The President's Daily Brief - April 29th, 2022. Yet Another Escalation in Ukraine. U.S. Government is Asking Doctors About Their Race.

Episode Date: April 29, 2022

It’s April 29th. You’re listening to the President’s Daily Brief. I’m your host and former CIA Officer Bryan Dean Wright. Your morning intel starts now. First, another escalation in Ukraine, financially and otherwise. Your second brief, Doctors in Colorado are being asked to disclose their race and sexual orientation to the state. As always, I’m keeping an eye out for developing stories. Put this one on your radar. Workers in Mexico are asking for a raise, from $3/hour to $6/hour, I'll tell you why this might matter to you,. All up next on the President’s Daily Brief. ------ Please remember to subscribe if you enjoyed this episode of the President's Daily Brief. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's April 29th. You're listening to the President's Daily Brief. I'm your host and former CIA officer Brian Dean Wright. Your morning intel starts now. Before we start, a quick reminder to those new to the show, the brief you're about to hear is in the same spirit of the actual President's Daily Brief, which is a top secret summary of the most critical events in the past 24 hours, all delivered to the President each day by the nation's spymasters. And so, ladies and gentlemen, I am your spy, and this is your brief. Here's what we're going to be talking about this morning. First up, Ukraine. American intelligence and weaponry has shot down a Russian transport plane, killing hundreds of Russian troops. It happened a while back and we're just now learning the details. We'll talk about the implications of that story and where this arc of escalation is headed. Your second brief, doctors in Colorado are now being asked to disclose their sexual orientation to the state and to their patients. We'll talk about why and whether this is a good idea. As always, I'm keeping an eye out for developing stories. Put this one on your radar. The Mexican workers who assemble our general motor pickup trucks, well, they want to raise. They're currently getting $3 an hour. I'll explain why this story is important to you. All up next on the President's Daily Brief. Your first piece of intel this morning, some very big stories out of Ukraine that directly affect you. First, we're learning fresh details of rumors that I've long heard.

Back at the start of the war in Ukraine, U.S. intelligence agencies provided the Ukrainian fighters, the intel, and weapons to shoot down. a Russian transport plane. That plane was full of hundreds of Russian troops. They all died on impact. The troops were to be deployed around Kiev in a fight for that city, and now we know why they'd never arrived. Vladimir Putin now knows that, too. The reporter who broke this story, by the way, is someone I know who has very good sources inside the CIA, so I give this reporting high confidence. And now that we're learning of greater, more direct involvement of the U.S. killing Russian soldiers, we also have this. Joe Biden is asking for another $33 billion in aid this morning for Ukraine,

mostly in military equipment, some humanitarian assistance, also more money to help keep the Ukrainian economy afloat by, for instance, paying the salaries of their government workers. For what it's worth, we don't actually have a spare $33 billion will be issuing debt to pay for it. Meanwhile, Congress also just passed a bill that will allow Joe Biden to send the Ukrainian military any weapon in the U.S. arsenal, except for nuclear weapons. The new law called the Ukrainian Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act of 2022, passed the House by a 417 to 10 margin, three weeks after its sail through the Senate with unanimous support. As soon as Joe Biden signs the bill, he and the Pentagon can send whatever weaponry they want to Kiev or any other European

nation that's been impacted by this war. Doesn't mean he will, but he has been authorized to do so. Combine all of this with my previous briefs to you on the Biden administration saying its goal in Ukraine is for a weak Russia, not just to help the Ukrainians defend themselves. That and Joe Biden saying that Vladimir Putin must be removed. That was back in March. I don't think you need to be a former spy to see where this arc is taking us. We are undeniably in an all but declared war with Russia. At present, both sides are taking covert shots at each other to include shooting down planes with troops inside. By the way, there's more going on than what we're being told. I can't share the details that I know,

but I'll simply say that our military and intel personnel are very active in the region these days. In time, I suspect, some of that will be made public. But that's the point of this first brief. Ladies and gentlemen, whether you know it or not, the escalation of America's involvement in Ukraine is real. And whether you think that's good or bad, this president needs to be candid with you and the risks involved. Now, right now, those risks don't seem very real. For most of us, it just feels like we're sticking up for the kid who's being picked on. We're supporting the righteous cause of stopping an aggressor. I suspect that's why a recent poll found that 73% of us support the U.S. providing arm shipments to Ukraine.

That's up from 68% a month ago. And yet those same polls show virtually no support for Cindy. in U.S. troops. In fact, only 13% of you want U.S. boots on the ground to fight the Russians. But there's a disconnect there. The more weapons we send, the $33 billion new dollars, the lend lease act authorized in Biden to send quite literally anything he wants, well, that only increases the odds that will have to commit troops. And so as you think about that, I'd encourage you to lean on history. For instance, when and where else have we seen this, or something like it. I'm going to encourage you to think back to the 1960s. In May of 1961, President Kennedy sent in 400 Green Berets to begin conducting secret missions

against the Viet Cong. There was a great fear that Southeast Asia would be overrun by communists. The argument that people made was that the Soviet Union and China wouldn't just stop with Vietnam any more than Hitler stopped as he snatched up parts of Europe, so better that we hold them off in Vietnam. We hear that same language. today. Putin wants part or all of Europe, so better that we stop him in Ukraine. Well, back in January of 1963, we escalated and our troops and advisors began to become deeply ameshed in that Asian conflict. And a year later, in August of 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that made it clear that we were indeed involved officially in the Vietnam War. Now, there are differences

between these conflicts in Vietnam and Ukraine. But what I want you to to think about. What I encourage you to consider is the escalatory nature of those two conflicts. It starts with isolated covert action, like secret advisors to South Vietnam or shooting down a Russian transport plane with special intelligence. And then we increase the number of those advisors and add lots of weapons and training, just like we've done in Ukraine and just like we did for the government to South Vietnam. Now, what we haven't seen yet, anyway, is a major event that officially draws us in. In 1964, it was the sinking of the USS Maddox. By the way, it turns out that the North Vietnamese didn't actually sink our ship, by the way. Regardless, it gave the push for

Congress to authorize an all-out war, and the American people were solidly behind it. So my counsel to you is to consider where we are in that escalating arc of conflict, and perhaps, more importantly, how to assess what comes next. Now, I don't have a crystal ball to give you the exact answer. But in the world of spies, it's about playing the odds, about probability, about degrees of confidence that something will or won't happen. And what I see is two things. On one hand, we have an aggressive Russia, their economy battered but holding, increasingly desperate for a win, taking on dramatically more casualties and damaged equipment than it ever imagined, and, of course, knowing that the U.S. and Europe want regime change. On the other hand, there is a

United States that truly hates Russia. That's authorizing tens of billions of dollars in advanced weaponry and intelligence. We are shooting down Russian planes and secret operations. And as of yesterday, we gave the president a blank check to send quite literally any weapons that he or the Pentagon wants to the war zone. So while I don't know what will happen, the odds of this thing ending peacefully between the U.S. and Russia are decreasing. The probability of war is increasing. And I am sorry to say that I lack the confidence to look into your eyes or speak into your ears and tell you that truthfully, you won't have to send your children off to a new war, just eight months after we left the last one. Instead, all that I can say to you is this. May God be with us. Your second brief this

morning, we're going to shift gears from an intense international story to a peculiar domestic one. And my goodness, it is both strange and worth your consideration. The state of Colorado is asking insurers who offer certain Obamacare plans to collect demographic information on both health care professionals and enrollees, folks like you and I. Now, the information that they want, which would be collected and stored and used by the state government in Denver, would include race, ethnicity, disability status, sexual orientation, and gender identity. The stated goal of collecting all that information is to build a list of what they call culturally responsive doctor. and providers. The hope is that people like you and me can then pick and choose the specific

race or sexual orientation of our doctors based on our particular desires. Their reason or rationale for doing this, at least allegedly, is that there is data that says that if you feel like your doctor is in your tribe, they're a woman or they're gay or whatever you may be, then you're more apt to tell that doctor things that you might otherwise be embarrassed about or not say at all. And that, of course, would put your health in danger. At least that was the idea behind this collection of demographic information until a bunch of Colorado doctors said, all right, hold up. Physician groups express profound privacy concerns, saying that maybe a doctor doesn't want people in their community to know particularly who they are. Other doctors,

meanwhile, took exception to people choosing them based on the color of their skin and not their ability to, well, practice good medicine. So the state reluctantly opted to make reporting of the demographic data by doctors voluntary and confidential. In other words, insurers can ask doctors for the information, but doctors don't have to tell. And then whatever data the insurers eventually collect, well, they promise to only report it to the state an aggregate, meaning the insurer might say, all right, yes, in the city of Arvada, we have X number of doctors who are black, or gay, etc. But they won't tell the state's specific doctor names or their specific practice names. So clearly this plan created some degree of controversy in Colorado. But the Biden administration,

however, caught wind of it and they really like it. As part of a new federal health equity initiative, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently announced that after exploring this Colorado program, that it too would like to collect this same kind of demographic data across all related Medicare and Medicaid federal programs. Ladies and gentlemen, that covers over 150 million people. So if you're enrolled in those programs, either as a doctor or a patient, they want to know and document your race and ethnicity, what language you speak, your sexual orientation, your gender identity, your disability,

you name it. And then they want to put all of that on a government list, with the timeline, the details of exactly how that would work to be developed. in the coming months. So, ladies and gentlemen, we now start to ask the tough questions, because if you were the president, I would encourage you to exercise some caution here. First, any time any government starts building lists of citizens based on immutable characteristics, whether you're black or white or gay or straight or disabled or able-bodied,

well, that makes me nervous. Because with that sort of information, the government then has a lot of data to use for its advantage, and sometimes for its political advantage. Let's take an example from our recent COVID pandemic. Do you recall when the state of New York prioritized black and Hispanic people for COVID treatments? They didn't have enough pills for everybody, so those with certain skin pigment got it, while others, namely white folks, didn't.

All because of, quote, health equity, which is the same language used by the Medicare and Medicaid folks to justify their interest in collecting all their interest. this new data. Now, in this New York case, there was no grand list to be checked. You just walked up to the clinic counter, tried to get the COVID pills, and then depending on your skin color, you got them or not. But the point is that with a list, the government can make that process much more efficient. And if that's to help people, well, great. But it can be easily weaponized to persecute, to marginalize, and in the extreme, to kill. Second, there's also the issue of cybersecurity and privacy. The state of Colorado and likely the federal government are going to build a

list of millions of people with specific names and contact information and then the very sensitive demographic data. So we should probably ask some questions about this, like can that information that they collect be sold? And if so, to whom, and for what purpose? Can you opt out? And if the government makes a mistake and releases information about you, perhaps even incorrect information, and then that in turn causes you damage or distress, what's the recourse? And if there is no real protocol to figure that out, can people actually afford lawyers to pursue justice? And then we have the issue of hacking. If that information gets stolen, that government information suddenly disappears and is some sort of cyber attack, what happens then?

Let's talk about a specific example. In 2015, China hacked the servers of the Office of Personnel Management. At first, the government claimed that only 4.5 million people were affected only. But subsequent investigation showed it was 22 million people. Now, for those folks, it was their applications for a security clearance that were taken. Applications that listed medical ailments and prescription drugs, relationship histories, any use of therapists or counselors. All of that now sits in communist China.

By the way, if you were a victim of that 2015 attack, the only thing you got from the federal government was a modest apology and an encouragement to watch your credit score for a while. And that brings us to the final question that I would encourage you to think about if you were the president. And that's a question of politics and morality. Do we want to encourage each other to pick our doctors based on the color of their skin? I understand that some of us would feel more comfortable say is a woman choosing a female OBGYN. I got it. But at what point do we cross an ethical line where we're actually encouraging tribalism, where black people only see black doctors, or gay people only see gay doctors, and so on. Whatever the gain might be from that,

we have to acknowledge that these kinds of programs in Colorado and the federal government encourage a very real cost. We incentivize and normalize the fear of talking to those who are different. And when you live in a country such as ours, that's a problem. We have long celebrated being a melting pot. I mean, our national motto is quite literally out of many one, e pluribus unum. So whatever your opinion on this issue might be, ladies and gentlemen, it seems clear to me that creating lists of black doctors and gay doctors or disabled doctors runs a very real risk of creating very real problems and very real divisions. So I encourage you to ask yourself, this morning, whether all those risks are worth the game.

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As always, I'm watching a few other stories this morning. Put this one on your radar. To all of my pickup truck owners, especially if you've purchased a Chevy Silverado or GMC Sierra, listen up. Odds are your vehicle was made in Mexico, specifically in a factory in the city of Salio, Mexico. The General Motors plant there turns out the highly popular pickups for delivery into the United States. Now, the workers there are unionized, and they've decided they want a pay bump. Their current wage, $3 an hour. Yes, you heard me correctly.

That's $3 an hour. They're asking to make $6 an hour, give or take. GM says that's too much. The workers have set a deadline for May 31st to come up with a settlement of some kind, or they strike. Folks, I'm watching this story this morning for a couple of reasons. First, we talk a lot about bringing jobs back from China or Mexico. Now, if we do so, workers here are likely going to demand a livable wage. In the auto industry, that's around 18 bucks an hour, give or take. So the question is how many companies are going to be

willing to bring back those factories and jobs if they're going to have to go from paying $3 an hour to $18? After all, GM is already throwing a fit, frankly, at the prospect of paying $6 an hour. For what it's worth, a Chevy Silverado will run you anywhere from $50,000 or up, which is a bit remarkable knowing that these vehicles are assembled by people making three bucks an hour. But the second issue here is what happens if this union in Mexico gets what they want or close to it. Observers inside and outside of Mexico are saying that if these folks win, it will set a major precedent for other factories across the auto industry that operate across the Rio Grande. Wages will obviously have to go up, and that could lead to price increases, or loss of profit,

maybe both? Or perhaps wages in Mexico start to become so high that American wages don't seem that bad in comparison, and then they move those factories home. I'll keep an eye out for this story, and if you're in a union family or you work in the auto industry, you might want to keep an eye on this story, too. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes your morning brief. I hope you liked it. And as always, I'd love it if you subscribe or followed or told a friend about the show. The President's Daily Brief is available on all podcast platforms, and by golly, I want you to pick one. Click on that follow or subscribe button. And keep sending me emails.

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