Dave Rubin (3:01)

I'm Dave Rubin, and joining me today is a New York Post columnist and host of and first time Rubin Report guest, although I really cannot believe that. Miranda Devine, welcome to the show. It's nice to see you.

Miranda Devine (3:14)

Thanks, Dave. It's great to be with you.

Dave Rubin (3:16)

I don't know how we have not done this before. I feel like I owe you one just to start, because you should have been on. You have done such good work and you are a journalist that I can say the word journalist without going like this, without putting those air quotes. We have met once in real life. It was a couple of years ago. We'll show some B roll here. I was g giving the Real Clear Politics Samizat award and you were one of the recipients for their first ever awards show. And it's an award for free speech. And you've been at the forefront of all of this for a long time. But maybe for people that don't know you, how'd you get into this crazy game of free speech and journalism and all that stuff? And then we'll dive into all the specifics.

Miranda Devine (4:00)

Well, I mean, from the beginning, I have ink in my blood. Both of my parents were journalists. And in fact, my father is from New Zealand and my mother is from Australia. And I was born in New York because my father was a foreign correspondent here. And then we lived all over the world. And I always wanted to be a journalist because it just seemed my parents both had so much fun and it just seemed like a great way to see the world. And I had a bit of a detour into a mathematics degree along the way because my parents did not want me to be a journalist, that it makes women hard, which I don't know if that's the case or not, but probably is. Anyway, so I'm here now and I came back to New York. I was asked by my former editor in Australia, a man by the name of Col Allen, who was then editor in chief of the New York Post. And he said, come and cover the 2020 election and you just be here for 18 months. It'll be a lot of fun. And it was. And then, you know, Covid hit and Rudy Giuliani gave me the laptop from hell. And one thing led to another. We got censored and I wrote a book. And then I wrote another book. And I'm still here seven Years later,

Dave Rubin (5:19)

you, indeed, you still are here. So, yes, you got the Hunter Biden laptop. You wrote about it. It was your story, in fact, that really broke everything. There were a bunch of people sort of talking about it online for a little bit. But you wrote that story. Subsequently, old regime at Twitter decides to lock down the story altogether. You couldn't post it. They banned or at least temporarily suspend the New York Post. You quite literally couldn't even share the link to your story in private messages on Twitter. So tell me a little bit about how well Rudy just. Did he just call you one day? Did he show up at your door? Here is this thing. How did all that go down?

Miranda Devine (5:57)

Well, I'd just done a story with Rudy when I came to New York. I hadn't lived here for, you know, 20 years, 25 years, and so I didn't know anyone. Sort of thrown in at the deep end. And I thought, well, Rudy Giuliani, I'm in New York. Rudy is a hero of 9 11. I remember the bad old days in New York before he cleaned it up. And so I went about making friends with him. And I'd just done a story. He was at that point, the personal lawyer of Donald Trump. And I'd just done a story where Rudy had been the first person to talk to Trump when he'd gone to hospital with COVID And we'd been immediately whacked that off online at the New York Post. And apparently Donald Trump loved it. Rudy loved it. So I was top of mind when Rudy and his lawyer, Bob Costello, were kind of desperately seeking. We're talking about three weeks before the 2020 election, desperately seeking a journalist who would take the laptop because they tried a few people and they were reluctant, you know, it was too hot to handle, really. And so I was last cab off the rank, and I guess I didn't know. I didn'. Know. Just. Just saw it On First Principles as an amazing story. Bob Costello rang me up late one night. I know that they were. I was the last person because the next on Monday, they were going to give it to the Daily Mail, a British organization. So. So anyway, I. I just thought it was an absolute screamer of a story. Rang my editor, Cole Allen. We've worked together for a long time, trust each other very much, and he's just. He's a boy from country Australia, rural Australia, and he just attacks journalism without fear or favor on first principles. He loves a good story and this was the best story. So he just activated the entire newsroom and, you know, hats off to Emma Jo Morris in particular, and the whole team at the New York Post who just nailed this story, tracked it down, verified the emails that we first put up, and just went and interviewed John Paul Mac Isaac in Delaware, who was the laptop repair shop guy, who Hunter Biden had abandoned his laptop with and who tipped off Rudy. And so the rest is history. We ran a front page, having got just lies and obfuscation from the Biden campaign. We ran a front page with emails showing that Donald Joe Biden had met with one of his son Hunter's Ukrainian business partners in Washington D.C. when Donald Trump, when, sorry, keep on saying Donald Trump when Joe Biden was vice president. And this went against everything that Biden had been saying during the campaign. And Pippa Schweitzer had written a book about the corruption in the Biden orbit when he was vice president, but none of it had really stuck to Biden. And he was denying on the campaign trail that he knew anything about his son Hunter's overseas business dealings. Here was evidence that that was not tr. And the other tell was that Joe Biden just went to ground. I mean, he was already in the basement, but he was unreachable. And his minions were telling different stories to us than the new, than the Washington Post. So they were telling us, oh, it's not in, you know, that meaning is not in his official diary of the time. And to the Washington Post absolutely, categorically did not happen. And then the story was sort of simmering. Other media outlets hadn't really touched it, but were interested, curious, looking at it. And then what happened, really within hours of our publishing, was that Twitter and Facebook, Facebook first basically censored the story. They blocked any ability to transmit it anywhere to share it. And they call it throttling, but they really killed it stone dead. And even, as you said, Kelly McEnany, who was then President Trump's press secretary, she tried to share on Twitter privately with one other person in her direct messages, and she had her account blocked. Our account, New York Post account was locked for over two weeks until just a couple of days before the election. You know, this was unheard of. We're the fourth largest by circulation and newspaper in the country and the oldest newspaper in the country. So unprecedented, of course, I mean, weeks later, these platforms, these big tech oligarchs, would deplatform the president, the sitting President, Donald Trump. But we were the first that out of the bag. And it was that kind of elevated the story like it went from just a really good political corruption story on the eve of the election to omg, this is a huge censorship story. And there's obviously a grand censorship operation that the Biden campaign, the Democrats, have at their fingertips. And we found out that was the truth later.

Dave Rubin (11:19)

Right. It's so crazy because you thought you had a scandal with the information you found on the laptop. And in some sense, that was secondary to a much larger scandal, which was the government colluding with big tech to hide the story. So there's a couple. Couple things I want to ask you about this, and I know you've answered some of these questions before, but I want to try from a couple different angles. So, one, when you get the laptop physically, how do you guys make sure that it's being taken care of properly? Or that, like, was he logged into all of the accounts? Do you have to have lawyers standing next to you as you're opening things? Are you even privy to all of that, or did you have to hand it off? How did it. Like, at a granular level, how did it work?

Miranda Devine (12:00)

No, because it really. We got the hard drive, which was a clone of the laptop that Hunter Biden had brought in to the laptop repair shop back in 2019, in April of 2019, coincidentally, just a couple of weeks before his father announced that he was running for president and then never showed up again. And so that sort of April 2019 was really the last time that Hunter Biden did anything on that laptop. So we had this frozen image, gigantic image of his hard drive that was copied onto. Cloned onto. From the laptop, onto the hard drive as he was cloned from the laptop into the computer of John Paul Mac Isaac, his big computer there. And then he made several copies, and they were pristine, untouched. And we got one of those original hard drives, and he sent one to Rudy, and Bob Costello got that, and subsequently they made copies. But we had one of the original pristine versions. And it's not. It's not like you're connected to the cloud. You can't connect to anything that he had. And in fact, there were several kind of encrypted sort of vaults on that hard drive of, for instance, his iPhone backup, his iPad backup, which had some interesting information in it, including some voicemails from his dad. But our lawyers would not allow us to access those because even though his opsec was hopeless and he had his passwords all over the laptop, you know, his notes, in his notes, et cetera. But. So we. We could have easily opened it, but we didn't. Others did, and we were allowed to, like Marco Polo did. And so we were allowed to take the information that they had found and report it and giving them credit for opening it. But the most important stuff that was on there, you know, it's not a complete dossier because Hunter had gone through and deleted quite a bit. It was also a complete mess, like a disaster. And, you know, the first thing that you saw there was a whole layer of smut and porn and filth and, you know, pictures of his penis with M and Ms. On it. He had like a two year old boy's fixation on his penis. So there are a lot of nude photos, a lot of photos of him having sex and videos of him having sex with various hookers and girlfriends.

Dave Rubin (14:39)

And doing drugs.

Miranda Devine (14:42)

Right, and doing drugs, yeah. One of the photos that we didn't publish a lot. We certainly didn't publish any of the smutty stuff. But we did publish the first day one photograph just as sort of proof of life, like that. This was really Hunter Biden's laptop. A photograph of him with a crack pipe in his mouth, seemingly asleep in bed. And someone had, one of the hookers had taken a photo of him with that. Actually, it was a meth pipe. We were corrected. It wasn't a crack pipe. Anyway, so, and, and there were, you know, throughout the laptop, I mean, they're, he's very proud of his drug cooking prowess and smoking prowess and finding prowess. Like he's, he's really into the drug culture. And, and so that's part of his, I guess, identity. And so there's a lot of images and videos of him with plumes of smoke and, you know, lighting up his pipe.

Dave Rubin (15:43)

So, okay, so putting. All right, so there's, there's two sides here. You have sort of like a political scan scandal side in that he's admitting his dad, he was having discussions about some of his work with his dad, which his dad was completely denying. Then there's just sort of illicit drugs and sex and prostitutes and okay, all of that. Were you worried that you personally were going to get caught up in some legal trouble around this? I mean, once Big tech stepped in and starts censoring this thing, you obviously realized how big the story was. And then, you know, we know that they can go after journalists and they do go after journalists.

Miranda Devine (16:19)

Yes, that's right. I, I'm, I'm just lucky that I work for the New York Post, which is part of the larger News Corporation. I've worked there for a long time. I know personally with you know, other crises in the past that, you know, Whether you're in war zones or, you know, in. In New York after 9, 11, I know I trust the company to take care of me. And in legal situations, they do. And we have very good legal advice, which we had every step of the way. But we were very careful about how we approached the laptop because, you know, there's just so much information on. So the decision was made early on, I mean, I made it myself with my editors as well, that we weren't gonna touch the sex and drugs. You know, so what, like the presidential candidate's son is a crack addict and wayward like that doesn't necessarily count against him. I guess it could elicit sympathy for him. So a lot of families are going through that. So that wasn't our focus. The focus was the corruption, which Joe Biden denied. And, you know, even if he had a plausible explanation for meeting with all these business partners from China, Ukraine, Russia, of son who was getting paid millions of dollars from these different countries that are many adversaries of America, even if there was a plausible explanation, can't think of one. You know, he wasn't giving it. And it was also proves that he lied in the past when he said he knew nothing about it. He was up to his neck in it. And so that was the story. Like that was the scandal. And you know, the COVID up made it even more plausible that Biden was corrupt. Because first of all, you had big tech stepping in. We found out later that the FBI was behind that. They had been pre bunking our story to the big tech companies in meetings before the election. And in the weeks running up to our story coming out, the FBI had the laptop, had had it since December 2019. They knew that this story would come out likely before the election. So they told Facebook and Twitter, Twitter, et cetera, to look out for probably in October, a hack and leak operation by the Russians to do with Hunter Biden. So that was our story. Nothing to do with hacking, nothing to do with the Russians. But it did scare people off.

Dave Rubin (18:47)

And then, and quite literally. I'm sorry to interrupt, but quite literally, Zuckerberg admitted that. I mean, he admitted that on Rogan, that they knew about it and that it was sort of sold under that pretense.

Miranda Devine (18:57)

Yeah, and Zuckerberg has not been at all transparent. He's had that dragged out of him, but only after Elon Musk bought Twitter, opened Twitter files, and people like Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger and Barry Weiss went in there and uncovered a whole cell of FBI and CIA operatives who had been hired by the big tech platforms, obviously planted there to basically control information and to ensure that things they didn't want to, to be learned by the American people were censored. And, you know, it wasn't for national security reasons. Maybe there were some legitimate ones, but no, it was to cover up their malfeasance and to cover up for Joe Biden. The stuff I looked at, to cover up for Joe Biden and ensure that he beat Donald Trump in 2020. And then of course, after that, we had a few days after our story, first story came out, we had had the dirty 51 letter, which was the letter by instigated by Antony Blinken, who was then a senior campaign advisor to Joe Biden became Secretary of State. He coerced this letter out of Mike Morell, who was a former acting director of the CIA who thought he was going to be Biden's CIA director. Ha ha. He wasn't. He was double tricked. But he, he got 50 of his colleagues to sign on to this very dishonest letter that said that Hunter Biden's laptop and therefore our reporting was a Russian disinformation operation. And they used slightly different language they said had all the earmarks of a Russian information operation, but that was what they meant. Politico broke the story, was given the story Natasha Bertrand, who's plugged into the Deep State and they headlined it Russian Disinformation. And among those 51 supposedly former intelligence officials were five former directors or acting directors of the CIA, including John Brennan, Leon Panetta and so on. And these people, I think, have sullied their reputations forever. And I can't believe that they still. John Brennan you're seeing constantly on CNN opining on the Iran war. He was also knee deep in the Russia hoax, you know, on behalf of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. So he's, I mean, he's under investigation by the doj. Not sure if they're going to be able to pin conspiracy charges on him. But, you know, it's just incredible that those 51 have gotten away with it and still have jobs. Many of them were contractors for the CIA. And what makes them that letter even more alarming is we found out much later on, only just a year or two ago, thanks to the Republican investigations in the House, that that letter had to be vetted by the CIA before it was allowed to be published. They have a classified classified review board that makes sure that you're not letting out any secrets. And the people on that review board or panel decided that it was way too high above their pay. They kicked it upstairs. It came to the CIA's number three at the time, a man by the name of Andrew McCreadis, who was the COO. And he looked at it and thought, above my pay grade. He has testified that he walked across the corridor at CIA headquarters at Langley and gave it to Gina Haspel, who was then Trump's CIA director. And she gave that letter the green light, even though it had been deemed to be way too political. You know, less than three weeks before the 2020 election by the of the CIA boffins. They thought it was too political. She didn't. She thought it was great. And one little side note about Gina Haspel is that she was the head of the CIA's London mission when the Russiagate hoax first kicked off in London with that meeting between a low level Trump campaign operative, George Papadopoulos, and an Australian diplomat or former diplomat, Alexander Down.

Dave Rubin (23:31)

There's so much here, but maybe we'll pause on that for a moment and let's fast forward to where we're at now. But connected to this, which is, so when you mention all of these names and walking across the hall and we can connect all of these things. When you look at the Trump administration now, which is basically not even a year and a half into this second presidency, do you think they have done an effective job at, at cleaning the agencies out? Are you able to ascertain how many of these people still exist? Are the systems still in place? How many people are undermining the very things that Trump was voted in on?

Miranda Devine (24:07)

I, I don't get a sense that there has been a wholesale cleanup. You know, I, I'm told that there are people in the CIA and the FBI who are just fair weather friends. You know, they will go with whichever way the wind is blowing and that, you know, some of the worst actors that the real political deep staters have been eliminated. I'm, I have no, I mean, I just have to take that on what they tell me. I don't necessarily believe it. I think John Ratcliffe's doing a good job at the CIA with exposing some of the malfeasance in the past. For instance, he got a review of that initial CIA sort of advice that kicked off the Russiagate hoax, that pretended that Russia wanted Donald Trump to win the 2020 election. That was not true. John Brennan massaged that through and John Ratcliffe showed how John Brennan did that by bullying analysts by saying, oh well, it doesn't matter if it's not true. It sounds Good, doesn't it? So that's been. But you know, these agencies, Cash Patel, I'm not sure. It seems a bit more ad hoc over there. He's fired and he's not fired. I don't quite see the rhyme or reason there. But you know, we just have to take their words for it that they're doing it. And I know Tulsi Gabbard's done a great job with declassifying a lot of information and really pushing the envelope on that. And I know that in Florida they are a grand jury is supposed to be looking at sort of conspiracy charges against people like John Brennan, James Comey. Let's see what happens with that. I mean, the DOJ has not had a lot of luck with trying to right wrongs from the past. And time's running out, you know, especially if the Republic, if the Republicans lose the house in 20 in the end of this year.

Dave Rubin (26:10)

Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say. It's like you don't really have two and a half years to deal with this. You may only have now eight months to deal with it, which is, which is very, very different. What do you make of the general state of journalism at the moment? You know, I spent most of my formative years in New York City and one of my great joys was for a quarter you could buy the New York Post and you know, you could flip through it pretty quickly. And at that time, you know, I'm talking, you know, early 2000s, it was sort of tabloidy, but I always thought it was pretty good. Where now the New York Post, I think has really shown itself to be a great place of journalism. And that's in stor stark contrast to New York Times, Washington Post, et cetera, et cetera. What do you make of the state of sort of mainstream media? And then we'll do the online thing.

Miranda Devine (26:56)

I mean, I think the New York Post is still what it's always been. I mean, it's a very proud to be a tabloid. We're the voice of New York and there's a lot of showbiz and all the things that make up New York theater and gossip, but also so we're pretty conservative and always have had opinion side and the news has always been like straight down the middle usually. And you know, like I write news stories and they are scrupulously fact based and then when I'm writing opinion, they appear in the opinion pages. So I mean, the New York Times, like all journalism has just totally lost its way. I think like all elite journalism, maybe, you know, tabloids have been left alone because we weren't deemed important enough to mess with because there's been a lot of infiltration for, I mean, forever. I think intelligence spies have gone and worked in newsrooms. My father was a foreign correspondent in Tokyo in the 1960s and he said there were spies everywhere. That was kind of one of the sort of key places for the Cold War and spies in every newsroom. And I think, I think that we saw the spies in Big Tech is just an offshoot of that. So I think that the fact that you do have spies does skew the coverage. And then the fact that those spies no longer the CIA and the FBI and so on, just I think in the past they were America first, whether you disagreed with their tactics or not. They wanted America to prevail around the world. And then the end of the Cold War. Those agencies seem to have themselves gone, woke or gone, lost their way. And so I think that's reflected in the, certainly the international coverage of the elite news agencies or institutions like the New York Times. But then you also have the change in journalism school. I went to Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism back in the 80s, which was just, you know, a fantastic place to learn the nuts and bolts of journalism, how to do it properly, how to write a story, how to gather information, how to make that last call, persevere, don't, you know, don't listen to lies, et cetera. It was just straight. It wasn't, didn't have a left wing bias. You just went into the world as a fully equipped journalist and reporter. But now journalism schools, even I think Northwestern, sad to say, but certainly Columbia, are teaching journalists to be activists, telling them that's their role. And you're getting all these young woke people in newsrooms. And the New York Times just got completely eaten up by identity politics and I think destroyed itself, you know, and it's the news section of the paper people don't understand, does not make money for them. They're making money out of wordle and cooking and crosswords, stuff that is not journalism. Washington Post has just, you know, almost on its last legs losing money. And Jeff Bezos is sick of it. You know, that's a story all over the country. And the Wall Street Journal, which has a conservative opinion side and news, factual news, slightly left leaning, but center left, is just doing very, very well. And it also has all the business stuff that people are willing to pay for and that's a subscription base. We're free and and the fact that we are doing so well and are profitable for the first time in, you know, almost since the beginning of Post history has meant that Rupert Murdoch is now confident enough to open a actual newspaper like a print version of the New York Post in California. The California Post, yeah.

Dave Rubin (31:04)

There's so much, it's so interesting. Let me ask you something that I've gotten some pushback on over the years. I've not only personally been lied about so many times in the New York Times, but then also covered stories where they lie about virtually everything. So one of the things that I always say is if you're reading a New York Times story and they're quoting anonymous sources, it's likely made up. Now I do get some pushback on that from my friends in the more mainstream journalist world. But at this point, if you're reading one of the papers that we've discussed here, or even in your personal view, how do you decide when to use an anonymous source or not? Because usually I can say it, at least from the New York Times side, it's just to craft a story. And I just don't think they deserve the credit it to that. We should believe that this anonymous source is real or when they say it's a source on Capitol Hill, that it's not the janitor on Capitol Hill who's probably a far better person than most of the people working on Capitol Hill, but you get the point.

Miranda Devine (31:59)

Or Adam Schiff, you know.

Dave Rubin (32:01)

Oh, it's always Adam Schiff. It's always Adam Schiff.

Miranda Devine (32:05)

If you know that your source is a proven liar, that's when you stop using them. But it seems like with the New York Times Times, they're quite happy to have lies laundered as long as they're laundered through someone plausible. Because you know, when you're a reporter and you're doing a high stakes story, your editor asks you who is your source and you have to tell your editor. And I mean, that goes to their grave. I have used anonymous sources, of course. I mean, they're crucial, particularly during the Hunter Biden investigation, because there were many friends and former business partners of Hunter Biden that could not risk their, I mean, safety, their financial security, could not risk being locked up. I mean, Devon Archer almost went to jail, lost all his money fighting legal, you know, spurious legal cases because he was deemed by Hunter not to be sufficiently loyal. So that that couldn't be risk speaking on the record. But they had lots of evidence that, I mean, they were on the laptop. So I knew that they knew what they were talking about and they were able to confirm that those emails were real. So they were crucially important. And as time went on and I gained their trust, you know, I mean, I had at my, I don't mind saying it because I won't say who they are, but at my second book, book launch for the Big Guy, the second book, I had five whistleblowers in the audience. So, and some of whom, you know, no one will ever know their names. But so they're important. Those anonymous sources are crucial. And I don't think you can really like hold truth to power or whatever it is if you don't use them. But obviously you should always try to get people on the record. And I just think with the New York Times, they have such a reputation and the Washington Post, they have such a august reputation that people will believe if it's in the New York Times or the Washington Post comes across, you know, the breakfast table of these old CIA and, you know, grizzled intelligence types who still get newspapers on their front porch in Washington or in wherever they live, Maryland and Virginia, they believe every word that's in there and it fuels their Trump Durango and it's really sick. But, you know, we are so siloed now. I saw a poll, Quinnipiac poll today that said that, you know, do you think Trump is explaining himself well enough on the Iran war? I think something like 80% of Republicans said yes, like 5% of Democrats said yes. So it's because we're siloed in our nuclear news centers. And I believe that conservatives are more realistic because we're forced to consume left wing news, even if we choose to watch Fox News or read the New York Post and nothing else. And also I would argue, maybe I'm talking my own book, but you get both sides in those two organizations, whereas MSNBC will, especially MSNBC will just give you one side and it's all the Trump deranged side. And if that's all you're watching, or cnn, you are woefully ignorant about half of what's going on in the world.

Dave Rubin (35:45)

So putting aside the mainstream portion of this, you know, obviously over the last 15 years we've developed this, this alt media thing. I'm very proud to say I was one of the early ins on this thing. What do you make of the state of alt journalism in a, in a time when there are now no guard rails and there's really, there's really no rules, no one's looking at the Old, you know, journalist's handbook from 1964 or whatever. And doing anything, we're all, you know, you can just put on it, as I say, all the time. And I mean it with all due irony. You can put on a jacket and sit at a desk and look like, you know, you're doing something true and honest. And now there's a gajillion of us. I mean, what, what do you make of the statement of that?

Miranda Devine (36:26)

Yeah, I mean, if alt journalism is, you know, what you're doing podcasting, what I've just started doing with Pod Force One, I think alt journalism is morphing into real journalism. You know, I think the last election 24 presidential election was really the podcast election. You could see that with Donald Trump fanning out to Joe Rogan and all sorts of obscure podcast that his son Baron had suggested. So that's now a way to transmit information across to the public. I think it's in some ways for politicians, a more real way because in an hour long interview with say, Donald Trump or any of his cabinet members, you get a feel for the real person beyond the spin that you don't get in a short soundbite or a short grab or a press conference. Although press conferences are good because they do put these people under pressure. So I wouldn't want a podcast to replace that. So I think that you now have this strange situation where you've got podcast hosts getting enormous, millions of viewers, bigger than Fox News or CNN sometimes. And yet there is no checks or balances at a news organization like Fox. You have editors and producers and ultimately Suzanne Scott and ultimately the head of the company and lawyers. And everybody is making sure that you are within the bounds of normality and truth. With podcasts, it's really, really you and your microphone. And unless you, you know, I, I'm obviously it's a New York Post podcast. So all those limits apply to, to me. But for you, you're your own, your own one man band and many podcasters are, and the most talented are like the most. I think that the real, the people who have made it big are the ones who have some innate broadcasting talent, some deep integrity that they project and a that comes across on the screen that makes people trust them. And that can be dangerous because sometimes appearances are deceiving.

Dave Rubin (38:51)

Ah, you gave me the perfect segue. You know, it's interesting. One of the things that I'm most proud of on the show is that I love correcting myself. I don't love making mistakes, but if I correct myself and my guys flag me in the middle of a live show, I will always stop and do it or if we realize it after the show. To me, it's the easiest thing to do. I'm not perfect and I'm going to make mistakes. And I do think it shows integrity and honesty. So I see all these people that now are more ideological and are just sort of laundering lies that are doing this. So how do you think if the world continues to go in this direction where we're just going to all get news catered to us and now, you see, I'll just say names. I don't know if you want to reference them, but say Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly who came from mainstream media. So they had some of those barriers. Now they're in the other thing. And I would say, particularly in the Tucker case, it's just sort of an endless conspiracy Crate Crazy Town episode every day. Do you think certain people just need some of that stuff, some of those boundaries, because they can't exist in the other world?

Miranda Devine (39:54)

Well, I mean, Tucker, who I, you know, was very friendly with when he was at fox. I was on his show all the time. I actually, he asked me to write his biography. I was halfway through it when he left Fox in, you know, know, mysterious circumstances, let's say. And, and so I, I, I was close to him, but I don't recognize what's happened with his, his, you know, podcast now because I think, you know, he comes from a good place, which is he genuinely is anti war to a point that I don't think people really understand. He was kind of in the neocon world when he first, you know, started out in journalism and he was working for what's in Bill Kristol. And he felt betrayed and used by Bill Kristol because as I said, like, he's incredibly charismatic and great on, on, on air. And so he felt, and he's a great writer. So he felt Bill Kristol used him to prosecute the Iraq war, which he now realized, realized afterwards was a huge mistake. He had a friend d there and, and he just beats himself up about it all the time. But I mean, he's not alone. I, I, I feel exactly the same way. I think a lot of us were hoodwinked into that. And therefore, you know, there's a whole generation of people. The new gum health hero is here from Parodontax, the experts in gum care. Parodontax gum strengthen and protect strengthens the gum seal by killing plaque bacteria along the gum line for a stronger and tighter seal between the gums and, and teeth clinically proven to reduce bleeding. And now with hyaluronic acid for foaming action. Brush and rinse twice daily to protect against plaque. Keep gums tight and enjoy long lasting gum health. Strong gums, healthy smile. Pete Hegseth talks about it. Who are very leery of war. Very different from the people who tricked us into the Iraq war. So, so I think Tucker comes from a good place, an honest place. But what's happened, I think was at Fox he had an incredible crew around him. Like he had Justin Wells, who was just, you know, first among equals in terms of Fox talent. Behind the scenes talent could have run the place. He was his executive producer. He had people like Charlie Cougar and a whole, whole retinue of real geniuses. And you don't get to be number one in cable for so many years without a good team. And that was leveraging Tucker's immense talent and turning it into gold. And I think Tucker suffers from having lost those people. Obviously when he left Fox, he couldn't keep them on and he's pretty isolated. And then I think, think he's, you know, he's someone who's a very independent person. He doesn't like being co opted by politicians or being seen as being co opted by a politician. So I think he was always very uneasy with his sort of closeness to Trump. I think we all are. You know, Trump is a very engaging, welcoming, hospitable person to people. He wants to be that way too. And it's very hard to resist, especially when he's president, you know, to be around that aura. And yet if you have any semblance of independence as a journalist, you find that uncomfortable. And so maybe, maybe Tucker also felt that because he had that proximity, I think he fell into a trap. This is my personal view. Maybe Americans don't think that. I think I come from a more of an Australian sensibility. But I think it's hubristic and arrogant to think that as a journalist you have close relationships with politicians by the nature of your job. But that does not mean you're an advisor, does not mean that you're on the same level as a Marco Rubio, you know, or the boffins who advise the president. You are just the voice of the people. You are there to listen and transmit what you've learned to the people. You should not make yourself more important than that because you really are just a journalist. And I always try and keep myself humble like that. And unfortunately, I think television and Podcasting, more than that, even gives people massive egos. Even humble people become really egotistical. It's just the nature of the beast. And maybe, and I hope Tucker doesn't hate me for saying this, but maybe he thought he was more important than he was. And then when Trump didn't pay any attention to him, when he advised him not to go into Iran, he sort of went ballistic. And, you know, he may turn out to be right. I mean, he may turn out to be Nostradamus, but there's no excuse for his playing with these anti Semitic tropes and for interviewing people who are obviously just lying about Israel and its role. And I'm talking about, about, you know, historians that are saying that Winston Churchill was the worse than Hitler and et cetera. And, you know, okay, you can interview Nick Fuentes, but don't interview him like he's a legitimate guy. I mean, you can let him have his say, but, you know, he's a fool. So I don't know. I just think Tucker is so talented and such a good guy. I find it really sad that he. He's just doubling down and doubling down when he does podcasts that are not on these topics, like on privacy or something. He's so brilliant, but he doesn't get as many views. And, you know, he gets millions of views and is making, like Candace Owens, who is completely batshit. She gets millions of views. He's making a lot of money out of just tormenting the widow of Charlie Kirk. I think that's unforgivable. Erica Kirk has been so brave and tried to rise above this, but it's so dirty. I just feel disgusted.

Dave Rubin (46:20)

Yeah. You know, well, I don't have to tell you. I mean, fame is a weird drug, and clicks are, I suppose, the lighter for the drug. Let me ask you just one other thing here, and I'd love to have you back and just maybe we could do this every few months to just recap what's going on as more of a look at the media, which is what I'm usually more interested in is the narrative than the specific stories. But as we're in the midst of this war, and I should say we're posting this on Saturday, you and I are taping this on Tuesday, so obviously a few things could change. I personally have been very impressed by the transparency of the administration, whether it's Trump, whether It's Rubio Hegseth. JD's been a little bit less out there. But when he's been out there, I think he's backing the president. And then you see Trump still doing some of his side remarks and, oh, we may have to do a little more here and there. I don't know that they could be doing the PR side of this much better. You sort of referenced before, no matter what they're going to do, the Democrats are going to say they're not being honest or whatever. Do you think there is more they could do in wartime right now? Because if there is, I haven't seen it, but I'm open to it.

Miranda Devine (47:23)

I really don't, other than Larry Kudlow is on his show this week and he's very hot and has been, you know, since last week on opening up the Strait of Hormuz because, you know, the price of oil obviously is critical to how Americans think about the war. And you know, Donald Trump came out yesterday and he said, look, it's not going to go on for very long. Long. I think he never intended it to go on for very long, but he didn't want to signal that to the Iranians.

Dave Rubin (47:58)

Right.

Miranda Devine (47:58)

So it seemed obvious to me why he wasn't saying that. But he was getting a lot of pressure from the base and from people saying, oh, you know, he has to, he has to say there's an end or we're going to go into a forever war. Like there's no way Donald Trump is going in a forever war. But anyway, he came out and he said what he said yesterday. I guess he had to, it quietened the markets and he cares deeply about the markets, obviously, and the price of oil is going to be important. It feeds into the cost of living for the midterms, which is all important. So I think getting the Straits of Hormuz, he's now said that, that, you know, they, and they're doing the insurance so the ships feel okay about going through and helping them with their own warship, our own warships to, to get through. So I think that's really crucial. And once you do that and the oil price settles down, I think the American people will be content that this is, you know, and those who trust Donald Trump, trust him. Right?

Dave Rubin (49:00)

Right.

Miranda Devine (49:01)

Those who don't will just use anything, no matter how detrimental to the national interest to come after him. So, you know, I mean, if you read the left wing media, none of the successes of this war and the degr degradation of the Iranian military and nuclear capability has been mentioned. It's all that everything's going terribly. And you know, Iran's just elected the, you know, Ayatollah's son and he's going to be worse than his father. Yeah. I mean, it's not easy. But Trump, at the very least, if he stopped today, as in Tuesday, has set the Iranian Europeans back, you know, a long time, many years in their nuclear ambitions. And I think the terrorist threat is something we need to keep an eye on. And of course, we've seen the ISIS threat in New York already with those two, thank goodness, unexploded bombs, but that would have killed and maimed many people. And the ISIS sympathisers, the two Muslim guys who threw their bombs, they. They said they wanted it to be bigger than the Boston Marathon bombing. So, you know, we don't know how many sleeper cells there are in this country, how many terrorists were let in over the open border for four years by Joe Biden. We know many have been arrested. We know there was an Iranian, he was actually a Pakistani guy who was just convicted on Friday, last Friday, for plotting to kill President Trump. And he said, but he was asked to do it by the Iranians. So the Iranian government has been at least two foiled plots to assassinate Donald Trump. And they will do whatever they can, even if they're degraded to destroy us with terrorism at home. And I think that will be a real political concern going into the midterms.

Dave Rubin (51:03)

Right. And meanwhile, the Democrats are defunding or temporarily have a partial shutdown for DHS amidst all this because of ice, even though it's funded through 29. And you didn't even mention that we had a less. Was it less than A month ago, 16 people were shot by a jihadist in Austin, Texas, and two were killed. So it's just, it's endless. I completely agree, by the way, with your point that he deserves a little bit of our trust here. He's been directionally right about so many of these things that even someone like you who comes from journalism. So you would be skeptical. Yeah. You have to trust a little bit here. Miranda, it's been an absolute pleasure. Pleasure. We're gonna link to the podcast down below. Good to see you.

Miranda Devine (51:40)

Thanks, Dave.

Dave Rubin (51:47)

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