Arizona Senator Outs Anti-Republican Sports Announcer And Online Troll

February 3, 2021 Terri Jo Neff
Josh Miller has been a public address announcer in the Phoenix market since 2000. His online troll activity was discovered by one of his victims, Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita as seen in the screen shots of Twitter accounts.

An Arizona legislator outed an online troll Tuesday who tweeted derogatory vulgarities toward several women and blamed Republican politicians for the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

On Tuesday, Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita (R-LD23) exposed @ZonaJosh as Josh Miller, a sports announcer in the Phoenix area with credentials from the Scottsdale Unified School District.

“Mr. Miller you have promoted violence and used your anonymous Twitter account to viciously attack me and many others. Today it ends!” the senator tweeted. “You didn’t think I could find you, but I did.”

Miller’s displeasure with Ugenti-Rita can be traced back at least late October when he posted that the legislator was a “racist Anti-Masker” and a “vile” individual who needed to be voted out of office. But his rhetoric escalated in vehemence toward some Republican women after the General Election.

Ugenti-Rita recognized some of the same posts were displayed on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and she used that information to identify who called conservative commentator Tomi Lahren “a stupid whore” and replied “F*** You” when Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-CD8) reported “I am safe” during the Jan. 6 riot.

Interestingly, the ZonaJosh account thanked Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat, for her service after she too tweeted “I am safe.” Another tweet by the same account demanded “SHOOT THEM ALL. SHOOT TO KILL” in response to the rioters who entered the Capitol.

On Wednesday night a message on Twitter advised “This account doesn’t exist” in a search for @ZonaJosh.

Ugenti-Rita’s disclosure came less than two weeks after a Rhode Island man was sentenced to four years in federal prison for online harassment of female prosecutors and politicians in two states.

In late January, Aaron T. Moul was convicted of using multiple Facebook profiles in 2020 to “annoy, abuse, threaten, and harass” several female attorneys across the country, many of whom were campaigning at the time for public office. He also conceded his actions would be expected to cause “substantial emotional distress” to his victims and that one of his targets had a “reasonable fear of death and serious bodily injury.”

Two of those he harassed -Kristina Guerrero-Sisneroz and Sandy Russell- were attorneys in Cochise County who were campaigning for judicial office. Another of the women was a District Attorney in Wisconsin who also was running for public office.