A lot has been written about the corruption of politicians. You've seen that before, but really not enough has been said about how unbelievably boring they are in person. That's the main thing you notice when you have dinner with them. Their main interest is themselves. That's what they talk about. It's all they can talk about, and it's very tedious. Narcissism always is tedious — and so one of the great and happy and unexpected surprises of this cycle is how many interesting people are running around the country, people who have something to say that isn't necessarily about them, people who have interests beyond just accumulating more power.
JD Vance in Ohio, Kari Lake and Blake Masters in Arizona, Joe Kent in Washington state, Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania — none of these people have been in politics before. All of them seem to be listening to voters, listening, not just talking, and amazingly, all of them could win on Nov. 8 and if they do, that's a huge problem for the Democratic Party, and for the people in charge more broadly, it's a potential disaster.
It's one thing to elect more Mitch McConnells, tame Republicans who know what the rules are. The first rule, of course, is you must lose. People like that will play along as they faithfully have for decades, but what would happen if someone like Blake Masters or JD Vance wound up in the U.S. Senate? That would be disruptive.
These are not people who care about secret partisan arrangements or even about partisan affiliation. They might actually try to change the country for the better. So if you're benefiting from the current disaster, that's a scary prospect, but no one running for office right now is quite as scary to people like that as Kari Lake. She's running for governor of Arizona. Lake may be the most skillful communicator in American politics right now, but most terrifying of all, she spent 30 years in television news.
When Kari Lake says the media are corrupt, she's not guessing. She lived right in the middle of it for decades. This is a deeply unsettling message for Democrats to hear because it strikes at the heart of their power. Without the complicity of the media, there is no chance neoliberal Democrats could get elected to office — not one of them, ever. They've got nothing to offer you. It's not like they're improving the country.
Have you looked around? No, they need the media. The media are all they have. The liberal media, they're not just annoying; they're the key to the whole system. Take them away and everything changes. So, it's essential to the people in charge that voters continue to believe that the so-called news coverage they see and read is real, that it conveys facts and not simply crude North Korea–style political propaganda, but Kari Lake knows better. She knows the truth. She has seen it and they truly hate her for revealing this secret in public.
Kari Lake has spent the last year absorbing the cruelest and most outrageous possible attacks from her former colleagues in the media. They're not simply trying to defeat her in November, though of course they are. They're trying to destroy her. They're trying to make certain that no American voter ever has the chance to hear what Kari Lake is saying, because again, once people know it's all fake, this isn't news; these are lies and these lies are the key to keeping the people who are wrecking the country in power. Once people understand that, the game is over, it's done. They have to stop Kari Lake. Here's a sample.
POLLS SHOW REPUBLICANS FLIP KEY METRIC IN 2022 MIDTERM ELECTIONS, DEMOCRATS 'BLEW THEIR LEAD'
MARIA CARDONA, CNN: Kari Lake was the picture, the image, the definition of a threat to our democracy.
CHRIS HAYES: Why the Democratic threat to Arizona is way more dire than you may think.
KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN: Kari Lake. She has made lies about the 2020 election, conspiracy theories.
OLIVIA TROYE: Kari Lake, who has been out there spreading false conspiracies and election lies still today.
ANDREA MITCHELL: Gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who’s been called Trump in heels and will not say whether she’d accept a loss in her own race, is an extreme anti-vaxxer.
JOE SCARBOROUGH, MSNBC: She’s an election-denier. She’s a conspiracy theorist.
KYUNG LAH, CNN: Rising star of the right-wing and proud spreader of lies.
TIM MILLER: We have to be abundantly clear about just how radical the Kari Lakes and Blake Masters are. They are nothing like John McCains.
JON HEILEMANN: She might be in the position to win the governorship in this state and that would be a very dangerous thing to both the state and the country in 2024.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI, MSNBC: A threat to our society: Kari Lake.
Oh, she's an extremist. "Kari Lake is extreme," scream the people who support open borders and late-term, sex-selective abortions and the castration of children. "She's extreme, unlike us. She's hurting democracy," they yell as they promote censorship and voter fraud. "She's a threat to our society," and it's not just aging lifestyle liberals on Xanax who have chosen MSNBC, who are saying things like this. No, it's Republicans too. Members of the GOP establishment in both Arizona and in Washington. That would include, amazingly, former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, who they told you was a conservative, but then, of course, they told you Liz Cheney was a conservative too. "You'll be happy with her. She's conservative. She's on your side." OK. Not surprisingly, Liz Cheney has come to the same conclusion about Kari Lake.
EVAN SMITH, CEO OF THE TEXAS TRIBUNE: Republican candidate in Arizona for governor.
LIZ CHENEY: Right, who’s an election denier, who is dangerous, and that’s the kind of thing we cannot see in our party, we cannot see an accommodation like that, and I think it’s very important that we be clear about that.
SMITH: Are you going to campaign for Katie Hobbs, the Democratic candidate for governor in Arizona, as a result of that?
CHENEY: I’m gonna do everything I can to make sure that Kari Lake is not elected.
SMITH: So, does that include campaigning for Democrats if that’s what it takes?
CHENEY: Yes.
"I'm going to do everything I can to make sure that Kari Lake isn't elected the governor of Arizona, a state I don't live in," she says before an audience of people in Texas who won't be governed by Kari Lake either and they applaud. "Yes, got to stop Kari Lake. She's a fascist. She's dangerous. She'll destroy our society." Why? Because she's telling the truth about the media with authority because she knows. That's the flavor of the media coverage Kari Lake has received. In fact, over the past year, there's not been a single objective or anything approaching an objective news story about Kari Lake in all of legacy media.
Every single story has been a partisan attack because they know she's telling the truth, but here's the amazing thing, and the heartening thing is it tells you about the winning power of the media. Kari Lake thrived anyway. She's now leading the race in Arizona. If the election is fair, she will win. So how did she do that? Few people can do that. How did Kari Lake do that? Well, she knows what she believes. She's not resetting her positions from a teleprompter like Joe Biden or John Fetterman. She's not brain-damaged. She has real beliefs, but more than anything, Kari Lake is not afraid of the media. She's not on a leash like everyone else. She knows who they are and she's willing to say so. She doesn't care what The New York Times thinks because she knows what The New York Times is because she lived in that world.
LAKE: If you’re going to start throwing around terms like election-denier, let’s remember who the other election-deniers were: Hillary Clinton and all the Democrats. Let’s talk about election-deniers, here’s 150 examples of Democrats denying election results. So, it’s OK for Democrats to question elections, but it’s not OK for Republicans? It’s a crock of BS, every one of you knows it, we have our freedom of speech and we’re not going to relinquish it to a bunch of fake news propagandists. Since 2000, people have questioned the legitimacy of our elections and all we’re asking is that in the future we don’t have to have that happen anymore.
So, you watch a clip like that and you begin to connect some dots. The media that control our perception of reality that lie about what they tell us and don't tell us all kinds of things we probably should know about the rest of the world, for example, those media organizations are relatively speaking, tiny. They're tiny. This is a country of 340 million people. MSNBC has, like, 11 people watching, so why are they so powerful? Well, they're so powerful because the people in charge take them seriously. They act like they have moral legitimacy when, of course, they have no moral legitimacy of any kind. This is full North Korean propaganda. It's an offense against democracy, what they're doing, and Kari Lake knows that and she pulls off their mask and lets them know they don't deserve our respect. Here, for example, is Kari Lake's response in June when a CNN reporter asked her for an interview.
LAH: Hi Kari, nice to see you, Kyung Lah from CNN.
LAKE: You don’t have a mask on anymore, what’s going on?
LAH: Well, we’re outside, do you have a minute to chat?
LAKE: Well, we’re six feet apart.
LAH: Do you have a minute to chat?
LAKE: I’ll do an interview, as long as it airs on CNN+, does that still exist? I didn’t think so because the people don’t like what you guys are peddling, which is propaganda.
MAN WHO ASSAULTED US REP. LEE ZELDIN TO BE RELEASED INTO REHAB
"Where's your mask, you neurotic freak? I'll do it on CNN+. Oh, that failed because everyone hates you." It's so great because it's so true. All of us know it, but the people in charge, especially in the Republican Party, never admit it out loud. If The New York Times did a hit piece on Mitch McConnell, he'd be rushing around his office worried about it. The New York Times does a hit piece on Kari Lake every day and she laughs because it doesn't matter what The New York Times thinks, they only have power because we give them power because we treat them like they're real, but they're fake. They're ghosts. Turn on the lights and they evaporate. They go away. They don't actually exist. They're a fantasy. They can only continue as long as we participate.
In attacking the media, what Kari Lake is really doing is standing up to institutional power. So, for example, Kari Lake is not afraid to improve the lives of people in Arizona by pushing back against the vaccine lunacy. "Oh, she's an extreme vaccine-denier. She's an anti-vaxxer," says MSNBC. She doesn't care. On Wednesday, she announced that no matter what the CDC does, Arizonans will never be forced to inject their children with an experimental vaccine that clearly hurts people.
LAKE: This is an experimental shot. Our children are not guinea pigs and we’re not going to have incidents of myocarditis in our young, precious children. We will fight that with every fiber in our being. We’re not going to have this forced shot by the CDC, which has their tentacles in big pharma, and I am going to fight that.
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Imagine what she would be like on a debate stage. How would you like to face off against her? Katie Hobbs doesn't want to. She's running against Katie Hobbs. Katie Hobbs was the secretary of state of Arizona and she's refused to debate Kari Lake. "Oh, she's an election-denier." Right. OK, so how does Katie Hobbs plan to win? Well, this week, Hobbs, who is again, the secretary of state of Arizona, in charge of elections, announced that thousands of voters mistakenly received a ballot that had only federal races on it. Now, there's no proof this was deliberate, but it kind of undercuts the whole election-denier attack when you send out thousands of faulty ballots a few weeks before the election.
As we said, assuming that all votes are counted — and we should never take that on faith, we should never take that on faith — if this is a democracy, we have an absolute right to have it proven to us that the election was fair. If it is fair, Kari Lake's going to win. She's leading in pretty much every poll. So, you kind of have to wonder: If there's a person running for governor of Arizona, with every person against her with institutional power and she's going to win anyway, then maybe she's doing something other Republicans should learn about.
