By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — As October began, the widely followed Citizen Free Press website posted a video of Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake at a lectern with a placard identifying this as a Hispanic community center event.
A reporter off-camera asked Lake about abortion.
Citizen Free Press, which often features news about Lake, is one of the national conservative sites that grew to fill the void when the popular Drudge Report increasingly began to resemble the kind of dominant liberal site that conservatives already saw enough of.
Lake is one of the Grand Canyon State’s GOP candidates who seem to be attracting a lot of attention from East Coast media worried that pliable Republican politicians of the past are being replaced by sterner stuff.
For instance, NBC television’s liberal Chuck Todd recently visited Phoenix to lament today’s political scene and yearn for bygone Arizona Republican politicians like U.S. Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake — who liked to work with liberal Democrats.
“Maverick” McCain died of an aggressive brain cancer in 2018. Flake, who retired from the Senate in 2018 after only one six-year term because of his unpopularity in Arizona, joined McCain’s widow, Cindy, in 2020 to endorse Democrat candidate Joe Biden for president. Once in the White House, Biden rewarded the two by naming them as ambassadors.
At the Hispanic community center event with Kari Lake, the video had a reporter’s voice asking, “Tell me. Abortion is effectively banned in the state right now. Tell me, do, is that something that you support?”
Once the U.S. Supreme Court returned the abortion issue to the states with its Dobbs decision in June, the question in Arizona became which of its restrictive abortion laws would prevail, a 15-week law that GOP Gov. Doug Ducey signed earlier this year or the previous mother’s-life law that was set aside in 1973 when the Supreme Court created a new national “right” to permissive abortion with its Roe and Doe opinions.
Lake replied to the reporter, “I support saving as many lives as possible,” and said she wants to know where her Democratic Party opponent, Katie Hobbs, stands. “I never hear you guys ask her that. I’m pro-life,” Lake said, adding that her own plan would be that every woman who walks into an abortion clinic should know there are other options.
“There’s families who would love to adopt a baby,” Lake said, but the women going for an abortion know of only one option. “Nobody tells them that there’s other options. We want to help our women.”
Lake indicated that she actually already knows where Hobbs stands, but she wants media members to press Hobbs on that.
“Let me tell you where she stands,” Lake said. “She supports abortion right up until birth, and after birth. She supports if a baby survives a botched abortion, that that baby die on a cold metal tray. And none of you ever try to get her to talk about her stance. So get back to me after you do.”
Lake’s blunt talk received a wave of applause and cheers from her audience.
Another Basement Campaign
The pro-abortion Arizona Republic, the state’s largest daily, again exposed its ignorance of the issue in an editorial it posted October 2 on the Lake-Hobbs race. The Republic sought to portray the pro-abortion stand as being powerful because “the Republican candidate for Maricopa County Attorney, Rachel Mitchell, announced she would not prosecute women for having abortions.”
In fact, laws against permissive abortion are aimed at abortionists, not the pregnant mothers they victimize.
Lake’s previous job as a longtime news anchor at a major Phoenix television station gives her an advantage in her ability to use her voice in public speaking, as well as presenting a comfortable, well-groomed appearance.
The left-wing Hobbs’ voice, on the other hand, may sound like a teenager while she, like Biden in 2020, tries to conduct a campaign from the basement.
This is Lake’s first major political campaign. She surprised Arizonans by resigning from her TV job in 2021 and then explaining that she was disgusted with liberal media bias. Following this, she said, people began asking her to run for governor.
While her comments on the campaign trail sound like the conservative tough talk of someone like Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, Lake has no political record yet to back that up.
She’s hardly the only strong conservative voice among Arizona Republican campaigners.
On September 29, a major Phoenix news-talk radio station, KFYI (550 AM), devoted the three hours of one of its regular afternoon talk programs to a “Keep Arizona Red Rally” it staged at the local Mountain Shadows Resort, with GOP candidates including U.S. Senate hopeful Blake Masters each given about six minutes to speak without interruption. More on that in a moment.
The Wanderer asked a couple of media figures to comment on the attention that East Coast media biggies are devoting to Arizona Republican candidates this season. The New York Times, for instance, repeatedly casts a critical eye on them.
A longtime journalist in New York circles asked to remain nameless because he has friends at The Times. He told The Wanderer, “Arizona is not only a battleground state, but its recent history of right-wing populism — going back at least to Evan Mecham — is irksome to the Times editorial staff, both the older Upper West Side liberals and the Brooklyn progressives.”
Mecham was a conservative Republican gadfly and critic of establishment corruption who served as Arizona’s governor for less than a year and a half in the late 1980s. The state’s establishment hated him as much back then as Donald Trump is hated today, and removed Mecham from office with a contrived impeachment.
Seth Leibsohn is a daily talk host at Phoenix-based KKNT (960 AM). He recalled for The Wanderer that other Arizona Republican conservatives also had come under the fire of the Eastern establishment, including U.S. Attorney General Richard Kleindienst in the early 1970s and Chief Justice of the United States William Rehnquist.
“The Eastern establishment has never liked Arizona’s rugged individualism and independence,” Leibsohn said on October 3. “Perhaps Barry Goldwater’s 1964 candidacy against that establishment was the beginning. But whether going after the Kleindiensts or Rehnquists or Goldwater, we’ve been with this a long time.”
Leibsohn also recalled that after deranged loner Jared Loughner went on a shooting spree in 2011 that critically injured Tucson-area Cong. Gabrielle Giffords, The Times tried to spread the blame for the attack widely.
“In 2011, after the Tucson shooting, The New York Times couldn’t spend enough time or ink on Arizona being a problem that Illinois and New York and Pennsylvania and D.C. never were or would be to them,” he said.
“We take it as a badge of courage that we do so much better than Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, and D.C., and worry that if The Times ever praised us, we’d know we’d be slouching if not racing toward the Gomorrahs that never receive their moral squint,” Leibsohn said.
The Mountain Shadows Resort, which was the scene of KFYI’s “Keep Arizona Red Rally,” had opened in 1959 as a sort of youngster to challenge notable resorts established in an earlier era including the Arizona Biltmore, Camelback Inn, Hermosa Inn, and Jokake Inn.
The iconic 1960s Monkees television band filmed a show at Mountain Shadows, and the short-lived detective series The Brothers Brannagan was based there.
The September 29 KFYI rally was slotted during its regular three-hour daily Russell & Hunter talk program from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. and continued to run commercials as it ordinarily would, although each political candidate made his or her speech without interruption. There was a raucous, sold-out audience.
Lake made the first talk, saying, “We’re going to declare a public emergency” on the first day of her gubernatorial administration because of the open-borders crisis caused by Biden, whom she called “a bumbling fool.”
She said she favored “stopping people from coming into the country in the first place” illegally, rather than busing them around after they cross the border.
Democrats “are hell-bent on trying to destroy this country,” she said.
A Dumpster Fire
U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters spoke shortly after 6 p.m., saying he was shocked at how quickly Biden had made things so much worse in this nation, including making the border “a dumpster fire.”
Masters said the Democrat incumbent he’s running against, Sen. Mark Kelly, “thinks that we’re dumb” and believe that Kelly actually wants to stop inflation and the open border, even though he votes firm support for Biden’s agenda.
Biden can’t succeed with legislation unless he has other Democrats in office to support him, Masters said, adding that Kelly can find $50 billion to send to Ukraine, but not to protect the U.S.’s own border.
Even though Kelly is heavily funded and has spent $65 million attacking him, Masters said, Kelly can’t hit as much as 50 percent in the polls.
On the other hand, Kelly keeps running ahead of Masters in the polls.
Masters said that under Biden, Border Patrol agents are “not allowed to do their job,” and that Kelly wants to resettle illegal immigrants “into your neighborhood.”
Tom Horne, the GOP candidate for superintendent of public instruction, reminded the audience that under incumbent Democratic superintendent Kathy Hoffman, the Arizona Department of Education has a “queer chat” web space that youngsters can hide from their parents.
On September 27 Fox News posted that the state’s Department of Education “reportedly advertised a chat room website called Q Chat Space, which targets LGBTQ+ youth 13 years and older. Q Chat Space, launched in June during ‘Pride Month,’ apparently offers a ‘quick escape’ feature that hides a child’s visit to the site by redirecting from the Q Chat Space site to Google’s homepage. The adults, referred to as ‘Q Chatters,’ are facilitating the discussions and do not have to be licensed professionals.”
Horne said these adults could include predators because they’re unlicensed volunteers.
He said that as superintendent, he will remove Critical Race Theory teaching and social-emotional learning. The latter, he said, means students aren’t disciplined “because it might hurt their feelings.”
Candidate for state attorney general Abraham Hamadeh recalled that just a few years ago, Democrats said to defund the police and abolish ICE, but they’re trying to run away from that record now.
Incumbent Arizona Cong. Andy Biggs said Democrats “have targeted our state for years,” to take it over. “These people are ideologues that don’t like the country.”
“They don’t want us to be able to have access to energy” because they want control over people, Biggs said, adding, “They want to imprison people who speak up for freedom,” but to release violent criminals from prison.
Arizona State Sen. Wendy Rogers warned against “a globalist attempt to take over Western democracies,” adding later that “we know our country is hanging by a slender thread.”
Rogers spoke of the importance of election integrity and said that if people take their ballot to the polls but are told they’ve already voted, “call the sheriff.”
Cong. David Schweikert said that when Democrats took complete control of the White House and Congress in 2021, their spending unleashed not only damage to the U.S. but also around the world. “When we do that, we blow up the world.”
Congressional candidate Jeff Zink hailed the Supreme Court overturning its Roe v. Wade opinion imposing national permissive abortion. “We now have been lifted from the curse,” he said.
Zink said the Democratic House incumbent he’s running against is a Ukraine-first congressman, while Zink promised to be an America-first congressman.
In addition to these candidates, Republican conservative political consultant Constantin Querard spoke to remind people of the importance of voting for the down-ballot races that matter, too, because they affect matters like taxation and the Second Amendment.
“Commit yourself to an extra 10 to 15 minutes to fill out the rest of the ballot,” Querard said.
Donald Trump announced that he’d be holding a rally for the Arizona candidates in the Phoenix suburb of Mesa on October 9, a few days after this issue of The Wanderer went to press.
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