Kari Lake Shares in New Book the Bible Verse That Inspired Her to Quit High-Paying News Anchor Job
Kari Lake, the 2022 Arizona GOP gubernatorial nominee, revealed the Bible verse that led her out of the media and into politics in her new book, “Unafraid: Just Getting Started.”
The book, set for release on June 27, takes the reader from Lake’s childhood years in Iowa, when her political hero was President Ronald Reagan, to the present day as a rock star in the America First Republican movement launched by former President Donald Trump.
Lake didn’t spend 30 years in media without learning how to tell a story concisely and well.
In “Unafraid,” Lake shares the spiritual reawakening that began for her during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
Like many others, she worked remotely early after the outbreak, co-anchoring the Phoenix Fox affiliate KSAZ-TV weeknight news program from a mini-studio set up in her office at home.
Since taking the position in 1999, Lake had helped make it one of the top-rated local news shows in the state.
In fact, Lake wrote in “Unafraid” that she and her co-anchor and friend John Hook spent almost all the 22 years they worked together in the top spot in the market.
I am so excited for you to read my first book, Unafraid, detailing my journey & vision for the future of our movement.
Pre-Order Now: https://t.co/En1wqfkf1I
Read my full statement ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/yG5xcU9T0t
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) May 3, 2023
But she had become morally torn about staying on the job by 2020, questioning whether it was God’s will for her life, given the state of corporate media.
During most of her adult life, Lake had not given too much thought to whether God had a preferred path for her to take.
As a young girl growing up near Davenport, Iowa, Lake attended church and Sunday school every week. Her father was Lutheran and her mother a devout Catholic, so Lake had a “bit” of both traditions in her.
By the time she had become an adult, she became a “lapsed or lazy Catholic,” she wrote.
However, while anchoring from home, Lake spotted a dusty Bible on her desk. She picked it up and began to read it during commercial breaks and other downtime.
Now in her 50s, “The words had so much more impact than when I last read the good book in Sunday school,” Lake recounted.
And the juxtaposition of reading the Bible and then reading news scripts was clarifying for her.
“I looked to the Bible: ‘This was the TRUTH,'” she thought.
“I looked at the news script: These were the lies,” Lake concluded.
The veteran journalist’s “BS Meter” would particularly go off when Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, spoke about pandemic policies.
“Everything he said was either nonsensical or contradictory,” Lake wrote.
“More and more, during the Covid craziness, I found myself leaving the signing off for the night as the newscast ended feeling sick to my stomach,” she recalled. “Had I compromised my integrity? I was telling people what was going on, but it was only PART of the story.
“At the end of the day, a half-truth is just a dressed-up lie,” Lake said.
She wrestled with what to do.
“I knew the job had gone from personally and financially rewarding, to unethical and biased. It now felt simply immoral. If I continued doing it, that would make me an immoral person. And I’d have to answer to God for that,” Lake wrote.
She asked God for direction, especially in light of the financial hit her family would take if she quit her job.
Lake flipped open her Bible and the verse on the page that immediately caught her eye was 1 Timothy 6:7: “For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.”
“Whoa! I got the message. Loud and clear,” Lake remembered. “That was the passage that changed my life and gave me a punch of courage.”
She did her last broadcast on Christmas night, December 25, 2020.
“I had officially handed my life over to God 100 percent in the past year. Not 50 percent. Not 75 percent. One hundred percent. I told him, ‘I’m Yours. You lead me where You want me to go,'” Lake wrote.
She took a leave of absence and then announced her departure from KSAZ-TV in March 2021 in a video that went viral.
“Sadly, journalism has changed a lot since I first stepped into a newsroom, and I’ll be honest, I don’t like the direction it’s going,” Lake said at the time.
“In the past few years, I haven’t been proud to be a member of the media,” she added. “I found myself reading news copy that I didn’t believe was fully truthful. … It’s been a serious struggle for me, and I no longer want to do this job anymore.”
A few months later, in June 2021, Lake announced her candidacy to be governor of Arizona.
Trump would endorse the Arizonan in September of that year, and she would go on to win the Republican nomination in a hotly contested race in August 2022.
Lake then narrowly lost the general election by approximately 17,000 votes or 0.7 percent of the ballots cast to Democrat Katie Hobbs.
The Republican’s challenge of Hobbs’ win remains in court.
Lake’s legal team has contended the large-scale ballot printer and tabulator issues that occurred at polling places throughout Maricopa County (the Phoenix metro area) and other problems in how the election was conducted were outcome determinative.
Republicans outvoted Democrats 3 to 1 that day, so the malfunction impacted their ability to vote, Lake’s team says.
Lake covers the Election Day chaos, meeting Trump for the first time at Trump Tower while seeking his endorsement and other interesting behind-the-scenes stories in “Unafraid.”
Altogether, the book makes for a fascinating read.
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