CLAY: We are joined now by Kari Lake. She is a former news anchor and Arizona gubernatorial candidate. By the way, we are number one in Phoenix, where I’m sure many of you are listening right now, and that obviously is a big market that Kari Lake will be trying to take advantage of as she pursues the governor’s office there in the great state of Arizona.

BUCK: KFYI! (laughing)

CLAY: There you go. Boom. Thank you for making us number one in Phoenix. Kari, first of all, we played a clip of you earlier this week saying, “Hey, I think we need to build the wall in Arizona what are they gonna do, arrest me?”

LAKE: (laughing)

CLAY: And people loved it so we wanted to get you on. Why do you need the wall in Arizona so much, and why are you running for governor or what needs to happen in your state that isn’t now?

LAKE: Wow, I mean, why do we need the wall? Because we are being invaded at our southern border. And why should other people care about it? Because what happens in Arizona doesn’t stay here. Just in this last week, guys, we saw more than 6,000 people that they caught come across Yuma. And we knew this was coming. We knew this caravan of people was coming and yet we did nothing about it.

We were warned the caravan was coming; we did nothing about it. So our federal government is failing us — and, frankly, our state leadership is failing us as well. We just need somebody to be tough on this issue because it’s affecting families, the drugs coming in, the people coming in, the crime is increasing, and it’s really an assault on working-class families to now have to compete with all these people coming in, flooding this country and eventually competing to our services and competing for jobs. It’s not fair, and it’s wrong.

BUCK: Kari, it’s Buck. Thanks for being with us. And, yeah, we really appreciated that clip of you. Certainly got a lot of attention over the week in talking about building the wall. Democrats used to say that they wanted border security too. And now it seems that they’ve moved increasingly toward just openly advocating for open borders in the state of Arizona. Your likely say Democrat opponent…

I know you still have to go through a primary process there, but the Democrat governor of Arizona be somebody who at least says, “Well, in this state we’re going to try to have some law and order when it comes to immigration,” or do they adopt the national Democrat line of “We effectively want to bring in as many legal aliens as we can”? I’m just wondering, you know, how much honesty do you get internally in the state of Arizona about this?

LAKE: You know, I personally believe that you’re talking about maybe a normal to a Democrat maybe like of yesteryear.

BUCK: Right.

LAKE: What we have now and they’re not even socialists. They’re pushing Marxist ideas and policies. And so, no, they want this. I believe they want this. They want people coming across the border, they think it increases their voter bloc, and it’s wrong. It’s wrong what’s happening. We’ve got to look out for the people of Arizona. And really the people of this country, if I were governor right now, I would ask our fellow red states to help us out.

If you have any extras that you can send from your National Guard or your state guard, send them down. I think we should be empowering our sheriff’s deputies along the border to actually deputize ready-and-willing citizens of this state to help out. We need posses. We need help along the border. But to have 6,000 people come in that we knew were heading this way and just let them walk in, that’s insane.

We can’t get doing that and we can’t keep having the drugs come across. But we do have a very complex situation. I’m sure you guys are aware of this. Arizona is not like every other state, and we have a very complex border situation because it’s not just federal land along the border and state land. We also have a sovereign nation, Tohono O’odham Indian reservation. So we can’t just build a wall across a sovereign nation, and that means we’re gonna have to work with our tribal partners to come up with some solutions.

CLAY: Kari Lake is gonna run for governor as a Republican in the state of Arizona. I’m sure you saw the Wall Street Journal poll  that came out — and it’s an interesting one — which showed that Republicans are now dead even with Hispanic voters. Are you seeing legal, resident Hispanic voters in your state moving in the direction of the Republican Party? Is that something on the ground that you feel as a candidate running in Arizona?

LAKE: Arizona is for security. It’s for safe streets. It’s for growth in business. Everyone here wants to have a place, a safe place to raise a family. It doesn’t matter what color your skin and what your background is. And that’s why I think Donald Trump brought so many Latino voters over because he was talking about family. He was talking about faith and good schools.

He was talking about the things that whether you’re Latina, whether you’re white, whether you’re black, whatever your background is we care about and so you don’t look at people and see the color of their skin. But I do know my kids are Latino, my husband is and many people on my staff and I have many friends who are Latino. They care just as much about safety, security, and I don’t like what they’re seeing at the border.

They know that people coming across, we haven’t vetted them. They know that drugs are poor guy across so I don’t think it even matters what your background is, whatever your nationality is or heritage is, you want safe streets and a safe street just like everyone else.

BUCK: We’re speaking to Kari Lake. She is a candidate for Republican governor, or Republican candidate for governor, I should say, in the state of Arizona. Kari, covid right now is something that Clay and I are very focused in on because you’ve got, first of all, the surge of cases in the north going on, Northeastern states, California, places that have high vaccination levels.

You also have numerous mandates including some of the Biden vaccine mandates getting held up or even slapped down in the courts. What do you think the way forward should be here, and how is your state of Arizona…? We haven’t talked about it much. How well has it handled the covid issue in terms of balancing freedom and public safety?

LAKE: Wow. That’s a loaded question. Really quickly on covid since we just came off talking about the border, a lot of the people coming across are testing positive. So we have $1.6 billion in federal money that was given to our state for covid relief, and I think Governor Ducey should take a bunch of that money and put it toward securing our border. We can check the covid box because we can say, “Hey, look, people are coming across with covid.”

How did we handle it? I thought it was heavy-handed. I thought our governor, Doug Ducey, who is Republican, and I’m thrilled that we had a Republican in office. He shut our state down twice and he shut our businesses down twice, and I find that unforgivable. That being said, he’s done some things well, and I’m just relieved we had a Republican government during the heaviest part of covid.

Because we saw what governors like Whitmer and Cuomo in the blue states did where they just literally brought people to their knees. And I don’t know that they’ll ever recover after some of that terrible leadership. But I think our governor could have been stronger and could have been… If he would have just been stronger to push back against some of these liberals who are pushing help me to mask our children and shut our state down and our economy, I wish he would have been stronger.

CLAY: Kari, one of the things that obviously I hear from people in Arizona is the continued influx California and how that is altering the dynamics of the politics in the state of Arizona. What do you think about what I’m sure is a continued flood of people fleeing from California and coming to Arizona? And what is the impact going to be in the next statewide election in are those people? In your mind, more likely to be Republican voters or more likely to be Democratic voters? What are you seeing?

LAKE: You know, we have a saying for it, “Don’t California our Arizona.” and I find that other states have that same thing. (laughing)

CLAY: Yes.

LAKE: Nobody wants the California refugees, I guess you could call them. But I will say this. We have a lot of really great people from California who have come here who are fleeing that state. And that’s one of the reasons I’m running. I don’t want our state turning into a California 2.0 where we Arizonans are going to have to rent a U-Haul, sell our home, load it up and find another red state. So they’re leaving because of decades of failed leftist policies have driven that state, which used to be heaven, into a complete nightmare hellscape and I don’t know if you guys… Have you guys been to California lately?

BUCK: Yeah, I went right before the lockdown, actually. It was the last place I traveled right before the lockdown and it was noticeable, Kari, and it was noticeable, Kari, what was going on in Los Angeles when I was there.

CLAY: I was there in October. So I’ve been out a decent amount. It’s a mess.

LAKE: It’s horrible and it’s bad policy. They have, you know, an ineffective governor. And that’s being nice, actually. And we don’t want that here in Arizona. So we’re hoping when people come here, that they realize and really examine the reasons why they left and they come here and appreciate Arizona for what it is and not try to vote the same way they voted and drive us into the ground.

We’re not gonna let that happen, and that’s why people are rising up. We have such a movement with our campaign guys. I announced on June 1st. I’m a political outsider. I’m kind of running against a bunch of politicos and bureaucrats. It only took us three weeks to get the signatures that we needed to be on the ballot. It typical would take a police station nine months or more to get those signatures.

It took us three weeks. We didn’t have to pay for a single one. People are so excited. We’re drawing crowds of thousands whenever we do events and rallies. And people are just ready to have somebody who they trust, who they know who understands the state and the people represent them and bring the government back to We the People.

BUCK: You’re doing great in the polls from what I’ve seen, Kari, so clearly something is resonating.

LAKE: Yeah.

BUCK: Kari Lake, candidate for governor of Arizona. Clay, you have one more?

CLAY: Well, I was just gonna say you were endorsed by Donald Trump as well for people out there. You haven’t mentioned it but we might as well mention it because we’ve got a lot of Trump fans in our audience.

LAKE: Yes. I’m so honored to be endorsed by President Trump. I thought that he was the greatest president. He did so much. The media brainwashed people and lied to people about him, and it’s really unfortunate, but he was still able to… He’s a fighter and he was still able to continue to work for us even though the constant barrage of fake news was coming at him.

I’m not gonna let the media get away with that. I come from the media ,and I know how they operate, and they’re not gonna push me around, and they’re not gonna push the people of Arizona around. They’re doing a disservice to the people of this country, and we’re gonna call ’em out on that. I’m also endorsed by Congressman Gosar, General Michael Flynn, Mike Lindell, and a list of really great, patriotic people that I’m just so honored to be endorsed by.

BUCK: Kari Lake of Arizona running for governor. Kari, good luck to you. Thanks for coming on the Clay and Buck show. We appreciate it.

LAKE: Thank you so much. We’ll talk to you again soon.