Kari Lake's Most Controversial Moments

Kari Lake is a relative newcomer to the political space, but her fiery personality and bold takes have earned her quite the reputation. Before she stepped down from an anchor position with KSAZ-TV, a Phoenix-based station, she found herself in some hot water. She earned plenty of criticism near the end of her career in the media for sharing information that had been roundly debunked and pulling stories from X, formerly known as Twitter, without verifying the facts behind them. One of her biggest blunders was tweeting that the #RedForEd movement was a front to legalize marijuana. It was, in fact, a movement meant to increase funding for public schools and raise teacher pay. Lake later walked back those claims, apologizing and saying she worried some may use the movement for their own agendas.

After working in news media as an anchor for over 20 years, Lake decided to try her hand at politics — and this is when the controversies really started. She did end up with plenty of publicity, but she has very little to show for it so far. Here are some of her most controversial moments.

In 2021, Kari Lake left her news anchor position and announced her intention to run for the governorship of Arizona. The race was open, as the incumbent could no longer run due to term limits. Lake ran for and won the Republican nomination as a champion of the far-right and was even endorsed by Donald Trump. Much of her campaign centered on the 2020 presidential election being rigged and stolen, but we'll get to that later. She rubbed her victory in the noses of her traditional Republican colleagues as well, despite sending a message of unity after winning the nomination.

Kari Lake eventually lost her bid to become the governor of Arizona, but that didn't stop her from contesting the results of the election. Her opponent Katie Hobbs won with 50.32% of the vote, an incredibly slim margin. Lake filed a massive lawsuit that claimed her opponent should be disqualified for intentionally sabotaging the results. Each part of the lawsuit has since been dismissed by the courts, but that isn't the end of the story — Lake has refused to concede that election, even today. During her 2024 Senatorial debate, she was asked on seven occasions if she would accept the loss and never answered.

Kari Lake made herself one of the leading political voices pushing the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. A major part of her gubernatorial campaign hinged on that assertion, with Lake even saying she would not have certified Joe Biden's electoral victory in Arizona in 2020 if she had been the governor. She also demanded the decertification of the state's results and said journalists and her political opponent Katie Hobbs should be imprisoned based on the conspiracy of election fraud.

Fair elections and the possibility of voter fraud have become major talking points for MAGA Republicans, and that hasn't changed since 2020. "We've got great candidates on the Republican Party and on our side," Lake said at an Iowa rally in 2023 (per HuffPost). "We've got so many great candidates that if our elections were really fair, I believe the ranks of Congress, the Senate, I think a White House, I think all the state governorships would be Republican if elections were fair." Investigations turned up no evidence of fraud within the state of Arizona.

The COVID-19 pandemic somehow became a divisive issue in the United States, largely thanks to poor handling and badly thought-out comments from all sides. After announcing her intention to run for the governorship of Arizona, Kari Lake made it a keystone of her campaign. At her own rallies, she called mask mandates "tyranny" and seemed to originally make the issue about the government telling folks what to do. But if not tolerating mandatory mask mandates, vaccine requirements, or vaccine passports was where it stopped, it would have been less controversial. 

Lake was one of the people who took hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin and became a proponent of the drugs. They were big talking points on the political right, with quite a few people claiming that they effectively treated COVID-19 and could even prevent people from catching it. Lake herself talked about manufacturing the drugs in Arizona to make them more available. Even today, there have been no studies showing that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are effective COVID-19 treatments, making claims like Lake's dangerous for people with the illness and those at risk of contracting it.

Conservative political voices have a habit of using drag queens to fearmonger and manufacture outrage. Kari Lake unfortunately became no exception, but her comments drew controversy for different reasons than they normally would. Lake publicly said that drag queens could be harmful to children, which was ironic given her past. See, Lake herself was known for having attended drag shows. The Log Cabin Republicans, a committee for LGBTQ+ Republicans, even endorsed her 2024 Senatorial campaign.

Lake responded to the criticism of her comments by trying to clarify that she believed adults should be able to do as they please, but children were her concern. She had previously stated on social media that she supported people's right to gender transition but reversed her position in 2022 by saying on X that gender is "determined by God at conception." Lake appears to have picked a side in the culture war, but she's been accused of hypocrisy.

Kari Lake may be known for her fiery rhetoric, but she tried pivoting to a more diplomatic approach when she started her 2024 run to be an Arizona senator. It was an attempt to patch up relationships with the very people she attacked in her 2022 gubernatorial campaign. Unfortunately, she wasn't able to keep that going for long. Lake publicly called for Arizona Republican Party Chairman Jeff DeWitt to resign over a corruption scandal, and he did. A recording of DeWitt and Lake speaking was leaked before the resignation, and in it, DeWitt urges Lake to wait before running for office and talks about campaign money in the party.

Lake called it a "bribery scandal" on X, but DeWitt pushed back. He said the audio was selectively edited and that he had been threatened by Lake's team with a more damaging recording if he didn't resign. Lake's advisors denied threatening or blackmailing DeWitt, but the events caused a major controversy for the state's party and left a stain on Lake's reputation among her colleagues.