Demand That The Arizona Senate Begin Expulsion Proceedings For Sen. Wendy Rogers

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Update to White Nationalist Extremists In The Arizona GQP Are Trying To Normalize Fascism (Updated).

In 2018, the Republican-controlled Arizona House of Representatives approved a resolution stating that “the House of Representatives finds that [Republican] Representative Don Shooter’s pattern of conduct was dishonorable and unbecoming of a member.” Arizona House expels Rep. Don Shooter, citing ‘dishonorable’ pattern of workplace harassment.

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If a pattern of conduct which is “dishonorable and unbecoming of a member” is the standard for expulsion from the Arizona legislature, how in God’s name does Arizona state senator Sen. Wendy Rogers not qualify for expuslion from office? She should be expelled from office before the end of this week.

The Arizona Mirror reports,Wendy Rogers said white nationalists are ‘patriots’ and called for hanging political enemies:

A Republican state senator fawned over the leader of a white nationalist movement on Friday and told his followers that she fantasizes about hanging her perceived enemies from gallows.

“I’ve said we need to build more gallows. 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 have betrayed our country,” Sen. Wendy Rogers, R-Flagstaff, said Feb. 25 in her speech to the white nationalist America First Political Action Conference in Florida.

Rogers told the white nationalists who were assembled in the ballroom at the Orlando World Center Marriott that they were “patriots.”

No, these are not “patriots.” They are seditious insurrectionists who want to impose their perverse views of an authoritarian theocratic white Christian nationalism (fascism) on the United States. They are fundamentally opposed to democracy and the Constitution which guarantees the rights of all Americans in a pluralistic society. Anyone who does not subscribe to their cult of white Christian Nationalism and Dominionism – the vast majority of Americans – should be alarmed and outraged by Sen. Wendy Rogers’ comments.

She addressed the AFPAC crowd remotely, speaking from Arizona, where she said she was busy pushing legislation. Rogers effusively praised Nick Fuentes, the event’s racist organizer, who she said had been “de-platformed everywhere” because he says things that upset “the media and the far left.”

“I truly respect Nick because he’s the most persecuted man in America,” she said to loud cheers, adding later that he was “standing up to tyranny” by creating AFPAC.

Fuentes, an advocate of turning America into a nation only for white Christians, is one of the leaders of the so-called “groyper” movement — along with the founder of American Identity Movement, a white nationalist group formerly known as Identity Ervopa — and Rogers is one of its emerging icons. The groyper movement is a collection of white nationalists who seek to normalize racism and make it a part of mainstream conservative political ideology.

AFPAC opened with Fuentes soliciting a round of applause from the crowd for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The white nationalists chanted in response, “Putin! Putin! Putin!” 

In his closing speech, Fuentes said “the United States is the evil empire in the world.”

“Now, they’re going and saying,’’Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler,’ as if that isn’t a good thing,” he said, before nervously laughing and adding, “Oops, I shouldn’t have said that.”

Rogers lamented that there was no longer freedom of speech, and said “we can’t even laugh at comedy any more” for fear of being banned from social media platforms. (The First Amendment protects people from being punished by the government for their speech, but it does not apply to businesses or exempt people from facing consequences for their speech.) She pined for the 1980s and 1990s, when “we could say the craziest stuff and people would just laugh and not take offense, because it was simply light-hearted.”

Calling for the hanging of your political opponents is light-hearted “comedy”? It is inciting violence with eliminationist rhetoric, and you damn well know it.

“Now, they deplatform and debank people like Nick Fuentes, and even President (Donald) Trump,” she said. “This is like the USSR, but worse.”

But you love Putin and “mother Russia,” you disloyal traitor.

The crowd at AFPAC included prominent members of America’s white nationalist movement, among them Jared Taylor and Peter Brimelow. Taylor garnered a following as the editor of a now-defunct pseudo-academic magazine that published pieces from open racists, and he hosts an annual conference that the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as a place “where racist intellectuals rub shoulders with Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists.” Brimelow publishes a popular white nationalist website and has said “the U.S. is a white nation.”

One speaker at the event was Vincent James Foxx, a stalwart white nationalist who said he wanted to “criminalize” LGBTQ Americans and warned of the “Great Replacement.” That idea, popular among white supremacists, holds that white Americans are being replaced by non-white immigrants.

It has also inspired violence. Fears of immigrants undermining his vision of a white Christian Europe motivated Anders Behring Breivik’s murderous rampage in 2011 at a Norwegian youth summer camp. In the U.S., the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018 was the deadliest attack against the Jewish community in United States history. Just before it took place, the killer took to right-wing social media site Gab to say he believed that immigrants were being brought in to replace and “kill our people.” The next year in New Zealand, 51 people would be killed and 40 injured but not before the shooter would post a 74-page manifesto titled “The Great Replacement.”

After Foxx spoke, Rogers gushed over him on Telegram: “Vincent James run for office.”

Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar, a Republican from Prescott, gave a brief video address, a far cry from last year, when he was the featured speaker.

Sen. Wendy Rogers is also a proud member of the Oath Keepers, a far-right domestic terrorist organization that the Department of Justice is prosecuting for seditious conspiracy after the violent MAGA/QAnon seditious insurrection in the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Leader of Oath Keepers and 10 Other Individuals Indicted in Federal Court for Seditious Conspiracy and Other Offenses Related to U.S. Capitol Breach.

More than a year ago, a coalition of ten community organizations called for the expulsion of several Republican lawmakers before Arizona’s legislative session began in January of 2021. Organizations call for expulsion of several Arizona GOP lawmakers:

The groups are calling for Kelly Townsend, Mark Finchem, Wendy Rogers, Sonny Borrelli, David Cook, Walt Blackman and David Livingston be removed because they publicly advocated the overturning of the 2020 election results.

Jenny Guzman with Progress Arizona, one of the ten organizations calling for their removal, told KTAR News 92.3 FM their support of baseless election fraud conspiracy theories contradicts their soon to be taken oath of office to uphold the Constitution.

Guzman added the lawmakers are only interested in themselves and claimed it was evident by their social media posts and the events they attended.

She also claimed the legislators’ public support of overturning the election enabled the insurrection on Capitol Hill.

If they are not removed, the coalition asks Senate President Karen Fann and House Speaker Rusty Bowers to bar them from leadership roles, including committee chairmanships.

They are all still in office. Senate President Karen Fann, the driving force behind the Arizona Senate’s GQP sham “fraudit” has since made QAnon Queen Kelly Townsend chair of the Senate Government Committee where she is pursuing numerous bills based upon the discredited “fraudit” and promoting Trump’s Big Lie. Several of those bills are sponsored by Wendy Rogers.

Senate President Karen Fann is going to have a harder time ignoring demands for the expulsion of Sen. Wendy Rogers from the Arizona Senate after calling for the execution of anyone who is not a supporter of the cult of white Christian Nationalism (which would include most members of the Arizona legislature), fawningly praising a Neo-Nazi who calls the U.S. the “Great Satan,” and praises Adolph Hitler and is “Rootin’ for Putin” against democracy and the interests of the free world led by the United States.

Call your state senator, and Sen. Karen Fann (Phone Number: 602-926-5874) today, and demand that the Arizona Senate begin expulsion proceedings this week for Sen. Wendy Rogers. She is in clear violation of her oath of office, and she has established a clear “pattern of conduct that is dishonorable and unbecoming of a member.”

If it was good enough for Don Shooter, it is more than good enough for Wendy Rogers. She is an embarrassment to the institution of the Arizona Senate (and yes, I know this is true for many others). Wendy Rogers needs to be made an example for others. Expel her from the Arizona Senate ASAP.





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