Bryan Dean Wright, a former CIA operations officer, recently appeared on Fox News Digital, where he criticized electric vehicles and warned about the implications of mass consumer adoption of the cars. Wright cited several issues surrounding the vehicles, such as environmental concerns, national security issues, and driver safety.
Wright expressed skepticism that EVs are beneficial for the environment. He explained that the materials that go into these cars originate from the invasive extraction of resources from Chinese-owned mines in Africa.
“That is a horrific thing, imagining these child miners pulling this stuff out of the ground to make our green cars go, but that is true,” he said. “Also, we know about the 19 cobalt mines in the Congo, 15 of them are controlled by the Chinese government or a Chinese entity,” he said. “We are removing the one critical resource by a lot of those indigenous folks down there, so we can have our green and clean car.”
Wright further highlighted national security concerns surrounding EVs, considering they are essentially a “computer on wheels.” He stated, “So imagining we get into that car, we have a few different concerns,” he continued. “First, we’ve got a national security concern, that car is basically a computer on wheels. So as that thing drives, it’s going to both get things downloaded to it or you’re going to upload stuff to whatever your car manufacturer might be. That opens up a major vector to be hacked or otherwise controlled.”
The former CIA operations officer suggested that China is interested in “flooding” the U.S. market with cheap products that undermine more expensive American products. “They’re trying to crash our economies by flooding the market with very, very cheap products so that we can’t compete, whether that be because of our labor costs or environmental rules or otherwise,” he said. “We are already seeing this, as a lot of Chinese companies are now moving their production to Mexico to try to then flood the North American market.”
Wright summarized the argument he is attempting to make: EVs are not as environmentally friendly as they may seem and could also jeopardize American national security. He emphasized that these factors should be a topic of conversation in the EV space.
“At the end of the day, EVs are not just about the environment, it’s about national security, and if we allow China to dominate this industry, as we have, and then allow them to flood our markets … this is going to not just be a problem about climate change, this is going to be an economic disaster, and we need to be honest and talk about it,” he stressed. “So I sure hope that that’s why folks understand why I’m so interested in it, why I’m so passionate about it.”
Drawing on his experience in the CIA, Wright highlighted the importance of viewing EVs through the lens of China’s ability to weaponize them against the U.S. “As a former CIA officer, I care about national security and this is one of those vectors where Beijing is using it to try to weaken us and ultimately destroy us, and while we can be agnostic, like it or not, in terms of the EV infrastructure or the cars themselves, there is a national security component to this, and we need to talk about that,” he stated.
Watch Wright here:
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