Former Democrat Bryan Dean Wright on What Drove Him Away

CLAY: We’re joined now by first guest of the day, Bryan Dean Wright, former CIA ops officer and host of The President’s Daily Brief, a new podcast debuting this week.

Bryan, you used to be a Democrat. I certainly know how that feels — and you feel like the party lost its mind. What was the tipping point for you in deciding that the Democrat Party no longer made sense for you?

WRIGHT: You know, in the past couple of years I saw a few different things. One was a bunch of very anti-American or un-American talk, I remember very vividly Governor Cuomo of New York saying that America has never been great. Well, that’s not really the right thing that any political party should talk about in the country unless you’re a trying to destroy it.

Then I saw a lot of bigotry-based commentary coming out of folks who are elected at our national level, Ilhan Omar and some of the Squad members who were very anti-Semitic in their views. But, moreover, they represented and embraced things like socialism and communism.

And that kind of stuff, going back to the roots of my family’s connections to the Democratic Party, we were Jack Kennedy Democrats who of course stood up and said “no” to the radical left — in the party and country and in the world.

So, I just saw a very, very consistent drift away from what I understood to be classic presentation and embrace of the Democrat Party, particularly for workers. We’re now seeing Democrats embrace Big Tech and big corporations, some of those woke agendas. And so me and a lot of other conservative Democrats, particularly in rural areas, said, ‘All right. We’ve had enough. We’re becoming independent or we are becoming Republicans.’

BUCK: Hey, Bryan, it’s Buck. I’m wondering how you assess one year in to the Biden presidency. One thing Clay and I talk about a fair amount is how it doesn’t seem like there’s anything they can point to that is a success. Is this in your mind, as somebody as you said used to vote Democrat, is this a moment of awakening for a lot of people who maybe were on the fence in 2020 and now see through results just how ruinous a Biden presidency is?

Basically do you think there’s a lot of voters’ regret out there for people who were independents or who just barely broke for Biden?

WRIGHT: You just hit the nail on the head. If you look at the polling for independents — and I’m sure we all know anecdotally and friends and family, they’re all saying, look, President Trump he did a lot of great stuff, maybe some of his personality just couldn’t stomach so either I didn’t vote or I did go ahead and pull the lever for Joe Biden but my goodness, I regret it. My father actually falls into this category.

So there are definitely people in this country who I think are very gettable by smart people, smart politicians who were the thoughtful policies. I hope that those people choose conservatives. But I think we have to get this man Joe Biden and this wing of his party out of the office because they don’t believe in the goodness of America.

Now what I will tell you is on the left, they’re not seeing a lot of degradation of progressives, that wing of the party. They’re pretty tight still with being both Democrats and identifying and supporting Joe Biden and his administration. So I don’t see the drift from the left and the far left yet. They may stick at home and not vote.
Let’s see.

But I think that they’re into this thing, that this is a revolution on the left that we’ve been experiencing really for the past 20 years. The woke stuff, the emphasis on racial identity, divisions, the tribal parts of politics, especially racial tribal politics, Democrats have bought that hook, line, and sinker. And that is not a hysteria that they’re going to abandon anytime soon.

CLAY: We are talking — appreciate him making the time for us — we are talking with Bryan Dean Wright, former CIA ops officer. What do you think when you look at what’s going on in Ukraine?

You mentioned that some people are questioning their decision to support Biden over Trump, including your dad. How much do you think of what’s going on in Ukraine right now is begged to Biden’s weakness, particularly in Afghanistan and also just around the world in general? We haven’t talked about it much, but Saudi Arabia’s got their version of SNL making fun of Joe Biden in a way I never remember them ridiculing a president before. How much of all that is connected?

WRIGHT: Yeah. So two things. One, if you look at a very stark fact, which is the people the Pentagon and the White House are the same folks who designed and executed our 20-year war in Afghanistan and lost. They are all still there, and they are now putting together our plan and executing it for a war in Europe against the Russians, a nuclear armed state, not a bunch of sheep herders or goat herders in Afghanistan.

All right, so that’s kind of a big deal. We should probably be talking about that more and figuring how, hey, should we have a change of our own regime in this country both in the Pentagon and at the White House, maybe even the CIA, some of that intelligence leadership, the ODNI’s office?

So I think that’s what we have to first clean house. The second question is, how does the worldview us, right? Is that important? At some levels it can be, but ultimately, you know, we lead from the front, from not behind. So I think that the world is seeing failure on our part and the West in terms of the run-up to the war in Ukraine. Everybody knew it was coming, or should have. And then we sat back and we just let it happen. If you recall, Joe Biden told President Zelensky that basically he should step down, he should look at, you know, asylum in other parts of Europe or even the United States.

So I think that what you’re seeing in Ukraine is really a failure of leadership in Europe and it’s a failure of the United States, of Joe Biden in particular. And now we’re left with a mess. And there is no good way to anybody to get out of this.

BUCK: Speaking to Bryan Dean Wright, former CIA operations officer. Got a new podcast that just launched, The President’s Daily Brief. You should go check that one out.

Bryan, to that end, you were CIA, I was CIA. That name, that brand, that entity, institution, along with many others in the intelligence world, has taken an absolute beating in recent years. And people ask me, do you think it is something that can be reformed or does it really have to be rebuilt, give an all the stuff about Russia collusion, the deep state, have former director signing that letter saying the Hunter Biden laptop was disinformation. What do you think, rebuilt or reformed?

WRIGHT: I think it has to be rebuilt, and I think that we start with the same approach that we took back in the 1970s when the CIA and the intelligence community was out of control, a number of committee investigations into exactly what was going on. And there was actually decent leadership at the time that said, yeah, we acknowledge that there’s a problem.

Let’s put it all out on the table, let’s be honest with the American people, and then let’s fix it. So you have to have a change in the White House because the president of the United States of course appoints the person that sits at Langley and then that person has to understand that a problem exists and then be dogged in trying to fix it and then of course you have to have oversight both in the House and in the Senate to recognize there’s a problem and want to fix it too.

So all the levers of power have to be in unison and have a uniformity of belief that things are bad. The data or the stories or both are pretty clear that things are really screwed up in the intelligence community. From my view, I think from a lot of us who’ve been former officers and watching the politicization of our intelligence community, our brothers and sisters who damn well know better, they know that they shouldn’t be doing this but they’re doing it.

So I think can be fixed. The question is what kind of leadership do we have to do it? Not gonna happen now. And let’s see if a Republican or conservative gets into office next time, if they have the backbone to get it done.

BUCK: Bryan Dean Wright, everybody. Check out his new podcast, The President’s Daily Brief. I’ll be giving it a listen. Bryan, great to have you, my friend. Come back soon.

WRIGHT: You got it.