To curry favor with Arizona’s far right, the former TV anchor is leveraging her unique background and using the media as a punching bag. It just might work.
Liz Skalka at HuffPost:
PHOENIX — It was a sweltering Arizona evening in late June, and Kari Lake was standing on a stage in a church community center in front of a giant poster of Kari Lake.
The promotional material for Lake’s campaign for governor featured Lake’s head and shoulders, floating alongside Donald Trump’s head and shoulders, with a quote from Trump: “Kari Lake is fantastic. She is going to win big.”
Trump’s endorsee was about to be interviewed by a reporter for a Japanese TV station in Gold Canyon, an upscale Phoenix suburb at the base of a mountain. Lake’s own video team hovered in the background, capturing her every move. It was a million degrees and Lake was dry as a cactus.
It wasn’t long into the interview that Lake turned to two of her favorite subjects: Trump and the media.
“People of this country love Donald Trump,” Lake said. “It’s the corrupt, rotten media that’s been trying to tell them and brainwash them into believing that people don’t like him.”
Lake’s remarks about a “corrupt” and “rotten” media are especially breathtaking considering the source: a former newscaster who, less than two years ago, was still delivering the news in one of the nation’s largest media markets.
“I want you to know if the Arizona ‘Repugnant,’ as I’ve taken to calling it” — Lake’s derisive nickname for the Arizona Republic newspaper — “if CNN and MSNBC are attacking people, those are the people you want to vote for,” Lake told the crowd at a candidate forum just prior to her interview with the Japanese station.
How Lake came to leave the media — or at least the story she tells about why she left the media — is the foundational story of her outsider campaign for governor. It also mirrors the trajectory of the far right’s accelerating break with reality during the COVID pandemic and in the aftermath of the 2020 election, a rupture driven by actual fake news and propaganda
Lake, whose previous job involved discerning fact from fiction, is now closely aligned with the cowboy-hat-sporting state lawmaker Mark Finchem, a Trump-backed promoter of election falsehoods running for the role of chief elections officer. Together they help form the ranks of candidates who claim the 2020 election was “corrupt” and “stolen,” and both recently suggested, without credible evidence, that 2022’s results may be compromised, too. Lake has also been endorsed by a slate of extremist figures tied to Trump, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn, U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar (Ariz.), MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, and Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers — the fringes of the fringe.
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There’s at least one commonly agreed-upon reality in this race: Lake is resonating with the GOP base. With two weeks to go until the Aug. 2 primary, Lake has consistently led in polling of the GOP field. Although more recent polling suggests the race tightened after Doug Ducey, Arizona’s moderate, term-limited Republican governor — who also leads the national fundraising campaign for GOP governors — endorsed her main rival, developer Karrin Taylor Robson, a move that fanned the flames of Ducey’s proxy war with Trump. On Monday, former Vice President Mike Pence also threw his support behind the more establishment-friendly Taylor Robson.
“She’s a diva of her own persona — the television news personality who just doesn’t believe the news.”
If Lake wins the Republican nomination, she will likely face Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs in a general election that Republicans are signaling they may use to relitigate, for the umpteenth time, the 2020 election results in a state that became known for its widely discredited election audit. In a debate this month, Lake pushed the stolen election narrative as a litmus test for the GOP field. In April, she and Finchem sued state and county officials to try and ban the use of electronic voting machines in this year’s election.
“It’s election denier against election defender,” said Chuck Coughlin, a veteran GOP strategist in Arizona, framing the hypothetical matchup between Lake and Hobbs.
Lake, 52, is a charismatic, made-for-TV candidate entirely in Trump’s mold — if Trump happened to be a woman with high cheekbones and a pixie haircut. Like Trump, Lake has spent decades on TV. Unlike the former president, Lake was primarily a local news anchor, spending a majority of her career at Fox’s Phoenix station. Lake even interviewed Trump twice before following him down the golden escalator.
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‘Embarrassed By The Mud She Splashed’
Watching them now, Lake’s two MAGA rally-adjacent interviews with Trump don’t give any inkling of what was ahead — except when in early 2020 Trump seems to override his handlers to give Lake extra time to ask him questions (Lake also interviewed President Barack Obama in 2016).
But at work and online, Lake was gaining a reputation for amplifying conspiracy theories that would touch on the election and the coronavirus. Lake was also promoting her presence on far-right social media sites, like the now-defunct Parler and Gab, a platform favored by anti-Semites.
Lake’s connection to a fact-based world became even more tenuous when she began running for office. She has since been linked to Ron Watkins, the rumored leader of the QAnon movement, which believes the nation’s elites are running a secret child sex trafficking ring. The man alleged to be “Q” himself (Watkins has strongly denied being the voice behind Q’s writings, but has admitted his general involvement in the QAnon movement) is also running for office as a Republican in Democrat Tom O’Halleran’s eastern Arizona congressional district. Watkins posted a photo on Telegram last year claiming he had dinner with Lake. Lake’s campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment about her relationship with Watkins or Nick Fuentes.
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Scott Jones, a former TV news director who runs FTVLive, a gossip blog covering the cable news industry, said Lake was “certainly big and well-liked in Phoenix. And for a long time while she was doing the job, she was a real journalist. And then slowly this change happened, where she became infected with the radical right-wing disease.”
That change unfolded publicly over the latter half of Trump’s presidency, according to people in Lake’s personal and professional orbit who’ve followed her career.
In 2018, while Lake was still at Fox, she tweeted that a grassroots movement to raise teacher pay was actually cover for a ploy to legalize pot. Lake later deleted the tweet and apologized. Another time, Lake was caught on a hot mic ridiculing the Phoenix New Times, calling the city’s spunky alt-weekly a “rag for selling marijuana” after they reported on her joining Parler.
“Lake was starting to make these statements, usually on Twitter or somewhere on social media. She would get in trouble and go off the air for a little while. Fox would never say if they suspended her or not,” Jones said.
Lake’s station wouldn’t elaborate on her tenure there, beyond confirming her final day of employment on March 1, 2021. Lake’s campaign also wouldn’t comment on her extended breaks or the specifics of her departure.
While Lake was taking family medical leave from her job in early 2021, Jones reported that she was spotted at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida (which Lake attended this year as a featured speaker). Lake announced her resignation from Fox 10 not long after.
Lake left the station with people “completely embarrassed by her,” Jones said. “They’re embarrassed by the mud she splashed on the station, and they’re mad with management who let her continue to get away with it, especially late in her career.”
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‘This Is All An Act’
Probably one of the more unexpected narratives to arise from the governor’s race came last month, when Phoenix drag star Barbra Seville, aka Richard Stevens, released photos and private messages he exchanged with Lake over the course of their two-decade acquaintanceship.
Stevens took issue with Lake tweeting, “They kicked God out of schools and welcomed the Drag Queens. They took down our Flag and replaced it with a rainbow.” Lake has also echoed GOP hysteria over drag and “grooming” children.
According to Stevens, his former friend had once hired him to perform at a baby shower in drag, in front of children, a bomb meant to show Lake’s hypocrisy on the issue. Stevens also performed for Lake once at her birthday and at “some of the seediest bars in Phoenix,” he wrote on Facebook.
The story caused enough of a stir that Lake’s campaign sent a cease-and-desist letter to Stevens warning him to stop making certain claims about Lake. Her campaign confirmed to The Washington Post that Stevens was “a friend” and that Lake once attended an event with “a Marilyn Monroe impersonator.” A campaign spokesperson told the newspaper that Stevens’ Facebook post contained “defamatory lies” and that Lake would pursue legal action.
Lake and Stevens bonded over makeup and Madonna, Stevens said over the phone last month, sounding almost wistful about his onetime friend. He said Lake started coming to his shows in the late ’90s and they struck up a casual friendship that lasted years. Lake’s campaign didn’t respond to questions about her relationship with Stevens.
“I knew her as very level-headed. I found her to be middle-of-the-road liberal. She and I, we didn’t have in-depth conversations about politics, but it wasn’t uncommon to talk about news and current events because that’s what we bonded over,” he said.
The idea that Lake isn’t who she says she is has haunted her entry into politics. And it might be what undoes her campaign.
“I think Karrin Taylor Robson will be the best person to be a fresh new leader for the state of Arizona,” Ducey, Arizona’s governor, said last weekend on CNN, lending his political heft to Lake’s rival. “Her opponent, on the other hand, bears no resemblance — her campaign or even her personal interactions with me — to anything she’s done over the past 30 years. This is all an act.”
Former KSAZ (Phoenix Fox O&O) news anchor-turned-MAGA firebrand Kari Lake is running for Governor of Arizona on the GOP ticket. If she wins the primary, she is highly likely to face Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) in the fall.
Lake’s campaign is hitting all the far-right extremist and conspiratorial notes, such as cheering the Big Lie, championing faux “audits”, amplified COVID conspiracies, and attacking drag queens despite repeatedly attending drag shows over the years.
Read the full story at HuffPost.
