For Immediate Release
Friday, December 15th, 2023
Contact: Olivia Taylor-Puckett, otpuckett@azdem.org

ICYMI: “Kari Lake’s back on the air, this time talking far-right topics on online show” [Arizona Republic]

ARIZONA -– Today, the Arizona Republic published a new report detailing Kari Lake’s “The Kari Lake Show” on a new far-right online network, where she continues to “burnish her credentials with the far right even as GOP leaders have hoped she would focus her campaign on issues more likely to resonate with the broader public in Arizona.”

Lake’s new show is hosted on AFN, where she has interviewed extreme conspiracy theorists Garrett Ziegler, Roseanne Barr, Eric Trump, and Roger Stone. Her new associate Joshua Feuerstein, founder of AFN, is a “far-right evangelical pastor” who created the 2015 Starbucks holiday cup controversy and was present at the January 6th riots, saying “It is time for war! Let us stop the steal!”

This report is yet another example of Lake continuing to push conspiracy theories, as her campaign struggles to court Arizona voters, and she continues to make frequent campaign stops outside of Arizona.

Read more about why Kari Lake’s campaign is a nightmare for the GOP:

Arizona Republic: Kari Lake fanned election denialism, conspiracy theories on her online show

By: Ron Hansen

December 15th, 2023

Key Points:

• Not long before Kari Lake launched her long-expected U.S. Senate run, the conservative firebrand and former newscaster took up another project: hosting an online talk show for a company started by a former Fountain Hills evangelical who has said Christians need to be “capable of extreme violence.”

• “The Kari Lake Show,” as it is called, has offered reminders of Lake’s far-right rhetoric in a Senate race where some have suggested she is now trying to moderate or focus her political messaging.

• So far, her show for America First News has provided interviews with conservative figures that often dwelled on election denialism, fealty to former President Donald Trump and corruption allegations involving President Joe Biden and his son. She also raised her political differences with the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., whose allies Lake has approached in hopes of support.

• The interviews further burnish her credentials with the far right even as GOP leaders have hoped she would focus her campaign on issues more likely to resonate with the broader public in Arizona.

• Top Republicans in Washington are wary of her political viability after she lost last year’s gubernatorial contest and have since the spring privately urged her to move past election denialism, a central issue for other statewide candidates rejected by Arizona voters in 2022.

• In Lake’s first episode, taped in August and released eight days after launching her campaign, she talked to Garrett Ziegler, a former aide to Trump’s former trade czar Peter Navarro. Ziegler has posted emails, photos and other material apparently taken from a computer owned by President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden.

• In an episode published in October, Lake interviewed Roseanne Barr, the former sitcom star whose career imploded after social media posts denying a Florida school massacre and joking that a multiracial former Obama administration official was the child of terrorists and “Planet of the Apes.”

• She began an interview with Eric Trump published in October by pronouncing him “one of my favorite Trumps,” and declaring “none of the stuff that’s been written about the Trump family is true.” The September interview was taped at one of Donald Trump’s golf courses.

• In an interview with Roger Stone published in November, she called him “a personal hero.” Stone is a former Trump political adviser convicted of lying under oath and threatening a witness. Trump commuted Stone’s prison sentence before it began.

• AFN was founded by Joshua Feuerstein, who burst onto the national scene in 2015 protesting generic holiday cups from Starbucks. Since then, he has notably disparaged Islam, gay marriage, abortion rights and is now running for a seat in the Texas Legislature.

• Lake’s new media partner is known as “A Family Network,” or AFN, and America First News is part of that company. AFN did not respond to a request for comment.

• In working with AFN, Lake has aligned herself with Feuerstein, a far-right evangelical pastor who advised against COVID-19 vaccines in 2021 and told Newsweek then that Muhammad, the founder of Islam, “was a pedophile, not a prophet.”

• The day before the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, Feuerstein spoke at a rally between the White House and the Capitol urging action, if not violence. Feuerstein figured prominently in a documentary-style video of that period posted by Business Insider.

• “It is time for war! Let us stop the steal!” he thundered as he banged his hand on a lectern with a U.S. flag draped around his neck, the video shows.

• The next day, after then-Vice President Mike Pence refused to derail congressional certification of the 2020 election results, Feuerstein promised a takeover of the GOP: “No matter what happens in the coming days, I can promise you this: There is no longer a Republican Party. It’s MAGA vs. everybody. It’s patriots vs. everybody. We are not voting Republican any longer. It is our party now.”

• In October 2019, he spoke at a pro-Trump rally at the Trump National Doral Miami Resort, calling the coming presidential election war even then. “I need you to know that 2020 is a civil war that will change the face of America forever,” he said, according to a 2019 account of his remarks posted by the liberal People for the American Way’s “Right Wing Watch.”

• More recently, in July he posted this message on Facebook: “In order to be peaceful, you must first be capable of extreme violence. Otherwise, you’re just weak. Be dangerous, but peaceful.”

• Feuerstein broke the news of Lake’s affiliation with AFN in a Facebook post. “OK, a bit of personal news y’all will be hearing about shortly .. we are launching a huge network called A Family Network or AFN. It’s like Netflix .. but it’s FREE .. and has ZERO woke content. I wanted my friends to know first … we have signed Kari Lake to a show!”

• “They may have stolen Kari Lake’s election … but they haven’t stolen her voice!” the company wrote.

• Lake’s contempt for “the media” figured prominently in her first four shows. She sometimes advanced conspiracy theories or let others do it unchallenged.

• Election denialism has come up at least 27 times.  

• Lake’s show suggests she was slow to let the subject go completely.

• “The election was stolen, I believe, in my opinion,” she said moments into her first show, “because Biden and many people in Washington are so compromised they could not afford to get President Trump in there and have all these stones unturned with all the corruption.”

• During a complaint about the media, Lake invoked McCain, reiterating her political split with the man who won six terms in the Senate and as Lake looks to broaden her appeal.

• While talking to Eric Trump, Lake ranted against the media, saying “we have no skeletons, they’ll make up the skeletons.”

• AFN provides its audience a torrent of conspiracy theories and hatred for Democrats.

• Sinclair has multiple fraud convictions and reportedly served prison sentences in Arizona, Colorado and Florida.

• AFN is based at the same address as Endtime Ministries in Plano, records show.

• Endtime Ministries has for decades sold magazines, books and videos discussing the coming apocalypse as interpreted and predicted by its founder, Irvin Lee Baxter Jr.

• Baxter was a Pentecostal minister who hosted radio and TV shows for 30 years, wrote a book outlining the case for the Bible prophesying the United States and other modern countries. Later, he opened the Jerusalem Prophecy College in Israel, which offers online classes that purport to show how contemporary events are linked to biblical predictions.

• Baxter died in November 2020 from COVID-19, a disease he said in a broadcast four months earlier could be God’s vengeance.

• “I am not asserting that the coronavirus is the judgment of God, but I am not saying that it’s not either,” Baxter said. He went on to note reasons for God’s displeasure over society’s sins. The Bible lists those excluded from heaven, he said, including adulterers, homosexuals and drunkards.

• Kari Lake’s sponsor popular with anti-vaxxers

• Lake’s show has a sponsor in the Wellness Company, an organization that sells supplements and vaccine exemption letters. It tells listeners it was formed “by a team of doctors who lost their jobs for speaking up about the vaccines.”

• Its medical emergency kit includes prescription drugs intended to treat conditions ranging from COVID-19 to syphilis. Among the drugs it sells is ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug that some claimed as treatment for COVID. A clinical trial last year showed it to have no sign of a useful benefit against COVID.

• Peter McCullough is the company’s “chief scientific officer.” The Daily Beast wrote that he was a cardiologist who became “a hero in anti-vaxx circles.” He claimed government-approved COVID vaccines killed thousands of Americans and advocated the use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to treat the disease.

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