'Weapons-grade nutbaggery': GOP lawmaker trashed for threat to round up opponents of Trump-inspired Arizona audit

Bulwark founder and conservative commentator Charlie Sykes criticized Arizona State Sen. Wendy Rogers (R) on Tuesday morning after she expressed a desire to arrest Republicans serving on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors who want to end the expensive and time-consuming efforts to find evidence of voter fraud that deprived Donald Trump of re-election.

Late Monday, Rogers tweeted "I would have arrested all of these people already if I had the power to do so. I vote to arrest. Arrest and put them in solitary" after the head of Board of Supervisors called the request for more information an excursion into "never never land."

She later tweeted, "I would like to know if we have enough solitary confinement cells in Arizona available for the entire Maricopa Board of Supervisors and the execs at the fraud machine company. We are going to need a lot."

According to the conservative Sykes, Rogers has gone off the deep end in her slavish devotion to Donald Trump.

"Let's start with this: The Maricopa County of Supervisors has had it with the bogus Cyber Ninja election audit and is openly defying the latest subpoena from the state senate," he wrote getting to his central point: "This is, of course, weapons-grade nutbaggery. But maybe we need to take it seriously, because, something genuinely odd (and disturbing) is happening on the right."

"Ideas that would have been unthinkable just moments ago are now being normalized and, if anything, the drift toward authoritarianism seems to be accelerating. This includes the explicit embrace of the idea of an American dictator — an American Caesar. Literally and seriously," he suggested.

According to Sykes, the conspiracy ramblings of Rogers are not a one-off, but instead is a reflection of a desire by avid supporters of Trump to embrace authoritarianism.

"As I've mentioned before,the publication that unironically calls itself American Greatness likes to think of itself as the "intellectual" home for MAGAWorld," he wrote. "Despite its dalliance with raw racism, and a fetish for sedition, American Greatness's roster of contributors includes such right-wing luminaries as Victor David Hanson, Seb Gorka, David Harsanyi, Conrad Black, Roger Kimball, Mark Bauerlein, Josh Hammer, Ned Ryun, Dennis Prager, and Salena Zito."

Adding, "It recently published an endorsement of military coups by a retired military guy with close ties to TrumpWorld," Sykes wrote, "But now its fetish for coups has morphed into a yearning for even more robust measures."

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