Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen appeared on a talk show published by a disgraced and openly racist former state lawmaker who has faced child sex charges.
Petersen, who is seeking the GOP nomination in next year’s race for attorney general, appeared on “Prescott Talks” over the weekend, which is published by David Stringer.
Although Stringer didn’t interview Petersen — guest host Elizabeth Ham, who has run campaigns for a few Republicans in Maricopa County in recent years, was the program’s host — it is published by Prescott eNews, the online news site that Stringer owns, and he has hosted the program many times.
Stringer served in the Arizona House of Representatives before he resigned from the legislature in disgrace in 2019 after refusing to cooperate with an ethics investigation into child sex crime charges he faced in 1983. Stringer took a plea deal on charges that he had repeated sexual contact with two boys younger than 15 years old, including one who was intellectually disabled.
Prior to that, Stringer had faced pressure to resign after racist comments he’d made became public. Additional comments emerged after the Prescott Republican won reelection in November 2018.
Stringer has long cozied up to white nationalists and espoused nakedly racist views. He has published his xenophobic views on immigration on Prescott eNews over the years, espousing views that have their roots in unabashedly racist organizations like Stormfront, and he has said there “aren’t enough white kids to go around” and that immigration was “an existential threat” to America.
Petersen, who did not respond to a request for comment, served alongside Stringer for several years in the state House of Representatives. Petersen’s campaign also did not respond.
In recent months, Stringer and Prescott eNews have been facing pointed criticism for publishing multiple AI-generated “political cartoons” that depict Prescott Valley Republican lawmaker Quang Nguyen in a racist manner. Nguyen has also filed a complaint with the Arizona State Bar Association regarding the cartoons.
Nguyen’s family fled communist Vietnam when he was a child and immigrated to the United States and he became a naturalized citizen.
The cartoons take aim at Nguyen for being an immigrant and question his loyalty to America. One cartoon suggested he was falsely claiming to be a naturalized citizen.
They also traffic in other racist stereotypes. In a cartoon titled “Going To The Dogs,” Nguyen is depicted being investigated by the police for stealing and eating neighborhood pets, a racist anti-immigrant trope that dates back to anti-Chinese immigrant rhetoric of the 1880s. Republicans in 2024 employed the racist trope against Haitian immigrants, even as they acknowledged it was untrue.
This story was first published by Arizona Mirror, which is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
