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In a video shared widely on Monday, a Republican official in Arizona with deep ties to the MAGA movement said she would “lynch” Maricopa County’s Republican recorder if he were there.
Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer shared a video of Maricopa County Republican Party official Shelby Busch speaking at a recent GOP event and garnering laughs after saying she would lynch him if he were in the room with her.
“If Stephen Richer were in this room, I would lynch him," Busch said. "I don’t unify with people who don’t believe in the principles we believe in and the American cause that founded this country.”
In her comments, Busch claimed she would tolerate only “a good, Christian man that believes what we believe.” Richer is Jewish.
“This isn’t healthy. And it’s not responsible. And we shouldn’t want it as part of the Republican Party,” Richer said in a tweet that acknowledged Busch’s prominent role as a conservative activist.
This isn't just idle rhetoric. Richer has been targeted with death threats for supporting the certification of Maricopa County’s election results, which largely favored Democrats, in the 2022 midterms. These attacks were primarily driven by Senate candidate Kari Lake and her associates, whose attacks led Richer to file a defamation lawsuit against Lake last year. (Lake, for the record, isn't even contesting the claims.) As The Washington Post reported last week, Busch is an extreme activist whose organization, known as We the People AZ Alliance, is linked to Lake and other prominent conservatives, including far-right activist Michael Flynn:
The group, the We the People AZ Alliance, has raised nearly $1 million, according to state campaign finance records. The group is closely aligned with Senate candidate Kari Lake (R) and is funded largely by entities linked to prominent election deniers such as Flynn and Patrick Byrne, a former Overstock.com executive who is no longer affiliated with the company.
Busch has featured prominently in Lake and Arizona Republicans’ bogus election fraud claims, and she’s also a close associate of pillow-pushing extremist Mike Lindell. Her remarks are just the latest in a troubling, decadeslong trend of violent, right-wing extremism metastasizing in Arizona. And they are an example of the threats targeting election workers that Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes warned about earlier this year.