Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake is freaking the Democrats out. She’s been branded an extremist and an “election denier” by the left — and even some on the right. What’s more, she’s leading in the polling averages.

Is it the extremism that’s spooking the liberals and the media? Not at all, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson says.

Instead, it’s the fact that Lake was once one of them: a member of the media.

Lake is one of a number of candidates for high office in the midterms who have come from the private sector — joining author and venture capitalist J.D. Vance, the GOP Senate nominee in Ohio; tech industry player Blake Masters, the Republican nominee for Senate in Arizona; and Herschel Walker, former football star and Senate candidate in Georgia.

Indeed, as Carlson noted on his Thursday show, “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.”

“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,” Carlson said. “People like that will play along as they faithfully have for decades, but what would happen if someone like Blake Masters or J.D. Vance wound up in the U.S. Senate? That would be disruptive.”

None, however, has caused the left as much agita as Lake has. There’s a reason for that, Carlson posited.

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“Lake may be the most skillful communicator in American Politics right now — but most terrifying of all, she spent 30 years in television news,” he said.

She was an anchor on KSAZ-TV in Phoenix until she resigned in March 2021. That means she knows their tactics — and where the bodies are buried.

“So when Kari Lake says the media are corrupt, she’s not guessing. She lived right in the middle of it for decades,” Carlson said.

“This is a deeply unsettling message for Democrats to hear because it strikes at the heart of their power,” he said. “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.”

Thus, he argued, “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.”

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And boy, do they loathe her for it.

Montage time: We have CNN saying the GOP nominee “was the picture, the image, the definition of a threat to our democracy” and “has made lies about the 2020 election, conspiracy theories,” MSNBC saying “the Democratic threat to Arizona is way more dire than you may think” and that Lake is “a threat to our society,” and NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell saying she’s “been called Trump in heels.”

(That last one was Mitchell’s way of saying her position precludes her from directly referring to her as “Trump in heels” — but, you know, she’s heard some people refer to Lake that way. Not that she thought it was clever or anything. Wink, wink.)

“Oh, she’s an extremist,” Carlson said, mockingly. “‘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.”

“Every single story has been a partisan attack because they know she’s telling the truth,” he said. “But here’s the amazing thing, and the heartening thing is it tells you about the waning power of the media. Kari Lake thrived anyway. She’s now leading the race in Arizona.”

Fact check: accurate. As of Friday morning, the RealClearPolitics polling average has her up by 1.6 percent, despite the months of attacks.

This is because, Carlson said, Lake “doesn’t care what The New York Times thinks because she knows what The New York Times is because she lived in that world.”

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And she can handle them accordingly, like when she was called an “election denier” by a reporter earlier this week.

“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,” Lake said.

“Let’s talk about election deniers. Here’s 150 examples of Democrats denying election results,” she said before reading off a few of them.

“So, it’s OK for Democrats to question elections, but it’s not OK for Republicans?” Lake said. “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.”

Although I must say, I prefer her June masterpiece of a quote when asked by a CNN reporter if she had some time to talk: “I’ll do an interview, as long as it airs on CNN+. Does that still exist?”

No, it didn’t; in case you’ve already forgotten about CNN’s ill-fated streaming service, it was killed off less than a month after it debuted.

Little wonder, then, that her opponent, Democrat Katie Hobbs, refuses to get on a debate stage with her. She’s as afraid of Lake as everyone in the media and her party is.

It has nothing to do with the red herring of extremism, though. Just like you can’t pull a card trick on a dedicated magician, you can’t pull the usual media tricks on someone who’s spent three decades witnessing them from the inside.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.