TOXIC TALK?
Political candidates with extreme positions on overturning elections could end up governing Ariz.
Extreme positions exist on both sides of the political spectrum, but Arizona Republicans, with a good chance of retaining control of the state Legislature, have the most candidates spreading false information about the election system and conspiracy theories.
Arizona voters could put candidates who support overturning elections in control at the Legislature and also in statewide offices including governor and secretary of state.
Republican legislative candidates include Oath Keepers and people who believe in, or have dabbled in, conspiracies like QAnon and a century-old imagined plot that a Jewish banking family manipulates geopolitics.
By contrast, no Democratic candidates for the Legislature appear to have a history in Antifa or other left-wing extremist organizations, and Democrats
have not publicly spread false, debunked allegations about the election system.
Not all GOP candidates who Democrats consider extreme actually fit that label. And moderate Republicans are running, too. A list of moderate Republicans running for the Legislature this year might include Ken Bennett of Prescott, a former secretary of state who worked as a liaison for the state Senate’s partisan audit but believes President Joe Biden won the 2020 election, or three-term House member David Cook, who voted against Gov. Doug Ducey’s flat tax last year and prioritizes paying down the state’s debt.
But out of 90 seats in the Legislature, more than a dozen GOP candidates — five running for the state Senate, the rest for the House — have been accused by partisans of extremism and have records worth exploring.
“We’ll never know who legitimately won the election.” Christian Lamar
A Republican who is running for the state House in central Phoenix’s Legislative District 2
Quang Nguyen escaped the Communist regime of Vietnam when his family was evacuated to the United States in the early 1970s. Now, 59 and a Republican state lawmaker from Legislative District 1 in highly conservative Prescott Valley, Nguyen said he helps his community as a member of the Yavapai County Oath Keepers.
Nationally, the Oath Keepers group is a “large but loosely organized collection of individuals, some of whom are associated with militias,” according to the U.S. Department of Justice, which is prosecuting 11 of its leaders, including Phoenix resident Edward Vallejo, on charges of seditious conspiracy related to the riot at the U.S. Capitol. “Members and affiliates of the Oath Keepers were among the individuals and groups who forcibly entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.”
The Anti-Defamation League and Democrats have called the organization an extremist group. Other local elected officials who have declared themselves members include Rep. Mark Finchem — the Trump-endorsed Republican nominee for secretary of state — and state Sen. Wendy Rogers, who won the Aug. 2 primary in Legislative District 7 against fellow Oath Keeper state Sen. Kelly Townsend.
Nguyen said it was a “misunderstood” organization and that the Yavapai County chapter has no affiliation with the national chapter. The extremism label is unfair, he said.
“I’m not an extremist and will never be one,” Nguyen said. “They are not a racist organization because I have been a member.”
Nguyen said the group is made up mostly of former or retired first responders. He goes to meetings a couple of times a year to work on preparedness training, learning to work radios and perform first aid. They’re training for community emergencies, with no “militia function,” he said.
A CBS News report last year, though, showed that the group’s Arizona leaders consider that they’re preparing in part for the possibility of “civil unrest” and “civil war.”
Anna Muldoon, an Arizona State University researcher who studies conspiracy theories, said Nguyen and anyone else who admits to being an Oath Keeper “ought to be placed on an FBI watch list.”
Nguyen scoffed at the idea that Arizona Oath Keepers were dangerous. Meanwhile, Republicans on the party’s far right wing, he said, have painted him as too soft on election security.
“I can’t win,” Nguyen said.
Even taking Nguyen at his word, Muldoon said, Arizona is at “serious risk” if its populace has moved so far to the right, “that Oath Keepers supporters aren’t extremists here.”
In her view, boosting the power of militia groups creates “significant social danger” both in terms of the potential for violence and the likely negative effect on the state’s “economic position” as corporations and parents of college students choose not to relocate to Arizona because of perceptions of extremism.
“There does come a point when people are like, ‘Ha. No,’” she said.
Nguyen and Selina Bliss, a fellow Republican who hasn’t held office before, face two Democratic opponents in November’s election. Nguyen and Bliss are nearly guaranteed to win the two House seats in the new district, which is heavily Republican.
Conspiracy promoters likely to win seats
Several conspiracy-promoting legislative candidates with minimal, or no, opposition in November are likely to win seats in the 56th Arizona Legislature, which takes office in January.
Of those, perhaps the best-known conspiracy-promoting incumbent legislative candidate is Trump-endorsed state Sen. Wendy Rogers, who was censured and investigated over her inflammatory social media posts. She’s running for a second term in Legislative District 7, a large, heavily Republican district that spans from Flagstaff to Apache Junction.
Representatives of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Phoenix didn’t bother to “waste our breath” in asking Rogers to retract an endorsement of antisemitic Oklahoma Legislature candidate Jarrin Jackson, implying she was beyond redemption. Rogers was previously accused of antisemitism after attending, via video, a convention hosted by Holocaust-denier Nick Fuentes.
Rogers, Finchem, Sen. Sonny Borrelli, R-Lake Havasu City, and Rep. Leo Biasiucci, R-Lake Havasu City, attended a Texas conference in October 2021 organized by John Sabal, also known as QAnon John, and his wife, Amy.
Rogers seemed to deny knowing about the conspiracy theory at the time.
“Why does the #Mockingbird media talk about Q more than anyone I know?” she posted. “What is a Q?”
Rogers faces Democrat Kyle Nitschke for the Senate seat.
Borrelli, who has no competition for his seat and will serve another two years, once told a constituent he might be killed for trying to find evidence of 2020 election fraud, though he later told the media he wasn’t serious and had been trying to elicit information from the woman. After the state Senate’s partisan audit last year concluded that Biden won, Borrelli told Newsweek the audit proved the 2020 election results should be “nullified.”
Former state lawmaker David Farnsworth — who won against House Speaker Rusty Bowers in the Aug. 2 primary election — told The Arizona Republic he believes the Book of Mormon foretells “secret combinations” that could lead to the destruction of the United States, and that the devil was behind Trump losing the 2020 election.
In October 2020, he said that the Arizona Department of Child Safety could be supplying children for a global sex trafficking organization.
Voters in Mesa’s Legislative District 10 will decide between Farnsworth and independent candidate Nick Fierro in November.
Arizonans will soon be learning more about misinformation-believing candidate David Marshall Sr. of Snowflake, who — with no Democratic competitors — will be one of two House members in Legislative District 7.
During a Payson Tea Party meeting in 2021, according to an article in the Payson Roundup, the pastor and former police officer issued a “head-spinning” number of conspiracy-minded claims.
His statements included the notions that COVID-19 vaccines will kill hundreds of thousands of people, that 8.1 million votes were cast fraudulently in the 2020 election and Trump should have won, that Biden is a “Grand Wizard of the KKK,” that Ambassador Susan Rice runs the White House — and many more such claims.
Marshall Sr. told a local pundit in March that Massachusetts lawmakers had introduced a bill to allow “abortions” “28 days after birth,” which is false.
Marshall did not return repeated phone messages from The Republic.
Election deniers question Biden’s victory
Skepticism of the 2020 presidential election is not an extreme belief among Republicans; polls show a majority believe Biden didn’t win the election legitimately.
Arizona has been a hot spot for election denial. Biasiucci, Borrelli and Rogers were among 30 Arizona Republican lawmakers, for instance, who signed a December 2020 letter asking then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results of the state’s election and give the electors to then-President Donald Trump, or to nullify the electoral votes and delay their counting pending an audit.
This year, most Republican legislative candidates have either voiced baseless concerns that the election was “stolen” or have said they have questions about it.
Yet several legislative candidates stand out among the election-conspiracy believers.
• Liz Harris, a real estate agent and political online influencer running in Chandler’s Legislative District 13, led an unofficial vote-canvassing operation and made claims — later debunked — that more than a quarter-million votes in Maricopa County were either “lost” or fraudulent. She regularly appears in videos casting doubt about various elements of the election, typically holding back contrary information that refutes the claims.
Democrats only have one candidate, incumbent Jennifer Pawlik, running against Harris and Republican Julie Willoughby for the district’s two House seats.
• Alexander Kolodin, along with incumbent Rep. Joseph Chaplik, will head to the House in January from Legislative District 3, (which includes north Scottsdale, Fountain Hills and Anthem), following the primary election. Kolodin worked with Trump attorney Sidney Powell on a legal challenge to the 2020 election that was tossed out of court because of a lack of evidence, and has represented the Arizona Republican Party in its attempt to end mail voting in Arizona. They have no opponents in the general election.
• Cory McGarr, a Tucson pest-control technician, has made alleged election fraud the foundation of his campaign. He got into the race after being “appalled” by all the fraud, according to his campaign site — despite that supposed evidence for widespread, electionchanging fraud was debunked at every step over the past two years by Trumpappointed judges and election experts in both the Republican and Democratic parties.
Echoing campaign rhetoric, McGarr said on Tucson’s KNST AM radio in January that election security was one of the “hills I’m willing to die on” and vowed to “literally vote on nothing” until he believes the problem is fixed. He and running mate Rachel Jones face two
Democratic competitors for the two House seats in Republican-heavy Legislative District 17.
Asked what kind of bill he would need to see passed before he began voting on other issues, McGarr responded by email: “This isn’t a partisan issue. Unlike the political elites, Election Integrity is not merely a talking point for me.”
• Christian Lamar of Phoenix, an information technology specialist, has vowed to try to decertify Biden’s 2020 win in Arizona if he wins office in 2022. No decertification process exists, according to election experts, but Lamar claims that’s not true.
He tweeted on Sept. 5 that the “AZleg has binary power to take any constitutional action it wants against presidential electors.”
Lamar told The Republic he did not mean to write “plenary,” which means absolute, explaining that the Legislature has “binary power” to address “election integrity” or not address it.
He would not say if he thought Trump was the real winner in 2020, but criticized Maricopa County for how it handled the election and County Recorder Stephen Richer, who won office in 2020, for how he handled the aftermath.
“We’ll never know who legitimately won the election,” he said.
Richer and county officials have pushed back strongly on such claims, releasing reams of data to support their position that the 2020 election was secure, including a 93-page report released in January.
In May, Lamar told a right-wing YouTube channel that the movie “2000 Mules” provided “irrefutable” proof of wide-scale ballot fraud in 2020. Yet the movie’s basic premise — that cellphone data can prove the fraud conspiracy — remains unverified, and much of it was debunked by experts.
Lamar and his GOP incumbent running mate, Justin Wilmeth, will face Democratic Rep. Judy Schwiebert for the two seats in central Phoenix’s Legislative District 2 in November.
• Anthony Kern, a former lawmaker endorsed by Trump, was on the slate of fake electors for Trump in 2020 who asked Congress to overturn the election in Arizona. Kern, who won his primary for the state Senate seat in Legislative District 27 (which includes Peoria and parts of Glendale and Phoenix), was photographed outside the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, riot.
Kern will face Democrat Brittani Barraza, who made the ballot as a write-in candidate, in November.
What about Democrats’ extreme rhetoric?
Some Democratic legislative candidates from the party’s progressive wing also have spread misleading or extreme rhetoric.
Sen. Raquel Terán, for instance, who is headed for another term of office and is also the head of the Arizona Democratic Party, dodged the question of defunding police when asked her position last month by Brahm Resnik of Channel 12 News. Terán recently won an endorsement from Planned Parenthood of Arizona, which is refusing to endorse candidates who support police.
Oscar De Los Santos, a former Obama field organizer who won the Democratic primary for a House seat in south Phoenix’s Legislative District 11, seemed to espouse a conspiracy theory on Twitter in June about the government’s policy to deter illegal border crossers with fencing.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say that our government is intentionally murdering migrants who are fleeing poverty and violence,” he wrote in the June 27 tweet.
When The Arizona Republic inquired about his tweet this month, De Los Santos explained that the government “knows” it’s dangerous to “push” migrants who have no legal right to enter the country toward rugged desert areas.
Asked for any evidence of a plot to intentionally murder migrants, De Los Santos said he regretted the tweet “could be read in an extraordinarily cynical light” and wished he had rephrased it.
On Sept. 2, De Los Santos published a clarifying tweet, stating that “laws that prioritize minimizing border arrivals instead of preventing foreseeable human death are the problem. Not individual gov’t employees.”
De Los Santos and running mate Marcelino Quiñonez face a single Republican challenger, Tatiana Peña, in the heavily Democratic district.
Some Republicans have tried to paint Democrats who don’t support limits on abortion as radicals.
“Think of how crazy that is,” U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters says in one of his ads. “That’s way more extreme than what Arizonans want.”
According to an OH Predictive poll in July, the largest share of Arizonans do want some limits on abortion. But the group of people who want no limits is not much smaller. The poll said 47% want some limits and 42% want no limits. The remaining 11%, out of 927 people surveyed, didn’t want abortion legal under any circumstances.
Eva Burch, who’s running for state Senate in west Mesa’s Legislative District 9, is one Democrat who does not believe in limits. She pointed out that elective third-term abortions are rare.
“I think it’s important that we respect the privacy of patients and providers,” she said. “As someone who had an abortion ... I don’t think I should have to explain that to the government.”
Rep. Jen Longdon, the Legislature’s assistant minority leader, said she believes there’s a fundamental difference between more extreme Democratic views and more extreme Republican views.
“I wouldn’t call mine extremists as much as call them activists who may have trouble with diplomacy,” she said. “The other side is defying reality. My side is changing standards and norms.” Republicans would disagree.
A group called Jane’s Revenge took credit for an attack on the office of an anti-abortion group in Wisconsin after the Supreme Court’s decision June decision in the Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case that overturned Roe v. Wade.
Law enforcement experts aren’t sure if it’s an actual, organized group. But Arizona’s GOP congressional delegation sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in June calling out an “alleged leader” of the group in Arizona for a tweet that seemed to encourage arson at crisis pregnancy centers.
Muldoon, the conspiracy theory researcher, said she would be “unsurprised if Dobbs leads to the rise of some left-wing extremist groups. … That’s a reasonable thing to keep an eye on and be concerned about.”
Ultimately, which legislative candidates could be fairly called “extremists” is in the eye of the beholder.
Democrats have been trying hard to smear Republicans with the label this election cycle.
“Republicans,” Arizona Democratic Legislative Candidate Committee spokesperson Ashton Adams said after the Aug. 2 primary election, “fell directly in line with an out-of-touch, radical right agenda … looking to appeal to the most extreme wing of their party to earn Donald Trump’s approval.”
Biden’s prime-time speech on Sept. 1 used a form of the word “extreme” six times in describing “MAGA Republicans.”
Believing, or not, in conspiracies
Justine Wadsack entered politics with a mind to make changes in foster care and child-services policy and advance conservative policy as a “Goldwater-Reagan Republican.”
But after a couple of posts on Twitter in spring 2020, she said, all reporters have wanted to ask her about is QAnon, the elaborate, Trump-focused conspiracy theory that imagines a worldwide child-trafficking ring run by political and media elites.
Wadsack is one of several candidates for the Arizona Legislature painted as crackpots and conspiracy theory believers by some news outlets and liberal activist groups. But she doesn’t actually support QAnon. She thinks it’s “crap.”
“For almost three years, I’ve been trying to fight this thing, and it just won’t go away,” she said.
Because of her social media posts, she’s listed in numerous national and Arizona news stories as a Qanon believer. One was on March 28, 2020, during her first run for the state Senate, when she labeled Hillary Clinton a “disgusting woman” and said her “days were numbered.” She added the hashtag, “#WWG1WGA,” which stands for “Where We Go One, We Go All,” a QAnon slogan.
A few weeks later, she responded to a video published by Gilbert QAnon guru Dave Wells, also known as the “Praying Medic,” spelling out the slogan and using the hashtag.
She thought she was promoting “unity” in the party, she said, but later she realized, “Oh, this isn’t a Republican Party. This is some faction that I don’t want anything to do with. And I’ve been denouncing it since Day One … . For people to hold on to such strange, odd things to me is just, you know, it is truly bizarre.”
The posts remain on Wadsack’s Twitter page. Republican voters in Legislative District 17 don’t seem fazed: she garnered more votes in the Aug. 2 primary election than GOP competitor Vince Leach.
Giving public support to QAnon themes could lead to bad outcomes: the QAnon movement has devout followers, a few of whom have committed or attempted to commit violence, including Roseanne Boyland of Georgia, one of the five people who died at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Another candidate who’s pushing back on claims of promoting conspiracy theories is Mary Ann Mendoza, a Republican who’s running for one of two House seats in west Mesa’s Legislative District 9. She and running mate Kathy Pearce both face Democratic challengers in November.
Mendoza’s son, Brandon, was a Mesa police sergeant in 2014 when a drunken driver who was an undocumented immigrant hit his vehicle head-on. Both
“I’m not an extremist and will never be one.”
Quang Nguyen
Republican state lawmaker from Legislative District 1 in Prescott Valley
drivers died in the collision. Ever since, Mendoza has made it her mission to fight illegal immigration, becoming one of Trump’s Angel Moms who the former president took along to tell her story at rallies.
She made a major misstep in 2020, however, when she shared antisemitic posts in retweets on Twitter before her video appearance at the National Republican Convention to help Trump get reelected. Organizers canceled her appearance.
A few hours before her video was to played at the convention, Mendoza retweeted posts that encouraged her 40,000 followers to research a Jewish plan for world dominance that was previously outlined by a QAnon supporter. The posts propped up a century-old conspiracy theory about the Rothchilds, a Jewish banking family, and said, among other things, that “malevolent Jewish forces in the banking industry are out to enslave nonJews and promote world wars.”
Mendoza said she was doing a lot of reading about the Federal Reserve before the posts but that she hadn’t read through the material she shared. She deleted her posts and apologized for putting out the information. She denied repeatedly that the incident represented her thinking or her values. A conservative rabbi even made a video defending her, noting that Mendoza had no previous history as an antisemite.
She was still vilified online and received death threats, she said.
“I didn’t know if I was going to come out alive,” she said. “I’ve learned my lesson.”
Mendoza said she wants to be known mainly as a constitutional conservative who wants to focus on illegal immigration, fiscal issues and help boost “school choice.”
But she acknowledged she’s still interested in the power of the Federal Reserve. Asked why, she mentioned that the Rothchilds are “part of the Federal Reserve” and they once “owned the United States.”
She recommended a book to The Republic called “The Killing of Uncle Sam: The Demise of the United States of America.”
The book, written by two Christian pastors, describes how the Rothchilds and other liberal elites have tried to create a New World Order that would destroy religion and usher in a “universal system of socialism.”