Kari Lake Blasted for Pandemic Claims About Ron DeSantis
/Kari Lake is gearing up for a Senate run in Arizona after her gubernatorial loss in 2022, but her appearance on Patrick Bet-David’s podcast has earned backlash.
Kari Lake attacked Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for closing beaches, saying he took a page out of California Governor Gavin Newsom’s playbook. “He did force vaccines. He did force face masks on our kids.” She even claimed he forced vaccines on workers.
Lake also said Florida itself is a great place to live and DeSantis’s leadership hasn’t made it easier. In fact, Lake argues it’s been harder to live under DeSantis. Bet-David pushed back on Lake, stating DeSantis’s policies have made Florida an attractive place to live and do business.
This is a strange shift for Kari Lake, who once widely praised Ron DeSantis for having “BDE.” Kari Lake said if you don’t know what that means, ask your kids. She opted to tell the conservative crowd that it stood for “Big DeSantis Energy.”
After DeSantis’s re-election, Lake said DeSantis “set the standard for conservative leadership at the state level nationwide. I look forward to trying to reach it.”
So, why the drastic change in tune? Well, Lake once thought the only compliment greater than being told she’d be the “DeSantis of the West” was being “Trump in a dress.” Simply put, Kari Lake is not acting as the straight shooter she once pitched herself to be while running for governor. She’s parroting similar remarks that former President Trump made earlier this year, who praised former Democrat Governor Charlie Crist, implying sunshine and ocean are enough to make Florida work well, and DeSantis is a nonfactor.
Jeremy Redfern, who serves as the press secretary to DeSantis, responded to Lake’s comments by pointing the finger at Trump. “It was Donald Trump that closed beaches, forced kids to wear masks and banned tag at recess, and was preparing for a military COVID vaccine mandate. Gov DeSantis fought the Trump-Fauci WH task force, banned vaccine passports, and forced schools to open.”
It is true that DeSantis did shut down Florida early in the pandemic, but he also reversed course and pushed back the national media and his critics who named him “DeathSantis.” Once the beaches were open, a man dressed in a grim reaper costume roamed the beaches to shame the governor and the residents who wanted to enjoy the sun.
Schools in Florida reopened after the summer break in 2020. DeSantis blocked mask mandates in July of 2021 and outlawed vaccine passports. Unlike Governor Kristi Noem, who recently endorsed Trump, DeSantis took a stand against businesses enforcing vaccines. While Noem told her people to find new jobs if they didn’t want to obey the mandates, DeSantis signed legislation to prohibit employers from mandating COVID-19 vaccinations.
No, Florida was not open the entire time, but DeSantis’s actions were vastly different than Gavin Newsom or former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who Trump praised over DeSantis this year.
After Kari Lake was bombarded with criticism and receipts of her own praise of DeSantis, she went to Twitter (now known as X) to redirect focus. “We could spend decades blaming each other for the Covid response. We probably will. I just don’t think that’s the most productive use of our time. I think our most immediate concern should be prosecuting Anthony Fauci. Can we agree on that?”
Lake ended up deleting that post after more pushback. When Jeremy Redfern asked Kari Lake why Trump didn’t fire Fauci, Kari Lake’s War Room account claimed, “President Trump could not simply fire him” because he was not a political appointee, and it would have created a “constitutional crisis during election year.”
Redfern replied by asking, “…why didn’t he fire him from the Trump-Fauci White House COVID Task Force?”
Fauci was a star during COVID. Trump couldn’t risk getting rid of Fauci due to potential bad press, and that’s why his campaign cut ads stating that Trump deferred to Fauci.
Last night at the GOP Presidential debate, Dave Rubin, host of the Rubin Report, claimed: “Kari Lake just came up to me and was clearly not happy with my criticism of her obvious lies about DeSantis and Covid, yet Dear Leader is afraid to defend his own record.”
