By Ray Stern| Arizona Republic
Wendy Rogers always has been a hard-edged conservative political candidate, taking extreme positions on abortion, LGBTQ rights and other issues that have raised concern among left-leaning voters and Democrats.
Rogers took a harder right turn in the Trump era and finally won political office in 2020 after 10 years of trying.
As a state senator for Flagstaff and part of northern Arizona, she’s been pushing for extreme changes to the election system that have caused even some Republicans to recoil, like eliminating mailed ballots for most voters.
But that’s not all that changed after she gained office.
Rogers, 67, turned up the heat. She became far more prolific on social media as her fandom grew, and her rhetoric grew bolder — and meaner. She’s turned into one of the state’s greatest dividers, with her statements recently going too far for most of her Republican peers in the state Senate.
Most of them voted with Democrats on March 1 to censure her.
The historic action came amid criticism of Rogers for appearing via video at a Florida conference hosted by Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist and Holocaust denier who attended the violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017 and rallied his followers on Jan. 6, 2021, to storm the Capitol and overturn the presidential election results. In the video, Rogers grinned as she spoke of convicting, then hanging, political enemies.
“If we try some of these high-level criminals, convict them, and use a newly built set of gallows, it’ll make an example for these traitors who have betrayed our country,” she told the group. “They have yet to be justly punished for the crimes they have committed.”
She heaped lavish praise on Fuentes, who infamously compared Jews to cookies in an oven in an October 2019 web broadcast, saying the “math” adds up to “only 200,000 to 300,000 cookies,” not 6 million, and made other antisemitic remarks.
Rogers added to the firestorm after the Feb. 25 conference that weekend by criticizing Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as a “globalist puppet” for George Soros and Bill and Hillary Clinton. The comments were perceived by many as antisemitic, as was a meme shared by Rogers that included a Jewish star on a dead rhino, mocking the mainstream Conservative Political Action Alliance as being “RINO” (Republican in Name Only).
Rogers controversy: Some in GOP repudiate Sen. Wendy Rogers after comments calling for executions, attacking Ukraine’s president
Critics responded swiftly.
Hearing that she might be censured, Rogers posted on social media on Feb. 28 that she would “personally destroy the career of any Republican who partakes in the gaslighting of me simply because of the color of my skin or opinion about a war I don’t want to send our kids to die in.”
Rogers subsequently vowed to never apologize or back down and promptly used the Senate censure to raise money, claiming she’d been victimized because she’s white.
