Feb. 22, 2025 - Epoch Times
09:54
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| Time | Text |
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| Carrie Lake, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders. | |
| Likewise, likewise. | |
| Good to be with you. | |
| So, well, Elon Musk has said he wants to get rid of VOA, Voice of America, and you're slated to run it. | |
| What's your take here? | |
| You know, I understand the sentiment. | |
| I mean, we're finding out so much about our government right now that it's an assault on the people. | |
| The money they're spending, the waste, what we're fined from Doge has just been outrageous. | |
| And so I understand the American people are like, get rid of it. | |
| If it's not absolutely mandatory, necessary, get rid of it. | |
| But I do think it's premature to say that. | |
| This is an 83-year outlet that has been doing, in many of those years, good work. | |
| Some of the work has been incredible, and some of the work has been pitiful. | |
| We need to do less pitiful work, more incredible work. | |
| It's a soft power. | |
| When you look at the budget, it's relatively a small budget item. | |
| For the big work it could do. | |
| And if we can get in there and make sure we're doing good, honest journalism, spreading the truth about America, about liberty and freedom, what we can do for the world is absolutely immense and perhaps prevent a few trillion-dollar wars. | |
| So I think it's worth getting in, digging around, fixing what's wrong, bolstering what's good and what's working, and putting out an incredible product that... | |
| Reaches its mission, which is to reach people around the globe, tell the American story, and try to bring more freedom to the people of this world. | |
| I think where there's bias and conflict of interest, we're going to have to address that. | |
| And I'm looking forward to getting in there and working with the people. | |
| There's some really great people working there. | |
| We'll see what we can do to put out a great product. | |
| I really came down on my speech on the media. | |
| Just when you think the media can't get worse, we call it the fake news, I'm calling it fake journalists out there. | |
| We are uncovering. | |
| Doge has uncovered so much fraud, waste, abuse in this government. | |
| And the media, many members of the media are trying to avoid talking about the corruption that's being uncovered and instead go after the messenger, Elon Musk. | |
| It's outrageous. | |
| Right now what is happening, we have the biggest story. | |
| It's bigger than Watergate and every other scandal combined and rolled into one. | |
| Decent journalists would be salivating to cover this moment in history and to see what's happening with groups like AP, where they're wanting to boycott the White House now because they're hurt, that they're losing some of their privileges because they refuse to call the Gulf of America the Gulf of America. | |
| This is the hill they want to die on? | |
| It is the Gulf of America. | |
| And now we're seeing other outlets saying they want to join with AP and boycott the press pool. | |
| The thing that I'm really disturbed about what I'm seeing in the press pool is we get the same mainstream media asking the same type of questions rather than saying, hey, tell us more about what you found when you dug into USAID or the Department of Education or whatever department they're in, the Department of Defense. | |
| They're going to be... | |
| You know, looking at that and taking a look and auditing that. | |
| Instead of asking pointed questions, they're, like I said, pushing the narrative through their line of questioning, which is attacking the messenger, Doge, attacking Elon. | |
| And we need to move into questions that the American people want asked. | |
| And so I'm hoping we'll see more of that. | |
| You're not against the idea of an adversarial press, are you? | |
| No, I think in many ways the press should push back. | |
| But it's always the same pushback with this mainstream media. | |
| My question is, when were they pushing back against Anthony Fauci? | |
| Why, when President Trump in his first term was recommending hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, did they immediately dismiss that and not say, wait, maybe we should look into that, dig into that? | |
| Why did they not tell the story of men and women who didn't want to get a COVID jab because they didn't know enough about it and they wanted to have the choice of whether to take that. | |
| They didn't cover those men and women who lost their jobs. | |
| They did this piece with 60 Minutes, USAID, and they're so sympathetic to USAID employees or people who worked for them losing their job. | |
| But I didn't see any of that kind of sympathy. | |
| When people who worked in the energy sector who lost their job when Biden came in, I didn't see any of that sympathy. | |
| So it's a two-way street. | |
| I wish they would have pushed back more when our freedoms and rights were being taken away, when we were being censored by our government. | |
| I don't see them pushing back and talking about the censorship in Europe right now and Great Britain. | |
| It's outrageous. | |
| What kind of a journalist doesn't push back against censorship? | |
| And so it just seems like they're always pushing back and adversarial only toward President Trump and not toward some of the other entities in the government. | |
| You know, it's very interesting. | |
| I keep thinking about equal application of law as you're talking about. | |
| You're really talking about equal application of journalism or something like that, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| It would be nice. | |
| Okay, they're pushing back. | |
| We want transparency in our government. | |
| I think President Trump has given us the most transparent government we've ever seen. | |
| For goodness sakes, we're finally going to get the JFK records. | |
| We're finally going to get them. | |
| MLK records. | |
| It sounds like actually the Epstein list now. | |
| Chairman Comer here in that seat yesterday was talking about that and Pam Bondi has been talking about that. | |
| A lot of Americans are interested in that. | |
| You would think the mainstream media would be thrilled. | |
| If they're truly journalists, they should be thrilled with that and they should cover it. | |
| If you're truly a journalist, you would be pushing to get the 40,000 hours of videotape evidence that we have, that we own as the United States. | |
| People own it. | |
| Of J6. And let's get to the bottom of that. | |
| But they don't want to get to the bottom of it because many of them have been knowingly spreading lies about it, about what happened. | |
| And they want to protect the narrative they've been pushing for four years. | |
| You mentioned censorship. | |
| And there's a lot of people talking about the vice president's speech at the Munich Security Conference. | |
| And so how would VOA fit into that kind of a rubric? | |
| How would it relate to the Vice President speaking this way? | |
| Well, we want freedom and free speech for everybody in the world. | |
| We want a flow of information. | |
| For everybody in the world. | |
| And it's really frightening to see this type of censorship that's playing out in Europe. | |
| And frankly, it's been happening here. | |
| I mean, I was censored during COVID. I'm sure some of your things were censored or suppressed. | |
| And you know what it's like trying to get around the firewall in China. | |
| There is suppression of information, and we want to make sure that that's not happening. | |
| I thought that Vice President Vance did an incredible job. | |
| It was a strong speech. | |
| He laid it out where the United States of America stands on this issue, and he didn't mince words, and everybody knew exactly where we stood when he walked off that stage. | |
| We're pushing back against this globalist agenda and pushing freedom for all. | |
| And so when VOA will report on something of this nature, how will they report? | |
| Meaning, how would we report on... | |
| Okay, so the vice presidents just gave this speech. | |
| There's some reactions. | |
| You know, there were a lot of dour faces in the room, if I recall, watching, right? | |
| And there were a lot of happy people watching on TV and also dour people. | |
| How would VOA report on something like that? | |
| Well, I hope they would report kind of like what you said just there. | |
| And you know what I want to see more of? | |
| Hearing the words of a speech like that rather than just showing video and having a reporter or a correspondent paraphrase what was said. | |
| I want to hear more of the actual newsmakers' words for themselves. | |
| I think we've gotten to a point where we want to hear from the horse's mouth, as you say, rather than just say, hey, the vice president spoke and here's basically what he said. | |
| Let's actually hear it from him. | |
| And we'd like to see more of that. | |
| So when can we expect you firing on all cylinders at VOA? I don't know. | |
| You know, there's many layers of bureaucracy to go through to get my feet in the door there. | |
| Surprise, surprise, whenever you're dealing with the government, there's layers of bureaucracy. | |
| And so I'm hoping sooner rather than later. | |
| I'm really looking forward to getting in and getting to work. | |
| But we have to kind of follow the path to get me in there. | |
| Okay. | |
| A final thought as we finish? | |
| I'm just really happy to be here at this moment. | |
| I want to thank... | |
| I always thank God. | |
| I start every day thanking God that we're here in this moment that is so consequential. | |
| And I know that you recognize that, Jan. | |
| You and I have had conversations. | |
| We are in such a pivotal, consequential moment in history. | |
| And to be... | |
| Privileged enough to serve as a journalist in this moment is a real honor, and I'm hoping that the people at Voice of America are looking forward to having me there. | |
| We're going to do some great coverage. | |
| We're lucky to be covering a moment when, right now, you can see this administration is working very hard to give back our government to We the People, a government that has been out of control, suffocating the American people, and it's now being given back to the American people, and I'm looking forward to covering this moment. | |
| It's going to be incredible. | |
| No, and I completely agree with the sentiment of we are in some, let's call it epochal times, and we get to cover them. | |
| It's unbelievable, right? | |
| It's as if when this name came about, you knew what was about to happen, but no, it's wonderful. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Well, Carrie Lake, so good to have you on again. | |
| Likewise. |
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