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Kari Lake Steps On A Landmine With Absurd Claim About Ron DeSantis

Scott Morefield
Scott Morefield  |  September 26, 2023 10:00 PM

Former Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake negatively compared the Covid record of Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to that of Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom during an appearance on the PBD podcast released Tuesday.

Lake, a surrogate of former President Donald Trump who lost her 2022 race for the Arizona governorship, told host Patrick Bet-David that DeSantis "took a page out of Gavin Newsom's playbook" by closing Florida beaches at the beginning of the pandemic and forcing interventions like vaccines and face masks for children.

"Let us not forget that DeSantis also shut the beaches down. DeSantis took a page out of Gavin Newsom’s playbook," Lake said. "Despite what he says he shut the beaches down. He did force vaccines. He did force face masks on our kids. So he tries to act like he was perfect and Florida ..."

When Bet-David pushed back with a question about whether DeSantis actually "forced vaccines on kids?" Lake doubled down.

"He forced vaccines on people, on workers. He forced facemasks on children," she said. And he was for all that, DeSantis was for all of that. So he thinks that we’ve forgot that as well."

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The failed Republican candidate, who, like Trump, alleged fraud in her election loss but failed to prove it in court, went on to insist that the duration of DeSantis' Covid interventions was "a little more" than the few weeks the host noted it lasted.

Lake, of course, had an entirely different take on DeSantis in 2022.

However, as the Florida governor emerged as a potential challenger to Trump, her approach shifted to lies and misinformation, even going so far as to allege that DeSantis was endorsed by leftist billionaire George Soros.

Lake's latest contentions are also lies and mischaracterizations. This piece by Townhall's Rebecca Downs documents the Covid debate between Trump and DeSantis, particularly DeSantis' admission that, while he allowed for local control and followed some of the Trump administration guidelines "for those first few weeks," he quickly made the data-based decision to chart his own course. 

And he certainly didn't mandate masks or vaccines. Florida was also among the first states to open schools in the fall of 2020, and has taken legislative steps to ensure things like mask and vaccine mandates won't be legally possible during a future pandemic.

The podcast clip went viral on Tuesday and Lake was blasted on Twitter/X by many on all sides of the conservative sphere:

Lake later responded to controversy surrounding her words with an attempt to move on, but people weren't buying it: