However, Rogers would go on to win her primary, handily defeating a fellow GOP senator, Kelly Townsend, whose communications with Trump’s lawyers were subpoenaed by the FBI, presumably for information she might have about the conspiracy by Trump allies to replace Arizona’s legal voters. with fakes. No moderate herself, Townsend recently promised that vigilantes at primary polling stations would monitor voters they found suspicious: “We’ll have people parked out there watching you and they’ll follow you to your car and take your license plate.” The leading name in this new wave of Republicans is that of Lake, the gubernatorial candidate who has been a well-known figure on Phoenix’s Fox affiliate for more than two decades. At a Trump rally in Arizona I attended in January, he called for the arrest of illegal border crossers, as well as Dr. Anthony Fauci for unspecified crimes related to Covid, as well as unspecified conspirators “in this corrupt, shady, bad election of 2020.” To this litany of suspected criminals, Lake has added teachers. “Put cameras in the classroom” , told conservative Arizona radio host Garret Lewis last November, arguing that parents should have access to video evidence of “something taught in the classroom” that they might find objectionable. Lake starkly, if exaggeratedly, described the Arizona GOP’s outlook on Twitter in June: “They kicked God out of the schools and welcomed the Drag Queens. They took down our Flag and replaced it with a rainbow. They seek to disarm Americans and militarize our Enemies. Let’s bring back the basics: God, Weapons and Glory.” On her campaign website, Lake describes the media – her former profession – as “corrupt” and “the enemy of the people”. A campaign video shows her hitting her televisions with a sledgehammer and a baseball bat. At a rally the night before the primary, she asked her audience to turn around and “show these bastards”—referring to the camera crews mounted on a riser—their disapproval, which they followed with loud jeers. Lake said she decided to leave journalism in 2021 because of frustration with the media’s liberal bias. In fact, Lake herself donated to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008. A decade later, Lake’s preference had changed. She visited the White House in June 2019 to do a story for the local Fox affiliate on Stephanie Grisham, who years earlier served as press secretary for the Arizona House of Representatives and had just been named communications director for first lady Melania Trump. . “What got me was how much of a fan of Donald Trump he was,” Grisham told me. “When he got there, he was absolutely gushing over him. I remember thinking, even for Fox, that’s a bit much.” Trump approved the Lake last September, hours after he tweeted that the former president’s likeness should be carved on Mount Rushmore. Trump also endorsed Blake Masters, now Arizona’s Republican candidate for U.S. Senate over incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly. Masters, the 36-year-old former COO of Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm, embraces the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. “If you say as a candidate, ‘Obviously, the Democrats, they’re hoping to just change the demographics of our country, they’re hoping to bring in a whole new electorate,’ they call you a bigot,” he told Rob Hefner, who goes by Birdman, on the podcast “Patriot Edition” in April. Such views align with those of Andrew Anglin, editor of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, who gave the Master his “strong endorsement”. (Masters declined the endorsement.) The campaign signs for Masters I saw adorning Arizona highways carried promises like “Blake Masters Will Ban Fauci” and “Blake Masters Won’t Ask Your Pronouns.”
