Arizona Republican Kari Lake sported a custom t-shirt depicting Andrew Breitbart’s face with the word “WAR” after former President Donald Trump announced he was indicted on Thursday.
Lake wore the shirt in Columbus, Georgia, ahead of the Georgia Republican Party’s state convention on Friday and Saturday, where Trump is expected to deliver remarks. When Breitbart News reached her for comment about the garment bearing its founder, Lake provided a statement on Trump’s indictment and said the shirt she designed “speaks for itself.”
“In indicting President Trump, Joe Biden and his corrupt DOJ have committed an all-out assault on the rule of law,” Lake said.
The Department of Justice unsealed the 49-page indictment on Friday that “includes 38 counts of alleged crimes, along with 31 separate counts of alleged willful retention of national defense information under the Espionage Act,” as Breitbart News Senior Editor Joel Pollak and Politics Reporter Wendell Husebø noted.
“We must push back against this political persecution with everything we’ve got. If we don’t, we’ll lose our country,” she added.
The image on Lake’s shirt comes from an iconic clip in conservative meme-lore from Andrew Marcus’s 2012 documentary Hating Breitbart, where Breitbart famously states, “fuck you. War,” while referencing mainstream media.
Breitbart was speaking more broadly about how conservatives, in the form of the Tea Party movement, finally began fighting back against mainstream and legacy media:
And what the left has stood for with political correctness is to try and get those with whom they disagree to shut up, and the Tea Party movement and Sarah Palin, and Michelle Bachmann, and Allen West and all the people that have gone out there against the mainstream media and said “you’re gonna call us racists? You’re gonna call us potential Timothy McVeigh? Fuck You. War.”
Lake, last year’s GOP gubernatorial nominee in the Grand Canyon state, is an unwavering ally of the 45th president and earned his coveted endorsement in last year’s GOP primary, which she won in dominating fashion. Amid legal contests of her election loss, which was decided by a razor-thin .66 percentage points, Lake has stumped for Trump in her native state of Iowa.
“I will do everything in my power to get that man elected,” the former Fox 10 Phoenix news anchor told a packed Bettendorf room in February.
“I’m not doing this for any gain. I truly love the man because he gave up so much. He did a lot for Iowa, he did a lot for Iowa farmers, he did a lot for Americans,” said Lake.