Kari Lake Accuses DeSantis — Whom She Once Hailed For ‘BDE’ — Of Following Gavin Newsom’s Covid Playbook Of ‘Misery’
Failed candidate Kari Lake has come a long way from hailing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) for his “BDE,” even going so far as to compare his Covid record to that of progressive California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) in a recent appearance on the PBD podcast.
“Let us not forget that DeSantis also shut the beaches down. DeSantis took a page out of Gavin Newsom’s playbook,” began Lake.
“Despite what he says he shut the beaches down,” she continued. “He did force vaccines. He did force face masks on our kids. So he tries to act like he was perfect and Florida-”
“DeSantis forced vaccines on kids?” asked one of her interlocutors.
“He forced vaccines on people, on workers. He forced facemasks on children. And he was for all that, DeSantis was for all of that,” replied Lake. “So he thinks that we’ve forgot that as well. Now granted he didn’t continue the misery as long as-”
“Was it one month or a couple weeks on what it was?” interjected her host again.
“It was a little more than that, it was a little more than that,” insisted Lake. “The beaches were shut down to people, so anybody that shuts a beach down…” she added with an eye roll.
Kari Lake the shameless pathological liar and grifter goes on the @PBDsPodcast and says that Ron DeSantis forced masks on children and forced people to get vaccinated. Compares him to Gavin Newsom. pic.twitter.com/GQvJdTWzzo
— Unfiltered☢Boss (@Unfilteredboss1) September 26, 2023
Lake has endorsed Donald Trump’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination and done an about-face on DeSantis over the past nine months.
While she remarked during her own gubernatorial campaign last year that “Every GOP Governor in the country looks to DeSantis for leadership on how to run a state,” and relished a comparison to him, calling it “the greatest compliment you could pay me.”
In another instance last August, she declared that DeSantis “has bigger – ok, wait let me think about how I wanna word this, my staff always says whatever you do, do not say balls – so I’m not gonna say it. That guy has a backbone made of steel.”
“I’ll tell you what he’s got, I don’t know if you’ve heard of it or not, but he’s got BDE. Anybody know what that means? Ask your kids about it later,” she added, referencing the acronym for “Big Dick Energy.”
But by February 2023, as DeSantis weighed a primary challenge to Trump, Lake was sharing misleading articles implying that Democratic donor George Soros had endorsed DeSantis, when really he had only predicted that DeSantis would win the primary.
DeSantis closed the Sunshine State’s beaches in early spring 2020 at the urging of then-president Trump and his advisors, but began the process of reopening them by mid-April. DeSantis also required public schools to offer in-person schooling in fall 2020, making him one of the only governors in the country to do so.
Florida never enforced a Covid vaccine mandate, and in May 2021, DeSantis signed legislation barring discrimination on the basis of vaccination status.
