This reckoning has been coming for a long time.
For years, white nationalists have been trying to leverage their way into the mainstream of American politics, especially in the GOP.
Now Arizona has a state senator bold or crazy enough to say thatโs exactly what sheโs doing, so we canโt avoid dealing with Sen. Wendy Rogers. The Senate did so by censuring her on Tuesday.
But whatโs harder is to confront the tendencies she represents โ not just white nationalism, but also the dangerous demonization of the political opposition โ and the political cynicism that empowers them.
Rogers hails from the Phoenix area, but after shopping for districts and losing elections for years, she now represents an area in north-central Arizona, Legislative District 6, and claims Flagstaff as her home. In the Tucson area, people may remember her as the Republican nominee who lost to Democrat Tom OโHalloran in the 2018 general election in Congressional District 1.
Since winning election to the state Senate in 2020, Rogers has been steadily ramping up her rhetoric and overtly trying to pull Republicans to the racist, anti-Semitic right.
โThere is whatโs called the Overton Window of political acceptability. And we have to move it inch by inch, day by day,โ she said in an interview.
Toward what? Rogers said in a Feb. 23 tweet sheโs simply pushing politics โtoward Christ, America First, Freedom and our Founding Documents.โ
Donโt believe her.
'Build more gallows'
During her time in the Senate, Rogers has become a star to the emboldened white nationalist movement.
She has embraced Nick Fuentes, who has repeatedly expressed white supremacist and antisemitic views. In June, the Anti-Defamation League reported, he tweeted, โIf you are a White male zoomer, remember that the people in power hate you and your unborn children and they will try to genocide you in your lifetime.โ
His Twitter account has since been suspended.
Fuentes also founded the America First Political Action Conference, a further right version of the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC.
Rogers spoke to Fuentesโ conference last week, praising him as โthe most persecuted man in America.โ Speaking at the same conference, Fuentes noted people are comparing Vladimir Putin to Hitler, adding โand they say thatโs not a good thing.โ
Wink, wink.
Speaking by video feed to the conference, Rogers said: โWe need to build more gallows. If we try some of these high-level criminals, convict them, and use a newly built set of gallows, itโll make an example of these traitors whoโve betrayed our country.โ
What traitors? It hardly matters. This kind of demonization is typical in the ideological zone that Rogers inhabits. She and Rep. Mark Finchem, the Oro Valley Republican, regularly refer to anyone who opposes them as โcommunists.โ U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar has also spoken to the America First conference and voiced much the same rhetoric.
Rogers tweeted Tuesday morning, โtoday is the day where we find out if the Communists in the GOP throw the sweet grandma under the bus for being white.โ
She added in a steady flow of posts, โSoros is a problem and anyone who sides with him over me is an enemy of the Republic.โ
She said of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is Jewish: โZelensky (sic) is a globalist puppet for Soros and the Clintons.โ
'Eliminationist' rhetoric spreads
The thing is, it isnโt just her resorting to this escalating rhetoric. Blake Masters, the candidate from Tucson for the GOP nomination for U.S. Senate, also has embodied this tendency in his campaign statements.
โThe left hates white people,โ he tweeted last year. โThey want you to believe that violence in the name of โBlack Lives Matterโ should be excused.โ
โWhenโs the last time you heard a leftist say anything good at all about our country,โ Masters said in a recent video. โIf it were up to them, we wouldnโt even exist.โ
This sort of talk is close to whatโs sometimes called โeliminationismโ โ the idea that oneโs political opponents pose an existential threat to the home country or culture and must be excised from the body politic or even killed.
Itโs led to genocide elsewhere, and itโs worryingly common these days in the USA. But it flourishes because it keeps people in power.
Gov. Doug Ducey acknowledged this last week in a frank response to a question by Jeremy Duda of the Arizona Mirror. Duda noted that an independent-expenditure group Ducey controls put nearly $500,000 toward helping Rogers win in 2020 and asked โare you still happy with that investment and do you think that was a good decision?โ
Duceyโs response was frighteningly pragmatic, to the point of amoral cynicism.
โWhat I need as a governor are governing majorities so I can pass dollars into our social safety net. So we can provide programs like this that will help children from around our state. The fact that we can put budgets that put $8.67 billion in K-12 education.โ
โThatโs what I wanted is to move my agenda forward. Iโm proud of what weโve been able to accomplish. And sheโs still better than her opponent, Felicia French.โ
Incentives for extremism
Certainly heโs right that having a Republican majority makes it easier to pass his agenda, but itโs ridiculous to suggest that Rogersโ opponent, Felicia French, wouldnโt have wanted as much or more social and education spending.
When he says โmy agenda,โ the top priority has always been tax cuts, especially those helping the wealthy.
And the way he specified the name of Rogersโ opponent was strange. He actually did it twice in his longer answer. French is a moderate Democrat who spent her career in the Army as a nurse and helicopter pilot, retiring as a colonel. Now she works on the Navajo reservation in Tuba City.
During the campaign, Peter Aleshire reported in the White Mountain Independent that โFrench has largely refrained from criticizing Rogers, instead focusing on a platform that calls for more spending on educational reforms, stronger action to slow the spread of COVID-19 and stronger environmental regulations.โ
So, in fact, Ducey and the corporations who subsidized his independent expenditure campaign elevated a candidate renowned for her rhetorical extremism at the expense of a qualified, restrained candidate. They did it to help Ducey accomplish his โagenda,โ though certainly not education spending and the social safety net.
Rogers even got a favor from Republicans on the Arizona Redistricting Commission, it appears. Shereen Lerner, a Democrat on the commission, accused David Mehl, a commission Republican from Tucson, of proposing a last-minute shift of legislative borders to move Rogers out of a Dem-friendly district and into a Republican one.
So censuring Rogers, as the Senate did Tuesday, perhaps sets some very loose guardrails for the most extreme rhetoric. But the incentives that put Rogers where she is remain in place.
White supremacy, antisemitism, eliminationism will remain strong as long as the power structure and the voters reward it.
