How sickos captured Arizona — and what to do about it
How sickos captured Arizona — and what to do about it
Blake Masters is an SS-designed T-2000.
Welcome to a big Sunday edition of Progress Report.
Writing about and even working in Democratic politics can often feel like screaming into a void. Over the past two years, with Democrats in complete control over the federal government, the experience has been more akin to screaming at the back wall of the sound-proof room in which people with the power to change the world make decisions that suggest disinterest in wielding that power.
If a story that appeared in the New York Times last week proves to be more than an observation of a fleeting trend, an excruciating 18-month experience may be coming to an end: Democrats are finally taking the blueprint I laid out in March and making the midterm elections all about the Republican War on Freedom.
Now, a coalition of progressive organizations has settled on what its leaders hope will be a unified pitch from the left. This November, they plan to argue, Americans must vote to protect the fundamental freedoms that “Trump Republicans” are trying to take away.
That pitch is the product of a monthslong midterms messaging project called the “Protect Our Freedoms” initiative, fueled by polling and ad testing.
Most of the initiative is focused on protecting reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and civil rights, which have quickly become the centerpiece of Democrats’ campaign messaging. The landslide victory that saved abortion rights in Kansas earlier this month points to the potency of those issues, which represent where the Democratic and Republican platforms diverge the most.
My blueprint also includes an economic component, and with inflation still polling as a top issue, my hope is that Democrats move to incorporate that aspect by this fall. Economic populism is not as comfortable a fit for many Democrats, but at least a few are experimenting with the frame.
In many states, it may well prove to be the difference between competent (if sometimes uninspiring) government and handing over the levers of power to fascistic barbarians and deranged true believers. In no state is that more true than in Arizona, where Republicans just nominated a murderer’s row of people beloved by aspiring mass murderers. Seriously.
It’s scary out there. Tonight, we’ll take a look at how it got to this point, and just what can be done to prevent the total collapse.
Thank you to our latest crowd-funding donors: Kathryn and Eric!
It took three long days and three carefully worded tweets for Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey to acknowledge former local TV anchor Kari Lake as the Republican nominee to succeed him as governor. Unlike Lake, Ducey has shown the depressingly commendable ability to accept the hard math of an unfavorable election result; his delay was the product of days spent hoping for a mathematically improbable vote count miracle, not searching for ways to overturn an inconvenient electoral outcome — even one as inconvenient as this one.
Lake, who has transformed from respected newscaster into a far-right conspiracy theorist troll with a flair for racism and insatiable need for attention, defeated Ducey’s preferred candidate, Karrin Taylor Robson, in the August 2nd gubernatorial primary. The primary was the main event in the climax of a bloody intramural political conflict, and so in begrudgingly endorsing Lake and calling for unity among Republicans, Ducey wasn’t just conceding defeat in a single primary election. Instead, he was officially surrendering in the war for control of the Arizona Republican Party.
Ducey’s refusal to entertain the Big Lie or hand over Arizona’s electoral votes to the Trump campaign in 2020 proved to be his downfall in a party now fully in thrall to Trumpism. The Arizona Republican Party has made it clear that it is finished with him, yet instead of going out in a blaze of righteous fury against the fascists now in charge, as several other fallen GOP leaders have done, Ducey chickened out. His endorsement of Lake, however tepid, was an act of self-preservation, the sort of acquiescence that permitted Lake and her ilk to take over the party.
The intense primary produced an entire slate dominated by far-right extremists and Big Lie truthers. Alongside Lake, statewide nominees include:
Rep. Mark Finchem, a QAnon diehard and Steve Bannon favorite, for Secretary of State. An adamant proponent of the voter fraud fallacy who rallied at the Capitol on January 6th, Finchem is seeking to control Arizona’s entire election system. It is currently overseen by Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who provided a bulwark against the GOP’s year-long clown show of an election “audit,” conducted by a hapless squad of con artists that perform under the name Cyber Ninjas. Hobbs is now the Democratic nominee for governor.
Abe Hamadeh, some young county prosecutor that played a shell game to win Trump’s endorsement, for Attorney General. He’s an annoying brat that spends his time trying to get a chuckle out of Charlie Kirk, who in an alternate universe would have inherited the deed to Abe’s frat house and demanded both the biggest bedroom and full control of the sadism of pledge week.
Blake Masters, the savage, seething tool of right-wing private equity baron Peter Thiel. He complements Lake’s preference for big public stunts and max volume bigotry with the quiet mania of a true believer, an SS-designed T-2000 with the resources, anger, and drive to inflict pain on others in service of his white nationalist vision. It makes him a singularly scary figure — think Josh Hawley without the smarm.
If he has one weakness, beyond seeming human, it’s an inability to cover his tracks. Last month, Masters was endorsed by the founder of the white nationalist social media platform Gab, and when he tried to distance himself from the Nazified Twitter app, his deep ties to its community quickly bubbled to the surface. This is becoming something of a pattern for him.
Arizonans also dutifully obeyed Trump’s request that they dump state House Speaker Rusty Bowers, who the ex-president called “weak and pathetic” for not allowing him to overturn the 2020 election. Trump’s hand-chosen replacement, QAnon adherent and former State Senator David Farnsworth — who in a recent debate insisted that the devil stole the 2020 election — walloped Bowers with more than 60% of the vote. Bowers’ testimony to the January 6th commission probably helped drive up that number.
The four other legislative candidates to receive Trump’s complete and total endorsement also won their primary elections.
Trump will rightly claim credit for those specific primary triumphs, but he was also the beneficiary of the fringe right’s decade-long plot to wrest control of the Arizona Republican Party.
The Big Bang of SB 1070
While not as ferociously right-wing as Texas or a Bible Belt state, Arizona has long been dominated by Republicans. Shaped by Barry Goldwater’s brand of reactionary libertarianism and its border with Mexico, the state was reliably conservative from the 1960s onward. Republicans have held a trifecta in Phoenix since 2009, controlled the state Senate in all but two of the past 30 years, and held a continuous majority in the state House since all the way back in 1967.
Senator John McCain, who succeeded Goldwater in the US Senate, had a moderating influence over the party, but his power began to give way after his doomed 2008 presidential campaign. Racists like Sheriff Joe Arpaio began to gain prominence, and the election of Gov. Jan Brewer, combined with the emergence of the bellicose Tea Party wing of the Republican Party, yanked state government to the right.
In July 2010, the GOP trifecta passed SB 1070, an anti-immigrant measure better known as the “Show Me Your Papers Law.” A racist response to the soaring number of undocumented immigrants that had crossed the border into the state over the past decade, the law became an immediate national flashpoint, an aspirational bit of state-sanctioned racism for the rising militaristic right.
SB 1070 served as a siren call for the rapidly growing Hispanic population in Arizona, triggering a decade of intensive grassroots organizing and the emergence of a powerful new political coalition. Groups such as LUCHA paved the road for a Democratic upswing in Arizona, even if certain Democrats have not proven particularly friendly to the grassroots activists that put them in office. (LUCHA had been preparing to deal with that issue and will resume that work after the fall election.)
The law also drew outrage from more moderate Republicans, who still held control of the party. By late 2011, voters in suburban Phoenix chose to recall State Senate Russell Pearce, the unapologetically racist legislator that wrote SB 1070 and fought for its passage. At the time, the result was heralded as a sign that Republicans had finally overstepped and would need to moderate their stances.
That did not happen.
Extremism and Appeasement
Pearce went on to be the Vice Chair of the Arizona Republican Party, a position he was forced to vacate in 2014 only because he suggested that single women on Medicaid should be sterilized, which was evidently a bridge too far. More significantly, Kelli Ward, a far-right hardliner, was elected to the state legislature in 2012, which gave her a platform to perpetuate the growing number of conspiracies that were emanating from the likes of Breitbart and the other alt-right “news” sites. She ascended to the state House alongside Kelly Townsend, another zealot.
That year also saw voters send Paul Gosar, a legit Nazi, to Congress. Gosar has a long history of meeting with and celebrating white supremacists and Holocaust deniers around the world. Back home, he was and remains a champion of the heavily armed and seriously pathetic militias that began to spring up around the border after Barack Obama’s election scrambled people’s brains. Gosar helped plan the January 6th insurrection, and today, his sicko militias back home are more radical than ever:
Ward’s failed attempts to primary John McCain and then Jeff Flake still served to amplify her vicious brand of grievance conservatism, and after Republicans lost their first Senate seat in generations (to Kyrsten Sinema, alas), Ward won a surprise victory in the race for chair of the state GOP. That put the descent into fascism into overdrive.
“Republicans have always been good at the grassroots level, and that extends specifically to precinct committeeman,” says Dillon Rosenblatt, a longtime political reporter and transparency activist in Arizona. “When the Republican Party gives complete control to Kelli Ward — and then gives it to her again for another two year term — she has access to all of Republican resources, access to voter data, access to all of the big fundraisers in the Republican Party. And then she wants to [impose a] litmus test: Are you a Trump faithful through and through? Do you think the 2020 election was stolen? If you don't, we're going to censure you.”
When Joe Biden edged out Trump to become the first Democrat to win Arizona’s electoral votes since 1996, the now-former president tried his best to force Ducey and Brnovich to overturn the results. They refused to do so, earning Trump’s enmity, especially after the state Senate’s preposterous audit, which empowered a bunch of con artists and true believers to scour ballots for signs of bamboo, turned up empty.
The number of independent voters in Arizona began to rise as moderates saw the writing on the wall. In leaving, the former Republicans handed Ward even more control over an increasingly unhinged party. It’s a power she wields with relish, recruiting like-minded fanatics and following through with censures on so-called RINOs.
The list of reprimanded Republicans is a who’s who of one-time power brokers: Ducey, Bowers, Attorney General Mark Brnovich, former Sen. Jeff Flake, and Kathy Petsas, the long-time chair of an East Phoenix district who was once one of the most effective local leaders in the party. Petsas was stripped of her voting rights within the Maricopa County GOP for calling an insurrection super-fan unfit to run for the Phoenix city council. She’s been defiant since, which makes her a rare Arizona Republican with a conscience.
Cindy McCain, who supported Joe Biden, was also censured, a coda to the 2015 censure that her late husband was dealt by a party he once essentially controlled.
“It's only after something drastic happens that they're willing to actually come out on the record to say anything,” Rosenblatt says. “We’re always going to have the Kelly Wards, the Kelly Townsends, the Wendy Rogers, they’re going to be around whether elected or not, but [the problem] is the people that know it’s all bullshit but continue to stay silent until it seems relevant for them. All they care about is being elected, and as soon as that is removed from the equation is when they're going to start coming around. And for some, that will end up turning into political pundit jobs.”
So Now What?
Arizona is a truly purple state; its state government is controlled entirely by Republicans, while both of its US Senators are (ostensibly) Democrats. The muscle memory that develops from decades of voting for Republicans means that the GOP still has a baked-in advantage as the starting default.
“Democrats cannot win in Arizona without Republican support,” Rosenblatt says. “The biggest Democratic winners over the past couple of cycles won because they appealed to suburban women, Republicans in the East Valley, and winning with independents.”
The GOP’s extremist statewide candidates give Democrats their best shot at recreating the dynamics of the past two campaign cycles, as it’ll be hard for a slate that prevailed on the strength of its collective bloodthirsty derangement to rebrand within just a few months.
If it’s still hard to fathom how dangerously adrift they are from even the outer-reaches of reality and decency, consider that former Gov. Jan Brewer, an extremist in her own era, called Lake’s campaign “mean, untruthful, and untethered to public policy,” likely to the point of no return.
Lake is attempting a pivot. Still prone to fits of election conspiracy pique, but she’s also attempting to obscure her reactionary cruelty by funneling it into rhetoric on “fixing” Arizona’s soaring homelessness crisis. Hobbs isn’t exactly a dynamic figure, but she’s also been seeking to grab hold of economic issues, with Ducey and the Republican legislature the obvious progenitors of the ongoing hardship.
Democrats are just a seat away from tying each house of the legislature, but they’ll have to be perfect if they want to do anything more than flip either chamber. Arizona’s unique top-two system permits parties to nominate multiple candidates for each legislative district, with the top two vote-getters getting sent to the state house. For years, Democrats have largely been running just one candidate out of fear of screwing themselves out of a seat, a logic that relies on the assumption that most voters will cast split ballots.
Obviously, the state Democratic Party is still a work in progress, but its decision to censure Kyrsten Sinema earlier this year offers some hope of brighter strategic days ahead. This year, it may be the Republican candidates that deliver the most votes for Democrats. The alternative is too bleak to consider.
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