The Narrative About Bad America First Candidates Is Nonsense

By Kurt Schlichter 

We keep hearing a lot about how America First conservatives, the faction of the Republican Party that took power in the wake of the utter failure of the GOP establishment, keep nominating terrible candidates. Why, we Republicans are wasting gettable seats by choosing people who actually agree with our principles and policies! Not surprisingly, this is the kind of nonsense cope we’ve been hearing from these establishment losers ever since we rejected them for their unbroken track record of failure. It’s the lame rationalization of people who want the power back that we stripped from them because of their gross incompetence, corruption, and condescension. Don’t buy it.

Kari Lake is a great example of this narrative in action. Let’s get real about Kari. I’ve had the chance to get to know her a little bit. She’s terrific. She’s smart, articulate, and if you listen to her on the equally great Megyn Kelly this week – and you should – you’ll see that what she’s supporting is what we want and how she’s expressing it is smooth, rational, and persuasive. She is not the crazy woman the regime media and her jealous GOP critics claim. The image of Kari Lake as some sort of lunatic is a lie. Nothing could be further from the truth. She’s a great communicator – she was a TV journalist in Arizona for years and knows her own state. She’s gotten even better at politics this go-round. Yeah, Kari made mistakes in the past, like everyone else. Her critics often accuse her of being a nut for insisting that the Democrats stole the 2020 Arizona election, though after all that has happened in the last few years, someone who believes we ought to default to believing in the honesty of governmental actions, the integrity of the judicial system, and the good faith of the donkey party is a nut. Regardless, she’s learned from her experience and is running a different campaign this time. The reason her opponents, inside and outside of the GOP, tell you she’s some sort of wacko is so that you don’t listen to her unfiltered, because once you do she’s likely to win you over.

We’re told by all the self-appointed smart people that if Arizona’s GOP primary voters had only nominated somebody “normal,” why, this seat would be in the bag for the Republicans and Democrat Ruben Gallego – a straight-up communist scumbag – would be 10 points behind. But that’s nonsense. It’s utter nonsense. Why? Well, because Arizona nominated Martha McSally. She was the most normal of the normal, an establishment Republican who was not carrying the America First banner. She was so completely “normal” that even a Mitt Romney would’ve approved of her white bread blandness. Now, I’m not disrespecting Martha at all. She’s a fellow colonel and was just fine as a senator. But she didn’t get it done. She got crushed – twice. McSally lost to Kyrsten Sinema in 2018, got appointed as a senator temporarily, and then lost again in a special election to Mark Kelly. The facts simply don’t support the narrative that an establishment Republican is a guaranteed winner in purple Arizona. If it was, center-right establishment ex-governor Doug Ducey would not have passed up the opportunity this cycle to walk into a Senate seat.

Arizona is not a deep red state anymore and the Arizona Republican Party is a mess, not just in organizational terms but because of a split within it between the aging McCain faction and the ascendant America First faction. You have some of the old McCain faction – and the McCains – actively supporting Kamala Harris. Did you know John McCain’s second wife is an ambassador appointed by the Biden administration (sic)? That’s not on America First that when it was time to unite, the McCainites gave unity a thumbs down when they did not get their way.

The Arizona primary voters were not crazy for voting for Kari Lake. They were simply voting for somebody who supports what the majority of them support instead of somebody from a faction that supports what the majority of them oppose. The fact is that the Arizona Republican Party is fractured, and some nominal Republicans decided that if they didn’t get their way they would go over to the Democrats. This is a continuing problem within the GOP. We American Firsters are endlessly lectured that we’ve got to vote for the GOP nominee, even if he’s a squish, just because he has an (R) behind his name. It’s always time for us to unite. And that’s the right thing to do. That’s what we should do. You have a primary, fight it out, and then you get together behind the winner. But the establishment doesn’t like that rule when it’s applied to them. They don’t want to unite when they lose. They want to either cry or collaborate with the enemy. You can’t have two sets of rules, one for us and one for them. We’re getting tired of that. It doesn’t work.

Kari has tried to re-unite her party anyway. This time, she’s much more experienced, and her efforts to reach inside our own aisle to bring those establishment Republicans back into the fold may be paying off. Kari is also reaching out to normal Arizonans, campaigning relentlessly. She won’t get the credit for it from her enemies, but she is a sensational retail politician. The Democrats are obviously afraid enough to be spending a ton of money in Arizona, and according to her internal polls she’s slightly ahead. I hope that’s true. She’d make a great asset for us in the Senate. 

Now, that’s not to say that we primary voters always get it right. Sometimes you’ve got to be strategic. In Delaware years ago, we had a chance to take a Democrat seat with a long-time moderate congressman and instead nominated that woman who had to go on TV to deny that she was a witch. And clearly, she wasn’t a witch because if she was, she would’ve cast the Spell of Winning and won. The William F. Buckley rule applies – you vote for the most conservative person who can win. This means that you have to vote for somebody who’s not as conservative as you are. But it also means that sometimes you’ve got to vote for someone more conservative than you. Are you listening, establishment folks? 

And there’s a lot of talk about the North Carolina governor’s race with Mark Robinson. The primary voters picked him, and he was a fiery orator who says many great things and many other things that appear to be taken out of context. He had a sort of sex scandal – imagine, a North Carolina politician in a sex scandal! The revelations about his alleged – and I see no reason to trust the regime media telling us anything about him – browser history indicate that, if true, the Democrats would want to use it as an elementary school syllabus. There’s been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth about how the primary voters screwed up by nominating him. The establishment put out word that his issues were known to oppo researchers before the primary. Well, perhaps before the primary might’ve been the time to release that key information, if it existed. “You should have read our minds and knew he was kinky” is a pretty weak argument – not that I give the regime media’s claims an iota of credibility.

Yes, Republicans sometimes do nominate bad candidates. You know what? A certain percentage of candidates are always going to be bad, whether they are establishment Republicans or hard-core America First conservatives. That’s life. But the idea that somehow America First conservatives are uniquely bad and establishment ones are winners is baloney. Do you know who else are America First conservatives? Tom Cotton. Ted Cruz. Mike Lee, Josh Hawley, and, of course, the great JD Vance, to name a few. Does anyone think we’re worse off having them in the Senate? Do you know who are some of those “normal” conservatives of rectitude and dignity? James Lankford, the Oklahoma establishment hack whose crappy border bill surrender, gets brought up every single time Harris opens her piehole about her failed border czar tenure. Thanks for giving the Democrats cover, Jimmy. Oh, and there’s John Cronyn, the Texas establishment hack who’s perfectly normal, unlike that scary Ted Cruz, and who cooperated with the Democrats for a gun control bill that gets brought up every single time Harris opens her piehole about taking our guns. Thanks for giving the Democrats cover, Johnboy.

You know, if the establishment wants us to nominate more establishment candidates, maybe they should try this plan – stop sucking. In the meantime, all of us – hard-core and establishment Republicans – need to jump on the team to bring it in for the big win and support the great Kari Lake.

Follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter. Get the newest volume in the Kelly Turnbull People’s Republic series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce, the bestselling Amazon #1 Military Thriller, Overlord! And get his new novel about terrorism in America, The Attack!