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.”
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 chuckling a rehearsed nervous laugh 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.”
“Now, they deplatform and debank people like Nick Fuentes, and even President
(Donald) Trump,” she said. “This is like the
USSR, but worse.”
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.”
Later in the evening, former Maricopa
County Sheriff Joe Arpaio gave a rambling,
40-minute speech in which he seemingly
didn’t realize he was speaking to a crowd of
white nationalists. At times, he seemed taken aback at the reaction to things he said.
“I have the reputation of being the biggest racist in the country,” he said, to robust
applause. “What are you clapping for, that I
am or that I’m not? Well, I’m not.”
Later, when he repeated that he was
called “the biggest racist in the country”
and received loud applause, he quickly
added, “I have a black grandkid, I got a
Mexican grandkid,” prompting some in the
crowd to boo him.
At another point, Arpaio boasted about
having a howitzer artillery gun while sheriff.
“Everyone said, ‘What are you using
this for?’ I said, ‘To shoot people that come
across the border,’” he said, eliciting raucous cheers from the crowd that left Arpaio
visibly surprised.
“Wait a minute. I didn’t mean to shoot
the illegals coming across. I’m saying the
illegals that are terrorists and other violent
(criminals), if they’re going to start shooting
at my people, I’m going to fire back,” he
explained, to much fewer cheers.
“I’m not about to shoot illegals who are
coming across, just for coming illegally,” he
finished, to no cheers.
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.
Arizona Republicans were largely silent
about Rogers and Arpaio speaking to the
white nationalist conference. But state Sen.
Paul Boyer, a Glendale Republican, blasted
Rogers for pushing “race superiority” and
“political violence.”
“You’re not a victim @WendyRogersAZ
so quit pretending to be one. And stop
using Christianity to justify race superiority
and executing your political opponents,” he
wrote on Twitter.
Boyer did not return a message seeking
comment.
This article originally appeared on the
Arizona Mirror, a nonprofit online news
agency.
This article appears in Mar 3-9, 2022.
When you hear about events like this you realize that January 6th, 2021 was just a dress rehearsal for those that fully intend to overthrow the United States of America.
They have been working overtime to ensure that the necessary people are in place and working diligently to firehose legislation at all levels to pave the way for the big day when the government of the people, by the people and for the people will be replaced with a government of “the right” (white) people, by “the right” (white) people, for “the right” (white) people.
I spent more than 20 years in the military where I thought I was making a difference, but when I hear people like this referring to themselves as “patriots” and laughing about their racist, hate-filled plans for America, it makes me sick.
How many of my fellow service members have served our time, fought and died, to defend the Constitution and this nation for moral reprobates like this who hide behind its protections to plot their treason.