Arizona Democrats say they feel unsafe around GOP lawmaker after email rejecting a plea for unity

Some Democrats in the Arizona House of Representatives say they feel unsafe around a Republican lawmaker after he responded to a call for unity in the face of political violence with a misinformation-filled diatribe where he claimed that the Democratic Party “has woken the sleeping giant” following the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

During a Monday phone call with the Arizona Mirror, Kingman Republican Rep. John Gillette insisted that the meaning of his message was obvious — and that Democrats had misinterpreted it.

“It’s not a call to violence,” Gillette said. “It’s not a threat. It’s historical context that the American people are now awake.”
Democratic Rep. Sarah Liguori on Sunday morning sent an email to all lawmakers in the Arizona House of Representatives lamenting “recent tragic violence, from the shooting of Charlie Kirk, to schools and churches, and to the heartbreaking assassination and attempted assassination of two Minnesota state legislators” in June.

Kirk, the founder of Phoenix-based Turning Point USA, was assassinated on Sept. 10 while he spoke to a group of students at Utah Valley University. Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old Utahn, has been arrested for his murder. Although internet speculation about his motives have been rampant, officials have not identified a clear motive.

The assassination of the 31-year-old, who was known for his provocative opinions, spurred passionate reactions from both supporters and opponents. His fans and friends praised his willingness to debate people with whom he disagreed and his outspoken Christian faith. His opponents reminded those who would whitewash it of his history of hateful comments about trans people, skepticism that Black people were qualified for difficult jobs and his disdain for empathy.

Liguori did not blame any party or ideology for an increase in politically motivated violence, but acknowledged that far too many of her fellow lawmakers had faced threats and even acts of violence themselves.

“The easy path is to lean into division,” the Phoenix Democrat wrote. “The harder, more necessary path is to find the strength in ourselves — and the responsibility we owe the people we serve — to model decency, not destruction. There is no ‘us versus them.’”

But Gillette, who has spent the last several weeks railing about Muslims and declaring them “f***ing savages” and “terrorists” who should be expelled from America, responded by castigating Liguori for her call for civility and unity.n a message to all of his fellow lawmakers that included a racial slur, Gillette said political violence in America is wholly the fault of Democrats and the political left, and he accused them of stoking hate and violence against Republicans.

“The tone was set by your party; unity is no longer an option,” Gillette wrote. “We handed you an olive ranch (sic), and you broke it. Your party invited the radicals to the table and they took over. Now you own them. As the J**s did at Peral (sic) Harbor, Radical Muslims on 911, your party has woken the sleeping giant.”

House Minority Leader Oscar De Los Santos issued a statement on Monday saying that House Democrats were taking Gillette’s words as a call to violence against them.

“His response contains a number of factual inaccuracies,” De Los Santos said. “More troubling, however, is his decision to compare Democratic members of this Legislature to the terrorists who attacked America on 9/11 and to the foreign military that killed more than 2,500 servicemen at Pearl Harbor.”

In the statement, De Los Santos said that, because Gillette is known to carry a firearm, “several members have expressed that they no longer feel safe in his presence.”

The words of both Liguori and Gillette are emblematic of the nation’s wide ranging responses to Kirk’s assassination.

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox and U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, both Republicans, and U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, a Democrat, all called for a tempering of harsh political rhetoric following Kirk’s murder.

Others, including President Donald Trump and his Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, have accused Democrats of creating an environment that fosters violence. Trump even said in a recent interview that he “couldn’t care less” about violence perpetrated by people on the right, because they did it in response to crime, doubling down on his stance that left-wing violence was the real problem.

Instances of political violence have increased in the past few years, but both Republican and Democratic officials have been targeted. That includes the fatal shooting of Minnesota Democratic state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband in June and the arson of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home in April, as well as two assassination attempts targeting Trump last year.

The division between Republicans and Democrats has increased in the past decade. But responses to Kirk’s assassination — from some on the far-right, including in the Trump administration, calling the Democratic Party and other liberal groups terrorist organizations to some liberals on social media celebrating Kirk’s death — have further tightened an already tense environment.

In Gillette’s email, which seemed to be filled with the kinds of false social media rumors that circulate following nearly every mass shooting, he falsely claimed that the last eight school shooters were transgender. He told the Mirror that the statistics were provided by the U.S. Department of Justice.

“You (Democrats) demand gun control after every school shooting, yet you ignore the fact that the last eight school shooters were from the trans community, a crisis tied directly to mental health decline and hormone drug abuse that you refuse to even discuss,” Gillette wrote. “Instead, you scapegoat law-abiding gun owners.”

There is no DOJ report concluding that the most recent eight school shooters were transgender. Gillette’s statement seems to be based on a rumor that followed the Aug. 27 shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis that resulted in the deaths of two children and caused injuries to 21 others.

Law enforcement officials said the shooter was 23-year-old Robin Westman, a transgender woman. Westman is the only person who has been identified as transgender who has been accused of perpetrating a school shooting in 2025.

Over the past few years, rumors that the perpetrator is transgender have flooded the internet after almost every mass shooting in the United States. Most of the time those rumors turn out to be false. The vast majority of mass shootings — 98% according to the Violence Prevention Project at Hamline University — are perpetrated by cisgender men. Less than 1% of mass shooters have been identified as trans.

Shortly after the shooting at Annunciation, the U.S. Department of Justice said it was considering banning transgender people from owning guns. Kirk, a staunch supporter of gun rights and the Second Amendment, endorsed the idea.

“If you are crazy enough to want to hormonally and surgically ‘change your sex,’” Kirk wrote in a social media post, “you have a mental disorder, and you are too crazy to own a firearm.”

In his interview with the Mirror, Gillette repeatedly refused to explain exactly what he meant when he wrote that the Democratic Party “has woken the sleeping giant,” insisting that its meaning was obvious.

“You’re the journalist, you’re supposed to be the smart media person,” Gillette said. “What do you think it meant?” But just a few minutes after he refused multiple times to explain his exact meaning and told the Mirror to make its own interpretation, Gillette accused the media, including the Arizona Mirror, of “twisting his words.”

“It’s obvious,” Gillette insisted. “I made a very fact-based statement and you people want to call and ask what it means. That’s bullsh*t, you know what it means. You’re just trying to put words in people’s mouths and write something out of context.”

He then said that the phrase “has woken the sleeping giant” has been used twice in history to signify an awakening of truth for the American people in the aftermath of the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“You’ve awoken the knowledge of the American people, that’s all that it means,” Gillette told the Mirror. “The people will decide what the response is. Not me. Not you. Not the parties.”

The attack on Pearl Harbor spurred the U.S. to officially enter World War II and the 9/11 attacks sparked the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq.

But Gillette balked at the idea that anyone would interpret his email as a threat of violence.

“Learn history, get real,” he said.

Although the phrase, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve,” is often attributed to Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor, many sources agree that it’s unclear if he ever said that.

That direct quote is from the end of the 1970 war movie “Tora! Tora! Tora!”

In his email and the phone call, Gillette echoed the language of many Trump allies, blaming Democrats and the left for division and stoking violence.

Completely left out of the conversation were the thousands of Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, perpetrating acts of violence against police and destroying property in an attempt to overthrow the government to stop Joe Biden’s victory over Trump from being certified, only to be pardoned by Trump when he took office in January.

“It was the Democrat Party that labeled 75 + million Americans and President Trump himself as ‘deplorables,’” Gillette wrote, referring to a comment Hillary Clinton made in September 2016 at a fundraiser. “Your side has called us Nazis, fascists, racists, misogynists, and ‘a direct threat to democracy.’ That rhetoric is not harmless it demonizes half the nation and fuels the very environment you now pretend to lament.”

In her email to Arizona’s representatives, Liguori acknowledged that each of them “feel the weight” of possible political violence and that every lawmaker has the responsibility to “model decency” in the face of violent rhetoric.

“As leaders with platforms, our words carry weight far and wide,” Liguori wrote. “Violent actions don’t happen in a vacuum. Violent rhetoric fuels violent threats, which can empower individuals to real violence.”

De Los Santos in his statement decried Gillette’s inflammatory language and called for others to do the same.

“We call on elected officials of all stripes to disavow this language and escalation,” he said. “Silence is tacit endorsement.”