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.”
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“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 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.”
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 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.
