The Times has a piece on the topic we’ve been talking about here in recent days: the escalating battle over “legitimate political discourse” and the January 6th insurrection. They see it primarily as a messaging gaffe. And that is certainly part of the story. The imperative for the RNC was the formal censure of the two dissident House Republicans: Cheney and Kinzinger. That didn’t require a blanket endorsement of the Jan. 6th insurrection, which the label “legitimate political discourse” certainly conferred. That has to go down to Ronna McDaniel’s general ineptitude. But you need to be a really good driver on a twisty road with a lot of black ice. And right now the GOP is on a twisty road with a lot of black ice.

It’s no accident this happened. It happened because Trump is demanding it happen. As we noted yesterday, this is a dance between Trump and the Jan. 6th committee with most elected Republicans caught in between.

Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers (R) has made quite the name for herself in the far-right, Big Lie corners of the Republican Party in the last year. As a key figure in the state’s phony election “audit,” Rogers knows how to aggressively captivate her audience.

She’s injected herself into several election-overturning causes in recent months. In the waning days of the sketch audit of 2020 election results in Arizona’s Maricopa County, Rogers suggested imprisoning members of the Republican-majority board of supervisors when the county rejected the state Senate’s subpoena for additional election-related materials. The Trumpian state lawmaker has since proposed legislation that would make it easier for the governor’s office to investigate so-called instances of election “fraud,” setting state Republicans up to try to Big Lie their way out of any 2022 disappointments for the party.

Now, she’s getting involved in the Canadian anti-vax trucker protests in Ottawa that have devolved into a reckless display of Big Rig power over the course of the last 12 days with thousands of protesters flooding the area surrounding Ottawa’s Parliament building.