Just when you think the Arizona Republican Party couldn't get any crazier ...

The Arizona Republican Party on Saturday sent a flat out, full-throated, flabbergasting message to the voters of this great state.

We be crazy, they proclaimed.

Party officials, during their state convention, elected none other than indicted Sen. Jake Hoffman and expelled Rep. Liz Harris to represent Arizona on the Republican National Committee.

This, then, is what the once-Grand Old Party is here in the year of our Lord 20SomebodyWakeMeUpWhenThisNightmareIsOver24.

Liz Harris' 'election fraud' was laughable

Meet Liz Harris, Arizona’s new Republican national committeewoman.

This Chandler far-right Republican first surfaced in public view during the bad old days of the Arizona Senate’s now-infamous Cyber Ninja Audit, when she ran an absurd door knocking “canvass” and claimed to have found massive fraud in the 2020 election.

It took about a minute and a half for her findings to be laughed off.

It didn’t help that the cover of her report pictured a vacant lot in Goodyear with a caption that said it “cast two mail-in votes.”

But an aerial map of the property, available online at the Maricopa County Assessor’s website, showed a house with a pool on the 4.3-acre property, with two registered voters.

Still, she was one of the Republican Party’s fiercest election deniers, and that was enough to get her elected to the Legislature in 2022, wherein she promptly announced she wouldn’t be voting on any bills until and unless there was a redo of the election.

Harris was booted for lying about a hearing

There wasn’t (a redo, that is), and ultimately Harris voted on some stuff.

But not a lot of stuff because she was expelled from the Republican-controlled House just three months into her term. This, after she staged an all-day, livestreamed legislative hearing at which her witnesses talked about the many ways in which our elections were supposedly stolen.

The highlight was a Scottsdale insurance agent who slimed dozens of public officials and private citizens, making preposterous, evidence-free accusations that they all accepted bribes from the Sinaloa drug cartel.

The House Ethics Committee unanimously concluded that Harris not only knew what that insurance agent was likely to say during that February hearing but that she actually took steps to hide the details from House leadership.

Then she lied about it to the ethics panel.

Now she’s a top ranking official in the Republican Party.

Hoffman paid teens to disparage the election

Meet Jake Hoffman, Arizona’s new Republican national committeeman.

This Queen Creek Republican burst into public view in 2020, when he ran an internet troll farm, paying teens to post conservative talking points and baseless conspiracy theories on social media — all aimed at getting then-President Donald Trump reelected.

The Washington Post in September 2020 exposed Hoffman’s Rally Forge, a digital marketing firm working with hard right Turning Point USA.

His job was to pay teenagers, some of them minors, to set up fake personas and blanket social media with thousands of nearly identical posts aimed at undermining confidence in the validity of election and downplaying the impact of COVID-19.

In other words, Hoffman wanted to fool you into thinking these were real people spontaneously expressing deeply held conservative beliefs instead of what they were — a group of kids being paid to deceive you, reportedly scoring bonuses, to boot, if they could create enough buzz around their posts.

He is 1 of 11 indicted fake electors

Their posts cast doubt on the integrity of mail-in ballots and noted that Joe Biden “is being controlled by behind the scenes individuals who want to take America down the dangerous path towards socialism.”

It’s the kind of thing you might expect to come out of Russia. Instead, it came out of Phoenix — or more specifically Hoffman’s secret cell of paid teenage trolls.

Two months later, he was elected to the Arizona Legislature.

Lawmaker sees fake electors: As civil rights heroes

But wait, there’s more.

Hoffman was one of the state’s 11 fake electors, or as he is called in the grand jury indictment handed up on Wednesday, a co-conspirator in the plot to overturn Arizona’s — and thus America’s — vote in the 2020 presidential election.

He was one of a bumper crop of election deniers and culture warriors sent that year to the Capitol.

Now he basically runs the joint as the chairman of the hard-right Arizona Freedom Caucus, where one of his key jobs seems to be waging war against Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs, one agency nominee at a time.

These are the faces of the Republican Party

Liz Harris and Jake Hoffman.

Lordy, lordy.

So this then, is really who the Arizona Republican Party is now: An all-out conspiracy kook and a troll farmer-turned-indicted fake elector.

As one Republican state committee member told The Arizona Republic’s Ray Stern on Saturday, shortly before Republican State Committee convened:

“It would be great to see Jake just carry that torch and continue to be the productive pro-Trump fighter,” R.C. Maxwell of Ahwatukee said. “We’re trying to take over the Republican Party. By we, I mean pro-Trump, America first, grassroots, ultra — call us whatever you want.”

Mission accomplished, sir.

And the message to the rest of us — the RINOs and the independents you must win over if you want 2024 to look different than 2020 and 2022?

Well, message received.

Reach Roberts at [email protected]. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter, at @LaurieRoberts or on Threads at @laurierobertsaz.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Arizona Republican Party sends a clear message to voters: We be crazy