault on the U.S. Capitol, and a website promoting the rally listed Turning Point Action, the group’s political arm, as a backer.

The Attack: The Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol was neither a spontaneous act nor an isolated event

With more than $65 million in annual revenue, more than 400 employees and a massive network of conservative influencers, Turning Point’s vast network exerts its influence through a dizzying array of mediums, from podcasts to social media to concert-like rallies, funded by GOP megadonors and aimed at younger generations.

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Kirk is a prolific fundraiser, using his connections in Trump’s inner circle to fete donors at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida. But it’s Bowyer, 37, who translates that influence and those resources into raw political power in Arizona, a state increasingly setting the tone for the national GOP.

Tyler Bowyer describes his role at Turning Point.

Kirk and Bowyer declined to comment for this report. Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Turning Point USA and its affiliates, said that both men effectively channel conservative interests and that the group’s years-long work in Arizona is “bearing significant fruit in 2022.” Kolvet sought to distance Turning Point from some of Bowyer’s political advocacy, which he said was undertaken in Bowyer’s “capacity as a Republican Party leader.”

In a private meeting with conservative activists this year, Bowyer remarked on his role at Turning Point by calling himself “the guy that basically runs everything,” according to an audio recording obtained by The Post. At another point in the conversation, he boasted of his enthusiasm for political confrontation: “I have giant balls.”

Tyler Bowyer boasts of his political mettle.

An attendee picks up a poster at the Turning Point Action event at Pioneer Park in Mesa in October. (Caitlin O’Hara for The Washington Post)

Forged in the MAGA movement

It was January 2015, and a pivotal presidential election loomed.

Bowyer had just started to work for Turning Point as part of its expansion in Arizona and other parts of the West. He was also elected chair of the Maricopa County GOP, promising to revolutionize the party by recruiting a new generation of volunteers at the lowest levels of the party — a strategy now at the center of pro-Trump organizing.

Bowyer, who touts that his family has lived in Arizona for seven generations, had long chafed at the conventional party apparatus and longed for one more willing to push boundaries. As a student at Arizona State University, he earned the adoration of tea party activists when he ridiculed Gov. Jan Brewer (R) for expanding the state’s Medicaid program.

In the summer of 2015, Bowyer received a call from Trump’s campaign manager, who was trying to schedule a small gathering in Phoenix but was facing pushback from Republican state leaders who had recoiled at Trump’s style and uncompromising approach to immigration, according to a person familiar with the call.

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The young activist and others helped organize and promote a rally that attracted thousands on a sweltering July day. Bowyer warmed up the crowd ahead of Trump’s 90-minute speech.

In the final months of the campaign, Kirk, then 22, took a leave from Turning Point to travel the country with Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., 38 at the time. They focused on events tailored to students and appeared at a Fox News town hall aimed at millennials.

President Donald Trump with Charlie Kirk, founder and executive director of Turning Point USA, in Washington in 2018. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

As they campaigned in the Phoenix area, Bowyer recorded a video of Trump Jr. helping a stranded motorist and pushing a car in triple-digit heat. He posted it on Twitter, writing, “This is why I’m voting Trump!” The message, which has been viewed more than half a million times, made clear to Turning Point leaders the online appetite for pro-Trump content.

Trump went on to win Arizona in 2016, and Republicans swept other races. Turning Point and the Make America Great Again movement fell into a well-defined symbiosis: Kirk and his associates helped amplify Trump’s messages on social media, and the group’s fundraising exploded.

In 2018, Kirk relocated his enterprise from the Chicago suburbs, where he was raised, to a two-story headquarters in a Phoenix office park. The sprawling facility includes a television studio where several live-stream shows are filmed, near a wall decorated with a huge American flag and pennants from dozens of college campuses.

An opening ceremony drew big names from across the Republican Party’s ideological divide, including Gov. Doug Ducey. Bowyer, who recently had been promoted to chief operating officer, addressed the crowd.

“One thing I hope that you take away from today,” he said, “is that you see all of the wonderful things that are happening across the country in the name of conservatism.”

A rival to the GOP mainstream

Within months, Arizona Republicans were in crisis. Democrats had swept the 2018 midterm election, flipping a U.S. Senate seat, the secretary of state’s office and races down the ballot. Arizona had quickly gone from a conservative stronghold to a true swing state. Turning Point leaders and other conservatives saw it as confirmation that the state party needed a dramatically different strategy.

Bowyer viewed the results as affirmation of his long-standing philosophy: “If the Republican Party doesn’t do its job, you know, then the Republican Party has to go,” he said in the private meeting with activists this year, according to audio obtained by The Post.

Bowyer talks to activists about the Republican Party.

Kolvet, the Turning Point spokesman, declined to elaborate on Bowyer’s comments but said, “Turning Point is confident Mr. Bowyer had the best interest of the conservative movement and the organization in mind.”

Tyler Bowyer, chief operating officer at Turning Point Action, speaks at the canvassing event in Mesa. (Caitlin O’Hara for The Washington Post)

In January 2019, party members gathered in a Phoenix church to pick their next leader.

Bowyer threw his support behind Kelli Ward, a former state senator who had unsuccessfully run for U.S. Senate twice and had publicized her disdain for the establishment wing of the party. She pledged to recruit MAGA Republicans as foot soldiers and oversee a transformation of the state party.

Bowyer worked the room that day with help from Jake Hoffman, a Turning Point consultant. Hoffman ran a marketing firm that worked for a PAC that had supported Ward’s failed Senate bids.

Ward prevailed over a McCain ally, and Hoffman helped her transition into the role of party chair. When Republicans wanted to reach Ward, they started with Hoffman, whose businesses have remained key vendors for the state party, according to campaign finance records.

As the state’s top Republicans kept their distance from Ward, Turning Point saw an opportunity. Her title gave Turning Point credibility.

Ward, in a statement, called Hoffman and Bowyer “friends and allies” and “two of the most righteous people I know.”

Hoffman, a former school board member and town councilman, was listed on Turning Point’s staff directory through at least early 2019. In 2020, The Post revealed that he was running a deceptive online operation for Turning Point’s political arm in which teenagers peppered the internet with pro-Trump messaging, some using fake accounts. Hoffman defended the practice at the time.

Over the years, Hoffman has been an administrator for the Facebook pages of Turning Point, Kirk and Trump Jr., according to a person familiar with the setup. Hoffman did not dispute the details of his social media work for Trump Jr. or Turning Point, saying that he was “happy to consult with the organization.”

That fall, Hoffman won a race for the Arizona House, giving Turning Point an ally in the statehouse.

Turning Point was no longer on the GOP’s fringes. It was at the party’s center.

Voters arrive for a Kari Lake event at the Rancho de Tia Rosa restaurant in Mesa in early October. (Caitlin O'Hara for The Washington Post)

Attendees at the Rancho de Tia Rosa event, including Bowyer, center, watch a video before Lake's appearance. (Caitlin O’Hara for The Washington Post)

Attendees at the GOP gubernatorial nominee's event at the Mesa restaurant. (Caitlin O’Hara for The Washington Post)

‘Repercussions could be big’

In 2020, Turning Point told donors its task was activating young voters, registering thousands to vote and delivering Arizona and other swing states to Trump, according to documents obtained by The Post.

The group aimed to capitalize on the electorate’s intensifying distrust of government, media and political parties, the documents show. Opportunities to do so expanded with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.

Kirk argued that the “China Virus” proved the need for Trump’s promised wall on the southern border,and text messages sent by Turning Point Action falsely claimed that the government was “sending goons DOOR-TO-DOOR to make you take a covid-19 vaccine.”

When Trump resumed holding large campaign events, Turning Point Action’s Students for Trump helped pack Phoenix’s Dream City Church for a June 2020 rally. Outside, police in riot gear clashed with protesters. Inside, the megachurch’s cavernous auditorium offered refuge from mask mandates.

Kirk prays at a "Freedom Night in America" event last month at Dream City Church in Phoenix. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)

Attendees at the Turning Point event at the Phoenix church last month. The group hosted a major Trump rally at the church in June 2020. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)

Ahead of the election, Turning Point Action touted its “round-the-clock Digital War-Room to promote content we create and constantly barrage the left online,” according to a slide deck obtained by The Post. It seized on culture war issues such as how race is taught in public schools, the rights of transgender individuals and illegal immigration.

But Trump lost Arizona — the first time a Republican presidential candidate had ceded the state since 1996. Quickly, Turning Point became a linchpin of Trump’s efforts to deny his defeat and reverse his loss.

Bowyer, elected that year to the Republican National Committee, gathered with Hoffman and Ward at the state party’s headquarters on Dec. 14, 2020, the day the state’s presidential electors met to cast their votes for Biden, according to state party tweets. As part of a seven-state plan, the trio signed paperwork falsely declaring themselves the state’s electors. That plan is now a focus of congressional investigators and prosecutors probing Trump’s quest to stay in power.

On Twitter, the state party asked followers whether they would be willing to die to keep Trump in the White House. Another post proposed “contempt & jail time” for county officials who affirmed Biden’s win.

The posts alarmed Trey Terry, 35, a conservative who lives near a Republican county official who had helped oversee the election and was facing death threats as a result. Terry urged Bowyer to help tone down the messaging in a private exchange over Twitter that was obtained by The Post.

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“His kids and wife can’t go anywhere without being harassed as they go in and out of their house,” Terry wrote, describing the county official’s experience. “That s--- is out of line. So it’s hard for me to ignore.”

Bowyer responded that while he had sympathy for the county official, elected leaders must adhere to the party’s platform and “repercussions could be big for those who aren’t on the same page with the party.”

Terry accused party leaders of “whipping” up activists “based on zero evidence” of widespread fraud. Bowyer did not disagree but suggested that his approach is the reason for Turning Point’s success.

“I didn’t build a 45 million dollar a year organization,” he wrote, by “misunderstanding the base.”

Kirk speaks during at the Dream City Church event last month. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)]

Meanwhile, Turning Point Action arranged for seven buses to take 350 activists from several states to D.C. for the Jan. 6, 2021, rally near the White House, according to three people familiar with the rally planning. Bowyer and Kirk have been interviewed by the House committee investigating the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol that followed the rally, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Austin Smith, a Turning Point Action employee, tweeted a photo of himself speaking to “thousands of patriots” at a rally in Washington on Jan. 5.

“Don’t get comfortable,” he wrote in a since-deleted tweet. “Fight like hell.”

Kolvet, the Turning Point spokesman, said the group’s involvement that day was “isolated to the president’s speech at the Ellipse.”

In the months that followed, Maricopa County became a hotbed of unsupported claims about the election, and Trump allies launched a haphazard review of the results, over the objection of county officials and election experts.

The purge

The next year, Bowyer tried to convince Bowers, the Arizona House speaker, that the party needed to intensify its efforts to maintain power, Bowers said.

With a map in hand, the activist zeroed in on sprawling Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and 60 percent of the state’s voters, and called for breaking it into four counties, one that would concentrate most Democrats and three that would favor Republicans.

Hoffman, the marketing consultant close to Turning Point who was elected to the state House in 2020, introduced legislation to make it happen — but the opposition of legislative leadership ensured its demise.

A few months later, the speaker testified before the U.S. House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection. Bowers detailed Trump’s attempts to overturn the election and his own decision to resist, intensifying the attacks from Turning Point influencers.

Alone in Washington, Rusty Bowers tells world what happened in Arizona

Turning Point expanded its political operation this year with a new PAC under Bowyer’s direction. The group has unleashed more than $415,000 in Arizona since July, according to state records, and has reported more than $600,000 in spending to the Federal Election Commission. About half of its spending in Arizona has boosted Lake after a bitter primary that pitted her against the party establishment, including the governor. But the money has also extended to legislative races in which spending is traditionally restrained. Hundreds of thousands of dollars went to Hoffman’s firm, records show.

The PAC helped a crew of far-right candidates win primary contests in state races, including Steve Montenegro, who helped coordinate bombastic election-denying messaging during the review of Maricopa County’s 2020 ballots; Liz Harris, who routinely spreads election falsehoods; and Smith, the Turning Point Action enterprise director who spoke at a D.C. rally the day before the insurrection.

Turning Point has played a wide-ranging role in Lake’s campaign, and former Turning Point staffers have filled key positions on her campaign, including a top adviser and a former press secretary. This summer, Lake said on Twitter that her daughter was involved with the group. In fact, she’s a full-time Turning Point employee, according to two people familiar with the matter.

“Turning Point has been essential in turning … enthusiasm into a tsunami of activists that naturally flock to candidates like Kari Lake,” Caroline Wren, a senior adviser on the Lake campaign, said in a statement.

Election deniers march toward power in key 2024 battlegrounds

Lake’s rise also created new opportunities for Hoffman, whose firm was paid about $2.3 million by a pro-Lake super PAC, according to state records. A complaint about the source of the PAC’s funding is under review by the Maricopa County elections department. Hoffman said his company is “routinely contracted” for such work because it is “one of the leading creative agencies in Arizona.”

Lake, a former television anchor, gained MAGA stardom at a Turning Point Action candidate forum in the summer of 2021, when she urged the crowd not to forget about the 2020 election. When Trump spoke on the same stage and name-checked Lake, the room erupted in applause. He cocked his head and clapped. “This could be a big night for you,” he said.

One year later, Lake won the Republican primary and celebrated at a victory party at a Scottsdale resort. On the lush lawn, young women in semiformal dresses and strappy heels lined up for photos. Music blared from inside a ballroom as partygoers snapped selfies. The scene, reminiscent of a graduation party or school dance, highlighted how Turning Point has thrust young people to the center of the state party’s transformation.

One is Carrera Horan, 18, who attended the Turning Point summit that elevated Lake and watches Kirk’s videos on Instagram. “He tells you what you need to be hearing rather than just what you would want to hear,” she said.

Daniel Fuentes, 25, joined his Christian university’s Turning Point chapter, which offered a ready-made friend group. He tunes in to Kirk’s radio show every day on Spotify.

Fuentes is volunteering for Lake’s campaign, and he attended a recent Turning Point canvassing event at a Mesa park, one of 200 that the group says it has hosted nationally this cycle. With the smell of chicken roasting in barbecue pits wafting through the air, he listened intently as Bowyer spoke of the need to “rebrand the conservative movement and the Republican Party as a hope for a future generation.”

Fuentes argued that “Democrat clubs on college campuses are not doing this. Liberal, woke, feminist clubs, they’re not out there telling people: ‘Let’s go out and knock doors. Let’s go out and, you know, sign up to be a precinct [committeeman].’ ”

Looking to 2024

The midterms will test whether Turning Point can win races or just disrupt them.

After winning the primary, Lake quickly made overtures to the state’s GOP establishment.

When Bowyer learned that Lake was meeting with a former state GOP chairman who had been close to McCain, he erupted at her during a phone call as she traveled on a donor’s plane, warning that the base would turn against her, according to three people who heard about his comments.

Lake was unfazed, these people said. Kolvet said Lake and Bowyer “maintain a great relationship.”

With a growing number of well-placed allies, Turning Point is poised to again push election-related legislation favorable to Republicans ahead of 2024. A preview of that came last week when Lake promoted a legislative proposal from Hoffman to punish media outlets that mistakenly report election results.

The Turning Point strategy, said Kirk Adams, a top Republican operative in the state and Gov. Ducey’s former chief of staff, is “all geared toward 2024,” aimed at elevating GOP officials at every level who could thwart an election outcome unfavorable to the party. “Get a compliant governor,” Adams said, describing the strategy. “Get a compliant secretary of state. Get compliant legislative leadership.”

Turning Point’s leaders are looking ahead to 2024. The group’s political arm has hosted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), widely seen as a possible presidential contender, at rallies aimed at high-stakes races in Arizona and beyond.

Lake has embraced the title of “DeSantis of the West.” Others view her as a potential vice-presidential contender. For the moment, she wants to be governor — and if she wins, it will be with Turning Point’s help.

One week before the election, a Kirk aide — who also works as Lake’s deputy field director — kicked off a rally outside a steakhouse in suburban Chandler by praising both of her bosses. Once onstage, Kirk and Lake embraced.

“Kari’s really special,” Kirk said.

“Thank you for the compliment. I’ll take it,” the candidate said. “… We have to tune in to people like Charlie.”

Jacqueline Alemany, Alice Crites, Josh Dawsey and Beth Reinhard contributed to this report.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/kari-lake-2658593938/

no lnx

an 11 22

The Arizona Republican Party’s nominee for governor, Kari Lake, is telling supporters there’s no reason for schools to spend so much time teaching science, math, and history. If elected she would recreate public schools into factories producing young adults who can immediately enter the workforce without the benefit of understanding basic information necessary in a democratic society. In North Carolina, the dominionist Lt. Governor wants to ban the teaching of science and history in elementary schools. And a Fox News host this week claimed that social studies – classes that teach history, culture, geography, political science, philosophy, and psychology – is a fake subject, “made up by progressives.”

That Fox News host is Pete Hegseth, who Donald Trump, when he was president, wanted to nominate to head the Veterans Administration. Hegseth may be best-known, however, for once bragging on Fox News that he hadn’t washed his hands in over a decade.

“Germs are not a real thing,” Hegseth...RELATED: https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2022/10/this-is-who-they-are-critics-blast-kari-lake-for-mocking-paul-pelosi-after-brutally-violent-assault/...‘This Is Who They Are’: Critics Blast Kari Lake for Mocking Paul Pelosi After Brutally Violent Assault

“Everything about the confines of my classroom was created by progressives 100 years ago,” Hegseth told a live audience this week. “You mentioned the rows. You mentioned that approach – the bell ringing. God being removed of course, lunch breaks, lunch breaks, different subjects, Social Studies.”

That’s when Hegseth got agitated.

“The idea we’re not going to study civics, history, philosophy, theology, we’re going to create psychology and social studies and split it all up as if we can dissect human nature and through a scientific method which they’ve invented.”.

“That’s right, create more perfectible human beings by controlling how they think and what they think, all created by progressives.”

Hegseth thinks taxpayer-funded public schools should teach everything through the “lens” of God, or, more specifically, his God...“Did you take social studies? I took social studies. The progressives made it up it – it’s, it’s a made-up conglomerate of subjects meant to silo the way that we think as opposed to basing all of wisdom in God’s wisdom, in His word, and it all makes sense, looking at it through that lens....[twt] ...social Studies, of course, includes civics and history, and philosophy. In fact, the offers a definition for social studies:

[READ MORE:

“Social studies is the integrated study of the social sciences and humanities to promote civic competence,” which Hegseth appears to object to.

“Within the school program, social studies provides coordinated, systematic study drawing upon such disciplines as anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, law, philosophy, political science, psychology, religion, and sociology, as well as appropriate content from the humanities, mathematics, and natural sciences.”

“The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.”

Hegseth is not alone in wanting to reduce what children learn.

Republican Kari Lake, Arizona’s GOP nominee for governor and a former TV news reporter whose entire education was in public schools, now thinks school children don’t need to learn as much as they are currently when it comes to science, math, and history.

[READ MORE: ‘We the People – Not Enemies’: President Biden Urges Americans to ‘Preserve Democracy’ in Address to Nation

“I believe we are at a prime opportunity to completely re-envision how our government schools are run, because everyone’s eyes are open,” Lake told supporters at an event while campaigning with far-right white Christian nationalist U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ).

“And who says we have to have this many hours of science, this many of math and history? We can change that up,” said Lake about an entire state’s public school system that already has been “ranked worst across the 50 United States of America,” according to a report in Arizona’s KGUN 9 News.

“What does it mean to have a high school diploma? It should mean that you know some of the basics, and you also have some ability to go out and make a living. Our schools have our kids for 13 years from K through 12 and at the end of 13 years, we should have some competent adults going into the world who can make a living because there are jobs out there.”

[twt vid patriot takes]

notice how Lake doesn’t say, “public schools,” but “government schools,” a term many on the right use to demonize public schools, expanding their belief that anything the government does is wrong, bad, or a waste of tax dollars.

Lake also sounds like she’s suggesting high school graduates are not able to get jobs because they have spent too much time learning about science, math, and history.

Then there’s far right Christian dominionist Republican Lt. Governor of North Carolina Mark Robinson, who is another extremist attacking education.

Robinson made national headlines after calling LGBTQ people “filth.”

In August MSNBC’s Ja’han Jones wrote that Robinson “may well be the most bigoted official in the United States with the least name recognition.”

Calling him “a full-on extremist,” Jones writes that Robinson And “reportedly has a new, ludicrous belief to share with the masses: Science and history shouldn’t be taught to students until they reach sixth grade.”

“First through fifth grades ‘don’t need to be teaching social studies,’ he wrote, according to local NBC affiliate WRAL-TV, which obtained an advanced copy of his upcoming book,” Jones adds, reporting that Robinson wrote: “We don’t need to be teaching science. We surely don’t need to be talking about equity and social justice.”

There’s more to Robinson’s extremist ideas on education.

Get rid of it. Or, specifically, Jones writes, Robinson has ” called for the elimination of the state’s board of education.”

“Robinson said flatly what most fact-averse conservatives won’t admit about their education crusade,” Jones continues. “They fear accurate history lessons that could inevitably lead to discussions about systemic disparities. And they fear discussions about science, which may undermine the fundamentalist Christian beliefs at the heart of the conservative movement.”

Jones sums up this entire approach to public education from the right.

“Robinson’s reported ideas about education showcase the logical endpoint of the Republican Party’s assault on lessons about social inequality: an eagerness to keep children stupid.”

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an 10 22

Among political journalists, Arizona has been one of the most closely watched swing states in the 2022 midterms — and it is also a place where some disturbing events have occurred in late October. The Phoenix campaign office of Democratic Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who is running for governor against far-right MAGA Republican and conspiracy theorist Kari Lake, was the target of a break-in (https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/26/politics/headquarters-katie-hobbs-broken-into-arizona/index.html), and armed men in tactical gear (https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/10/26/world/us-armed-poll-watchers/) have been hanging around ballot drop box locations in Maricopa County.

Laura Thornton, director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, has been observing authoritarian trends and movements all over the world. Thornton is worried about anti-democracy trends in the United States in general, but in an op-ed published by the Daily Beast (https://www.thedailybeast.com/arizona-is-ground-zero-of-americas-democracy-crisis?ref=scroll) on October 28, she lays out a list of reasons why she is especially worried about Arizona.

“For more than two decades,” Thornton explains, “I lived overseas working to advance democracy and credible elections, including leading multiple election observation teams, conducting election audits and reform efforts, and training election management bodies. In my new role at the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund, I work both abroad and at home and can view U.S. democracy through the lens of my experience and global best practice.”

READ MORE: ‘Are they out of their minds?’: Former Reagan staffer slams WSJ for overlooking Kari Lake’s 'extremism' (https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/are-they-out-of-their-minds-former-reagan-staffer-slams-wsj-for-overlooking-kari-lakes-extremism/)

Thornton now considers Arizona “Ground Zero” in the far-right movement to undermine democracy in the U.S.

“According to the Arizonans I met,” Thornton writes, “the state is in a dangerous place, and Maricopa is in the eye of the storm — representing one of the largest voting districts in the country…. Arizona election officials are still battling false claims over the 2020 results, while under intense scrutiny for the upcoming midterms. Rogue ‘poll watchers’ stake out drop boxes, photographing citizens, taking down license plate numbers, and harassing voters as they deliver their ballots. Vile, descriptive death threats inundate the inboxes of hard-working election officials. Enormous resources, machinery, and staff have been poured into the county to keep up with constantly evolving election regulations, such as a recent decision to mandate a recount for any election with a 1 percentage point or lower difference in results, to mitigate against problems that do not exist.”

Thornton cites Lake and Mark Finchem, the far-right GOP nominee for Arizona secretary of state, as “instigators” of Arizona’s “volatile state” who have been “propagating false allegations of fraud in the 2020 elections.”

“Kari Lake, the Republican gubernatorial candidate, has called for a 2020 ‘redo’ and has not committed to accepting the results of an election she does not win,” Thornton observes. “This has caused, according to Maricopa officials, a fresh onslaught of violent threats against their offices. Mark Finchem, secretary of state candidate, is one of the most prolific spreaders of Big Lie conspiracy theories, was part of the riots outside the U.S. Capitol on January 6, and has a laundry list of election ‘reforms’ he pledges to enact…. Election administrators told me they’ve seen an exodus of staff due to the threats and harassment, just when they need more personnel than ever to accommodate demands from policymakers to ‘enhance integrity.’”

READ MORE: Democrats blame Kari Lake for 'inciting violence' after Katie Hobbs’ campaign office was burglarized (https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/democrats-kari-lake-inciting-violence/)

Arizona is among the swing states that journalist Alex Shephard discusses in a report for The New Republic (https://newrepublic.com/article/168281/midterms-trump-practice-next-coup?utm_medium=notification&utm_source=pushly&utm_campaign=pushly_launch) published on October 25. Shepard views Arizona and Pennsylvania as two of the swing states where Trump is using the 2022 midterm as a “test run” for a coup attempt in 2024. If Democrat John Fetterman defeats his Republican opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz, in Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race, Shephard warns, Trump will claim that Fetterman’s victory was due to voter fraud.

According to Shephard, “Trump is using Pennsylvania’s election as a kind of test case for 2024, to see whether he and his allies can successfully challenge a legitimate result. Fetterman has consistently polled ahead of Oz since the general election campaign, but the election is expected to be close: Republicans have regained momentum in recent weeks, and many suspect that the polls are once again overstating a Democratic advantage. If Fetterman wins outright or the election is close enough to prompt a recount, Trump will swoop in and declare it illegitimate, claiming widespread corruption in Philadelphia involving voting machines and mail-in ballots.”

Trump, Shephard writes, is using the 2022 midterms to “lay the groundwork for challenging his own potential loss in 2024.”

According to Thornton, the election officials she has spoken to in Maricopa County, Arizona “are indeed worried about violence.”

“It might simply be too late to put this deranged genie back in the bottle,” Thornton laments, “but the leaders who created that genie must be held to account. Voters have the power to do so by refusing to elect them to office. Rewarding them for their lies will send Arizona down a dark, undemocratic path, and the few brave leaders whom I met will not be able to stop this trajectory.”

READ MORE: Democrats are blowing it in a race that has life-or-death implications for democracy: conservative (https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/democrats-are-blowing-it-democracy/)

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rww -->

...

“This is still an active investigation with detectives checking all security cameras in attempts to identify and locate the subject involved,” the police department said in a statement obtained by CNN. No suspects have been identified yet, and the police have not elaborated on what kind of items were taken.

As the investigation continues, Hobbs’ team and the Arizona Democratic Party have painted Lake as responsible for the break-in, arguing that her incendiary rhetoric has fueled violent threats against them. This comes as the Hobbs and Lake campaigns head into the final stretch of a heated race for the position of governor.

“Let’s be clear: for nearly two years, Kari Lake and her allies have been spreading dangerous misinformation and inciting threats against anyone they see fit,” said Hobbs campaign manager Nicole DeMont. “The threats against Arizonans attempting to exercise their constitutional rights and their attacks on elected officials are the direct result of a concerted campaign of lies and intimidation.”

Lake responded by calling the accusation “defamatory” and claiming that the Hobbs team’s attempt to blame her is “trying to deflect from her own abysmal campaign and the fact that you know, nobody even knows where her campaign office is.”

“This sounds like a Jussie Smollett part two,” Lake said in response to reporters’ question. “The person who broke in probably didn’t even realize it was a campaign office. It’s really sad. And the fact that you guys are running with this story, shame on you.”

Watch above via CNN.

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10 22

media Matters (https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/steve-bannon-calls-infowars-listeners-become-poll-workers): Steve Bannon calls on Infowars listeners to become poll workers.

Ryan Teague Beckwith and Margaret Newkirk @ Bloomberg (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-27/masked-poll-watchers-are-showing-up-at-voting-sites-with-handguns-and-kevlar-vests): Masked Poll Watchers Are Showing Up at Voting Sites With Handguns and Kevlar Vests.

Kelly Weill @ The Daily Beast (https://www.thedailybeast.com/maga-roadshows-plagued-with-grifter-allegations): MAGA Conspiracy Tours Plagued With ‘Grifter’ Allegations.

Ken Meyer @ Mediaite (https://www.mediaite.com/news/katie-hobbs-campaign-blasts-kari-lake-for-inciting-threats-after-office-is-burglarized/): Katie Hobbs Blasts Kari Lake for ‘Inciting Threats’ After Campaign Office Is Burglarized.

Hemant Mehta @ OnlySky (https://onlysky.media/hemant-mehta/christian-nation-americans-45-pew-research-center/): Yikes: 45% of Americans say the U.S. should be a ‘Christian Nation’.

Katherine Stewart @ The New Republic (https://newrepublic.com/article/168314/republicans-scared-called-christian-nationalists): Why Are Some Christian Nationalist Leaders Opposed to Being Called Christian Nationalists?

Tags: Kari Lake (https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/kari-lake/) Steve Bannon (https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/steve-bannon/) Christian Nationalism (https://www.rightwingwatch.org/topics/christian-nationalism/) Round-Up (https://www.rightwingwatch.org/topics/round-up/)

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/kari-lake-threatens-super-bowl/

nfl

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mma 10 22

no lnx twt

QAnon and white nationalist-linked media provide friendly platform for Arizona GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake

WRITTEN BY JUSTIN HOROWITZ

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM MEDIA MATTERS STAFF

PUBLISHED 10/12/22

QAnon and white nationalist-linked right-wing media have provided Arizona Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake a welcome platform to campaign for office.

Lake’s connections to political extremists in the media are not new. A longtime local TV newscaster who is endorsed by former President Donald Trump, she has appeared with a Nazi-sympathizing YouTuber, QAnon activists, and once endorsed a far-right, antisemitic streamer running for Oklahoma state Senate. (Lake later rescinded her endorsement.)

Here are some of the QAnon and white nationalist-linked programs that have platformed Kari Lake

Former Trump aide and alleged January 6 coup plotter Steve Bannon regularly hosts Lake on his War Room podcast. Bannon was instrumental in spreading white nationalist talking points while working as executive chairman at Breitbart News and his podcast has become a platform for QAnon.

Days before her August 2 GOP primary, Lake appeared on the QAnon program MatrixxxGrooove Show to fundraise and promote her campaign. Lake also took a photo with the show’s host.

Lake has appeared at least twice on white nationalist Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show. Carlson consistently hosts guests with ties to white supremacy and QAnon, and he has repeatedly defended the conspiracy theory.

VideoCitationFrom the September 26, 2022, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

QAnon influencer Mel K has hosted Lake multiple times on her show.

During the August 8 edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, Lake appeared with neo-Nazi collaborator Jack Posobiec and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. Posobiec has appeared alongside notorious white nationalists Richard Spencer, Scott Greer, and Baked Alaska, and has supported the white nationalist group Identity Evropa, among other white nationalist ties. Kirk has previously advocated for protecting “white demographics in America” and touted the white nationalist “replacement” theory. Turning Point USA also has a history of working alongside and promoting racists and white nationalists.

Right-wing radio host Sebastian Gorka has hosted Lake on his program multiple times. Gorka is reportedly a member of the Nazi Germany-linked group Vitézi Rend and he has been seen wearing an honorary medal of the group.

Lake appeared on conspiracy theorist and white nationalist Stew Peters’ show for an interview on November 18, 2021.

Conspiracy theorist and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell has interviewed Lake on his LindellTV platform. Lindell and his business are linked to white nationalist media personalities including Laura Loomer and Vincent James Foxx. Lindell also has connections to the QAnon community.

On February 19, David Carlson of American Populist Union interviewed Lake. Carlson is aligned with white nationalist Nick Fuentes and his show has been described as “a livestream for teenage white nationalists.” Carlson previously interviewed Washington Republican House candidate Joe Kent, pushing Kent to explain why he disavowed Fuentes’ white nationalist movement.

Video CitationFrom the February 19, 2022, edition of American Populist Union's podcast

Lake has appeared in various interviews with Right Side Broadcasting Network, the far-right outlet that formerly hosted Fuentes’ show.

At one point, Fuentes claimed that Lake was planning to speak at his AFPAC white supremacy conference but had to pull out because of a “scheduling mix-up,” telling his followers, “We support her.”

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an raw tom b 10 22

In an unsurprisingly contentious interview with Arizona Republican Kari Lake, who is vying to become her state's next governor, CNN "State of the Union" host Dana Bash was forced to cut her guest off as she ranted about 2020 election fraud -- and then pressed her to present any evidence she has.

With Lake not in the CNN studio and responding remotely, where she was shot in soft-focus, the conversation started off pleasantly until the Arizona election denier started making accusations that led the CNN host to pull her up short and fact-check her multiple times.

"I want to move on to another really important issue, particularly when it comes to your critical swing state of Arizona," Bash prompted after a discussion about immigration. "That is what happened in 2020. You called the 2020 election 'corrupt, stolen, rotten and rigged.' There is no evidence of any of that presented in a court of law or anywhere else, that any of those things are true. So why do you keep saying that?"

"Well, there's plenty of evidence," Lake countered. "We had 740,000 ballots with no chain of custody. those ballots shouldn't have been counted."

"Where is the evidence of that?" Bash cut in.

"Dana, there's plenty of evidence," the GOP candidate parried. "I'm happy to send it to your team. The problem is the media won't cover it."

"We've covered this extensively and what you just said has been debunked," the CNN host interrupted.

"Only one side of it, Dana," Lake shot back. "The real issue, Dana, is people don't trust our elections -- they haven't since 2000. I'm a reporter, been sitting on your side of the desk for a long time. Since 2000, we have Americans who don't trust our elections. In 2000, in 2004 they didn't trust the elections."

Watch below or at this link (https://www.rawstory.com/kari-lake-election-denier/):

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an 10 22

Arizona Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/?s=Kari+Lake) used footage of Russian troops marching in a “victory parade” in her latest political ad, according to Heartland Signal/WCPT 820AM (https://heartlandsignal.com/2022/10/06/kari-lake-uses-stock-footage-of-russian-soldiers-in-campaign-ad/) in Chicago.

The ad opens showing Lake and says she will “stand with Arizona’s border sheriffs,” a plea to anti-immigration voters. It immediately cuts to footage of marching troops. Those troops are Russian soldiers, not Arizona National Guardsmen.

Heartland Signal reports, “this footage can be found in its original form (https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-1057268815-russia-novosibirsk-june-24-2020-victory-parade) on the stock footage website Shutterstock (https://www.shutterstock.com/explore/flex-subscriptions?c3apidt=p27652951156&gclid=668b6eb9ad5716dcfc360d8413579f90&gclsrc=3p.ds&kw=shutterstock&msclkid=668b6eb9ad5716dcfc360d8413579f90&utm_campaign=CO%3DUS_LG%3DEN_BU%3DIMG_AD%3DBRAND_TS%3Dlggeneric_RG%3DAMER_AB%3DACQ_CH%3DSEM_OG%3DCONV_PB%3DMicrosoft-Ads&utm_content=FF%3DBrand-Shutterstock_Exact_AU%3DProspecting&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=bing&utm_term=shutterstock), which shows that the troops are, in fact, Russian soldiers marching in a victory parade.”

“Another website called Russian Army Shop (https://russianarmyshop.eu/) sells the very same uniforms shown in the footage, which is the desert camouflage version of Russian Army fatigues. These are very different from the Arizona National Guard uniforms (https://kjzz.org/content/1391261/amid-iran-tensions-150-arizona-national-guard-troops-return-middle-east-deployment)." [twt vid]

Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, blasted Lake.

“If Kari Lake can’t identify a uniformed member of the Arizona National Guard from a Russian soldier, she has no business leading our brave men and women as governor,” Hobbs told Heartland Signal.

READ MORE: Arizona GOP Candidate Melts Down After Being Confronted for Endorsing Lawmaker Who Says ‘Jews Will Go to Hell’ (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2022/08/arizona-gop-candidate-melts-down-after-being-confronted-for-endorsing-lawmaker-who-says-jews-will-go-to-hell/)

Lake is considered by some to be a Christian nationalist. Her recent endorsement of Jarrin Jackson (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/?s=%22Jarrin+Jackson%22), an virulently antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ (https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1534192472825417729) Christian nationalist extremist who tells his supporters being LGBTQ is a “gateway to pedophilia,”and that “Jews will go to hell,” received wide condemnation. Lake, a former journalist, responded by stating it’s “impossible to dig into everything someone has said in their life. If his reported comments are true, I obviously rescind my endorsement.”

She did not condemn Jackson, but stated: “I respect Jarrin’s service to our Nation, but clearly denounce that kind of derogatory language. Let me be clear: Our great movement welcomes anyone and everyone who wants to fight for a better future,” as Axios Phoenix (https://www.axios.com/local/phoenix/2022/08/20/arizona-kari-lake-denounces-derogatory-language-oklahoma-candidate-endorsed) reported.

Lake is far from the only Republican who uses Russian video and photos in their work.

READ MORE: Christian Nationalist GOP Nominee Doug Mastriano to Speak to Radical Conspiracy Theorists Ahead of Election (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2022/10/christian-nationalist-gop-nominee-doug-mastriano-to-speak-to-radical-conspiracy-theorists-ahead-of-election/)

House Republicans led by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy two weeks ago “unveiled their ‘Commitment to America’ agenda for 2023 ― and with it, an inspirational video chock full of scenes presented as exceptional imagery of America but that are actually stock footage from Russia and Ukraine,” HuffPost (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/house-republicans-commitment-to-america-stock-footage-russia-ukraine_n_632dc7afe4b0d12b5404bab1?hgm) reported.

“Serg Grbanoff, a filmmaker based in Russia…told HuffPost that he filmed” a scene used in the GOP’s video “in Russia’s Volgograd region.”

“In another scene,” HuffPost reports, “a boy is seen smiling and running in a field with a toy airplane. The words ‘Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ appear on the screen, a reference to the Declaration of Independence.”

That “clip was also created by Grbanoff, and also filmed in the Volgograd region of Russia.”

That’s not the first time McCarthy has used Russian footage.

READ MORE: ‘Nothing to Be Ashamed of’: Herschel Walker Says if He Paid for an Abortion He Would ‘Be Forgiven’ (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2022/10/nothing-to-be-ashamed-of-herschel-walker-says-if-he-paid-for-an-abortion-he-would-be-forgiven/)

In 2019, as NCRM (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2019/11/top-house-republican-kevin-mccarthys-ad-defending-trump-features-footage-from-russia/) reported, McCarthy released an ad defending then-President Donald Trump which included footage from Russia.

The ad itself was widely mocked, but that CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski identified the stock footage was from Russia. Several years ago McCarthy was caught saying he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin is paying Trump (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2017/05/house_majority_leader_kevin_mccarthy_in_2016_said_he_thinks_putin_pays_trump_paul_ryan_swore_group_to_secrecy/).

There’s more.

In 2020 Trump’s Make America Great Again Committee asked Americans to “support our troops” in an ad that ran on 9/11. It featured Russian fighter jets and a soldier carrying a Kalashnikov assault rifle (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2020/09/trumps-9-11-ad-said-support-our-troops-but-featured-images-of-russian-mig-19-fighter-jets/).

Still more.

“According to a review by American Ledger,” that website (https://american-ledger.com/corruption-secrecy/crenshaw-texas-republicans-use-russian-stock-footage-in-campaign-ad/), published by the progressive super PAC American Bridge 21st Century, reported in 2020, “a political advertisement featuring several Texas Republican congressional candidates used stock footage of a Russian warship and an Israeli military helicopter to promote their campaigns.”

“Cut by Representative Dan Crenshaw’s campaign, the ad is inspired by a range of action and spy films (https://t.co/Y445JY4hAJ?amp=1) and features a slate of candidates running for the House of Representatives in Texas: Wesley Hunt (TX-7), August Pfluger (TX-11), Beth Van Duyne (TX-24), Tony Gonzales (TX-23), Genevieve Collins (TX-32), and Crenshaw (TX-2) himself.”

It’s been going on for years.

In 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump released an ad decrying the treatment of American vets.

“Our great veterans are being treated terribly,” Trump said in a video. “The corruption in the Veteran’s administration, the incompetence is beyond. We will stop that.”

Gawker (https://www.gawker.com/trump-pulls-veterans-campaign-ad-that-depicted-russian-1754600322) at the time reported “it was pulled down before most anyone could see it after commenters pointed out that the footage clearly depicted Russian veterans wearing the distinctive St. George ribbon and pins with the Communist hammer and sickle.”

For reasons unknown the accidental usage of Russian imagery appears to have only occurred in ads by Republicans and only Russian footage. Footage from any other country, for instance, Canada, Australia, or Mexico, does not appear to have ever mistakenly been used.

See Lake’s ad above or at this link (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2022/10/arizona-gop-nominee-caught-red-handed-using-footage-of-russian-troops-marching-in-a-victory-parade-in-her-campaign-ad/).

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an 922

On Monday, September 26, the Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial board published an editorial attacking Democratic Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (https://www.wsj.com/articles/arizonas-school-choice-election-katie-hobbs-education-savings-accounts-governor-doug-ducey-11663335266?mod=opinion_lead_pos3) — who is running against far-right MAGA Republican and conspiracy theorist Kari Lake in Arizona’s 2022 gubernatorial race —for her views on “school choice.” The WSJ’s editorial board recommended that Lake emphasize “school choice” rather than the 2020 presidential election, which she falsely claims was stolen from Donald Trump. And veteran conservative columnist Mona Charen, in a scathing article published by The Bulwark (https://www.thebulwark.com/what-country-is-the-wall-street-journal-living-in/) on September 28, slams the Journal’s editorial board for turning a blind eye to Lake’s extremism.

In its editorial, WSJ’s editorial board wrote, “The race for governor is close, and Democrats are seeking to rev up turnout by making the election about Donald Trump. GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake hasn’t helped herself or her party by insisting that the 2020 election was stolen. Her election fraud claims put off many Republicans and independents and are a loser in the general election. A winning and unifying issue for Republicans this November is school choice.”

The board continued, “(Florida Gov. Ron) DeSantis won in 2018 thanks in part to support from black mothers who were worried his Democratic opponent would take away their kids’ state scholarships. Ms. Lake has a chance to drive a similar message, and Ms. Hobbs has made herself vulnerable by telling parents they can’t be trusted with school choice.”

READ MORE: Why 'polished and ostensibly moderate' Glenn Youngkin is promoting election deniers: columnist (https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/glenn-youngkin-election-denier/)

Those familiar with Charen’s background know how conservative she is. The 65-year-old Charen worked in the Reagan White House during the 1980s and was a speechwriter for First Lady Nancy Reagan, and the titles of her books include “Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got it Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First” and “Do-Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help (and the Rest of Us).” But Charen has been a blistering critic of former President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, and in 2020, she endorsed Joe Biden for president.

In her Bulwark article, Charen notes that she agrees with “school choice” and has been critical of teachers’ unions. But “school choice,” she emphasizes, is no reason to endorse someone as “extreme” as Lake.

“Disturbing, extremist, and otherwise unfit candidates dot the national landscape in 2022 like monkeypox, from Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania to J.D. Vance in Ohio to Don Bolduc in New Hampshire, but Arizona surely takes the highest honors for the sheer concentration of ranting incompetents who threaten the democratic process,” Charen writes. “Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor, whom the Journal is endorsing, may be in favor of school choice, but that’s a little beside the point when you consider the larger picture. Kari Lake has declared that the 2020 election was ‘corrupt and stolen.’ Regarding the current president of the United States, she has expressed pity, urging that ‘deep down, I think we all know this illegitimate fool in the White House — I feel sorry for him — didn’t win. I hope Americans are smart enough to know that.’”

Charen continues, “She has no patience for temporizers. ‘It is not enough to say you are for ‘Election Integrity’ if you are not for DECERTIFYING the 2020 election if wrongdoing, fraud or different results are revealed,’ she tweeted last year. She then boasted that she was the only candidate for governor calling for decertification of the 2020 election. In addition to the standard denial of the 2020 election, Lake has also adopted the smarmy tactics Trump has normalized in the GOP. When former Congressman Matt Salmon, one of her primary opponents, demurred aboutputting cameras in every Arizona classroom, she accused him of coddling pedophiles and sneered that he was too weak to be governor.”

READ MORE: Meghan McCain melts down after Kari Lake and other GOP extremists win in Arizona elections (https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/meghan-mccain/)

According to Charen, WSJ’s editorial board has responded to such “awkward realities” by viewing them “as problems only insofar as they make it harder for her to win.”

“Again, I tend to agree with the Journal’s editorial board on many policy matters,” Charen writes. “Pro-school choice? Check. Pro-free enterprise? Check. Anti-regulation? Much of the time, yes. Pro-free trade? Double check. Pro-immigration? Check. Anti-big government? Check. But they are pretending, or perhaps deluding themselves, that the Republican Party remains, underneath it all, the party of Paul Ryan and Larry Hogan and Chris Sununu, and that the country will be better off if Republicans win elections, full stop.”

Charen continues, “Yet as Liz Cheney sees and is willing to say, that’s not this Republican Party. This GOP is the party of Mastriano and Vance and yes, Kari Lake. This is a party that cannot be trusted with power, that openly proclaims its eagerness to overturn elections. Next to that, everything else, including school choice and regulation and taxes, pales to insignificance. The Wall Street Journal editorial board has continuing influence with reasonable center-right voters. They owe them better.”

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

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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

Rose 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 Laketold 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 Caucus and 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 candidate Trump, 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.”

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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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Former President Donald Trump suffered a major humiliation in Georgia when, in May, Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger crushed their “Stop the Steal” challengers in GOP primaries; Kemp, in fact, defeated the Trump-backed former Sen. David Perdue by a brutal 52 percent (https://www.npr.org/2022/05/24/1100739768/georgia-trump-kemp-perdue-abrams-primary-election-lies). But in Arizona, another key swing state that President Joe Biden won in 2020, there were much different outcomes in Republican primaries that found the most extreme, far-right “Stop the Steal” MAGA candidates defeating more traditional conservatives. The Big Lie promoters (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2022-election/kari-lake-trump-backed-election-denier-wins-gop-primary-arizona-govern-rcna41317) who are now competing with Democratic nominees in the general election in Arizona include gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, secretary of state nominee Mark Finchem and state attorney general nominee Abraham Hamadeh.

Lake, Finchem and Hamadeh have all falsely claimed that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump in Arizona through widespread voter fraud. It wasn’t; recount after recount has made it abundantly clear that Biden defeated Trump fair and square in Arizona, where on Election Night 2020, right-wing Fox News’ decision desk was the first to call the Grand Canyon State for Biden.

In an article published by Politico (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/08/18/trumps-man-in-arizona-might-get-the-last-laugh-00052519) on August 18, Phoenix-based journalist Hank Stephenson — who co-founded the Arizona Agenda newsletter — describes a conflict within the Arizona GOP: far-right MAGA conspiracy theorists versus traditional conservatives. And Arizona’s traditional conservatives, according to Stephenson, fear that they’re losing the battle.

READ MORE: [Why Ron DeSantis is stumping for election deniers in key swing states: report (https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/ron-desantis-stumping-election-deniers/)

“When Arizona state lawmaker Mark Finchem, a 2020 election denier who deals in fringe legal theories, won the Republican nomination for secretary of state earlier this month, many of his GOP colleagues in the (Arizona) State Legislature couldn’t believe it,” Stephenson explains. “To be clear, they knew he would win — he had Donald Trump’s endorsement — but they were still stunned. Mark Finchem. Him. A back-bench lawmaker best known locally for his over-the-top drugstore cowboy get-ups and extreme ideas, Finchem would be in charge of the state’s elections should he win in November. That would also put him first in the line of succession for the governorship since Arizona doesn’t have a lieutenant governor.”

The political landscape in Arizona has changed dramatically from what it was back in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. In those days, Arizona was known for being a deep red state and was closely identified with Goldwater conservatism — as in Sen. Barry Goldwater and his successor, Sen. John McCain. Now, it is a swing state with two centrist Democratic U.S. senators: Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly, who is running for reelection this year and is up against Trump-backed MAGA Republican Blake Masters.

These days, it isn’t uncommon to hear Arizona Democrats say that they miss the days of Goldwater/McCain conservatism — which is ironic in light of the fact that when Goldwater won the 1964 GOP presidential nomination, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) successfully painted him as an extremist who would get the U.S. into a nuclear war (the infamous “daisy ad” (https://youtu.be/2cwqHB6QeUw) that sunk Goldwater’s 1964 campaign can be found on YouTube). But the MAGA Republicans of 2022 are way to the right of Goldwater, who was considered an arch-conservative in his day, and McCain. Democrat Sinema often praises McCain, who was proud to call himself a Goldwater conservative.

But while Arizona on the whole is much more of a swing state than it was 30 or 40 years ago, much of the Arizona GOP has been moving more and more to the MAGA far right.

[READ MORE: \Meghan McCain melts down after Kari Lake and other GOP extremists win in Arizona elections (https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/meghan-mccain/)

“Trump’s slate of political insurgents swept the GOP nomination for every state office in which he offered his blessing, from the U.S. Senate down to state Senate races,” Stephenson explains. “After decades of civil war, the Arizona primaries mark a decisive swing in the state GOP’s balance of power. The center-right, pro-business wing of the party led by the late Sen. John McCain and Gov. Doug Ducey has been defeated, at least for now. Finchem and other far-right outsiders — the original Tea Party activists and the new Trumpist hardliners — have taken over…. Lake, a former TV news anchor, fended off more than $20 million in spending against her to narrowly capture the nomination, despite her opponent’s backing from Ducey, former GOP Gov. Jan Brewer and former Vice President Mike Pence.”

Stephenson warns that if Lake, Finchem and other MAGA Republicans are victorious in November and Trump runs for president in 2024, Trump could have “a slate of statewide officials who could steal the election for him” in Arizona.

Arizona State Sen. Paul Boyer, a conservative Republican who received death threats from MAGA extremists after refusing to go along with the Big Lie, decided not to seek reelection in 2022. Discussing the Arizona primary results with Politico, Boyer commented, “Abe Hamadeh for AG? Kari Lake for governor? It’s very simple. If you can fog up a mirror and win the ‘Arizona Apprentice,’ you’re good.”

Many Never Trump conservatives are hoping that if Democrats enjoy a lot of victories in Arizona in November, the Arizona GOP will move away from extremism. But Barrett Marson, a GOP consultant in the Grand Canyon State, isn’t so sure that MAGA losses in November would discourage the Arizona Republican Party from continuing to move in the direction.

Marson told Politico, “It may take a drubbing at the polls this year to get Republican voters off the Trump train. Or maybe they’ll just double down.”

READ MORE: How Trump made Arizona’s gubernatorial race a vendetta against Doug Ducey (https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/how-trump-has-made-arizonas-gubernatorial-race-a-vendetta-against-doug-ducey/)

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8 15 22 an

In six key battleground states that played a decisive role in the 2020 presidential race, Republican candidates who have openly embraced former President Donald Trump's "Big Lie" have won nearly two-thirds of the GOP nominating contests for positions with power over state and federal elections, a potentially seismic threat to democracy.

According to a Washington Post analysis (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/15/election-deniers-march-toward-power-key-2024-battlegrounds/) published Monday, 54 of 87 Republican nominees for key posts in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin have denied the legitimacy of President Joe Biden's 2020 election victory.

"Had those candidates held power in 2020, they would have had the electoral clout to try something that the current officeholders refused: overturning the vote and denying Biden the presidency," the Post notes. "Whether they could have succeeded in practice is a matter of vigorous debate among scholars, who cite the potential for court challenges and other means of upholding the results."

"But the experts agree on one thing: A close presidential contest that comes down to the outcome in states where officials are willing to try to thwart the popular will could throw the country into chaos," the newspaper adds. "It would potentially delay the result, undermine confidence in the democratic system, and sow the seeds of civil strife on a scale even greater than what the nation saw on January 6, 2021."

Trump, who is gearing up for a possible 2024 run as he's under criminal investigation (https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/07/27/big-news-doj-investigating-trump-criminal-probe-jan-6-attack) by the Justice Department (https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/08/12/insane-search-warrant-indicates-fbi-investigating-trump-espionage-act-violation), has endorsed and campaigned for many of the candidates featured in the Post's analysis, including Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake—a former TV news anchor whose incessant lies about the 2020 election catapulted her to a win (https://apnews.com/article/kari-lake-arizona-governor-election-karrin-taylor-robson-e8f6cb66e63bc63464d149112d77d2a4) in the GOP primary earlier this month, delighting (https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/07/trump-gop-kari-lake-00050215) the former president.

Even in victory, Lake lashed out at the Arizona election process, complaining (https://twitter.com/KariLake/status/1555377932096249856) that the results "took longer than they should have."

The Post's analysis confirms that Arizona, a state Biden carried narrowly in 2020, is a bastion of election denial on the GOP side: 12 of 13 Republican nominees for state and federal offices there have questioned the election, including the chosen candidate for secretary of state (https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/08/03/jan-6-rallygoer-wins-gop-primary-arizonas-top-election-official).

[twt graf]

noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, called (https://twitter.com/NoahBookbinder/status/1559186901709402113) the rise of GOP election deniers across the U.S. "the biggest story not enough people are watching."

"This is how our democracy could crumble, quickly and quietly," Bookbinder warned.

The notion that Biden was elected illegitimately is broadly popular (https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2022/70-percent-republicans-falsely-believe-stolen-election-trump/) with Republican voters, according to recent opinion surveys. As the Post points out, "The predilection among Republican primary voters toward candidates who deny the result of the last election extends well beyond Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona—three states that together accounted for 47 electoral votes in 2020, more than enough to flip the last election to Trump."

Ian Vandewalker, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, wrote in a blog post (https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/arizona-primary-shows-how-election-deniers-win-where-their-party-pushes) earlier this month that "the Big Lie that the election was stolen from Trump has been pushed by powerful politicians, starting with Trump himself."

"But it may be leaders closer to home who have the greatest ability to affect the popularity of election denial among the people of their state," he added.

One prominent Republican officeholder that is actively boosting election deniers is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a possible 2024 presidential contender.

The Orlando Sentinel reported (https://www.orlandosentinel.com/politics/2022-election/os-ne-politics-2022-election-desantis-rally-election-deniers-20220808-xzf6zhr4mnarlmotsq3emjrvfi-story.html) last week that DeSantis is "set to appear at rallies for Pennsylvania GOP governor's candidate Doug Mastriano, Arizona candidate for governor Kari Lake, and U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters, all of whom have denied Biden's win and falsely claimed election fraud.

DeSantis was one of the first Republicans (https://www.orlandosentinel.com/politics/os-ne-eastman-desantis-alternate-electors-20220623-vogwlxv6vvgjhamtg4fqmqiama-story.html) to suggest state legislatures could overrule voters to choose Trump.

"Appearing on Fox News on November 5, two days after the election," the Sentinel observed, "he said 'presidential electors are done by the legislators and the schemes they create and the framework. And if there's departure from that, if they're not following law, if they're ignoring the law, then they can provide remedies as well.'"

The Republican Party's elevation of fervent election deniers—often with the support of dark money (https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/08/01/dark-money-pouring-secretary-state-races-featuring-big-lie-candidates)—in battleground states and nationwide (https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/election-denial-ballot) has dramatically raised the stakes of the upcoming November contests, given that they could usher into power officials willing to subvert the democratic process to secure their desired outcome.

Wisconsin offers an illustrative example of November's implications. As the New York Times reported (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/15/us/politics/wisconsin-governor-supreme-court.html) Monday, "The governor's race this fall, along with a pivotal State Supreme Court contest next spring, will decide whether Republicans can solidify their grip on the swing state and remake its voting laws."

"Nowhere in the country have Republican lawmakers been more aggressive in their attempts to seize a partisan edge than in Wisconsin," the Times noted. "Having gerrymandered the Legislature (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/29/magazine/the-new-front-in-the-gerrymandering-wars-democracy-vs-math.html) past the point that it can be flipped, they are now pushing intensely (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/19/us/politics/wisconsin-republicans-decertify-election.html) to take greater control over the state's voting infrastructure ahead of the 2024 presidential contest."

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press release was sent to the media by Senate Republican spokeswoman Kim Quintero and was subsequently posted on the Senate GOP caucus’ official Twitter page, the Arizona Mirror (https://www.azmirror.com/2022/08/05/karen-fann-used-senate-resources-to-campaign-for-kari-lake/) reported Friday.

Hours later, in the face of intense criticism that the statement broke state law, the Senate retracted the statement and insisted it was “accidentally” distributed through the Senate instead of Fann’s campaign. How that happened is unclear, and neither Fann nor Senate Republican spokeswoman Kim Quintero responded to questions from the Arizona Mirror.

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an 6 22

2022 wacko-rama

although Arizona has gone from being a deep red state to being a swing state, the Arizona GOP has not responded by purging itself of extremists. In fact, far-right MAGA conspiracy theorists like Kelli Ward (https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/kelli-ward-audit/) (who chairs the Arizona Republican Party), gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake (a former television news anchor) and Rep. Paul Gosar have becoming increasingly prominent in Arizona politics. And Arizona Republic opinion columnist Phil Boas, in his June 2 column (https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/philboas/2022/06/02/kari-lake-and-kelli-ward-televangelism-trump-wont-last/7477270001/), has a recommendation for the Arizona GOP: ditch the MAGA extremists and return to a more traditional Barry Goldwater/John McCain type of conservatism.

Lake, who has been endorsed by former President Donald Trump, and Ward have been aggressive promoters of the Big Lie — falsely claiming that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump. Such “whackadoodles,” Boas writes, have been a thorn in the side of non-MAGA conservatives like former Sen. Jeff Flake.

“In Arizona, the whackadoodles took control of the Arizona Republican Party a decade before Trump,” Boas explains. “They were loud and eccentric and loved to censure John McCain. But they were never trusted with more power than, say, your average hamster, so they were perfectly adorable and easily ignored. That changed when the Maricopa County Republican Party invited Donald Trump to speak at the Arizona Biltmore in 2015.”

Boas adds, “Trump then was still considered a pretender in the race for the White House, and his sometimes crude comments led more powerful Republicans such as U.S. Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/07/09/sen-flake-local-gop-should-not-host-trumps-arizona-event/) to protest.”

McCain, a Barry Goldwater disciple who died in 2018, was a scathing critic of Trump and the MAGA movement. And in 2018, Flake — obviously frustrated by the MAGA extremists who had taken over his party — decided not to seek reelection. That seat is now held by a centrist Democrat: Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who has been a frequent source of frustration to the progressive wing of her party but gets along well with members of the McCain family — including John McCain’s widow Cindy McCain (https://www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/media/2021/10/06/cindy-mccain-the-view-kyrsten-sinema/5951428001/) and his daughter, Republican activist Meghan McCain, a former co-host of ABC’s “The View.”

Arizona’s other U.S. Senate seat — the one once held by Goldwater and later, McCain — is also held by a centrist Democrat: Sen. Mark Kelly, who is up for reelection in the 2022 midterms. A state that was, for many years, synonymous with Goldwater/McCain conservatism now has two Democratic U.S. senators.

Boas notes that Lake and Ward have become “the most visible evangelists of Trump Republicanism in Arizona,” arguing that both of them have been terrible for the Arizona GOP.

But Boas stresses that the type of MAGA extremism that Lake and Ward champion was recently rebuked in some GOP primaries in Georgia, where incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp defeated a Trump-backed challenger, former Sen. David Perdue, by a whopping 52%. And incumbent Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/25/raffensperger-wins-georgia-secretary-of-state-primary-over-trump-backed-opponent-00035011) was victorious as well, defeating his challenger, Rep. Jody Hice, by 18%.

Perdue and Hice, like Lake in Arizona, campaigned on the Big Lie.

“In Georgia, a state long considered a peer to Arizona because of its demographic similarities, the old-school Republicans stomped Trump candidates for governor, secretary of state and attorney general,” Boas observes. “Brian Kemp won reelection as Georgia governor, beating Trump errand boy David Perdue (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/05/24/us/elections/results-georgia-governor.html) by 52 points. That’s not a landslide. That’s a collision of planets, an exploding ball of flame that can still be seen through the drapes at Mar-a-Lago.

Boas adds, “If you’ve been buying what the Arizona GOP televangelists have been selling, this might be a good time to short.”

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amanda c

https://www.thebulwark.com/dinesh-dsouzas-2000-mules-is-a-hilarious-mockumentary/

dinesh D’Souza’s 2000 Mules is Plandemic for election truthers. For the non-insane, it’s a hilarious mockumentary. Not that D’Souza cares what the non-insane think: He has discovered that there are enough suckers out there to keep him laughing all the way to the bank.

Released by the Salem Media Group,2000 Mules aspires to be a work of serious investigative reporting which will rock the foundations of American democracy. In reality, 2000 Mulesis an investigative documentary in roughly the same way Reno 911 was a hard-hitting look at real-life police work. Though that doesn’t mean that D’Souza’s cash-grab won’t further pollute the political system. For instance, Kari Lake, who can’t wait to get elected governor of Arizona so she can jail her political opponents (https://www.thebulwark.com/the-truth-according-to-kari-lake/), is championing the film (https://twitter.com/KariLake/status/1524157792826761216)—which ends with a plea for law enforcement to take up D’Souza’s cause.

Here’s the elevator pitch for 2000 Mules: D’Souza’s buddies at True the Vote spent $2 million on cellphone geotracking data—which he describes as “digital DNA”—that they say proves “mules” were paid to illegally “traffick” thousands of ballots from non-profit “stash houses” into drop-off ballot boxes.

All D’Souza really has—if the cellphone data is real and is really what he represents it as being—is some evidence that some people made frequent trips in areas around ballot drop-off boxes which, by design, were usually placed in heavily-traveled areas for convenience. Putting that aside, who are these mules? Who paid them? Where is the evidence of people making repeated trips to illegally stuff drop-boxes with ballots? What non-profits were involved? These questions are not even asked, let alone answered, in the movie. The theory of the case relies almost entirely on digital maps with dots and squiggles, supposedly demonstrating the questionable movement of the “mules.” Boom-Diggity. All that’s left is for the FBI to take it from here. Or something.

2000 Mules doesn’t survive the most basic fact-checks to support its most important claims. See them here (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/11/2000-mules-offers-least-convincing-election-fraud-theory-yet/), here (https://www.ajc.com/politics/what-2000-mules-leaves-out-from-ballot-harvesting-claims/FFMNUU56RVBRNOLZKWHUREQPEU/), here (https://www.denverpost.com/2022/05/08/2000-mules-fact-check/), and here (https://www.politifact.com/article/2022/may/04/faulty-premise-2000-mules-trailer-about-voting-mai/). But, let’s stipulate that the film’s purpose isn’t really to present facts. Because if it were true that D’Souza had rock-solid evidence of widespread voter fraud in his possession, would a true patriot like him be selling that evidence for $29.99 per download? Bwahahaha. (In defense of D’Souza, that $29.99 was only the premium VOD price. This week he dropped it to $19.99 to buy or just $14.99 to rent. Or you can get the movie free by purchasing an annual subscription to his Rumble channel!)

It’s better to view the film as a performance piece, a comedic triumph where the joke is on the rubes gullible enough to give D’Souza their money.

some quick backstory: The people behind True the Vote—Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips–have been unsuccessfully hunting the Loch Ness Monster of voter fraud (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/02/voter-fraud-loch-ness-monster-republicans-trump-benjamin-ginsberg) for many years. After the 2016 election, Phillips claimed he “verified” that more than 3 million votes were illegally cast by “non-citizens.” Piggybacking on Phillips, Trump launched a “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity” to pursue this and other claims (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/gregg-phillips-trump-voter-fraud/515046/). Chaired by Vice President Mike Pence and former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the commission ultimately found no evidence of widespread voter fraud and disbanded without ever producing a report. (Since producing such a report would contradict Trump’s kooky allies.)

After the 2020 election, True the Vote sought $7 million (https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/true-vote-lawsuit-fraud-eshelman/2021/02/15/a7017adc-6724-11eb-886d-5264d4ceb46d_story.html) to chase down new voter fraud stories and shop them to GOP consultants in hopes of getting some courtroom or member of Congress to take them seriously. But even in the cluster that was the Kraken #StopTheSteal show, they had no takers. It was such a disaster that one of True the Vote’s biggest donors, who gifted the organization $2.5 million, took the group to court to get his money back (https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/true-vote-lawsuit-fraud-eshelman/2021/02/15/a7017adc-6724-11eb-886d-5264d4ceb46d_story.html), citing their failed efforts.

All of which goes to say that True the Vote’s tall tales are too dumb even for its biggest supporters to go along with anymore. D’Souza, however, is happy to scrape up the bullshit and repackage it for the direct-to-consumer market.

some of the film’s funniest moments come when D’Souza summons his fellow Salem Media Group talkers—Dennis Prager, Eric Metaxes, Seb Gorka, and Charlie Kirk—for a meeting of the minds to discuss their thoughts about election fraud before and after viewing D’Souza’s movie.

The “before” meeting amounts to an assortment of pronouncements about how none of these very fine people believe that Biden won. They cite the massive turnout in the election, GOP success down-ballot, Trump’s ability to draw large crowds, and apparent popularity in the face of withering media coverage.

Kirk offers that “millions of Americans know something went wrong, and they have little pieces, and no one’s really put it together.” Prager, somewhat of an outlier in the group, says he wants someone to “show me the proof” of fraud. Which sets the stage for D’Souza to helpfully put the pieces together.

The movie draws heavy suspicions about people who dropped off ballots early in the morning, wore gloves to drop off ballots, and took photos of drop boxes. All this is drummed up as proof of nefarious activity captured on surveillance video. Coupled with the True the Vote’s geotracking data, the viewer is led to believe these were the “mules” making repeat trips to unnamed non-profit offices to collect ballots and “traffick” them to drop boxes. One problem: They have no video showing these individuals making repeat trips to said non-profits or drop locations, or evidence they were paid to do so. Also, one of the so-called “mules” presented in the film has already been investigated by Georgia (https://www.ajc.com/politics/what-2000-mules-leaves-out-from-ballot-harvesting-claims/FFMNUU56RVBRNOLZKWHUREQPEU/) officials and no evidence of wrongdoing was found.

No matter. Engelbrecht and Phillips make their presentation to the group and the guys jump on the clips accordingly. What Salem wants, Salem gets.

Questioning why someone would drop off ballots late at night or early in the morning is a common refrain, even though drop boxes were implemented precisely so voters could drop off their ballots any time they chose. For this, these unnamed individuals are depicted as dangerous people. Phillips described them as “not grandma out walking her dog.” They have “bad backgrounds, bad reputations, we’ve had encounters with several who are not terribly positive.”

“Violent guys?” D’Souza asked.

“Can be,” Phillips replied. “They are interested in one thing, that’s money.”

But even the Salem hosts seem wise to the game and acknowledge that D’Souza hasn’t, and won’t be able to prove anything. Gorka sums it up with this non sequitur: “It’s the perfect crime because it cannot be curated after it’s committed.”

Kirk says: “I don’t think we will ever know the full story and what makes this crime so compelling and unique is that once the ballot enters the system it’s really hard to reverse engineer it. But when you have the cell phone geolocation data and then the actual footage. . . it explains the sudden spike of Biden support that we saw late at night.”

At this point, all that’s left is for law enforcement to intervene. “There’s an easy way to bust it,” D’Souza says. “Law enforcement has to step in . . . go interview the mules. Who paid you? Where did you get the money?”

Which satisfies Prager enough to bellow:

“They have ruined election day in the United States of America. That’s provable, and that is enough for me to fight the left with every fiber in my body!” This counts as a conversion. But, considering the fact Prager is someone who also believes the left is destroying Western civilization ,”:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"/maxresdefault.jpg) (https://youtu.be/fSpwSEVpk3I),” it’s not like he needed any pretext from D’Souza to declare total war on the Democrats. That’s just a regular day at the office for the old man.

the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro reviewed (https://youtu.be/BnYWx2Ozahk)2000 Mules and said, “my problem with the documentary” is that “there are dots that need filling in.” He said:

You can question all the ballot harvesting; you can take for granted that all the geolocation data that they’re using is actually true . . . that does not mean all those ballots are illegal votes. . . . . What you need is actual evidence of people going to multiple drop boxes that isn’t just the cell phone data moving past the drop boxes. . . I guess what I would say is an answer that’s gonna make nobody happy. I think that the data is really interesting. I think that it’s really suspicious for sure, I don’t think it’s just positive that this alone shifted the election . . . I think the conclusion of the film is not justified by the premises of the film itself. There are a bunch of dots that need to be connected. Maybe they will be connected, but they haven’t been connected in the film.

But I suspect that D’Souza is delighted with even the critical reviews. A hate watch is still a watch. All the people talking and writing about 2000 Mules means more relevance and more downloads and more income. Despite being released only on “non-cancelable” platforms, D’Souza says the film has grossed $10 million (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2000-mules-becomes-most-successful-160000389.html).

What burns D’Souza are the people who won’t give him attention—especially those at Fox News and Newsmax (https://www.thedailybeast.com/dinesh-dsouza-claims-tucker-carlson-and-newsmax-wont-promote-his-batshit-movie). And why shouldn’t he be? The movie’s storyline, complete with a brown menace (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/30/us/tucker-carlson-gop-republican-party.html) subplot, is tailor-made for their audiences. At one point in the film, a woman, who keeps her identity hidden, says she worked as a “mule” in Yuma County, Arizona, on behalf of an organization that collected ballots from Hispanic people who were unable for various reasons to get to the polls. “Most of the Hispanics that live in the town are not well educated as far as the law . . . I call it the Mexican mafia, seriously because they work like that.”

How could Fox and Newsmax resist this premium content? Probably because the executives at these infotainment companies are wary of fighting another round of lawsuits (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trial-date-set-defamation-suit-against-fox-news-over-us-election-claims-2022-04-12/) for pushing bogus election claims (https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21039760/dominion-suit-oan-23431510r.pdf). Dinesh D’Souza is judgment proof (https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/what-does-judgment-proof-mean.html). Fox and Newsmax aren’t.

Donald Trump is mad about the Fox blackout, too. He gave the film a glitzy premiere at Mar-a-Lago (https://www.mediaite.com/opinion/glitz-glamour-and-election-fraud-sights-and-sounds-from-the-mar-a-lago-premiere-of-dinesh-dsouzas-loony-2020-film/), and still, no love from Tucker Carlson. Waaaah.

“Fox News is no longer Fox News,” Trump posted on his Truth Social account. “They won’t even show or discuss the greatest & most impactful documentary of our time, ‘2000 Mules.’ The Radical Left Democrats are thrilled – They don’t want the TRUTH to get out.”

In a way, the pairing of 2000 Mules and Truth Social is perfect: A pretend social media company doing PR for a fake documentary, with both siphoning off dollars from gullible superfans.

It would be funny if these people weren’t also the past and possible future of the United States government.

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2 22 an salon

Donald Trump's pick to be the next governor of Arizona, Kari Lake, a former local television reporter with no political experience, praises cops, touts "back the blue" on her campaign website (https://www.karilake.com/issues) and vows to increase resources to tackle violent criminals. She's also hit the campaign trail multiple times with a convicted felon who was accused by the Justice Department (DOJ) of trying to kill an FBI informant.

According to a finance report (https://seethemoney.az.gov/PublicReports/2022/800F346B-6C37-4FC5-BFB9-A21B61181BE9.pdf) recently amended by Lake's campaign, the former TV news anchor who has repeatedly echoed Trump's election lies paid $2,000 to Kenneth Ulibarri, a repeat violent offender who pleaded guilty after the DOJ accused him of trying to hire a hitman to kill an FBI informant and an unrelated state charge of battery on a peace officer.

Ulibarri spoke (https://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/51298741460/in/photostream/) at Lake's "Stand for Freedom" rally in Scottsdale last July, the first rally (https://twitter.com/KariLake/status/1409578821037133824) of her campaign. He was introduced as a man who's "been addicted to drugs, imprisoned, and totally hopeless" before a "miracle came" and he became a small business owner "on a mission to help others break free from addiction." Ulibarri used his rally speech (https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=1178546679225897) to rail against "liberal policies that are destroying our country" and a laundry list of conservative culture war issues while touting his nonprofit work helping teenagers become "soldiers for Christ."

"She stands for all the things that I believe in," Ulibarri said, adding that he would not send his kids to public school or college because they might "come back with purple hair and gay."

Campaign finance records show that the campaign paid $2,000 to Ulibarri at an address where he is listed as the statutory agent for a natural hair services (https://ecorp.azcc.gov/BusinessSearch/BusinessInfo?entityNumber=23224547) business.

Ulibarri also appeared at a roundtable event with Lake earlier this month, according to images posted to Instagram (https://www.scribd.com/document/560881242/Screen-Shot-2022-02-23-at-2-31-22-PM-converted). It's unclear how many campaign events in total Ulibarri has appeared in. Ulibarri and Lake's campaign did not respond to questions from Salon.

During his July speech, Ulibarri made references to his past but did not mention the extent of his criminal record. As the Justice Department alleged (https://www.justice.gov/usao-nm/pr/former-head-albuquerque-based-drug-trafficking-organization-pleads-guilty-federal-cocaine), in 2015 Ulibarri "attempted to murder an FBI informant to prevent that informant from testifying" in a New Mexico trial related to a drug distribution ring. Ulibarri admitted in a plea agreement that he told another FBI informant that he and others "were hiring a hitman to kill" the FBI informant, though he denied that he was serious and claimed that he only wanted to get money from the second informant under the guise of hiring a hitman, court documents show (https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-nmd-1_12-cr-03182/pdf/USCOURTS-nmd-1_12-cr-03182-9.pdf).

Ulibarri in 2019 pleaded guilty to a 2014 charge of battery upon a peace officer, New Mexico court records (https://caselookup.nmcourts.gov/caselookup/app) show. In 2006, he was arrested on a felony drug warrant after he was found with a known associate of a man charged with killing a New Mexico sheriff, according to KRQE (https://advance.lexis.com/document/?pdmfid=1519360&crid=39f9c2ba-0712-4a9f-a7a4-b6a95561d7f2&pddocfullpath=%2Fshared%2Fdocument%2Fnews%2Furn%3AcontentItem%3A4JMJ-9GY0-TX6T-P1WT-00000-00&pdcontentcomponentid=297753&pdteaserkey=sr23&pditab=allpods&ecomp=xbxnk&earg=sr23&prid=a8d0dd88-98ad-409b-98d0-a92391361962). He was also convicted in 2014 on a charge of driving under the influence, according to state records. In 2000, he pleaded guilty to receiving or transferring a stolen motor vehicle and criminal damage to property. In 1999, he and others were accused of beating another inmate at a New Mexico jail, according to the Albuquerque Journal (https://advance.lexis.com/document/?pdmfid=1519360&crid=1db789c7-2c51-4ad9-a67d-425d458fbea1&pddocfullpath=%2Fshared%2Fdocument%2Fnews%2Furn%3AcontentItem%3A3XKF-7TV0-0045-321B-00000-00&pdcontentcomponentid=160617&pdteaserkey=sr35&pditab=allpods&ecomp=xbxnk&earg=sr35&prid=a8d0dd88-98ad-409b-98d0-a92391361962).

Ulibarri was also charged with two counts of assault on a peace officer in 2002, though those charges were later dropped, and hit with a litany of drug offenses and evidence tampering charges between 2002 and 2013 that were also dropped.

Fellow Republican primary contender Karrin Taylor Robson's campaign called out Lake over her ties to Ulibarri. "Real conservatives who support a secure border and back the blue don't pay a campaign operative with a criminal history that includes drug trafficking, battery of a female officer and attempted murder of an FBI informant," Matthew Benson, a spokesman for Robson's campaign, said in a statement to Salon. "Like everything else involving Kari Lake, her words don't match her actions."

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/kari-lake-says-its-slanderous-to-report-shes-attending-the-white-nationalist-afpac-conference/

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Kari Lake Says It’s ‘Slanderous’ to Report She’s Attending the White Nationalist AFPAC Conference

Kyle MantylaBy Kyle Mantyla | February 18, 2022

The list of those participating in the upcoming America First Political Action Conference continues to grow.

Organized by white nationalist Stop the Steal activist Nick Fuentes, who regularly uses his online platorm to spew antisemitic, misogynistic, racist rhetoric, AFPAC had already announced the participation of a cavalcade of white nationalists, alt-right MAGA activists, and right-wing conspiracy theorists likeStew Peters, Lauren Witzke, Patrick Howley, Michelle Malkin, Jared Taylor, Peter Brimelow, Andrew Torba, Jesse Lee Peterson, Milo Yiannopoulos, Laura Loomer, and former Rep. Steve King.

On Thursday, Fuentes announced the addition of radical birther conspiracy theorist and former sheriff Joe Arpiao and Arizona state Rep. Wendy Rogers, a 67-year-old grandmother who has catapulted onto the national stage after just one term in office thanks to her tireless promotion of the “Big Lie,” her embrace of former President Donald Trump, who has endorsed her bid for reelection, and her outreach to the far-right extremes of the white nationalist America First movement.

Another Trump-endorsed candidate, Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, is featured among the “special guests”who are scheduled to appear in a promotional image for the conference, but Lake is disputing that claim, insisting on Twitter that it is a “false photo” and that it is “slanderous” to report that she intends to participate in AFPAC.

Fuentes tried to smooth things over and came to Lake’s defense on Telegram when other began to attack her for trying to distance herself from AFPAC, asserting that he had been “under the impression” that Lake would be participating but then she had to drop out because of a “scheduling mix-up.”

Last year, Rep. Paul Gosar was among those who spoke at the conference. The congressman—who faced wide criticism for his appearance but was not censured by his party—has not indicated whether he will attend the conference again this year.

Tags: Kari Lake Nick Fuentes AFPAC

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/kari-lake/

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This MAGA conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer, endorsed by Trump, may be Arizona’s next governor

Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake speaking at the 2021 Young Women's Leadership Summit, hosted by Turning Point USA at the Gaylord Texan Resort & Convention Center in Grapevine, Texas, Gage Skidmore

Alex Henderson January 18, 2022

In the past, Kari Lake was a Democrat, a television reporter and a critic of former President Donald Trump. But these days, the 52-year-old Lake is a Republican — specifically, a far-right MAGA Republican and conspiracy theorist of the Marjorie Taylor Greene/Lauren Boebert/Paul Gosar variety. Lake is seeking the nomination in Arizona’s 2022 GOP gubernatorial primary, and journalist Daniel Strauss — in an article recently published by The New Republic — warns that the possibility of Lake winning the primary can’t be ruled out.

Lake, a relentless promoter of the Big Lie, has been endorsed by MAGA wingnuts who include MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn as well as Trump, who is willing to overlook the fact that she was once a critic of him. An anti-vaxxer, Lake has been quite friendly with QAnon activists.

“Lake has never held elected office before, but she’s quickly risen in notoriety during this race,” Strauss explains. “She’s appeared with QAnon activists and Nazi sympathizers. She has supported a secretary of state candidate with ties to the QAnon conspiracy theory movement. Her rivals see her not just as a problem for other candidates running for the nomination, but also, for the party’s chance to keep the governor’s mansion in general…. Lake has said that if she were elected governor, she would direct Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich to open a wide-ranging criminal investigation into the 2020 election.”

One Republican who is sounding the alarm about Lake is GOP strategist Barrett Marson, who is working with one of Lake’s rivals in the primary: former Rep. Matt Salmon. The ex-congressman ran for Arizona governor in the past, narrowly losing to Democrat Janet Napolitano in 2002. Napolitano went on to serve as secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under President Barack Obama.

READ: 'You singlehandedly blocked the Emmett Till antilynching act': Rand Paul scorched over his MLK 'commemoration'

Marson believes that Salmon would be much more electable than Lake, telling The New Republic, “There’s no doubt that if Kari Lake is the nominee, then this state is in play (for Democrats)…. She’s a danger to Republicans losing the gubernatorial race for the first time in 16 years.”

Strauss notes that although other Republican gubernatorial candidates are ahead of Lake in terms of fundraising, she has been “polling ahead of her six other rivals.” Meanwhile, in the Democratic primary, the gubernatorial frontrunner appears to be Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs — who has been pushing back so aggressively against the Big Lie and Trump’s bogus election fraud claims that Lake thinks she should be criminally prosecuted.

“There’s still plenty of time before both parties select their nominees,” Strauss explains, “but it’s entirely possible that the general election could be between Hobbs, after an extended primary, and Lake, having won despite failing to unite the Republican primary behind her candidacy…. A Hobbs versus Lake matchup would almost certainly be one of the more bruising and negative statewide contests in the 2022 cycle.”

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