The Fighter

Review of Kari Lake’s Unafraid

In recent years, Republican voters have flatly rejected the traditional formula of promoting lifelong politicians by serially helping them rise up the political ladder.  This desire for new blood willing, above all, to fight the relentless onslaught of the Left has allowed remarkable new leaders to emerge.  While President Donald Trump’s career remains the example par excellence, the meteoric rise of Kari Lake at the state level also has been breathtaking.  Her popularity with the GOP grassroots today confirms what polls of the presidential race are showing:  Republicans want toughness, a no-compromise fighter, with strong rhetorical gifts. 

Few if any Republican leaders today eclipse Lake in those talents, which are on display in her new book Unafraid.  The foreword by no less than Trump underscores the position she now occupies in American politics.  Trump vouches for Lake by observing, “In a situation like this, many Candidates, too weak to fight, throw their hands up and accept this horrible and very unfair situation.  But not Kari Lake . . . [who] is as strong a fighter as there is.”  He adds, “Kari Lake’s story does not end in a defeat, because she is just getting started!”

I knew Lake years ago when I served as Maricopa County Attorney.  Prior to her entry into politics, Lake was the long-time anchorwoman of the primetime newscast of Fox 10, the Fox News affiliate in Phoenix.  Her years on those valuable airwaves helped her build up great credibility and name ID among the station’s many GOP-leaning viewers.

RINO Hunting

A series of events led Lake to question her future in the media and look at the political arena instead.  The left-wing Phoenix New Times attacked her for opening an account on the conservative app Parler.  Other media elites did not defend her right to free speech, including her own station.  As she soured on the current state of journalism, Lake rightly sensed a propitious time to lend her talents to right-leaning politics. 

Lake began looking at the wide-open race for Governor of Arizona in 2022.  As part of her due diligence, she met with former Governor Jan Brewer.  Lake rightly notes that Brewer, like her successor Doug Ducey, was a RINO who received a pass from GOP voters before Trump’s rise fully exposed the GOP establishment’s lip service to basic conservative principles.  Lake was amazed when Brewer visibly recoiled at Lake’s complaints about irregularities in the 2020 elections and the need to investigate.  Brewer would go on to endorse Lake’s RINO opponent in the 2022 gubernatorial elections.

Indeed, the 2020 elections were pivotal for Lake’s own assessment of establishment shenanigans.  Lake said she was “appalled” when Fox News called Arizona for Joe Biden early on Election Night.  She perceived this as an attempt by the network “to influence this election.”

Her campaign for governor focused on core conservative issues, delivered with rare professional polish.  Lake campaigned with a slogan, “Don’t California my Arizona.”  She noted San Francisco “now looks like a scene out of a zombie apocalypse.”  She took bold stands on fighting illegal immigration, an issue that is powerful nationally but whose influence is magnified many times in the besieged border state.  Very quickly she carved out a strong plurality in early GOP primary polls.

The left-wing Arizona Republic struggled to pigeonhole and diminish Lake, as they inevitably seek to do to all conservative candidates.  Not knowing how else to disparage her, the editors settled for describing her as a “slasher.”  That she earned this distinction for being unusually articulate and at times acerbic in her ripostes against the Left only endeared her further to the grassroots.

Confronting the Stone Wall

Yet she ran into the same ruling-class stone wall that has bedeviled conservatives in Arizona and nationwide for years.  After winning the GOP primary over a RINO plutocrat, Lake faced Democrat Secretary of State Katie Hobbs.  Hobbs was such a pathetic and weak candidate that she refused even to debate Lake.  On Election Day, Lake noted she was ahead in the RealClearPolitics average of polls by 3.5 percent, and her internal polls showed her leading by 10 points.  Yet as people headed to the polls that day, numerous voting machines mysteriously malfunctioned.  Long lines developed for the GOP-laden Election Day crowd.  It appeared to many to be an establishment trick to suppress the Election Day vote, which skewed heavily Republican.  In litigation challenging the results, one expert would testify for Lake that the voting-machine chaos could only have been intentional.

Lake describes in detail her postelection battles with the bipartisan “gang” of ruling-class elites in Arizona.  They proved, in the end, a “gallery of rogues” she could not overcome.  (My own experiences with some of them can be read here.)  The official vote count would show Lake losing the race by 17,117 votes.  Hobbs became—there is no nice way to say this—the dumbest, least qualified governor in the state’s recent history (I’ve known all of them for the last thirty years).  “I am the lawful Governor of Arizona,” Lake writes, referring to Hobbs as a “squatter.”

Despite losing the bitterly contested race, Lake became a national phenomenon.  At the recent Turning Point USA conference, Lake won the straw poll for Vice President.  Her legal challenges to the election remain on appeal but are unlikely to succeed, as the courts have no stomach for relitigating the 2020 elections and punish attorneys who force them to do so.  Yet Lake is poised to win easily the Republican nomination for Arizona’s U.S. Senate race in 2024 in what could be a wild three-way race.  In a nation under siege by a vicious, militant Left intent on destroying our Republic, Lake has shown herself one of the few genuinely brave and resolute leaders on the Right—qualities that make her fully worthy of the title of her book.