Watch: Kari Lake threatens to cancel the Super Bowl if the NFL objects to her immigration policies

24 October 2022

In 1990, voters in Arizona defeated a ballot measure that would have designated Martin Luther King Day as a holiday. One of the ensuing consequences for the Grand Canyon State arrived when the National Football League relocated Super Bowl XXVII from Tempe to Pasadena, California in 1993.

"The NFL's decision to move the Super Bowl is believed to be the first time a major sports league reacted to a highly politicized issue by relocating an event," ESPN explained last year.

Now, that ruling by the NFL has reverberated into the 2022 race for the Arizona governorship.

On Sunday, Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake declared at a question-and-answer event that she would be willing to cancel Super Bowl LVII at Glendale's State Farm Stadium in 2023 if the NFL raises objections to her right-wing immigration policy proposals.

“You have stated for quite a while now, day one as governor, that you would declare an invasion at the southern border,” moderator Mike Broomhead of AZTV 7 noted to Lake. “Do you believe you have the legal authority to do that?”

Lake responded that she "absolutely" does because of “Article One, Section 10, United States Constitution," which decrees:

No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.

Broomhead sought additional clarification.

"You would be inaugurated – you would be sworn in a month from the Super Bowl being here. If the NFL were to threaten they’re going to pull the Super Bowl if you do that, would it make you waver in your decision?” he asked Lake, a conspiracy theorist who has fully embraced former President Donald Trump's Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

“You want to tell me that a bunch of football teams owned by billionaires are okay with fentanyl pouring across our border at a record level, killing our young people? Number one killer right now is fentanyl, 18-45. It’s killing a generation of people. If the NFL is okay with that, then they ought to do some soul-searching. I don’t think the NFL’s that stupid," the ex-talk show host replied. "I really don’t.”

Later on, Lake accused China of using fentanyl to destroy "civilization" through substance abuse:

I'm not going to be taking marching orders from the NFL. I'm taking marching orders from the people of Arizona, who are tired of their children getting their hands on the most deadly drug this country's ever seen. Mike, I talk to the parents all the time. The hardest thing in the world is having a mother come up to you and tell you that she lost her nineteen-year-old because he took a pill. He took one pill. He didn't know it was a fentanyl pill. He didn't know it came from Mexico and the cartels. He's gone. Think about what we, and think about out there, what you have accomplished since you were nineteen. There's no amount of money that can ever bring a child back who's lost his life to fentanyl, and the thing is, we don't have to have these senseless deaths. We're being poisoned by the cartels and the C[Chinese] C[Communist] P[arty]. The communist regime in China is behind this. And if you don't think that they can take down civilization and a country over drugs – with drugs – then you need to do a history lesson. You gotta look at the Opium Wars. They brought down dynasties with drugs and they're trying to bring this country down.

I am a mama bear at heart and I will fight tooth and nail to protect our children. I don't wanna have to face another parent who's lost a seventeen-year-old son, a nineteen-year-old daughter, twenty-year-old daughter. We're losing our future, Mike. And so if the NFL has a problem with that, they're gonna have to lick their wounds because we are going to secure our border in Arizona.

After her conversation with Broomhead, Lake wrote on Twitter that “if the NFL wants to play chicken over the 2023 Super Bowl, I can promise you that I win that game.”

Mediaite pointed out on Monday, however, that "logistically, it is next to impossible for the NFL to move the 2023 Super Bowl — even if it wanted to. With sponsors, broadcast entities, and countless others already having made their plans for Arizona in February, the hurdles are seemingly far too great to overcome — making this a fairly low-risk dare by Lake."

Furthermore, Lake's allusion to the 19th-century Opium Wars distorted the circumstances that led to the dual conflicts. It was actually imperial Great Britain that was smuggling opium from India into China against the wishes of the Chinese government. England twice emerged victorious. It is also notable that Lake's supposed empathy for families who have lost children does not appear to extend to victims of school shootings.

Watch below or at this link.

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