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Oct. 25, 2024 - Louder with Crowder
01:01:41
Let’s Talk About It: Miranda Devine
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I think the cover-up is frightening because those same people who covered up for the Biden family and gave the green light to the corruption, allowed Joe Biden to effectively sell out the country for a few million dollars for his family, they're the same people who are today propping up Kamala Harris.
Miranda Devine is one of America's most prominent journalists, and as a columnist at the New York Post, she has been integral in some of the most important reporting of the last decade.
Most famously, Devine broke the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Are you in agreement with what Twitter and Facebook are doing?
The same story that was promptly labeled misinformation and removed from Twitter and Facebook at the behest of US intelligence agencies.
Of course, we all know now that the story wasn't disinformation, and those responsible for its censoring were doing everything in their power to stop the re-election of Donald Trump.
But rather than just shut up and go away, Divine continued to dig and has since become the foremost expert on the corruption that surrounds Joe Biden and his family's ties with hostile foreign governments, as well as the embedded deep state that facilitates it all.
Now, getting into kind of the reason that you, for lack of a better term, blew up on the national stage was your first book on Joe Biden and the Biden crime family, for lack of a better phrase.
And now you've kind of written a follow-up to that.
But I am curious, what is it, or was there a defining moment that you decided, I'm going to be the Biden crime family expert, or did it just kind of fall into your lap?
What was the story there?
Well, the way it happened was that in September of 2020, if you remember, Senators Chuck Grasley and Ron Johnson put out this report on Hunter Biden corruption and Burisma, Burisma being the Ukrainian energy company that had been paying the vice president's son at the time, a million dollars a year.
This was, to me, a big scandal.
You know, I'd pretty much just arrived a year earlier and I couldn't understand why The New York Times and the Washington Post that no one was really, nobody was really treating this story seriously.
I read the report, I thought it was incredible, spoke to Ron Johnson.
You know, they had all the evidence there, it was all clean.
The only One sort of spot on the story was the fact that Nancy Pelosi and her Democrat friends had decided to introduce Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley as Russian agents and say that they had unwittingly or wittingly allowed Russian disinformation To creep into their inquiry, I didn't see any evidence of it.
Johnson and Grasley denied it vehemently.
And in fact, Ron Johnson told me at the time that he'd been set up with a bogus FBI briefing.
And he was sort of ambushed and was told, you need to do this defensive briefing with the FBI. Halfway through the meeting, he said, this is bogus.
And if I see this leaked, I will know that you've just set me up.
Sure enough, next day, it's in The Washington Post.
So it was a total setup just to besmirch their Hunter Biden investigation, which was completely legitimate.
So I thought, well, obviously there's a big story here.
And so I went ahead and wrote about it in just a straightforward manner as I would with any other big story.
And I pretty much had the field to myself.
And then within, and I think that may have been why Rudy Giuliani In one way told his lawyer, Bob Costello, try Miranda with the laptop from hell, the hard drive.
I was not the first cab off the rank at all.
They tried several other journalists.
I was pretty much the last person.
They told me that they were going to go to the Daily Mail after they tried me.
But again, I bit.
I guess I didn't know what I didn't know.
You know, people were warning me off Rudy Giuliani, but I just took him as I saw him, and he seemed legit.
And certainly, Bob Costello, who was his younger off-sider back in his days in the Southern District of New York, is a really sharp lawyer.
And he gave me the breakdown on the laptop from hell.
He told me all the important, what he'd found, crimes.
I mean, he was the number two criminal investigations in the Southern District of New York.
He knows a crime when he sees one.
So that was pretty legitimate.
So I took that to my editor, Cole Allen, the Australian I told you about, who brought me over.
And he immediately just, he's always been a fantastic editor that just knows a good story and will go after it.
So he just immediately switched the entire newsroom onto it, sent teams down to Delaware to interview the laptop repair shop guy.
So the whole New York Post, you know, crack team was on it.
And I had just, you know, from...
It's an enormous...
I mean, the hard drive, when you look at it, is just an enormous amount of information.
I mean, I think 30,000 photographs.
It's just so many emails, so much text message, so much homemade porn, Hunter Bidens, that I think actually distracted a lot of people who went to it because...
You know, I mean, my colleague at The Post, Emma Jo Morris, and I often laugh and we say, you've got to be pretty grounded to go through that laptop and not get totally distracted and spooked because there's so much garbage on it.
He recorded every aspect of his life, his sex life, his drug life, everything.
So it is pretty distracting, but I had this roadmap that was given to me by Bob Costello for the crime.
So we were just looking at the emails and we didn't want to, you know, at the New York Post, it was very important to us not to do the gratuitous sex and drugs and rock and roll stuff.
Even though we're a tabloid, that's what people would expect.
We were interested in the The story and the evidence that showed that Joe Biden had lied to the American people.
Remember, this is three weeks before the 2020 election.
He'd lied when he said he knew nothing about his son Hunter's overseas business dealings.
We had here ample evidence that not only did he know about the business dealings, the influence peddling with China and Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Kazakhstan, but Joe Biden, when he was vice president, was intimately involved in this business.
He was meeting Hunter's overseas business partners.
He was arranging meetings.
He was on the speakerphone.
You know, he was involved.
And there was also some evidence, certainly in Hunter's words, that Joe was getting quote, 10% for the big guy.
Joe Biden.
He's pretty straightforward.
Yeah.
So as you described it as sort of the roadmap, the laptop was the roadmap that sort of unearthed a lot of stuff that would have, without the absolute disregard for common sense that Hunter Biden displayed, this might still all be completely unknown to the American public.
So with that roadmap you were able to write the first book, which was to me about the crimes themselves, sort of.
The corruption.
The corruption.
But the follow-up, the big guy that is recently released, seems to be more about the cover-up.
And that's what I glean from it.
When you are describing this book to readers and kind of the differences from the first book, what do you hope they take from the new evidence that you're bringing to the table?
What lessons do you want the audience to learn from this book that maybe they wouldn't have gotten from the first book?
Well, I think, you know, the first book is the story of corruption, the influence peddling of the Biden family, which I think is well known.
But this second story, I think, is more important because it's the story of the cover-up.
And like Watergate, the cover-up is more egregious.
It involved the CIA, the FBI, the State Department, the Department of Justice, the IRS. What I guess...
What Donald Trump called the deep state, what the Obama people called the blob, specifically the blob is more the CIA, the State Department and the Pentagon.
And they have their own agenda and their agenda is at odds with what the American people understand that their security and intelligence institutions that they spend a lot of money on are meant to do.
The American people would think that these institutions, these agencies Are there to keep us safe.
In fact, they seem to have their own rogue agenda.
And you can see while they are shadowy figures, we don't know exactly who they are.
We can see them from their sort of their fingerprints and we can see them from the foreign policy that was followed under Barack Obama and then again under Joe Biden.
And we can see that during the Trump presidency, there were no new wars, that Donald Trump treated foreign policy the way he treated everything that he did as president, just like he did when he was a property developer in Queens, just on first principles, logical, using common sense.
He saw a problem.
How do I fix it in the most efficient, you know, cheapest way?
And so...
When he first became president, for instance, Barack Obama said to him, the biggest problem is Kim Jong-un is North Korea.
They keep on letting off all these nuclear tests.
And so, Donald Trump just went around solving that problem.
He was mocked mercilessly for his bromance with Kim Jong-un, Little Rocket Man, all of that.
But it worked.
He put Kim Jong-un in his box.
Same thing with Vladimir Putin, you know.
Trump made these sort of grandiose threats like, you know, I like those golden domes you have in Moscow.
Shame if something happened to them.
But, you know, Putin took him seriously or half seriously, wasn't sure whether to believe him or not, enough anyway that Putin never invaded any countries under Donald Trump, like he did when Obama was president, like he did again immediately.
When Biden was president, he invaded Ukraine.
And the Middle East, Donald Trump at least had the beginning of some sort of a peace deal in the Middle East with the Abraham Accords.
Iran was on its knees.
It was broke.
It didn't have the resources to fund proxies to go and attack Israel.
Like they did last October 7.
ISIS was a huge problem.
People have forgotten about it.
But if you remember, leading up to the 2016 election, ISIS was burning people alive, raping Yazidi women.
I mean, it was terrifying.
There were ISIS terrorists blowing up bombs all over the world.
You know, London and Australia, there were ISIS attacks.
So that was a problem, and Donald Trump dealt with it.
You know, he vanquished ISIS. So just by marching to his own tune, he actually had a more effective foreign policy than Joe Biden, who is a puppet of the blob.
Same with Obama, same with, I mean, a lot of presidents that we can look back, George W. Bush, et cetera.
And that was why this cabal in the deep state, CIA, FBI, etc., they were implacably opposed to Donald Trump.
They crippled his presidency, or tried to, with the Russia hoax.
And then they played this, which is where I come into it, They played this trick, which was they got our story censored three weeks before the election, which was derogatory to, obviously, Joe Biden, one of the two candidates for president.
We now know that when Twitter and Facebook censored our first stories and Twitter locked the New York Post account for two weeks, right up until a few days before the election, we thought at the time, oh, this is just...
Big tech being woke.
They don't like Donald Trump.
They want Joe Biden to win.
What we didn't know at the time was that the FBI had been coercing big tech to censor our story.
They had been meeting with Twitter and Facebook weekly before the election.
They had warned them.
They'd sort of pre-bunked our story, warned them to look out for a story likely in October.
It would be a hack and dump operation, probably from the Russians.
Likely about Hunter Biden.
And so, of course, when Twitter and Facebook on October 14, 2020, saw our story, they recognised it as the hack and leak operation from Russia that the FBI had warned them about.
So they censored it and felt that they were within their rights to do so and that they had no choice.
And in fact, Mark Zuckerberg has said Since then, that he felt, what could he do?
The FBI is telling him that this is dangerous, a threat to national security.
What choice did they have?
So that was scary.
And then you had the, a couple of days later, you had what I call the dirty 51 letter.
And this was 51 former intelligence officials.
Most of them were CIA. I think about 42 were ex-CIA. And five of them were either CIA director or acting CIA former director.
People like John Brennan, Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden.
A real list of the who's who.
James Clapper, yeah.
You know, MSNBC. Total never-Trumpers.
Anyway, they signed this letter saying that the laptop and therefore our reporting was Russian disinformation.
Now, it wasn't.
That was a complete lie.
But what we've subsequently found is that that letter was actually given the green light by the then CIA director Gina Haspel at the time.
And not only that, there were several of those so-called former CIA officials who were active CIA contractors at the time.
So this was really a CIA domestic election interference operation to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president again.
Is it just because they were so afraid that they couldn't control him?
Because it seems to me like what made him effective on the international stage was a little bit of his unpredictability.
Yeah.
He would make threats.
Would he make good on them?
You couldn't say for sure, but he might.
So that really deterred a lot of action from our enemies.
It seems like the same principle might be at play when it comes to his, you know, role vis-a-vis the deep state.
And we use the term deep state.
It's not some conspiracy theory.
It is just the bureaucracy.
It's not some wild, deep in the...
The permanent bureaucracy in Washington.
You're not finding this on the dark web.
It's in front of our eyes.
They've tried to spin the phrase.
But it seems like the same reason he might be threatening to or at least intimidate other world leaders might be the same reason that he would intimidate our three-letter agencies here in the United States.
Yeah, I mean, when you say unpredictability, that's a good word for it.
I have called him uncontrollable.
He's really been uncontrollable since he was a child.
His parents had described him, or he describes himself, his parents used to call him rambunctious.
They sent him off to military college because he was uncontrollable.
And that's part of his...
I guess the beauty of Donald Trump and also the horror of Donald Trump.
That he's just, you can't control him.
And therefore, this cabal, the deep state, the blob, whatever you call them, the CIA, they couldn't control him.
He was not going to abide by their agenda.
I mean, these are unelected people.
They're permanently in control.
They are used to having presidents that they can control that will follow their prescriptions for You know, whether it be, I don't know if they're colour revolutions, regime change, whatever the little tricks are that they come up with, they expect that their president will go along with them and that they know better.
And for the most part, presidents have done so.
Barack Obama certainly was happy to do it.
He had Joe Biden, really, he outsourced his foreign policy to Joe Biden, which was why Joe Biden's family was able to grift off him so easily because Joe Biden was in charge of these parts of the world, like Russia and China, Ukraine, that were so corrupt and that so much money could be extracted from.
Because in those countries, when the son of the most powerful man in America, really, which Joe Biden was overseas, arrives on Air Force Two with his dad, As happened in December 2013 in China, all the Chinese understand what that means because they know what it means in their own country.
That's the way they operate.
That's the way they operate.
He's a princeling, is how they call the sort of sons and daughters of the CCP, high-ranking officials.
Hunter Biden was a princeling, and when he arrived on Air Force Two with his dad in December 2013 in Beijing, they knew that this was American power come to do private business.
And while Joe Biden pretended that he's just a good family man and likes to bring his son and his grandkids along on these trips, Not all of his grandkids.
We're going to leave one of them behind.
That's right, yes.
Well, I don't think that one was born yet.
The baby mama from Arkansas, the love child there.
But yeah, so Hunter Biden, a couple of days after that Beijing trip in 2013, got a lovely gift of a 10% in this company, Chinese company called BHR. I don't know how much that's worth.
We've tried to figure it out.
There have been some bad investments.
It's probably, you know, it's worth several million dollars.
And Joe Biden met with Hunter's business partner on that deal while he was in Beijing there.
So that's all proven.
It's all been delivered in sworn testimony.
Under oath.
And so we only had the bare bones of it in that first book.
I decided to write the second book because I think the cover-up is frightening because those same people who covered up for the Biden family and gave the green light to the corruption, allowed Joe Biden to effectively sell out the country for a few million dollars For his family, they're the same people who are today propping up Kamala Harris.
Yeah, that leads me right into my next question.
As your book lays out very clearly and ample evidence elsewhere suggests Biden was very easily controlled by pick your three-letter agency and pick their goal.
So my question for you then is since he was pushed to the side because he became either too senile or whatever it may be, whatever reason they decided to push him out, is Kamala Harris just going to be a continuation of that same corruption and same control or is there any sort of divergence that she would take or if she were to become president?
She is an absolutely compliant puppet because she knows that the only reason she's in this incredible position where she could be the next President of the United States has nothing to do with her great qualities, her brilliance, anything.
She's just Lucky and has been chosen.
And if you notice her speech that she gave at the DNC accepting the nomination, she talked, and was sort of out of character for her, but she made a real point of talking about having a lethal military.
Right.
She said it again the other day.
It's part of her armory and it's really a signal to those deep state controllers that she will not change a thing, that having a lethal military, that continuing on with Ukraine and sort of ignoring the greater threat, greater threat than Russia, being China, will continue.
I think, you know, I can only...
Because this is such shadowy figures, all I've done in these books is lay out the evidence.
And it points in a certain direction.
So I certainly have theories on where it points.
But I've tried not to.
I've just tried to be a reporter.
I think it's more powerful if I don't draw the conclusions.
I allow the readers to draw their own conclusions.
But I think the breadcrumbs lead in particular directions.
And one of those is, I think, That the reason that the blob, the deep state, has wanted to demonise Russia and create a much greater threat in the public mind about Russia, which is a country with its small GDP. It's not really a threat to the United States.
There are two reasons.
But one, I think, is that they want eyes off China.
Because I guess Wall Street is so intertwined with China.
Donald Trump tried to unhook the links between the Chinese economy and American economy because Because China was eating our lunch, as Joe Biden so famously said they were not.
China is an imperialist power.
And President Xi Jinping, his baby is the Belt and Road Initiative, which the Biden family was promoting.
That was what they were being paid to do, to use the Biden, then the prestigious Biden, Joe Biden name and Joe Biden's power as vice president to open doors around the world.
By that stage, you know, there were countries that had been ensnared in debt traps by China, small broken down countries.
And they were a little bit wary of China coming in with lots of money to build infrastructure and so on because they knew that at the end it meant that China would own them, China bribed their top officials.
And so what teaming up with the Biden family name did was give them some credibility and allow those doors that were shut to be opened again and to Allow the Belt and Road Initiative to make inroads in a way that was detrimental to America's best interests.
And so that's why the American, the Chinese military was involved in that company, that energy company, CEFC, that paid Hunter Biden and his uncle, Jim Biden, who's Joe Biden's younger brother, you know, tens of millions of dollars.
And that was, I mean, Hunter Biden was a crackhead.
He didn't provide any benefit himself.
It was because he was the son of the vice president that he was useful.
So that's what was going on.
And the American people are not really aware of the threat that China poses.
We're told that, and we've been told for a long time, that they'll just grow into a more democratic sort of form of government.
Well, the modernization theory has proved to be terribly false in this case.
And I think so many of these people that are supposedly the brilliant decision makers in our country, you know, in the 80s and 90s and the reform and opening up, they're like, this is a great chance for our market, you know, for our companies to sell to this giant marketplace in China.
And, you know, they'll become more like us the more that we interact with them.
And we've seen that not to be true, but it seems like these Brilliant decision makers are so invested in their sunk costs.
Like, you look at Apple, for goodness sakes, Tim Cook is still over there saying how great of a market opportunity that China offers.
When we know the second something hot breaks out, they'll just nationalize anything that Apple owns, take control of it, and that will be that.
But they're fine.
They're fine, at least from what I can see and from what you're saying, is throwing American interest to the wayside as long as they can make a quick buck right now for themselves.
And it seems like...
And CEFC, as you mentioned, was not this random Chinese company.
They were the sort of front and center company for the BRI. And Joe Biden was more than happy to sell his political clout so his family could make a few bucks.
At the end of the day, what's it all worth?
I don't know.
It's very disheartening as an American citizen to know our leaders and unelected officials, even that, would be so happy to sell us out for a few dollars.
Yeah.
And, you know, as you say, CEFC, the Chinese energy company, was the capitalist arm of the Belt and Road Initiative.
And, you know, people have said to me, well, you know, Biden just got a few million dollars, you know, yeah, it's corrupt, but so what?
I can just point to Joe Biden's actions as president and say some of it is inexplicable.
He did unwind and go soft with some of the Trump era get tough on China policies and You can sort of explain away some of them, but the one that can't be explained away is,
I can't remember the exact name of it, but it was this initiative and it was to go into the universities and to find Chinese spies and the academics that they had compromised because China was spying on and stealing our intellectual property.
And it was quite a successful program.
They did manage to wrap up some spies.
They did manage to charge some academics who'd taken bribes.
To sell out their country.
And Christopher Wray, the FBI director, no pal of Donald Trump, he was apoplectic when Joe Biden closed this down.
And in fact, he made public statements criticizing that decision.
Joe Biden never explained why he would shut that down.
Seemed to be in America's worst interest to shut it down.
And allow the Chinese free reign to spy at our top research institutions.
The only explanation I could ever find was that it was racist to target Chinese, which is so ridiculous.
But, you know, it's the sort of excuse that shuts down further inquiry.
Well, that's the entire excuse that shut down any inquiry to the origins of COVID, which would have saved millions upon millions of lives and economies the world over.
Exactly.
And remember when Donald Trump was president and COVID first started breaking out and he immediately went to shut down flights from China and was called racist.
And who was front and center calling him racist?
Joe Biden.
Well, Nancy Pelosi was saying we needed to go to Chinatown and hug people.
Yeah, that's right.
That was just a very strange PR stunt.
But the last question I want to ask on China before we move on is, Obviously, Biden's out.
Kamala's in.
Do you think that China...
How do you think they view that transition?
Or do they care one way or the other?
And to that degree, as you've sort of touched on, what influence does China have in our domestic institutions, like our three-letter agencies, like our universities?
You said they don't want the American people to know.
Is it because...
It's actually extremely scary if the American people were to know what kind of influence our biggest adversary had in our domestic politics.
Yes, but also it's very hard to extricate the American economy from China.
You know, the stock market would take a big hit.
No president wants that.
Donald Trump was putting big tariffs on China, really mainly as a threat.
And he would make them do things they didn't want to do in America's interests in order not to have those tariffs put on their goods.
That seemed to be a pretty good blunt instrument.
And I think, you know, to be fair, I think Biden's continued on with some of that tariff regime.
In terms of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, Tim Walz very much mirrors Joe Biden in terms of his relationship with China.
Like Joe Biden, at an early stage, he was captured and captivated by the Chinese.
Tim Walz has had something like 30 of these strange trips to China, supposedly taking students there.
We know from some reporting that's been done from his former students that he, like Joe Biden, just is enamoured of Chinese and Chinese communism, talks about how clean it is, how law and order is so tight there under an authoritarian regime.
You know, he loves communism or Maoism, according to some of his former students.
He's come back and said how wonderful it is.
He's passing out little red books.
Exactly.
That's insane.
And look, sorry, Joe Biden, when he was a young senator, remember he came into the Senate, he won his election by a fluke, by a few thousand votes in Delaware at the age of 29.
So he was a very young senator, the youngest senator At the time, at the age of 30.
So very malleable.
He didn't really have a good education.
He didn't have much knowledge of foreign relations and foreign policy.
So he was very quickly taken up and captured.
Even with such a paltry background, he became one of the most powerful senators.
He was on arguably the most powerful committee, the Foreign Relations Committee, for a decade as either the chairman or the ranking member.
This is a guy, really, you would not choose him to do that job.
He was chosen.
By people that obviously thought that he would be useful.
And like Tim Waltz, he was one of the first senators to go on this trip to China.
He went to the equivalent of Martha's Vineyard to meet all the top CCP officials and came back waxing lyrical, just like Tim Waltz, in such an embarrassing, gushing way that the Weekly Standard at the time, I think this was in like the early 70s, Just mocked him mercilessly, put him on the cover and said what a joke he was, you know, the Manchurian candidate.
So like Tim Waltz, a sort of a Manchurian candidate, certainly someone who feels that he has a good pipeline to The CCP officialdom and feels, as Joe Biden always boasted, he had many hours of speaking to President Xi.
And what President Xi, who has a degree in chemical engineering, pretty intelligent man, what he made of Joe Biden's Constant self-aggrandizing and, you know, bignoting himself.
Nobody knows.
But I don't think it's helpful for America to have a man like Joe Biden and a man like Tim Walts representing, you know, our highest level of politics to China, because it would lead China to underestimate and think poorly of the intelligence of the average American.
Absolutely.
And we all know that China's working on a very finite timeline right now with Xi's age and kind of the closing window with demographics.
The last thing we need is leadership in our country that is not stalwart in opposition to the CCP's ambitions.
And I just can't imagine that the CCP looks at a potential Harris-Walls regime with, you know, a lot of fear in their hearts.
Not at all.
If that, and I think we all agree, I think if you read anybody that is at all knowledgeable on foreign affairs, or even somebody that has traveled the slightest bit, they would say, okay, Russia's, they're maybe not the greatest actor.
Maybe they have some...
Ambitions that don't necessarily align with Western values, sure, but they're not really an existential threat to the United States.
China is.
They have the potential to be.
They have the economy.
They have every supply chain, everything important that we use from pharmaceuticals to our own weapons runs through a supply chain sourced in China.
Every single rare earth that we use in our missiles has to come from China because we didn't want to kill a desert tortoise in the 1990s.
Yet Russia preoccupies and Ukraine preoccupies the minds of the State Department.
Please explain this to me.
Well, I just have two theories.
The one is it's to take eyes off China and the other is You know, there's this fantasy that somehow they can supplant Russia as the supplier of most of Europe's energy with Ukraine.
And that does not make sense.
I mean, I've heard people say it in these Washington think tanks, but Ukraine has 3% of the shale gas deposits that Russia has.
So it's just not going to be able to fulfill the needs of Europe.
It's sort of a dream of the blob to sever Russia because that's where Russia really gets its wealth from its And Putin has failed his people by not weaning them off, just using their mineral wealth, their gas under the ground.
High value-added economy.
No.
So they're still dependent on money from their sales of their oil to Europe.
And Europe is still dependent.
On Russia.
And even though when the Ukraine war broke out, there have been efforts to try and wean Europe off Russian energy, it's just very difficult.
And especially when, you know, American What is it?
LPG exports were curtailed.
I think the Biden administration realized that that's something that they've got to do, even though it goes against their climate activists in their own party who are trying to just stop all fossil fuels.
So it's that friction, I think, for the Democrats between that necessity to maybe try and be an alternate supplier of energy and keeping their climate crazies in their party happy.
Ukraine also, I mean, there's the issue, I think, with Russia.
There's a hatred in the State Department for the fact that Russia is an orthodox Christian country.
It's the same sort of hatred that is aimed against Viktor Orban in Hungary.
And this sort of new imperialism of the State Department.
And I think that's being done without the American people's knowledge or approval, which is that they're exporting this sort of what used to be truth, justice and the American way, but now that includes the rainbow agenda.
And that's, you know, all the, you know, trans ideology, which You know, I know the State Department had some sort of a program where they gave money to, I can't remember the country, but I think it was like, maybe it was Indonesia or it was, you know, it was a very conservative Southeast Asian country, I think.
And they had a drag queen storytime project.
And, you know, when they were in Afghanistan before the fall, the brand new expensive embassy in Kabul had a pride flag hanging over it.
Taliban's a huge fan of that.
Yeah.
I mean, why would you deliberately go out and antagonize the very people that your diplomacy and the American people's billions of dollars is being spent rebuilding roads and schools and so on, and export this divisive ideology that these conservative Right.
In Russia, Vladimir Putin has allied himself with the Orthodox Church.
And I don't think that's necessarily because he is particularly a religious man.
I mean, he's former KGB, he's a killer.
I have no illusions about Vladimir Putin being a good...
It's a pragmatic alliance.
100%, because it's given him the power that he has.
And so the Orthodox Church is against LBGT, Trans stuff in particular.
And so that, I think, has set the State Department on a really antagonistic pathway against Putin.
Regime change is something that's not said aloud unless you're Joe Biden and you've lost your filter.
He actually did talk about regime change with Putin.
But I have no doubt there are people in the US State Department who would like nothing better than to topple And for those reasons, they see him as anti-gay.
And it's when they say gay, it's not really gay, it's anti-trans, which I think is the last bastion of toppling those traditional values.
And I mean, I think Putin and the Orthodox Church there is anti-gay in the way that Ron DeSantis has been accused of being, simply because he doesn't want children At the age of 12 being put on the path of having cross-sex hormones and changing their sex and going through social transitioning which most of them end up means that they do have surgery and hormones to change their sex and at a time
time when they haven't really figured out what they want.
And so all Rhonda Sanders and all, I think, all of these so-called anti-gay measures are the opposite.
They're actually about not forcing kids that might be gay into changing sex when they might just find out at the age of 18 that they're just gay.
Yeah.
But so this is a really rancid ideology that has somehow crept into American sort of cultural imperialism.
And that's rejected by Americans themselves, most of them, and certainly is rejected by these very conservative countries like Russia, like Hungary, like these Islamic countries like Afghanistan.
And all that happens is that it damages America's interests and makes the people in these countries hate America.
Yeah, I mean, it's a far cry from blue jeans and Coca-Cola.
100%.
And I don't think Americans, the average American, I certainly didn't realise it.
I was just flabbergasted at how this ideology, which is so foreign to most societies, would have crept in and...
And become an agenda at the State Department and especially under Obama.
And I think it remained there during the Trump era.
He didn't really have a lot of control over the bureaucracy.
I don't know if it's possible to have that.
I don't know if he does win if in four years he's going to be able to get a hold of the State Department, the CIA, the FBI. I'm not sure that he can.
Yeah, I mean, I hope so.
I think the last thing we need is Rahm Emanuel telling the Japanese they need to be more progressive with their LGBTQ values.
No, I'm sympathetic to the Polish and the Estonians and the Finnish that say, okay, maybe we want to work something out because we think that Russia wants to, you know, do a little bit of imperialism in our backyards because they have hinted at that.
Fine, but I'm not good with the United States using all of its political, social, and military capital in a theater that isn't really existential to our well-being.
And also to deliberately antagonise Russia by enlarging NATO, which was something that Joe Biden has had as one of his...
I presume he's got this idea from the people who control him.
But enlarging NATO, people like Victoria Nuland, all these neocon walks...
That's been their primary purpose.
Even though Russia and Putin have said, don't do it, don't come up to my border with Ukraine and Georgia, in particular, as being part of NATO, because that means that, you know, it would be as if, in America, as if Russia put its missiles right on the border with Mexico.
It's a provocative action and unnecessary.
Yeah, clearly Bucharest in 2008 was a red line for Putin.
Georgia was a red line and Ukraine is an extreme red line.
And even if our intentions were ambivalent, if it was we just, we think enlarging the Western group of nations is a good thing, fine, but you have to look at it from the Russian perspective.
They're obviously going to see that as a threat.
The Polish and the Finnish and the Estonians that pushed for NATO. It wasn't just the United States pushing them to join.
They also wanted it.
I get it.
There is a conversation to be had there.
But you have to look from Russia's perspective how they're going to perceive things and then undertake appropriate diplomacy going forward.
Not totally disregard them as a sovereign nation.
So I don't disagree with you there.
I do think that America owes something to Ukraine because, and again, Joe Biden was involved in this, but as a senator then on the Foreign Relations Committee and vocal, in getting Ukraine to give up its nuclear arsenal.
Right.
Which was very reluctant to do because it felt that was its only bulwark against Russia.
So I do feel Ukraine is a little different and that we do owe...
Something to it.
But I agree with Donald Trump when he says that Putin never would have aggressed into Ukraine if he had been president because there would have been competence and a threat.
And I think when you put an incompetent president like Joe Biden or like Kamala Harris would be into office and disasters naturally will happen and very early on In Joe Biden's term came the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, which told all the bad actors in the world, like Vladimir Putin, that it was open season, make hay while the sun shines.
Absolute disaster showed utter incompetence.
And I think we showed a similar thing when And Biden decided he wanted a talking point during the State of the Union, the last one he did, and he decided to have that pier built in Gaza, which was a disaster.
Like, how much did it cost?
Billions of dollars.
Billions of dollars to float away into the ocean.
Float away for a few days it was out there.
And that just showcased a terrible thing, which was the mighty American military, which, second to none in the world, logistical feats beyond, showed that it was actually...
Had feet of clay, that it wasn't actually as competent as everyone thought.
That's another disaster that's, I guess, been underestimated.
But the signal that that sends to the world, having our astronauts stuck in space, that Elon Musk has to come to the rescue, there's another sign of incompetence.
So I think that the signals that the Biden administration The feckless incompetence of Joe Biden and the people he's amassed around him, I think that the results of that will have ramifications into the future that we can't even tell yet.
But what we do know is that one of them was that Russia felt emboldened, like it did under Obama, to invade its neighbour.
And I think a strong United States is needed, a strong...
And that's why Donald Trump, for all his faults, he acts like a gangster, you know?
And, you know, you're in a world of gangsters.
You're in a world of wolves.
You have to be like that.
You can't be some fae, you know, Parisian, brought-up Antony Blinken.
I mean, Antony Blinken.
Yeah.
He was basically conducting foreign policy while Biden was sort of AWOL, and he's just not cut out for it.
His very first meeting with the Chinese, the sort of wolf leaders of China, they were shouting at him across the desk and he put up with it.
It's fine for Antony Blinken You know, went to school in Paris, speaks a million languages, is, you know, this Europhile guy.
It's fine for him to think, oh, well, I'm a man enough.
I don't feel aggrieved by having the Chinese shout at me.
You know, I don't care about those sorts of things.
It's America they're shouting at.
It's American weakness he's projecting.
And when Donald Trump muscles his way into the front of a photograph with the G20... You know, people like Antony Blinken back home in Washington are saying, oh, he's such a brute, he's so embarrassing.
Yes, good.
He's being a gangster on the international stage where it's dog eat dog, it's a jungle, and you need a tough...
Gangster guy like Trump who understands how gangsters operate because he was operating in, you know, the property development world in New York.
He knows how it works.
He survived that shark tank.
And so that's why Putin and Xi and people like that, Kim Jong-un, were all back in their boxes under Donald Trump.
They have no fear and no respect for Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, Kamala Harris or Tim Walz.
Yeah.
In a world of gangsters, you want your gangster to be the best.
That's right.
Like you mentioned, though, and the last thing I wanted to touch on, kind of bring it back a little bit, is the corruption.
But corruption is what breeds the incompetence.
And we know there's corruption at the federal level.
We've talked about that.
But it permeates throughout.
It's at your state.
It's at your local levels.
And that's sort of where our institutions crossed was with the reporting that we did recently in New York with the Department of Justice, with Nicholas Biazzi talking about how the Manhattan DA's office in Alvin Bragg was essentially conducting lawfare to enhance his profile, or Jay Varma, possibly the most cartoonishly corrupt official that I've ever laid eyes on, the COVID czar.
He was in charge of New York City's COVID response, and he worked with de Blasio.
I guess my question is, since we kind of crossed paths in that and you get to have an ear to the ground in New York City, does the kind of reporting that we like to think that we're doing here and that you're at the New York Post are doing as well, did that make a difference in New York?
Do those stories change the way New Yorkers perceive the world around them?
Like, what's gone on since those stories have actually broken?
Absolutely.
I mean, they're crucial.
I think those sort of stories that you were doing Grassroot stories on the ground with local officials are more important than any national story because the corruption doesn't just begin in Washington.
Washington's, you know, been corrupt as long as Washington's been there.
It's equal opportunity corruption.
But in these cities and states like New York that are now...
Basically one party states and one party cities.
Corruption's out of control.
There's no opposition research really to speak of.
The Republicans have pretty much given up.
And so it's just this...
Swamp this morass.
And if you don't have journalists who really are willing to speak truth to power and kind of mavericks like you guys who are willing to go and do that undercover work that's so frowned upon by establishment journalism.
You know, those stories would never have come out.
And I think the fact that you had the spokesman for the Southern District of New York for their prosecution team and New York has been the basis of a lot of the lawfare against Donald Trump.
The fact that he was actually saying that some of these cases against Donald Trump were ridiculous and were regarded as not real law, not good law, by a lot of the prosecutors, that was news.
And it sort of accorded with our gut feeling that this was completely unfair and unjust lawfare done for political purposes by Democrat-aligned, corrupted prosecutors for purely the purpose of making sure that Donald Trump didn't win the election.
That seemed like, on a gut level, what it was, but you could never prove it.
And you guys went some way to giving us evidence to prove it.
And then, oh, with the repellent COVID czar, you know, again, this is something that New Yorkers in their guts knew who lived through the pandemic in New York, knew that there was so much hypocrisy going on, knew that there were speakeasies where people were, you know, making merry while...
While we were supposed to be, you know, shut down, that the virus really wasn't as lethal as we were being told, that the vaccine really didn't stop the virus.
We were still getting, you know, this mild cold for most people.
I mean, not downplaying it.
There were people who died, of course, but they were, for the most part, elderly or had comorbidities, right?
And that was something that in Florida, Ron DeSantis quickly ascertained from the right Medical people that he had around him, people like Jay Bhattacharya, Marty McCary, and so on, who were trying to sound the alarm to the American people early on.
But in cities like New York, where it seemed like everyone was taking, the Democrats were taking Jane Fonda's adage, which was, What she said early on in the pandemic, that COVID is God's gift to the left, that it was an instrument of control.
And so you have this COVID czar who is there setting policy for the mayor, de Blasio, which is one of the most stringent lockdowns in the country.
And New Yorkers, you know, were forced to take the vaccine that they didn't need and didn't really want just to be able to have a life.
That was so wrong.
And businesses went out of business.
There was a lot of suffering and heartache in New York.
New York has not recovered.
You know, there are whole areas of Ninth Avenue and so on that are still empty shops, restaurants that have gone bust.
A lot of people moved out of New York because it was just very difficult to live there.
Therefore, The city's tax revenues gone down.
And all of this was because they didn't do the right sensible thing and take advice from proper impartial doctors like Ron DeSantis did in Florida, which became a mecca for a lot of New Yorkers.
And has grown in its economy enormously as a result.
It's thriving.
New York is failing.
And it's all because we had a terrible mayor who was taking advice from this dishonest COVID czar who you now busted, you know, in his own words, allegedly having these sex parties during COVID because he knew himself that it wasn't as lethal as he was making out to the rest of the city.
It's Yeah, and I think this, I hesitate to use the term special and I'll end with this, but when we selected that story and we have to look at all the factors if it's something we want to cover, there's a lot of risk involved with something like that, where obviously with the Hunter Biden laptop there's enormous amounts of risk.
But I think where these kind of stories resonate with audiences is that they truly are bipartisan and interest.
This doesn't affect Republicans more, it doesn't affect Democrats more, it affects Americans and their ability to live freely in their communities.
And that's only known because of quality journalism.
I'm definitely not taking credit for it.
The team here behind me.
Absolutely.
And then obviously your entire team at the New York Post.
Is there hope for the future of journalism that these kind of stories will become more commonplace and there will be less political interest in what is given the light of day and what is being decided to be covered?
I do think so.
And I think you can see that, again, not in a direct way, but an indirect way by the efforts that are being made by those in power, by the establishment, by the controllers, the deep state, the people I've been talking about in this book, in trying to bring down the dark veil of censorship in America, which is antithetical to American DNA and also to the Constitution, to the First Amendment.
This is why America alone, I think, in the world has managed to withstand what Michael Schellenberger calls the censorship industrial complex.
In Europe, in Australia, in New Zealand, in the UK, you have seen censorship just So dramatically increased since COVID to the point where people are being thrown in jail for making statements on social media that the establishment doesn't agree with.
We suffered that here, that we saw that when the New York Post stories on the laptop were censored.
But at that same time, there were other stories being censored about COVID, about The origins of COVID, about the efficacy of the vaccine, about the efficacy of masks and so on.
All of that was censored.
And even to the point of memes that were mocking Jill Biden were also censored.
There was a situation where you had Politicians and bureaucrats were sending messages to Facebook and Twitter telling them to shut down this story.
You had FBI and CIA operatives were embedded in those, and still probably are, in those social media companies.
There were so many, at one point, CIA and FBI people embedded at Twitter that they had, we know this from the Twitter files, that they had their own kind of Slack channel or their own kind of You know, group anyway, that they had their own email group.
And we saw at Twitter the FBI's former chief legal counsel, a guy by the name of James Baker, he was parachuted into Twitter eight months before the election to make sure Well, it certainly appeared that way, I'll say allegedly, to make sure that stories that were going to be detrimental to Joe Biden and the Biden campaign didn't see the light of day.
That seemed to be certainly his role.
And whatever other stories that the FBI or the powers that be didn't want to be aired or to get a lot of traction.
That's what they managed to do and we only know about this because Elon Musk bought Twitter and opened up the files that became the Twitter files that Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger and Barry Weiss and so on Managed to put out a whole lot of good stories exposing that kind of censorship.
And then we've had some really good court cases.
There was Missouri v Biden, which has a new name now.
That went all the way to the Supreme Court and did put...
It's still being litigated, but it did put a crimp in the censorship process.
Regime.
And then, you know, reporting of our own whistleblowers that have come forward from the FBI, not from the CIA, as far as I know.
And so that sort of environment where whistleblowers feel comfortable to come forward, where there is reporting being done, that encourages more reporting of that kind.
As young journalists come forward and they see the power of that kind of reporting and their ability to do it almost alone in small groups like yours, citizen journalists, I guess, because of the way that technology has gone, they don't have to go and get a job at the New York Times where those stories are not being reported, where it's controlled information, controlled journalism.
I think young journalists don't want to be part of that.
Right.
Well, it's also nice to have some legacy media on our side.
Please continue.
Very few and far between.
The New York Post, Fox News, really, we're the last of that legacy media.
And then there's a whole constellation of fantastic publications that have come up.
Yeah.
Well, no, I mean, like the Washington Examiner, like, you know, the Free Beacon, you know, Daily Wire and so on.
Like, they're all these smaller media organisations that are growing up and coming out of the internet and doing good work as well.
So, but we're just, we're old school.
We've the oldest newspaper in the country, continuously published.
And I think we're the fourth biggest by circulation.
So we're up there with the big guys and still managing to hang in there and do the right thing.
But there's a huge amount of pressure and very powerful people that are arrayed against Fox News and the New York Post and demonise what we do.
I mean, New York Post is fairly middle of the road.
I mean, you know, right of centre, but not extreme right.
And yet we're downgraded in these sort of new organisations that have grown up, like they're called NewsGuard, they're fact-checking organisations.
They relegate the New York Post to sort of some sort of fringe outfit and they elevate New York Times and Washington Post, which are responsible for the most disinformation we've seen on COVID, Wuhan, and particularly on the Russiagate, all the Donald Trump demonisation stories, which, you know, have turned out not to be true.
Under Biden Laptop, they refused to report it.
They reported that it was Russian disinformation.
They're very gullible when it comes to accepting the lies that are told by the cabal, the deep state cabal, told by the Biden White House.
They're very happy to accept that as the God's honest truth.
Which is weird.
It's not what journalism used to be.
No, it's not.
And hopefully it's not what it is in the future.
And hopefully we can continue making dents in that facade anyway.
But before we end up, where can people find your book?
Where's the best place to get it?
Because it is fascinating.
Thank you.
Well, The Big Guy, it's available at all good bookstores and obviously on Amazon.
It's done very well.
It hasn't done quite as well as Laptop from Hell, but it was number eight on Amazon.
Number eight?
I think.
Anyway, my editor told me it was number eight, should have been number eight in the New York Times bestseller list in its first week.
Of course, it didn't appear anywhere there.
No.
No.
It's shocking.
Funny about it.
Same with Laptop from Hell, which was number one on Amazon of all books.
And this book was number eight.
But anyway, there we go.
Well, thank you so much.
I appreciate everything.
I had a great time talking with you.
Thank you.
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