The President's Daily Brief - June 10th, 2022. American Leadership is Failing in South America. China Initiates Another Lockdown. Direct Connection Between Lockdowns and Dementia.

Episode Date: June 10, 2022

It’s June 10th. 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, Joe Biden is hosting leaders from North and South America this week. Well actually, not all of them. And that’s a problem. I’m going to explain why their absence was a dangerous failure of American leadership. As always, I’m keeping an eye out for developing stories. Put these two on your radar. First, more COVID lockdowns to report this morning, but not in America. It’s China this time — again — just days after they opened back up. I’ll explain what’s going on and why this is more bad news for your pocket book. Finally, all these COVID lockdowns — in China, here in America — well they have taken a toll. I’ve got a study out this morning that proves it: there’s a direct connection between lockdowns and the risk of dementia. And, one last thing: I’ve got a very special weekend request. 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 June 10th. 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. 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, Joe Biden is hosting leaders from North and South America this week. Well, actually not all of them. And that's the problem. I'm going to explain why their absence from these meetings was a very dangerous failure of American leadership. As always, I'm keeping an eye out for developing stories.

Put these two on your radar. First, more COVID lockdowns to report this morning, but not in America. It's in China this time, again, just days after they opened back up. I'll explain what's going on and why this is. is more bad news for your pocketbook. Finally, all these COVID lockdowns in China here in America, well, they have taken a toll, haven't they? I've got a study out this morning that proves it. There's a direct connection between lockdowns and the risk of dementia. And one last thing, I've got a very special weekend request. All up next on the President's Daily Brief.

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North and South America, a forum to address our hemisphere's many challenges and opportunities. It happens every three to four years, and it started back in the 1990s by Bill Clinton, all to talk about how our regions should change following the end of the Cold War. They usually talk about things like trade and drugs, immigration. Well, this year, they talked a lot about climate change and equity. It's a very curious word that we'll talk about another time. But what I want to highlight for you this morning is that while this meeting was supposed to involve all the leaders from the Americas, some didn't show up. Specifically the heads of Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, all missing from the summit, and all because they were angry at Joe Biden for one reason or another.

Some were mad because Biden didn't invite Cuba or Venezuela, and others because of their own internal domestic politics. But whatever the reasons, it's really a remarkable development. Because each of those four countries who just gave Joe Biden the middle finger, if I may, again, those countries are Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, well, they're all recipients of a lot of U.S. aid. In fact, Kamala Harris spent this week talking about how many billions that she and the president are sending to those countries. In fact, she even has a new initiative, the call to action, she says, to promote the fact that she's managed to wrangle up more than 3.2 billion in investments from the private sector. Plus, American taxpayers, you, me, we're going to pay for a new youth program that's going

to pay Central American kids to engage in, quote, climate action and violence prevention. Details forthcoming. And yet the leaders of these countries receiving your taxpayer dollars refuse to attend a meeting with the man, our president, who's offering it. So that is very, very unusual and remarkable, isn't it? But what's fascinating here is that their rejection of Joe Biden runs contrary to how he opened up the summit to begin with. Here's what he said, I'm going to quote him, because we're democracies, we work through our disagreements with mutual respect and dialogue. And yet four presidents showed no respect and offered no dialogue when they refused to come. So if you were sitting in the Oval Office this morning asking for a brief

on what's going on and how to fix it, I would tell it to you straight. This is a moment of failure. It's a failure of American leadership. And it's a failure that as a former CIA officer, I've seen time and again from our country's leaders. And it's not just Joe Biden. You see, what they forget is some advice from an Italian fellow who lived back in the 1500s. And that man, named Machiavelli, wrote a book called The Prince, and it was full of political advice, and you may have actually heard a quote from it. So here's the one in particular that I'm thinking of. It is far better to be feared than loved if you cannot be both. Now, he went on to say that people are generally ungrateful, fickle, liars, and deceivers. And I can tell you as a CIA officer,

that's pretty spot on. You see, I went toe to toe with some of our greatest adversaries. the Russians, the Chinese, and I'll tell you what I learned. Neither of those cultures or their governments respect or listen to people who aren't strong, who aren't decisive, and who aren't feared. The same thing is true of our allies, by the way. I've worked with the British and the Israelis, for example, and I can tell you that they are not our friends, not all the time anyway, and that's because they have interests. And sometimes even those friends want to steal things from us. our military technology, for instance, or maybe even place a spy inside the CIA. Oh, how I wish I could tell you stories.

The point of all this is that it would be wonderful if the world both loved and feared the United States and our president. And we should strive for both because there's a need for both. But when you can't have both, it is better to be feared than loved, because I'll tell you what happens when you're not feared. Right now, as I speak these words, There is a massive migrant caravan with approximately 10,000 foreign nationals on its way to the United States. And it's a caravan that started in Central America from those countries that were pouring money into,

the presidents that refused to meet with us. And it is creeping its way north to bum rush our border, to force their way into our country, irrespective of our laws and our rules. Now, I want you to listen to this. Caravan organizers were recently interviewed after they encountered a police checkpoint where there were Mexican National Guard members, there were immigration officials, and state police. And those Mexican government officials smiled as they let the caravan go through freely. And that word freely is the word used by caravan organizers to describe the Mexican government officials and how they treated them.

In other words, the people who put together the caravan and all the participants walking, none of them fear Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. They don't fear the U.S. Border Patrol, and they don't fear our laws either. So is it any surprise that the presidents of each of those countries represented in the caravan from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, that none of them would show up to a meeting with Joe Biden at the summit of the Americas? I mean, they'll take his money, our money, no problem there, and then they will effectively spit in his face, and nothing will be done in response. The point of this is not to throw an arrow at Joe Biden, no matter how much I like or dislike him, because this is far more important than Joe Biden. The point for you, if you were in the Oval Office this morning, receiving this President's Daily Brief, is that we have forgotten some very good advice from the 1500s, advice that,

every CIA officer learns very early in their career as they deal with enemies and allies alike. It is better to be feared than loved if you cannot be both. And right now, America is neither. We are, however, humiliated in the eyes of the world. And whether we're talking about our border or standing up to China, that humiliation is a very dangerous thing indeed. Coming up, a closer look at what's on my radar. But first, a few messages.

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Put these two on your radar. First up, do you run? remember the brief that I gave you a few weeks back on China locking down both Beijing and Shanghai because of COVID. It was a remarkable thing for lots of reasons. Tens of millions of people locked up in their apartment buildings. There were factory workers locked into factory floors and not allowed to leave. And that last part was a really big deal because Shanghai and lots of other Chinese cities create the goods that you and I buy. So when they get locked down because of COVID, our consumer prices go sky high. Well, just a few days ago, both Beijing and Shanghai loosened COVID

restrictions and people began enjoying their lives again. Factories that couldn't lock their workers down started opening back up. But it didn't last long. In Shanghai, there were three infections at a popular beauty salon. And that led to a lockdown of the Mingheng district. And that's home to more than two million people. In other words, three cases of COVID has led to the lockdown of two million people. In Beijing, the most populated district of that metropolis, it's called the Chow Yang district that's home to more than three million people. Well, they also had a handful of cases too, and now they're locked down. Entertainment venues closed, bars shuttered the whole shebang. And all of that in Beijing and Shanghai is because China has decided to adopt a zero-zeroing

zero COVID policy. So rather than accept that everybody is going to get infected at some point, which is what every public health official is saying, instead they shut down entire cities after just one case. And this is a really big deal because, again, we have an inflation problem in this country that's being driven in no small part because there are too few goods being chased by too many dollars. So when you lock down the world's factory, like big sales, sections of Shanghai, you just make inflation worse. There are fewer goods being produced. I will be watching how bad this COVID outbreak gets and how many factories are affected because once again, friends, it is a big deal. More to come. Finally, let's just forget the Chinese COVID lockdowns

for a minute and focus instead on our own experiences because we too suffered a lot. They took a devastating toll on all of us, didn't they, these lockdowns? And we are only now learning how devastating they were. For instance, I briefed you previously on how viruses are now behaving very differently. We've got winter viruses like the flu and RSV that they're now happening in the summer, and they're hitting us harder too. And that's because these viruses actually mutated when we all effectively disappeared as hosts because of social isolation. There's some incredible data on that from Australia, as I briefed you on. I also shared the horrible effects that remote learning had on kids. America now has a generation of children far behind on reading and math,

and that's especially true of our poorest children. And it's not clear that things like tutoring are going to help anytime soon. Well, now we have another sad consequence to add to this list, one that I bring you this morning, not just as an update, but also to inspire us to never let this happen again. There was a study released Wednesday from British researchers, a Cambridge University, and two other schools. They wanted to understand whether the social isolation from COVID lockdowns led to poor physical health afterwards. So they looked at 462,000 people across the United Kingdom,

people who had actually been followed for nearly 12 years before the pandemic on another study. Well, researchers collected survey data from these participants. They put them through cognitive exams and also made them take physical and biological measurements via things like MRIs. Well, here's the headline for what these researchers found. People who were socially isolated during the COVID lockdowns

were 26% more likely to develop dementia than those who had had social engagement. In other words, physical contact with other humans is really important for us because without it, the brain quite literally starts to fall apart and function.

that was the finding that was published on Wednesday in the online issue of neurology. Now, this is a tough study for me to highlight because it's one that impacted me personally. And maybe someday I will tell you the full story of my grandmother. But my counsel to you is that this study should steal our spines to do things differently the next time around. Because odds are there will be another outbreak of some virus or pathogen in our lifetimes. And as with COVID, our public health officials are likely to mandate that we do certain things like lockdowns. Now, it may be appropriate to do that, I don't know, but what's far more important is that we ask

questions and demand answers before we even think about complying. We need to ask questions about risk versus gain. How deadly, for instance, is the virus as compared to all the horrible consequences of being locked up? For instance, will lockdowns once again create lazy immune systems or cause other viruses like the flu or RSV to mutate? Again, I briefed you on that because it's happening. Or maybe we should ask how we're going to change the disaster that is remote learning that comes with lockdowns, because we cannot afford to set back another generation of our children. Or as we now know with this latest British study, we have to think about the costs that lockdowns will have on otherwise healthy,

people, especially our elderly, and cast them and their families to live with the nightmare that is dementia. Because if you've ever loved someone with that disease, and I have, you know how gut-wrenching it can be. So let us take the sorrow of this study and instead turn it into power. Let it be a reminder that we should always, always ask questions, and demand robust answers before we ever comply with public health officials again. And that ladies and gentlemen concludes your morning brief. Before I let you go, a quick weekend request.

If you like the president's daily brief, if you find value in it, if you feel a bit smarter and more well informed, do me a favor. I want you to tell one person this weekend about the podcast, why you like it, of course, and then suggest one episode in particular, whichever one that you like best, maybe found most helpful or compelling or

inspiring, it would mean a lot to me if you did. Because if everybody listening tells just one person, I can get a lot closer to doing a whole bunch of things that I think you guys are really going to like, the newsletter that we've talked about before, a YouTube channel that I'm considering, and also a call-in show where you and I can talk about the day's brief and you can ask me questions. Maybe even bring on some guests who disagree with me and we can debate. So think about it. Tell just one person this weekend about the PDB and your favorite episode. They can find the PDB on all podcast platforms like IHeart, Apple, and Spotify. So thank you very, very much for listening and being a part of the PDB family. And thank you for considering today's request.

As always, we close out the show reminding each other of why we are here, talking about our country and our world. It's the creed of every good spy and every smart American. It's from John, chapter 8, verse 32. And you shall know the truth. And the truth shall make you free. Today.