MAGA favorite Kari Lake continues to challenge Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, who defeated Lake in the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election. Lake has repeatedly challenged those election results in court, without producing winning results. (Hobbs is still Governor, a position in which she sometimes faces personal harassment instigated by Lake’s election-denying compatriots.)
Having largely exhausted her legal avenues to challenge the 2022 results, Lake — though still soliciting money for the cause — has turned her attention to going after Hobbs in the court of public opinion. Lake says Hobbs “secretly sought to deny free speech to citizens” though her allies “in social media companies.”
.@JonathanTurley is 💯 right
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) August 13, 2023
"@katiehobbs secretly sought to deny free speech to citizens through allies in these social media companies. The AZ legislature should investigate these allegations & hold Hobbs accountable for any attack on political speech." https://t.co/DSJogzYb5R
Using two of MAGA’s most popular pieces of weaponized rhetoric, Lake is now accusing Hobbs of demanding censorship and — what is in the MAGAverse an even more egregious crime — criticizing Donald Trump.
On X, Lake shares an article that shows Hobbs castigating then President Trump for what she and others perceived as his failure to adequately condemn racism after a 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA, turned violent.
The President is on the side of the freaking Nazis. Don't just say stuff – DO SOMETHING!!! https://t.co/Es9ScskF58
— Katie Hobbs (@katiehobbs) August 12, 2017
Hobbs wrote at the time: “The President is on the side of the freaking Nazis. Don’t just say stuff – DO SOMETHING.”
Elsewhere, Hobbs wrote that Trump is “more interested in pandering to his neo-nazi base.”
Below is a CNBC video of the press conference in which Trump addressed the brutality at the rally. One side heard a failure to condemn, while the others heard a measured attempt to assess the conflict — and a defense of its non-violent participants “on both sides.”
The censorship charge Lake raises derives from reports that Hobbs allegedly requested that Twitter (as X was then called) investigate what she characterized as harassing comments she received as a result of this post.
[NOTE: Twitter, at the time, encouraged reports of perceived harassment on the platform, seeking to curb incendiary rhetoric in order to better service its advertising clients. Another aspect of the story is the controversial role played by The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a Homeland Security department, charged with trying to quell mis- and disinformation online, and how it worked with Big Tech companies to identify dangerous information as it pertained to elections.]
One extant reply on Hobbs’s 2017 post wonders whether Hobbs herself was harassing Trump, asking: “Did this get fact checked? Nazi is a strong word to use for an individual, especially our President.”
Lake and others contend that Hobbs displayed, by associating Trump with Nazis, a bias against the President that should have prohibited her from executing her administrative responsibilities, as Arizona Secretary of State, in the 2020 election, the results of which were also disputed by MAGA adherents in the GOP.
