Tag: kari lake
Kari Lake Appears To Welcome White Nationalist Into Her Senate Campaign

Kari Lake Appears To Welcome White Nationalist Into Her Senate Campaign

Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake has been cozying up to a well-known white nationalist and QAnon-adjacent operative, the Arizona Mirror reports. Wade Searle has been called one of neo-Nazi leader Nick Fuentes’ “strongest soldiers.” Searle lost his job working for the extremist Rep. Paul Gosar after Talking Points Memo exposed his ties to Fuentes.

So of course Searle has been welcomed by Lake, the biggest election denier of 2022 after she lost her gubernatorial bid to Democrat Katie Hobbs. Lake continued to claim she was the “lawful governor”—even as she was filing papers to run for the Senate seat currently occupied by Kyrsten Sinema, who announced Tuesday that she will not seek reelection.

Like the true Donald Trump fanatic she is, Lake filed repeated lawsuits to challenge the election outcome. Like Trump, she just kept losing those suits. Also like Trump, she’s embroiled in a defamation lawsuit over her attacks on an election official.

Searle has been showing up at Lake’s campaign events, even standing prominently behind her when Sen. John Barrasso—a member of the Senate GOP leadership—recently gave her his endorsement.

Lake’s campaign and Searle boost each other’s social media posts, and Searle seems to be involved with two Arizona groups, Students for Kari and Students for Trump, the Mirror reports. Lake, Searle, and the groups didn’t respond to the Mirror’s request for comment and clarification about his role in her campaign.

That endorsement from Barrasso isn’t a one-off from Senate Republican leadership or the GOP establishment. They’re coalescing behind Lake’s bid—never mind the MAGA-spouting white nationalist neo-Nazi lurking just below the surface of her campaign. A whole mess of senators are holding a fundraiser for her in Washington this week, including wannabe Senate Minority Leader John Cornyn, National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Steve Daines, and Senate Republican Policy Committee Chair Joni Ernst.

Is it official now? Has the Senate GOP just declared themselves the party of Trump and white nationalists? Sure seems like it.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Kari Lake

In Arizona Senate Race, Kari Lake Is A Big GOP Problem

Senate Republicans already have an Arizona problem they are trying to fix.

Their top GOP candidate, 2022 gubernatorial loser Kari Lake, isn't polling well against the top Democratic candidate, Rep. Ruben Gallego, and independent incumbent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. In fact, one recent survey found Sinema, who is polling third in the contest, pulling more votes away from Lake than Gallego.

Noble Predictive Insights’ late October polling of the hypothetical three-way contest showed Gallego at 39 percent, Lake at 33 percent, and Sinema at 29 percent. Notably, Gallego inspired far more party loyalty than Lake, with Sinema drawing support from nearly twice as many Republican voters (23 percent) as Democrats (12 percent).

In early October, a Public Policy Polling survey commissioned by the Gallego campaign similarly showed him winning a 41 percent plurality of the vote to Lake's 36 percent, with Sinema garnering just 15 percent. The same poll found a head-to-head favoring Gallego at 48 percent over Lake at 43 percent.

What makes the polling particularly ominous for Republicans is the fact that Lake is extremely well known by voters across the state after her high-profile but ultimately unsuccessful bid for governor last cycle. In other words, most voters have made up their mind about her.

That leaves Republicans with one chief tactic at this point: trying to drive down support for the other two candidates. Thus, the National Republican Senatorial Committee's latest ad blasting Gallego's personal life and tying Sinema's voting record to President Joe Biden. The ad frames the choice facing voters as one between "Rotten Rubin," who "abandoned" his pregnant wife when he filed for divorce, and Sinema, who "voted for Biden's agenda 100% of the time." The ad accuses Gallego of being a "deadbeat dad" without providing any evidence and slams Sinema as a "liberal Democrat." Yikes, what could be worse?

But the main takeaway here is that Senate Republicans are already grasping at straws in order to prop up a Trump-aligned election denier who enters the race with high name ID and a boatload of baggage.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Kari Lake

Kari Lake Appears On Antisemite's Podcast To Endorse Political Violence

Failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake recently appeared on the podcast of Michael Scheuer, a virulent antisemite who has called for the assassinations of leading political figures like President Joe Biden. During their discussion, Lake stated that the Second Amendment is “there to stop the tyrants.” Scheuer responded by claiming that there’s “an enormous enemy in Washington” and “in the general staff of the military.”

Lake, who is considering a bid for the U.S. Senate, is a former news anchor who has repeatedly and falsely insisted that she won her 2022 gubernatorial bid. She has referred to herself as “the real governor, the duly elected governor” and told one podcaster that Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs “should be pulled out by her collar."

She repeatedly appeared on far-right programs during her unsuccessful campaign. She also endorsed — and then rescinded, following media criticism — an antisemitic candidate for state Senate in the non-neighboring state of Oklahoma.

Lake has attempted to stay relevant by positioning herself as Donald Trump’s potential 2024 running mate and releasing an election-denying memoir. Throughout her promotional tour for the book, Lake has appeared on shows like the QAnon-supporting X22 Report, Steve Bannon’s War Room, and right-wing troll Catturd2’s In the Litter Box w/ Jewels & Catturd.

On July 28, the Arizona Republican appeared on Scheuer’s Two Mikes podcast, which streams on Rumble. Scheuer is a former CIA operative and QAnon conspiracy theorist who has said that Jewish people are “disloyal,” “subversive,” and “lethal enemies of Americans” who "must be stopped and then scoured from the continent.” He has also stated that numerous political figures should be assassinated, including “the Bidens, Harris, the Clintons, the Obamas,” George Soros, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

During the interview, Lake said that “the Second Amendment, in many ways, is the most important amendment” and that it’s “there to stop the tyrants.” (Elsewhere, Lake has directly accused Biden of acting tyrannically.)

Scheuer pounced on Lake’s suggestion of using the Second Amendment against tyrants by arguing that “what we've seen now is an enormous enemy in Washington and an enormous enemy in the general staff of the military.”

Scheuer also suggested to Lake that she consider “restoring the state militia,” an idea that she later said was “interesting.”

MICHAEL SCHEUER: When you were preparing to be governor, did you ever give any thought to restoring the state militia?

KARI LAKE: I had just — you know, I had a lot of people ask those kind of questions and I said — you know — interesting question, I'm sure that's your top issue, but my top issue is the border. And I think we have the people to help secure the border if we just put our will there to secure the border. You know, I think that the most — reason that we are still a country is we do have an armed citizenry.

SCHEUER: Right.

LAKE: The Second Amendment, in many ways, is the most important amendment, because when all else fails, we have that. That's what's keeping the world, honestly, going still, when you've got citizens who are able to protect themselves from tyrants, and that's why it was placed there. It wasn’t placed there for target practice. It wasn't placed there for pheasant hunting. It was placed there to stop the tyrants, and our Founding Fathers were pretty darn smart.

SCHEUER: Yeah. And that's why we initially had a militia — because they were afraid of the federal government encroaching on them. And when they stole that away and made a National Guard, they left the Second Amendment alone. So it's still there. I've often wondered why governors haven't thought, "Well, you know, maybe we should have our own militia again." But it's probably just a wild thought. But it's something that's in the Constitution. No law can overrule the Constitution. And it just seems to me a state should think about that. That's all.

LAKE: Interesting.

SCHEUER: And I don't mean — I would agree with what you said. You probably have enough firepower to do what you need to do for your border. But I mean, what we've seen now is an enormous enemy in Washington and an enormous enemy in the general staff of the military.

LAKE: That's [inaudible]. Well, and our founders understood this more than anyone, because they fought back the most — the largest tyrant you can imagine, King George and the British monarchy, and they died for our freedoms. They died for us to be able to choose our elected officials, our elected representation. And that's one of the reasons I stay in this fight, because I don't want that to have been done in vain.

Scheuer invoked the Second Amendment as a solution to political problems during a July 3 exchange with Fox News host Jeanine Pirro. On that podcast, he claimed that prior elections were “rigged” and said he thanks God that “the Second Amendment remains in the Constitution because I don't know how else to take care of these vermin.”

This is not the first time Lake has invoked the American Revolution and the Second Amendment as a remedy for alleged tyranny. During a December speech at Turning Point USA’s America Fest, Lake called for the imprisonment of Maricopa County election officials and, comparing her circumstances to the tyranny that precipitated the American Revolution, said, “I think we’re right there right now, aren’t we?”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Kari Lake

MAGA Conspiracy Loons Spark Civil War Among Arizona Republicans

If the Arizona Republicans of the 1980s and 1990s had been able to predict the future, they would have no doubt been shocked by the state's political environment of 2023. Arizona, in those days, was a deep red state, and its most influential Republicans were Sen. Barry Goldwater and the conservative who took over his U.S. Senate seat in January 1987, Vietnam veteran John McCain. Goldwater suffered a landslide defeat at the hands of Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964's presidential election; in Arizona, he was a conservative rock star, and McCain was proud to be called a "Goldwater Republican."

But in 2023, Arizona is as much of a swing state as Pennsylvania and Virginia and has a Democratic governor (Katie Hobbs), a Democratic U.S. senator (Mark Kelly), a Democratic state attorney general (Kris Mayes) and a once-Democratic U.S. senator who is now an independent (Kyrsten Sinema). Arizona is way more Democrat-friendly than it was 30 or 40 years ago, yet much of the Arizona Republican Party has moved to the extreme right. And MAGA Republicans like Kari Lake (the conspiracy theorist who Hobbs defeated in 2022) regard the late McCain and his admirers as RINOs (Republicans in Name Only).

In an article published by HuffPost on March 7, journalist Matt Shuham examines the divisions in the Arizona GOP and the disdain that MAGA conspiracy theorists have for more traditional conservatives.

"Since the 2020 elections," Shuham explains, "Arizona has been Ground Zero for wild conspiracy theories about supposed voter fraud leading to Joe Biden's victory. The claims gripped state Republicans to the point that nearly the entire slate of GOP midterm candidates for statewide office last year consisted of election deniers. To this day, Kari Lake, who lost the governor's race, maintains that she is actually Arizona’s governor now. Even after getting washed out in the midterms, state Republicans can't quit these outlandish theories. And now, it has thrown the party into chaos. For the past two weeks, Republicans have faced wild accusations of bribery, money laundering and election fixing — from their own supporters."

Two of Arizona's MAGA conspiracy theorists, according to Shuham, are attorney John Thaler and his ally Jacqueline Breger. During her testimony at an Arizona State Legislature hearing on February 23, Shuham notes, Breger 'accused everyone from state officeholders to judges, prosecutors and court-appointed medical health care advisers of accepting bribes from a criminal enterprise." And she "alleged that dozens of public officials were on the take, from judges to state officeholders and everyone in between."

Breger has accused fellow Arizona Republicans of being allies of Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel, whose infamous former leader, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzman, is serving a life sentence in a Colorado prison and has been the subject of numerous narcocorridos (Mexican corridos about the drug trade). Thaler and Breger's conspiracy theories, according to Shuham, have "created" a "near-civil war…. within the Arizona GOP."

"Following Breger's appearance (at the February 23 hearing) — Thaler left the state months earlier due to fears about his safety, he says — the two became instant celebrities among election conspiracy theorists," Shuham observes. "And Republican politicians now find themselves, some for the first time, on the wrong end of unfounded conspiracy theories and angry right-wing social media mobs."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.