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.
How long until the Apricot Antichrist offers Finchem a cabinet post?
ReplyDelete