#2844: John Fitzgerald

The influx of QAnon-affiliated candidates in the 2020 elections and onwards has been duly documented, but extreme wingnuts have of course submitted their candidacies since the beginning of elections, and in the 2018 midterms, John Fitzgerald wasn’t the only Nazi and Holocaust denier running for Congress. Fitzgerald, who ran in California’s 11th Congressional District, was initially even endorsed by the Republican Party (because of a state party rule, later modified, to automatically endorse any candidate when that candidate is the only Republican on the ballot), and he received no less than 23 % of the vote in the general election. 

Now, Fitzgerald was a one-issue candidate: “Everything we’ve been told about the Holocaust is a lie. So my entire campaign, for the most part, is about exposing this lie,” said Fitzgerald in a radio interview with openly anti-Semitic radio host Andrew Carrington Hitchcock. Elsewhere, Fitzgerald called the Holocaust a “complete fabrication”, and during his campaign he would target voters and urge them to “end the Jewish takeover of America and restore our democracy” and, for good measure, claim that “the Jewish conducted attack on 9/11.” His website also falsely claimed that 9% of U.S. government officials are dual citizens of Israel and that Jews played a “prominent role” in the African slave trade.

 

He does assert that he is not anti-Semitic, however, so there’s that.

 

Diagnosis: Easily dismissed, perhaps, but the level of mindrot among tens of thousands of inhabitants of California’s 11th Congressional District should arguably be deemed a national emergency.

#2843: Tom Fitton

Judicial Watch is a wingnut legal and comms shop that targets political opponents with FOIA requests, lawsuits and media. It is currently headed by President Thomas J. Fitton, who is not a lawyer but a long-term senior member of the Council for National Policy and purveyor of 2020-election-related conspiracy theories (in 2022, researchers found that Fitton was the third-most prolific promoter of election misinformation on Twitter during the late months of 2020) and climate change denialism (JudicialWatch has filed several lawsuits against climate scientists).

 

Pre-Trump

Fitton received some attention in 2013 for his straightforwardly false claim that the Obama DOJ had sent representatives to Sanford, Florida, following Trayvon Martin’s death “to help organize and manage rallies and protests against George Zimmerman” and indeed “actively worked to foment unrest, spending thousands of taxpayer dollars on travel and hotel rooms to train protesters throughout Florida.” It was all part of Obama’s “totalitarian leftist” agenda, just ike his totalitarian and fascists efforts to combat domesticterrorism.

 

Also during Obama’s presidency, Judicial Watch was of course eager to join the fray of delusional wingnut conspiracy mongering about Benghazi; according to Fitton, the Obama administration actually wanted Ambassador Chris Stevens to get kidnapped so they could release Omar Abdel-Rahman, an Egyptian Islamist convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, in return for Stevens. Fitton freely admitted that he had “no evidence” whatsoever for his allegations, but the point here was of course never to be correct but to muddy the waters.

 

In 2015, Judicial Watch also made a splash with their nonsense claim that ISIS had established a “base” in Mexico “around eight miles from the U.S. border”. Fitton refused to specify his sources or, really, what on Earth they based the claim on. When the FBI, Texas Department of Public Safety and Customs and Border Protection pointed out that none of them had any information to corroborate Fitton’s claim, Judicial Watch promptly accused them all of lying, publishing instead an article claiming that the FBI was meeting Mexican authorities to create a strategy to hide the ISIS camps from the media – again, Judicial Watch revealed no sources or information to back up the claim, of course, since it is not the kind of organization that uses sources or evidence or facts to ground their claims and potentially hamper their efforts. It is worth noting that Fitton received the American Conservative Union's ‘Defender of the Constitution Award’ at the 2015 CPAC.

 

Pro-Trump

Fitton received some attention also for his attempts to argue that the Mueller investigation into alleged Russian interference in the election was “unconstitutional” and a “coup” against Trump. Trump himself, who tends to listen to Fitton, retweeted the claim. Fitton also called for shutting down the FBI on the delusional grounds that “it was turned into a KGB-type operation by the Obama administration”. In general, Fitton has spent a lot of effort, and received much media coverage, to claim that Trump is being persecuted and “victimized”, in particular by the vaguely defined “deep state”.

 

When Trump wandered off with a cache of government documents after leaving office and refused to return them even in the face of subpoenas from the DOJ, he was acting on the advice of Tom Fitton, who is not a lawyer but nevertheless claimed – contrary to the advice of everyone with genuine backgrounds in law – that Trump had the legal right to keep the documents. After the FBI subsequently had to raid Mar-a-Lago to get the documents, Fitton predictably whined that “the Biden FBI staged a dishonest photo with purportedly classified material” and called government agencies “irredeemably corrupt” (without even attempting to detail in what way).

 

Election-related misinformation and conspiracy theories

Fitton falsely thinks – or at least claims to think – that voter fraud “is real, widespread, and substantial to the point that it can decide elections”. Prior to the 2018 midterm elections, Judicial Watch and the Public Interest Legal Foundation sent hundreds of letters to election officials across the country, threatening lawsuits if they didn’t conduct massive purges of their voter rolls (Judicial Watch repeated the threats in 2020). Afterwards, Fitton did, without a shred of evidence, claim that hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants voted in the 2018 elections.

 

As for the 2020 elections, Fitton started early: already in February 2020, with the Iowa caucuses in the Democratic presidential primary, Fitton wailed that voter fraud was afoot by utterly falsely claiming that “eight Iowa counties have more voter registrations than citizens old enough to register.” And in a video recording from October the same year, Fitton implored fellow wingnut activists to come up with ways to prevent mail-in-ballots from being distributed to voters, i.e. to undermine the election by any, including illegal, means.

 

In October 2020, Fitton sent a memo to Trump encouraging him to declare victory before a single vote was counted, and sketched a plan to only recognize votes counted by the “Election Day deadline”, something that doesn’t exist. Counting votes after Election Day is, according to Fitton, “last gasp” efforts to “subvert” a Trump victory and “strong evidence of malintent” since it would include mail-in ballots and ballots cast in large urban districts that tend not to agree with Fitton on politics and accepting votes that don’t yield the results Fitton wish for, which is undemocratic, fraudulent and evil. When the memo was looked at by the Jan. 6 committee, Fitton claimed that Judicial Watch was a target of “full-blown assault on the First Amendment” and that Nancy Pelosi was really to blame for the January 6 attacks. Fitton was also a signatory to Cleta Mitchell’s December 2020 letter urging GOP representatives to contest swing state electors.

 

At the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2021, Fitton asserted, falsely, that on the day of the 2020 United States presidential election “Trump had the votes to win the presidency. These vote totals were changed because of unprecedented and extraordinary counting after election day.” He was subsequently identified as unindicted co-conspirator #1 in the Georgia indictment of Trump and other defendants for their attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, where it was noted that he wrote a speech for Trump prior to the election in which Trump would falsely attribute his loss to voter fraud.

 

As you probably were able to predict, Fitton was a major purveyor of conspiracy theories and misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic, including various wingnut conspiracy theories about Anthony Fauci. In an attempt to merge his COVID-related and his election-fraud-related conspiracy theories together, Fitton groundlessly speculated, at an August 2020 meeting of the Council for National Policy, that commie leftists were planning to use COVID to delay the 2020 election tally until January 20, 2021, to allow House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to become acting president, which, he asserted, “could cause civil war”.

 

Climate change denialism

Judicial Watch’s official position is that climate science is “fraud science” given that climate-related scientific inquiries tend to yield results the group doesn’t like. They have accordingly filed lawsuits seeking to harrass climate scientists and, in particular, force the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to release the correspondence of climate scientists who published a 2015 study in Science debunking the common climate change denialist myth of a global warming ‘hiatus’ from 1998 to 2012. Although Judicial Watch was rightly condemned by organizations like The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund (CSLDF) and the American Meteorological Society because the disclosure of private communications between scientists “would harm (or halt altogether) government scientists’ ability to collaborate with colleagues, damage the government's ability to recruit or retain top scientists, and deter critically important research into politically charged fields like climate change”, that was, of course, precisely the point. Fitton, inspired by Climategate and by US Representative (and professional gohmert) Lamar Smith baselessly accusing the authors of the study of “alter[ing] data” to “get the politically correct results they want”, said that “there has been scandal after scandal involving climate data and we are skeptical of government agencies that won’t tell people what they are up to … I’m sure scientists are concerned that funding for dubious research will be cut, but the truth will win out in the end.” Well, the truth did get out – in the aforementioned 2016 study. Fitton obviously didn’t like it.

 

Diagnosis: Yet another angry, paranoid and generally deranged conspiracy theorist, and Fitton, too, has immense authority and influence (Trump demonstrably listens to his nonsense). One of the most obvious threats to civilization, freedom and decency in the US at present.

#2842: Kevin Fisher

We’ve mentioned some Kevin Fishers over the years, but this one seems to be new to us: The present Kevin Fisher is a fundie pseudohistorian and pseudoarchaeology promoter and, not the least, a disciple and former companion of the late Ron Wyatt. So Fisher believes not only that Noah’s Ark once sailed the Global Flood but that its physical remains have in fact been located. You can read more about it on his website Ark Discovery International (“Featuring the Lord's final show-and-tell demonstration of truth for mankind, which will be shown to the world during the mark of the beast showdown”), which seems to have been designed in five minutes by an otherwise average 12-year-old in 2003, and where you can also buy DVDs about the discoveries learn how to host a billboard (“Noah’s Ark Found”) in your area. The website also contains summaries of the alleged findings as well as responses to critcs: for instance, the criticism that Wyatt was using a hilariously pseudoscientific dowsing device (a ‘molecular frequency generator’) to ‘identify’ metal at the alleged ark finding site is countered by pointing out that “if the device does not work, it would not be on the market after all these years, and selling for such a large price”.

 

But Kevin Fisher doesn’t merely think Wyatt found Noah’s Ark; he can also tell you about the discovery and identification of Sodom and Gomorrah (the evidence is staggering” and even “the absolute proof” – apparently the ‘absolute proof’ is finding balls of sulphur near the Dead Sea), the location of Moses’s Red Sea crossing, and the Ark of the Covenant.

 

Diagnosis: There are a couple of these around, and their incoherent rants sometimes manage to break into the mainstream by virtue of the entertainment value associated with such unbridled insanity and delusion. Otherwise, Fisher and his ilk are probably mostly harmless – indeed, their actvitities might ultimately have a certain positive impact on civilization as well since other creationists seem to feel compelled to take time away from their efforts to ruin public education to respond to them.

#2841: Dan Fisher

Dan Fisher is a former Republican member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives (representing District 60 from 2012 to 2016), a pastor and a notoriously insane religious fundamentalist; Fisher is also on the leadership team of the Oklahoma City Tea Party and serves on the boards of groups like Vision America and the hardcore fundie creationist organization Reclaiming America for Christ. He also ran for governor in 2018 on a platform of abolishing abortion (explicitly by ignoring all legal issues) and asserting state sovereignty (his positions were backed up by some curious analogies). As a state representative, Fisher was most notable for his bizarre war against teaching US history courses in public schools.

 

Unsurprisingly, Fisher is no fan of LGBT rights. He is, for instance, affiliated with the fundie extremist anti-gay umbrella organization Gone Too Far (together with people like Scott Lively, E. W. Jackson, Peter LaBarbera, Paul Blair and Brian Camenker), and his general views on the issues can be discerned from his presentation at a 2019 Gone Too Far press conference: After focusing an unnerving amount on anal sex and pedophilia, Fisher stated that if “Congress attempts to label as a civil right that which has been understood by generations as immoral [like interracial marriage?], it would not only be reversing centuries of western Judeo-Christian thought, but would be in essence, as Pastor Broden said, actually rendering historic, orthodox Christianity illegal.” He was predictably short on the details of what he thought would be made illegal.

 

Fisher is also worried about what he sees as a “direct correlation” between what happened in Sodom and Gomorrah and what is happening in America today, and therefore blamed LGBT activists in the US today for putting us on a trajectory that will likely end with angel rape (“When you read the story in Genesis about Lot and the angels who came to visit him, these men are wanting to rape these angels … That just shows you the kind of violent sexuality that this produces”).

 

Diagnosis: Insane fundie madman, and although writing about Fisher feels like a bit of a blast from the past, these people are still plentiful, and they often find themselves in positions of power.

#2840: Michele Fiore

Michele Ann Fiore is a former member of the Nevada Assembly (2012–2016), former member of the Las Vegas City Council and has since 2022 served as a justice of the peace for Nye County. In July 2024, she landed herself, not for the first time, in legal trouble for defrauding donors and was convicted for wire fraud and conspiracy in October (her troubles with the law is her only legal background and thus her only qualification for her current position). Otherwise, Fiore has gained attention for her vocal support of Trump and for Cliven Bundy, and in particular for her firm stance that “[i]f government is going to point a gun at me, I'm going to point my gun right back” and that shooting government and law officers trying to arrest you counts as “self-defense”; she was, however, quick to clarify that such actions were justified only against government officers she didn’t agree with, such as the Bureau of Land Management, which according to Fiore is “a bureaucratic agency of terrorism that terrorized Americans, especially ranchers.”

 

In fact, Fiore has a long history of wanting to shoot people, such as Syrian refugees, whom she was ready to “shoot ‘em in the head myself” – elaborating, Fiore declared that “I am not OK with Syrian refugees. I’m not OK with terrorists. I’m OK with putting them down, blacking them out. Just put a piece of brass in their ocular cavity and end their miserable life. I’m good with that” (though she later emphasized that she was talking about terrorists, that was not the topic she was responding to).

 

For the entry here, however, Fiore’s most notable delusion is her position on cancer and cancer treatments. Fiore is on record promoting the insane pseudoscience of none other than Tullio Simoncini; according to Fiore “if you have cancer, which I believe is a fungus, and we can put a pic line into your body and we’re flushing, let’s say, salt water, sodium cardonate [sic], through that line, and flushing out the fungus … These are some procedures that are not FDA-approved in America that are very inexpensive, cost-effective.” This is, needless to say, not remotely how anything works in the reality the rest of us are inhabiting. Fiore made the comment in connection with a right-to-try bill she was introducing, commenting that Nevada is already “the capital of entertainment” and that her bill and the opportunity it would open up for trying to cure cancer with salt water and baking soda could help “make it the medical capital of the world as well.”

 

The suggestion sheds some light on the reasoning behind her 2012 proposal to arm school officials and college students as a means to combat school shootings. There is a brief portrait of Michele Fiore here.

 

Diagnosis: A complete moron. A somewhat flamboyant one, to be sure – like a clown – but definitely a moron.

#2839: Patricia Finn

Patricia Finn, P.C., is “a Vaccine Injury and Exemption litigation firm” run by Patricia Finn, Esq., a delusional anti-vaccine activist and lawyer who has built a legal career out of helping anti-vaccine loons and parents obtain exemptions from vaccine requirements – she did, for instance, represent anti-vaccine nurse Suzanne Field in the latter’s 2009 case challenging New York’s regulation requiring health care workers to be vaccinated – and in cases concerning alleged “vaccine injuries”. She at least used to be a minor celebrity on the anti-vaccine conspiracy circuit, landing interviews and feature articles with InfoWars and Mike Adams, conspiracy theory institutions that were quick to rush to Finn’s defense when she landed herself in legal troublesin 2012, presumably due to violations of the Rules of Professional Conduct for New York regarding advertising, crying – predictably – persecution; according to Adams, for instance, the real reason the State of New York was going after Finn was to get her client list so that CPS workers (agents of “Communist Pedophile Services”, as Adams sees it) could identify unvaccinated children, kidnap them and sell them into sex slavery.

 

Yes, that’s the scene at which Finn is performing and offering her services. According to herself (and we find it worthwhile to quote her at some length):

 

“The practice of vaccinating is dangerous. People are being deluged with vaccines because of fear mongering and profit. Mobilizing a global community to line up and inject should not be taken lightly, after all what if it is indeed weird science out of control, terrorism or maybe just a dose of bad shots because the contractors making and transporting the vaccines were skimming [sic] on ingredients, safety controls or refrigeration because it simply cost too much to adhere to pesky safety standards and formulas. Cutting corners might save a few bucks also. And what if the Pharma factory workers simply don’t like Americans and could care less if the shot is safe? The ProVax Choice community is not saying you can’t get the shot if you want it, but it is saying do so with caution because others could be affected”.

 

Yep; not only are vaccines unsafe, as Finn delusionally sees it, but everyone involved in developing, producing, transporting, offering and defending vaccines are evil, greedy and corrupt.

 

Whatever her legal troubles back in 2012 were about, Finn seems to be still going strong, offering her services to various anti-vaccine litigations (such as the case of Anthony Marciano). In 2014, for instance, Finn represented Dina Check, who claimed that her child had been improperly denied a religious vaccine exemption in a New York suit. (Check, in fact, rejects all of modern medicine, including vaccines, because of a religious revelation she had telling her that “disease is pestilence, and pestilence is from the devil. The devil is germs and disease, which is cancer and any of those things that can take you down. But if you trust in the Lord, these things cannot come near you.”) The suit was dismissed, and Finn couldn’t resist dismissing media commenting on the story as “pharma trolls” because everyone who disagrees with her must be dishonest and do so on behalf of a nefarious conspiracy.

 

In 2019, Finn was a vocal opponent of a push to end religious vaccine exemptions in New York after a number of measles outbreaks. Finn, ever the conspiracy theorists, saw the push to end religious exemptions as part of a “scheme” to benefit the pharmaceutical industry, and complained that opponents of such exemptions have embraced the “herd immunity” premise that outbreaks can be prevented from occurring if at least some 97 percent of the population has been vaccinated. “They want to eliminate exemptions to achieve herd immunity but herd immunity doesn’t exist [yes, it most certainly does],” claimed Finn because just asserting it can make a perfectly false claim true. Moreoever, “vaccines can actually spread measles and that is probably [most certainly not] what is happening.” As a lawyer, her lack of understanding of the role and function of evidence is sort of striking.

 

When the city did impose more stringent vaccination requirements, Finn, who is apparently also affiliated with Robert Kennedy jr.’s anti-vaccine organization The Children’s Health Defense, was part of a team, together with Robert Krakow and Kennedy, representing five parents of unvaccinated children protesting the requirements; they lost, and in his ruling on the case, Judge Lawrence Knipel correctly pointed out that the arguments presented by the plaintiffs amounted to little more than “unsupported, bald faced opinion”.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, even anti-vaccine activists deserve legal representation and has the right to challenge vaccine-related laws, and it is, of course, entirely legitimate for Finn to represent them. But Finn is also not only an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist herself, but one that is completely unfettered by reason and reality; one would think it wouldn’t usually help the case of her clients that Finn’s own conspiracy and pseudoscience commitments are even more insane than their own.

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence, sciencebased medicine

#2838: Mark Finchem

Mark William Finchem is a Christian nationalist conspiracy theorist, thoroughly disturbed fascism-adjacent wingnut, member of the Arizona House of Representatives representing District 11 from 2015 to 2023, and an Arizona State Senator from 2024 (yes, he was elected). Finchem is a member of the militia group the Oath Keepers, and the Arizona coordinator for the Coalition of Western States, an organization founded by Matt Shea that opposes the activities of the Bureau of Land Management and that supported the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016. He is not, however, a “legislative fellow in residence” at UA’s James E. Rogers College of Law, despite his own claims to the contrary.

 

House antics

As a member of the state House, Finchem quickly gained fame for promoting extreme wingnut and/or idiotic ideas – indeed, Arizona Republican state senator Paul Boyer described Finchem as “one of the dumbest” members of the Arizona House of Representatives, and there are plenty to choose from. Already at the beginning of his first term, Finchem would try to convince other lawmakers that Isis and other terrorist groups were pouring over the border with Mexico to invade the US, backing up his claims with fake news and various maps of mysterious origins, and one of the first measures he sponsored would reduce state taxes on gold coins on the basis that gold coins were “legal tender”. In 2016, Finchem introduced legislation that would prohibit Arizona from implementing presidential executive orders, directives issued by federal agencies, and U.S. Supreme Court rulings, and in 2019 he introduced a bill that would implement a code for ethics for teachers that was largely copy-pasted from a text published by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also sponsored, in 2019, a bill that would seek to transfer management of federal lands in Arizona to the state government.

 

Stop the steal involvement

Finchem was heavily involved in the stop-the-steal conspiracy movement in the aftermath of the 2020 election, and was a participant at a November meeting with Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis to outline strategies for contesting the election results. Finchem repeatedly claimed, without evidence of course (but together with a number of other Arizona legislators including Wendy Rogers, David Cook, Walt Blackman, Kelly Townsend, Sonny Borrelli and David Livingston), that the election was “stolen” from Trump and that Mike Pence had orchestrated a coup attempt against Trump. He was also among the first election denialists to promote the “independent state legislature theory”, i.e. calling for the Arizona legislature to appoint presidential electors of its own choosing to avoid having to follow the results of a democratic election. (He was, notably, paid by the Trump campaign to do so).

 

In the following months, Finchem shared numerous conspiracy theories about and repeatedly debunked “reports” of alleged voter fraud in Arizona, and even found ways to monetize his conspiracy theories (beyond the obvious ones) with his #ProveIt campaign and T-shirts – “I am starting the #ProveIt campaign right now. I am sick and tired of the liberal officials and media gaslighting us with fictitious attacks about the election,” said Finchem. When Cyber Ninja’s purported “audit” of the Arizona Election failed to come up with evidence of fraud despite trying really hard, Finchem was nevertheless quick to claim victory and conclude that the election should be decertified. Even as late as 2022, he introduced a resolution to the state legislature to “reclaim” Arizona’s electors based on his false claim that the results in three Arizona counties were “irredeemably compromised”. He has also advocated for banning mail-in voting.

 

Finchem was present in D.C. on January 6, 2021, to claim (again without evidence, of course) that “this election was a fraud”. He tweeted numerous photographs of protestors massed on the steps of the Capitol building – despite claiming never to have come within 500 yards of it – and even tried to justify the storming as “what happens when […] Congress refuses to acknowledge rampant fraud”. He nonetheless claimed afterwards that leftists had instigated the violence, and in response to a FBI briefing bothering to point out the obvious fact that antifa groups were not involved in the attack on the Capitol, Finchem said that he did not “trust a word that comes out of the FBI’s mouth”.

 

During his 2024 Senate campaign, Finchem modified his strategy slightly from complaining about “election fraud” to using the expression “election tampering” on the grounds that “we’ve got to prove fraud. This is about election tampering”, and Finchem is the kind of guy who views requests for evidence for the shit that falls out of his mouth to be at best a nuisance.

 

2022 Secretary of State Campaign

Though he keeps getting reelected to the Arizona House of Representatives, Finchem notably failed in his 2022 bid for the position of Secretary of State, despite receiving the Trump’s endorsement and despite significant donations to his campaign from his fellow Oath Keepers. His actual campaign, however – one of several campaigns across the US that sought to put election deniers and conspiracy theorists in positions that would give them influence over future elections – consisted largely of claiming to be combatting the ”Soros machine” (i.e. windmills) and accusing his opponents of being backed by George Soros (“Soros funded opponent”); in particular, the media is supposed to be Soros-funded across the board, unless it is controlled by the CIA (not mutually exclusive options for Finchem, since Soros presumably controls the CIA and everyone who disagrees with him is ultimately really Satan anyways as well as a “Marxist” billionaire instrument of Marxist international bankers). He also claimed that criticism of him, e.g. from Jewish organizations, was proof of a Soros conspiracy.

 

Finchem also received some attention for his endorsement of openly anti-semitic Oklahoma State Senate candidate Jarrin Jackson, as well as for the endorsements he himself received from “Constitutional sheriff” Richard Mack and Andrew Torba, the antisemitic founder of the white nationalist platform Gab, which Finchem welcomed and even bragged about.

 

Insofar as he had promised not to concede if he lost the election beforehand, Finchem also refused to concede when he in fact lost the election, citing – predictably – fraud. Indeed, already in April 2022, Finchem and Kari Lake brought a suit against state officials seeking to ban electronic voting machines from being used in his 2022 election. The lawsuit was of course dismissed, insofar as Lake and Finchem “articulated only conjectural allegations of potential injuries”, and the courts also sanctioned their lawyers (including Alan Dershowitz) for making “false, misleading, and unsupported” claims, asserting that the court does not tolerate litigants “furthering false narratives that baselessly undermine public trust at a time of increasing disinformation about, and distrust in, the democratic process”. Finchem and Lake promptly appealed in order to lose in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and get thrown out by the Supreme Court.

 

Finchem did file a lawsuit in December 2022 to have the election “nullified and redone”, which was dismissed with prejudice since it (among other things) did “not allege that any of the votes cast were actually illegal” but consisted mostly of repetitions of vague complaints about voting machines. In March 2023, the courts also sanctioned Finchem and his lawyer to pay the legal fees of his opponent’s campaign since the lawsuit was “groundless and not brought in good faith.” Finchem reacted by calling for the judge to be “removed from the bench for her abuse of judicial authority” on the grounds, apparently, that finding against him in a court case automatically counts as abuse of judicial authority. He also blamed Ukraine, because whatever.

 

General conspiracy theorist

At bottom, Mark Finchem is ultimately just a paranoid and confused (and therefore angry) conspiracy theorist of the kind that back in the days used to just troll comment sections on various news articles from their basements – the kind who rants to and bothers relatives and makes family members worried about their grasp of reality (Finchem is estranged from much of his family because he is a crazy and angry asshole) – but who has recently, to the stupefaction of anyone remotely reasonable, managed to more or less take control over the world.

 

And Finchem has promoted a range of conspiracy theories. Already in 2013, Finchem asserted that then-president Obama was seeking to establish a “totalitarian dictatorship”, and he maintained a “Treason Watch List” with photos of prominent Democrats on his Pinterest account. He also posted about stockpiling ammunition since it could allegedly come in handy against people he imagined were out to get him. Particularly relevant, perhaps, is his promotion of variants of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. And in 2017, Finchem tested his 2020-allegations by baselessly describing the Unite the Right rally as a “deep state psyop” carried out by Democrats.

 

And of course Finchem pushed Covid-related conspiracy theories. For years, his social media posts were to a large extent devoted to a barrage of dangerous misinformation and deranged conspiracy theories surrounding the virus and efforts to halt the pandemic; indeed, even as late as August 2021, Finchem suggested that Covid didn’t even exist at all, citing social media posts from conspiracy theory sites that falsely claimed that Alberta, Canada, had lifted its Covid protocols – a claim that would certainly come as a surprise to residents of Alberta (or visitors, such as yours truly in December 2021) – because “they can’t produce an isolated sample of SARS-CoV-2 to prove covid exists to back their mandates”. And his conspiracy mongering naturally extended to the vaccine; Finchem, based on things he had read on fake news sites and social media sites and against all reason and evidence, deemed the vaccine a “crime against humanity” and implied that it was a “bio-weapon”. He also linked to (and emphasized that he was JAQing off) a website promoting the laughably idiotic (but nevertheless thoroughly debunked) claim that “the life expectancy of all who have taken the [vaccine] is only 2 years,” apparently because the vaccine ostensibly alters human blood cells in some not-entirely-coherently-explained manner. Later, in July 2021, he stated that he refuses to take the vaccine because he falsely believes it is a “potentially deadly gene therapy.” We doubt that Finchem knows enough about anything to be able to reliably distinguish gene therapies from a lasso made of bananas, but no: the Covid vaccine is not a gene therapy. And of course he promoted – contrary to all evidence – the use of hydroxychloroquine as a “beneficial medication”.

 

Most of all, however, Finchem has been a major proponent of QAnon conspiracy theories and has shared numerous debunked QAnon-themed memes (e.g. this one) and fake news stories. And QAnon conspiracies were a central theme of his 2022 secretary of state campaign, where Finchem e.g. attended the “Patriot Double Down” QAnon conference in Las Vegas promoting debunked conspiracy theoriesand antisemittism, with himself repeating standard QAnon nonsense along the lines of “We’ve got a serious problem in this nation. There’s a lot of people involved in a pedophile network in the distribution of children … And, unfortunately, there’s a whole lot of elected officials that are involved in that.” He also attended a Newport Beach fundraiser, promoted by Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn, where conspiracy theorist Nicole Nogrady ranted about fetal tissue in the food supply and the September 11 attacks being a federal government plot. In August 2022, he also attended a Wisconsin gathering of the Church Militant movement.

 

Rather illustrative of his mindset is his October 2022 conspiracy theory that Google’s search algorithm was biased against his campaign because its website did not come up in searches on his name. The reason, of course, was that his campaign had added a noindex tag to the metatag of the sites HTML code, but Finchem i) is a conspiracy theorist to the core and ii) does not understand how anything works, so the outcome was completely predictable.

 

As for his over-the-top paranoia, a good example could be his response to a fundraiser for Josh Hawley being cancelled by Loews Hotels in 2021: Finchem promptly compared it to the Holocaust, claiming that “[t]his is what Hitler and Stalin did. What's next Camps? Ovens?” It is not remotely what Hitler and Stalin did. Similarly, social media deplatforming is exactly like Nazi Germany, Pol Pot, and Mao’s cultural revolution rolled into one, with Finchem adding that “the next step is eliminating people”. We would normally implore his voters to think very seriously about what Finchem thinks natural nexts steps are and what that suggests about how he himself would inclined to run things, but we fear, of course, that they already have.

 

Diagnosis: Certainly one of the stupidest and craziest people in the Arizona state legislature, and the competition is fierce. And yes, Mark Finchem is a threat to democracy, civilization and public health and welfare. Yet what is truly scary here are the people who keep getting him elected – one can, not without plausibility, try to explain away a Trump win with concerns about the economy and/or a general vibe associated with him among low-information voters, but none of those factors could realistically play any relevant role in an explanation of Mark Finchem’s continued successes.