May 8, 2022 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| There was a, uh, a, uh, black officer who wanted to start an organization, an internal organization where only black people, and then he would have preferred only black gay people could come to a meeting, right? | ||
| So in other words, on government property with inside Langley, you had to be black and you had to be gay in order to come to those meetings. | ||
| Now, I don't even know how many people would fit the bill there, maybe like seven or eight. | ||
| So I'm not sure what you've done at that meeting, but nevertheless, Uh, the point is there was this very clearly discriminatory, uh, request by an officer who should have known better. | ||
| Uh, but he made the request and the office of general counsel had to come in and say, no, that is wildly inappropriate. | ||
| We're not doing that. | ||
| And he was actually livid. | ||
| I mean, he was livid, uh, that he had to be told no, and to be reminded of the law. | ||
| So that kind of woke ism stuff matched with, I think some of the PR stuff you see coming out of the CIA these days. | ||
| You may recall that young woman in the Twitter video saying that she was a What was this? | ||
| A bisexual or lesbian Latina who has ADHD. | ||
| Oh yeah, she had a little of everything. | ||
|
unidentified
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She went through the woke Olympics, you know, list. | |
| So that, I'm sorry to say, has really become the younger culture and, you know, folks who are a little bit older who came through, I think, the era, frankly, of the 90s, such as yourself and myself, that the Gen Xers were like, look, we don't care who you are, just coming to do the work. | ||
| We want to treat everybody with respect and equal opportunity, but it's now, like, you now have to believe what I do, and if you don't, you're a bigot, or a racist, or a homophobe, etc. | ||
| And that's new, and that's only been in the past, sort of, five to ten years. | ||
| really started under the Obama years. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is a former CIA officer and host of the new podcast, | ||
| The President's Daily Brief. | ||
| Brian Dean Wright, welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Pleasure is always my friend. | ||
| Brian, you've been on a couple of times. | ||
| I know you a bit outside of the show. | ||
| I did not know you were the president. | ||
| Is there something I've been missing here? | ||
| Well, it was, I started first with a local group of dog owners as the president of that club. | ||
| And I've moved all the way to the White House. | ||
| In my mind, and it's great. | ||
| Just me and Joe, and we're working on a Hunter's laptop. | ||
| It's gonna be all fixed up. | ||
| Don't you worry about that. | ||
| The President's Daily Brief, that's the name of the show. | ||
| You have a real pedigree in the CIA that I want to talk about for people that have not seen some of your other appearances on my show. | ||
| I want to recap some of that stuff. | ||
| But let's just off the name of the new show, The President's Daily Brief. | ||
| I'm not a big believer in this guy. | ||
| Something does not seem right with this guy. | ||
| I'm starting to think this guy may not be in charge. | ||
| Is this your way of kind of getting in, and in case something happens, saying, hey, I'm here, I've got the title of the show, et cetera? | ||
| I wasn't thinking about that, but now that you mention it, yes, and I'm ready to serve, because let's be honest, Kamala's number two, and that's also a hot mess. | ||
| And then we got Pelosi. | ||
| We all know where that's going. | ||
| So yeah, it's me. | ||
| I'm ready. | ||
| It's you, it's you. | ||
| All right, for people that don't know you, we'll link to the original interview below if they want the full recap. | ||
| But can you just give me a little of the Brian Dean Wright 101, a little bit of your history in the CIA? | ||
| And then also, we have a sort of similar political path that we should get into a bit as well. | ||
| So I began my career with the CIA just after the 9-11 attacks. | ||
| It was October of 2001. | ||
| Uh, you know, we, we were all panicked, uh, as we all started our young careers is, you know, folks who love this country. | ||
| We had just been hit in the face. | ||
| Nobody quite knew exactly who, when, and, and, uh, you know, where abroad that we might be hit from next. | ||
| So that really kicked off my career at the agency. | ||
| And I was there for a good number of years, focused on weapons of mass destruction and counter-terrorism as most of us did, uh, focused a little bit in, uh, Asia, uh, can't get into particulars and then also in Africa. | ||
| And it was an amazing career and I had a great, great time doing it and been fortunate to actually teach the next cadre or next generation of officers as well. | ||
| So I've had a really, really fun career. | ||
| And then towards the very end, got introduced to a few different people to include you and had a great opportunity that was just by lucky happenstance to start talking about different issues in the world, particularly national security. | ||
| And here we are with a podcast and I'm really excited. | ||
| How tough is it to make that transition? | ||
| Because CIA, you gotta be somebody that can't drop all the secrets all the time. | ||
| And then next thing you know, you're talking on camera, doing a podcast. | ||
| How do you blend those two things? | ||
| Spent 20 years avoiding cameras and attention, and now here I am. | ||
| It's an odd transition. | ||
| You know, I think if you talk to anybody who has really been a true operator, they understand the importance of being anonymous, you know, unlike, let's say, James Bond or, you know, those characters. | ||
| The idea is that you go into somewhere and you start blowing stuff up. | ||
| The idea is you go in, you're very quiet, you're discreet, you do what you need to do. | ||
| And then you leave and actually no one ever knows. | ||
| So if you're pointing out a gun or you're tossing a bomb, like something's gone pretty wrong, right? | ||
| So, uh, but the, the idea of then sitting in front of a camera and engaging people, yes, was absolutely odd. | ||
| But I will tell you that in many ways that the job has a lot of, um, parallels in that if you do it well, and if you do it right, and, and with all truly, I think you're one of them. | ||
| You, you really can capture people's hearts and minds. | ||
| And you can move people. | ||
| And I think with intelligence, you can do that with your listeners or your, your viewers, uh, you know, if you're briefing the president, right? | ||
| So the president's daily brief is an actual brief given to the president United States every morning by our spies and analysts. | ||
| And you can capture the president's attention, not only with what's happening in the world, um, but how do we solve the problems and, and why he or she should care about those problems. | ||
| So, uh, I think in that sense, there are some parallels and I'm really excited to bring. | ||
| that kind of background to this podcast and bring listeners that same focus, that same piece of critical information every morning. | ||
| So I actually wanna talk about the real president's brief that you just mentioned, as well as whether you think Joe is actually reading it, or whether they even bother handing it to him, or even if they're printing it at this point. | ||
| But putting that aside for a second, it struck me as you were saying that, that if five years ago, And I had you on probably maybe three or four years ago. | ||
| But if, let's say, five or even seven years ago I had had a former CIA officer on, my feeling about the CIA as an institution would be very different than it is right now. | ||
| And I think a lot of people feel that. | ||
| And it's not with any great pleasure I say that. | ||
| I suspect for you with a lot of displeasure. | ||
| Can you talk about what has sort of happened to the agencies? | ||
| Like, we see this woke thing infecting absolutely everything. | ||
| I mean, the CIA, the FBI, the military, they're tweeting about woke stuff more than seemingly doing whatever it is that they are supposed to do, even if we're not supposed to know all that stuff. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, man, I'll tell you that there are two things that I think folks should really be focusing on. | ||
| The first is the weaponization of the intelligence community. | ||
| You know, we knew back in May of 2017, James Comey, the FBI director at the time, acknowledged that he had leaked sensitive classified information to a cutout to the New York Times with the only goal of basically hammering Donald Trump, getting a new special counsel to investigate the Russia collusion allegations. | ||
| Now, Comey knew back then, and unfortunately we were only learning in the last number of years, that that was garbage. | ||
| Right, so we saw that in the FBI. | ||
| We later saw it with a guy named Kevin Clinesmith, who was a very senior FBI official who falsified evidence to a court to get surveillance or continue surveillance on Carter Page. | ||
| So I think that had you told me that seven years ago, that that was in the realm of possible, I would have, to be honest with you, I would have laughed you out of the room. | ||
| Because what I knew to be true is that we had people who were committed to the rule of law, whether it be the FBI or the CIA, we were committed to our oaths. | ||
| To be nonpolitical, apolitical, certainly when we walked through those front doors and we were focused on mission. | ||
| But that has been completely and utterly annihilated. | ||
| That is to say, my belief that the intelligence community and the FBI are not political. | ||
| They are. | ||
| We have proof. | ||
| We have evidence. | ||
| It's painful because the very moment that we are facing this massive challenge with China, this huge issue with Russia, We actually need a really good, healthy, functional intelligence community and law enforcement community. | ||
| And on the federal level, we just, we don't have it. | ||
| I can't tell you or the folks watching that they've got the kind of government that they deserve, because I don't think that they do. | ||
| Do you know when that started there? | ||
| Because now we're seeing it more obviously, but it didn't just start because they started tweeting about this stuff six months ago, obviously. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I'll tell you, I think, candidly, politics aside, I think during the Obama years, you started seeing a lot of people misunderstanding that they were there to be of service to their country, and instead those agencies, and ultimately their country, is supposed to be of service to them. | ||
| I mean, Jack Kennedy said it very famously many decades ago. | ||
| That started to change, I think, culturally in the Obama years, because it was really about me, it was about the self, you know, my truth, and celebrating that. | ||
| And so we went, I think, from, you know, the early 2000s when, you know, people were saying very clearly, look, it doesn't matter if you're gay or straight or Christian or Muslim or black and white, just come in and be of service, leave your politics at the door. | ||
| So that was, I think, where most of us would be, is to say, yeah, get the equal opportunity that's focused on mission. | ||
| And now it's become, instead of mission, or really at the same level of mission, tell me what you're passionate about, what your interests are. | ||
| Like, tell me your story and your truth. | ||
| Stuff that's not mission critical, but it's being treated as such and I can tell you a couple amazing stories on the inside of the agency about how this the racial work piece is really Detrimental or playing a profoundly detrimental role in mission criticalness Give me one of those. | ||
| All right, so there was an individual anyone yeah, a lot of unfortunately, there was a a Black officer who wanted to start an organization an internal organization Where only black people, and then he would have preferred, only black gay people could come to a meeting, right? | ||
| So in other words, on government property with inside Langley, you had to be black and you had to be gay in order to come to those meetings. | ||
| Now, I don't even know how many people would have fit the bill there, maybe like seven or eight, so I'm not sure what you've done at that meeting, but nevertheless, the point is there was this very clearly discriminatory request by an officer who should have known better, but he made the request And the Office of General Counsel had to come in and say, no, that is wildly inappropriate. | ||
| We're not doing that. | ||
| And he was actually livid. | ||
| I mean, he was livid that he had to be told no, and to be reminded of the law. | ||
| So that kind of wokeism stuff matched with, I think, some of the PR stuff you see coming out of the CIA these days. | ||
| You may recall that young woman in the Twitter video saying that she was a, what was this? | ||
| Bisexual or lesbian, Latina, who has ADHD. | ||
| Oh yeah, she had a little of everything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
She went through the woke Olympics, you know, list. | |
| So that, I'm sorry to say, has really become the younger culture and, you know, folks who are a little bit older who came through, I think, the era, frankly, of the 90s, such as yourself and myself, that the Gen Xers were like, look, we don't care who you are, just come in and do the work. | ||
| We want to treat everybody with, you know, respect and equal opportunity, but it's now, like, you now have to believe what I do, and if you don't, you're a bigot or a racist or a homophobe, etc. | ||
| And that's new, and that's only been in the past sort of five to ten years, really started under the Obama years. | ||
| Are you shocked that the institutions didn't have better defenses against this? | ||
| I've asked this to many guests from many different disciplines, usually at the education level, that you'd think that some of the STEM subjects would have had better defenses. | ||
| People were like, ah, yeah, of course, you know, lesbian dance theory was gonna go down, but, you know, math, perhaps, or biology, that should have been okay, but now we're seeing it across there. | ||
| Are you surprised that our actual, I mean, these are our most highest elite Security services now are going down, that they did not have some failsafe in there? | ||
| Look, am I surprised? | ||
| Yeah, I think most people in this country right now are not just surprised but shocked, right? | ||
| I think most people want to be reasonable and want to be compassionate about, you know, welcoming different people into their families, into their communities. | ||
| But we're seeing that go well beyond any degree of reason. | ||
| And so I think the CIA, you're seeing a reflection of what people are experiencing outside of Langley, in their own families, in their own communities. | ||
| They're feeling that pressure to sort of conform. | ||
| And then they're being told from the top down from the president's office, him or herself, like, you have to do this. | ||
| And they're like, well, I'm not gonna be fired. | ||
| So I guess I have to, you know, go along with it. | ||
| And that's what I think you're seeing. | ||
| Even the very, very smart, very, very critical thinking people are starting to fall into this trap because they're gonna lose their job if they don't. | ||
| When you saw the 51, I believe it was, former intelligence officers who all said that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian misinformation or disinformation, they all said it without having seen it, okay? | ||
| When you saw that, so let's go back, Before it's been debunked, but when it originally came out, I'm talking during the election, when they all came out and said that, conveniently enough right before the election, what was your take then compared to now? | ||
| Both then and now my reaction was the same. | ||
| There is absolutely no way to know unless you do a forensic analysis of whether or not that laptop, A, belonged to Hunter Biden, and B, if there was any additional information added that would be thus disinformation or propaganda or part of some sort of covert action op by the Russians, the Chinese, whoever it might be. | ||
| So to immediately come out and just dismiss it was absurd. | ||
| And what it showed me was that those people on that list were partisans. | ||
| They were using the stink, as it were, of working at the CIA, being an intelligence officer, to go out to the American people with some degree of gravitas, like they're sort of mini James Bond or whoever it might be, and so you're going to take them seriously. | ||
| And so they abused their professional histories to make this partisan point. | ||
| And so again, we saw this, by the way, not just with the Hunter Biden laptop. | ||
| We saw this with the Steele dossier. | ||
| That's perhaps even more egregious years prior to that, when I think you could say, where's the point where we really started seeing this publicly? | ||
| You had a whole bunch of intelligence officials who damn well know better that when you get information, which was what was inside the Steele dossier, which is from Russia, right? | ||
| That you have to tread very, very cautiously around Russian intel because of the likelihood that it has been fed, in this case, to Steele, the British spy. | ||
| So when you had people saying, oh, the Steele dossier is true, it's gotta be true. | ||
| That's when I was like, all right, this whole thing has been cooked. | ||
| This is absolutely members of the IC wanting to be part of the Hillary Clinton administration or the Joe Biden administration now who are trying to gain favor and they're using their backgrounds to do so. | ||
| And it's just infuriating because ultimately what happens and what has happened is the American people lose faith | ||
| in the intelligence community. | ||
| They lose faith in the law enforcement community and rightfully so. | ||
| And so when that happens, you got a whole bunch of people with lots of profound powers who don't actually have | ||
| the support of the American people, they start acting basically with impunity because they can. | ||
| It's just a country start falling apart when this stuff happens. | ||
| And that's the part that I'm so profoundly afraid of. | ||
| Right, so I try not to be a crazy alarmist on this show. | ||
| Try, maybe I fail at it, but I try not to be. | ||
| But it seems to me that's kind of where we're at because when the 51 intelligence officers | ||
| Officers, in essence. | ||
| Former... Propagandists. | ||
| Propagandists. | ||
| I was trying to be nice. | ||
| Thank you for cleaning that up for me. | ||
| Yeah, you don't have to. | ||
| When those 51 propagandists were exposed as such, meaning the New York Times finally, a year and a half later, everyone knows this now, a month and a half ago or so, finally said, yeah, yeah, the laptop is real, by the way. | ||
| Did anyone get called into an office? | ||
| Did anyone get fired from a consulting gig they got? | ||
| Did anyone get fired from a lobbying firm or anything? | ||
| I suspect not. | ||
| And that goes to your point about the trust. | ||
| It's like, I think they sort of feel like they can get away with anything, because they can get away with anything. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, and there was a report out some time back that the Joe Biden administration has actually encouraged and allowed this junk intel to go out about Ukraine. | ||
| I mean, all because he wants to try to encourage the American people to embrace greater involvement in the war. | ||
| So you are having this intelligence fiasco after fiasco. | ||
| And at some level, I think a reasonable person says, I've had enough. | ||
| Whenever you say American intelligence assesses, I'm not gonna believe it. | ||
| And I can't tell those people right now, particularly with the current leadership, that they're wrong. | ||
| And that's really sad for a guy who spent most of his life in the world of intelligence. | ||
| Let's shift that a little bit to what you just mentioned there. | ||
| So this Russia-Ukraine situation, I actually have not covered it a ton on the show. | ||
| I was very honest with my audience from the beginning. | ||
| I was kind of like, this whole thing, Reads very weird to me. | ||
| The whole setup, the Biden laptop piece of it. | ||
| Suddenly, we all got to hate Russia. | ||
| I'm not defending Russia. | ||
| You can't just invade a sovereign nation. | ||
| But it just felt like so much propaganda that I've bounced around it a little bit. | ||
| And I've talked about the after effects, meaning inflation and gas and things like that. | ||
| And I've tried to talk about what we should do, perhaps, and shouldn't do. | ||
| But I'm not doing the daily thing. | ||
| with Russia and Ukraine. | ||
| How are you able to assess information properly? | ||
| Because I think people are just, you know, you put the Ukrainian flag in your Twitter avatar, everybody else is an evil Nazi. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| I suspect it's not quite that simple. | ||
| Oh dear. | ||
| No. | ||
| Uh, so you know, you know that you're caught in a hysteria when, and this is true, both of the major marathons in this country have banned runners from Ukraine or Russia. | ||
| I should say Russia or Belarus from running, right? | ||
| So we're banning marathon runners because of their national identity, right? | ||
| And we're pouring out, you know, we're renaming chicken Kiev and it's chicken Kiev. | ||
| It's stop. | ||
| All right. | ||
| It's we are. | ||
| This is hysteria defined. | ||
| So I think that it's important for people like me to speak to these issues around war | ||
| and peace and including in Ukraine, knowing that there is a fog of war issue. | ||
| So when I talk about Ukraine or any other places around the world, I'm going to be very careful to make sure that I have medium or high degree of confidence in what I'm sharing with people. | ||
| Now, this issue of confidence is one that is very familiar to anybody who's worked in the intelligence community. | ||
| You don't put out to policy makers or the public low confidence information. | ||
| Low confidence information means that you haven't vetted it or the person, right? | ||
| You haven't compared that report that that spy is giving you | ||
| to maybe you've captured an email or a phone call or you've gotten other spies | ||
| who are confirming the same information. | ||
| So in other words, there's this issue of confidence. | ||
| You want to give policy makers medium to high degree of confidence in your assessments. | ||
| I do that the same, I have that same focus, it's in spirit when I talk about the things | ||
| on the President's Daily Brief, the podcast, and that's what the intelligence community | ||
| should be doing right now on the issues of Ukraine and others, but that's not what's happening. | ||
| Again, this report that came out not too terribly long ago that confirmed the Biden administration is putting out low confidence intel, gossip, rumors to the American press about what's happening in the Ukraine. | ||
| For example, the story that Russia was going to utilize chemical or biological weaponry, | ||
| that story came out in February into March. | ||
| There was actually no intelligence that said that that would happen. | ||
| Now it could still in the future, or perhaps as we're speaking, it just has. | ||
| But the point is at the moment when they gave that story to the American people and to the | ||
| world, it wasn't true. | ||
| So when you start doing that, when you start just pumping out low confidence information, | ||
| it's probably just gossip and rumors, you do this horrible thing of undermining confidence | ||
| in the intelligence community. | ||
| And oh, by the way, Dave, we did this before. | ||
| Do you remember in the run up in the war of Iraq, we started that war because of weapons | ||
| of mass destruction. | ||
| That was the story that was sold to people. | ||
| We had low confidence that that was true, by the way. | ||
| It was based on one guy, the operation was Curveball, and Curveball was a big old liar. | ||
| And it was the responsibility of the intelligence community to vet that person and their information to say, nope, that was a lie. | ||
| Didn't Colin Powell say there was a rod? | ||
| I thought Colin Powell went in front of Congress and said he saw a rod or something. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, sure. | ||
| Well, I'm sure they all saw lots of things after they were wrong, namely their retirements. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But the issue is, so now the intelligence community, when I was at the CIA, we all were burned by that case. | ||
| And we said to each other, particularly the analysts, never again, never again are we going to be allowed to pump out low competence, low confidence garbage intel into the world because we're going to get ourselves in trouble again. | ||
| we're gonna cause trillion dollar wars with hundreds of thousands of people dead like in Iraq, | ||
| or thousands and thousands of our soldiers and airmen and the rest who come home without arms | ||
| and legs and their minds are broken. | ||
| Like that's the legacy of putting out garbage intel and Joe Biden is doing it again in the Ukraine. | ||
| What do you make of what I would argue is the absolutely extraordinary level of incompetence of this administration when it comes to the messaging? | ||
| So for example, when just a couple weeks ago there was suddenly this rumor that they were going to use, Russia was going to use chemical weapons. | ||
| I did not bother saying a word about it because it just felt nonsensical to me because why wouldn't you in a war of propaganda just be like, yeah, the other guy is going to use chemical weapons. | ||
| That's a pretty good move. | ||
| But then Joe Biden was asked a question about chemical weapons, and he said if he uses them, we'll respond in kind. | ||
| Now, I don't think he has the greatest understanding of what he's saying on any given moment, especially when it's completely off-prompter, but that everything they say. | ||
| We did an incredible compilation on my show a couple weeks ago of the mixed messaging related to sanctions. | ||
| Sanctions will stop them. | ||
| Sanctions do nothing. | ||
| Sanctions do a little. | ||
| Sanctions do a lot. | ||
| Everybody, from the president to Psaki to Kamala to the whole crew, just saying every version of everything. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You were highlighting the inconsistencies, the American people see the inconsistencies. | ||
| And that's why at this present moment, Joe Biden's approval numbers are about those of a really bad case of hemorrhoids. | ||
| And so it makes sense that the American people are, they see through it. | ||
| We all see through it. | ||
| And it ultimately beyond the political ramifications for the rest of this year, for instance, in the run-up to the midterm elections, it also has profound implications in terms of our relationships with people abroad. | ||
| Because for instance, when we start sharing bits and pieces of intelligence, is that really true? | ||
| And we're asking these countries to do things on our behalf because of this intelligence, right? | ||
| So that's the cost from our national security perspective, when they're putting out bogus information, or they're putting out stuff that's even inconsistent with their own values. | ||
| So if Joe Biden says that we're going to respond in kind with chemical weaponry, are they going to pause and say, well, we don't want to hitch our nation's wagon To this country, America right now, because it's being led by a crazy person who obviously is mentally incapacitated to some degree and clearly is not able to make good decisions or can't even put out the right words to do so. | ||
| So there's there's pretty serious national security ramifications to his mumblings. | ||
| And we all see it. | ||
| It's reflected in the approval numbers. | ||
| But I guarantee you when capital is around the world right now, they see it, too. | ||
| How do we reverse some of this stuff? | ||
| Because, okay, we could all say, all right, the errors always seem to be in the Democrats' favor or the leaks are always to the New York Times in the favor of the Democrats, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| But this isn't just, okay, elect more Republicans and you're going to save the intelligence services, right? | ||
| I mean, what is the solution? | ||
| Well, you know, I mentioned Jack Kennedy earlier. | ||
| He has a pretty famous quote that I love and I embrace and it's, uh, you know, when we seek out solutions, let us not seek the democratic answer, the Republican answer, but the right answer. | ||
| And I think that most reasonable people in this country understand that that's really how you should govern. | ||
| Uh, and that's how you should lead your own families, not necessarily in terms of your politics, but you look for the right way to do things based on, you know, reason and critical thinking. | ||
| So the issue then is at this moment in time, Do we have two parties or two movements or another party that we're not considering beyond the Democrats, Republicans who are committed to critical thinking to, to reason, or is one of them just so wildly off the mark that we just have to say, look, for right now, those people are too crazy. | ||
| And that for me, uh, that decision was very obvious about a year ago. | ||
| I left the Democrat party. | ||
| I became a Republican. | ||
| Not because of any profound affection or affinity for Republicanism in general, although I've always been a conservative. | ||
| But the point is, we actually have people on the left right now, the Democrat party, which I've been a part of for a long time, was, my family, who are saying critical thinking's bad. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right? | |
| Reason is bad. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because those are things that white people do. | ||
| And white is bad. | ||
| That's not hyperbole, by the way. | ||
| They're saying this. | ||
| You know this. | ||
| You've spoken about this eloquently. | ||
| So if that's part of the answer that people are, when they have to go to the ballot box and they're saying, okay, do I want elected people who don't think that reason or critical thinking is a good thing? | ||
| In fact, it's a bad thing because it's white. | ||
| Like, no, it doesn't even matter what the rest of their solutions are. | ||
| Those people are crazy. | ||
| And I'm not going to to vote for them. | ||
| Now, you very again eloquently talk about that the left is, you know, mentally bonkers. | ||
| They're mentally ill. | ||
| And that's true. | ||
| The party is full of these folks. | ||
| And because they are so full of these sort of panicked, hysterical ways of thinking that they're not responsible enough to govern. | ||
| There are some Democrats still who are reasonable, but they choose to be quiet. | ||
| right? Some of the blue dogs for instance, they have chosen to just be quiet, to go along, to get | ||
| along. And that's just not enough, right? I mean there aren't enough of them and they certainly | ||
| aren't speaking up to say, yep, all right, they're crazy elements, but I'm going to give them a shot. | ||
| Because those people are not in leadership, and they never will be. | ||
| So that's exactly why I said at the beginning that we've had similar political evolutions, because you were a Democrat most of your life, and you've probably heard me say it, but my new line that I've been saying for about a year and a half now is, you don't have to be a Republican, but you cannot be a Democrat. | ||
| That seems like the honest assessment. | ||
| It does not mean that these guys are right and they screw up an awful lot of stuff. | ||
| But as AOC said, you don't have to be factually right, you have to be morally correct. | ||
| That is some dangerous, dangerous stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, it's reflective of her political movement, which is not liberalism, it's Marxism. | ||
| And she's very clear, although she hides it on occasion or dresses it up in TikTok dance videos to make people think that it's cute and fun. | ||
| But you are absolutely right. | ||
| You have called this out consistently and folks watching know that that is absolutely the truth. | ||
| Because we have eyes and ears and we listen to people on the left right now. | ||
| You know, the video that went around some time back of, you know, I think it was Dennis Prager who went on the Bill Maher show a number of years ago and was talking about this idea of the trans movement and that right now, you know, a bunch of people are saying that men can menstruate. | ||
| And what was so interesting is, of course, that Bill Maher and others were laughing at him at the absurdity that anybody would propose such a thing. | ||
| But it was also that the audience, the audience was laughing. | ||
| At, uh, the suggestion that men could menstruate. | ||
| And they all thought it was just this absurd thing. | ||
| These crazy right-wing people are saying, but it turns out he was right. | ||
| Both then and now, and other people are making this argument. | ||
| Look, look, you're not only, you're telling us that we can't think, or we can't think for ourselves. | ||
| I think can't think critically or with reason, but now you're actually telling us to abandon basic biology, basic facts. | ||
| And so the question is why, why are you having us do this? | ||
| Because this is crazy. | ||
| And so politically speaking, you're going to start losing a lot of people who otherwise identify as Democrats or moderate Democrats. | ||
| Even some progressives that I've talked to, and I'm sure you have as well, they're like, okay, I don't know where this is going or where it came from, but this is really weird. | ||
| They want to be embracing all kinds of different people and they want to create a lovely opportunity for folks to excel in life. | ||
| But this stuff of the magic closet where teachers right now are telling Trans kids that they can go into the secret closet with a teacher and swap out their clothes, but don't tell mom and dad. | ||
| I mean, come on. | ||
| That's ridiculous. | ||
| That kind of stuff. | ||
| That's creepy. | ||
| It is grooming behavior and it's wildly inappropriate. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And people are more upset with the label grooming than actually what's going on in the freaking secret closet. | ||
| And to your point about Dennis Prager, that was probably a year and a half ago. | ||
| And, you know, just in the last couple weeks we confirmed a Supreme Court Justice who isn't a biologist, so she has no freaking clue what the difference between a male and a female is. | ||
| But okay, so let's, if someone's listening to this and they're like, alright, I won't vote for Democrats, at least for now, I'll vote for Republicans. | ||
| So now we get all the Republicans in, we get the red wave that I pray will happen, because we need it at least for now. | ||
| What will they do that will fix the intelligence agencies? | ||
| I mean, what really is that? | ||
| Are we just cleaning house, firing? | ||
| You know, you hear some people just fire everybody or close. | ||
| I mean, I hear people talking about just close them all. | ||
| Just get rid of everybody. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, look, I think all options have to be on the table. | ||
| And I think that you have to understand that within the Department of Defense, the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA, there is a history of doing a pretty profound investigation, as it were, panels on the, And I think that that's where you need to start. | ||
| There was a church committee back in the 1970s when there were all kinds of horrible things | ||
| in the intelligence community the CIA was doing. | ||
| They had these conversations where they said, look, you guys are out of control and here's | ||
| what we need to do to fix it. | ||
| So in other words, let's acknowledge there's a problem and then let's talk about how we | ||
| fix the problem. | ||
| And I think that that's where you need to start. | ||
| And I think Republicans would be very, very wise in both the House and the Senate to have | ||
| those series of investigative conversation, those panels, those committee conversations, | ||
| and probably many months long where you just start airing some dirty laundry inside the | ||
| Some of the bad things that they would probably otherwise, uh, folks want, you know, they don't want us to know about, put it out there and let's have, uh, you know, some solutions based on how bad the rot is. | ||
| This is happening, by the way, in the military, that they're becoming super woke as well. | ||
| I I've had the great fortune of working with folks in the military for a good number of years. | ||
| They see it too. | ||
| I've seen it too there. | ||
| So this is broad and we need to have some really good oversight diving into this issue. | ||
| It's not just the woke stuff. | ||
| It's how did it start? | ||
| Who embraces it? | ||
| Moving those people who aren't focused on mission and then, you know, rising other individuals up into positions of authority and influence who I don't care if they're Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, whatever. | ||
| They have an exclusive understanding of mission, right? | ||
| A faithful commitment to law and order, and that they take an oath and they understand what that means, and that is to be of service to the American people and to the mission, and they leave politics behind. | ||
| That's what has to be reinstilled into the intelligence community, FBI, the CIA, NSA, and also our military. | ||
| How do you do that? | ||
| You got to remove some people. | ||
| Unquestionably, that's going to happen. | ||
| Do you look at folding, you know, the FBI? | ||
| I'm open not to collapsing the entirety of it, but if you want to shift the mission, different parts of the National Security Division, for instance, to other places, let's talk about it. | ||
| I don't know what the solution is, but we need dramatic and complete reform. | ||
| What I always think sits behind a conversation like this, and I've had this type of conversation with you before, and I've had it with other people, and you've obviously had it with tons and tons of other people, is like, aren't you afraid to talk about some of this stuff? | ||
| Like, don't they put the drink, you know, the drop in the drink when you're looking the wrong way? | ||
| Or the litany of weird things, or drop information on you, or smear you, or go to the New York Times and lie. | ||
| I mean, the litany of things that they can do to anybody in a time, especially when it's fueled by algorithms and A media that's not an honest arbiter of truth. | ||
| I mean, you're saying some pretty, you know, it's some scary stuff that obviously some powerful people will not be thrilled to hear. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, not to be cliched about this, but if you remember with the founding of this country, when someone asked, I believe it was Benjamin Franklin, what kind of government that he and the rest of the founding fathers and mothers gave us, his response was a republic, if you can keep it right. | ||
| So explicit. | ||
| And that response from the very foundation of our government is, you have to get in there, roll up your sleeves, and get dirty. | ||
| And unfortunately, that getting dirty sometimes can be somebody sullying your reputation at worst, or doing you physical harm, or I should say best, and doing you physical harm at worst. | ||
| So yeah, I mean, has it crossed my mind? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Is it possible that there'll be some sort of deep AI smear campaign? | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| In fact, I think that's gonna hit not just You know, truth tellers, people who speak up and and tell the American people what's really going on. | ||
| But I think you're also going to see different politicians be hit by that. | ||
| That warning has been out for a number of years. | ||
| So I absolutely think that it's possible, maybe not on an official basis, but former officers who might not like me could decide to do little shenanigans. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But my my bottom line to anyone who's worrying about that is if we live in fear, we will be ruled by it. | ||
| So I'm not going to live in fear. | ||
| I know who I am. | ||
| I know I'm a good man. | ||
| I'm not a perfect man. | ||
| And if it is such that I end up getting hit or smeared by something, then by God, so be it. | ||
| Then somebody else is going to pick up the flag and they're going to grab that thing and they're going to keep running forward. | ||
| Because this place is exceptional. | ||
| This country is exceptional. | ||
| It's worth fighting for. | ||
| It is imperfect, but it's our job to make it better. | ||
| And I'm not going to be ruled by fear. | ||
| And I don't think people like you are either. | ||
| And what's awesome about people like you with your voice, people putting out incredible books like you are, you're telling people don't live in fear either. | ||
| Find alternatives, keep pushing, and do not stop because this place is worth saving. | ||
| That should be the end of the show, but we've still got some more time. | ||
| But that was a beautiful opus to end this thing on. | ||
| Now you've put a lot of pressure on yourself to end this thing properly. | ||
| Somebody give me a Lincoln speech. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Since we're sort of bouncing around with a whole bunch of stuff here, so let's just keep going then. | ||
| When it comes to the way The intelligence community deals with media and with big tech. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Um, what should we be thinking about worrying about? | ||
| So, you know, if we just back up to the, again, to the Biden laptop, it wasn't just the 51 CIA and intelligence officials. | ||
| It was also that Twitter got in on it. | ||
| So it's like, why has nobody said to Twitter, Hey, who, who decided that? | ||
| Did you guys have a meeting? | ||
| Is there an email record of that? | ||
| Maybe a calendar invite? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, you know, if is the ultimate question, how the heck do we get a, uh, a lasso on big tech and make sure that they're sticking to, you know, what they should be, which is, you know, the provider of opportunities to share speech versus sensors. | ||
| Um, there are very smart people working on this issue. | ||
| You are one with locals and, and, uh, other great solutions. | ||
| And I think that's what you do. | ||
| You start building your own infrastructure, uh, to reach people. | ||
| And that's going to take time. | ||
| That's going to take a lot of effort and a lot of money. | ||
| I think we're starting to see people who might not necessarily be an ideological partner in some ways, but guys like Elon Musk who are stepping up to the plate and saying, hey, here are my resources. | ||
| Not because I love, you know, conservatives or liberals, but damn it, there should be a platform for people to speak truth or their version of it. | ||
| And the answer to crazy talk is more sane talk. | ||
| Uh, and that's always been the actual liberal position. | ||
| You've talked about this. | ||
| That's the classic liberal position that has been abandoned by the left. | ||
| Um, and they've embraced tyranny and censorship, you know? | ||
| So I think that it is more of us recognizing what's happening, uh, and more people with influence, people like you, people with money like Elon Musk, finding market solutions to this problem. | ||
| And then it's about next fall, God willing, conservatives take over. | ||
| No matter if you agree or disagree on some of the other party platform positions, this has to be a central one. | ||
| And so when you go to vote, you make it very clear to the person you're voting for, in whatever way you do, that, look, I might not otherwise have voted for you, but this is an important issue to me, this censorship stuff. | ||
| It's really about our constitutional rights. | ||
| They're under assault. | ||
| Fix it. | ||
| And maybe I'll vote for you again, I don't know, but you deserve one shot to get this right because it's an existential problem and it's important to me. | ||
| You mean you don't necessarily deserve 60 years in the Senate like some of these people or in the House or whatever they're doing, not the senators, but the people in the House that are there forever. | ||
| Nancy Pelosi's been there 87 years, something like that. | ||
| It's just, it never ends. | ||
| Can you talk a little bit about generally how in politics, Uh, secrets remain secrets. | ||
| So, or things like, for example, things that we can see that we all can kind of see with our own eyes that somehow just never get discussed. | ||
| So the, the Biden cognitive stuff, it's obvious. | ||
| Everyone knows it. | ||
| Every single person that you mentioned to, you talk about it privately. | ||
| Everyone will admit something is not right there, but no one's allowed to talk about it on mainstream. | ||
| It's never brought up. | ||
| Meanwhile, if Trump was slurring every one of his words and making up stories and having these blips that just go completely awry, we would have 25th amended him, you know, seven times ago. | ||
| So what do we do? | ||
| How does that happen, I guess, is the question. | ||
| Not what do we do. | ||
| I have some ideas. | ||
| I just said one of them, the 25th amendment. | ||
| Look, I think if you look back in American history, there have been times when the media has stepped in to hide a deficiency of a leader. | ||
| So I'm thinking of Roosevelt and some of his physical challenges being in a wheelchair and so forth. | ||
| So it's not unprecedented. | ||
| The issue is, why are we hiding? | ||
| That is to say, why is the press hiding this thing that might otherwise be bad or perceived as bad in the world? | ||
| You know, for Roosevelt, it was about You know, would people view him as weak if he couldn't stand up on his own two feet, right? | ||
| And, but otherwise his mind, his decision making processes, the, the, the ability to surround himself with smart people and make good decisions for the country that was never in doubt. | ||
| So it was more of a, this is a private matter that made him sort of look less manly perhaps, or it was wrong. | ||
| Of course he was just as manly as he was ever in a wheelchair otherwise. | ||
| But at the time that was kind of the logic. | ||
| It was, A bit more of a genteel approach to a personal problem, right? | ||
| But that's not the case anymore. | ||
| The press is basically serving as the mouthpiece for different politicians, right? | ||
| So it's, I don't want this embarrassing thing about their infidelity or their cognitive impairment or the fact that they've taken on, you know, whatever degree of corruption, right? | ||
| They're insider trading with stocks, et cetera. | ||
| So now the press knows those things. | ||
| And if, The person who's created, engaged in the sin, for lack of a better word, I'm gonna hide it because they're on my team, right? | ||
| So the press has become part of a team. | ||
| And when you have that, and the data, by the way, supports that, we know that, for instance, that the press gives overwhelmingly to Democrats anywhere, depending on the poll, you look at 83, 85% to 95, 98%. | ||
| No matter where you look, it's overwhelming. | ||
| to 95, 98%, no matter where you look, it's overwhelming. | ||
| So they've chosen a team and are hiding the bad stuff that their team engages in. | ||
| That's what's different as compared to what's happened historically. | ||
| So how do you change that? | ||
| Matt, you just keep calling it out and the American people see it. | ||
| And what's happening is they're starting to gravitate to voices that they think are more reasonable. | ||
| So mainstream media is being challenged by, you know, sort of smaller voices, but that's great. | ||
| It's a marketplace of ideas. | ||
| It allows really, really smart people, yourself and others to stand up and say, Hey, look, Listen, here's my own bias. | ||
| I'm going to admit it. | ||
| Unlike some of the people in mainstream media, I'm going to tell you what my biases are and where I've come from as Brian, as a former Democrat, now Republican conservative, like, you know, that on the table, I'm not hiding any of that. | ||
| So let me present you the material. | ||
| I'm going to offer you my reflection, and then you can decide what to do with it or add it to other voices. | ||
| I think that's, what's going to just naturally happen and is already happening. | ||
| Are there any countries or security services, information services that are doing it significantly better? | ||
| Like if we get the right people in, is there anyone we can look at that is doing it right? | ||
| And we can be like, hey, borrow the manual that they have over there. | ||
| Now, I'm sorry to say that this issue of the politicization of media is widespread. | ||
| It's across the country and it's been bad in lots of places for a long time. | ||
| And I don't think anybody's got it right. | ||
| Anybody's doing it well. | ||
| Unfortunately. | ||
| So that means that we have to come up with the set of solutions. | ||
| And I think we're going to try different things here and some things are going to work and some things won't. | ||
| And that's all right. | ||
| But I think at the end of the day, my hope, and you hate to base a plan on this, is that there are going to be enough people in journalism and the owners and the editors who are like, look, we're losing audience share and they're going to other places and listening to other people because we are such I would love to think that that's possible. | ||
| I don't know that it's gonna happen here because most of us click or are attracted to media outlets and personalities who reaffirm our own biases. | ||
| So I don't know what's gonna break that fever. | ||
| What about on the intelligence side? | ||
| I'm with you on the media side, but are there any countries Here, this hemisphere, the other hemisphere, maybe on another planet. | ||
| Is someone doing this somewhat okay? | ||
| So I'll tell you, I think that a lot of that is pretty close hold, so I don't know the extent to which it's being rooted out. | ||
| What I do know is that in other countries, if they find that, there is no rule, you know, publicizing that. | ||
| They end up just disappearing people, right? | ||
| The sort of clean house in that sense. | ||
| So unfortunately that there is no good path. | ||
| But again, I would go back to the fact what we did in the 1970s when the CIA got so out of whack, we dealt with it publicly, and then we had reforms. | ||
| And so we did it before, and I think we can do it again with thoughtful people who understand that the problem is real. | ||
| That's the actual issue. | ||
| Right now you have people in Congress who don't think the issue is real, that we don't have a politicized intelligence community or a politicized law enforcement community. | ||
| Some of them believe that privately, But they're not willing to do anything about it publicly because the FBI or the CIA has been on their side, right? | ||
| You remember the Democratic congressman who was going to give a job to the disgraced FBI official who had done good things for the Democrats? | ||
| That's the kind of stuff that you have to remove those people, putting good people in your House and your Senate who are focused on the country, and then you have these panels, these investigations, You come up with reforms and you get it done. | ||
| We've done it before. | ||
| We can do it again. | ||
| Usually when they screw up or lie to Congress, they just get a job on CNN, right? | ||
| Touche. | ||
| That's generally how it works. | ||
| Brian, I suspect a political future for you. | ||
| I don't know that you suspect one and I thought you were going to make that very face, but I, I suspect one, you know, well, Okay. | ||
| Look, that's very kind. | ||
| Seriously. | ||
| I mean, I go back to this idea of like, it's, it's our Republic if we can keep it. | ||
| So as, as much as I make that grimace face as everyone does, like we have to all figure out ways to get involved. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So if that's running for your local city council or, or being part of your school board, if it's a County commissioner at some level, like it doesn't have to be, you know, the top of the, the poll, you know, in terms of being, being president or Senator or something, if that's your passion and you've got the money, great. | ||
| But just, we all have to get involved. | ||
| So my scrunchy face, uh, getting involved, uh, is, is on the national level, man. | ||
| It's just, I think we all know what happens when people run for office. | ||
| Stuff gets yanked out of, uh, your, your past, completely misrepresented. | ||
| Um, or, you know, you're imperfect, right? | ||
| And so nobody wants to face that. | ||
| I don't have a lot of that, so that's not what anchors me. | ||
| It's just the idea of, Man, just being a public person, always under the microscope. | ||
| So that's why I'm doing a podcast. | ||
| So that doesn't make any sense. | ||
| I love my argument. | ||
| I've just undermined it. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| Well, former County Commissioner Brian Dean Wright, I appreciate you doing the show and look forward to seeing you soon. | ||
| Thanks, man. | ||
| You betcha. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of non-stop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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