Sometime after I hit publish on Saturday’s article “QAnon freak Arizona state Senator Wendy Rogers kills anti-Stolen Valor bill to protect her failed endorsee fake Vietnam veteran,” and thinking about what I’d slapped together I had something of an “Oh fuck” moment. Now this isn’t to express any regret, in fact I’m mostly at peace with the way it turned out, simply because going into the weeds about Arizona HB2030 itself would’ve marred and bloated what was already a pretty long if mostly straightforward retelling of how the white nationalist psychopath Rogers came to end up blocking a bill criminalizing misrepresentations of one’s military record. That piece was about politics and legislating, not the potential implications of the bill if it does end up getting signed, a possibility that still remains as it will bypass Rogers and be in Arizona state Senate President Warren Petersen’s hands if and when the state House passes it again as SB 1214, all thanks to a cheat code.

That said, I did kind of breeze over HB2030’s constitutionality itself, writing “Most of this bill’s probably unconstitutional as, in US v Alvarez, the Supreme Court has already ruled that it’s protected to speech to falsify military service,” which, though the latter part is true in a vacuum, the entire sentence was a gross mischaracterization of how HB2030 would work under Alvarez. The real story leads to a dark place for Wendy Rogers and every other fucking freak in the Republican party.

It begins in 2007 when Xavier Alvarez, then a newly-elected member of the Three Valley Water District in Claremont, California introduced himself by saying, “I’m a retired Marine of 25 years. I retired in the year 2001. Back in 1987, I was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. I got wounded many times by the same guy.” What the hell Alvarez actually meant about being wounded in combat in 1987, specifically as to what war or battle and where this was is unclear but not really relevant. The truth is he had never served a day in the Marines or any other service branch in his life.

Federal prosecutors indicted Alvarez under the Stolen Valor Act of 2005. The case made its way through the appellate courts, finally landing in front of the Supreme Court in 2012, where a 4-2-3 plurality decision (Kennedy, Roberts, Sotomayor, and RBG in plurality, Kagan and Breyer in concurrence but on different grounds) the court ruled that bullshitting for the sake of bullshitting, like Alvarez apparently had, was protected speech. Funny enough, though this was not material to the main case, Alvarez had also lied about whether he and his ex-wife were still married, which allowed her to receive health insurance benefits. He ended up doing two years in the joint for that.

Congress went back to the drawing board, revising it to the Stolen Valor Act of 2013, which stipulates that certain actions, such as wearing a fake military decoration or otherwise lying about them, “with intent to obtain money, property, or other tangible benefit,” were subject to prosecution.

Seems to be going well, as here’s a Justice Department press release from December 2023:

A Tyler man has been sentenced to more than 11 years in federal prison for multiple violations in the Eastern District of Texas, announced US Attorney Damien M Diggs today.

Derek Robert Hamm, 39, pleaded guilty to wire fraud, money laundering, violating the Stolen Valor Act, using a fraudulent military discharge certificate, and being a felon in possession of firearms and ammunition. Hamm was sentenced to 135 months in federal prison on Dec 7, 2023, by US District Judge J Campbell Barker. Hamm’s sentence was the largest ever imposed in relation to a fraud scheme involving the Stolen Valor Act.

The Stolen Valor Act of 2013 makes it illegal to fraudulently wear medals, embellish rank, or make false claims of military service to obtain money, employment, property, or some other tangible benefit. As part of his sentence Hamm agreed to pay restitution of at least $2.3 million and forfeiture of the proceeds of his criminal conduct, including jewelry, automobiles, and cash proceeds in the amount of $1,675,000.

According to court documents, Hamm invented a persona of being a wealthy and successful war hero. Hamm held himself out to be a former member of the Army Special Forces who had served multiple tours of duty in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries. He claimed to have been awarded a Purple Heart, Bronze Star, Silver Star, and Distinguished Service Cross for his service. Hamm also represented that he was related to Harold Hamm, the billionaire oilman in Oklahoma, which he claimed gave him access to financial resources and oil industry expertise. Through this larger-than-life persona, Hamm created an extensive network of friends who introduced him to potential investors. Those investors believed Hamm’s claims and invested in what they expected to be worthwhile ventures spearheaded by a trustworthy and capable entrepreneur.

In reality, Derek Hamm was nothing of the sort. Hamm was not a decorated war hero. He was no oil industry tycoon. He was not related to Harold Hamm. He did not spend investors’ funds on the latest oil industry technology or new oil wells. Within hours of receiving investors’ funds, Hamm spent their money on himself and his family, including expensive jewelry, vehicles, and vacations to expensive resorts on private charter planes. All the while, Hamm represented to investors that he had invested their money in successful oil industry projects. He continued to pump investors to keep sending him money even as their investments failed to produce any returns.

Despite the press release’s emphasis on the Stolen Valor 2013 act there’s definitely an icing on the cake feel to it in that Hamm almost certainly got a lot more investor-scamming mileage out of sharing a last name with that billionaire in the same industry than he did claiming he got a goddamned Silver Star. Like there’s zero chance he wouldn’t have been indicted anyway for lying to investors about being related to a heavy hitter even if he had really earned those medals.

There are very few other examples besides Hamm of Stolen Valor prosecutions at either the state or federal level and literally no appellate cases since Alvarez. Worse for the other fake warriors: if Hamm was going to bark up that tree then he probably would’ve done it already, and his inaction just makes it that much harder for the next asshole given the bedrock principle of Stare Decisis.

So yeah, I was wrong to write that Arizona HB2030 is going to run into problems constitutionally because of Alvarez. That was some crackerjack bullshit though again it didn’t matter that much in the context of a story about politics rather than a law that isn’t law yet. Still the Arizona Mirror’s article from which I had gotten much of the background all of this week’s drama in the Arizona state legislature’s GOP caucuses specifically said “In 2005, a similar bill was passed by Congress, though parts of it were found to be unconstitutional because it violated the First Amendment. Blackman said he aimed to avoid that by focusing solely on those who impersonate veterans for benefits that they would otherwise not be entitled to receive and adding that to existing state scam and fraud laws.”

But even that assertion undersells the implication, which is the real “Oh fuck” part:

Something between 35 and 45 states have already enacted something that could in one way or another be criminalizing misrepresentation of one’s military record either by wearing medals in public, lying to obtain contracts, or both. HB2030 is the first to specifically proscribe “Impersonating a veteran of the United States Armed Forces to obtain employment or government contracts, to secure votes,” emphasis added as that part’s right up front, what Wendy Rogers claims is “a personal vendetta” Walter Blackman is continuing to pursue against that Steve Slaton dipshit.

Having thought about it a bit, even without the benefit of an education and juris doctor in constitutional law, I’m of the mind that’s low-key, stealthily, actually a preeeettty big fucking deal, because if the bill passes and gets signed into law and Slaton or some other MAGA Stolen Valor candidate in Arizona is prosecuted for knowingly misrepresenting their military record to voters and it’s upheld on appeal then what else does that open the door to in Arizona and 49 other states?

It may be a world Rogers does not want to live in.

Funny enough the first time I’d ever heard of Alvarez was when Trump’s scumbag defense lawyer in Georgia, Steve Sadow, cited Alito’s dissent in a motion to dismiss to argue that it was okay for him to believe and propagate all that shit about the 2020 election having been stolen to harass Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger because that was Trump’s First Amendment right:

Never mind that Alito wanted Alvarez’s conviction upheld, that he actually did intend for the state to be the arbiter of truth on certain matters, this was what Team Orange were trying to sell when it looked like the fat fuck was going to face consequences for his coup attempt. Someone had the idea to turn the Georgia indictment into Alvarez, that utterances Trump made in furtherance of the criminal conspiracy were protected speech and that cocksucker Sadow ran with it in his motion. You can see Charlie Kirk and a ton of other “thought leaders” in the movement pointing that way back in 2023, that it was going to be the “precedent” to defend him in both the media and the courts.

Asking for phone numbers: CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY pic.twitter.com/B0IFLBKOYX

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) August 15, 2023

Now I can’t speak to why Wendy Rogers blocked HB2030. It could very well be some version of the political, technical bullshit reasons she said in her statement, or that she really wants to protect her buddy Slaton from Blackman’s “vendetta” (whether Slaton would actually end up getting prosecuted if and when the law comes into effect is not really worth getting into the weeds on right now). Still, you have to wonder that whether in that desiccated, terminally pilled brain of hers that there may be some association in there of “STOLEN VALOR LAW = BAD” because of the ultimately unnecessary legal/political defense that MAGA world was trying to slap together for their Orange God Emperor.

Or maybe she actually thought about it and realized that if making false claims about one’s military record on the campaign trail can be criminalized then maybe so could other types of false claims.

If you think Stolen Valor laws are a goddamned political no-brainer then try telling voters they shouldn’t support a law that says politicians can’t lie. That’s almost quite literally the end of the political world as we know it. Of course there’s gotta be a burden of proof, probably a standard akin to the actual malice of civil defamation, and so on and so forth, but at the end of the day, what was the real difference between Steve Slaton and Derek Hamm? What’s the real difference between misrepresenting one’s service record to rip off a bunch of shithead oil investors and doing the same to get a bunch of shithead Republican primary voters in Arizona to cast a ballot for you? They’re both “tangible benefits.” Who’s then to say in that world that George Santos shouldn’t have been prosecuted for falsely claiming to be on the volleyball team at Baruch College (lol). Yeah he’s going to prison for actual fraud and what not but that specific lie wasn’t in the indictment.

So yeah, maybe Wendy Rogers and however many other MAGA Republicans who saw the wording of Arizona HB2030 are right to be concerned. It could be the top of a very slippery slope for them.

And Democrats like Eric Adams if we’ve gotta “bothsides” it…