Remember a couple months ago Arizona state Senator Wendy Rogers received something no other Arizona legislator had earned in 30 years (and believe me, we’ve had some crazy motherfuckers who deserved one): a formal censure from the Legislature for praising Putin, damning Zelenskyy, and threatening her opponents.
You may have heard, ours is a Republican, quite conservative Legislature—you know, the bozos behind the “audit” boondoggle—and they’re running a close 2nd or 3rd to Florida and Texas when it comes to hating on women, education, immigrants, LGBTQ, voting, and a fair economy. My point is this is a conservative place, so to be censured by these knuckleheads, members of your own party, probably means you’ve done some pretty nasty shit. Sen. Rogers did, but while Republicans voted overwhelmingly to censure her on March 1, the actual document doesn’t say what she did. The censure does not even mention Rogers by name.
Spineless, frightened jackasses! WTF are they afraid of? Oh, that’s right, Trump. He adores Wendy Rogers, who’s got just the right amount of racism, theocratic nutballery, conspiracy madness, and crackpot DNA, along with her steamy embrace of the big lie, that she’s earned that draft-dodging predator’s endorsement. Congratulations.
So Arizona’s pucker-up Republicans won’t call out Rogers by name, nor mention what she said or did. For instance, they didn’t censure her for speaking at Nick Fuentes’ Putin-lovefest in February (his retort to CPAC, which isn’t into Holocaust denial enough), where she called the assembled white supremacists “patriots,” advocated hanging her political opponents, threatened fellow Republicans, and branded Zelenskyy a globalist puppet for Soros. Nor did the GOP censure her for tweeting that the social democracies of Europe that are aiding Ukraine are building a new Third Reich.
Is she complimenting the European nations by comparing them to nazis, because at the white nationalist rally she had just attended (MTG was there too) they cheered Hitler (and Putin). The Legislature’s censure doesn’t mention these tweets and comments; instead they rebuked Rogers for some namby-pamby bullshit like “conduct unbecoming of a senator” and “encouraging violence,” and “damag[ing] the reputation of the Arizona state Senate,” without saying who or what.
But now Rogers, a member of the Oath Keepers, is out with another garbage dump that Arizona officials can’t ignore, because the content is too recent and too raw—the Buffalo massacre. It’s one thing to tweet conspiracies about voting machines or distant wars, but to go all Alex Jones and claim Buffalo’s tragedies are part of a Federal plot to do … what? It didn’t even take them a day.
Nick Fuentes tweeted without evidence that Buffalo was a false flag, then Rogers posted a short comment on Telegram along the same lines—suggesting the murder of 10 people in Buffalo was a government job:
As news of the mass shooting by a white suspect who had posted a racist screed on the internet and driven about 200 miles to a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, Rogers [posted on Telegram] "Fed boy summer has started in Buffalo."
The Arizona Mirror notes that her “use of the phrase ‘fed boy summer’ appears to be a nod to ‘white boy summer,’ a viral meme used by neo-Nazis and white nationalists in 2021.” It also implicates the Federal government in a mass shooting.
Arizona Democrats immediately called for Rogers’ removal. For years they’ve put up with her bigotry, homophobia, religious vomit, antisemitism, and trump talking points, but the vote to expel Rogers failed. The Republican Legislature released a statement condemning the “heinous” crimes in Buffalo, without mentioning Rogers’ post or the significant media attention it has received, even in Buffalo.
Her ugly words and QAnon conspiracies are more and more unavoidable: In the wake of fluffing Putin and cheering on insurrectionists she actually suggests Buffalo is part of a federal conspiracy, not the work of a young, impressionable, Tucker-loving, gun-hugging white nationalist, i.e., Rogers’ base, Trump’s people. So instead of removing her from office and risk offending the orange shit stain in Mar-a-Lago they’re going to investigate her.
… to move forward with an investigation by the Senate Ethics Committee. The committee will now examine Rogers' remarks "relating to the Buffalo shooting as inappropriate of an elected official with this body."
Sen. Lisa Otondo, a Democrat from Yuma, said what a lot of us are thinking: “What more investigation do we need? … The evidence is right here in front of us." Bingo! How can Rogers’ recent posts not be “inappropriate”? She’s a bigot and her words are dangerous, remove her now! Rogers tweeted, “Sadly, my comment was taken completely out of context...” But there wasn’t a whole lotta context to take it out of—she wrote one friggin’ line, seven words. What context?
Victims that Republicans always are, Sen. Rogers highlighted the first censure in her fundraising materials (they’re silencing me!), so it’s no surprise that, investigation or not, she was out on the stump immediately after the current scandal with GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and Secretary of State candidate Mark Finchem—the Trump trifecta of Q-nuttery. Lake has recently adopted the Trump strategy of pissing on war heroes—in her case, John McCain. Finchem, who was part of the Jan. 6 mob, says the first thing he’ll do as SoS is decertify the 2020 election. Like he could do that. All three are all-in on the big lie.
It says a lot about the kinds of officials Lake and Finchem would be when they welcome to the stage with them a once-censured, now-investigated Putin admirer, xenophobe, Jan. 6 cheerleader, and Buffalo false flagger. I guess they’re okay with that.