In a widely circulated video Monday, a Republican official in Arizona with deep ties to the MAGA movement said he would “lynch” the Maricopa County 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 getting 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 do not unite with people who do not believe in the principles we believe in and the American cause that founded this country.”
In his comments, Busch stated that he would only tolerate “a good Christian man who believes what we believe.” Richer is Jew.
“This is not healthy. And he is not responsible. And we shouldn’t want that as part of the Republican Party,” Richer said in a tweet that acknowledged Busch’s prominent role as a conservative activist.
“If Stephen Richer walked into this room, I would lynch him.”
This is Shelby Busch.
She is second in command of the Maricopa County Republican Committee (Image: Getty Images)@MaricopaGOP). She was the county party’s 2023 “volunteer of the year.” She is a councilor for Kari Lake and others.
Her too… pic.twitter.com/L7lWTm3oSk
– Stephen Richer — MaricopaCountyRecorder (prsnl account) (@stephen_richer) June 24, 2024
This is not just useless rhetoric. More rich was targeted with death threats for supporting the certification of Maricopa County’s election results, which largely favored Democrats, in the 2022 midterm elections. These attacks were driven primarily by Senate candidate Kari Lake and her associates, whose attacks led Richer to open a libel suit against Lake last year. (Lake, for the record, nor is it disputing the claims.) Like The Washington Post reported last week, Busch is an extremist activist whose organization, known as We the People AZ Alliance, is linked to Lake and other prominent conservatives, including far-right activist Michael Flynn:
Busch has emphasis in the Lake and Arizona Republicans’ false claims of voter fraud, and she is also a close associate of pillow-pushing extremist Mike Lindell. Her observations are only the most recent a worrying trend of violent right-wing extremism that has lasted decades metastasizing in Arizona. And they are an example of the threats directed at election workers that Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes has warned about earlier this year.
This article was originally published in MSNBC.com
