Recall Seeks to Sack Wadsack
“Why are we going to wait to fight discrimination? Why are we going to wait to fight for our civil rights? I don’t see a reason to wait." + more
Sen. Justine Wadsack (LD-17) is facing a recall.
The far-right freshman state senator has only been in office for a few months but her hateful bills and toxic behavior has fired up a group of constituents to remove Wadsack before her term ends in January 2025.
During those few months, Wadsack has sponsored dozens of bills attacking everyone from the local LGBTQ+ community to the Arizona School for the Deaf and the Blind. Wadsack’s unconstitutional SB 1413 would criminalize homelessness — unsheltered people would be fined for trespassing and their property would be disposed of. SB 1413 offered no funding for shelters and zero alternative resources. Wadsack defended her anti-homeless bill by saying the unsheltered shouldn’t be viewed with compassion because they “aren’t our neighbors” and falsely claimed they “don’t pay taxes.”
Wadsack’s similarly unconstitutional SB 1698 sought to imprison drag performers for up to 10 years under a class 4 felony if they perform in front of a minor. Wadsack has attempted to hide the intentions of her bill by removing the word “drag,” but she continued to brag that her bill would make Drag Story Hour “unlawful.” Online and in the AZ Senate, Wadsack has repeatedly denigrated the LGBTQ+ and drag community as “groomers,” even aligning with the anti-trans, astroturfed hate group “Gays Against Groomers.”
“Why are we going to wait to fight discrimination? Why are we going to wait to fight for our civil rights? I don’t see a reason to wait. I don’t,” said Carla Roberts, an LD-17 resident and co-organizer with the Sack Wadsack campaign, at their third meetup this month.
Every Saturday in April, a dedicated group, including Roberts, have been meeting in parks throughout Wadsack’s district signing up and organizing volunteers for the upcoming recall effort. Sack Wadsack organizers are expected to file the recall petition at the beginning of May. This will give the campaign until the beginning of September to collect the 30,000+ required signatures.
The recently ousted Liz Harris won’t change the political makeup of the Arizona House, but Wadsack’s removal would trigger a special election. With the AZ GOP only a one vote majority in both the House and Senate, a Wadsack recall could flip the Senate.
Wadsack has openly bragged the recently redrawn district 17 was gerrymandered in her favor but she barely squeaked by a win, beating Mike Nickerson by less than 3,000 votes. She also faced a legal challenge during the primary for failing to live in the district.
Before running, Wadsack worked as a real estate agent and regularly aligned with the far-right, anti-education “Purple for Parents” movement. While campaigning, Wadsack touted her endorsements from Purple for Parents founder Forest Moriarty and president Michelle Dillard. Back in April 2021, Wadsack was pictured amongst fellow Purple for Parents members and militia wannabes as they stormed a Vail school board meeting over the district’s mask mandate and falsely staked their claim as the new members of the board.
Wadsack also criticized the Vail School Board for books they carried in the district, specifically targeting Sherman Alexie’s novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.
“Books are an issue,” she wrote on Facebook before criticizing Alexie’s bestseller for “cultural insensitivity” and an “anti-Christian” viewpoint.
Wadsack’s vendetta against books grew as she gained legislative power. SB 1700 enables the book banners to target any book that promotes “gender fluidity or pronouns” aka nearly every book ever written. In an era where anti-“CRT” and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric runs rampant, it’s obvious which pieces of work would be swept up under Wadsack’s legislation.
Christina Rodriguez, another organizer with the recall campaign, cited Wadsack’s attacks against public education as a motivator to issue a recall.
“I’m most afraid of my kids not being privy to the information I feel they need to know,” Rodriguez explained. “We are going to keep repeating history, until we learn about it and put a stop to it.”
Volunteers are still needed. The Sack Wadsack campaign is still meeting for the last two Saturdays in April. This weekend’s meeting will be at Canada Del Oro Park, next week at Naranja Park. Both from 5-7 PM. Visit SackWadsack.com for more information or follow SackWadsackLD17 on Twitter.
In other news…
Nice Hat, Loser: Back in January 2022, Unicorn Riot published over 400 gigabytes of data exposing the private chat logs between members of the neo-Nazi hate group Patriot Front. The leaks, their arrests, and a deadly crash has aided researchers in identifying members of Thomas Rousseau’s nationwide white supremacist gang. Multiple members from Arizona appeared in the leaks under an alias, including “Leo AZ,” who was quickly identified as Jeff Daniel by Texas investigative reporter Steven Monacelli. But the rest have gone unnamed… until now.
This month, Central Oregon Antifascism exposed another Patriot Front member: Thomas Gilmer. Named in the Patriot Front leaks as “Jack AZ,” Gilmer was a particularly active member. Chats and photos show him participating in nazi meetups and activism, including the December 2021 march in DC. Gilmer also regularly put up promotional material for the group. In Arizona, Patriot Front has plastered their propaganda throughout the state, including college campuses. Last August, a mural at the Taqueria Pico De Gallo in Tucson was vandalized with Patriot Front stencils. Gilmer himself is a resident of Tucson and former student at University of Arizona. According to his Linkedin, Gilmer also listed his workplace as Revolute Robotics, also based in Tucson.
If you’d like to comb through the 2022 leaks for yourself: Patriot Front Fascist Leak Exposes Nationwide Racist Campaigns - “The information stands as a chilling reminder that fascist organizing thrives in secrecy and obscurity.”
We’re Here, We’re Queer, Get Fucking Used to It: In Cottonwood, a family-friendly charity drag show faced opposition from anti-LGBTQ bigots. The Arizona Pride Tour, which has been touring across local rural communities, sold out despite the hate coming from Oath Keepers, Proud Boys (including one waving a Knight’s Templar flag), and a local church. Following a heated city council meeting, there are now concerns Cottonwood seeks to age restrict drag events to 21+ only, Lookout PHX reports.
Later Liz 👍🏼: On April 12, the GOP-majority Arizona House of Representatives voted to expel Liz Harris in a 46-13 vote. The House Committee on Ethics found Harris damaged “the institutional integrity of the House” by inviting a QAnon real estate kook, Jacqueline Breger, to a joint committee meeting back in February. Many QAnon kooks have been paraded through (or sit in) AZ legislature, but Breger went too far with her tall tale of Sinaloa Cartel organized “election fraud” when she also accused far-right AZ GOP members of being in on the scheme. Harris’ time in the AZ House was short lived but the Sinaloa Cartel conspiracies and memes her guest inspired live on…
Maybe she’ll get her job back? Unlikely, but the other options include Julie Willoughby, who ran on a ticket alongside Harris, and Steve Steele, who was part of Harris’ Cyber Ninjas “canvass” brigade and one of the infamous shredded ballot dumpster divers. Nothing changes.
Birds of a Feather: Much attention was drawn to political spending of the nazi memorabilia collecting GOP mega donor Harlan Crow after his close relationship with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was exposed by ProPublica. Crow bribed gifted Thomas with lavish gifts and luxury mega yacht vacations (once at Bohemian Grove 👁️). Crow’s political spending goes back decades and occasionally extends across political parties. Back in 2021, when she was blocking the Senate reconciliation bill, Crow also maxed out to Kyrsten Sinema’s campaign (even donating more than the legal limit, forcing her to refund some).
Sinema’s Other Challenger Approaches: After repeatedly teasing, Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb finally launched his 2024 US Senate campaign. The Arpaio-wannabe, failed paintball businessman, and former Live PD star has a well documented history with the far and conspiratorial right — Election denying partnerships with the 2000 Mules/True the Vote duo? Check. Close affiliation with the so-called “Constitutional Sheriff” movement/ideology? Yep. Hanging out with the local Proud Boys hate group and militia LARPers? Uh-huh. Holding his book signing at Kelly Walker’s Viva Coffee only weeks after Walker was arrested for threatening an elementary school principal? You fucking know it. Lamb has also appeared on multiple QAnon podcasts and events, even signing his book with the QAnon catchphrase “WWG1WGA.”
There’s still speculation Kari Lake will jump into the crowded race between Lamb, Sinema, and Ruben Gallego but she’s surely waiting to see if she becomes America’s Next Top Ass Kisser™ (aka Trump picks her for VP).
REALTED: He Calls Himself the ‘American Sheriff.’ Whose Law Is He Following? by Jessica Pishko
ADF GTFO: In Scottsdale, reproductive rights activists with Radical Women Phoenix picketed outside the office of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) protesting their recent legal attacks against mifepristone, a medication commonly used in a medical abortion. The Christian nationalist ADF, recognized by Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group, has regularly represented anti-LGBTQ and anti-choice legal cases over the decades.
RELATED: Abortion Pill Remains Legal in Arizona Despite Texas Court Ruling on Axios and Arizona Providers Confident Abortions Will Continue Despite Court Challenges on Cronkite News
In Other “Pro-Life” News: On April 12, a large anti-choice display went up at the University of Arizona featuring graphic images comparing abortion to slavery, the Holocaust, the Cambodian Killing Fields, and the Rwandan Genocide. One panel of the outdoor exhibit compared abortion to “honor killings” in a section titled “What About Rape?”
“Some cultures execute innocent rape victims and call it honor killing. Our culture executes innocent babies of rape victims and calls it reproductive choice. Are we less barbaric for killing the baby than they for killing the mother,” the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform-sponsored display read.
The student organization who organized the anti-choice demonstration was College Republicans United (CRU) and its founder Richard “Rick” Thomas. An odd choice of imagery given Thomas’ history of antisemitic, racist, and pro-eugenics comments. While CRU itself has ties to Nick Fuentes’ “groyper” movement and other white supremacist propagandists.
A day after CRU’s anti-choice stunt, hundreds of pro-choice counter protesters began to rally against the display. During the rally, a man picketing on the “pro-life” side, Roy Earl Spears, was filmed using a racist slur towards a Black student. Despite the ugliness, a comrade on the ground gladly reported that students were “actively out there calling these bigots out for these use of Holocaust imagery” and “solidarity was strong.”
Speaking of Groyper Fascists: Rep. Paul Gosar is being a racist poster again, shocking no one. This time he was caught promoting a Holocaust-denying website after they wrote an article favorable article on him for going after “Jewish warmongers.” Yikes, but predictable.