Kari Lake’s Delusions Aired at TPUSA’s Anti-SemiteFest

Kari Lake spoke at length at Turning Point’s AmericaFest 2023, held in Florida this year, and flew her full-on delusional freak flag.

She claimed – among many other delusions – that she and her attorneys are being unjustly persecuted for continuing to litigate her election lies (her attorneys are actually being investigated for their unethical behavior during the litigation), that the Jan 6th rioters are wholly peaceful protesters being jailed for their politics (hundreds of trials and courts’ factual findings establishing their criminal behaviors beyond a reasonable doubt would tend to disagree), and her litany of fantasies about how perfect and wonderful a MAGA nation would be: featuring $1 per gallon gas, chock full of affordable homes, good paying jobs for all, and a perfect society of happy families free of leftist scum and trans vermin (when it would actually be just more of the hellscape of public institutional collapse, mass death, international chaos, and official corruption we experienced in the Trump Administration).

Lake has become fully immersed in delusion, denial, and fantasy with very little remaining tethers to the world as it actually is. She is saying NOTHING to Arizona’s voters who live in the real world and not in the purely self-referential media bubble of fascist fantasy that has birthed the MAGA movement. The AZGOP seems poised and enthused to get beaten like a red-headed step-child in the 2024 US Senate race by nominating her.

While Kari’s fantasy life continues to be a rich tissue of propaganda, projection, and reality distortion, the rest of AmericaFest explored the festering swamps of American anti-semitism. Rolling Stone covered the event with a great attention to detail, so that we don’t have to:

… in addition to patriotism, many of the gala’s headliners appear to be of like mind about something much darker: a distrust, distaste, or outright hatred of Jewish people. The celebration comes on the heels of Kirk himself having been called out by prominent conservatives for creating “an anti-Semite problem” for the right.

Rolling Stone

The featured and lead-off speaker of the event was the blatantly mentally ill Roseanne Barr, but also included many of the most virulent anti-semites of the MAGA movement:

AmericaFest will be kicked off Saturday night by Roseanne Barr — the far-right comedian, who this past summer not only voiced Holocaust denial, but made a call for violence against the Jewish people. “Nobody died in the Holocaust,” Barr said on a June podcast with Theo Von. “That’s the truth.” Barr followed that lie with an even more shocking statement: “It should happen. Six million Jews should die right now, ‘cause they cause all the problems in the world.”

…

Barr is an extreme example, but she is far from alone among TPUSA speakers in making troubling comments about Jews. Jason Whitlock, a host for Blaze Media, this June denounced “Jewish pride” as an “affront to God,” while insisting that Jews are in league with LGBTQ minorities and Black Americans in the pursuit of power and “a one-world government.” Whitlock acknowledged during the segment that, “I will be accused of being an antisemite,” but added that this is “what happens in a nation of ‘pride.’ The groups that lean into pride, wield the power to silence their critics.” 

Blaze Media was founded by Glenn Beck, who is also speaking at the TPUSA celebration. In his previous incarnation as a Fox News host, Beck uncorked a hateful rant about “puppet master” George Soros, in which he accused the left-wing billionaire, a Holocaust survivor, of somehow being complicit in the death of fellow Jews. The Anti-Defamation League deemed Beck’s comments “horrific” and one writer memorably described the segment as “some of the most offensive anti-Semitic imagery ever purposely shown on American television.”

Other top TPUSA speakers also have an offensive track record of voicing anti-Jewish rhetoric and conspiracy theories. They include Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who infamously blamed western wildfires on satellite weapons controlled by the Rothschilds, a.k.a. “Jewish space lasers.” (Addressing that controversy in a new book MTG insists, “I have no antisemitic sentiments whatsoever.”) 

AmericaFest star speaker Tucker Carlson has routinely attacked the Jewish president of Ukraine, with claims about Zelensky’s “rat-like” appearance and “shifty” behavior, with commentators criticizing Carlson for trafficking in “antisemitic tropes.” In recent weeks, Carlson hosted longtime TPUSA contributor Candace Owens on his Twitter show, where Calson described his “hate” for Harvard’s “biggest donors” for “allowing” and “paying for” calls for “white genocide” on campus. Owens — who has also been accused of using antisemitic dog whistles — will also be speaking at AmericaFest

Rolling Stone

With so many notorious anti-semites laced through the event, one might suspect – with a great deal of justification, IMO – that the overt anti-semitism is feature and a draw for the event, not an oversight or sideline.

Even some on the political right wing are starting to wake up to the fact that TurningPoint is not an organization that merely dabbles in anti-semitism, but one that actively promotes and exploits the disease:

Red State founder Erick Erickson blasted TPUSA as “an antisemitic grifting organization” — combining criticism of Kirk’s comments with a reference to a recent AP report that the TPUSA empire has made its founder suspiciously rich. Kirk later defended himself from his conservative critics insisting, “Asking questions does not make you anti-Israel.” 

Rolling Stone

None of this is to suggest that the ENTIRE MAGA movement is anti-semitic, but like the movement’s sexual bigotry and racism, most ‘based’ MAGA-heads – including Kari Lake – seem to have determined that while vile and open anti-semitism may not be the point of the movement, neither is it a deal-breaker. As with the movement’s political violence and torrent of terroristic threats to anyone who opposes their Orange Julius, MAGA Americans have decided that embracing anti-semitism is easier and more comfortable than policing their own.