Miranda Devine & The Laptop From Hell
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All right, boys and girls, we are back with another edition of the Ben Domenech podcast brought to you by Fox News. You can find all of our podcasts at foxnewspodcast.com. I hope that you will subscribe, rate, and review this one, especially if you like it.

Today I'm going to have a conversation with the New York Post's Miranda Devine. She's a columnist there and is probably familiar to you from her appearances on Fox News. She also has an upcoming book about the Hunter Biden laptop situation, which we talk about at length. I hope that you will check out her work at the New York Post.

And also check out her book, which is entitled Laptop from Hell, Hunter Biden, Big Tech and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide. It is releasing on November 30th, 2021. But you can preorder it on Amazon and wherever books are sold. Branded Divine coming up next. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Whether you're selling a little or a lot.

Shopify helps you do your thing, however you cha-ching. From the launch your online shop stage all the way to the we just hit a million orders stage. No matter what stage you're in, Shopify's there to help you grow. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash special offer, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash special offer.

Miranda Devine, thank you so much for joining me today. Very welcome, Ben. Great to be with you. I want to talk to you about a number of different topics, but first off, maybe for our listeners who are less familiar with your background in journalism and your perspective writing about things before you started showing up in the New York Post and on Fox Airwaves, give them a little bit about your background and how you came to be writing about American politics.

Well, I suppose people are confused by my Australian accent and would be surprised to find out that I was born in Queens, in Jamaica, Queens, and spent the first few years of my life here before going to, with my parents who were, one was Australian, one was a New Zealander, to, we then went to Tokyo and spent the next six years there where I went to an American school in

the Sacred Heart School for a lot of children of expats and became a very patriotic American, read the Bobsy Twins, et cetera, had a very strong American accent. And I think when Americans are transported to, you know, an alien environment like Tokyo was, they become even more American than they are. So I guess I had sort of almost a cartoon American identity. And then I was plucked out of that. My parents went...

back to Australia to Perth, which is the west coast of Australia, but really frontier territory. I mean, there's nothing there except where my mother was from a huge wheat and sheep farm there, just vast territory there.

And anyway, so I went back there and it was a real culture shock for me and my sister who had been born in Tokyo and grew up speaking English with a Japanese accent and me with my strong American accent. And I overnight almost practiced my Australian accent because, you know, at the age of 11 or 12, you just want to conform everywhere.

And so I remember my mother horrified by my overnight turning into, well, what she called, it's sort of like a redneck accent. She said, oh, darling, you've become an ochre. So there you go. That's my Australian accent. But then I came back here. My parents moved back.

um to new york um and i came back um to go to college in chicago went to northwestern university uh to do journalism and then worked for several years in boston at the boston heralds um and worked uh you know had a couple of odd jobs in um in new york as well working for a magazine uh science magazine and um

Then went back to Australia and got married and had children. And then our boys are, you know, pretty much grown up. One's still at college, but they're early 20s. So we were sort of free again. And my former editor at the Daily Telegraph in Sydney, Cole Allen, had been editor-in-chief here at the New York Post, in fact, during 9-11, actually.

And I'd been sent over here by another newspaper. I worked for the Sydney Morning Herald, the opposition paper, and caught up with him then and said to him then, oh, I'd love to come back and work here. And that was, of course, 20 years ago. And then he ended up being recalled from retirement at the Post a couple of years ago and asked me if I still wanted to come and

and have a go working here and I said of course so my husband and I packed up and moved over. You know in terms of your travels and living so many places

I wonder your perspective that you have on America's media, because there's such a different attitude toward the media in the different places that you've lived. It fulfills different roles within society and is treated differently, both by the powerful and by the people who consume it. What sets apart American media in this current moment?

from the rest of the world, really, in the attitude that the media has toward these partisan debates that we're going through and toward other fellow media members of the like.

Well, I think to answer that question, I have to go back to my journalism training at Northwestern. And, you know, American journalism was always the gold standard in terms of beautiful writing, the formula that you were taught for news stories, inverted pyramids, all that. You know, it was like it's like an...

It's a skill, it's a trade. And then also being taught how to write feature articles and so on. And then the emphasis on accuracy, on reporting, on getting every single detail. I mean, there is nothing like American journalism for the finest writing and reporting in the world, I would say. And I've worked also in London and it's much more, you know, it's

There's a certain energy there, but it's much more slapdash. And there's definitely a tension between sort of the British mode of journalism and the American mode. And I always had thought of the American mode as being more protected against pressures to be partisan and to lie and for propaganda. But in fact, it turned out to be...

more exquisitely vulnerable. I look at the prestige journalism outfits like the New York Times and the Washington Post. They're still capable of doing excellent journalism. You saw that with the New York Times on Friday with their brilliant expose of the drone strike that Biden committed for optics reasons in Afghanistan, which killed a family and a dozen kids.

So they did a brilliant job there, so they're still capable of it, but they have so sullied the idea of objectivity that they now are routinely publishing propaganda that services one side of politics and one, in fact, one, you know, narrow fraction of that side of politics, which is the progressive end of the Democratic Party. And it's sad to see, and I think the very...

things that made American journalism so good, the rigor and the accuracy and the sort of brilliance of expression has now been used to serve evil, in fact, because that's all you can say about journalism that lies. You said something really important there, which is that this is a skill, this is a trade. And to me, that's something that has also been eradicated during this moment in which

we see these developments, I think particularly of something like the 1619 project as something that is less about the skill and the trade of research, investigation, and reporting being replaced with people expressing their truth about the way that they see the world in often artistic and sort of

you know, flourishing ways, you know, the emanations as opposed to the facts. And to me, that's something that's really sad about American journalism. But there's something else too that you've mentioned, which I think is so important. When I was younger, the goal, I think, of many respectable center-right people

was that they wanted to have a career where their opinions became respected, where they could occupy positions on boards and on a Sunday show and write some books and end up with a column in the Washington Post or the New York Times along those lines.

And now the most interesting people who I know who are in that area would never go and work for those publications because they're very much aware that they wouldn't last a day. You know, they would have the Kevin Williamson experience at the Atlantic, except it would probably move even faster. And so it's the sort of it's a change. It's a deep change in the way that these institutions operate.

And from my perspective, there are a number of different factors there. But I wonder what your perspective is on what you think is going on and driving that very negative change that has taken American journalism from being gold standard to so much of it being propaganda and subject to that criticism.

Gell-Mann amnesia effect that Michael Crichton famously talked about, where you read the topic that you're familiar with, you understand the writer knows nothing about what they're talking about. And then you turn the page and you read something that you're less familiar with and you automatically assume that they know what they're talking about. I think that that has actually been eradicated.

In the past couple of years to the point where people now no longer trust when they turn the page that anyone knows what they're talking about and many times instead are starting to consume media asking the question, who is it who wants me to believe this or to read this take on what's going on?

Yeah, that's so true. I mean, I think there's a parallel with the loss of faith in all our institutions, but you can see it most starkly at the moment with the public health experts, people like Anthony Fauci. I mean, you know, I'm sure a good part of the vaccine hesitancy is based on the fact that why, you know, people just have lost any faith that the FDA, the CDC, people like Fauci are actually telling them the truth or in fact know what they're talking about. And I think it's,

Part of that erosion of our trust, institutional trust, is the media, is the fact that, you know, it's becoming really apparent to a lot of people and particularly to conservatives that the media is not telling the truth.

that it is twisting the truth. You know, their lived experience sees the opposite of what goes on. And, you know, to the point where you have such absurdities as Larry Elder, you know, a black man in California is being accused of being a white supremacist. And,

You know, the problem is now that we've polarised our debate so much that there are Liberals, people on the left, who consume the New York Times and the Washington Post and actually believe

what they read and they watch CNN and so on. And I think conservatives are more inoculated against propaganda because they have the left-wing view thrust down their throat. They can hardly avoid it. And yet they also...

know from their own lives and from the more conservative media, which I would argue is more balanced. Fox News is much more balanced than CNN. You're much more likely to get both sides of the story simply because that's sort of the

The air we breathe is the liberal viewpoint. But it's very destructive. And I think the institutions are hollowing themselves out. You know, the New York Times, the Washington Post are debasing themselves and they are using those skills and, you know, those treasured and honoured skills of journalism to wrap up garbage.

and make it look pretty. And people are seeing through that and it's destroying journalism. And as a result, it's really having a debilitating effect on our discourse, on our culture, on the trust and trust

the unity and I guess the way we can hang together as rational human beings who have a common belief in certain things are true. The sun is going to rise tomorrow. I mean, there are a lot of people now who probably believe the earth is flat. Why would you trust anything anymore? Well, you've hit on something that's very timely because we live in this odd moment where

Where you have the media credulously reporting about, you know, Joe Biden's finally, you know, he's he's fed up with these unvaccinated people. He's not going to put up with them anymore. And so he's going to give this this mean and I think, frankly, you know, diminishing to his office speech.

you know, demonizing effectively a, you know, one out of every five Americans or, you know, pick your pick your statistic in that regard who hasn't gone along with with his agenda. And at the same time, you know, lamenting the lack of unity and the fact that he has to confront

you know, FU Biden signs when he is doing his, his tour during the Northeast, which I know you wrote about. And it's, it's like, are you not connecting these things? Do you not see why one would lead to the other and, and create this cycle? I mean, the, you know, people,

People forget that when Barack Obama was running for president in 2008 and he talked about people clinging to their guns and their religion, their Bibles, he was talking about it in the context of the Democratic primary. It was when he was battling Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania for those Democratic primary votes. He was talking about Democrats and he was effectively saying, these are people we need to get out of our coalition.

They are the they are the remainders of the Catholic Union voters who voted for Kennedy because he was Catholic, who voted for Johnson because of what happened and who went over to Reagan maybe during the 80s and that Bill Clinton won enough of them back.

You know, he's saying, you know, these voters are not the future and we need to get away from them. And to me, that the moment that he did that, there's a direct line that runs from that to the deplorables, everything that we're hearing from Biden right now about Democrats not liking the fact that they used to have a more culturally diverse coalition.

I that that was much more religious, much more culturally in favor of of policemen and firemen and the military and the flag and liked. I mean, there was a whole strain running from.

in the early 2000s about NASCAR Democrats and that like, that's what you needed in order to, in order to win. And once they felt like they didn't need that anymore, they had enough,

uh, we know highly educated, overeducated, I would suggest, uh, you know, people badly educated for, for a very pretty penny, um, the, uh, you know, as part of their coalition and that they brought in a lot of, uh, you know, culturally liberal, you know, suburbanites and like, uh, that they feel like they don't need those people anymore. And that's how you create a situation where

I mean, one of the biggest, one of the harshest critiques that I read of Joe Biden's decisions regarding Afghanistan was from Jim Webb in the national interest. And Jim Webb is someone who just has no, there is no place for him at the Democratic Coalition anymore. And that's something that I think is bad for the divisions that you're talking about. But just to circle back to what you were saying, one other thing about media that I think

is really becoming a problem is that they're now at war with fellow media entities

In a way that I find to be very stark and disturbing, where, you know, in the old days of the 1990s or of or of, you know, or even of the early 2000s, you would see media members stand up for other media members who they disagreed with simply because of the work that they were doing being important or.

and it being important that, say, government not shut them down or steal their phone records or demand that they hand over sources or something like that. A unity of the trade that used to exist among people who respected each other. And now the attitude seems to be, well, you are aiding and assisting someone who, an ideology that we believe to be abhorrent

or a candidate that we believe to be abhorrent or a policy we believe to be abhorrent. So forget about those principles. Forget about any kind of defense of media or the press.

And the old kind of guard of ACLU Democrats, which basically seems to now consist of Bill Maher, has really diminished to a point where you and your own publication at the New York Post have the audacity to report news.

about Hunter Biden and his laptop, important news that if you change the political ideology of anyone involved, that all of these publications would be clamoring over and paying attention to. And instead, they basically view you with disgust for reporting things that they find to be inconvenient.

That really, it bothers me deeply because it seems like an indication of how fragile their respect for the First Amendment really is. What is your own perspective on that? And what has the experience been like working at the Post during this period where you've been essentially the primary outlet, not the only outlet, but the primary outlet reporting this story?

Well, I mean, it's quite incredible from my perspective because, you know, for reporters, the story is paramount. You know, a good duty story, all journalists, doesn't matter who they work for, what their ideology is, a good story is a good story every day.

And the Hunter Biden story is a very good story. And the Post broke it last October. And, you know, it doesn't matter the fact that it came from Rudy Giuliani, who was contacted by the guy at the Mac repair shop in Delaware, who Hunter Biden had dropped the laptop off. It doesn't matter that the right, the left doesn't like Rudy Giuliani. But

The story itself, the laptop itself is real. The emails, all the documents on there have all been verified. We've contacted the other recipients of the emails, you know, ad nauseum. I mean, this thing has been tested and tested. We've published and so many other people now have published material from the laptop and it has never been disputed. The...

fact that you can see on there millions of dollars sloshing into the Biden family coffers from overseas oligarchs and governments that Joe Biden as vice president was doing business with. I mean we all know the story. It's a horrendous story and it should have disqualified him from office and yet

It was suppressed. The story was actively suppressed. I guess it was a few weeks before the election. So there was this desperate attempt by a coalition, a collusion of big tech, Facebook and Twitter, and the New York Times, CNN, Politico, all these august journalistic groups

organizations decided to go mum on it. I mean, I remember there was a reporter from the New York Times that morning, Maggie Haberman, who tweeted up a link on it and she got berated. There was another reporter did the same thing and took his tweet down and apologized for it. And

And then, of course, Twitter and Facebook pretended that it was hacked material, even though the New York Times just a couple of weeks before had published actual hacked material, which was Donald Trump's tax returns. This is not hacked material. This is actual emails from, you know, foreign oligarchs who are paying Hunter Biden millions of dollars, uh,

thanking him, for instance, for organising a meeting in Washington, D.C. with his father, which we later found out was at Cafe Milano in a private room with, you know, Russians and Ukrainians and, you know,

People from all over the world that Hunter Biden and his family were enriching themselves with. And that's a big story, but it has been suppressed. Not only that, fact checkers have tried from the Washington Post, Glenn Kessler, have tried to poo-poo the story and make out that it's wrong and just swallowed the White House line. And then, of course...

This suppression campaign, which is all you can call it, got a big assist from the former intelligence community. We had 50 spooks, you know, people like John Brennan and James Clapper and, you know, a whole lot of, frankly, discredited people

intelligence operatives who were responsible for the fake intelligence that led to the Iraq war, for instance, they all signed an open letter to say that this had all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation operation. I mean, that was a complete lie. And none of them, it's like the 50 scientists who signed the Lancet letter and said that the Wuhan virus could not have come from a lab. You know,

They haven't retracted neither of these 50 former spooks. And why is that? Because there's no pressure on them from the mainstream media to retract, to apologize, and to account for why they did that. You know, their reputations are sullied forever. You know, you have this situation where...

And I'm glad you brought that letter up because it was profoundly irritating to me to see that and to see them have no consequences for that whatsoever.

Because these are people who are highly paid for as now media commentators for the most part. They're giving speeches. They have chairs at academic institutions. They're at the Aspen Ideas Festival. They are routinely brought in as consultants on multiple foreign projects and things of the like.

And yet they can go out there and say something that was just obviously false. It was false in the moment. It was, it was just something that was meant to be useful to the, to the narrative of the day. And, and to me, that was just, it was so insulting that, and I knew in, in reading that letter and in seeing those names, none of these people are going to have to answer for this. And in the rare instance, when they do,

It's going to be when some random contrarian at an event that they attend, you know, stands up at a microphone and asks them about it and they poo poo it and move on. Like a ranch pole. Exactly. Exactly. Well, let's talk about Rand Paul for a minute. The last angry man, you know, it's so funny because he's such a, he's such a mild mannered personality in person, but he gets under so many people's skin.

He has been insistent on getting the truth out of so many people who were bald-faced lying about aspects of the origins of the coronavirus and everything that was related to that. The gain-of-function research that we know now via the FOIA emails and the like, we were not getting the truth about.

And yet he is viewed with, you know, by many as with revulsion, you know, as if he's, you know, how dare you bring this up to our respected, you know, medical hierarchy. At the same time, Miranda, you know, we know that in the last two, three weeks, we've seen multiple resignations, right?

from the FDA over the internal fight that they are having with the CDC and with the White House about booster shots. And that's something that certainly for me raises concerns. If you have high-level bureaucrats resigning, sometimes they're just doing it in a fit of pique.

because they're not being listened to. But other times they're doing it because there's very important things and decisions that are being made that they disagree with. And so we ought to know why. And yet there's only been a handful of stories at Politico about this development

It's another example to me of how so much of the media's approach to these cases is about spinning a narrative. And in this case, you know, in particular, the treatment of Hunter seemed to be that, oh, well, he's been through a lot in his life. You know, he's a recovering addict, which I don't, I'm not really sure about that recovering part. And, and, you know, that means that, you know, we really should just treat it with, with kid gloves. It was so,

irritating to me, Miranda, to see his appearance at the inauguration day and have basically every member of the media pretending like this was not an uncomfortable situation. Do you believe that ultimately we will learn the truth about the various deals that have been done here, the amount of money that, as you say, has sloshed through into the Biden family coffers? Or is this a situation where even when we do learn it,

The power of the media cathedral to spin this narrative the way that they want is going to mean that most Americans remain unfamiliar with it, even if it's the sort of thing that I think would be front page news under a Republican administration. Well, I think, I mean, that's why I've written a book about it, because my book lays out

every single detail that's in that laptop that is newsworthy. And you really need to get that perspective of how this began really with Joe Biden. It's the way he does business since his very first days at the age of 29, becoming the senator for Delaware. And

He's, you know, that cosy little cronyism that has grown up in a very corrupt, small state of Delaware that is unique in America. I mean, it's listed as one of the most corrupt places in the world. You know, it's where corporations go to incorporate and hide their business. And this is...

The quid pro quo, the huge amounts of money that is sloshing around in Delaware and the quid pro quo that Joe Biden, who had a rails run in the Senate because a lot of people felt sorry for him, the elders of the Senate, because he was recently widowed, had that tragedy. You know, no one denies that he has had tragedy in his life, but he certainly parlayed it for his benefit and quite,

quite cynically and he got plum positions thanks to the sympathy factor, including when he was head of various Senate committees, whether it be foreign affairs,

or the judiciary. I mean, he used those positions to do favours for his benefactors, his donors. And, you know, he was king of, or still is, king of Delaware. And that was a family business. Hunter's

benefits and Hunter's antics, you can only see as part of Joe Biden's. I mean, he's just an appendage of Joe's. Joe used his son as the bagman for the family. So this is not a story about Hunter Biden addicts.

This is a story about Joe Biden and his 50 years of corruption in the state of Delaware, which he then, you know, globalised when he became vice president and was given carriage of, you know, China, Ukraine, a big part of the world that really I'm amazed that

Obama outsourced to Joe Biden, knowing President Obama, knowing what a liability he was. I mean, maybe he wanted him out of the country. I don't know. But I think it was really irresponsible of the Obama administration to give Joe Biden so much power and to be able to walk around the world carrying American prestige on his shoulders. And I think that gave him this added arrogance. He's always had this...

sort of irrational self-belief considering really he has few skills.

But I think his period, eight years travelling around the world, being feted by world leaders, you know, like President Xi in China and so on, gave him an inflated feeling of self-worth. And that's now translated into a president, you know, a president with absolutely zero humility. I mean, Donald Trump was a big nosier and a boaster, you know, what he's like, but he was aware of the limits.

of presidential power because he was a sort of, you know, within boundaries, behaved fairly conventionally. But Joe Biden is off the charts. And because he has this image cultivated for so long of being a foreign policy expert, steady as she goes, you know, a man of political norms, he's never been any of that. He's never...

played within the rules or coloured within the lines. And now as he's, you know, more aged and his cognitive function is, you know, faulty and certainly at certain times he becomes angry, as you see, and loses his train of thought. Now that's even worse. And I just feel that...

A lot of Americans are still fooled because they bought the mirage that he cultivated so carefully over the many decades of public life, of being honest Joe, you know, the poorest man in Congress, very humble. I mean, he lives like a king. You know, you don't need to have money in the bank.

to be very, very wealthy. You know, I know billionaires who never carry a wallet. You know what I mean? Like when you're so rich, you don't actually need cash. So I find it. I think that what's happening is that a lot of America is getting a red pill and you see that with these people

college games where people are chanting, you know, F Joe Biden. And then it even translated out of college into the Yankees game on September 11. And everywhere he goes now, there are people, and it's not just, you know, Trumpists. There are just...

Independent voters, you see it in the polls, have really become disenchanted. They've suddenly realised that this guy sold them a bill of goods, that he campaigned, as much as he did campaign, as the unity president and his inaugural speech

was such a melange of this sort of message of unity while at the same time he was demonising Trump voters as white supremacists and domestic terrorists. And this is his MO and we saw it, you mentioned his vaccine mandate speech on Thursday, very angry, very hostile. But again, he

He rules by dividing the country. I think it's the way he's always been. It must be second nature. He divides us by tribe against tribe, race against race, vaccinated against unvaccinated. I guess when the kids are squabbling, he can just get away with blue murder. More with my conversation with Miranda Devine right after this.

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I want to read to you from this New York Times report, again, meant to further, obviously, Twitter's narrative about this FEC decision dismissing the claim that Twitter illegally blocked the New York Post Hunter Biden article.

The FEC documents reveal one reason that Twitter had been especially suspicious of the Hunter Biden article. The company's head of site integrity, according to the FEC, said Twitter had, quote, received official warnings throughout 2020 from federal law enforcement that malign state actors might hack and release materials associated with political campaigns and that Hunter Biden might be a target of one such operation, end quote.

The FEC said it found, quote, no information that Twitter coordinated its decisions with the Biden campaign in a sworn declaration. Twitter's head of the U.S. public policy said she was unaware of any contacts with the Biden team before the company made its decisions.

This is absolutely ludicrous. You have someone flagged as potentially being the target of a hacked materials conversation, and then you don't actually bother to see whether those materials are hacked or not before you come down with the hammer on the ability of people to share this article. And keep in mind, that was not just sharing it in terms of public matter. They were preventing you from sending it privately to

And that to me is something that

really lays bare the joke that big tech is anything but a malign influence on our freedom of thought, freedom of speech, that they have decided to take up arms against it. And they seek and they will seek again to shut down any conversations that prove inconvenient to the ruling class and to the ideology to which they belong.

The aspect of this story that I think you can expand to the more general conversation about free speech in America is that we have seen people, you know, in recent years,

Lament the idea that individuals live in silos. This is certainly something that Joe Biden and his team at the White House use and smashing anyone on on the conservative side of the spectrum, blaming them for the lack of vaccinated Americans in certain populations.

While I'm sure they can make some argument about, you know, radio hosts or something like that here and there, you know, the vast majority of people who the vast majority of problems in terms of getting people vaccinated has been, of course, among America's African-American and Latino population. So I never really knew.

that Tucker Carlson and people like that were as popular among those people as apparently the White House believes they are. But setting that aside, it seems to me that there really is a malign lie about what they're projecting here.

in terms of the arguments that have actually been advanced about vaccines and the people who are actually telling people not to get it. And that really is so irresponsible. It only creates more division. And, you know, as you said earlier,

The fact is that conservatives, I believe, and people on the right generally are far less siloed because they are surrounded by a media that is entirely foreign to them in terms of ideology and the background of the writers and the like.

if you consume any major newspaper, if you consume, you know, any NPR station, any public radio, any public television, and all but one of the cable networks, of the major cable networks, you are only seeing really one side of the story on most programs. And that

And that to me, you know, means that most people who are, who are right of center can tell me what the left believes. And most people who are left of center are shocked when they find out what the right actually believes. They don't understand it. They don't, uh, they're not familiar with it at all. And, uh, you mentioned, you mentioned college football. Uh, I, I had, uh, an interaction with, um,

with someone who definitely does consume overwhelmingly left of center media, who was, who was shocked and horrified at the, at the, the crowds being back this weekend for college football and for, and for the NFL. And, and I, I just kind of wanted to say, well, what do you, what did you think was going to happen? This is obviously what was going to happen. These States are open. They're not locked down. They, they want, you know, people want to go to the games and they're,

They're taking the risk of their own that they're certainly aware of by this point, you know, of when they of when they go into these outdoor arenas and the like. And it's not going to stop them from rushing the field when their team wins. So they're probably vaccinated. And they're probably vaccinated. A majority of the vast majority of Americans are. And so. Yeah. So to me, this is just an indication of.

how off the rails we really have gotten in terms of the media landscape. But before I let you go, I do want to ask you a little bit about

reflecting back on 9-11 this weekend and the events that were taking place. You wrote a couple of articles about that, both the Biden experience and about an address from Rudy Giuliani concerning what was going on. I wonder if you could just reminisce a little bit for me about what your thoughts are on the lessons that we've taken away. If

if any, what we've learned in the 20 years since then and your perspective on New York and how it has changed at that time. Well, I remember I wasn't living here, but I was on the first Qantas plane back to New York sort of three days after 9-11 and the smoke was still

you know, coming out of the hole in the ground and the smell in the air that, you know, beautiful late summer was horrendous. And I spent a lot of time down at Ground Zero reporting for the newspaper I worked for at that time in

in Australia and the feeling, and I had lots of friends in New York and the feeling of camaraderie and unity was incredible. I mean, the taxi drivers were not even honking their horns, you know, remember everyone was just loving the fire, firefighters dropping off food and flowers and, you know, uptown where life was sort of fairly normal, people were going to bars and, you know, there were all the romances. I mean, it was like wartime.

There was such a heightened emotion and such patriotism. And I remember going down to Union Square Park late at night, like two or three in the morning, and there would be these long debates between people and there were, you know, some of the boober liberals were saying, we should not drop bombs but we should drop food parcels. And, you know, that was the embryonic argument that then raged around

for many years afterwards about how do we retaliate. And

You know, I think the Bush administration, I mean, everyone's played a lot of George Bush getting up at ground zero, getting up on a truck and saying, you know, they'll hear us soon. And everybody was all for that. And that was the right thing to do because you couldn't, America could not power and allow itself to be seen as weak and unable to retaliate as it is now. But I

You know, we all know where George Bush went wrong was the invasion of Iraq. I mean, some people agree with it, some people don't, but I think in hindsight it really debilitated the country and wasted a lot of blood and treasure for not much or for nothing, really, and they took the eye off the ball in Afghanistan. And so I feel that the 20 years of war has really...

profoundly sort of demoralised Americans because you had successive administrations that didn't know why Americans

why they were sending soldiers over there. I mean, we had generals tell us that they didn't know. We saw the Afghanistan papers. I mean, they're now saying it wasn't nation building. I mean, I went to Afghanistan and I saw them building the bridges, the engineers, the soldiers just had turned into social workers and engineers and building hospitals and building more infrastructure in that godforsaken country than in this country. And I think that

Ultimately now we're trying to grapple with all those years of, I guess, wasted effort, which was brought to just an unholy conclusion by the worst person possible in Joe Biden with his, you know, botched withdrawal and his, you know, the fact that he had the generalization

General Milley and General Austin just saying, yes, so, you know, three bags full, sir, even though the military knew that the way he was doing it, abandoning Bagram was a disaster. So the catastrophe of the humiliation of America in that final surrender, I guess, is so profound. I think it's going to take a long time to filter through. And I feel, though, that from that

From that, I guess, devastation, it's almost like a delayed devastation after 9-11 because, you know, people's spirits were really high after the initial shock of those planes crashing into the World Trade Centre. There was the shock and the devastation, but then that was quickly turned into this national unity and resolve to get revenge and to ensure that

that that never happened again. And in fact, I mean, for 20 years, America, unlike Europe, unlike Australia, has been free of Islamist terrorism for the most part. I mean, obviously there was the Boston bombings and, you know, there have been

other incidents, but not in the same way that, you know, we've seen, you know, for instance, in Paris with the attack on the Bataclan, that terrible time. So I think part of that, though, is because America has been a unified country.

It's a melting pot where everyone is unified under the idea of America. It's been a beacon of freedom and hope and aspiration for people all around the world. And mostly when you come here, you just work hard and get ahead and have a good life because it is such a bountiful country. I mean, it's so blessed with, you know, natural prosperity and great people and generous people.

and hardworking people. So I think the spirit of America is what's kept everything going and kept us safe. But unfortunately, there is this malign influence, whether or not it was spawned by the attack on America then and allowed to flourish. But there is a malign influence now inside this country, which is weakening it from within. And that's coming from the left.

And we see how they're trying to divide us, using identity politics to split us into warring tribes, how they weaponised the George Floyd tragedy last year when America was on its knees from the pandemic. I mean, the left never...

misses an opportunity to capitalize on misfortune. And the conservatives are too decent to do that. And I'm not saying conservatives should stop being decent, but I think they need to wake up. I mean, we talked about the FEC. There are three Republican appointees on the Federal Election Commission and three Democrat. And yet,

You know, they were willfully naive. There's too much naivety even among Republicans. They're too generous to the other side. They think that there still is the ability to be bipartisan. And I think you just look at Joe Biden and you see how he has demonstrated

and diminished and disparaged, really, the 9-11 sacrifices by saying that the January 6th Capitol riot was worse by, you know, I mean, he hasn't, unlike other presidents, he hasn't elevated 9-11 and especially on this 20th year to the momentous, momentous

moment for this country that it was both in terms of an attack, the biggest terrorist attack on our soil where 3,000 Americans were killed, but also in the just wonderful show of courage and selflessness that that day

in the first responders who went and gave their lives knowing that they probably wouldn't come out. And for Joe Biden not to give a speech, for him to be behaving the way he was, you know, trying to justify his botched withdrawal still and not

and demonising those people who were protesting against him. He's just unworthy of the position. And unfortunately, though, he reflects a mindset in the Democratic Party which says that we've spoken too much about 9-11, get on with it, it wasn't important. I think it was crucial and I think it told the world a lot about America and its resolve and the kind of people...

that live here and that the sort of idea of America transcends everything else. And it's still a great country. And I'm hoping that, I guess, the red pilling that's happening with the Biden presidency will wake up a lot of people and mean that America can be great again, whether it's under Donald Trump or someone else. Certainly we need leadership. But just the last point is that I think that

You see now in Congress, the real formidable leaders are the men and women, I think mostly men, who served in Afghanistan and Iraq. And that generation is just, they're a serious generation. You know, they shouldered the burdens of war.

They were saddled with the hollowing out of the institutions and the eroding of the moral capital of this country that really the baby boomers were responsible for doing that. So I think the future is in good hands in the 9-11 generation. They're serious people, and I don't think that they are going to do to America what the baby boomers have done for the last 40 years.

Miranda Devine, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. Pleasure, Ben. Great to talk to you. I reached out to a friend recently to ask him what he thought of what we had learned 20 years after 9-11. And these are the answers that he sent along to me.

Number one, that our enemies have taken our measure and we never took theirs. Bin Laden's strategic predictions vis-a-vis Afghanistan and the United States have been vindicated. 9-11 was, for the other side, a massive generational strategic success. Number two, that the entire American governing apparatus is incapable of real strategic thought.

Number three, that the federal government of the United States is much more inventive, determined, and relentless in curbing its own citizenry than it is in curbing those who would slaughter that citizenry.

4. That the federal government of the United States will allow foreign power interests, especially Saudi and Pakistani, to override and eclipse the just interests of the American citizenry. 5. The preceding item exists, of course, because we are ruled by an elite with much stronger social ties to other elites than to the people of our republic. 6. That our generational response to 9-11 guarantees that 9-11 will happen again and again.

This 20th anniversary is even more depressing and cruel than they usually are. We didn't suffer as a lot of Americans did that day.

But because we are Americans, we suffered. Our leadership class is utterly incompetent to the moment and remains so for the succeeding generation. Today, we have inflicted upon us the twin bookends of blundering who mark the two-decade span. In Pennsylvania, President George W. Bush speaks, the man who cared more for Saudis than Americans while the fires still burned, who abandoned the hunt for the immediate perpetrator mere weeks after the massacre, and who cynically leveraged the moment to pursue his own disastrous projects.

In Manhattan, President Joe Biden speaks, the lone figure of significance who opposed the raid to get Osama bin Laden and the man who presided over the shameful humiliation of defeat in Afghanistan.

Some questions arise. Now that we've decided it's fine for al-Qaeda and the Taliban to have a country of their own again, can we at least abolish the TSA? Now that we've given al-Qaeda and the Taliban a stupendous cache of arms and ammunition, can we eliminate all federal gun control laws? Now that we've decided we have a community of interest with the Taliban, including its al-Qaeda elements, can we release everyone jailed on the count of January 6th?

It hardly seems unreasonable for Americans to ask Washington, D.C., for treatment as generous as Washington, D.C., accords the terrorist movements who slaughtered thousands of us in our own streets. From my perspective, we really do have to wrestle with the fact that nothing, nothing about what is this current moment seems to indicate that we have successfully learned the right lessons from 9-11.

20 years on, it's a combination of forgetfulness and denial. It's an unwillingness to grapple with the world

as it was changing. And it is a real disservice to the people who bled and died that to have the attitude toward them that says that the same group of people who marched on January 6th in Washington arise from the same elements in America as produced those who slaughtered thousands of our fellow Americans on September 11th. To me, I have this perspective as someone who

was a teenager on 9-11 and the perspective brought by having a brother and a sister whose lives were fundamentally changed by the existence of the wars that came afterwards. To me, this is a generation that must not make the same mistakes that their parents did when it came to grappling with the reality of the world around us.

And as much as there was so many people who were motivated by goodness, by trying to do the best, the truth is that they made a big mess of things and that they didn't answer and solve the questions of the moment in ways that led us to a more strong position in the world, quite the opposite. It's a sad anniversary for that reason.

But there's still hope, because I think that in this moment, as we grapple with the truth about these things, I think more and more Americans, as Miranda said, are waking up to the reality of the world and are going to have to focus on it with a steely-eyed priority on the nature of what faces us now. Much of what the left wants to grapple with in terms of their culture war identity is

domestically here at home is bent on running down the America that so many love, the flag, our history, our founding documents and leaders and the like. And I think much of America is now awake to that fact in a way that they perhaps were not prior to the last several years.

I'm Ben Domenech. You're listening to another edition of the Ben Domenech Podcast. We'll be back soon with more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray. I'm Guy Benson. Join me weekdays at 3 p.m. Eastern as we break down the biggest stories of the day with some of the biggest newsmakers and guests. Listen live on the Fox News app or get the free podcast at GuyBensonShow.com.