An Hour With Miranda Devine

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Hello everyone.

This is Victor Davis Hansen today and I'm doing solos.

Sammy Wink and Jack Fowler are here but I have the pleasure of having as our guests Miranda Devine.

You all know her from her podcast and she's a columnist for the New York Post.

And we're going to talk about

current events with her.

But

before we do, we'll be right back.

We have a break.

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And we're back.

Miranda,

you've been your whole life going back and forth between Australia and the United States.

You were born in Australia and you were educated in the United States and you were educated in Australia.

Why don't you give us a little background?

Yes, and also Tokyo, which actually was sort of like a mini United States.

There were such America files in the 60s and the 70s.

So my parents were journalists.

My father was a foreign correspondent

and he's a New Zealander, but he was working for an Australian newspaper when he met my mother.

And they went to New York where I was born and then to Tokyo where one of my sisters was born.

and I went to an American school, had an American accent.

Then we went to Australia when I was about 11 and I overnight changed my accent to a very strong Australian accent, which my mother was horrified about.

And then my parents came back to Chicago, sorry,

New York, Chappaqua.

My father was then working for Reader's Digest and then moved to Chicago, where he was editor of the Chicago Sun-Times.

And I then joined them in Chicago and went to Northwestern University to do a journalism master's, which was fantastic, just a wonderful experience.

And

my parents have not wanted me to be a journalist, but Northwestern kind of cured them and cured me of any idea that I would do anything else.

How often do you go back to Australia?

About once a year.

We have

two grown-up sons who live there and.

miss them very much and just love seeing them.

How do you, but you also used, you comment on British politics a lot, right?

Well, kind of.

I mean,

because I worked for News Corp for so long,

I went and had a six-month stint on Fleet Street, basically, working for,

you know, doing

it was a sort of a training stint or an internship on Sunday Times and The Sun and a now defunct newspaper called Today.

So I knew a little bit about.

British journalism.

And, you know, having worked and studied in America, I think Australia is more like British journalism.

It's not as rigorous or,

you know, there's more of a tradition, I guess, of good writing and reportage in America.

Whereas in England and to a lesser extent in Australia, it's about the sub-editors on the desk have more power than the reporters in the field.

Whereas in America, you're a reporter, writer.

And I mean, I prefer that.

I used to think that America was really the gold standard.

Certainly when I was at Northwest in 1996 of gold standard of journalism, I looked up to

writers, particularly

on the august publications like the New York Times and so on.

But

in the 30 or so years since,

they've really fallen down and become a sort of caricature and a shadow of what they used to be.

And they've perverted journalism and yet they still have the,

you know, fine reputations i i think they follow along you talk a lot about what's happened to that the ivy league uh universities i think the same things happened to the sort of ivy league newspapers i i think it has too what do you what do you

what do you when you look at the berliner um all this controversy about pbs and npr have you got to the point where it just would be better just to get the government out of it entirely since you know it's not pbs when i was a kid in california and NPR,

it was billed to us as this is your only chance to have a commercial-free station on the air and television.

We're going to have all of these culturally enriching opportunities.

And now in the age of, you know, direct TV or whatever, you're Hulu or whatever, you have five or 600 channels.

Many of them have no commercials.

You have different voice.

Why do we need it anymore?

Do you think, because it's not really public TV or public radio anymore.

It's an extension of the liberal project or project, or even that's being charitable.

What's your view on that after you've seen this underbelly with 82 editorial staffers in the NPR room that are all liberal?

Well, it's impossible to fix that culture.

You know, the only thing you can do is scrap it.

But America's a lot luckier than Australia or Britain because their, you know, NPR has hardly any footprint here.

It doesn't really have much influence in Australia.

And there's something called the ABC, which is the English equivalent of the Australian equivalent of the BBC.

And they have an enormous impact on

the news and the sort of narratives that are spun.

And they're equally left-wing.

And, you know, just like NPR, they're peopled by the same, and they're completely funded very generously in Australia anyway, the ABC by the government.

They are the dominant media voice and they have much more money than, you know, as the commercial operations have shrunk, the ABC is now very wealthy and can afford to poach the best reporters from the commercial television stations and other networks.

And they have the best equipment.

It really is the employer of choice if you're a journalist in Australia now.

And are they as far left as NPR?

Oh, wait.

More so?

Oh, yes.

How can that be possible?

More so, huh?

More so.

I think, you know,

I know that, you know, we're living here and we are complaining about what happened during COVID and censorship and so on, but at least America is fighting back.

At least Americans understand what's going on and they have a First Amendment.

And there are people in Congress who understand what's going on and are trying to push back.

Whereas in somewhere like Australia, and you see in Europe as well, these new censorship rules that Facebook and they're trying to impose on Elon Musk, even at Twitter,

they're sort of accepted by the populace without complaint because they don't really know any better.

And they do believe the story that, well, during COVID, we had to protect the public from crazy conspiracy theories.

And,

you know, you saw in Australia how

the place was shut down.

And it was really seemed

to Americans here anyway, that it was a police state.

And, you know, I had friends and I was traveling back after COVID to Australia and no one really noticed that anything terrible had happened.

But it's,

we were all growing up, and then in college, it was always the freer and more autonomous you wanted to be, you went west in the United States.

So Utah, Nevada, California, you just did your thing.

And if you really, really wanted to be so, you went west to Australia,

crocodile Dundee, and you just didn't give it.

it.

And that's all a myth now.

Of course, is that rugged Australian outback caricature false now?

It doesn't exist anymore.

Well, those people still exist and they're fantastic, but unfortunately, they've been completely overwhelmed by

the same way here.

What's happening in California, I'm sure.

I mean, there's still people like you in California,

but

who's in control?

The people who

are the politicians and the media mavens.

The funny thing about California is we have 40, well, we're losing them at 300,000, 250,000 to 300,000 every year, but we have 40 million people and one-third of them are conservative, and that really makes us the largest red state.

So

yeah, you know, if you have about 13 million and it's funny, they're kind of like French conservative or black conservative intellectuals.

When you meet conservatives in California, they're the most conservative.

And if anybody, they have to be to survive.

So the top third of the state is lightly populated.

And then you, and that's all conservative.

And then the Great Central Valley, except around Sacramento area, is conservative.

The foothills and the Sierra are all conservative.

The inland empire east of Los Angeles toward the desert is conservative.

And then we have this

28, 30 million, 25 to 30 million person strip from Berkeley to La Jolla on the coast where everything is crazy.

And they run at everything.

They have $9 trillion of market capitalization in Silicon Valley.

That's where our universities are and everything.

But it's funny because here I'm in the San Joaquin Valley.

And the night before last, I went to a Republican

Lincoln dinner.

There were some of us speaking.

And I have been to these in Nevada and

Arizona, et cetera.

That evening was the most conservative event I've ever been at.

And that's the kind of, so you get a kind of inversial

culture.

You're right in New York.

Why don't you tell us what your impression are of these crazy trials and Trump in Harlem?

What's the impression?

Are you optimistic that there will be one brave juror who will look at the evidence and not nullify it?

Are you pessimistic?

You don't know?

Or

what's your impression of what's going on in the circus?

Well, it's similar to you with California.

There are a lot of closet Republicans.

Actually, they're not really closet, but they're pretty staunch conservatives in New York,

and particularly, you know, places like Staten Island and Pockets in Long Island.

And, you know, I served, I had to go into a jury pool in Manhattan last year.

And so I spent all day with, you know, the same sort of people in this jury pool.

And they seemed pretty

run-of-the-mill, ordinary, decent, nice working people.

I think that maybe the elites managed to get out of even going to the jury pool.

But

they seemed fairly reasonable.

I didn't detect that they were crazy, blue-haired,

you know, Upper West Side haters of Donald Trump.

But you look at the questions of the jury and there are a lot of

people who said that they just, particularly women who seem to detest Donald Trump,

who just couldn't be fair and impartial.

I think they got rid of 48 by yesterday morning.

They

passed over 48 jurors who said that they couldn't be fair and impartial.

And I think I saw this morning even

they had a woman who was, she's one of the alternate jurors.

And she said that, yes, you know, she thinks that Donald Trump is a selfish oath.

But you only need one who likes him.

Maybe there'll be a Russian cab driver or a Mexican-American

canteen owner or mobile kitchen or something.

Latino.

Anybody.

Yeah.

That would be good.

What do you

do you like this split-screen strategy that he's doing?

So he's at the rainy wake of an officer who was killed and then

Biden is leveraging 26 million with celebrities and Bill Clinton or he's at Chick-fil-A in Atlanta, why Biden's got Robert De Niro, et cetera, et cetera, at the White House, or he's up at Abogbega in Harlem.

You think that's going to, that seems to be getting a lot of publicity, and it's driving the left to the degree they won't even to mention it.

It drives them crazy.

Don't you think it's a pretty successful strategy so far?

It's brilliant.

And, you know, the reason it's brilliant is because it actually comes from something authentic in him.

Yes.

Remember when East Palestine happened,

the derailed train and the toxic plume that affected all those poor people.

Well, you know, Donald Trump went there immediately and brought some water, but I mean, it was just the fact that he cared about them,

whereas Joe Biden was completely ignoring them.

And still, you know, how long did it take him to go there on this very cursory visit?

And I think it was the same with the

police officer who was killed in New York.

You know, Donald Trump's from New York.

He loves the cops.

Joe Biden pretends that he's a sort of a cop lover.

And I think that's more based around the union background that he has.

But he doesn't have that empathy and it's ironic with Joe Biden because I think his

whole persona has been defined by the word empathy and that just comes from the fact that at the very beginning of his career, even before he got into the Senate, his wife and baby daughter were killed in a horrific car crash.

So he comes into the Senate as this young young widower just turned 30.

And, you know, the empathy was coming from the entire country and from his Senate colleagues who reached out to him.

I think his career got a big boost because he had these mentors and their wives were telling them, look after this young widower.

But I've never seen a sign of, you know, I've seen a lot of empathy given to Joe Biden for his entire career, and he trades off it in every campaign, but I've never seen much empathy coming from him to other people.

It's always about him.

It is.

It is.

He's always been, I followed him most of my life.

And even the tragic car crash, it wasn't more than a year or two that he was on the campaign trail, unfairly alleging that the truck driver

was found not to be culpable.

I think he used that term maybe 10 or 20 times.

He drank his lunch.

In other words, and the family had kept begging him, don't say that.

He was never found culpable.

He never drank.

He didn't do anything wrong.

If anything, when you read the police report, it was almost suggesting that maybe Mrs.

Biden had a rolling stop at the intersection.

But he didn't stop until finally it got so bad he did.

And it's been that way with everything.

You remember on the...

When he ran for president or he was on the kind of crazy, he'd say, hey, fat, or you're a lying dogface pony chills, or he'd call an African-American assistant, boy, you ain't black,

you're a junkie.

I never understood the old Joe Biden from Scranton because he was a pathological fabricator

and he's mean to people.

And it comes out all the time.

And that's a complete myth that he was an empathetic, sympathetic character from the lower middle classes that hard scrabble.

He never seems to be worried about people

who are victims of all of these hyperinflation or gas prices and he's always been somebody who really was infatuated or admired the very wealthy and wanted to be around them and i think you're right about trump he came to tulare california i wasn't there so i ask a lot of people it's kind of a it's where that world ag center is but it's kind of the the epitome of rural california and agriculture and when they come mom near mccain i had been there sometimes and they put they get the caterpillar caterpillar hats, they get the hay barrels, and then they come and they usually wear work shirts.

It's kind of like Hillary, you know, I'm so tired, that type of fake voice when she did that.

Yeah, and Obama, the same thing.

But so I asked everybody,

I said, well, he did the straw in the mouth, and he had the blue shirt and jeans.

They said, no.

I said, well, what was it like?

He said it was over 100 degrees.

He was sweating like a dog.

He had a black suit.

He had wingtip shoes.

He had this grating

Bronx accent.

And he was completely dressed out of place.

And everybody loved him.

And I said, why was that?

And he said, because he was authentic.

He didn't change his spots just to meet the environment.

That's his greatest forte.

And if he can,

are you confident about the election?

As opposed to the balloting.

Election is one thing and then the balloting process is the other.

Are you confident about either one?

Look, if things were fair

and

the FBI, CIA, whoever didn't put their thumb on the scale,

I think that Donald Trump could win, even despite the

sort of character assassination, which he, I mean, you have to say he brings it on himself.

He makes himself a big target.

But again, you know, it was interesting what you say about his authenticity.

Even some of the people, the jurors that have been asked questions about him, who aren't that fond of him, what they have said, women, have said, well, you know, at least sort of what you see is what you get.

And grudgingly, you know, they admire the fact that he speaks his mind.

And that, you know, one woman said, well, you know, I get into trouble.

My mother said to me, you know, don't say anything rude, don't speak your mind.

You'll get into trouble.

He can't, doesn't seem to be able to do that.

But they don't, you know, maybe as time goes on, people realize that he doesn't have a filter.

I mean, it's not that he's contriving to insult people.

It's just really what he thinks and he doesn't, he doesn't, he doesn't hold back.

And it's the exact opposite of Joe Biden.

There could not be two more different characters.

You know, Joe Biden is everything.

that you don't think he is.

And Donald Trump just is what you see is what you get.

And he's quite a, you know, I've been castigated by some readers or lefty readers who say, how can you say that he's, you know, he's warm?

But when you meet him, he is a very warm and kind of generous person.

And I mean, he has so many faults and foibles.

And I really disliked the way he came after Ron DeSantis.

I did too.

Yeah.

And I, and also Nikki Haley, who, I mean, I liked Ron DeSantis as a candidate.

I didn't really think Nikki Haley was that great, but I didn't like the way he came after her either.

I remember she gave a speech after a loss, and she was wearing a dress, which was very similar to a dress my mother had worn and liked very much, was a lovely dress.

And he was nasty about her dress.

And so he has also a nasty streak, which I think turns women off.

And

I think, you know, you see men, just the

in all polls, you see this growing divide between the genders, between the sexes, I should say.

But particularly on Donald Trump.

And I think that's why I think that sort of gratuitous swipes, women particularly don't like when it's aimed at women.

And, you know, and he has the ability.

Do you remember when his brother died?

It was kind of tragic and he was an alcoholic, supposedly.

And Donald Trump was asked about it if he drank.

And he said, oh, my God, can you imagine what I would be like if I drank?

And he And he meant it.

It's too bad that

he can't.

And I've written a couple of suggestions, not that, and I've talked to him once in a while, but he should,

he could have called Haley up and say, look, you may not like me and I don't like you, but we're on the same team and this is an existential fight now because these people are not Democrats.

They're Jacobin route.

Can't we find some modus operandi so we can get along?

And I'm trying to go, and I will go halfway.

And he could do the same thing with DeSantis, all of them.

And it would be,

he has no margin of error.

And I think you're right.

He's going to have to win the popular vote in these states by 3 to 5% because of the balloting.

Although, I was talking to a guy not too long ago, and he said, I said that to him.

He said, well,

in a lot of the swing state

big cities, Atlanta

and

Phoenix and Las Vegas and Detroit, Milwaukee,

that are going to matter.

A lot of the Latino minority black population is

disproportionately represented in balloting city government registrars.

And this time around,

if it's true that 20 to 25% of the black vote is sympathetic to Trump and 40 to 45 percent Latino vote, you're going to have members of the Trump, people sympathetic to Trump who are going to be involved in the ballot process in a way that was less true in 2020.

And they are going to be the ears.

He was giving me this explanation.

I hadn't heard that before, but I don't know to what degree that's true, but it could be.

And

he's so alienated the white non-college working class that he doesn't.

I mean, he's never going to get the, that's the people that live around here along with Mexican-American people.

He's lost i can tell you i live in a community that's 95 percent mexican american he has lost the mexican american male vote over 40

especially the self-employed that they they've just been crushed by the gas prices the food prices

added on to the california cost of living and they don't like the emphasis on transgenderism and soft on crime and all of that.

So, and that's a bit, those are, that's the one rubric along with

Latino women

over 40 who vote.

And I think that's going to show up.

But I had one question I wanted to ask you.

So

we're learning that he's supposedly going to, he's polling historic highs among minorities compared to other Republicans.

And yet the more that we hear that story,

the more that we also see the national polls where they're almost dead even.

Is that gain in minority support?

Does that explain why in these key states states like Georgia or Arizona, he's still ahead?

Or how can he be gaining in the Latino and black communities?

But

Biden is catching up and almost even, if not ahead, in the national poll?

Well, I think the national poll narrative is a bit dishonest.

Because, for instance, as an example, the CNN New York Times poll just recently,

the New York Times trumpeted it as, oh, you know, now Joe Biden's on this since the State of the Union because he did such a brilliant job and he's caught up to Trump.

Well, that's not true if you look at the margin of error there is 3.3%.

So actually, I think it was a difference of five points or something he'd caught up, which is within the margin of error.

So that.

that they just they will twist the narrative whatever way they want.

And the other thing is

these polls are tiny numbers.

I think that CNN was like less than a thousand.

Yeah.

So oversampled women by a significant amount.

So

I don't really put stock in that momentum story unless you know we have to wait quite a long time.

And also, it's just not true that Joe Biden did a brilliant job at State of the Union.

He managed not to fall off the stage or drop dead, but that was it.

I don't think anyone who was paying attention thought he did a great job.

You could tell from watching CNN and MSNBC after it, they were pretty deflated.

And then the thing about the minorities, I'm just a little suspicious about that because I drank the Kool-Aid in 2020 and believed that, you know, there was such an emphasis in the Trump campaign about, you know,

letting people out of jail and so on and just wooing minorities and that this was working really well.

But when you looked at the exit polls, in fact, he hadn't really moved the dial very much.

And I thought, well, that was a waste of time.

Maybe it would have been better if he just focused on the people that were really going, you know, on getting out the vote in places like

yeah, I agree.

I don't think any of his support to be candid from Latinos or black that's supposedly increased comes from a greater appreciation of Trump.

I think it's unlike 2020, Biden was old Joe Biden from Scranton, who was going to be the working class.

And then they've got, they're just voting against him now.

And there's all these people.

There's a lot of suburban women, a lot of minorities,

even I know people at Stanford campus that will whisper and they'll say, have you been up to San Francisco lately?

Or, you know, we don't drive much, but we had to drive to L.A.

Have you seen what gas is like?

Did you know that my kid had straight A's and perfect SAT and he didn't get into Stanford under the new repertory?

And

what they're trying to say is that they want a reason to vote against Biden.

They don't know if they're going to vote for, but they have no empathy for Trump.

But unlike 2016

and

2020, they've seen now Joe Biden, and they don't want another four years.

And I don't know how he's going to capture that vote, but there's a lot of discontent with Biden.

And maybe if they just voted for Robert Kennedy or stayed home, it would be good.

But he has to find a way to...

to capture him.

I don't know if what's the full effect.

I have one last question on the trials, and I'd like to ask you some stuff about last night's attack,

retaliatory attack by Israel.

Do you think there's going to be, what's your reaction that we've just started this four indictment cycle?

Does he continue to gain empathy the more outrageous this is?

And he's sort of in the docket and people see this?

Or do finally people go into a fetal position, put their hands over their ears and go, I can't take it anymore.

And how do he get himself in this?

What will be the net effect?

Or is it neither, say in August or September?

We see this every single week.

Look, I think the damage is the opportunity cost.

As Donald Trump himself is saying, I should be in Georgia.

I should be in Pennsylvania.

While

Joe Biden just spends pretty much all his time in Pennsylvania, not to much great effect, but

the 19 electoral votes there that are going to be crucial.

And you know, Donald Trump does win over people when he goes and does these rallies and goes and

does, you know, goes to the bedager or goes to the policeman's funeral

or meets the policeman's widow.

I think that's the damage.

And, you know, I don't think it's a good look for him continually to be sitting in court because people who are low information are just going to think, well, he must have done something wrong.

Yeah.

And that's what I feel that he they're going to drain him financially physically mentally

time-wise and then by august and september people are going to they're not going to be sympathetic with prosecuting him they're just going to say

i need i need somebody to beat biden and and he's he's distracted he and he he brings this on himself, even though I don't think that's quite true.

But I'm really worried that he's got to find...

I think if he were to be acquitted in this first one it would be such a shock to the other prosecutions that it would it would really kind of reveal that they're all of the same caliber it's very important in the first one that he get acquitted yes absolutely yeah i sort of see their strategy the democrat strategy is it's like um you know in a bullfight where you send in the picadors yes to attack the bull with spears and so he's half dead by the time the broken down old matador comes out and just finishes him off like a hero.

So that's because Joe Biden is the most hopeless candidate you could ever imagine.

And, you know, if Pennsylvania is important to him, you just watch some of the focus groups and people are, you know, angry, as you say, about the economy, about inflation, about his lie.

They know his gaslighting really annoys them, telling them, no, no, you know, I've brought down inflation when they can see with their own eyes and their own hip pockets that gas is up and food is up um he his gaslighting and his lies he he he's been shielded from it all his life but i think now he's up on the big stage you can't really hide that you're a congenital liar and that he is that's a that's a good word because that cannibal story

it was everything about it he he was his uncle was flying a two-engine not a one-engine plane he was he was crashed at sea and he wasn't alone There were four people, and there was no evidence he was shot down.

It was injure-failed, much less.

He wasn't the pilot.

Yes, and he wasn't.

And there were not cannibals floating around the ocean, unless they were sharks, I guess.

But it was all made up, like everything he says.

And I mean, just, we're going to take a break after...

after we get done with Bachelor and we'll go into Israel.

But I have one last question.

What do you think the odds are that he will make it to the convention and be the nominee given this seemingly geometric decline in his cognitive abilities or if he's nominated that he will be fully functional and then and by November

I don't think he's as cognitively shot as he sometimes appears

and maybe that's because he had those aneurysms and so he's got you know, holes in his brain where those happened and they've gotten progressively worse.

But he always seems to be able to pull it out of the, you know, pull it off the shelf.

He'll go to a debate.

Like in 2020, I think he surprised everyone ran rings around Donald Trump.

Donald Trump wasn't expecting that.

So I think the biggest mistake Republicans could make is to underestimate him.

And, you know, there are lots of videos going around and Republicans, the RNC has a fantastic Twitter stream of ridiculous videos of Joe Biden looking like a fool and it goes around the world and, you know, he looks terrible but um I think when he's pumped up with enough drugs he has enough sleep that's a very good point I I had a Democrat a Republican person call me before this second debate

and I said first of all it's not going to matter because 50 million people have already voted and you guys waited too long and you should have negotiated them much earlier in the

but

he's been sleeping for three days

he hadn't been anywhere and you know I've seen people

children on Adderall or that type of upper.

And for brief periods,

they're very alert.

They're very angry.

I think that explains a lot of the state of the Union.

He seems to get animated when he's rested

for an hour or two hours.

And he really does hate the opposition more than he does the Iranians or the Russians because

he never uses vocabulary of Russia or the Houthis or any.

Nobody animates him like Trump and Trump supporters.

And

they do underestimate him, at least for brief periods.

And he rises or falls.

That State of the Union was just an angry, furious, pump-dump rant.

And the purpose was to make him look muscular and vital, even if he was full of hate and kind of incoherent.

But you're right.

So you think he's going to make it through the convention and he'll go all the way to November.

And if he does have a cognitive implosion, it'll be after he's elected.

Yeah, I don't think physically or cognitively he's going to collapse between now and then.

I mean, they may decide that he's doing so badly in the polls that they'll use that as an excuse.

And that would give, they would release the super delegates or his delegates, and then they could tell Camilla, it was a fair convention vote.

And we're sorry, we wish you had won and you're not the nominee.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, you know, it's this is they always talk about it, did Trump being an existential threat, but there are a lot of people who do believe it.

And particularly the deep status, they can't abide Trump and they will not allow him to take control of foreign policy again because it's such anathema to everything that they believe in.

It is, yeah.

I'm worried because it seems

I can't be too candid here because I know a lot of them, but I'm very worried about the three to four star general active and retired class of the Pentagon.

I've never seen such unanimity in their hatred of him.

The Pentagon really hates him.

And you saw that with the retired generals who kept coming out in 2020,

kind of violating the uniform code of military justice by attacking and disparaging their commander-in-chief, what Mark Milley did with the Chinese counterpart.

We're going to take a break and we'll be right back with Miranda Devine and Devine, excuse me.

And we're going to be talking about this latest Israel response.

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And we're back with Miranda.

Miranda,

We were told that when Iran

wanted to reply to the Israeli hit on the Republican Guard Corps in Damascus, that through a Turkish intermediary, as I follow it,

our government

translated or transmitted to the Turks that it wouldn't object or it would be tolerable if it was within limits.

And I guess they were, I don't know what limits was, one dead Jewish Israeli citizen for each,

I don't know what it was, but it was controlled.

And now we have, I guess there were suggestions that the Israelis were told that they could retaliate within limit.

It seems almost, I don't know what the word is, it's affirmative action war, that we take the stronger power and we try to suppress it and say that it's not going to be disproportionate.

And then we're trying to manage it.

And we say, well, we...

It's almost like we're saying that the Iranian military capability is that they don't have the same high SAT score as the Israelis.

So we're going to still let them participate.

It's affirmative action war.

It's not going to work, not with the Iranians.

No, no, the peculiar

fondness that the Obama-Biden people have for Iran

is really curious.

I mean, and Anthony Blinken is part of this, the Secretary of State, who his childhood friend, Robert Malley, was in charge of the original Iran deal and

which was reanimated by Joe Biden after Donald Trump ditched it.

And Robert Malley was put in charge again.

And then mysteriously, he gets suspended and there's an inquiry into him and his security clearance

is taken away from him.

And now we hear the FBI is investigating him for mishandling of classified information.

Meanwhile, he gets picked up by Princeton University.

I mean, this is scandalous.

We don't hear anything about it.

The media doesn't talk about it.

His protégé, a woman he brought in called Ariana.

I think I'm not pronouncing her name.

She's still at work, isn't she?

She's working at the Pentagon.

She would have been right in there when, you know.

the Iranian missiles were raining down on Israel.

And so, remember Joe Biden, when Putin was saber-rattling about invading Ukraine just before he did in in 2022.

Biden said, I'll just, as long as you don't do too much, I can't do it.

Yeah, he said, if it depends on whether it's a minor invasion.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And he said the same thing to Putin about the cyber attacks.

He said, you know, if you're going to do it, keep hospitals and things like that.

Yeah.

So he does try to,

it's kind of like he tries to manage it, although there's a bit a very different vocabulary with Ukraine and Gaza.

Ukraine's got to be disproportionate to win, and

they can cancel elections in a way that Netanyahu could never do.

And I support arming Ukraine, but

we're not worried about collateral damage on the part of Ukraine like we are Israel.

And we want them to be disproportionate, and we think that's the only way you're going to get Russians out is to try to be disproportionate, where we tell the Israelis, you're too disproportionate.

And both of them were attacked at peace.

So you would think that we would just have the same attitude.

And I know that people think, well, Israel is the superdog, but in the wider Middle East of 500 million Muslims, it's the underdog.

I don't quite understand

the disparate attitude that

we use to restrain Israel, but we want to liberate Ukraine in some way to get Putin out.

But I guess I don't understand.

Maybe you can enlighten me or the audience.

Why does this administration or Biden seem to be, oh, I agree with them about Putin, he's a demonic character, but why can't they apply the same condemnation toward Hamas as they do the Russians?

Well, I can only assume that it's partly domestic policy because so much of their base is,

you know, Hamas lovers and particularly in Michigan, which is a crucial state for him.

And

look, there's also the Netanyahu factor.

You know,

I don't know whether it's true or not, but that, you know, there was somehow American meddling in the trying to do a color revolution against

court.

They hate, you know, Joe Biden gets terribly animated about these autocrats, he calls them around the world, whether it's Victor Orban or Netanyahu, who he puts in the same bucket as Trump.

So this is sort of Joe Biden's unsophisticated view of global politics: is that there are bad guys who are autocrats, and that's Trump and his ilk, and Netanyahu's part of that.

So,

and you know, I think he's a pretty basic person, certainly intellectually, Joe Biden.

And

I think also he just, this is the way he brought up his children, not really with a firm hand, but with a lot of false promises and,

you know, I don't know, smoke and mirrors.

I don't think you really know what Joe Biden believes because he just believes what he's told to believe.

And he has some very basic instincts about who he hates and

who he loves and who he loves as himself and his immediate family.

And so I think the people around him who manage him appeal to those instincts.

And therefore, with Israel, what they want,

they get by animating him against Netanyahu.

And what they want in Russia, in Ukraine, they get by animating him against Putin.

That's a good point.

I know that.

Zelensky canceled the opposition parties and elections, and I can understand why he did it, but although Churchill and Roosevelt didn't do it in World War II, but that would have been just inconceivable in Israel.

I mean, Israel brought in a war cabinet of two members of the opposition.

And

there's something there that I can't quite fathom.

And

it's almost inexplicable.

Let me ask you a question about the protests, because there are a lot of them are going on in New York.

I don't quite understand this mentality.

I understand it, but

maybe I could ask your take on it.

This

crybaby Hamas mentality where you have all these young people, both Americans and foreign students, they shut down the Manhattan Bridge, they shut down the Bay Bridge, they shut down the Golden Gate Bridge, they chase students, Jewish students, into Cooper Union, they deface the

Veterans Cemetery in Los Angeles, anything, any disrupt St.

Patrick's on Easter.

So they're sort of, they see themselves as glorious 1968 European revolutionaries or Bolsheviks.

And then when there's the tiniest bit of accountability

at Vanderbilt, the woman says, well, you can't do this.

She needs to change her tampon in the bathroom.

Or out here in Bakersfield, we have this Patel person.

She goes before the Bakersfield City.

It's about an hour from where I'm speaking.

And apparently she thinks it's something like Yale University.

So she insults all of the members of the city council.

And then she gets this Parthian shot where she says, and by the way, you should all be guillotined.

And we're going to come to your house and murder you.

And then two days later, she goes to court, and they charge her with 18 felony counts.

And she starts crying.

She just breaks into sobs.

This person was yelling and screaming.

And that.

And I was watching the people at Pomona College.

I was watching the people at Columbia.

They're almost like hothouse plants.

They're so tough and bullying, but they're actually really cowardly.

Or is it that they're upper middle class kids that are on this cursus of norm and they're afraid their parents will get angry, they won't get a job on Wall Street or a university?

What is it?

They're almost schizophrenic.

And

the same thing is true of the Middle East students.

If they come from the Middle East, are they afraid that they'll have to go back to Gaza or what?

Or they'll lose their Saudi oil money?

But they're a very strange bunch of revolutionaries.

Well, I think wherever they're from, whether they're from the Middle East or, you know, America or Australia or England, they're all from the same class.

They have more in common with each other than they do with the average person in their own country.

And they're spoiled, entitled brats who've been brought up by people.

There may be, you know, one or two kids in the family.

And they have had privileges beyond belief.

And they've gone to the best schools and they've always expected that they will.

And their parents have pandered to them

and looked after their neuroses.

And there's never really been any accountability.

And that woman, Patel, is a perfect example.

There she is in court, a quivering mess.

You know, you feel sorry for her, the poor thing.

And yet, she was just a monster when she was standing up in front of the courts.

And through history, you look,

you know, in Rwanda, some of the most vicious

genocidal maniacs were women, you know, from the,

they

can be incredibly cruel and vindictive because if people have never lived in the real world, in the real physical world, you know, they've never seen an animal killed, or they, you know, they might be vegetarians because they can't bear the cruelty to animals.

If they don't understand the impact of cruelty or death and life and, you know, what happens when you cut a tree down and it might hit you.

They don't understand those consequences of the physical world, and so nothing is anything means anything to them.

And they never understand that there are consequences because, in their kind of virtual life, there never have been consequences, there've never been punishment, they've always gotten away with it, they've always had their mistakes glossed over, they've never learned from their mistakes.

It's funny, you know, when I was a student, this was going on, although

I must give credit to the radical 60s generation.

They were a lot grungier and they were sort of dropout.

They weren't like the Harvard students right after October 7th.

Remember when Wall Street people said, I want their names.

I don't want to hire them.

And they all fell down and cried and said, this is so unfair.

I can't get a job in Wall Street.

But at least these guys didn't sell out until they were in their 30s and they were grungy and they were Maoist and they went to jail and

that baby boomer generation

had to deal with the greatest generation that ran the courts and they were pretty tough and they got felony a conviction.

But

this,

I've noticed what I'm trying to say is the present of Pomona or Vanderbilt,

when you just see a glimmer a little bit, It reminds me so much of the 60s when there was this crazy linguistics professor, very well known, widely published, named S.I.

Hayauakawa.

I don't know if you remember him.

And he was at San Francisco State.

And they made him interim.

He was this cranky conservative on the faculty senate.

And San Francisco State was out of control.

So they make him interim president, and he goes out, and they're all screaming and yelling.

And there's a rule you can't use amplified sound devices.

So he just, as a little,

he's a second generation Japanese American.

He had been in the camps at Manzazor, and he quietly goes over with scissors and cuts all of the cords.

I love it.

And then they ask him, and he talks like a linguist.

And I am now the president, and so I'm following protocol.

And this was illegal, so it will be punished.

And then they said, well, what are you going to do, the students that are mobbing here?

Well, they will be suspended.

And that will be the beginning, not the end of their travails.

They will be arrested and they will be incarcerated.

And

he had this little

camera shot, whatever you call it.

It was like a beret.

And it became famous.

Everybody started wearing them.

And then they elected, he was in his 70s, and they elected him to the California Senate for six years.

He slept through most of the proceedings, but he became a folk hero.

And then almost immediately, there was John Silbert, Boston.

and everybody or tech yeah he was everybody wanted to be like si hirokawa and that kind of crushed the whole thing.

You get the, you know, it's like Napoleon, you know, a whiff of grape shot.

You get the impression that if just one or two people stayed, it stood up, a college, they would be folk heroes, and then this whole thing would collapse.

It seems to me it would.

Yeah, wouldn't that be wonderful?

We need an SI Hirokawa.

Yes, and maybe you could deport one or two people too that were on a student visa.

The Columbia president,

I mean, I think she was MIT.

They said, well, all these students have

no go zones for Jewish students.

Why don't you expel them?

And she said, well, if we expelled them, they would lose their student visas and they might have to go back.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Any final thoughts about

before we conclude about where it's all going to end in the Middle East?

Look, I have no idea.

I just think that the sooner that there is a change of government, you know, for all the criticism of Donald Trump, you look at his foreign policy and you look at the consequences, you look at the Abraham Accords, which even the Biden administration was sort of inching towards emulating with Saudi Arabia.

I just think the only thing, everybody in the world, every bad actor in the world looks at America as weak and this is their opportunity.

So I don't think that there is going to be peace until Joe Biden is gone.

You know, every time he stumbles on the world stage, he just projects American weakness.

And I don't know if people in America understand how, what an impact he has.

I mean, the president doesn't really have that much of an impact, maybe, because your state or your local government has more impact.

But on the world stage, that America is just seen as, you know, the fall of the Roman Empire.

It's the end of America.

Because how on earth could

they elect someone like Joe Biden as their president?

And then, of course, Donald Trump doesn't have that good a reputation around the world either.

And so,

you know, the fact that the next election is two men,

you know, one who will be 82 and one who's heading up to 80, that again is a very bad projection of American strength.

So I think it's going to be a very dangerous time ahead.

But you would know much more about that from your understanding of history because it happens in cycles, doesn't it?

Wouldn't it?

It does.

Well,

the only redeeming feature of removing Biden would be that it's in

geostrategic, even nuclear poker, unpredictability is an asset.

And when you look at when Putin violated an international border, he did it under George Bush and Georgia Nosatia.

He did it under Obama and he did it under Biden.

He didn't do it under Trump.

And when Trump, when Jake Sullivan said, I think in that Foreign Affairs article, that the Middle East portfolio was sort of boring, it was so calm,

what he was really saying is that we inherited the Houthis as a terrorist organization designate,

and then we were out of the Iran deal, and we were kind of tough on Hezbollah.

We killed Soleimani.

We moved the embassy to Jerusalem.

We said the Golden Heights.

And there was no daylight between us and Israel, even though, and there was nothing like comparable the Afghanistan humiliation or the Chinese balloon travesty.

So people, and then there was my button is bigger than your button with North Korea.

So there was this sense that Donald Trump was despised abroad, but he was also secretly, I don't want to say admired, I don't know you want to say feared, but he was respected as somebody that if you tried to do something to the United States, you had no idea what he would do.

And even the critics that thought they were going to convey to the world that we were sober and judicious because there were men like Mark Milley and they weren't all like Donald Trump, they had the opposite effect.

They were basically saying to the world, we've got a madman that we can't constrain.

And that...

that actually helped deterrence.

It was like Nixon, Kissinger in his memoirs, he has a great passage where Nixon comes to him during the Christmas bombing of 72 and he says, I'm going to be the madman, and you've got to restrain me.

And you're going to just have to say that I rail and I scream and yell, and I just want to keep bombing.

So Kissinger goes over and he tells the North Vietnamese and all of the Russians and everything.

I can't constrain him.

He's absolutely completely nuts.

He's walking around the White House corridors at night.

He's capable of doing anything.

And it was all concocted, but

it did have a temporary advantage.

So Film brings that.

He's got an animal cunning that people really underestimate about human nature.

I had a kind of a high-ranking foreign leader once said to me, no man has done

more.

I don't want to give away anything, but it was just a person who was prominent in political affairs.

And he was remarking about Israel.

And he said, nobody has done more for Israel and known less about the Middle East than Donald Trump.

And then he he said, why is that?

And I said, well, I think if you and I wanted to be a real estate developer in Manhattan and deal with unions, environmentalists, and minorities, and the mayor, and Walston, I don't think any of us could do it.

Maybe that's, you think that's what explains his ability that

he's been in that arena so long in New York?

Absolutely.

And he told me an anecdote once, which I haven't yet used, but it was brilliant.

I was trying to find out from him what the nickname was that he had chosen for Ron DeSantis, because he was very proud that

he managed not to divulge it.

But

anyway, he said, I said, because that nickname that you gave for Jeb Bush absolutely killed him.

It did.

So he told the story of what happened.

He was in New York and he had a Chinese guy that he said, I'd stiffed him.

He was quite honest about it.

He'd stiffed him on a deal.

And he's sitting over the boardroom in his office and they're having breakfast.

and he said this chinese gangster is like shouting at him and you said bits of scrambled eggs coming out of his mouth spit spit spit and the guy was a killer you know so this is a pretty torrid time that donald trump has and he has to get on a plane and fly out to a debate against jeb bush and the others of them and he said he was just standing on stage he just looks over at them and he thinks you know you guys are just such weak insipid people and here i am you know i've just come from battle with this gangster and so he just he just said what he said he said low energy jeb because he's not the the spitting gangster with the scrambled incoming out of his mouth once you've once you've tackled that these guys on stage these gop milquetoasts are nothing so i think i i think you're right

my wife wasn't going he i mean she didn't she wasn't fond of him and then she's now a big supporter of him but at the initial point she wasn't.

And she said to me, he was on stage

and she said to me,

and why does he have to say little Marco?

And she burst out laughing.

Why does he have to say, but she didn't want to.

So she went through all lying.

She goes, and then he says, lying, Ted Cruz.

There was always an element that he had so exact, that there was that element there that resonated.

And so I said, well, if you hate him so much, why are you burst out laughing when you're trying to tell me I should hate him too?

And you find it funny.

And she said, I don't know what it is, but it's childish, but it works.

You see, and that I can't, he understood something about it.

I mean, you shouldn't have the president of the United States calling people low energy, lying, little Marco, et cetera.

But there was something about

as well.

Like he's, you know, he gets from New York that kind of Borsch Belt humor, which slaps it.

It's hilarious.

It's brutal.

But everyone understands it.

Who understands it?

But the media and European Europhiles in America just deliberately refuse.

They pretend they don't understand, or maybe they really don't.

They have no sense of humor.

But

they say now that he uses his humor as a weapon.

But I mean,

he does use humor as a tool, certainly.

No, he does.

He does.

And he's,

I remember that debate.

I thought he was going to win the nomination.

I wrote about it when he, at that, I think it was the first or second, when Rand Paul, they asked Rand Paul about the nexus between money and politics.

And Rand Paul said, and he pointed to Donald Trump and he said, there it is, and basically went on and ran.

And Trump said,

he's right.

He's come up to my office and he's asked me for $10,000.

I gave it to him.

And he's been very subservient and helpful ever since.

And, you know, nobody had ever done that before.

And when he got on stage and he said, he said, yeah, Russia, please, you know, spy on

emails.

You know, and they turned that into the Russia hoax.

And he did.

And he said, and sometimes it

boomerangs when he said he'd like to be, he said, I'd like to be dictator just for one day to get executive orders.

And then that is everybody.

has been told he's admitted he wants to be, including Joe Biden.

But maybe, Miranda, you can come on right before the convention.

How's that?

Yeah, that'd be great.

Well, thank you.

Thank you to Milwaukee, actually.

Well, thank you for being with us.

We've been with Miranda Devine, who is the New York Post famous columnist.

We read her every single day and absolutely fearless.

And we appreciate her being with us today.

Thank you, Miranda.

Thanks so much, Victor.

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