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"I never count America out" - Miranda Devine
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Miranda Devine is an Australian journalist and bestselling author. Whilst working in Australia, her opinion pieces for, among others, The Daily Telegraph and The Sydney Morning Herald more often than not made their way to the forefront of the national conversation. She currently resides in New York, where she writes for The New York Post.
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Transcript
Introduction and Subscription Offer
00:00:00
Speaker
The Spectator Australia is a weekly delight for anyone who loves insightful analysis, contentious opinion and hard-hitting comment. With the finest writing on current affairs, politics, the arts, books and life, you will read regular columnists who delight, provoke and amuse, and editorial features of incredible breadth and depth.
00:00:20
Speaker
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Introducing Miranda Devine
00:00:52
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia, a series of conversations on Australian politics and life. I'm Will Kingston.
00:01:01
Speaker
My guest today is Miranda Devine. Miranda is one of the most influential Australian journalists of my lifetime. She straddled the Fairfax News Corp divide in Australia, writing columns for among others, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Telegraph. These columns more often than not made their way to the forefront of the national conversation.
Influence of Miranda's Father
00:01:20
Speaker
She now resides in the US where she writes for the New York Post. Miranda, welcome to Australia. Thanks for having me. Well, it's great to talk to you.
00:01:27
Speaker
So I have a confession to make. I wasn't aware that your father was one of the pioneering Australian journalists until I did some research for this interview. He was the editor of, among other publications, the Australian Chicago Sun Times and the New York Post, where you currently work. Did the Post have a sentimental lure for you, given that context?
00:01:48
Speaker
Yeah, it does. Very much so. And I mean, he was editor back in the 80s, so I wasn't even a journalist, but he just always loved New York. I was born here. He was actually from New Zealand. My mother was Australian, and he was a foreign correspondent for the Herald Weekly Times at the time that I was born in New York, in Queens, and always had an allure for him. He was a John O'Hara fan.
00:02:14
Speaker
He used to read American fiction when he was a boy in Blenheim in New Zealand and always loved New York. So when he went back later in life with the family to edit the New York Post, he loved it. He was there actually before that. He worked for many years for the Riddas Digest about 10 years in Australia and then in America, in New York, actually a little bit in Westchester County, which is about an hour north of Manhattan.
America's Decline under Biden
00:02:40
Speaker
America is a very different country to when he was there. Do you think America is an empire in decline? Well, yeah. I mean, it's sort of obvious in every way. I mean, most visibly in the very ancient president who keeps falling over and has cognitive moments, let's call them, and just the general gerontocracy in charge in Washington.
00:03:03
Speaker
Congress men and women in their 80s and 90s are not uncommon. And so it's that sort of, maybe it's that baby boomer generation that just refuses to move over. I think that certainly caused some sort of sclerotic problems. But I never count America out. I mean, it has in its the seeds of its foundation
00:03:25
Speaker
the ability to continually regenerate itself. And so I think that we'll see probably in 2024 that sort of regeneration, a new generation. And, you know, I think America has a lot of problems at the moment, but so has every country in the world. So having lived here and having visited Australia a couple of times post pandemic, I mean,
00:03:50
Speaker
locked out of Australia for 18 months and not been able to see friends or family. I feel like everyone in the world went crazy with COVID except maybe Sweden and America was slightly less crazy than Australia. A couple of thoughts there that I want to pick up on. I read your article from a few days ago where you mentioned Joe Biden's latest stumble. How do you think these sorts of moments feed into the perception of America in the eyes of their enemies like China and Russia?
00:04:20
Speaker
I think it's a bigger deal overseas than it is here. Everyone's sort of inured to it. And you have such a protection racket around Joe Biden. And, you know, for instance, after this after this latest very heavy fall on stage, he tripped over a sandbag, but he couldn't get up. He had to be hoisted to his feet by a couple of Secret Service agents. That really plays badly, I think, internationally.
00:04:45
Speaker
The New York Times came straight out, I think, the next day or the day after with this 3,000-word article written by four reporters, just basically saying how perky and sharp his attack Joe Biden was and how amazing he was. And he makes younger staff exhausted by his punishing schedule, which is just ridiculous because we see his schedule and we see him in action.
00:05:11
Speaker
Americans are also very kind, kinder, I think, than Australians or Brits. They don't poke mock and poke fun at people who are struggling like Joe Biden is. I mean, in one sense, it's.
00:05:24
Speaker
It's a sad spectacle, even though he's such a corrupt and nasty old man, and doing so much damage to the country and the world. You know, it's hard not to feel some sympathy for an 80-year-old who is obviously in decline. But I do think that it plays bigger overseas, and sure, the weakness that America exhibited, not just image-wise, but when
00:05:47
Speaker
in the withdrawal from Afghanistan. I think that certainly emboldened our adversaries. There are also Australia's adversaries and led to Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine, which he never did when Donald Trump was in charge, because I think everyone was overseas just didn't quite know what to make of Donald Trump.
Comparing Foreign Policies: Trump vs. Biden
00:06:08
Speaker
Donald Trump sort of boasts about how he used to tell Putin, oh, you know, I'll bomb those beautiful domed buildings that you have in Moscow.
00:06:17
Speaker
And he said, Putin kind of didn't really believe me, but 10% he believed me. So that was enough for a deterrent. And I think whatever the reason, during Trump's sort of belligerent and equally belligerent and sort of charm offensive time, foreign affairs for America was a lot calmer. No wars were started.
00:06:36
Speaker
And it's much, much worse with Joe Biden and Anthony Blinken and the sort of warmongery group. Now, uni party group, because the Senate, the Republicans, Mitch McConnell, who's the top Republican in the Senate, he has said the most important thing for him is Ukraine. And one of the most vocal senators, you know, other vocal senators anyway, feel the same way.
00:07:03
Speaker
Let's go to Ukraine because I think it is an interesting lens to look at the changing face of the American right. Many on the right in the US are now actively hostile to engagement in Ukraine. This is despite that same group being cheerleaders for 20 years of conflict in the Middle East. I would personally argue there is a less of a moral imperative and possibly less of a strategic imperative in those Middle Eastern conflicts than there is now.
Republican Views on Ukraine War
00:07:29
Speaker
How do you describe that change on the right of American politics?
00:07:33
Speaker
I don't think it's as clear cut or as simple as you just laid out. I don't think that it's the same people who barracked for Iraq as are now not barracking for Ukraine. There is some overlap. But what you're seeing is there is really now, I mean, back then there was a sort of an anti-war group now.
00:07:54
Speaker
there's almost unanimous consent in Congress to go and continue to spend trillions of dollars without any real auditing of that money. And no kind of boundaries on how far this conflict will go. And a conflict that began with the moral imperative to stop Putin from invading another country has now seems to have morphed into a desire for regime change in Moscow, which nobody signed up for.
00:08:24
Speaker
and nobody wants. So you're seeing a much more nuanced criticism from the right of this blank check that Biden isn't even the most strident of them. He's had to be pulled into escalating America's military assistance. But in a way, I wonder if that's not just some strategic negotiation on his part with
00:08:49
Speaker
are the Republicans in the Senate because the Republicans have control of the House, but not the Senate. And Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, his sidekick, have both are both emotionally entwined with Ukraine. And and many Republicans are as Democrats are because they're financially entwined with the weapons industry. And so, you know, for instance, in the latest negotiation over the debt ceiling,
00:09:20
Speaker
the one thing that was social security, welfare.
00:09:23
Speaker
was kept quarantined from any possible cuts, but so was defence. And, you know, that means two thirds of the budget is just not able to be touched. And that's a bipartisan decision. So I think there are some on the right, but equally on the left, people like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who's now running for the Democratic nomination for president. He's got 19 percent in a polls.
00:09:50
Speaker
straight out of the gate. So it shows there's a lot of dissatisfaction on the Democrat side with Joe Biden.
Potential China-US Armed Conflict
00:09:56
Speaker
But he's very anti the war. And there are many on the left, like Glenn Greenwald, who were anti the Iraq war, like RFK Jr. and are now anti Ukraine war. And there are some on the right who flipped. And now they're joining their comrades on the left. It's a very interesting and complicated situation.
00:10:15
Speaker
Hmm, we'll play this out further. I've spoken to a couple of people in the last month, Senator Alex Antic, Major General McRyan, both of them in Australia think that an armed conflict between China and the US in the next decade is increasingly likely. If that possibility comes to pass, how do you think the US will respond? Look, I don't really know, but I must say it's crossed my mind that the conflict in Ukraine, America's
00:10:44
Speaker
involvement in that basically in a proxy war with Russia is deeply unpopular in America and particularly among that cohort of Americans that provide the cannon fodder for the military and so there is an increasing isolationist feeling in the country and you get that with the populist nationalist movement on the right but also on the left and so I think that if America is
00:11:12
Speaker
continues to be weak, ties itself out with Ukraine and Europe, that there'll be less appetite, less ability to get involved in Taiwan, which is probably the most likely first flashpoint. And this is sort of an intangible emotional thing, but there was always a feeling among just kind of grassroots Americans that they really loved Australians. And they felt that Australia was like America used to be. It's sort of like Texas.
00:11:42
Speaker
and that Australians are really tough and stood up for themselves. And I think that the whole, you know, performance during COVID, just there were so many videos coming out of Australia. And I know it's not really a fair representation because most of them were coming from Victoria during their very harsh lockdowns. But still, the image has been shattered of Australia is this tough, resilient stand up for itself, independent minded nation. And
00:12:12
Speaker
a lot of Americans have turned off Australia. They say it's just been captured by the WEF, it's left here, it's succumbed to the great reset, all of that stuff, which I think hurts Australia. And just in terms of just an emotional reaction to Australia needing America's help, I just, you know, whatever the administration does, I think there's less appetite for it out in, you know, certainly in Republican America.
00:12:40
Speaker
Yeah, that's interesting. And we'll get back to the specific relationship between the US and Australia first. There's a lovely line that you penned for The Spectator Australia in 2014. You said that the quiet truth of politics is that it all comes down to the character and caliber of those running the show. Now, I'm interested in this. Many people in the US would agree with that, and they would also be very fervent Trump supporters. Now, Trump, for all his undoubted strengths, his character can be called into question.
00:13:10
Speaker
How do you explain that apparent paradox or tension on the right of American politics? Well, I think that people were so fed up with the powerlessness, with the corruption in Washington, with the arrogance, the dismissal of their concerns, the hollowing out of the middle class, the complete sellout to China, and that they were desperate.
00:13:36
Speaker
And all they were getting in terms of candidates were people like Mitt Romney, who were just part of that kind of uni-party elite. And so they went for a giant middle finger to the establishment, which was Donald Trump. And that's what he was. He was a big wrecking ball and he was a great threat to the status quo. And, you know, I mean, he was his own worst enemies in a lot of ways. But in a lot of ways, the sort of break from orthodoxy
00:14:02
Speaker
that was his administration did great things for the country. And he was obviously such a threat to what he calls the deep state, but it's that permanent bureaucracy in Washington, D.C.
00:14:16
Speaker
that they broke every rule to try and cripple his administration. And the FBI particularly behaved corruptly and dishonestly and dangerously and really intervened in two elections, 2016 and 2020. So there is a lot of anger and bitterness in the electorate about what happened to Donald Trump. And he has a big evangelical
00:14:42
Speaker
following or had certainly, and they were willing to overlook his personal foibles and his kind of unseemly behavior because they felt, some of them that I've talked to, they felt he was kind of sent from God. But even if those that didn't think that, they felt that he was
00:15:02
Speaker
the barbarian that was needed, their barbarian, to go in and smash things up in Washington and expose, you know, look under the rocks and expose the cockroaches. But I don't know if you could do that twice. I think that was a one-off, and certainly the candidates that have come after him.
00:15:20
Speaker
are emulating his policies and his kind of pugnaciousness. And chief among them, of course, being Ron DeSantis, the 44-year-old governor from Florida. And so it'll be a fascinating campaign season. And I don't think it's at all a laid out mazare that Donald Trump is going to win.
00:15:44
Speaker
Let's go on to DeSantis because the cult of personality around Donald Trump has put DeSantis in a difficult position. It's put many in the conservative media in a difficult position, so I've noticed
00:15:57
Speaker
People like Dave Rubin, people like Ben Shapiro, who are openly protestantists, are trying to have to tread this line where they're saying, we think this guy is the guy, but at the same time, a large part of their listenership are ultra-maga fanatics, who generally don't take kindly to anyone saying a bad word about Donald Trump. Are you conscious of this phenomenon?
00:16:19
Speaker
Look, I think that's a slight exaggeration. You might get that impression if you look at Twitter, but that's not representative of the real world. And I just know from just early forays into New Hampshire, where I went to see Vivek Ramaswamy do a little sort of free campaign tour that
00:16:40
Speaker
People there, Republican voters who love Trump and voted for him in 2016 and 2020, they're open to looking for someone else. And it's not that they're disappointed with Trump, but they are conscious that he's old. You know, he's 76. He's four years younger than Joe Biden.
00:17:00
Speaker
And he's older than Joe Biden was when he began the presidency as the oldest president ever. So while Donald Trump is very, he really is sharp and he's much younger cognitively and seemingly physically, although he doesn't look after himself, than Joe Biden.
00:17:20
Speaker
he's still old and wouldn't be able to serve a second term. And they kind of like what they see in Rhonda Santas and even Vivek Ramaswami and others in the field. And they're on a shopping tour. They've got Trump in the back pocket, but they're going to see if Rhonda Santas, say, blows their socks off. And
00:17:44
Speaker
You know, he's got a lot of time to work that out. He's not Donald Trump. He's a completely different persona. But what he is is a very serious person and very disciplined. He's not charming. He's not a showman. He's not charismatic.
00:18:02
Speaker
You know, the times are very different now to what they were in 2016 and in 2020 even. You know, the economy is really suffering. The border has been invaded by six to eight million illegal migrants. Cities around the country are falling apart. Crime is rampant. Joe Biden's been an unmitigated disaster, you know, according to the majority of voters. And there are so many problems that
00:18:31
Speaker
People might start looking at Ron DeSantis as a sort of a discipline. They might not like him, but he'll get the job done. Let's say you are Ron DeSantis' campaign manager. How do you beat Donald Trump?
00:18:43
Speaker
I think just do what he's doing. I don't think he, I think he needs to answer the criticisms and just show his wares, you know, show, show his plans, show what he's done in Florida and point out the Achilles heels that Donald Trump has because of course, because Donald Trump served for four years as president, everyone knows
00:19:07
Speaker
how his policies turned out and look COVID I think Donald Trump's very vulnerable because while he's tried to flip the tables and say that DeSantis was a lockdown merchant in fact DeSantis was almost alone in the country as a governor who kept his state open, followed the science, protected the elderly and allowed you know young and healthy people to continue to keep the economy ticking over and
00:19:33
Speaker
The proof of the pudding is in the fact that so many New Yorkers have moved there, so many people from all sorts of democratic states have moved to Florida. And Florida's taxes are low and its GDP is high, its economy is booming. He just won re-election in a huge landslide. So he has a fantastic record to stand on.
00:19:57
Speaker
And if he can catch the imagination of people that they can hope that he can fix the great problems that are here, you know, Donald Trump wasn't able to fix a lot of the problems. And so maybe maybe the voters will sort of go with their their head rather than their heart, because, you know, Donald Trump does have their heart.
00:20:20
Speaker
Last year, you released what is now a best-selling book, Laptop from Hell, which your publishers quite cleverly described as a 210-page story of the Biden family as recorded on Hunter Biden's laptop.
Hunter Biden Laptop Controversy
00:20:32
Speaker
Now, some people said something along the lines of, Joe Biden has a rap-bag kid. So what? More right-wing distractions. Why should people care about this story?
00:20:42
Speaker
Well, it's not about Hunter Biden. It's about Joe Biden. And it's about the influence peddling racket that his family conducted overseas while he was vice president with his knowledge, with his involvement. And they got tens of millions of dollars from some of America's biggest adversaries, chiefly China, Russia, Ukraine, then Kazakhstan, Romania, you name it. And Hunter Biden was really the bag man for the family.
00:21:11
Speaker
And there is ample evidence that Joe Biden lied when he told the American people during the campaign that he knew nothing about his son Hunter's overseas business dealings and that Hunter and Joe's brother, Jim Biden, Hunter's uncle, didn't receive any money from China. But look, the book is not just the laptop. The laptop is a sort of incomplete, imperfect record of nine years of the Biden vice presidency.
00:21:40
Speaker
and Hunter Biden's life as a crack addict. But I also augmented, it was like a jigsaw puzzle, what was on the laptop with the material from Tony Bobolinsky, who was a former business partner of Hunter Biden, who's turned against him. I obtained
00:21:56
Speaker
you know the contents of three of his devices and a lot of that material overlapped with what was in the laptop and then also there was a fantastic investigation that was done by Republicans in the Senate by two senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson back in September of 2020 before we got the laptop
00:22:17
Speaker
And that used a whole lot of suspicious activity reports that the Treasury Department collects from banks which are required to file them whenever there's something that looks to them to be suspicious like a money potential money laundering or you know money that comes in from a sanctioned person or a sanctioned country or a criminal criminal.
00:22:36
Speaker
proceedings. There could be nothing, but there were dozens, I think 180 or something suspicious activity reports generated by Biden family payments from China and these other countries. And so from those suspicious activity reports, the Johnson-Grazley investigation managed to piece together some of the beginning of a money trail that is, you know,
00:23:03
Speaker
married up with a lot of the invoices and other bank documents that were on the laptop. And since then, we've now got since the Republicans have taken back the House, we have the House Oversight Committee has been able to
00:23:18
Speaker
delve even deeper into those suspicious activity reports. And they've subpoenaed bank records and have traced money now that's come. Well, they've done the first tranche was $10 million from a Chinese energy company that was paid to a Biden family factotum in Arkansas. And he then parceled out that money
00:23:44
Speaker
in dribs and drabs over several months to, well, James Comer, the oversight committee chairman, says up to a dozen different immediate family members of Joe Biden, that being Hunter, his brother, Jim Biden, Hallie Biden, who was Hunter's sister-in-law, the widow of his late brother, various grandchildren, nieces.
00:24:08
Speaker
It's a very suspicious money trail and the all roads kind of lead back to Joe Biden. We've got whistleblowers now that have come forward that the oversight committee has been talking to.
00:24:20
Speaker
And they are implicating Joe Biden in a massive bribery scandal. The latest one is talking about a $5 million bribe, bribery scheme involving Joe Biden and Ukraine. So, I mean, all of these allegations, but I guess the Oversight Committee is operating on the theory that where there's smoke, there's fire.
00:24:41
Speaker
And the pushback from these teams of lawyers that the supposedly broke Hunter Biden has defending him and the Biden family, the ferocity of it tells you that there's something there to be protected.
00:24:57
Speaker
Well, it's a shocking story, but at the same time, you were one of the very few people in the media who pursued it, to your great credit. What do you think that says about the state of journalism in the West today?
00:25:13
Speaker
Well, it's quite disturbing, the whole saga of the laptop. I mean, it was actually an Australian, my editor, Cole Allen, who at that point was editor in chief of the New York Post or the top editor at the New York Post, some sort of a different title. And he had brought me over here having been, I think since 2001, he'd been editing here. He had been editing the Daily Telegraph.
00:25:37
Speaker
in Sydney and so he really was the one who had the courage and the vision to give the green light to the story when I brought it to him and you know I think Rudy Giuliani and his lawyer Bob Costello brought it to me as a kind of a last-ditch effort because they had not been able to get other media outlets to run it or they were just being too slow
00:26:07
Speaker
And it took Carl Allen's sort of, I don't know, he's from Dubbo, you know, his sort of Dubbo can do it attitude that just made the newsroom go into all systems go and we got the story up. And then immediately on October 14, 2020, that the story went up online at 5am.
00:26:28
Speaker
Facebook and Twitter moved to censor it. And that then set us down the path of the cover-up story, which has turned out to be bigger even than the original story of corruption in Washington, which is kind of as old as time. And even though Joe Biden's one of the past masters of influence peddling, the corruption story involves the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Justice. It's a frightening
00:27:00
Speaker
untrammeled power and the collusion with big tech, again, incredibly powerful and unaccountable oligopoly, a global, not even accountable in America to anyone.
00:27:13
Speaker
that just decided that they were going to censor the country's oldest newspaper, fourth largest by circulation. The story was completely true, completely accurate, completely checked out and carefully presented. And, you know, the FBI had gone into Twitter and Facebook in the months and weeks before the election and basically
00:27:37
Speaker
sort of pre-bunked our story because they knew it was coming, because they'd been spying on Rudy Giuliani's cloud and would have had access to the emails that came from the laptop repair shop guy, who, where Hunter had abandoned his laptop, and probably would have had access to my messages with Rudy that would have alerted them to the fact that the post was imminently going to publish. So, you know, that
00:28:08
Speaker
And there are all sorts of other whistleblower allegations and other evidence to show that the FBI had derogatory information about the Bidens, about Joe Biden, which they buried, they sat on, they dismissed as Russian disinformation.
00:28:23
Speaker
And then the second part of this is the CIA. Just three days, maybe four days after our story came out, the 51 former intelligence officials, most of them being from the CIA, including five former directors or acting directors, they wrote this completely dishonest letter suggesting that this laptop and our stories were Russian disinformation. And Joe Biden used that
00:28:50
Speaker
a couple of days later in the last debate against Donald Trump to just dismiss any debate about the laptop and the millions of dollars that had come into Biden family coffers. And our first day story was a Ukrainian businessman, an associate of Hunter Biden, his benefactor, who was paying him $83,000 a month to sit on the board of this energy company.
00:29:17
Speaker
He was thanking Hunter in an email for introducing him to his father in Washington, D.C. when Joe Biden was vice president. And Joe Biden's campaign just denied that that meeting ever happened. After Joe Biden was elected, we found more evidence that it did. And it was in fact a dinner and it wasn't just Ukrainians, it was Russians and Kazakhstanis at the dinner. And the White House had to admit that, yes, Joe Biden was there. But at the time, the rest of the media just bought this
00:29:47
Speaker
lie that it was Russian disinformation. It was comfortable for them to buy the lie because it was so close to the election. And I guess it was a difficult story. And they all wanted Trump gone. This is the thread. You know, it was it was most of the media. It was certainly New York Times, Washington Post, the sort of prestige media and and the FBI and the CIA and
00:30:10
Speaker
what Donald Trump called the deep state. They really had in their head that Donald Trump was an existential threat and that they were doing their patriotic duty by taking him out by fair means or foul.
00:30:24
Speaker
I know you've got to get to a dinner on the other side of Manhattan, which is easier said than done. So I have one final question for you, Miranda. Journalism is obviously your passion. It's your life's work. It was your father's passion and his life's work.
Advice for Young Journalists
00:30:38
Speaker
What advice would you give to a young journalist in 2023? Don't do it.
00:30:46
Speaker
Look, there are some absolutely fantastic young journalists. I think, you know, be independent, don't be captured, remain cynical, don't be sucked in by your sources and just have fun. I mean, it's the best job in the world. And don't also think that you're somehow going to save the world. Don't be an activist. You're there to just uncover facts, tell the truth, illuminate the world for your audience.
00:31:16
Speaker
Interesting. When, by the time this comes out, a conversation with Johannes Leek that I had the other day will also be out. And the two things he said were be cynical and don't become an activist. So great. Fantastic laptop from hell available from all good bookstores. Always wanted to say that it's an incredibly important contribution to the US political conversation Miranda. You can also sign up for Miranda's newsletter neatly titled divine online. The link is in the show notes.
00:31:46
Speaker
Round of Divine, thank you for coming on, Australiana. Thanks so much, Will, great to talk to you. Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get your first month absolutely free.