An Arizona MAGA official made a bloodthirsty threat during a meeting with Republicans party members against an election officer who supported certifying the state election results in the 2022 midterms.
County recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican, has come under fire from his fellow party members since he said the 2020 and 2022 elections had not been rigged. He posted a video Monday of Maricopa County GOP official Shelby Busch’s grisly comment on X, formerly Twitter. Busch is the first vice chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Committee and according to Richer, an advisor to far-right Senate candidate Kari Lake.
The video shows Busch speaking at an event about her narrow interpretation of the concept of “unity.”
“But let’s pretend that this gentleman over here was running for county recorder, and he’s a good Christian man who believes what we believe. Now, we can work with that, right? That, that’s unity,” she said.
Clearly to Busch, unity is just uniformity—more specifically, compliance and support for Christian nationalism, a far-right Christian movement that seeks to place all aspects of U.S. society into the hands of Christians, including the responsibility of filing public documents on a local level, as it turns out.
“We’re gonna agree that we’re going to run a good Christian foundation campaign, and we’re gonna treat each other well and we’re going to get through this together. That’s unity,” Busch continued. “But, if Stephen Richer were in this room, I would lynch him.”
The room burst into sharp, nervous laughter that quickly dimmed. “I don’t unify with people who don’t believe in the principles we believe in and the American cause that founded this country,” Busch said.
"If Stephen Richer walked in this room, I would lynch him."
— Stephen Richer—MaricopaCountyRecorder (prsnl acct) (@stephen_richer) June 24, 2024
This is Shelby Busch.
She is second-in-command for the Maricopa County Republican Committee (@MaricopaGOP). She was the county party's 2023 "volunteer of the year." She's an advisor to Kari Lake and others.
She also… pic.twitter.com/L7lWTm3oSk
Busch’s unhinged resentment comes from the Republican frenzy that followed the 2020 presidential election and the 2022 midterm elections, during which her buddy Lake lost her gubernatorial run.
After the 2022 midterms, Lake and her allies baselessly insisted that Richer had been responsible for her loss, after Maricopa County had some issues with the tabulator machines, although similar issues were reported in the county where Lake actually won. In 2023, Richer filed a defamation lawsuit against Lake, who admitted that all of Richer’s claims were true.
In May, the Maricopa County GOP formally censured Richer, as well as all seven of Arizona’s State Supreme Court justices, for rejecting bids to overturn the 2022 election results from Lake and Abe Hamadeh, a Republican candidate who ran unsuccessfully for Arizona’s 8th Congressional District.
Busch is the founder of We The People AZ Alliance, a group that purports to be an election integrity watchdog but is funded by election deniers including Mike Lindell, Patrick Byrne, and Michael Flynn. Her comments show just how far the Republican party has fallen.
