The Bill Walton Show
Bill Walton
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Bill Walton sits down with experts and interesting people to discuss how to achieve economic prosperity and human flourishing. Every week, commercial free.
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6 days ago
Episode 245: “Climate Catastrophe, or Simply the Weather?” with Jay Richards
In this episode I’m joined by Jay W. Richards, Ph.D. to talk about “climate change.”
We are both skeptical about the claims that man is causing abnormal changes in the climate, mainly by adding CO₂ to the atmosphere, and that we need a political solution - fast! - to somehow arrest the spread of this toxic combination of molecules. We’re even more skeptical that the solution is for governments or the UN coerce us do it, and along the way essentially shut down the modern economy.
There are a lot of breathless claims being made. Bryan Moynihan, the CEO of Bank of America and a regular fixture at the World Economic Forum, directed his bank to produce a Global Research Report which claims the consequences of climate change will be dire and extreme. “This is the last decade to act,” they write. “Absolute water scarcity is likely for 1.8 billion people, 100 million face poverty, and 800 million are at risk from rising sea levels by 2025. Climate migration could reach 143 million from emerging markets, driven by extreme weather.”
The amount of investment required they estimate to fully decarbonize the world? “$150 trillion over the next 30 years.”
Before we get out our checkbook, here are some of the questions Jay and I believe demand an answer:
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Is the Earth warming in any meaningful way?
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If the Earth is warming, are we causing it?
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If Earth is warming, and we’re causing it, is that bad?
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If the Earth is warming, and we’re causing it, and that’s bad, would any of the solutions being proposed make a difference?
Jay Richards is the Director, Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at the Heritage Foundation, Executive Editor of The Stream, and a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute. He is author or editor of many New York Times bestsellers and the soon to be released Fight the Good Fight: How an Alliance of Faith and Reason Can Win the Culture War (with James Robison)
“Are climate change concerns based on real scientific evidence and study and careful consideration,” asks Jay “or is this an ideology? Every ideology in the modern world seems to claim that it’s based on science, because “science” has become the keeper of the public domain. In the Middle Ages, it would've been the church and the clerics. Now it’s Science, so everyone from Karl Marx to the President wants to appeal to science for their ideology. And so it is with climate.”
The IPCC (the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) produces dozens of different computer climate models predicting a climate apocalypse. The problem is that they are in significant disagreement with each other. And not only have they not made accurate predictions, they can’t explain the history of the earth's climate for the last hundred years. And they don’t encompass some basic essentials.
For example, missing from virtually all of these computer programs are the effect of clouds. Al Gore’s movie assumed a cloud free earth when in fact the earth is shrouded in clouds up to two thirds over its surface area. The variation in the cloud cover is a 200 times more powerful factor than the small effect of CO₂, according to Nobel Laureate John Clauser.
The IPCC has not convincingly answered the questions we have asked (and neither has the climate science consensus).
We do know this: a mass hysteria has been whipped up by people and organizations purporting to bring about so-called climate change solutions who are also big beneficiaries. Trillions of dollars have already been spent to no effect, yet they are demanding even more.
Who benefits? The climate change industrial complex, John Podesta, China, Goldman Sachs, Al Gore & John Kerry, the degrowth zealots, Blackrock and Klaus Schwaab.
Who loses? most of the rest of us, developing countries, thousands of species & habitats, taxpayers, the average consumer and real science.
The climate change agenda threatens our modern way of life. Listen in to arm yourself with the arguments we need to be making to resist it.
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Sep 13, 2023
Episode 244: How Financial Regulators Have Become a (Progressive) Law Unto Themselves” with Todd Zywicki
In this episode I’m talking with Todd Zywicki, the George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law in the Antonin Scalia Law School and former Executive Director of the GMU Law and Economics Center.
He is also one of the most engaging and clear thinkers about the vast and complicated world of consumer financial services. He was Chair of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Taskforce on Federal Consumer Financial Law and served as Editor of the Supreme Court Economic Review.
Todd’s recent article “Restoring the Rule of Law in Finance” served as our launching point for a fascinating - and disturbing - conversation about how financial regulation has become a key weapon in the progressives arsenal to fundamentally change America.
The rule of law is in steep decline in the United States. And perhaps no more so than where I’ve spent most of my career: in finance and banking.
Financial regulation is unusually convoluted and secretive. It affects us directly every day, but most of us are not even aware of how it operates and its agenda, even though the financial system is an essential infrastructure of our society and economy. It enables people to have a bank account, buy a home, start a business, or simply make a purchase at the grocery store.
This sounds like it could be a commonplace, or even boring topic, but let me assure you, after listening to Todd explain what’s really happening, it is not.
For more:
https://billwalton.substack.com/publish/posts
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Aug 30, 2023
Episode 243: “Capitalism’s Promise: Essentially Infinite Resources and Human Flourishing” with George Gilder and John Tamny
I’m talking in this episode with the upbeat and visionary George Gilder, one of America’s leading economic and technological thinkers, and the author of the groundbreaking books, Wealth and Poverty, Knowledge and Power, The Scandal of Money and now:
Life after Capitalism: The Meaning of Wealth, the Future of the Economy, and the Time Theory of Money
Co-hosting with me is the equally upbeat and contrarian thinker John Tamny, founder of Parkview Institute, editor of RealClearMarkets and author of the recently published The Money Confusion: How Illiteracy About Currencies and Inflation Sets the Stage for a Crypto Revolution“
Life after Capitalism launches a new economic theory. A key theme of the book is that wealth is knowledge and that the difference between our age and the Stone Age is entirely the accumulation of knowledge.
The prevailing “capitalist” theory, conceived by Adam Smith and coined by its enemy Karl Marx, is deeply inconsistent with actual capitalist practice. Karl Marx - and now the cultural Marxists - are dead wrong. Economics is not a zero sum game class struggle for power. Instead, what governs economics and flourishing is human creativity. Innovation and growth are capitalism’s infinite promise.
The clash between creativity and power is the central issue of our time. We need to keep front and center the idea that freedom and innovation are humanity’s best path of escape from stagnation and tyranny.
Here are just a few of the things we talk about in this episode:
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Most of the way people talk about economics is wrong. Almost all the economic statistics you see in the newspapers are just plain unfounded. They're just projections, arbitrary subjective views, and self-interested inventions.
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Information theory puts it in the proper light. Economics is not an incentive system. It’s an information system. Information theory explains the actual foundation of our modern era.
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Humans operate on the learning curve which means that with every doubling of total units sold, costs drop between 20 and 30%. In other words, the natural progress of costs is to drop. The Federal Reserve’s idea that the natural condition of life is 2% inflation every year is completely spurious.
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Economists and statisticians disguise the fact that that GNP is wildly overstated for government services and wildly understated for private sector business contributions.
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Free enterprise is driven by the creativity of the human mind and the possibilities of human creativity are essentially infinite. The “surprise” is that the new great inventions always come as a surprise to us.
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One way to understand the economic theory of information is to see how it’s been pitted against the politics of fear. Today’s world is dominated by the politics of fear. The late Senator Fred Thompson, was asked, "Why didn't you run for president in 2000?" And he said, "I just didn't want to go around the country telling people how bad they had it."
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The prevailing notion that there are magical people in a government office that can protect us from bad things is just wrong.
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The truth is that material resources are essentially infinite. They are not scarce. Humans keep inventing new materials from what was previously thought useless.
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The solution to a Texas sized flotsam of plastic refuse floating in the Pacific Ocean is not to shut down the plastics industry. It’s to use it as the raw material for a transformational new material, graphene.
This episode offers up a strong dose of positive reality. Not optimism. Reality. Look around at the super abundance that’s been created in the world in the last 250 years. Billions of people have been lifted out of poverty and are living longer healthier lives.
All these good things that are happening will keep happening if we simply keep what are essentially Marxist zero sum “solutions” from getting in the way and instead let freedom and human creativity work its magic.
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Aug 22, 2023
Episode 242: “The Surgeon General Now Wants To Cure Your Loneliness: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?” with Stella Morabito and Mark Tapscott
In one of our most talked about episodes, Stella Morabito came on the show in May to talk about her book The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer.
We talked about a new kind tyranny creeping into American lives. Government, social media and a new kind of “ruling class” are increasingly working to control speech and behavior and isolating us from one another. This effort is intensifying and spreading throughout society’s institutions.
“Isolation, and how rulers use it to control people, is really the greatest threat to freedom, no matter what level of tyranny it is,” explained Stella.
And now, as if right on cue, the U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has released an advisory titled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.” It warns that social isolation is a major public health problem and that the federal government should both fund and direct local organizations to “strengthen social infrastructure in local communities.” The Orwellian advisory in effect warns that participation is mandatory if their plan is to work.
In Murthy’s report you’ll find no admission of the government’s key role in promoting anti-family, anti-faith, and anti-speech policies that drive people into social isolation, nor for its responsibility in brutally enforcing our isolation during its Covid era.
Also jumping into the federal government loneliness business is Democrat Senator Chris Murphy who has introduced a bill - the National Strategy for Social Connection Act - that would “create a federal office to combat the growing epidemic of American loneliness, develop anti-loneliness strategies, and foster best practices to promote social connection.” It would be housed in the Executive Office of the President reporting to Joe Biden.
So the federal government, which just three years ago commanded Americans to “lock yourself up, don’t go to work, school, or church, cover your face, social distance, close your business, stay far away from other people, even your family” is now telling us it can solve the isolation and loneliness problem it created.
We’re living in insane times.
To talk all this through I’m joined on this episode by two wise thinkers and counselors: Stella Morabito, again, and Mark Tapscott.
Stella Morabito, a senior contributor at The Federalist, writes extensively on the effects of propaganda, group think, censorship, and the cult mindset. Previously she was an analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency specializing in Soviet politics, and communist media and propaganda.
Mark Tapscott is an award-winning veteran investigative journalist who covers Congress for The Epoch Times, and is the founding editor of HillFaith. Mark was admitted to the National Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame class of 2006, and he was named the Conservative Journalist of the Year in 2008 by CPAC.
There are many ways to combat isolation and cope with the problems of loneliness. As you might guess, we don’t think federal government agencies should be part of the solution. (Unless they simply get out of the way.)
Listen in.
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Aug 15, 2023
Episode 241: A Victory for Free Speech with Jenin Younes
“America needs to come to terms with the reality and scale of the assault on free speech. Our government has established a vast system of censorship. By keeping it largely secret, it has been able to exert unconstitutional control over medical, scientific and political speech, suppressing debate over questions of great public importance. This is a shocking constitutional violation. All of us, not only the courts, need to recognize what is at stake.”
But the calvary may finally be arriving. With the recent ruling in the “State of Missouri vs Joseph R Biden et al” a major first shot has been fired at the “surveillance state”.
Judge Terry A. Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana has issued a preliminary injunction ruling that the Biden administration and other federal agencies suppressed free speech in an “Orwellian” manner during the pandemic.
In a significant victory for free speech, Doughty ruled that the Biden administration, including:
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the White House
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the FBI
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the Department of Justice
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the Surgeon General
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the CDC
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the Department of Health and Human Services
and other federal agencies could not communicate with or coerce the social media companies for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech. And last week, the news got better.
In oral arguments during the federal government’s appeal of Judge Doughty’s ruling, the appellate judges resisted the Biden administration’s arguments trying to defend its social media censorship regime.
Nearly all of the points raised by DOJ lawyer Daniel Tenny, were met with skepticism by the three judges hearing the case.
Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod said the administration claiming it merely had a “very close working relationship” with social media companies was like the mob making demands without having to “spell out things.”
On the front lines in the case as one of the lead plaintiff attorneys, Jenin Younes with the New Civil Liberties Alliance joins me in this episode to talk about what’s at stake.
She explains:
“Essentially government employees in an astonishing number of agencies, including the White House, the CDC, the FBI, a Homeland Security agency called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, were using all means of tactics, pressure, threats, and coercion in order to get the social media companies to censor people who expressed views that were different from the Biden administration’s.”
The explosion of social-media platforms has resulted in unique free speech issues.
Where the government - not directly but through platforms like Facebook and Twitter - has attempted to suppress alleged “disinformation” and blatantly ignored our First Amendment right to free speech.
This was especially true during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Listen in for an astonishing story of how government abused its power to censor speech.
Fortunately we now have judges ruling for our right to free speech.
All in this episode of The Bill Walton Show.
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Aug 8, 2023
Episode 240: An Early Look at a Certain Bestseller: "Motorhome Prophecies” with Carrie Sheffield
This is a different kind of episode of The Bill Walton Show. My guest is the charming and insightful polymath Carrie Sheffield who is a columnist and broadcaster now with the Independent Women’s Voice.
We were slated to talk about economic and women’s issues, which we do for the first 25 minutes and cover a lot interesting ground:
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Jay Powell and the Federal Reserve Board
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The Biden Administration’s massive spending and its obsessive focus on diversity equity & inclusion and its climate change agenda.
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The Women’s Bill of Rights and IWV’s work with a more traditionally leftist feminist group called the Women's Liberation Front.
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Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) and the roots of “trans theory” in cultural Marxism.
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The lockstep leftist narrative that journalists are expected to fall into and her determination not to toe the party line.
But at this point in our conversation, we wandered into her extraordinary personal story, the subject of her soon to be published memoir:
Motorhome Prophecies: A Journey of Healing and Forgiveness.
Read More: https://billwalton.substack.com
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Aug 4, 2023
Episode 239: “The Sporting Life” with Haven Pell
Sometimes, no it’s almost all the time, I wish I could spend more time playing the many sports I love to play.
But I don’t.
Instead, like most of us, I get caught up in organizations, politics, work, and all the other stuff that life seems to tee up.
So it was a joy to catch up on this episode with my friend Haven Pell, a man who has successfully managed to do these things while also being a lifelong sports participant, and who has tried more than 100 different ones. Perhaps the most unusual is court tennis, the predecessor to modern tennis, which is still played by about 6,000 people in roughly 50 venues in England, France, Australia and the US.
Haven’s just published a wonderful and quirky book Around the World in Fifty Courts about the game of “real” tennis, also known as court tennis. It’s not yet on Amazon but you can find it on his publisher’s web site.
Read more: https://www.billwalton.substack.com
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Aug 1, 2023
Episode 238: “When ‘Free Trade’ Does More Harm Than Good” with Robert Lighthizer
For regular listeners, you know I like to take on complicated subjects, and try to make clear what’s at stake for all of us.
In this episode the Bill Walton Show we take a another deep dive into one of the most complicated and contentious areas of economic policy: International trade.
International trade negotiations are incredibly complex multilevel games—there are negotiations not just with America’s trading partners, but with Congress, domestic constituencies, and rival factions within the executive branch.
There are sharp - almost theological - differences in how trade policy ought to work. I was taught that protectionism was terrible and that free trade was the highest good, but then found few examples of countries that actually practice it. It’s now clear that we cannot simply trust the principles of "free trade" to solve our problems -- that every trade policy represents a balancing of interests. The stakes have never been higher.
Today we find ourselves in a position where our most important trading partner - China - has essentially revealed itself to be our mortal enemy. Trade is no longer a boring topic.
To break all this down I’m delighted to be joined in this episode by Robert Lighthizer, our US Trade Representative in the Trump Administration.
For more than 40 years, Bob Lighthizer has litigated, negotiated, and editorialized against the policies of one-sided “free trade” first in the Reagan Administration as Deputy Trade Rep and as a private lawyer.
As President Trump’s U.S. Trade Representative, he fought against globalists, importers, lobbyists, foreign governments and big businesses whose interests diverged from those of the American workers and American security.
Now Bob’s published a illuminating book “No Trade is Free” that for anyone interested in understanding the realities of international economic policymaking, this is the book.
Part memoir, part history, and part policy analysis, Bob lays out in detail what he sees as the objectives of a practical approach to trade policy.
Bob’s views on this subject have been remarkably consistent since the late 1990s when he editorialized against granting China admission to the WTO. At that time, he was a lonely voice in the wilderness. Now his views are mainstream.
We cover a lot a ground in this episode, from the role trade disputes played in the American Revolution, the American System of tariffs used to build up American industry to the pivotal entry of China into the World Trade Organization. Since then China has become trade issue Number One.
After China’s entry “it created an ecosystem and learned about the subsidies and started doing all the other things that made it go from being an enormous problem to being a cataclysmic one,” explains Bob. “There is no private sector in China.”
“Outsiders make money in China only as long as the Communist Party of China allows you to make it. And when you're not benefiting them, you're out. And we have all these clever American businessmen who think, "Oh, I'm making money in China." They don’t realize they’re simply being allowed.”
“China’s purpose is for you to transfer know how, transfer technology, and help their ecosystem to get more business. And then you'll see after a period of time, you won't be useful anymore. And then, at that point, you'll find yourself with a Chinese competitor who's not only taken over your entire market in China but is now threatening your market in the United States.”
“So the number one thing has to be decoupling with China without question. And there's a number of specific steps, many of which I have outlined in the chapter on the China prescription. We have to right this ship. There's a lot that needs to be done.”
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Jul 25, 2023
Episode 237: Financial Regulation: Boring, or Terrifying? with Chris Iacovella and Norbert Michel
A slew of financial crises that stretch all the way back to the banking Panic of 1907 have been exploited to justify erecting a financial regulatory system that has vastly centralized and expanded federal power over our money.
The irony is that these crises were largely caused, or at least exacerbated, by poorly designed government regulations.
What we have now is an unholy alliance of regulators, mega banks and entrenched special interests who are the chief beneficiaries our system of opaque and complex financial regulation. Adding to this mix is the progressive Left who are now using our financial system to push its DEI and climate change agendas.
Joining me on this episode to explore some of what should be our main concerns and to point the way to solutions are Chris Iacovella, the president of the American Securities Association and Norbert Michel, the director of Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives. Both are deep subject matter experts who know their way around most every nook and cranny of the deep regulatory state.
Read More:
https://billwalton.substack.com/p/financial-regulation-boring-or-terrifying?sd=pf
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Jul 17, 2023
Episode 236: It’s High Time to Retire Senator Tim Kaine: Talking with Senate Candidate Scott Parkinson
This show only occasionally gets into election politics but we now have a candidate for U.S. Senate from Virginia who is superbly equipped to run a substantive campaign articulating the real issues facing Americans.
In this episode I’m introducing Scott Parkinson, who's running for the Senate in the Commonwealth of Virginia, to replace Virginia Senator Tim Kaine.
In a crowded primary field, Scott stands out as a candidate with the expertise to understand the mechanics of how to get things done in the Senate.
He has worked in the United States Senate for three Senators — John Ensign, Ron Johnson and Marco Rubio. Scott was the Executive Director of the Republican Study Committee (RSC), the largest caucus in the House of Representatives – under Chairmen Bill Flores and Mark Walker. He also was Chief of Staff to Representative Ron DeSantis and served as the Deputy Executive Director to Governor-Elect Ron DeSantis’ transition team in Tallahassee, Florida.
Read More Here: https://billwalton.substack.com/p/its-high-time-to-retire-senator-tim?sd=pf
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Jul 11, 2023
Episode 235: “Defining a Man and a Woman: What’s At Stake” with Dr Jay Richards
Until recently, no precise legal definition of sex—and especially the terms “male” and “female”—was needed because no one contested it.
Up to now.
Gender activists are rapidly moving to redefine sex in federal laws and regulations, such as Title IX, to include “gender identity.” If this succeeds, it will subvert all preexisting legal references to sex, contrary to their plain intent.
The movement to redefine sex to include “gender identity” is part of a larger agenda to dissolve sex as a stable legal category and create chaos.
This is a massive and infuriating issue and we need to understand the deeper agenda that lies underneath it.
For some answers I’m joined in this episode with Dr Jay Richards, Director of the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at the Heritage Foundation about his recent essay on “Why States Must Define Sex Precisely”.
Read more: https://billwalton.substack.com/p/defining-a-man-and-a-woman-whats
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Jul 7, 2023
Episode 234: “The Chess Pieces are Moving: Russia, Putin, the Wagner Group, Ukraine, China, Xi, and Blinken” with Stephen Bryen
Two months ago I wrote “the war in Ukraine drags on at a terrible cost for all involved with no seeming end in sight. Ukraine is on the ropes and running out of manpower with its most of its elite forces destroyed. Missiles for its air defenses are depleted. Both sides are dragooning teenagers and old men for their armies. Russia’s military command is in disarray.”
Since then, the situation’s grown worse - for both sides.
So I’ve asked my frequent guest Stephen Bryen back for another conversation for his take on what’s likely to happen next. Stephen is a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy and the Yorktown Institute, and has over 50 years’ experience in the arms trade and national security including several stints in the Pentagon.
As usual, there’s a lot packed into our brief conversation, ranging from Zelensky’s and Putin’s future, and the Wagner Group uprising, to China’s involvement and Xi’s designs on Taiwan. And of course Tony Blinken’s rec…
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Jul 5, 2023
Episode 233: Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life with Brandon Weichert
"Would you want your DNA and other healthcare data going to an authoritarian regime with a record of exploiting that data for repression and surveillance? Let’s be specific, would you want it going to China?”
That’s just one of the questions my returning guest national security expert Brandon Weichert and I cover in this far-reaching conversation about China's BioTech ambitions and their alarming implications.
Brandon Weichert, author of Biohacked: China's Race to Control Life is a leading expert in geopolitics and emerging technologies and who been described as a “panic-and-anxiety inducing scholar.” He lives by Dr. Herman Kahn’s mantra that “I’m against fashionable thinking” and you won’t hear much of that in this disturbing, yet at the same time entertaining conversation.
In the realm of cutting-edge biotechnology, the relentless drive of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to exploit emerging BioTech technologies casts a dark shadow over the global stage.
"Chi…
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Jun 25, 2023
Episode 232: “Our Dystopian Green Energy Future” with Mark Mills
This episode is about the catastrophic dead ends we face if we plow blindly ahead with the promised “green energy”future.
Powerful forces obsessed with CO2 and climate change are determined to replace hydrocarbon fuels with solar and wind energy and other yet to be invented technologies.
It’s a obsession fueled by a toxic mix of religious fervor, old fashioned greed and a “degrowth” agenda aimed at dismantling the modern global economy.
But setting these agendas aside, has anyone anywhere adequately explained the physics and the economics of the so-called green utopia? My guest on this episode, Mark Mills, has thought it through and has a stark message for us, an inconvenient truth. “There won't be a world powered entirely by wind and solar or batteries. The reason I say that is because it is not possible. We don't have the materials and we can't afford it in either environmental or economic terms.”
Mark Mills probably knows more about this than anyone. He's a senior…
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Jun 19, 2023
Episode 231: “Reclaiming the Culture through Film” with Michael Pack
Global streaming services are projected to reach over 1.5 billion subscribers in 2025 with worldwide spending on TV, film and documentary production reaching over $220 billion a year. Netflix, Disney, Amazon Prime, and HBO Max alone account for more than $75 billion of that spend with almost all of it on woke progressive themed entertainment. Looking only at documentaries and small independent features, the Left spends tens of billions of dollars each year.
The Left’s successful decades “long march through the institutions” has captured Hollywood and it now owns the cultural narrative. Conservatives have paid a big price for downplaying the importance of culture, seeing its airy fictions as less serious than economics or politics.
The numbers show it. The right spends, maybe, only tens of millions of dollars on films and television, a spending gap of over hundreds of billions of dollars. Artists are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world” and if conservatives hope to…
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Jun 13, 2023
Episode 230: “An Action Plan to Thwart the Chinese Communist Party’s Aim to Achieve Global Dominion” with Frank Gaffney
Over three decades ago the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party began in earnest to develop and execute a strategy to bring about what its now President Xi Jinping calls “global governance, directed and enforced from Beijing.”
Determined to avoid the fate of the Soviet Union’s defeat in the Cold War by the United States, then President Deng is said to have declared to the Party that “a new Cold War has now begun between the United States and China, and China will win."
Thus began a comprehensive plan of “unrestricted warfare” that came to be known colloquially as the Hide and Bide strategy … “Hide your capacities, bide your time."
It was designed to assure that China become so integrated with the United States’ open economy and society (e.g. through “elite capture”) that the US would be strategically vulnerable.
In this, the CCP has wildly succeeded, and now the United States finds itself back on its heels against an openly aggressive China and its inten…
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Jun 5, 2023
Episode 229: “You May Not Be Interested in CISA, But CISA is Certainly Interested in You” with Ben Weingarten and Frank Gaffney
“Overwhelming evidence suggests that federal agencies – led by among others, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), buoyed by senior executive branch officials and lawmakers, colluding with Big Tech, and a coterie of often government-coordinated and government-funded “counter-disinformation” organizations, have imposed nothing less than a mass public-private censorship regime on the American people.” Explains Ben Weingarten, one of America’s leading investigative journalists, at a recent Homeland Security Oversight hearing.
As you’ll learn in this episode, the evidence is overwhelming.
Ben Weingarten is editor-at-large for RealClearInvestigations, contributor to the Federalist, Newsweek, New York Post, Epoch Times and author of the alarming book American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party.
Joining me as co-host is Frank Gaffney, host of “Securing America with Frank Gaffney” on Real America's Voice…
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May 30, 2023
Episode 228: “Google’s Utopian Vision and the 2024 Election” with Dr Robert Epstein and Jenny Beth Martin
Voter and ballot fraud may just be a small part of the problem that conservatives face in the upcoming 2024 elections compared to the power of Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube.
Using its “total data collection” systems it can sway the opinions of millions of people and influence how they vote.
We’ve known about this issue since at least 2016 and it has not gone away. If anything, with the emergence of AI, the threat has grown even more ominous. Executives at Google have stated that “investments in machine learning and AI” are a big opportunity to address the “misinformation” shared by “low-information voters.”
Shining a bright light on Alphabet’s power is the comprehensive research done by my returning guest, research psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein, a California Democrat with a Harvard Ph.D, who has spent the last decade monitoring Google’s manipulation of newsfeeds, search results and YouTube suggestions.
Joining me to co-host is Jenny Bet…
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May 18, 2023
Episode 227: “It’s Time for the US to Use Its Power to Bring the War in Ukraine to an End” with Stephen Bryen
The war in Ukraine drags on at a terrible cost for all involved with no seeming end in sight. Some estimate that there have been almost 400,000 total Russian and Ukraine casualties so far, although both sides claim their losses are much lower.
Ukraine is on the ropes and running out of manpower with its most of its elite forces destroyed. Missiles for its air defenses are depleted. Both sides are dragooning teenagers and old men for their armies. Russia’s military command is in disarray.
But no one knows what is really going on. A key problem understanding the war in Ukraine is the reliability of sources of information and the fact that both sides specialize in disinformation and fake news.
To sort through what might be true, and where events are leading us, I’m joined again by an astute observer of the world scene, Dr. Steven Bryen, Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Policy and the Yorktown Institute. With over 50 years national security experience, including many stints…
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May 10, 2023
Episode 226: "The Weaponization of Loneliness" with Stella Morabito
“Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other.… Therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
“Americans have long sensed a new kind tyranny creeping into our lives. This disquiet has hovered in the background for a long time, though most of us couldn’t put our finger on it. Trends to control speech and behavior are isolating us from one another, and they have begun to intensify rapidly and spread throughout society’s institutions.” — Stella Morabito
In this episode Stella Morabito returns to talk about her recently published book The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer.
Stella, a prolific author at The Federalist, writes incisively about the social fallout of propaganda, mob psychology, and the cult mindset, drawing in part from her years as an analyst at the Centra…
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May 4, 2023
Episode 225: “Protecting Investors from an Overreaching Regulatory State” with Chris Iacovella
When Walmart went public in 1970 and soon thereafter listed on the New York Stock Exchange, its SEC disclosure prospectus was 20 pages long.
Today, a prospectus requires massive numbers of mostly obscure disclosures imposing very real liabilities for the issuing company - but which no one reads, except for lawyers who charge $2,000 an hour to read it and to write it - and which can run upwards to 300 pages or more.
Under President Joe Biden’s whole of government effort to weaponize federal agencies, this regulatory creep has become an outright onslaught of new regulations. Except now it brings an overt political agenda to promote ESG and “equity” outcomes.
Case in point is the SEC under Chairman Gary Gensler (who was Hillary Clinton Campaign’s CFO), which has proposed 55 new rules and massive climate change disclosure requirements without any mandate from Congress.
“Over the last two years, we've seen more rules than we've ever seen before,” explains my guest on this ep…
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Apr 26, 2023
Episode 224: “The FBI’s Ambitious New Plans” with J. Michael Waller
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is proceeding with plans to build a new headquarters which would be twice the size of the The Pentagon, the world’s largest office building.
The new FBI headquarters is to be built on one of three sites in suburban Virginia and Maryland. Those sites are large parcels of 58, 61, and 80 acres.
The Kremlin in Moscow —a walled fortress containing the administrative offices of the Russian central government, the official presidential residence, massive auditoriums, an arsenal, a museum, four palaces, three cathedrals and several churches—is just over 66 acres in area.
Vatican City in Rome, the seat of the Roman Catholic Church, is tucked into 110 acres.
The FBI is proceeding with its plans at a time when Americans have grown increasingly alarmed about the mission creep of an institution we once regarded as the world’s greatest law-enforcement agency.
After the 9/11 attacks, the Bureau’s mission changed to become an intelligence operation ra…
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Apr 20, 2023
Episode 223: The Differences Between Men and Women: Warriors and Worriers with Joyce Benenson
What are the evolutionary differences between men and women, and how do they survive and thrive through differing competitive strategies?
In this episode, Dr. Joyce Benenson talks with Bill about her book, Warriors and Worriers, which draws her extensive lifelong research on children’s interactions. The result is fascinating array of studies and stories that explore the ways boys and men deter their enemies, while girls and women find assistants to aid them in coping with vulnerable children and elders.
Dr. Benenson, a retired professor of psychology at Emmanuel College and an associate member of the Human Evolutionary Biology Department at Harvard University, turns upside down the conventional wisdom that women are more sociable than men and that men are more competitive than women.
E.O. Wilson of Harvard praises her work as:
"brave, thoroughly documented, and written with unusual clarity … her book explains more about the fundamentals of gender differences – and the meaning…
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Apr 12, 2023
Episode 222: “What You Need to Know About Your Money and the Federal Reserve” with Cato’s Norbert Michel
Is the Federal Reserve a godlike Zeus able to control our money and the economy, preserve financial stability and keep a lid on inflation?
Or is it like the Wizard of Oz? A little man behind the curtain pulling levers to create smoke and noise to terrify and control people, but in the end only one market participant among many worldwide.
If you’re a bond trader in New York, trying to predict minute day to day changes in interest rates, it’s more like Zeus. For the rest of us, I believe, it’s like Oz.
Trying to figure out the Fed is a complicated business and I'm delighted to be joined again on this episode by one of my favorite guests and good friend Norbert Michel, who's vice president and director of Cato Institute's Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives.
“The Fed does set an interest rate target,” says Norbert, “and they do administratively set a policy rate that they pay on reserves. But the idea that the Fed is sitting down in a basement and turning…
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Apr 5, 2023
Episode 221: “Are We Really Surprised We’re Having Another Banking Crisis?” with Alex Pollock and Steve Dewey
It looks like the bill is finally coming due after decades of reckless monetary policy and out of control federal spending. After 40 years of relatively stable prices, we now have raging inflation. Interest rates have risen dramatically. Mortgage rates have more than doubled. And commercial banks are now sitting on more than $600 billion of unrealized bond losses.
Of course, and as expected, with the Silicon Valley Bank bailout, the Regulators have pulled out their default playbook declaring yet another institution systematically risky, taking another step toward the federalization of our banking system.
But there's also something new to worry about: regulatory mission drift. The Fed's historical mandates are to 1) promote price stability and 2) full employment and a safe and sound banking system. But instead, the Fed - and the Treasury - have changed their priorities to promote the progressive policies of climate change and equity.
Joining me to talk all this through are Alex…
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Mar 28, 2023
Episode 220: “Silicon Valley Bank: The Bill Finally Comes Due for Decades of Reckless Monetary, Fiscal and Regulatory Policy” with Rick Manning and Robert Romano
This week, Americans for Limited Government published a provocative and insightful piece about the banking system asking, "Has the United States banking system become too big to save?”
In the past three years, to finance massive federal spending, the Treasury has issued almost $8 trillion new treasury bonds with almost $4 trillion bought by US banks during the tail-end of the Fed’s era of zero interest rates.
US Treasury Bonds? Sounds like a safe investment for a bank, but here’s the problem. After 40 years of relatively stable prices, we now have raging inflation caused by reckless Federal spending. To try to fight this price inflation the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates which reduces the value of the commercial banks treasury bond investments. (We explain why this happens in this episode.)
The result: banks are now sitting on more than $600 billion of unrealized bond losses. Silicon Valley (SVB), Signature, and First Republic banks look to be canari…
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Mar 22, 2023
Episode 219: “The Labor Department’s Radical Agenda” with Pat Pizzella
Under President Joe Biden and his Administration the whole of government has been weaponized to promote a so-called Diversity Equity and Inclusion agenda that, in fact, will bring about just the opposite of what these words mean.
Case in point is an assertive, left-wing, anti-family Department of Labor with its power to regulate and attempt to social engineer virtually every aspect of the American workplace.
Congress has granted it a stunning amount of power to administer more than 180 federal laws and thousands of regulations affecting more than 10 million employers and 150 million workers.
And almost no knows what it does.
There's probably no one better equipped to explain this threat to liberty than my old friend, the very honorable Patrick Pizzella who served as Deputy Secretary of Labor for three years under President Trump, and as Acting Secretary for a few months in 2019.
I’ve known Pat since former Attorney General Edwin Meese brought me into the Conservative Actio…
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Mar 8, 2023
Episode 218: “The Ugly Truth About the White House, the FBI and the Social Media Companies” with Jenin Younes and Todd Zywicki
Newly released documents show that the White House has played a major role in censoring Americans on social media.
Email exchanges between Rob Flaherty, the White House’s director of digital media, and social-media executives prove the companies put Covid censorship policies in place in response to relentless, coercive pressure from the White House—not voluntarily as the government has claimed.
The emails emerged last month in the discovery phase of Missouri v. Biden, a free-speech case brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana and four private plaintiffs, including leading epidemiologists Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya and Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff.
Government's role in social media censorship has been just as bad as we feared and worse.
So what are the details, and what’s at stake? To explain, Jenin Younes, litigation counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance which is representing the private plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden, join…
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Feb 27, 2023
Episode 217: “Ukraine: It’s Time for Realism” with David Goldman and Stephen Bryen
The Biden Administration - and a majority of Republicans in Congress - persist in their bellicose rhetoric about an “existential war to defend Ukraine” telling the Russians that “we're going to destroy your regime and dissolve the Russian Federation.” Really? After sending more than $100 billion to Ukraine to fight a proxy war against Russia, have they thought through whether the US is capable of doing this? They are calling for actions that only a global hegemon might possess. But a hegemon that no longer controls its own borders, has crumbling critical infrastructure, hollowed out military capabilities and is $33 trillion in debt is no longer a hegemon. This is an Administration that left $87 billion of U.S. military equipment behind when it bolted from Afghanistan, let a Chinese surveillance ballon pass unmolested over the entire Continental United States and is led by a Commander in Chief who daily elicits ever stronger labels for cognitive impairment. It is not to be trust…
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Feb 25, 2023
Episode 216: “What The Grateful Dead and Successful Dealmakers Have in Common” with Marc Morgenstern
Backstage with Bill Walton
In this episode I compare notes and share stories with veteran dealmaker and entrepreneur Marc Morgenstern.
In today’s polarized world, where people seem intent on not agreeing, Marc has had a long and successful career helping opposing sides come to agreement.
He’s completed billions of dollars of M&A transactions, buying, selling, and financing businesses as a managing partner of law firm Kahn Kleiman and as a venture capitalist.
Marc’s new book The Soul of the Deal: Creative Frameworks for Buying, Selling, and Investing in Any Business creatively reframes and radically changes how we can approach dealmaking of any type.
Marc is a brilliant synthesist who weaves in, for example, what he’s learned as a successful door-to-door encyclopedia salesman, as a leader of several rock bands in college (Yale) and as a lifelong fan of The Grateful Dead.
He’s come to believe - and I think this is right - that much of the conflict in dealmaki…
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Feb 16, 2023
Episode 215: “To Shrink Government, Cut Taxes: How the States are Doing It” with Grover Norquist
For an excellent primer about how the politics of our over-complicated state and local tax systems operate, this conversation with Grover Norquist is absolutely the place to start.
It's comprehensive, easy to understand and often humorous, as only Grover knows how to make it.
(When Grover is not doing taxes, he’s doing stand-up comedy. For real, and he’s good at it.)
As founder of Americans for Tax Reform, which opposes all tax increases as a matter of principle, no one in modern times has fought harder than Grover Norquist to shrink the state by keeping the issue of high taxes and IRS abuses in the public eye.
To my delight, I learn that there are some good things taking place at the state level, where many states are either getting rid of their income tax altogether or moving to a flat tax. Grover explains where and how this is happening, with ATR playing a leading role.
“Americans for Tax Reform,” explains Grover, “hosts frequent conference calls among the various gov…
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Feb 10, 2023
Episode 214: “Ukraine, The Balloon and the Loss of US Hegemony” with Brandon Weichert.
Events are picking up pace rapidly on the world stage and I’ve asked my frequent guest Brandon Weichert to join me to help explain what’s happening. Brandon, geopolitical analyst and publisher of The Weichert Report, is among the best at connecting the dots globally with his bold and unnerving forecasts. Among the many issues brewing that we get into: Russia is amassing up to 400 thousand troops on Ukraine's borders for a winter offensive, objectives unknown. Nuclear escalation looms. The Chinese sent a satellite balloon hovering ominously across the entire United States as it presumably took surveillance photos. Strangely, the Biden Administration, which is all in to defend the borders of Ukraine, refused to protect America’s own airspace. Why wasn’t it shot down sooner? Our southern border with Mexico has been left wide open for over two years. The United States’ enemies - and its friends - have watched us admit almost five million undocumented aliens, whose purposes and de…
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Jan 31, 2023
Episode 213: “It’s High Time for a Ceasefire in Ukraine” with Stephen Bryen and David P. Goldman
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine grinds on, it’s nearly impossible for the ordinary observer to figure out what's really happening.
One of the problems is that war news is generated primarily by Ukrainian propaganda, which is endlessly parroted in the Western media. Anytime there is contradictory information – for example, mention of Ukraine’s high casualties – Kiev pushes back so hard that Western leaders go silent.
But what is clear is that looming on the horizon is the very real possibility of a nuclear war, as more and more European countries are drawn in to the conflict. The stakes could not be higher.
To understand what’s happening as the Ukraine situation grows more dire, I’m joined on this episode by my frequent guest Dr. Stephen Bryen, a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy and by David P. Goldman - Spengler columnist and Deputy Editor for Asia Times and PJ Media.
Stephen has over 50 years national security experience that includes serving as Senio…
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Jan 13, 2023
Episode 212: “The Truth about Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change” with Dr Jerome Corsi, PhD
“This whole climate hysteria seems to focus on a molecule - carbon dioxide (CO2) - which we humans exhale and which we release into the atmosphere by burning so-called fossil fuels,” explains my guest on this episode Jerome Corsi, PhD.
But what are realities of CO2, who is behind the agenda to demonize it and - most importantly - who benefits?
Dr. Corsi, author of the tour de force book The Truth about Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change: Exposing Climate Lies in an Age of Disinformation, has the answers.
Drawing extensively on scholarly published peer-reviewed literature in the fields of climate science, geology, astronomy, energy physics, and statistical methodologies, Dr. Corsi reframes the CO2 global warming argument from the realm of politics to the sphere of science where the discussion properly belongs.
He also exposes the political, scientific, and economic reasons for concluding that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an advocacy creation of…
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Dec 21, 2022
Episode 211: “It’s Happening According to Plan” with Kevin Freeman
If someone wanted to weaken, then destroy a sovereign and free United States, what would they do?
Well they might start with surrendering its energy independence. Make war on reliable fossil fuels oil and gas, coal and nuclear power.
Induce it to rely on wind and solar energy sources that are certain to lead to rolling blackouts and the ultimate failure of America’s electrical grid. And while they’re at it, persuade America to rely on China for most all of its wind and solar energy production technologies.
Inflate its currency. Have the Federal Reserve print trillions of dollars of money out of thin air to finance insane levels of federal spending, much of it going to a so-called “green energy” lobby.
Destroy public trust in its elections. Make Election Day a thing of the past. Normalize a voting system that coughs up over 100 million unaccountable mail-in ballots.
Demonize the idea of America as a melting pot and encourage tribalism, based on race, ethnic, gender, or sexu…
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Dec 13, 2022
Episode 210: “Office Buildings: Will We Ever Go Back?” with John Scheurer
"Commuting to office work is obsolete. It is now infinitely easier, cheaper, and faster to do what the 19th century could not do, move information, and with it office work to where the people are, the tools to do so are already here. The telephone two-way video, electronic mail, the fax machine, the personal computer, and so on."
Peter Drucker (1989)
In 2020, over 30 years later, futurist and management guru Peter Drucker’s prediction came true with a bang. With the mandated COVID lockdowns, suddenly everybody had to learn to work from home. Office occupancy plummeted from 90% to 10% and we all learned about how to Zoom. Since then people are going back to the office, but occupancy still averages only 40 to 50% depending on the market, and in New York lower.
So what’s going to happen next? In this episode, I talk with commercial real estate expert extraordinaire John Scheurer about the prospects for office work and office buildings. John heads the real estate investing arm of Si…
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Nov 30, 2022
Episode 209: “The Money Confusion: Why Inflation Now?” with John Tamny
In 1974, with annual inflation raging over 12%, President Gerald Ford introduced WIN (“whip inflation now”) buttons telling Americans: “To help increase food and lower prices, grow more and waste less. To help save scarce fuel in the energy crisis, drive less, heat less.” In other words, the responsibility to fix inflation fell to ordinary Americans. It didn’t work - because they didn’t cause it in the first place - and it would be another eight years before Fed Chairman Paul Volcker tamed the inflation beast. With draconian measures, like draining bank reserves, the Fed funds rate rose to 19.1% and mortgage rates reached over 18%. Volcker’s “remedy” engineered not one severe recession but two of them, back to back. Today, a “WIN” button might stand for “Why Inflation Now?” The many explanations include: the explosion of Federal spending and the money supply, Vladimir Putin and the Ukraine war, the economic disruptions caused by Covid policy lockdown, the war…
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Nov 23, 2022
Episode 208: “How Policy Responses to the Pandemic Continue to Shatter Our World” with Jeffrey Tucker
The world has suffered and continues to suffer catastrophic economic and social damage from the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 - but not from the virus itself.
Rather we’re in the midst of a continuing global crisis created by governments’ policy responses to the pandemic.
*
Trillions of dollars of Federal “relief” spending
*
Financed by the Federal Reserve massively increasing the money supply
*
And the countless coercive rules and restrictions implemented to stop a Covid virus that came anyway.
The result is the highest inflation in 40 years, which is not slowing down but accelerating. Of course there are other forces at work, like the Biden Administration’s war on fossil fuels, but the root causes of inflation were in place before that.
To understand this better and what we need to be concerned about next, in this episode I talk with the great Jeffrey A. Tucker, the founder of the Brownstone Institute and author of the recently published “Liberty or Lockdown.”…
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Nov 16, 2022
Episode 207: “The Red Trickle: Where Do Our Elections Go From Here?” with Paul Teller PhD
To put it mildly, the expected massive Republican Red Wave in the recent 2022 midterm elections didn’t materialize. Even though 75% of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track, the election gave us status quo. Virtually every Governor, Senator and House incumbent won reelection. Trump states elected Republican Senators and Biden states elected Democrats. And despite House Republicans getting six million more votes than Democrats (52.3% compared to 46.2%), these votes did not translate into a surge of seats for Republicans. With more and more districts tightly gerrymandered, Democrat incumbents hung on if only by narrow margins. So what happened? Was it the issues, the money, the candidates, local factors, or something else? Joining me to explore this question, and where we go from here, is Paul Teller PhD, the Executive Director of Advancing American Freedom who served in the Trump White House as Special Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs, and then as Direc…
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Nov 11, 2022
Episode 206: “The Pro-Human Answer to Intolerance & Racism” with Bion Bartning
In this episode I’m joined by Bion Bartning, the founder of FAIR, the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism. An entrepreneur and investor, Bion also co-founded eos Products, a personal care brand best known today for its iconic egg-shaped lip balm.
Bion launched FAIR to address head-on the tribalism, identity culture and politics of division that are pitting Americans one against the other.
With innocuous terms like diversity, equity and inclusion, or arcane ones like critical race theory, a cynical and intolerant orthodoxy of division is being advocated and enforced throughout America.
It’s infected virtually every American institution: colleges, businesses, government, the media, museums and the arts, the military and most alarmingly, our children's K-12 schools.
In schools, “what’s called an “anti-racist” curriculum,” explains Bion, “is in every sense of the word, racist and is teaching children to see themselves fundamentally as defined by the color of thei…
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Nov 10, 2022
Episode 205: “Confronting the K-12 Racialist Star Chamber” with Sahar Tartak
Recently The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by my guest on this episode, Yale freshman Sahar Tartak.
Titled “My High School’s ‘Antiracist’ Agitprop”, she described how illiberal her supposedly liberal high school had become, and the ways she and other students were “berated, bullied and insulted” for voicing dissent towards the school’s race essentialist policies and programs.
The story goes like this.
In 2021 Great Neck North High School directed the student government to give $375 of student funds to a “racial equity” group to speak to the student body about “systemic racism.”
Sahar, then a Senior at Great Neck, was the student government’s treasurer, and felt they didn’t know enough about the organization and its mission to disburse the funds.
So she refused to sign the check.
What happened next was that the full weight of the education cartel’s racialist star chamber fell upon a smart and courageous 17 year old.
The teachers who advise t…
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Nov 1, 2022
Episode 204: “The Climate Change Industrial Complex: Trillion $$$ Promises That It Can’t Keep” with Myron Ebell
In this episode I’m talking again with Myron Ebell, Director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment, one of our most effective advocates for Free Market Environmentalism. Myron led the successful decade-long fight to defeat cap-and-trade legislation and led the effort to convince President Trump to withdraw from the Paris climate treaty. The list of those in the “climate industry” who fear Myron’s effectiveness is long. The radical head of the Sierra Club has said he is “one of the biggest threats our planet has ever faced.”
But when you actually listen to Myron, you conclude that nothing could be further from the truth.
Some Takeaway From Our Conversation:
Inflation and an economy heading south are far and away the biggest issues that concern American voters. Climate change barely makes the list.
But instead of easing inflation, the falsely named Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) pours climate change subsidies onto the inflation bonfi…
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Oct 24, 2022
Episode 203: “This is not a Nintendo Game” with Dr Stephen Bryen
“There is more respect to be won in the opinion of this world by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant or unpromising objectives.” George F. Kennan, 1966
Americans may admire the valiant resistance of the Ukrainians to the Russian invasion and be proud that we have been able to support their defense. Yet now we have to ask: how does this war end?
Neither the leaders of Russia or Ukraine have espoused a goal that can restore peace in the area. Nor have any other suppliers of cash, military assistance and equipment - including the United States - articulated what an acceptable outcome might be.
At what point are the players in the conflict in Ukraine willing to stop fighting and enter into genuine negotiations to bring peace in Ukraine?
The primary concern of any American government must be the security interests of the American people. How is continuing to escalate the conflict in Ukraine serving American inte…
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Oct 18, 2022
Episode 202: “Biden’s Playing Nuclear War Brinksmanship with Russia; Meanwhile China Looms” with KT McFarland
In the 20 months that Joe Biden has been President, his decisions and rhetoric have made the world ever more combustible. Events in Ukraine has reached a flash point. Still, the Biden Administration refuses to negotiate with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. The chance of a wider war between NATO and Russia grows ever more likely, a war that would immediately draw in the United States under NATO’s Article 5 requiring collective defense . Worse, supposedly serious people - both in the Biden Administration and many top Republicans - are talking about a “limited nuclear war.’ Do they really want to risk this outcome over a country that most Americans cannot even find on a map? Meanwhile, China is about to elect President Xi Jinping to a third term, effectively anointing him as Emperor for Life. And Xi has his sights set on Taiwan, which like Putin with Ukraine, he believes must be absorbed into China. “The complete reunification of our country must be realized, and it can without a doubt…
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Oct 11, 2022
Episode 201: “Surviving Hurricane Ian while Contemplating Nuclear Armageddon” with Brandon Weichert
This episode took a couple of twisting turns to complete. A few weeks back, I emailed my friend Brandon Weichert, a very smart geopolitical strategist and publisher of the Weichert Report, to ask if he could come on my show to talk about Ukraine, Putin and the possibilities of a nuclear war. He emailed back that “well, perhaps we could do the recording later this week or next weekend because I've got a category three hurricane bearing down in my home, presently. It might end up in Tampa, but we might be right in the epicenter". In the event, the hurricane did land, and it landed right on top of Brandon. “Before the hurricane hits,” shares Brandon, “the night before, I'm watching local news and they're saying it's going to strengthen into a category four, but it looks like it's still going to miss Southwest Florida, it's going to hit Tampa. So we’ll be ok. Not great, but ok.” “Then I wake up at 7:00 or 8:00 am the next morning and my house is shaking and it's like somethin…
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Oct 4, 2022
Episode 200: If You Want Lawful Elections, You Will Need To Get Engaged (Here’s How) with Cleta Mitchell
Election process isn’t a sexy topic, but if we want to preserve our democratic election system, and keep our Republic, election integrity is essential.
Election Integrity means ensuring the legal right of all Americans to vote in a free and fair election:
* without concerns that their political voice would be diminished by individual or institutional fraud,
* physical or verbal intimidation,
* vote trafficking (“harvesting”)
* buying of votes,
* ballot manipulation at election offices,
* voting by non-citizens,
* or any political activism that alters, coerces, or negates a citizen’s right to vote.
In 2020, using the pretext of COVID, Democrat lawmakers and partisan judges, systematically changed state election laws. No matter what words you use to characterize it, the election process was massively tilted to favor the Democrat candidates, including Joe Biden.
However we feel about 2020, that was then, and this is now. We have an…
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Sep 29, 2022
Episode 199: It is Time to Negotiate Peace Between Ukraine and Russia with Shea Bradley-Farrell
“These are the cold, hard facts: Russia, the country cornering the European energy market, is profiting from its war against Ukraine, while the West’s adversaries gain economic and global dominance. U.S. Warhawks and like-minded ideologues of the European Union (EU) have enabled a war that grinds on, destroying Ukraine, while its leadership poses artistically for Vogue magazine.”
“And now, in the ninth month, the citizens of the EU are preparing for a cold, dark winter and a fight for which they did not ask.”
“Peace will not come to Ukraine until the U.S. and Russia sit down face-to-face and negotiate specific terms and conditions of a peace treaty. Nothing short of that level of negotiation will be effective, respected, or guaranteed.”
So declares my guest on this episode of The Bill Walton Show, Dr Shea Bradley-Farrell - and I agree.
Shea is president of the Counterpoint Institute for Policy, Research and Education and is a recognized expert in international de…
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Aug 19, 2022
Episode 198: Will Chinese-Style Social Credit Be Coming to America? with Todd Zywicki
In the decade since Barrack Obama remarked that “it would be so much easier to be the President of China,” the Chinese Communist Party has been working hard to make that job even easier.
How? One way is to impose a social credit system that monitors, rewards, and punishes people according to how closely their behavior conforms to the Party’s diktats.
"The social credit system is an important component of the social market, the socialist market economy, and the social government system. Keeping trust is glorious, and breaking trust is disgraceful,” the Party declares.
So what happens in China when its people do things that the Communist Party thinks “breaks its trust”?
We saw that last month when some Chinese banking customers tried to organize a rally to protest having access to their bank deposits cut off. The CCP flipped their social credit health codes to red, which means they couldn't use public transport, they couldn’t go into restaurants, they couldn’t go into…
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Jul 28, 2022
Episode 197: “How We Can Rein in the Power of the Federal Government” with Mark Meckler.
The genius of the founders who gave us the United States Constitution was that they sought to provide a system of government to guard against the concentration of power by an elite few. Their clear-eyed understanding of human nature was that unchecked power almost always and everywhere has been the source of tyranny throughout history. But for more than a century in America, the Constitution, as drafted and ratified, has been either ignored or, creatively lawyered by Supreme Court rulings, to expand federal power. Washington DC today enjoys almost unchecked power. This is a systemic problem that requires a systemic solution. So says Mark Meckler, my guest on this episode. Mark is founder of the Convention of the States, which calls for using Article V of the Constitution to call a Convention of States to propose amendments. “This is about more than elections. Elections cannot and will not solve the problems of a broken system. The only solution big enough to fix our nation’s proble…
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Jul 19, 2022
Episode 196: Freedom, CPAC, America and Winning the Next Election with Matt Schlapp
This episode is set in our mountainside house in Rappahannock County, Virginia for a wide ranging conversation with my friend, the always engaging and provocative Matt Schlapp, leader and Chairman of CPAC. We cover a lot of ground, with some of the highlights being: Why we believe we’re in the human flourishing business. Why the “diversity, equity and inclusion” mantra is a false God. How CPAC is finding that America’s founding principles and freedoms are resonating all over the world with its international events in Japan, Brazil, Hong Kong, and this week, Israel. What we think is the most important word in CPAC’s name. Where people who share our values should be investing their time and money. Why a “little bit of voter fraud and corruption” is unacceptable when it comes to our elections. What Ron DeSantis can expect if he becomes the Republican standard bearer. This is a fun conversation, especially as we joust and jest with my director Kenny, as the sun moves around t…
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Jul 14, 2022
Episode 195: “The Supreme Court Reins in the EPA: Why? What Happens Next” with John Vecchione and Casey Norman
The Supreme Court’s most momentous decision was not the 5-to-4 vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. That simply sent the issue back to the states to decide.
Rather it was the blockbuster decision to rein in the Environmental Protection Agency from claiming powers that Congress did not grant.
When Congress passed the Clean Air Act it authorized the EPA to impose the “best system of emission reduction” for carbon-emitting activities. It did not authorize the EPA to shut down electricity generated from coal. It did not authorize a “generation shift” to so-called renewables like wind and solar.
The EPA had claimed these powers to order changes of vast economic and political significance and the Supreme Court essentially said “no you can’t do that, not unless there’s legislation that clearly and explicitly authorizes it.”
As John Vecchione, my guest on this episode, puts it succinctly:
“Why do you write down laws? If you write down the laws, don't those words mean somethin…
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Jul 7, 2022
Episode 194: "Making America First Again" with Brooke Rollins
As we can all recall, when Donald Trump took office in January 2017, he didn’t exactly come equipped with the detailed plans and the 1,000s of people necessary to bring about his agenda. Essentially, he had to start from scratch. That was part of his appeal. That he did accomplish so much was a testament to the strength of his mission - Make America Great Again - and the power of his personal leadership. Still, there were a lot of missed opportunities. With Republicans likely to get another chance when America elects a Republican President in 2024, we need to get it right. We need to be prepared. Working on just such a project is the America First Policy Institute led by its CEO Brooke Rollins, my guest on this episode. Brooke was Director of the Domestic Policy Council in President Trump’s White House, where she also served as Director of the Office of American Innovation. Simply put, AFPI is developing a detailed blueprint for governing. To put in place the right people, policies…
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Jun 28, 2022
Episode 193: "Gun Control Myths" with Dr. John Lott
We've all been appalled by yet another school shooting, this time in Uvalde, Texas. We want these tragedies to stop. We want to do something. Of course the cries to “do something” almost always means doing something about guns. Yet, the gun bill just signed into law by President Biden is unlikely to prevent future school shootings. There's a lot of evidence to show why it won't work, especially when existing gun laws appear to cost more lives than they save. So says Dr. John Lott, my guest on this episode, and the nation’s leading expert on guns and gun laws. Dr. Lott, with a PhD in economics, is president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. With almost three decades of research, his many books including More Guns, Less Crime, The Bias Agains Guns and Gun Control Myths which show that by allowing adults to carry concealed weapons significantly reduces crime in America. Some things you may find surprising: Between 1950 and May 2022, 96% of mass public shootings in the United…
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Jun 14, 2022
Episode 192: "National Security Realities: Threats and Solutions" with Brandon Weichert
From the moment President Joe Biden’s administration took office, the world has grown a more dangerous place, and the pace is accelerating.
There’s a long list of national security worries that didn’t used to be of concern to everyday Americans, but now are, or should be.
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Russia, Ukraine and the prospects of a nuclear war.
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China’s mounting threat to envelop Taiwan, a world leader and supplier of semiconductors and information technology.
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Collapsing political stability in the Middle East thanks to the administration’s blunders that have helped Iran's quest to obtain nuclear weapons.
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The mostly unreported Chinese and Russian quest to dominate outer space. The country that controls space controls the world.
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And, maybe worst of all, the made-in-America war on fossil fuels, which has driven inflation sky high and made us dependent on our enemies for our energy.
Triggered by our disastrous cut and run from Afghanistan last year, the world’s bad actors…
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Jun 7, 2022
Episode 191: "Lessons from the Street: Stephen Schwarzman's Book Prompts Bill to Compare Insights into the World of Money” with John Tamny
In this episode, my friend John Tamny interviews me about legendary Wall Street leader and Blackstone founder Stephen Schwarzman’s book What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence. There are many fascinating insights and lessons in Steve’s book which we can all benefit from.
A few highlights:
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Steve Schwarzman started Blackstone with a unique strategic plan. There’s a tremendous lesson in how he approached building his firm.
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For any young man or woman who wants to build a business, or any type of organization, Steve Schwarzman’s book would be a great place to start learning about “what it takes.”
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When Steve Schwarzman tells his team “don’t lose money” it’s about a mindset. Think through the downsides, what Jay Pritzker called “the horribles.” Both, in part, became billionaires from thinking this way.
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One of my favorite Steve Schwarzman Rules: “Worrying is an active, liberating activity. If channeled appropriately, it allows you to…
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May 31, 2022
Episode 190: "Cancel Culture Comes to Banking” with Todd Zywicki and Paul Watkins
Have you ever thought about what your life would be like if you were denied access to a bank account or a credit card or access to any kind of digital payment system? Well, it's happening and it's happening to an increasing number of people and organizations. Cancel culture has come to banking. PayPal, major credit card networks and banks have already stopped processing payments for organizations they deem “hate groups.” Remember “Operation Chokepoint”? Well, it’s evolved and gotten even more draconian. And cryptocurrencies, which some thought might be a safe haven, well, maybe not so much. Bitcoin was supposed to be a financial lifeline for the truckers in Canada, but instead, Canadian authorities ordered banks and crypto exchanges to block transactions from crypto wallets tied to the truckers. Seems like everything has now become political, including our digital money. Joining me for a chilling conversation about these threats are Todd Zywicki, who served as Chair of the Co…
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May 25, 2022
Episode 189: “Ukraine Explained, Taiwan Explained” with Dr Stephen Bryen
Russian’s war on Ukraine, and China’s aim to take over Taiwan. Joining me is one the wisest national security experts around, Dr Stephen Bryen. With 50 years of experience in foreign relations and national security, he’s seen it all. Called the Yoda of the arms trade, he was the Pentagon's top cop, the man whose job it was to ensure that sensitive technology would be kept from enemies, potential enemies and questionable allies. Stephen is the driving force behind the Center for Security Policy’s just published Stopping a Taiwan Invasion. It’s proposals, if adopted, will discourage any attack from China and strengthen peace and security in the Pacific. I’ve a lot of questions, and Stephen provides answers. And some deep insights. Was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine inevitable, or did the we provoke it? Why is Russia’s invasion failing? If Putin’s ousted, what are the odds that someone much worse takes over? How concerned is the veteran intelligence community that we could…
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May 17, 2022
Episode 188: "Why Are We Investing American Retirement Dollars in China?" with Frank Gaffney and Roger Robinson
The Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board is once again planning to allow federal employees’ to invest their retirement savings into companies controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.
The FRTIB has decided to ignore directives by both President Trump - and President Biden - as well as strong opposition on Capitol Hill, to open a ‘Mutual Fund Window’ in June which would make available to Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) participants the opportunity to invest up to 25% of their savings in some 5,000 mutual funds.
The problem?
These funds would include businesses involved in the Chinese government’s military, espionage, human rights abuses, and its aggressive industrial policy designed to undermine U.S. industry.
Why, after all we’ve learned about China’s extensive aims at global domination, does the FRTIB plan to proceed with this? China is no longer simply an economic competitor, but rather an aggressive adversary.
The FRTIB public statements say it’s “too much work…
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May 17, 2022
Episode 187: “The Federal Government Is Using Twitter to Censor Speech” with Jenin Younes and John Vecchione
Is this right and lawful? Well, we now have a test case to find out.
In a first-of-its-kind First Amendment lawsuit against the federal government, attorneys Jenin Younes and John Vecchione of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, argue that the government acted wrongfully when it “directed social media platforms, including Twitter, to censor alleged “misinformation” about COVID-19.”
Both Jenin and John join me on this episode to explain the suit and what’s at stake for free speech.
To recollect, in May 2021, the White House began a coordinated and escalating public campaign to stop what it called the flow of purported “health misinformation” related to Covid-19.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki went so far to say that the President believed social media platforms have a responsibility to censor health “misinformation” related to Covid-19 vaccinations. She then added ominously that by not doing so social media companies were responsible for American deaths.
Ne…
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May 10, 2022
Episode 186: John Tamny and I Don't Agree About Everything, and That's OK
Author John Tamny joins me on this episode for a freewheeling back and forth about some of today’s big concerns. John, a free market fundamentalist and original thinker, almost always has a contrarian take on things. John’s books include Who Needs the Fed, When Politicians Panicked, Popular Economics and The End of Work. Some of the questions we get into: Elon Musk’s plans for Twitter Why credit's never there when you need it What it means when Jeff Bezos says your margin is my opportunity Has social media censorship been overstated Have social media companies created a market opportunity for Musk Should we have more engagement with China, not less Is the Fed just an outsourced function of Congress Why you're hard pressed to find examples where governments have created much wealth Are the agendas of big multinational companies and government converging What it might mean if Elon Musk sells more Tesla stock to buy Twitter Did Twitter’s censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story…
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May 3, 2022
Episode 185: The Behind The Scenes Story Meeting with The Bill Walton Show Team
Listen in to a behind the scenes story meeting as the Bill Walton Show team speculates on what’s going on in the world. Starlink satellites and all the junk flying around in space, Elon Musk vs Jeff Bezos, Ukraine, the domino theory, Biden’s open borders, Alyona’s Kazakhstan take on Russia, media’s monolithic coverage of Ukraine, inflation, cooking oil and fertilizer prices, the insane (perhaps) Shanghai covid lockdown, the fragmenting world order and the dollar’s reserve currency status, what’s going on with China and Russia, corporate profits at all time highs … and more. Send us your thoughts about what we should cover.
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May 3, 2022
Episode 184: “A Final Report Card on the States’ Response to COVID-19” with Phil Kerpen
We’re more than two years into the Covid-19 pandemic. So by now, we should know enough to assess what we’ve learned about the measures our governments took to mitigate the virus? What worked? What didn’t? Fortunately, we now have a comprehensive comparative study, published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, authored by University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan - and Steve Moore and Phil Kerpen of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. They compared Covid outcomes in the 50 states and the District of Columbia based on three variables: the economy, education and mortality. Their conclusion? “The correlation between health and economy scores is essentially zero,” say the authors, “which suggests that the severe lockdown states that withdrew the most from economic activity did not significantly improve health by doing so.” The bottom 10 are dominated by the states and D.C. that had the most stringent lockdowns and were among the last to…
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Apr 26, 2022
Episode 183: “Have US and EU Blunders Led to Putin’s War?” with J. Michael Waller
In this episode I’m talking again with Dr. J. Michael Waller, Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Policy,
Mike’s Secret Empire: The KGB in Russia Today predicted the rise of the KGB, and inevitably, a Vladimir Putin. He was also Annenberg Professor of International Communication at the Institute of World Politics, and instructor in SYOPS operation at the Kennedy Special Warfare Center School at Fort Bragg.
In this wide ranging and of necessity, speculative conversation we ask whether, after the Cold War ended, the United States could have brought Russia into alignment with the West. There are many what if’s.
Here’s some of what we speculate about.
Is the war in Ukraine a product of Putin’s aggression or US/EU fecklessness, or both?
Why did President Bush 41’s Administration fear the collapse of the Soviet Union? and even urged countries, such as Ukraine, to temper their hopes for a popularly elected government?
After the USSR collapsed, the U.S.…
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Apr 19, 2022
Episode 182: "Are We Misreading Putin's War Aims" with Dr. Peter Vincent Pry
This episode is a follow-up to my conversation a few weeks ago with Dr. Peter Vincent Pry about our concerns that our Administration’s responses to the Russian invasion of Ukraine could lead to nuclear war.
Today, we consider also an alternate possibility that Vladimir Putin is playing a much deeper game than most in the West have imagined.
As Executive Director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, former Chief of Staff of the Congressional EMP Commission and Director of the US Nuclear Strategy Forum, Dr Pry brings a vast and imaginative knowledge of history and of modern warfare.
“Most analysts, including myself, thought that the relevant scenario was Crimea and that the Russians would go for a quick, almost bloodless, victory,” speculates Peter, “but there is another Russian way of war that was right under our noses. And that is a long protracted war … it's almost like they're deliberately doing everything they can to try to provoke the West to int…
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Apr 14, 2022
Episode 181: "A Brave New-and More Dangerous-World" with Brandon Weichert
Since the COVID-19 virus was loosed upon the world, either intentionally or accidentally, from Wuhan, China, the world has been fundamentally changed. The globalist economic and geopolitical fabric has been torn. There is no one single dominant power anymore and the post Cold War, unipolar world system is gone and is not coming back.
Russia now is the first to take advantage of what they think is a window of opportunity. The Russian-Ukrainian conflict is but the beginning of many conflicts that will emanate over the next decade.
So argues Brandon Weichert, my guest on this episode, publisher of the Weichert Report and author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower.
Brandon, who has been called a “brilliant and anxiety inducing scholar,” believes mainstream American analysts have been wrong from the start on the war in Ukraine.
“Even if they have gotten some details correct, they are missing the picture: there is no rolling Russian power back in Ukrain…
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Apr 7, 2022
Episode 180: “America's Open Borders" with Ken Cuccinelli and Russ Vought
“No borders. No walls. No USA at all.”
Chant by Antifa rioters marching in the streets of Denver.
With Ukraine and Russia dominating the headlines, America seems to have lost focus on the border - and the war - that really counts.
It’s not Ukraine, it’s America’s southern border with Mexico. The Biden Administration seems simply to have “opened it up.”
Completely.
And what’s happening is an ongoing catastrophe that’s fueling illegal immigration, human trafficking and drug smuggling. People from over 100 countries around the world have crossed the border illegally in the last year.
We need to focus on this war on our own border here, at home - a strange war where it seems our adversary is our own federal government. What the Biden administration is doing is not incompetence at protecting our border, it's a deliberate policy to open it up.
But we don’t have to wait for a change in the Administration.
“A plain reading of the Constitution…
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Mar 29, 2022
Episode 179: “Taking a Hard Look at our Dependence on China for Our Drugs” with Rosemary Gibson and Frank Gaffney
Thirty years ago, the United States, Europe, and Japan manufactured 90 percent of the global supply of the key ingredients for the world's medicines and vitamins. No more. China is now the largest global supplier. Millions of Americans are taking prescription and over-the-counter drugs made in, or with critical ingredients from China and they don’t know it and neither do many of their doctors. This is becoming a grave concern. As we’ve seen, first with the global pandemic driven lockdowns and now, with the Russia/Ukraine war, the world’s economy has acute supply chain interdependencies. And for America, among the top of our concerns, has to be our dependence on an increasingly hostile China for our pharmaceutical drugs. Sharing my concern and joining me on this episode are my returning guests: Rosemary Gibson, author of “China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine” And Frank Gaffney, founder of the Center for Security Policy, Vice Chairman of…
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Mar 22, 2022
Episode 178: "Stops Along the Way" with Brent Bozell
Growing up Bozell. Stops Along the Way: A Catholic Soul, a Conservative Heart, an Irish Temper, and a Love of Life. Talking in this episode with L. Brent Bozell III, author of Stops Along the Way and who is one of the most outspoken and effective national leaders in the conservative movement today. Brent founded and is president of the Media Research Center, the largest media watchdog organization in America; and ForAmerica, which the New York Times declared was “one of the greatest unexpected influences on the 2016 election.” Lecturer, syndicated columnist, television commentator, debater, marketer, businessman, author, publisher, and activist … Brent’s done it all. He's also has the great gift for friendship. This episode though, is about a Brent Bozell that we don’t know enough about. What was it like to grow up as one of 10 children as part of the nomadic family of amazing consequence of Brent Bozell Jr and Patricia Buckley? He, who headed the Yale debate team (with roomm…
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Mar 16, 2022
Episode 177: “A Nuclear War Scenario” with Dr Peter Vincent Pry
This is a very upsetting episode. I’m joined by my frequent guest Dr Peter Vincent Pry and we’re talking about Ukraine and the likelihood of nuclear war. Dr Pry is executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, served as chief of staff to the congressional EMP Commission, and director of the U.S. Nuclear Strategy Forum. Just recently, he published a piece titled, “The Nuclear Crisis Nobody Knows” “I think we're facing an unprecedented danger that we've never experienced in the nuclear missile age, worse than Cuba, a circumstance where we are on the threshold of a nuclear war, nuclear attack, from Russia.” Nobody knows what’s in Putin’s mind but apparently he going to just keep using his conventional forces to overwhelm the Ukrainians and eventually achieve victory in Ukraine at a conventional level. But many people predicted that the Russian conventional military would just steamroll through Ukraine in a couple of days, and that hasn't happened.…
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Mar 16, 2022
Episode 176: "Ukraine First?" with Fred Fleitz and John Zadrozny
For a wide ranging overview of how and why the Biden’s national and homeland security teams have made America more vulnerable on virtually every front, start here.
I’m joined on this episode by Fred Fleitz, Vice Chair of America First Policy Institute’s Center for American Security and who served as Deputy Assistant to President Trump and Chief of Staff of the National Security Council
and
John Zadronzy, Director of America First Policy Institute’s Center for Homeland Security and Immigration, and who served as Deputy Assistant to President Trump in the office of Senior Advisor for Policy.
As both Fred and John convey in our conversation, it’s hard to overstate the security risks America is facing today. From Ukraine and Russia to China and Taiwan to our own wide open southern Border, the Biden Administration seems incapable or unwilling to protect us.
Secretary of Defense Bob Gates wrote in his 2014 memoir that Joe Biden has been wrong about every national security ques…
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Mar 8, 2022
Episode 175: "The West’s New Totalitarianism" with Dr. Naomi Wolf and Jenin Younes
In the past two years, measures taken to deal with Covid have resulted in extraordinary losses of freedom in the West - in fact, all over the world - driven by government mandates and lockdowns. Now that it's clear that we're no longer in the throes of a pandemic, what next?
For how long are citizens prepared to accept these extraordinary extensions of state power and loss of their civil liberties? Have we slid into permanent tyranny in the name of “protecting us?”
Joining me on this episode are two people who refuse to accept this tyranny. Dr. Naomi Wolf, author of seven best-selling books, who writes on Substack as the extraordinary and fierce “Outspoken with Dr. Naomi Wolf” (see below) and
Jenin Younes, litigation council for the New Civil Liberties Alliance, NCLA, a former public defender, and a warrior against the massive encroachment of the Administrative State.
Both Naomi and Jenin have made an intellectually and emotionally difficult break with the Left over governm…
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Mar 2, 2022
Episode 174: “Race Marxism” with James Lindsay
James Lindsay is someone who truly understands Critical Race Theory and doesn’t believe a word of it.
As James explains in this episode of The Bill Walton Show,
“Critical Race Theory is a disaster. Critical Race Theory is the tip of a 100 year-long spear that's being thrust into the side of Western civilization. In its simplest terms, CRT is Race Marxism.”
Like Marxism, CRT is a fundamentalist religion, a comprehensive belief system that claims to address the fundamental questions of human existence.
CRT rests upon a belief that racism is the fundamental organizing principle of society. It claims that racism is systemic and that it was created and maintained by whites to maintain their privileges and advantages over every other race.
According to CRT, racism - as a form of power - can only flow from “whiteness” and it lays the problems of society on the doorstep of “whiteness.”
Critical Race Theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, incl…
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Feb 22, 2022
Episode 173: The Desecrators with Matt & Mercy Schlapp
The subtitle of Matt Schlapp’s new book, written with Deal Hudson, sums up well why this book is a must read. Defeating the cancel culture mob and reclaiming one nation under God They write: “For half a century, people of faith have seen traditional ideas of morality undermined as a cascade of progressive revolutions impacted society. The waves of change hit the shores, but most nevertheless believed that families, the Church, truth, and education would all weather the storm. But we were overconfident. We fought, but we also rested in the confidence that common sense and decency would prevail. It was impossible, it seemed, that the basic values held by our parents and grandparents would ever be challenged by charges of racism and, for many, their “whiteness.” Each day now brings news that defies common sense; it’s as if the world has turned upside down and none of the old verities matter anymore. When a society begins to unwind, chaos ensues. It’s now crystal clear that our…
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Feb 15, 2022
Episode 172: Ukraine: Is the Biden Administration Unleashing Furies It Does Not Understand? with Dr Peter Vincent Pry and J. Michael Waller
There are growing calls among political elites in Washington for the United States to “do something" about preventing a Russian invasion of the Ukraine.
But do we have the military capabilities to stop it?
Why do we want Ukraine to join NATO?
Does Ukraine matter?
Why are American politicians who have been so soft toward Moscow for their entire political careers all of a sudden turn uber hawks against Vladimir Putin.
Are we pushing China and Russia to make common cause with each other?
Does the Biden foreign policy team have a clue what they’re doing?
To get some answers to these and many many other questions, two seasoned national security analysts - and returning guests - Peter Pry and Mike Waller - weigh in.
* J. Michael Waller, PhD, is Senior Analyst for Strategy at the Center for Security Policy and
* Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, is the former Executive Director of the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security
Some sample observations:
“Russia and China…
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Feb 8, 2022
Episode 171: “Govzilla: How the Relentless Growth of Government Is Devouring Our Economy—And Our Freedom” with Steve Moore
On this episode we’re talking with economist Steve Moore about his terrific new book Govzilla.
It’s a sobering, yet easy to read, tale of the gigantic expansion of government over the last 50 years, and especially over the last two years since COVID hit.
“The virus became an excuse to massively expand the powers of government,” says Steve, “the size of government, the regulatory reach of government, in ways that I think we would've found unimaginable a decade ago.”
With so many other issues before us: borders, education, mandates, Ukraine, election integrity, and on and on, it’s easy to lose focus on Washington’s catastrophic federal financial mismanagement.
Watch this show to regain focus. And if you’re looking for an excellent primer on economics, Steve’s book is it.
It's relatively short and easy to read. It's filled with very clear graphs. It covers all the major issues. It talks about who the heroes are (too few), who the villains are, what the money is go…
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Feb 1, 2022
Episode 170: “Ethics at the Heart of Public Policy” with Ryan Anderson and Roger Severino
America’s founding ideals and our nation’s rich Judeo-Christian heritage have been under constant attack from a so-called “progressive” Left for over a hundred years.
Yet as they’ve marched through and deconstructed America’s great cultural institutions, instead of the “progress” they claim, we’re seeing the opposite.
It’s abundantly clear now that as the progressive elites prevail, the rest of us lose.
And more and more we feel a growing urge to push back.
We know now that America’s flourishing will depend on prevailing in a successful cultural counter revolution.
And it’s beginning to happen.
On the front lines leading this fight - and my guests for this episode - are President Ryan Anderson and Senior Fellow Roger Severino of the Ethics & Public Policy Center.
Prior to leading EPPC. Ryan Anderson was the William E. Simon senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation
He is also the Founding Editor of Public Discourse and the author…
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Jan 25, 2022
Episode 169: George F. Will on “American Happiness and Discontents” with Don Boudreaux and John Tamny
In this episode we get to talk with George F. Will about his latest collection of essays, American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020, and also about his magnum opus, The Conservative Sensibility.
Joining in on the conversation are John Tamny, Vice President of FreedomWorks, editor of RealClearMarkets, and author of When Politicians Panicked,
and Don Boudreaux, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, research scholar at Mercatus Center, who runs the go-to blog for free market economic thinking, Cafe Hayek.
Always witty and erudite, George offers up his views on today’s pressing concerns, queried, challenged and amplified by John and Don, two very smart men.
Among our questions:
* How and when do Americans recover the liberties lost from over two years of government lockdowns and mandates?
* Why did so many libertarians acquiesce?
* Public choice theory says that people in government are not any different than people in the private…
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Jan 18, 2022
Episode 168: "No Rights, No Games" with Chen Guangcheng, Reggie Littlejohn and Yaxue Cao
The 2022 winter Olympics in Beijing China opens a few weeks from now, and the International Olympic Committee's 2015 decision to have China host the event looks ever more dubious.
Since then, it's become obvious to most observers that China, never a champion of human rights, is growing ever more oppressive. It’s Communist Party leadership has become even more deeply committed to preserving its monopoly on power through state sponsored repression, surveillance, and indoctrination.
Witness its takeover of Hong Kong, the internment of Muslims in Xinjiang, the disappearance of tennis star Peng Shuai, its totalitarian social credit system, the Covid coverup and mounting threats to democratic Taiwan.
So why are democracies from all over the world moving ahead to send their athletes to a country so antithetical to their values?
My guests for this episode provide a first hand and stark assessment as to why they should not.
Chen Guangcheng, a Chinese civil rights lawyer, was impris…
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Jan 11, 2022
Episode 167: "The Great Reset" with Jay Richards and James Patrick
Unprecedented government measures to stop the spread of an unstoppable virus have morphed into mortal threats to our liberties and civil rights, not just here in the United States, but worldwide.
First we were told that lockdowns, masks, and social distancing stop the spread of the virus. Do these things and we would be safe. There’s no clear correlation between these measures and the spread of the virus.
Then the CDC changed the definition of herd immunity on its website. They defined the concept to account for vaccines only, and erased the role of infections themselves. Winston Smith (1984) would understand.
Now, it’s only vaccines, vaccine mandates, vaccine passports that will do the trick. Natural immunity doesn’t matter. Why?
One big casualty of government responses to the coronavirus over the last two years is the loss of trust in our public health establishment.
Joining me to talk about this is James Patrick, documentary filmmaker, whose film Planet Lockdown is coming…
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Dec 28, 2021
Episode 166: “Energy and Technology Reality” with Mark Mills
Today’s episode is a treasure trove of important facts that we all should know about technology, society and the future. My guest is once again Mark Mills, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute - who specializes on science, technology, energy, and future manufacturing technologies - and who has just published The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and A Roaring 2020s Conventional wisdom as to how technology will change the future is wrong. And what is quite wrong is the view that the only technological revolution that matters will be found with renewable energy and electric cars. According to Mills, a convergence of technologies will instead drive a broad economic boom over the coming decade. It will come not from any single big invention, but from the confluence of radical advances in technology’s three domains: microprocessors, materials, and machines. At the center of all of this is the Cloud, history’s biggest infr…
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Dec 21, 2021
Episode 165: “Just Facts about the Virus” with Jim Agresti
Albert Einstein said science can only flourish in an atmosphere of free speech.
Today, despite claims about “following the science” with regard to Covid 19, this is simply not happening. Why? Because “they” have taken away one of the essential elements of science: allowing people to disagree based on facts learned through experiments and observation, reconciling practical knowledge and ends with scientific laws.
This is how science works. This is how freedom works. This is how good things happen in a free society because people are free to get information and disagree. Nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth.
By contrast, look at every totalitarian regime, what do they do? They squash free speech. And when that happens, people suffer.
Who are “they?”
I think we all know by now and it seems that they have the totalitarian playbook well in hand. Facebook, Twitter, all the tech giants and the mainstream media have all decreed that if you say something that…
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Dec 14, 2021
Episode 164: “Wrath: America Enraged” with Peter Wood
Over the course of roughly four generations, from around 1950 to the present, American culture has been transformed from a culture that believed in the value of self-control into a culture that celebrates self-expression. And that “self-expression” has now twisted into a new form of anger - political wrath - which makes a performance art out of our darkest emotions. So argues my guest on this episode, Peter Wood, author of Wrath: America Enraged and 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project and President of the National Association of Scholars. “The question is not whether we didn’t have to deal with anger before, but how we channeled it. What kind of cultural frame did we put around it? And that began to change. After World War II, the hero type of Gary Cooper who could maintain his cool under extreme pressure gave way to, think, of Allen Ginsberg, and his famous poem Howl.” “We’ve brought anger into our music, movies, and personal lives; and now, having step by step…
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Dec 7, 2021
Episode 163: Challenging Leviathan with Mark Chenoweth and Jenin Younes
In this episode, we're talking again about the coercive power of the Administrative State and its serious threat to our constitutional freedoms. No other development in contemporary American law denies more rights to more Americans. Joining me to discuss is Mark Chenoweth, Executive Director, and Jenin Younes, Litigation Counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) a public interest litigation and pro bono advocacy law firm. NCLA represents both plaintiffs and defendants engaged with administrative state actions to make sure that their civil liberties are not being violated. Although Americans still enjoy the shell of their Republic, the administrative state has brought about exactly the sort of government that the Constitution was designed to prevent. "The kinds of protections that you would expect to have, if say a prosecutor from the Department of Justice were going after you in a federal district court, those same protections don't exist if it's a federal agency going after…
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Nov 29, 2021
Episode 162: "Is the Administrate State Democracy’s Death Knell" with Michael Pack
Your eyes may glaze over when you hear people talking about the “administrative state.” But if you care about liberty, it’s long past time to start paying close attention to what it is and how impervious it has become to election outcomes.
Today in Washington, we have what’s become effectively a fourth branch of government: an unelected permanent bureaucracy of self-regarding “expert” progressive elites who staff and run the federal agencies.
And if you believe they are hostile to conservatives you would be right.
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Nov 23, 2021
Episode 161: “Whose Interest Does Big Business Serve?” with Justin Danhof and Matt Schlapp
In the past decade, America’s big businesses have increasingly moved to the political left. For evidence, take a look at their actions and stances on critical race theory indoctrination, vaccine mandates, radical climate change agendas, boardroom “diversity”, doing business and making common cause with a hostile China, etc … on issue after issue they align with the “woke” left. Now even the Federal Reserve and the Securities Exchange Commission are weighing in to support these agendas. What does this mean for ordinary Americans, and what can be done to push back? Joining me to explore this are: Matt Schlapp, Chairman of the American Conservative Union, which sponsors CPAC, founder of Cove Strategy, and long time advisor to major corporations, and Justin Danhof, Executive Vice President of the National Center for Public Policy, who has been waging a courageous battle against creeping corporate socialism for years. If you feel like American lovers of liberty are fighting agai…
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Nov 16, 2021
Episode 160: “An Army of Momma Bears” with Tony Perkins
I open this show fondly quoting Shakespeare about how “one man in his time plays many parts.” He could have been writing about my friend and one of my personal heroes Tony Perkins Tony's indeed a man of many extraordinary and effective parts. He's president of the Family Research Council. He's been chairman of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom and past President of the Council for National Policy. He's a syndicated radio host. He's an author of a terrific book called No Fear of New Generation Standing For Truth. He's a Baptist minister. He was a Louisiana State Representative, a TV reporter, a Marine, a policeman and when he was five years old, he led his father to Jesus. In this wide ranging conversation we talk about his journey, the importance of faith for a thriving society and economy, the threat from China, but at about 14 minutes in we get to the heart of matter. The number one thing we have to do is take back control of education in America. The lockdowns…
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Nov 5, 2021
Episode 159: “Marxism’s Long March” with Mark Meckler and Eric O’Keefe
America is waking up to the capture of our institutions by the “progressive” woke Left. Beginning with K-12 education, universities, the media, and Hollywood, it’s now moved into many churches, our military and corporate boardrooms. This didn’t happen overnight. In this wide ranging and thoughtful conversation with Mark Meckler and Eric O’Keefe, we explore its roots going back to an obscure Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci writing in the 1920’s and his strategy to gain control of cultural institutions. Eric explains that “Gramsci called it ‘the long march through the institutions.’” It took 100 years, but now it’s arrived. We also look at one of the drivers of the American Revolution: the contempt that elites in London held for Americans, even the successful ones. ==== Guests: Mark Meckler, one of America’s leading grassroots activists, founder of Citizens for Self Governance, Convention of States, co-founder of the Tea Party Party Patriots and interim C…
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Oct 26, 2021
Episode 158: “After Covid: Recovering Our Liberty” with Don Boudreaux and John Tamny
It’s almost two years on from the onset of the Covid virus and we know a lot now that we didn’t then. Society should be healing. But we live in vitriolic and partisan times, and widespread disagreement abounds about what it was, what it is, what it isn’t and how to cope with it. Yet to those who understand how economies work, this much seems clear: governments’ blunderbuss one-size-fits-all lockdowns and mandates have turned a manageable public health problem into a social, medical and economic catastrophe. It did not have to be this way. Joining me on this episode to talk about the price we’ve paid and where we go from here are two of our most independent economic and social thinkers: Donald Boudreaux, professor of economics at George Mason University, who runs the “go to” blog “Cafe Hayek” which has become a critical resource for facts about Covid and sensible response strategies. And John Tamny, editor of Real Clear Markets, a Forbes Magazine editor and the author…
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Oct 19, 2021
Episode 157: “Standing Up For Truth” with Kevin Hassett
First year economics classes usually begin the semester with the principles of supply and demand.
You learn that incentives matter and that to suggest otherwise is to betray basic principles of economics - and human nature.
You learn that you can ignore or violate these fundamental laws, but that you cannot change them.
You learn that throughout history the societies that have succeeded recognize and respect these economic laws - they use them to their advantage.
Well, someone needs to get this message to progressive Democrats - and soon - because they have become completely unmoored from economic realities.
And their agenda will end in economic disaster. In fact, it’s already happening.
Joining me on this episode to talk about economics and his work with Donald Trump, is my old friend, Kevin Hassett, who served in the Trump administration as Senior Advisor to the President and as his Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. His latest book The Drift, analyzes America's sl…
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Oct 13, 2021
Episode 156: “Liberty or Lockdown” with Jeffrey Tucker
It is hard to overstate the assault on civil liberties we are witnessing in America today.
What began over a year and a half ago as temporary government measures to keep us safe from a virus spread from China, have now metastasized into something much more sinister, spreading to all aspects of societies around the world.
We need to name this thing, understand what’s happening to us, and how to stop this threat to our freedoms.
For some answers, in this episode I talk with Jefferey Tucker, founder of the Brownstone Institute and author of Liberty or Lockdown. Jeffery, a man with a serious message and mission, is a delightful and engaging raconteur who turns policy discussion into a fascinating journey into truth.
This is not an episode to skip. Some highlights from Jeffrey:
“We’ve dealt with pandemics in the past. In the modern age and the 20th century, we did very well intelligently. And suddenly 2020 comes along and we decided to forget everything and pursued…
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Oct 12, 2021
Episode 155: “Afghanistan, China and our Reckless Congress” with Ambassador Pete Hoekstra
In this episode we talk with Ambassador Pete Hoekstra, formerly Chair of the House Intelligence Committee and now Chairman of the Center for Security Policy Board of Advisors.
Some of the many things we explore:
* Biden’s preposterous claim that “America is not at war” seemingly oblivious to China President Xi’s aggressive global ambitions.
* And the Administration may be done with the Afghanistan war, but that doesn’t mean Afghanistan is done with us. Its leaders still are driven to establish a caliphate and kill infidels, and now they have $85 billion in US military equipment to help them do it.
* While there are some differences among al Qaeda, the Taliban and ISIS-K, they agree on one important thing – they hate us and still want to destroy us.
* There’s bipartisan agreement in Congress that Blinken, Milley and Austin failed us in Afghanistan. The honorable thing for them to do is resign. That’s not going to happen. Another option: Congress should censure…
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Oct 5, 2021
Episode 154: “Restoring Our Election Integrity” with Ken Blackwell and Ken Klukowski
Election Integrity: Why we don’t have it, how we lost it and what to do about it. In the election of 2020 we saw a dramatic loosening of the chain of custody of ballots. We saw an indiscriminate use of mass mail-in ballots. We saw a verification process junked and pushed aside. And as a consequence, we saw major irregularities in that election. The result: a waning confidence among voters in the integrity of our election system. The issue is critical. If we don't get our elections right, we lose our American Republic. We lose our liberty. Joining me on this episode are two of our leading players in the fight to restore election integrity - and co-authors of a seminal piece in the Yale Law Review “The Other Voting Right”. Ken Blackwell, in his role with The Center for Election Integrity of the America First Policy Institute. And Ken Klukowski, who was senior counselor in the US Department of Justice and the Trump White House. Right now, the Democrats in Congress are trying to push…
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Sep 28, 2021
Episode 153: "Our Dunkirk Moment" with Steve Moore
The Reconciliation Bill, which Congress is rushing to pass in a matter of days, will push America over the brink into financial and social catastrophe. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is hellbent on this as her legacy project to turn the U.S. into a European entitlement state.
No one can explain what is at stake more plainly than economist Steve Moore, my guest on this episode of The Bill Walton Show:
“This Reconciliation Bill, and by the way, do not call it a $3.5 trillion spending bill, this is $5 trillion on top of the $2 trillion they spent earlier this year, on top of the $6 trillion budget that they are passing and on top of the broad $1 trillion infrastructure bill.”
“You add it up, in one year, Congress is authorizing $12 trillion of spending, which is more money than the United States government spent to finance the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War I, World War II, the moon landing, the transcontinental railroad and the interstate highway system.”
“We a…
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Sep 21, 2021
Episode 152: “The Administrative State vs Our Civil Liberties” with Phillip Hamburger and Jenin Younes
Joe Biden has mandated that businesses with more than 100 employees require every worker to be vaccinated or face weekly testing. It's estimated this will impact over 80 million people or almost two thirds of the country's workforce.
Setting aside his dictatorial and offensive tone, does Joe Biden really have the power to do this or is it that under the guise of "keeping us safe," federal state and local governments have trampled our constitutional rights with draconian regulations and emergency orders with arbitrary executive decrees?
This points towards even a bigger threat to our freedoms: an enormous and growing Administrative State and its threat to every American's constitutional rights.
With me on this episode is Phillip Hamburger, the founder of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a scholar of constitutional law whose contributions are unrivaled by any US legal scholar in driving the national debate on the first amendment, government administrative power, and the separatio…
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Sep 14, 2021
Episode 147 Part 2: “Ahead of the Curve” with John Mauldin
In this Part 2 of my show with John Mauldin, we range far and wide peering into an optimistic future for humanity.
Near term, things look pretty bleak, but when you step back and look at the innovations and technologies that will end up enhancing and prolonging human life, the future holds a lot of promise. Billions of people have been lifted out of poverty in the past 50 years.
Some excerpts:
* We’re living in a financial bubble and a massive bubble of government promises that can never be fulfilled.
* “I see a reset ahead when these bubbles burst, and it will be a tough adjustment,” explains John
* “It’s not riding the tiger that's the problem, it's the dismount.”
* “My job as an investment manager, as an economic thinker and writer, is to help my clients get through to the other side. What can you do? There are things that we can do and great companies that are still going to thriving on the other side of the great reset.”
* There’s a lot t…
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Sep 7, 2021
Episode 151: "The Afghanistan Debacle: What it Means for Americans” with Dr Stephen Bryen and Kyle Shideler
The Afghanistan debacle.
An in-depth look at its implications with Dr Stephen Bryen, Senior Fellow at the American Center for Democracy and Kyle Shideler, Director and Senior Analyst for the Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, both with the Center for Security Policy.
So many questions. Why did we leave so precipitously? Who was behind it? Where do we go from here?
Why, when President Trump proposed withdrawing US troops, did the US military tell him that was a bad idea and that they wouldn’t do it.
But then, when Mr. Biden announced a complete pullout and retreat, there wasn't a word from the Pentagon saying we shouldn't do it.
In fact, they embraced it.
And now Biden has the audacity to blame Trump for something he never did.
What does this means for future of the United States? What was in our national interest by cutting and running from Afghanistan?
The Taliban now have enough arms, including all the equipment that we left behind that it's larger now…
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Sep 2, 2021
Episode 150: The TBWS Brain Trust : "Afghanistan, what a Catastrophe"
It's on everybody's mind right now. Emotions are raw.
*
* What were we doing there?
* Where we're going to go from here?
* What this means for the country, and the rest of the world, going forward, since we cannot trust this Administration’s leadership to protect America.
With me for some plain talk about this are some of my brain trust, the smart people involved with The Bill Walton Show. Today we’ve got Rich McFadden, Greg Corombos and Brian McNicoll.
We get into what we're all seeing and feeling and what we think's going to happen next. Some predictions, mostly questions.
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Aug 31, 2021
Episode 149: “Why America Must Remain the World’s Preeminent Seapower” with Russ Vought and Arthur Herman
After decades of cuts to shipbuilding and maintenance, the United States Navy has been stripped down to a fleet barely larger than it was 100 years ago, in 1916.
Meanwhile, China has dramatically increased its spending on its Navy, as well as on its Air Force, cyberspace and electronic warfare capabilities. Alarmingly, Beijing is building islands in the South China Sea, threatening trade routes and menacing allies.
President Trump made it a priority to expand the American “blue water” fleet to 355 battle-force ships. His plan would have increased shipbuilding by only $6.7 billion and would have launched us on a trajectory to protect America’s maritime supremacy.
Shortly after taking office, Joe Biden slashed this from his budget.
With me to explore this and many other national defense concerns - in a fascinating, wide-ranging and strategic conversation - is Russ Vought, the founder of The Center for Renewing America and the Trump Administration’s Director of the Offic…
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Aug 24, 2021
Episode 148: “Vaccine Mandates?” with Professor Todd Zywicki and Jenin Younes
On June 28th 2021, George Mason University announced its reopening policy related to the COVID-19 for the fall 2021 semester. The policy required all unvaccinated students and staff members - including those who can demonstrate natural immunity from prior COVID-19 infections - to wear masks on campus, physically distance and undergo frequent COVID-19 testing. On July 22, GMU emailed the policy to students and employees and threatened disciplinary action—including termination of employment—against any who do not comply with the vaccine mandate. The university’s website describing its vaccination policy reiterated this threat. On August 3, 2021, GMU Professor Todd Zywicki, represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), filed a complaint in the Eastern District of Virginia, challenging GMU’s so-called “reopening policy.” “This coercive mandate violates my constitutional right to bodily integrity for no compelling reason,” explains Prof Zywicki. “For those of us…
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Aug 17, 2021
Episode 147: “Fingers of Instability” with John Mauldin
In this episode I’m joined by John Mauldin the best-selling author of Bull's Eye Investing: Targeting Real Returns in a Smoke and Mirrors Market and whose “Strategic Investors Conference” is considered among the best events in the business. This is the 21st anniversary of John’s newsletter Thoughts from the Frontline aimed at helping individual investors and institutions develop a clearer understanding of the forces driving the global economy and investment markets. John has a lot of concerns, as do I, about the fate of the U.S. economy given the avalanche of spending and social engineering programs coming out of Washington. It’s spending $6 trillion on a long list of progressive dreams, raising taxes and killing incentives for entrepreneurship and growth. “I don't know any other way to say it, but it's a guaranteed recession. It just is. You cannot take 15 to 20% extra out of the economy and expect it to perform,” says John. What’s happening is otherworldly. You can't…
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Aug 10, 2021
Episode 146: “These People Are Crazy” with Steve Moore
My guest this week is economist Steve Moore
Our topic: the economy and how the trillion upon trillion dollar spending orgy in Washington is going to cause irreparable damage to America.
“This is an extremely dangerous time for our country. What happens over the course of the next three or four months will have decades worth of repercussions,” explains Steve.
“The people who are running Washington right now are out of control. I think they’re crazy. Joe Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer have an agenda to truly radically transform our country” and not for the better.
“They are targeting the productive class, the people who produce things, the people who work, the people who save, the people who invest, the people who start businesses.”
They want to eliminate incentives for people to work, save and invest; all the key drivers of growth.
By the end of 2021, federal debt held by the public is projected to equal 102 percent of GDP.
Debt that high and rapidly rising increa…
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Aug 3, 2021
Episode 145: “America’s Intelligence Wars” with Ambassador Pete Hoekstra and Fred Fleitz
We are living in a complicated and dangerous time in America.
American intelligence and national security should not be part of partisan politics but that is exactly what they’ve become.
“We saw it towards the end of the Obama administration, and the transition into the Trump administration,” according to my guest, Ambassador Pete Hoekstra.
“The weaponization of intelligence and the intelligence community against an incoming president of the United States. And it has continued right up to today with reports that the NSA has been listening to Tucker Carlson’s phone calls and screening his emails.”
As former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands, Pete has keen insights into the problems plaguing our intelligence community.
Moreover, America’s divisions over national security have never been greater, explains my other guest Fred Fleitz, President of the Center for Security Policy who served as Deputy Assistant to the Preside…
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Jul 27, 2021
Episode 144: Wokeness: A Grave Risk to America’s Military-w/Lt.Gen.Boykin and Dr. Waller
Today we are witnessing a growing threat to our American military. A threat that is capable of doing what no foreign enemy ever could: Fracture the world’s greatest armed forces from within, through divisive political indoctrination and controls. That threat is called “wokeness.” At its root, “wokeness” imposes the resentful mindset of an extremist few onto society - in this case the American military. It has infected the Pentagon and its top leaders, and it has been metastasizing for years. Joining me to explore this alarming development is Lt. Gen. (Ret.) William G. Boykin, one of the original combat commanders of the U.S. Army's elite Delta Force. Jerry also commanded all the Army's Green Berets as well as the Special Warfare Center and School and served for four years as Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. “Our military should be about readiness, and its mission must be winning the nation’s wars,” explains Jerry. “There is nothing more important on…
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Jul 22, 2021
Episode 143: Previewing the “Covid Olympics" with The Bill Walton Show Team
As COVID cases continue to climb in Tokyo, the nation is preparing to host the world in what may wind up being the most infamous Olympic Games ever. The Bill Walton show team discusses the role the virus is already playing and impacting athletes. There’s also the issue of wokeness as members of Team USA are expected to protest the National Anthem, while the media and advertisers will be in their own competition to use every opportunity to promote social justice campaigns. Will it be worth watching? We debate that.
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Jul 20, 2021
Episode 142: The Dictatorship of Woke Capital with Stephen Soukup
For the better part of a century, the Left has been waging a methodical - and largely successful - war to control American institutions. Our universities, K-12 education, the news media, Hollywood, federal government bureaucracies … to name just a few … have all fallen victim to what the Left calls their “long march.” During most of that time American business and the military escaped infiltration and indoctrination. But now this has begun to change - and dramatically. In this episode we look at business and The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business with author Stephen Soukup. With stunning speed most of the elites running technology companies, banks, Wall Street investment managers and consumer product companies like Coca Cola and Nike have embraced “woke capitalism.” What’s angers the most is the arrogance of those running our biggest companies. Stephen terms them “Gnostics” who “believe they have the secret to attaining hea…
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Jul 13, 2021
Episode 141: Debunking the 1619 Project with Phil Magness
It’s becoming quite clear that one of the central aims of Critical Race Theory is to delegitimize and diminish the political and moral achievement that is the United States of America. And with their 1619 Project, the New York Times has weighed in to rewrite American history by deconstructing institutions responsible for our prosperity and our success: free market capitalism and the United States Constitution. How? On the grounds that they were deeply interconnected with and irreparably tainted by the institution of slavery in America. To assert their claim, they employ many “big lie” stratagems. Here are some of the biggest: America was founded as a “slavocracy” in 1619 and “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.” Americans declared their independence from Britain to protect the institution of slavery. Half of antebellum U.S. GDP came from slavery and cotton production. Southern planters and slave owners were champions of capitalism. Abraham Lincoln want…
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Jul 6, 2021
Episode 140: Talking with Charles Murray
Identity politics, and charges of systematic racism and white privilege, pose an existential threat to the American experiment and risk tearing our country apart. In this episode, I talk with Charles Murray - one of America’s greatest social scientists - who has now weighed in on this crisis with his latest book: “Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America” In it he argues that we must confront genuine race differences while at the same time defending our nation’s historic commitment to a melting pot and the goal of colorblindness. What good can come of bringing such uncomfortable realities into the open? Here Charles explains: “Ignoring them is destroying America’s most precious ideal, once known as the American creed: People are to be judged on an equal basis as individuals, not by national origin, social class, race, or religion. The ideology behind the charges of systemic racism repudiates this ideal, demanding instead that the power of the state must be used to f…
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Jun 29, 2021
Episode 139: Victims of Communism: Are We Condemned to Repeat the Past?
America has a problem. Positive attitudes toward communism and socialism are at an all-time high in the United States. Almost 40% of Americans now view them favorably and half of our kids in their 20s say they favor socialism. This demonstrates a stunning lack of knowledge of the evils of communism. In the last century, communism murdered more than 100 million people, and forced billions into Marxist tyranny. This horrific past is not dead. It’s not even past. China and its Chinese Communist Party subjugates its own people with absolute controls over freedom of speech and movement while engaging in its strategy of “Three Warfares” to become ascendent globally. They assiduously work our world organizations like the UN and the WHO, while simultaneously engaging in genocide, slave labor and forced human organ transplants for sale on the world market. Meanwhile, in America we’re seeing the rise of cultural marxism and ideologies derived from it like Critical Race Theory. Joining me…
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Jun 22, 2021
Episode 138: “Thinking Again about the Unthinkable” with Dr. Peter Vincent Pry
This show comes at time that this episode’s guest, Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, calls our “hinge of fate.”
Our topic is his riveting paper "Surprise Attack: ICBMs and the Real Nuclear Threat" where he lays bare the world’s current and future nuclear warfare realities.
It’s an issue that many simply do not want to think about.
As Peter puts it, “when it comes to nuclear weapons, U.S. and Western strategic culture mostly thinks and acts in a state of denial and unreality. Nuclear weapons of mass destruction are antithetical to our ethos.”
But as Leon Trotsky warned, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
By contrast, totalitarian states - China, Russia and North Korea - love, celebrate, and parade nuclear missiles as symbols of their omnipotence and their potential “final solution” to the vexing existence of free peoples, like the United States.
The U.S. “Triad” comprises decades old bombers, ICBMs and missile submarines, requiring yea…
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Jun 13, 2021
Episode 137: “How Financial Regulations are Reshaping America” with Todd Zywicki and Brian Johnson
If you think a show about financial regulation is likely to be boring, I ask you to think again.
Financial regulations are really about money.
And in particular, ordinary Americans’ money.
Consumer credit and credit cards
Student loans
Credit reporting
Mortgage finance
Fintech
Crypto currencies
How small businesses get financed
And financial regulations have become yet another primary battlefield on which the Left hopes to fundamentally transform America through the prisms of race and social justice.
Joining me to explain this at-first-glance arcane but critically important topic is Todd Zywicki professor of law at George Mason’s Antonin Scalia law school and Brian Johnson who was deputy director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
They make this come alive. To learn what’s at stake, listen in.
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Jun 8, 2021
Episode 136: Why Republican Glenn Youngkin could become the next Governor of Virginia
The most politically important election in America takes place this November - the race to become the next governor of Virginia.
This race will not be just about Virginia. It will be the first statewide election since Joe Biden took office, and will also be a referendum: How do voters feel about where Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are taking the country.
Glenn Youngkin is the Republican candidate and he joins me in this episode to talk about what he wants to do as Virginia’s governor.
Glenn’s joining the political fray after a career with the Carlisle Group where he rose to become co-chief executive officer of a firm with over $230 billion of assets under management.
As you’ll learn from this conversation, he not only brings a strong economics and leadership background, he also has a sound grasp of the on-the-ground social and pocketbook issues that concern Virginians.
Among them: opening up communities and schools, the culture wars being waged in schools, keeping communitie…
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Jun 6, 2021
Episode 135: “A Woke CIA is a Broke CIA” with Fred Fleitz and Mike Waller
“I used to struggle with imposter syndrome, but at age thirty six I refuse to internalize misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be. I am tired of feeling like I'm supposed to apologize for the space I occupied rather than intoxicate people with my effort, my brilliance. I am proud of me, full stop.”
Is this a quote from a self-help workshop in a “safe space” on a university campus?
No, it’s taken from a recent CIA recruitment ad.
What’s going on here? What kind of people does the CIA want to recruit?
American national security agencies are charged with protecting the United States and its citizens from foreign threats to our safety and liberties. But it seems that “national security” is no longer just about threats to our freedom from external enemies.
Our national security agencies have been drifting leftward for decades and have become increasingly “woke” and hostile to political adversaries.
Recently former CIA Chief John Brennan declare…
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May 30, 2021
Episode 134: The TBWS Roundtable on “Joe Biden’s Horribles”
My friend Paul Teller keeps a running (and depressing) list of the destructive actions taken by Joe Biden’s Administration. Joe Biden has been in office for just a few months and already the list is a mile long. Paul, who was a top aide to VP Mike Pence and is now his chief of staff, calls his list “The Horribles” The TBWS Team agrees that the name is apt. In yet another free association roundtable, we kick off with how grateful we are for lunch bucket Joe’s letter - in an IRS envelope - reminding us to thank him personally for our pandemic relief checks. Then we move on to wokeness, equity and Biden’s sowing more racial divisions, cancel culture, Biden’s proposed “Section 8” tax plan, the assault on religious liberty, whether a Federal government promoting “wokeness” violates the Establishment Clause, the attempted Federal takeover of elections with the “John Lewis Voting Rights Act”, and the HR5 “Equality Act” which would do anything but bring about equali…
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May 29, 2021
Episode 133: The Future of Policing in America
The Bill Walton Show Roundtable worries about what the future of law enforcement could look like in this country.
In many cities, seasoned officers are rushing to retire - causing a major deficit as those positions are becoming harder to fill.
Increasingly, resisting arrest is becoming a badge of protest. And rather than punishing law breakers, police officers are being demonized for doing their jobs.
Why happens if big city Mayors actually do "defund the police?" What will cities look like a decade from now? Who will be keeping the peace? Who will want to live there?
Much to ponder, and unless we change course, the future of cities look dystopian.
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May 18, 2021
Episode 132: “Combating Woke Capitalism” with Justin Danhof and Matt Schlapp
For years, major American corporations have been drifting to the political Left.
Now that drift seems more like a tidal wave. Companies like Coca Cola, Delta Airlines … and even Major League Baseball have, for example, condemned Georgia’s legislature’s effort to protect free and fair elections.
And increasingly the very top echelons of many big corporations - the C Suites and the boards of directors - are filled with people on the left promoting a “woke” agenda.
Household names like Levi, Nike, Air BnB, Blackrock, Ford, the NBA and Bank of America are now aligned with the Democrat Party.
This corporatist move to the left has emerged as the latest front in the war to “fundamentally change America.”
How this happened is a complicated and disturbing story. Joining me to tell it is Justin Danhof director of the Free Enterprise Project at the National Center for Public Policy Research, who has waged a long battle against creeping leftism in corporate America.
And Mat…
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May 17, 2021
Episode 131: "The Chinese dominance of your medicine cabinet" with Rosemary Gibson
When you think of all the things in your house that are "made in China", one thing you may not realize is how many medicines are. That bottle of aspirin? Made in China. Penicillin? Made in China. Even something as simple as Vitamin C is produced in China. And if that's not shocking enough, there's also a good chance your doctor doesn't even know where these medicines are being manufactured! Joining me is Rosemary Gibson, author of the book "China Rx", which chronicles how this began and how the Chinese developed it in stealth. Rosemary, a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, is a thoughtful and careful chronicler of this very alarming reality. How did the US let this happen? What about Chinese quality control? How has the pandemic played a role in all of this? Before you take that next pill, you'll want to hear this conversation.
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May 11, 2021
Episode 130: “Refounding America” with Mercy and Matt Schlapp
This past year has been filled with adversity, but with tough times can come great blessings.
In my case, my wife Sarah and I have found a wonderful blessing in our friendship with Mercy and Matt Schlapp and their five daughters. We all found ourselves locked down in our places in Madison and Rappahannock County, Virginia during the pandemic. So what did we do? We formed a "quarantine club" and got together on weekends to talk deeply and at length about what's going on in America, and what we can do to keep it a free country.
This show first appeared on CPAC Now last night and we thought you might enjoy hearing from Matt and Mercy in a wide ranging conversation that's very much like our informal get togethers.
Of course, Mercy was director of communications strategy for the Trump-Pence reelection campaign, and Matt is Chairman and CEO of the American Conservative Union, sponsor of CPAC.
Things have changed so much in society in recent years. As Matt points out, "What's interesting…
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May 9, 2021
Episode 129: "Weighing the Cost of Panic" with Jay Richards and John Tamny
In this episode, Bill talks with Jay Richards and John Tamny about the Covid-19 pandemic and the trade-offs between freedom and government mandated “safety.”
Should governments have simply provided people with information about risks and precautionary measures, or were the microscopic instructions, lockdowns and mask mandates necessary?
At this point the answer seems pretty clear.
“We're a full year into this and we've got a lot of empirical data,” Jay explains. “We have Florida and New York to compare, as well as other states, so it's not as if we're in a position where we don't really understand whether lockdowns worked. The most modest and moderate way of saying it is that the lockdowns seem to make no difference one way or the other.”
Moreover, we’re now seeing the lockdown’s enormous human and social costs with most vulnerable groups in the US devastated by unscientific and ineffective policies.
But even with the evidence before us, we’re now seeing the goal…
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May 2, 2021
Episode 128: "The Bard and the Bible" with Bob Hostetler
For the past year or so, I’ve been reading in a daily devotional titled the The Bard and The Bible. In it each day is a quote from William Shakespeare, a related passage from the King James Bible and a witty and wise reading of how they might relate to us today.
With Shakespeare, and of course anything related to the Bible, increasingly banned from American school curriculums, we are losing touch with these cornerstones of our western culture. The Victorians celebrated Shakespeare and the Bible as the twin moral underpinnings of British civilization. And when American pioneers headed west in their covered wagons, the two books that they brought with them were the King James Bible and the works of Shakespeare.
Joining me to talk about their importance is Bob Hostetler, the author of The Bard and the Bible and a font of interesting and fun facts. In particular, Shakespeare, once you get used to his language, is a surprising antidote to today’s toxic politics.
Shakespeare distruste…
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Apr 25, 2021
Episode 127: "An Actor's Craft: A conversation with Tony LoBianco"
During the last several years, I have had the great pleasure of getting to know a wonderful actor, Tony LoBianco. It’s the 50th anniversary of his iconic movie “The French Connection” where he played Sal Boca, and a perfect occasion to invite him on the show to talk about the acting craft and working with other creatives.
A leading actor in films, TV and the stage, he's made over 100 films during the course of his career and along the way won an Obie, an Emmy, an Outer Circle Critics Award, and was nominated for a Tony award for Best Actor.
In this wide-ranging conversation, Tony and I talk about the days of Hollywood when it wasn't so woke. He shares stories of working with legends like Milton Berle, Richard Widmark, William Friedkin, Arthur Miller, Richard Gere, Alec Baldwin and James Gandolfini among others.
Some of his great antidotes include how he got the role of Raymond Fernandez in the cult classic ”The Honeymoon Killers" by fooling a casting director into thinking h…
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Apr 18, 2021
Episode 126: “The Unsettling Truth About Green Energy” with Mark Mills
In this episode, Mark Mills, Energy & Tech expert at the Manhattan Institute, and I go in-depth about the perils of so-called “green energy.” Case in point: February's deadly blackout in Texas. Texas, with the most wind farms in the country providing 25% of its energy, learned what happens when the weather gets cold and the wind goes away. Just when you need electricity the most, it’s not there. The National Academy of Sciences has declared the electrical grid the most important invention of the 20th century. But it doesn’t work if it depends on unreliable wind and solar sources. Reliance on green energy “is a really, really bad idea. With it, we are going to switch America's energy from domestic production to imports. We're going to switch America's energy from liquids and gases which are easy to move and cheap to extract, to energy minerals, which are hard to move and energy-intensive to extract,” according to Mark. “We're going to switch from a small footprint on the p…
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Apr 9, 2021
Episode 125: Warriors and Worriers
What are the evolutionary differences between men and women, and how do they survive and thrive through differing competitive strategies? In this episode, Dr. Joyce Benenson talks with Bill about her book Warriors and Worriers, which draws her extensive lifelong research on children's interactions. The result is a fascinating array of studies and stories that explore the ways boys and men deter their enemies, while girls and women find assistants to aid them in coping with vulnerable children and elders. Dr. Benenson, a retired professor of psychology at Emmanuel College and an associate member of the Human Evolutionary Biology Department at Harvard University, turns upside down the conventional wisdom that women are more sociable than men and that men are more competitive than women. E.O. Wilson of Harvard praises her work as “brave, thoroughly documented, and written with unusual clarity … her book explains more about the fundamentals of gender differences - and the meaning of hu…
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Apr 6, 2021
Episode 124: The Strange Rabbit Hole of Theory with James Lindsay
If it's possible to have a fun and entertaining conversation about political correctness, critical race theory and the state of being "woke", this is it. Joining me is James Lindsay, PhD, Co-author of Cynical Theories and founder of the newdiscourses.com website and podcasts. James, who has been called the Donald Trump of Intellectuals (meant as an insult), because of his courage to take on political correctness, guides me down through the stranger and stranger rabbit hole of "Theory." Also knows as Postmodernism, it first took root in America in the Yale University English Department and since then, like a virus, it has jumped from this laboratory to infect all American society. In the wide-ranging interview, he explains things like "anti-racist", systems of privilege, Queer theory and how all these theories start with the conclusions you want to reach. Thought experiment: You are a white shopkeeper and two customers enter your store, one black and one white. Who you serve first deter…
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Mar 31, 2021
Episode 123: Trans Men in Women's Sports
On this episode, our TBWS Roundtable discusses the push by the radical woke left to let transgendered boy/girl athletes participate in girls and women’s sports. After coming out strongly against trans men in women’s sports, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem recently vetoed a bill that would’ve banned it. Why? She says “it’s complicated” and she may be right. The very woke NCAA would ban her state from staging its competitions. But allowing trans men in women’s sports would gut Title IX. It seems that who and how you would define a boy or girl depends on your politics, not “the science.” Where are the feminists on this when all the victims are girls? Martina Navratilova has been excoriated for coming out against it. Why is this seemingly only an American issue? What are the implications for our military? And is this just the opening salvo in the race to replace the binary? Did you know there was a “race to replace the binary?” It’s a mess, and the Roundtable expl…
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Mar 26, 2021
Episode 122: The "Mis-Pricing" of Calvin Coolidge
On this episode, we look into the life and presidency of Calvin Coolidge with Amity Shlaes, author of The NY Times bestsellers Coolidge, The Forgotten Man, The Greedy Hand and The Great Society.
Amity is also co-editor of a fascinating new edition of The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge revealing how he embodied the best of America's founding principles and the character of the American people.
In this wide-ranging interview Amity and I cover Coolidge from his early days growing up in Vermont to how his legacy impacted Ronald Reagan. The thing to remember about Coolidge is that the federal budget was lower after he left office than when he entered the Presidency. What a different time.
She also chairs the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation and we talk about its scholarships and programs for young people.
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Mar 19, 2021
Episode 121: A Wide-Ranging Conversation with the Always Interesting Yaron Brook
On this episode, I’m talking with Yaron Brook, Chair of the Ayn Rand Institute, in a wide-ranging conversation that launches into the case for why the profit motive is a good thing. Capitalism gets a bad rap in the media and pop culture, but should business be epitomized by Gordon Gecko or Steve Jobs? Was the 2008 financial crisis caused by greedy Wall Streeters or by wrongheaded government policies? We agree that finance, properly understood, is about “win/win” strategies to move capital to more productive uses, but what about all the people left behind by capitalism’s “creative destruction? Are Americans any longer willing to do what’s necessary to create their own future. We also talk about his view that our moral purpose should be our own happiness and that self-interest is not wrong. We part company on trade with China and on Donald Trump, but wholeheartedly agree on the need for an optimistic freedom agenda that embraces America’s founding ideas.
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Mar 4, 2021
Episode 120: The Leadership Crisis and the Free Market Cure with John Allison
On this episode, I'm joined by John Allison, named one of the 100 most successful CEOs in the world by the Harvard Business Review. In this wide-ranging interview, we talk about how he went from growing up in a lower-middle income family in North Carolina to becoming the head of BB&T, the Cato Institute and author of "The Leadership Crisis and the Free Market Cure". John and I discuss some of the 10 principles for living your best life as outlined in his book, a must read for anyone interested in learning the ethical values necessary for individuals, leaders and societies to achieve real human happiness.
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Mar 3, 2021
Episode 119: CPAC, Trump and the future of the GOP with the TBWS Roundtable
The TBWS Roundtable discusses former President Trump's CPAC speech, and what it means for Republicans going forward. Has he learned anything about shoring up his weaknesses? Will he attempt another run for President? Should he? And if not, where does the Republican party go from here?We also look at the future for Mike Pence. What role will the former VP play in the party?
Plus, we look at the role social media will play in getting out the message of the GOP and get into the risky business of offering predictions for the mid-term elections.
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Feb 26, 2021
EPISODE 118: “JUST THE FACTS”
The phrase “Just the facts” has taken on new meaning with the creation of media-based fact checkers. However, the definition of truth varies based on the organization doing the research.
I’m joined today by Jim Agresti, the President and co-founder of Just Facts as we talk about why what you see in the media is often agenda driven and what his organization does to find the truth.
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Feb 18, 2021
Episode 117: "Sim City" COVID with Phil Magness and Jeffrey Tucker
In this Episode, we continue our conversation with Jeffrey Tucker and are now joined by Phil Magness also with the American Institute for Economic Research regarding the current state of the nation due to the Coronavirus. How does the handling of the virus remind us of the video game "Sim City"? What does the future hold now that the vaccine is starting to be distributed? We also discuss what the role of politics has played in the pandemic.
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Feb 13, 2021
Episode 116: A new clarity in a COVID world with Jeffrey Tucker
With the first anniversary of the emergence of the Coronavirus, Jeffrey Tucker head of research at the American Institute for Economic Research joins me for an in-depth discussion about what have we learned so far about the virus and what the future holds for our daily lives. We also talk about how 2020 was almost medieval, and how long it will be before we fully understand the pandemic's aftermath.
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Feb 11, 2021
Episode 115: A light at the end of the COVID tunnel? with Phil Kerpen
As Coronavirus lockdowns around the country are slowly starting to be lifted, I'm joined by Phil Kerpen, President of American Commitment to talk about what shutting down businesses and social activities have meant for our economy and our social fabric. We also discuss what the future holds now that vaccines are starting to be administered.
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Feb 3, 2021
Episode 114: Wall Street War Games with The Bill Walton Show Team
On this episode, the BWS Roundtable discusses how thousands so called amateur investors got everyone talking about GameStop and Robinhood.
What caused the stock to skyrocket? What does it say about the future of Wall Street? How will the regulators react? Those questions and more will be answered during this in-depth conversation.
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Jan 29, 2021
Episode 113: From Biden to Brady: Looking back on January 2021 with John Tamny
As we start a new year, I’m joined by my friend John Tamny with Freedom Works and Real Clear Markets to recap the events of the past month.
We talk about the unrest at the U.S. Capitol, the first days of President Biden‘s administration, and the role Gisele Bundchen plays in the ongoing success of Tom Brady as he prepares for his 10th Super Bowl.
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Dec 31, 2020
Episode 112: 2020 Silver Linings
As we wrap up one of the most chaotic years in modern memory, members of the BWS team gather virtually to talk about the impact of COVID-19 on our lives.
What will the future hold when it comes to masks? The economy? Life in general?
While 2020 is one most of us would like to forget, we manage to find several “silver linings” heading into 2021.
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Dec 24, 2020
Episode 111: The Meaning of Christmas
Have you noticed more people using the phrase “Merry Christmas”?
This wonderful holiday greeting has come back in style in recent years, and in this special holiday episode, we take a very personal - and spiritual - look into the meaning of Christmas .
My friend, Larry Green, owner of the Spirit Wind Trucking Company, joins me in a brief discussion about how it goes far beyond gift giving and family gatherings. It’s about a rebirth.
I also take a crack at reciting two of the best known Christmas songs and perform them in a way you likely haven’t heard before. This was far more challenging than I ever imagined, but so worth it to find the deeper meanings of Christmas. MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR !
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Dec 17, 2020
Episode 110: Paul Krugman vs. Ayn Rand
In the era of mandated mask wearing and social distancing, we are fighting two battles: One against COVID-19, the other over preserving personal freedoms. In a piece about the virus, New York Times Columnist Paul Krugman blamed President Trump and Ayn Rand for Americans who have stood up against wearing a face covering. Calling it "libertarianism gone bad, a misunderstanding of what freedom is all about". Tal Tsfany, the President and CEO of the Ayn Rand Institute joins me to talk about the article and how liberals are looking to rob Americans of the free will granted to them in the Constitution. We also discuss how Ayn Rand would react to all of this if she was still with us today.
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Dec 10, 2020
Episode 109: BWS Roundtable: Talkin’ shots— the debate over the COVID vaccine.
As states are expected to start receiving their first vaccine doses as soon as next week, the new battle over whether you’ll be required to get the COVID shot is about to begin.
In the debut of the Bill Walton Show Roundtable, I’m joined by Rich McFadden of Radio America, Greg Corombos host of the Three Martini Lunch and Journalist Brian McNicoll in a lively exchange about how having the vaccine available will impact businesses, schools and life in general.
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Dec 8, 2020
Episode 108: So much fraud...Too little time? with The Honorable Ken Blackwell
The Hon. Ken Blackwell is back with the latest in the fraud investigation related to the 2020 Presidential election.
With less than a month to go until Congress is scheduled to count the electoral votes, we discuss what needs to happen and why fraud isn't the only obstacle the Trump campaign needs to overcome.
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Dec 6, 2020
Episode 107: Surviving COVID with Dr. Jay Richards
Weeks after our interview with Dr. Jay Richards, co-author of “The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic into a Catastrophe”, he contracted COVID-19.
Now recovered, Jay tells me about his personal experience with the virus, discussions he had with front line healthcare workers and why they don’t wear the masks that the rest of us wear. We also look at how vaccines will start a whole new debate in this country.
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Dec 1, 2020
Episode 106: Illegal Voting and the 2020 Election with Jim Agresti
As the investigation into the 2020 Presidential Election continues, questions about the legitimacy of some voting machines and mail-in ballots are only part of the issue.
Jim Agresti, Founder and CEO of "Just Facts" joins me to talk about how non-citizens were able to cast ballots to help tip the scales in favor of Joe Biden.
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Nov 28, 2020
Episode 105: Commercial Real Estate in a COVID World
People are working from home and traveling less these days due to COVID-19. That’s resulted in a lot of companies re-evaluating whether they need a brick and mortar space, and the hospitality industry struggling to fill rooms.
Commercial real estate expert John Scheurer and I discuss the current state of the market and where it’s likely to head once the Coronavirus is behind us.
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Nov 25, 2020
Episode 104: Does Voter’s Remorse Lie Ahead?
While Trump voters knew who they were supporting, a new study shows many of those in swing states who voted for Joe Biden didn’t really know him at all.
Brent Bozell, President & Founder of the Media Research Center details the poll, the realities of our mainstream media, where we as a nation go from here in regard to the White House, and how to get the social media companies to give all Americans an equal voice.
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Nov 24, 2020
Episode 103: Section 230 - Mend it or End it.
If you’ve ever had a post flagged on or removed from social media, you need to know about the arcane sounding Section 230 of the Communications and Decency Act.
Klon Kitchen, the Director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Technology Policy joins me to take an in-depth look into Section 230 - called “the 26 words that created the Internet.” And how the Big Tech/Social Media companies have squandered the public’s trust by abusing its privileges.
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Nov 22, 2020
Episode 102: The Gettysburg Address with Leigh Wilson Smiley
As we celebrate the 157th anniversary of the Gettysburg address, I try my hand at reciting and analyzing the historic speech with Voice and Acting Coach Leigh Wilson Smiley. We also discuss how the address relates to the current state of affairs in our country.
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Nov 19, 2020
Episode 101: “We’re in the Fight” with the Honorable Kenneth Blackwell and J. Christian Adams
On this special edition, we continue our in-depth look at what’s happening with the Trump campaign’s battle over the counting of legal votes.
The Hon. Ken Blackwell, advisory board member of the Trump/Pence 2020 Campaign and J. Christian Adams, President and General Counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation discuss the latest on the recount process and the strategy moving forward.
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Nov 17, 2020
Episode 100: Do the votes matter at all? with Tom Fitton
For our 100th episode, we continue to take an in-depth look into the 2020 Presidential election.
As the lawsuits by the Trump campaign continue, we chat with Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. He is the author of “A Republic Under Assault: The Left’s Ongoing Attack on American Freedom” about why voters on BOTH sides of the aisle should be concerned about the voting process.
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Nov 12, 2020
Episode 99: “Is time running out for President Trump? with John Fund”
On this special edition of the Bill Walton Show, we talk about the fight for the White House as the legal battle continues by the Trump campaign. But is there enough time to get it through the courts? John Fund with the National Review is skeptical.
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Oct 26, 2020
Episode 98: “Fact-Free Journalism with Mark Tapscott and Brian McNicoll”
Last month Atlantic ran a hit piece on President Trump that was notable, even by today’s low standards of journalistic practice, for its invisible sourcing.
It remains news because it typifies the realities of our increasingly fact-free media environment.
“It’s based on four anonymous sources and has in addition the strange sideshow of other media outlets ‘confirming’ the anonymous sources” says my guest, veteran journalist Brian McNicoll.
“It's a classic illustration of how to do bad journalism that destroys the credibility of journalists,” emphasizes Mark Tapscott, a member of the Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame.
Join me in a clarifying conversation about how the standards of what’s called journalism have eroded over the years.
How today’s reporting compares to the Watergate story.
How the distinctions between “opinion” and “news” have become fainter and fainter.
Why the Society for Professional Journalists no longer plays the role of truste…
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Oct 5, 2020
Episode 96: "Making a Difference: HillFaith" with Mark Tapscott
“If you wanted to aim at the heart of the matter to bring about a more virtuous Washington DC where would you start?
For Mark Tapscott, the award winning investigative journalist, editorial page editor and founder of HillFaith, the answer is clear: share the Good News of His Gospel with congressional staffers on Capitol Hill.
“If you were asked, who’s the most influential but least well-known group in Washington, DC, if you really understand how things work in this town, you would say immediately, ‘Congressional Staff.’ There are about 20,000 of them. They are mostly young men and women, highly educated, very motivated, and very smart.”
Mark, a member of the Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame and recipient of the CPAC Conservative Journalist of the Year, explains further:
“I knew that God was calling me to some sort of ministry and I kept coming back to the fact that virtually everything I’d done in my career included, directly or indirectly, contact with…
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Sep 25, 2020
Episode 97: “Paying the Price of Panic” with Dr Jay Richards.
“The human costs of the emergency response to Covid-19 have vastly outweighed its benefits.”
So argue, backed by a vast amount of research, scholars Jay Richards, William Briggs, and Douglas Axe, authors of “The Price of Panic.”
For the first time in history, the world has shut itself down - by choice - for fear of a virus whose dangers have been dramatically exaggerated. Governments, with the support of most Americans, have ordered the closing of thousands of small businesses, schools, colleges, churches, sports events and most all of our civil society institutions. Overnight, "social distancing" - masks, 6 foot rules, no handshakes, no hugs - have become a moral obligation. We are now living under a “tyranny of experts” explains Dr Jay Richards.
The world will reopen, and life will go on, but we are never going back to "normal.”
And we need to recognize that whatever the future holds, we cannot make the same mistakes again. What have we learned? What will have been…
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Sep 22, 2020
Episode 95: "When Politicans Panicked" with John Tamny
Talking with John Tamny about his upcoming book "When Politicians Panicked: The New Coronavirus, Expert Opinion, and a Tragic Lapse of Reason." His premise, and I agree, is that experts aren't the answer to crisis, they are the crisis. What was needed at the onset of the virus was leadership wise enough to let sensible Americans figure out how to protect themselves.
Information coming from China in January and February made it very clear that the virus was/is many things, none of them remotely justifying the enormous health, social and economic costs imposed by our panicked political response to it.
Instead, our political leaders needed to provide information guidelines about the risks, take steps to protect the vulnerable and their caregivers, and otherwise let people take care of themselves and each other. Give them the facts and a little bit of guidance, and their intelligence and common sense will see them through. Pretty much what South Dakota and Sweden did.
John writes, "One-…
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Sep 15, 2020
Episode 93 : The Post Office: Explained
Confused about what’s going on with the Post Office?
I am. So I asked my friend Brian McNicoll, who has written about the post office for many years and has a real feel for its economics and the politics, to clarify what’s going on.
In our conversation he tells me, “the Post Office has a monopoly on two things. Only the post office can put something in your mailbox and only the post office can handle first class mail. But the number of first class letters have dropped by almost 40% in the last decade. And in the last 15 years, the U.S. Postal Service has lost some $60 billion and is expected to lose some $10 billion this year.”
But its package delivery business is growing like gangbusters, and it it also losing money on that. Why? Turns out U.S. Taxpayers are subsidizing Jeff Bezos’s Amazon and other package delivery companies, big time.
So we dig into post office economics 101. I think it could break even, especially with its new Postmaster in charge.
But it isn’t…
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Sep 10, 2020
Episode 94: College Football: Money Culture Politics with John Tamny and Brian McNicoll
It’s Saturday in September and there’s no Big Ten football being played today.
But in a not-so-surprising reversal, just weeks after Kevin Warren, the Big Ten commissioner, pointedly said the decision not to play this year would “not be revisited”, they revisited.
They just announced that it will start up its fall football season October 24. Why the change?
Of course it faced pressure from coaches, players, parents and fans but the decision looks like it has everything to do with politics and money, and very little to do with “science.”
Last week, before the Big Ten’s change of heart, I talked about the cultural phenomenon, politics and money of college football with my friends and frequent collaborators, John Tammy, author of When Politicians Panic and Brian McNicoll, a veteran newspaper and sports reporter.
Both are “certified college football fanatics” and do a great job explaining to me what's happening with the college football season this fall.
It se…
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Sep 2, 2020
The New Night People
Jean Shepard ("Shep"), the legendary 60’s and 70’s WOR NYC late nightradio show humorist and storyteller, romantically described the differences between what he considered to be "day people" and "night people.” Day people were conformists, night people were non-conformists, and he was proud to be one of them.
Well had he lived to see the streets around the White House last week he would be hard pressed to feel romantic about its new “night people.”
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Aug 26, 2020
Episode 92: The Covid Coup with Angelo Codevilla
“From early March 2020 on, the best-known authorities on epidemics—the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control— have presented the COVID-19 respiratory disease to the Western world as a danger equivalent to the plague.
But China’s experience, which its government obfuscated, had already shown that the COVID-19 virus is much less like the plague and more like the flu.
All that has happened since followed from falsifying this basic truth.”
So writes my guest Angelo Codevilla, Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute and professor emeritus of International Relations at Boston University and author of The Covid Coup (hyperlink this).
He continues:
“What history will record as the great COVID scam of 2020 is based on:
1) a set of untruths and baseless assertions—often outright lies—about the novel coronavirus and its effects;
2) the production and maintenance of physical fear through a near-monopoly of…
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Aug 11, 2020
Episode 91: Howard Zinn’s War on History
There is no historian like Howard Zinn.
Certainly no other history book has taken the place of the Bible at the swearing-in of an elected official . But in 2019, Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History” was the sacred object on which newly elected Oklahoma City council member JoBeth Hamon chose to place her hand for her oath of office .
“For one of the great enemies of the American idea, Howard Zinn, our history “a story of defeat, despair, and domination … a tragedy in three acts: what we did to the Indians, what we did to the African-Americans, and what we did to everyone else,” explains my guest Dr. Mary Grabar the author of “Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America”
Because of Zinn and other historians like him, American schools have largely stopped teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the history of the world.
“An all-important question has opened up a great chasm between Americans:…
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Jul 30, 2020
“Forget Covid 19. Worry about EMP." With Dr. Peter Vincent Pry and Frank Gaffney
It’s time to wake up to an existential risk that looms infinitely larger than anything posed by the Covid 19 virus.
Electromagnetic pulse (EMP).
EMP can be caused by either a naturally occurring solar storm or a manmade suitcase sized device and would collapse electric grids and electrical critical infrastructures all over the world
A nationwide blackout lasting one year could kill up to 90 percent of the American people, through starvation, disease, and societal collapse.
Moreover, EMP is the ultimate cyber-weapon in the military doctrines and plans of Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran.
The threat is not theoretical. A solar storm EMP occurred in 1859 at the dawn of our electrical age and destroyed telegraph systems everywhere in the world.
“Today, the impact would be catastrophic. Power grids would collapse all over the world. And all of the life sustaining critical infrastructures, telecommunications, transportation, business, finance, even food and water, depend direct…
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Jul 23, 2020
Episode 89: Why Ayn Rand Matters Today with Tal Tsfany
Many of us have read Ayn Rand's novels especially, “Atlas Shrugged” and the “Fountainhead.” But I have been surprised to learn how her ideas and philosophy have continued to resonate throughout the world many years after her novels were first published. To learn more about this I asked Tal Tsfany, President and CEO of the Ayn Rand Institute to come on the show to talk about the Ayn Rand phenomena. Mr. Tsfany has a great personal story having been an software entrepreneur, investor and executive in both Israel and the United States. In a fascinating conversation we talk both about Ayn Rand’s ideas and Tal’s personal journey toward her philosophy.
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Jul 9, 2020
Episode 88: "Enough is Enough" with Donna Rice Hughes and Colby May
Some of society's problems are just so upsetting that it's hard to imagine that they continue to exist, or in fact, are spreading.
Well, this episode explores one of the worst: Internet child pornography and sex trafficking.
Internet pornography been called the largest unregulated social experiment in history.
Ushered it into the cultural mainstream, it enjoys increasingly widespread acceptance. But while it’s well known that the internet has been hijacked by the sex industry, what’s less understood is that it provides children free and easy access to all types of pornography, and sexual predators' easy and anonymous access to children.
“Much of the content that is out there is hardcore, it's extreme. Kids under 10 years old are getting hooked on it, addicted to it. And it's free. It's mostly prosecutable under U.S. law. But it's not being prosecuted. Then you've got sex trafficking, which is one of the largest organized crime businesses in the United States,” says Donna Ri…
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Jul 2, 2020
Episode 87: Reality Economics 101 with Don Boudreaux and John Tamny
A must see and wide ranging conversation about all things economic with Donald Boudreaux, best-selling author, professor of economics at George Mason University who writes the popular blog Cafe Hayek and John Tamny, editor of Real Clear Markets, an editor for Forbes Magazine and the author of “The End of Work” and “They’re Both Wrong.”
Even if, or maybe especially, you think economics is too abstract or arcane or harsh, this is a fresh and engaging take that everyone can learn from. I did. Some excerpts:
“Politicians are never very good about taking economic considerations into account when they make policy. They are especially bad at it now, with people frantic over COVID-19, so politicians who don't know much economics, have taken the easy way out, basically putting us all into house arrest, shutting down an incredibly complex system and set of processes for producing goods and services.”
“One of my favorite economists Thomas Sowell said that one of the first laws…
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Jun 17, 2020
Episode 86: The True Human Costs of Government Imposed Lockdowns with Jim Agresti
Medical studies show that excessive stress and anxiety are among the most debilitating and deadly of all health hazards in the world.
Beyond their obvious effects like suicide and substance abuse—these mental stressors are strongly related to and may trigger and inflame a host of ailments like high blood pressure, digestive disorders, heart conditions, infectious diseases, cancer, and pregnancy complications.
Based on a broad array of scientific studies, my guest Jim Agresti and his organization Just Facts, have calculated that the health risks created by reactions to Covid-19—such as stay-at-home orders, business shutdowns, media exaggerations, and legitimate concerns about the virus—will destroy at least seven times more years of human life than can possibly be saved by lockdowns to control the spread of the disease.
This figure is a bare minimum. The total years of life that it will rob from all people is likely more than 90 times greater.
So when a politician like And…
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Jun 4, 2020
Episode 85.2: A Conversation with Michael Pack, the Director of “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words”
Join me as go behind the scenes with writer, director and producer Michael Pack about the making of his extraordinary film about Justice Clarence Thomas.
Distilled from over 30 hours of interviews during a six-month period with Justice Thomas and his wonderful wife Ginni, for the first time, he tells his entire life’s story, looking directly at the camera, speaking frankly to the audience.
This first-person account is accompanied by a rich array of historical archive material, period and original music, personal photos, and evocative recreations. Unscripted and without narration, the documentary takes the viewer through this complex and often painful life, dealing with race, faith, power, jurisprudence, and personal resilience.
The film is a must see.
In part two, I talk with Michael about what it's like to be a conservative filmmaker in today's America and how documentaries have become almost the exclusive playground of the left.
Michael Pack is also an extraordinary man. Presi…
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Jun 4, 2020
Episode 85.1: A Conversation with Michael Pack, the Director of “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words”
Join me as go behind the scenes with writer, director and producer Michael Pack about the making of his extraordinary film about Justice Clarence Thomas.
Distilled from over 30 hours of interviews during a six-month period with Justice Thomas and his wonderful wife Ginni, for the first time, he tells his entire life’s story, looking directly at the camera, speaking frankly to the audience.
This first-person account is accompanied by a rich array of historical archive material, period and original music, personal photos, and evocative recreations. Unscripted and without narration, the documentary takes the viewer through this complex and often painful life, dealing with race, faith, power, jurisprudence, and personal resilience.
The film is a must see.
In part two, I talk with Michael about what it's like to be a conservative filmmaker in today's America and how documentaries have become almost the exclusive playground of the left.
Michael Pack is also an extraordinary man. Presi…
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May 29, 2020
Episode 83: Calling for a Return of Conservative Economics
“There is more to life than economic freedom. And there is more to economic freedom than economic freedom. A society that attempts to maximize everyone’s freedom at every moment will fail miserably in preserving individual liberty and limiting government over time.”
What is missing from our policy debates is a distinctively conservative approach to economics.
So argues my guest Oren Cass, founder and executive director of American Compass, whose mission is to restore an economic consensus that emphasizes the importance of family, community, and industry to the nation's liberty and prosperity. Also joining me is Wells King, the research director of American Compass. www.americancompass.org
Cass points out that the libertarian right and the progressive left have dominated our political debate, with one side favoring fewer government programs and less regulation, while the other advocating more, and that there is a more attractive middle course.
“Neither prioritizes the tradit…
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May 29, 2020
Episode 82: Assessing Beijing's Power
China presents a vastly different challenge from anything America has confronted before.
The United States economy has never been as deeply dependent on an oppositional government the way we are with China. We have outsourced significant portions of virtually every important supply chain to China.
America has even lost its manufacturing capabilities to make aspirin, penicillin and a lot of essential antibiotics.
Chinese Communist Party leaders are fundamentally similar to its old emperors. In 5,000 years of Chinese history, it has never seen the development of democracy, or the development of an independent judiciary.
China is not a “rule of law” society and views the law as an instrument for keeping the Chinese Communist Party in power. It has neither a civil society or an independent press. And today, they are leaning heavily on their technology sector as a tool to enable a type of “techno-totalitarianism.”
So explain Dean Cheng Senior Research Fellow, Asian Studies at H…
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May 21, 2020
Episode 84: Post Pandemic K-12 Education: Why We Don't Want a Return to "Normal"
What comes next when we emerge from the COVID-19 lockdown? What is “normal” is going to be like?
Well in the case of America’s K-12 schools we should not want a return to normal, where “normal” means a nation where fewer than 30% of students - and fewer than 15% in poor communities - read, write, spell, do math or know history, science, or civics on grade level.
“With the doors to most of K-12 schools shut for the rest of the academic year and beyond, it’s time to implement a dramatically different way of educating our nation’s youth, and make it stick,” explains my guest Jeanne Allen.
Major policy decisions about our schools must be made in the coming months, and because schools are most families’ main source of childcare, this will be critical to restarting the economy.
What lies ahead is a serious rethinking of the fundamental organization of the school day and school year.
K-12 Education is ripe for change and the opportunities to make i…
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Apr 21, 2020
Episode 81: “Life After the CoronaVirus: Planting the Seeds of Growth and Resilience”
The outbreak of the CoronaVirus has created a health crisis.
But federal, state and local governments’ reactions to this challenge - however well intentioned - have created an economic crisis that will linger past any recovery from or stabilization of the spread of the disease.
The economy’s been broken and government action cannot bring it back, only alleviate some of the pain.
It’s the private sector that will provide lasting solutions to restoring a vibrant America. Of course businesses will play a significant role, but often overlooked is how our civil society non-profit institutions will also be making a big difference.
Joining me to talk about this are Lawson Bader CEO of DonorsTrust which directs donor dollars to highly promising conservative and libertarian nonprofit groups throughout the country and Tracie Sharp CEO of The State Policy Network which works with public policy and activist groups in all 50 states.
They are leaders of the newly formed Growth and Resilie…
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Apr 17, 2020
Episode 73: Big is Beautiful with Robert Atkinson and Ron Nicol
What do you think about the following statements?
Small businesses are overwhelmingly responsible for job creation, innovation and American prosperity.
Small businesses are more productive than big companies.
And small business owners are the core of democracy in America.
Yet Washington, controlled by big business and engaged in “crony capitalism,” systemically discriminates against small business.
We all know this is true, right?
Well, no, these things are not true. Or at least, mostly not true.
Joining me to explain why is Robert Atkinson, author of “Big is Beautiful: Debunking the Myth of Small Business” and Ron Nicol who led Boston Consulting Group’s Americas Practice and was global leader of its Media, Technology and Communications Group.
Rob, founder and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, is one of the country’s foremost thinkers on innovation economics.
Ron has developed strategies for dozens of Fortune 100 Companies is co…
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Apr 9, 2020
Episode 80: “China Rx: America’s Dependence on China for Medicine” with Rosemary Gibson and Frank Gaffney
“Millions of Americans are taking prescription and over-the-counter drugs made in China and don’t know it and neither do their doctors. These are prescription drugs in the legal supply chain that are distributed to U.S. hospitals, sold in corner drug stores and grocery store pharmacies, and distributed to military hospitals and clinics around the world,” explains Rosemary Gibson.
We cannot make aspirin in the United States. We cannot make penicillin in the United States. Nor can we make generic antibiotics.
China’s aim is to become the pharmacy to the world, and it is on track to achieve it.
Join me as I talk with Rosemary Gibson, author of “China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine” and Frank Gaffney Vice Chairman of the Committee for the Present Danger: China about the existential risks posed by the United States’ dependence on China for drugs and essential healthcare supplies.
“And I'm sure you may have seen the statement fro…
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Apr 1, 2020
Episode 79: How Masks and Scarves and Overdraft Protection Can Help Get Us Through This Crisis with Arnold Kling
This week I sought out Arnold Kling to learn more about some of his innovative ideas to deal with the health, economic and social fallout from the Covid-19 crisis.
Arnold, who blogs at arnoldkling.com/blog, author of “Specialization and Trade” and “The Three Languages of Politics” and with a PhD in Economics from MIT is one of America’s more original and penetrating thinkers.
Some of what we talk about:
“Masks and Scarves”
How do we know that we are getting the right data and smart science from our health authorities?
We’re relying on computer models, not real world experiments. The best evidence we have of what slows/halts the virus spread, is what’s happened in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Rather than lockdowns, they have limited the disease’s spread by allowing people to go to work and school wearing surgical masks that help prevent sick people from infecting others.
If the purpose of social distancing is to keep sick people from infecting others, you could acco…
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Mar 25, 2020
Episode 78:The health and economic crisis created by COVID-19 with Steve Moore and Jay Richards
Join me as I talk with economist Steve Moore and Dr. Jay Richards about the health and economic crisis created by the coronavirus. And how to respond without all of our freedoms and civil liberties being trampled.
Yes we need to move decisively to address the virus. But by focusing too narrowly on just disease control, we risk losing much or most of what makes America great.
As always, I learn a lot from Jay and Steve.
For example, I had thought the coronavirus death rate comparable to that of the seasonal flu, but Jay explains it’s more complicated than that.
And as Steve explains, the tradeoffs are much more complicated than simply “kill your grandma or boost the Dow Jones Industrial Average.”
We explore the many policy proposals driven by partisan politics, China’s role, the World Health Organization, the Left’s agenda, and what this crisis mean for President Trump’s re-election prospects.
This is a fast moving issue with a lot of moving parts. Steve and Jay do a g…
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Mar 19, 2020
Episode 77: "Countering the Lethal Narrative of the 1619 Project" with Robert Woodson and Kenneth Blackwell.
“The most effective way to destroy a people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” George Orwell
According to the New York Times, the true founding of the United States of America did not begin with the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
Rather, the Times informs us, it occurred in 1619, the year 20 or so African Slaves were brought to Jamestown, Virginia and the American Revolution occurred primarily because of the American's desire to keep their slaves. Consequently, “America is irrevocably and forever rooted in injustice and racism.”
My guests Robert Woodson and Kenneth Blackwell emphatically do not agree, and Mr. Woodson has launched the “1776 Project” to refute the Times claims.
“I was particularly outraged that the New York Times would exploit America's birth defect of slavery and weaponize race and use the conditions of the black community as a bludgeon against this country's character, almost defining it as if it's a crimina…
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Mar 12, 2020
Episode 76: Steve Moore on the Trump Economy
Last week I interviewed economist Steve Moore at a conference with conservative leaders. While the capital markets selloff and bad coronavirus news had not yet had hit galeforce levels, as it has this week, they were looming.
I'm posting this to remind us that even in the face of fierce headwinds, the United States has entered this troubling time riding on top of a booming economy. Steve details the Trump administration’s progress in improving the U.S tax system, regulatory regime, household income, job creation, energy independence and productivity growth.
As Steve adds,
“The amazing thing is we've been growing at a time when the rest of the world isn't … Europe is growing at less than 1% … Japan is practically in a recession. So is Germany. China's economy has been declining even before this virus erupted.”
In my view, the coronavirus is shutting down too much economic activity to avoid a mild recession. But it’s useful to remind ourselves about the strong base fr…
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Feb 13, 2020
Episode 75: Making "First Lady" and Life in the Screen Trade with Nancy Stafford and Nina May.
Nancy Stafford, known to millions as Andy Griffith’s law partner on TV’s “Matlock” and Nina May, an award winning independent film maker, join me to talk about their new film “First Lady” a romantic comedy feature film premiering Valentine’s Day 2020.
Nancy’s been a series regular on many TV shows and as an author, has written two best-selling books.
Nina, the founder of Renaissance Women Productions, has also written and directed the awards winning “Daily Bread” and “Life Fine Tuned”.
Among the many things we talk about:
Nancy’s start in life as Miss Florida, being a Ford model, and as a star in over 300 commercials before starting her career in TV.
What life is like for Christian women artists in the TV and film business.
How independent films get made.
The “Me Too” movement.
How their strong Christian faith has helped both Nina and Nancy succeed in life and their careers.
Advice for young women venturing into the entertainment business…
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Feb 13, 2020
Episode 72: “The Red Thread: Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy” Part I-w/Diana West and Frank Gaffney
“The anti-Trump conspiracy is not about Democrats versus Republicans. It's not about the ebb and flow of political power lawfully and peacefully transferred. It is about globalists versus nationalists, and they're locked in the old and continuous Communist versus anti-Communist struggle, and fighting to the end whether we, the anti-Communists, recognize it or not.”
So writes, Diana West, the award-winning author of “The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy” one of my guests on this week’s show.
It’s a stark claim. And it demands that we look at the Trump impeachment in a whole new light, as part of a century long conflict to take America away from its constitutional roots, and towards globalism.
Donald Trump is an enormous threat to this agenda. In this sense, he’s a counter-revolutionary, seeking to protect the American nation from its globalist enemies, enemies not just from without, but from within.
As Frank Gaffney, found…
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Feb 13, 2020
Episode 74 "The Big Lie" - Part Two of my conversation with Diana West and Frank Gaffney
Join me on The Bill Walton Show as Diana West and Frank Gaffney tell a vivid and chilling story about the machinations to end the Trump Presidency.
It’s quite a story, a work of fiction, if it weren’t playing out in real life. Shakespeare's Henry VIII, his most crowded play, had a cast of 71 characters. This story has 100s in the headlines, with 1,000s of other actors behind the scenes and more emerging every day.
Although the U.S. Senate voted to acquit President Trump against impeachment charges, expect this drama to continue, a story whose end has yet to be written.
And as Diana says, “the plot is very thick.”
“There's a timeline here, a narrative that starts about the time the Democrats became aware the Democratic National Committee servers were compromised, and that launched a whole series of coverups.”
And then came the Big Lie: Russia hacked the DNC to help Donald Trump into the White House. “Let's see if we can get people thinking that not only is Russia…
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Jan 29, 2020
Episode 69: Dick Bodman's Remarkable Career and Life Lessons
What do you do with a good friend who has had a successful career in many fields, who seems to be good at everything, and is interesting on a wide range of topics? Well, in my case, I bring him on my show.
Richard S. Bodman, founder of AT&T Ventures, joins me with John Tamny, editor of Real Clear Markets, an Editor for Forbes Magazine and the author of “The End of Work” and “They’re Both Wrong.”
Among the many things John and I learn from Dick are:
His “eleven different careers.”
Why ”whatever I do, it's going to start in California."
How he helped start “something called Mastercard" at age 24.
Sparked AT&T’s acquisition of McCaw Cellular.
His three rules for success. And what “orthogonal” has to do with it.
How he launched AT&T ventures. And why he sold it before the dot-com bubble burst.
What he learned about the American legal system from his experience as a Director of Tyco.
His views about the impact of artificial intelligence growing at a thousan…
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Dec 4, 2019
Episode 70: China, Cyber-enabled Economic Warfare, 5G and Cyber-crime
Cyber warfare is raging around the world, with China as the leading state actor. But unlike Russia, and unlike Iran, and unlike North Korea, China is deeply integrated into the US economy and many aspects of our national strength. This is one reason why Congress wanted to learn from my guest Klon Kitchen about the Chinese app TikTok.
By now, Chinese global ambitions are well known, but less understood is how they have penetrated the US. The Chinese understand their nation to extend to every individual Chinese around the world whose loyalty and responsibilities are to the Chinese nation and its aims.
“Any counter-intelligence professional will tell you that China is exceedingly active in the United States.”
Within China’s borders, there's a new Chinese cyber security law that requires all foreign companies to give the Chinese government nearly unfettered digital access to all their communications and trade secrets data.
Learn much more about China’s strategies in this episod…
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Nov 21, 2019
Episode 71: Behind the Scenes of the Conservative Movement and The Republican Party
Matt and Mercedes Schlapp give us a behind-the-scenes look at the conservative movement. Mercedes is the current Communications Director of the Trump/Pence re-election campaign and Matt is the Chairman of the American Conservative Union (CPAC).
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Nov 14, 2019
Episode 68: An Impeachment Behind Closed Doors.
Jenny Beth Martin discusses politics, the Trump impeachment and why she co-funded the Tea Party Patriots.
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Nov 6, 2019
Episode 63 - Part 2: The Power to Re-engineer Humanity
Dr. Robert Epstein and Reggie Littlejohn describe how a leaked internal Google video describes their goal of impacting the beliefs, attitudes, purchases, and votes of 2.5 billion people around the world.
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Oct 30, 2019
Episode 67: Why It's OK to be a Black Republican.
Star Parker and Winsome Sears discuss race, religion, poverty, and our addiction to government.
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Oct 24, 2019
Episode 66: "They're Both Wrong, But Wait, Aren't There Three Languages of Politics?"
John Tamny and Arnold Kling discuss the problems of political parties in the US - and why are political elites still buying oceanfront property if the world climate crisis is so dire.
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Oct 16, 2019
Episode 65 : "We're in the Midst of a Cold War. An Economic War."
Robert D. Atkinson, founder and president of ITIF, describes the United States role in the war for influence and control.
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Oct 9, 2019
Episode 63: The Power of Reengineering Humanity.
Dr. Robert Epstein and Reggie Littlejohn describe how a leaked internal Google video describes their goal of impacting the beliefs, attitudes, purchases, and votes of 2.5 billion people around the world.
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Oct 1, 2019
Episode 62 : Is climate change really a planetary emergency? with Myron Ebell
Myron Ebell gives input on the EPA Endangerment Finding, subsidizing of wind and solar, and The Green New Deal. "If the Green New Deal were implemented, which is very similar to the idea that we're going to get off of coal, oil, and natural gas in 10 years, it would take an area comparable to the size of California, which is our third largest state. The environmental consequences of taking up all that land with windmills and solar panels is outrageous."
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Sep 24, 2019
Episode 61 - Who Owns The World's Art? with C.D. Dickerson - Part 1
C.D. Dickerson III, Curator, and Head of the Sculpture Department at the National Gallery of Art, comments on issues around art ownership and repatriation - including art that was taken from Africa in the colonial era that now resides in museums all over the world.
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Sep 24, 2019
Episode 61 : Who Owns The World's Art? with C.D. Dickerson - Part 2
C.D. Dickerson III, Curator, and Head of the Sculpture Department at the National Gallery of Art, comments on issues around art ownership and repatriation - including art that was taken from Africa in the colonial era that now resides in museums all over the world.
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Sep 18, 2019
Episode 59: Why We Need to Care About “Space Warfare” with Kevin Freeman and Frank Gaffney
Our military has a disturbing tendency to keep fighting the last wars, not the likely future ones. Now a visionary general is being forced into retirement because he’s advocating a very different approach to counter Chinese aims to achieve dominance in space.
By employing technologies from space like lasers and robotic systems, China could severely compromise our national security and our economy. Take out our GPS system, and banking comes to a grinding halt.
On another front, China’s massive surveillance state and social credit scores send a chill down the spines of free people everywhere. Worse, China also aims to “export” these systems throughout the world. It’s already happening in Venezuela and wherever they build their “Belt and Road”. And with Huawei 5G they could have capabilities to monitor the entire world.
Frank Gaffney, founder of the Center for Security Policy and Kevin Freeman, host of the Economic War Room, explain on the Bill Walton Show.
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Sep 11, 2019
Episode 60: “Social Media Speech Police” with Brent Bozell and Dan Gainor
Has Facebook corporate become a parody? They banned a Prager University video on the “Ten Commandments.” Their explanation? "Well, it mentioned murder." Maybe next time Prager should do a video on the “Nine Commandments.”
There’s much to learn about “social media speech police” on The Bill Walton Show with Brent Bozell and Dan Gainor.
For example:
What are the rules used to “de-platform” someone from social media?
What’s the difference between a “European model” of speech and the U.S. Constitution’s.
Why should you care about the Communications Decency Act and its Section 230? Some people call it the 26 words that created the internet.
And new research shows that Google’s search engine could sway up to 20 million voters in the 2020 elections. Really?!
Learn the answers to these questions, and more, on this latest edition of The Bill Walton Show.
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Sep 3, 2019
Episode 59: Frank Gaffney and Kevin Freeman on China’s War with the United States
For decades, the U.S. has given China preferred trade & economic status. In a long overdue effort, President Trump is now negotiating new and more balanced trade deals with China, but however effective new trade deals will prove to be, they cannot address the many other dangers posed by China's Communist Party.
After seeing astounding economic growth, the Chinese leaders now show how little they value the liberal world order by threatening unrestricted economic, cultural and kinetic warfare.
Frank Gaffney, founder of the Center for Security Policy and Kevin Freeman, host of the Economic War Room, explain on the Bill Walton Show
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Aug 14, 2019
Episode 57: Money Greed and God with Jay Richards Part 2
Economics as a discipline suffers from “physics envy” when it tries and fails to build mathematical models of the economy and society. Instead, it should be studying human behavior and focus on the intersection of health, morality, philosophy, wealth creation and how to bring people out of poverty, Jay Richards says on The Bill Walton Show.
In particular, economics and culture can’t be viewed separately. While some people care most about economic agendas, and others focus on social issues, you can’t really separate them. A vibrant market economy, vibrant economic growth requires a solid foundation in family, civil society, rule of law and religion.
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Aug 7, 2019
Episode 57: Money Greed and God with Jay Richards Part I
We know from history and evidence all around us, which economic system works, and which one makes people the happiest. It's the economic system of free enterprise. But is it the most moral?
Bill Walton explores the question with Jay Richards, author of the newly reissued book “Money, Greed and God.”
He explains, “you need to ask: compared to what?” The question isn't, well, is it moral and as good as say nirvana or the kingdom of God or whatever the kind of utopian idea that we can imagine? The relevant question is, how good is this system compared to the other ones that we have some capacity to realize in this world.
When people claiming to be socialists have actually tried to implement it in history, what has resulted? They can’t simply wish away the 40 or 50 or 60 actual failed socialist experiments.
Socialist Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez likes conjuring scenarios of a Scandinavian village, a little fishing village in Norway where everybody has a Volvo in the…
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Jul 31, 2019
Episode 56: Deconstructing the Federal Reserve with George Selgin and Norbert Michel
If the Fed brought home a report card reflecting its performance since its creation in 1914, its parents would not be pleased. Its record for stability is among the worst in the developed world, and it has done little to fix the problems it was invented to address.
Moreover, the Federal Reserve is far from the only way to assure stability in banking. As George Selgin of the Cato Institute and Norbert Michel of the Heritage Foundation persuasive argue on the Bill Walton Show, it may not even be the best way.
More provocative views on the Fed from George and Norbert:
How the Fed contributed to, then botched its response to, the 2008 recession. Forget the idea that it was only about “greedy bankers.” If you want to learn what really happened, their explanation is lucid.
Why an “independent” Fed has never been a reality and probably should not be the goal. We need our money to be politically accountable, but how to do this is a thorny issue.
If America could print all the mone…
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May 16, 2019
Episode 55: Chen Guangcheng and Reggie Littlejohn on Human Rights in China, with Huchen Zhang
Americans' theory that more trade with China would open up the country to more democracy has been proven wrong. In fact, say Reggie Littlejohn, Huchen Zhang and Chen Guancheng on The Bill Walton Show, they have backfired. "You cannot tolerate evil. You cannot treat evil with kindness," Zhang said.
The Chinese consider Western countries to be naive and easily manipulated, but if the US will stand up to them in trade deals, it will earn the support of the Chinese people and deprive the government of the money to control the country's social structure, Chen Guancheng said on The Bill Walton Show.
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May 16, 2019
Episode 54: Billionaire Investor Ken Fisher on Donald Trump and Politics, with John Tamny
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May 16, 2019
Episode 54: Ken Fisher: Thinking in Ways That Others Do Not, with John Tamny
Ken Fisher on: coastal redwoods, dikes, efficient markets, quantitative easing, the limits of our knowledge, climate change, the fed, interest rates, why $10 billion isn't that much money, money flows around the world like water downhill, tree science, behavioral science, why philanthropy is immoral and bad for humans, optimization of scarce resources, Bastiat, financial system intermediation and why inequality is a good thing.
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May 16, 2019
Episode 52: "Ed Meese and Ron Nicol on Lessons Learned from the Trump Transition"
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May 16, 2019
Episode 51: "The Elephant Whisperer"
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May 16, 2019
Episode 53: "Some States are Getting Rich, Others are Going Bankrupt"
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May 8, 2019
Episode 51: "We All Need to Maker Protecting Habitats a Concern"
Species and habitat protection are issues that can be separated from polarizing disagreements about climate change. Everyone - on both the left and the right - ought to be able to come together to protect endangered species and their habitats. It’s a problem that humans have created and one that humans can solve.
But first, we must understand the enormous scope of the problem.
Skipper Darlington and Ron Maxwell, on a recent visit to The Bill Walton Show, describe some of the places where habitat destruction is at its worst. We also get into the many ways both private citizens and governments can work to stop it. It’s a bipartisan issue where there is a lot of common ground for people to work together towards solutions.
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Apr 23, 2019
Episode 52: "Ed Meese on the Mueller Report" with Ron Nicol.
We had the good fortune to have Ron Nicol and Edwin Meese on The Bill Walton Show the day the Mueller report was released. Meese, a former U.S. Attorney General, says Robert Mueller should have made a decision on obstruction of justice by the president and that at least one of his attorneys was a "totally irresponsible, unprofessional, unscrupulous lawyer" whom "should not be in any part of the Department of Justice." There's much more in this penetrating analysis by one of our foremost Constitutional authorities."
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Apr 22, 2019
Episode 51: "Half Earth for Species Protection" with Ron Maxwell and Skipper Darlington
The population of humans has almost tripled since 1950, and the impact on other species has been profound. Humans have absorbed vast amounts of habitat for living space and farmland, leading to the extinction of hundreds of species and threats to countless others. Ron Maxwell and Skipper Darlington join Bill Walton to talk about a radical but oddly simple and doable solution.
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Apr 9, 2019
Episode 49: "Why Socialism Fails to Deliver" with Richard Rahn
“The economy of Venezuela has collapsed as a result of gross socialist mismanagement. Their currency is essentially worthless. To start over, the next government of Venezuela must re-establish the rule of law, protect private property rights and create a new currency.”
So writes Richard Rahn, one of America’s most brilliant economists.
With socialism now stunningly in fashion in the United States, we need to be better teachers about its dangers.
For example, Dr. Rahn has a great way in a classroom setting to convey to students the problem with socialism. He asks how many favor free college or medical care. Almost everyone’s hand goes up. But then he asks them to assume that the 30 people in the classroom are an entire nation’s population and asks “Which one of you should pay for the “free” medical care for everyone else?” Awkward silence.
Socialism depends on coercion and takings from the productive members of a society. That means those who can create wealth wil…
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Mar 27, 2019
Episode 48: "Is War with China Inevitable?" with Dr. Stefan Halper and Adm. James Stark
In China, the U.S. confronts an adversary that saw itself as the Middle Kingdom –the center of the universe –for 3,000 years, then endured a century of humiliation and now seeks to return to what it sees as its rightful place in the world. Join Bill Walton as he and veteran Washington foreign policy experts Dr. Stefan Halper and Adm. James Stark discuss China’s comprehensive program to dominate its region and to challenge the U.S for cultural, economic and military superiority.
The Trump administration has a new approach to China, and it could bear fruit. But the Chinese remain active in cyber warfare, restrict our access to their domestic markets and force companies that are allowed to do business there to hand over their technology, and none of that will change unless we force them to change.
But a war is not inevitable. Instead, it’s critical that the U.S. think in terms of managing our relationship with China. It is our largest trading partner and there are man…
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Mar 20, 2019
Episode 47: "Burn the Business Plan" with Carl Schramm
An entire industry – mostly government-funded – has sprung up around the idea of creating entrepreneurs. Don’t buy any of it. Don’t buy college. Don’t buy business incubators. Don’t buy mentors – you probably know more about what it takes to succeed in your business than they do. Start the business. As Carl Schramm and I discussed on “The Bill Walton Show,” get your education at the School of Hard Knocks. Observe your competitors. Work somewhere first so you can understand the choreography of business. There’s a right way to do it, but there are no short-cuts and no gimmicks to get there.
Entrepreneurship is about lines of action. The best way to learn how to start businesses is to start a business.
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Mar 6, 2019
Episode 13: “What is Venture Capital and How Does It Help Drive Cutting Edge Innovation.”
“Technology is creating unprecedented wealth the world over, and venture capitalists find themselves in the midst of the best opportunities.
It’s an exciting time. There are about $60 billion invested per year in US firms by venture capitalists, and my guests Dan Mindus and Brett Gibson, founders of NextGen, say another $100 billion or more is sitting on the sidelines ready to jump in.
At the same time, there is so much progress going on, so few barriers to entry, that opportunities are exploding as well. Professional venture capital investors are on the cutting edge of bold new innovations - like the hyper loop trains, drone delivery services, and more.
Or, we all hate waiting to see a doctor. Soon, you might not have to. Telehealth would allow you to take routine tests at home and consult with your doctor from your sofa. And it will make doctors and hospitals more financially stable. On “The Bill Walton Show,” we discuss many of these exciting ideas and the power of ven…
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Feb 27, 2019
Episode 46: How American Medical Insurance has Failed to Keep Pace with Modern Medicine
Did you know there was no health insurance until 1930 and that 90 percent of today’s medical care did not even exist in 1950? Yet, health insurance has not evolved to match the innovation or the demand. On this week’s edition of “The Bill Walton Show,” economic author John Steele Gordon and I discuss how our antiquated health insurance system has utterly failed to keep pace with modern medicine, how our healthcare system became such a tangled, costly mess and where we can find simple, free market solutions.
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Feb 12, 2019
Episode 45: "One Nation Ungovernable" with Wayne Crews.
By some estimates, the cost of government regulation in the U.S. exceeds $2 trillion. An amazing number. And while we’re paying a fortune for existing regulations, major new ones are coming out at the rate of 3,000 per year, so fast that the White House can only do a cost-benefit analysis on less than one half of one percent of them.
But there’s hope. This week on "The Bill Walton Show," Wayne Crews of CEI joins me to explain how to return the U.S. to the path of greater freedom and why “walling off the future” is critical to preserving as much liberty as possible.
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Feb 5, 2019
Episode 44: "China's Three Warfares" with Dr. Stefan Halper and Admiral James Stark
TBWS44 2019_01_10 Halper Stark - China is a mass of contradictions. Intellectual property thief. America’s largest trading partner. Home to 476 billionaires. Choked with air and water pollution. A rapidly aging population. And leadership eager to project its national will.
China is plowing ahead with what one of my guests, Dr. Stefan Halper, call its “three warfares.” What are these and what can the U.S. do about them? Effective confrontation of this threat begins with an understanding that China views itself as the “middle kingdom” and why Beijing will only honor an agreement as long as it’s gaining an advantage. Admiral James Stark and Dr. Halper join me to break it all down on “The Bill Walton Show.”
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Jan 15, 2019
Episode 43: "Trumponomics" with Steve Moore
TBWS43 2019_01_03 Moore - Ronald Reagan was a winner who believed in the boundless potential of America. Sound familiar? It's one of the reasons Donald Trump is succeeding despite the relentless criticism. He "has a finger on the pulse of millions and millions and millions of Americans." He beat 17 other candidates to get elected and then outsmarted Congress and his own advisers to get a much better tax bill. Learn how Trump gets what he wants on "The Bill Walton Show" with guest Steve Moore.
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Dec 31, 2018
Episode 42: "What Both the Left and the Right Miss About Work in America" with Oren Cass
TBWS42 2018_12_13 Cass - Economic growth is strong but far too many Americans feel left behind and hopeless. This is leading to huge problems that neither political party is ready to address. But author and scholar Oren Cass and I tackle them in my new podcast.
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Dec 18, 2018
Episode 36: "Why Talent Trumps Taxes" with John Tamny and Ralph Benko
Lower taxes and less regulation are great for business, but some are thriving in high-tax states like New York and California. On my new podcast, Ralph Benko explains the “Tamny Axiom”. Hint: there’s something more valuable in those states than low taxes.
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Nov 28, 2018
Episode 41: Financial Busts: Why Are We Always Surprised, with Alex Pollock
People look to the government to prevent future financial crises and too many trust that politicians and economic experts can create policies to protect us and our 401(k) plans. We shouldn’t rely on them. These experts are smart, mostly well-intentioned people but they can’t prevent the next crisis. No one can. Why is that? And why is a future crisis inevitable? I discuss these and many other questions with “Finance and Philosophy” author Alex Pollock.
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Nov 13, 2018
Episode 39: How to Restore Power to the American People with Peter Wallison.
TBWS39 2018_10_18 Wallison - Since the days of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, progressives have kept claiming that government bureaucrats know better than the rest of us. But putting more power into the hands of administrative agencies instead of our elected representatives leads government by the people to the road to extinction. American Enterprise Institute’s Peter Wallison and I explain why this is such a huge problem on my new podcast.
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Oct 29, 2018
Episode 35: "Cultural hegemony" and why it should concern Americans today.
TBWS35 2018_09_26 Benko Nammo - Why do 53 percent of millennials prefer socialism to capitalism? Probably because they don’t know what socialism is and neither does Bernie Sanders and others who embrace it. But how bad can it get? Democrats might be moving further to the left but it’s absurd to compare them to Marxists, right? My podcast guest, Ralph Benko, says you might be surprised at how similar their beliefs really are.
While Marxism never got much traction in the U.S. his ideas are still infiltrating our society through strategies developed by Antonio Gramsci. How much can the thoughts of an obscure Italian socialist who died in prison almost a century ago really matter today? A lot. They’re helping socialists gain power in the U.S. every day by infiltrating many of the institutions that impact our daily lives.
Learn just how this is working and how high the stakes are on my new podcast with Ralph Benko and David Nammo.
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Oct 11, 2018
Episode 38: Bill talks with Klon Kitchen and Dean Cheng on Reckoning with China
Over the past forty years, since Deng Xiaoping began his policy of “Reform and Opening,” the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has evolved from a less developed country to the second largest gross domestic product (GDP) in the world. Over the past 25 years, it has also steadily transformed the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) into a force that is capable of influencing regional, and increasingly global, security environments. While the United States can’t seem to look beyond the next election cycle, China is far along in its decades-long vision to be the dominant economic and military power in the world On the latest edition of “The Bill Walton Show,” I spoke with Heritage Foundation senior research fellows Klon Kitchen and Dean Cheng to size up the China problem and begin sketching out an effective response. Dominating the technology sector is a key part of China’s strategy. Listen in to learn more about China’s high technology challenge to the United States, and also t…
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Oct 3, 2018
Episode 37: Why The Senate's Ritual Defamation Of Brett Kavanaugh Threatens Every American with Stella Morabito
"Any rational observer of the Democrats' non-stop character assassination machine can see that something is seriously sick in our republic. Instead of allowing Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Brett Kavanaugh, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee were permitted to use trumped-up, hip-pocketed charges to stage a show trial more in tune with a totalitarian system." Stella Morabito, The Federalist
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Sep 11, 2018
Episode 34: Bill Speaks with Haven Pell, Pundificator
The next time you feel the urge to join a major protest to condemn the elite, powerful forces who are supposedly making your lives worse, don’t bother. The event is most likely organized by elite, powerful forces who are getting rich off your activism while you don’t make a dime or a dime’s worth of difference.
From Occupy Wall Street to the endless disruptions in the recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings, the increased polarization of America is on full display. The disagreements Americans on key principles like the size and role of government are very real, but rather than seeking common ground, the special interests are exploiting this division at every turn.
My friend Haven Pell recently joined me on “The Bill Walton Show” to explain how politics is just another big business. He spent a career in law and finance and is now a self-described “pundificator” in retirement.
He says the confirmation hearings are a perfect example of how political activism is ofte…
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Aug 30, 2018
Episode 33: Entitlements aka Promises That Governments Can't Keep with Jim Agresti
Social Security is not secure at all. Many people think the government is setting aside the money they pay in taxes and it’s waiting for them when they retire. It’s not. The government is giving your hard-earned tax dollars to current retirees and running huge deficits. And the problem is only getting worse. Listen to our full discussion on the growing entitlement crisis and how to solve it.
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Aug 16, 2018
Episode 19: “Are You Lazy or is it Your Job?” with John Tamny
Sunday evening comes around and you wish the weekend had just one more day. You are just not feeling it. Monday morning, whether you’ll be sitting at a desk or outside on the construction site looks to be a drag. You wonder if you’re lazy, or is it something else?
According to John Tamny, it’s something else.
John, the editor of Real Clear Markets and the policy director at Freedom Works, spoke with me on The Bill Walton Show about his soon to be released book “The End of Work.”
“It’s not laziness.” John believes “it’s that you’re in the wrong job.”
There’s a lot hand wringing by policy gurus that technology and automation will kill off millions of jobs. Instead, John observes that many more millions of jobs will be created by productivity enhancing technologies and economic growth. Yes, there will be fewer manufacturing and truck driving jobs, but the new jobs created will be far more interesting and engaging.
In the movie The Graduate, the magic wo…
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Aug 6, 2018
Episode 32: The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money with Bryan Caplan
It’s long seemed obvious that if we want to truly fix education, actually make it work for the 21st century, we need to kill a stockyard full of our sacred cows.
And we had just the man for the job on The Bill Walton Show this week. Bryan Caplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University and author of “The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is Waste of Time and Money,” described the findings in his book and provided some stark recommendations based on them.
First, he said, we need to understand what we’re doing in school. There is the romantic version, he said – you go, learn skills employers are interested in, then get jobs with those employers performing those skills.
More likely is what he calls the “signaling school of education.” You mostly go to school to get certification, “a bunch of seals of approval saying, ‘Grade A worker’ or ‘Grade B worker.’” But, regardless of the grade, you need a seal.
The certification, Caplan argue…
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Jul 23, 2018
Episode 31: Chill. Trump Knows Putin is KGB. Expect Some Unconventional Success with Russia - with Herman Pirchner
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” Sun Tzu, The Art of War
So how does Donald Trump measure up to this ancient adage? His supporters, and count me among them, believe he knows that Putin is KGB and is simply taking his measure. Trump haters believe he’s an idiot and that Putin is playing him for a fool.
There’s no doubt President Trump made a mess of his press conference in Finland, but let’s not get distracted from other critical truths about the way the Trump Administration is dealing with Russia.
The predictable partisan media clatter utterly ignores the fact that Trump is being tough on Russia. His unconventional approach to foreign policy is working, and engaging a bad guy like Putin can be a good thing for the U.S. if Trump negotiates fro…
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Jul 16, 2018
Episode 16: Football and Family with Jimmy Kemp and Lamaar Thomas
Football and Family with Jimmy Kemp and Lamaar Thomas
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Jul 9, 2018
The Three Languages of Politics with Arnold Kling
The Three Languages of Politics with Arnold Kling
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Jul 2, 2018
Episode 21: What Acting Teaches You About You with Leigh Wilson Smiley
It was the 21st episode of The Bill Walton Show, but there were a lot of firsts.
For the first time, we warmed up for a show. It was not the cacophony of listening to an orchestra prepare to perform, although the difference between the sounds made during the warmup and the actual performance were almost as dramatic.
Instead, there was deep breathing, sighs big enough to be felt in every bone in the body, and burbling. Yes, burbling.
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Jun 29, 2018
The End of Work with John Tamny
Sunday evening comes around and you wish the weekend had just one more day. You are just not feeling it. Monday morning, whether you’ll be sitting at a desk or outside on the construction site looks to be a drag. You wonder if you’re lazy, or is it something else?
According to John Tamny, it’s something else.
John, the editor of Real Clear Markets and the policy director at Freedom Works, spoke with me on The Bill Walton Show about his soon to be released book “The End of Work.”
“It’s not laziness.” John believes “it’s that you’re in the wrong job.”
There’s a lot hand wringing by policy gurus that technology and automation will kill off millions of jobs. Instead, John observes that many more millions of jobs will be created by productivity enhancing technologies and economic growth. Yes, there will be fewer manufacturing and truck driving jobs, but the new jobs created will be far more interesting and engaging.
In the movie The Graduate, the magic wo…
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Jun 20, 2018
Episode 30: America's Crumbling Highways with Bob Poole
Famed economist Milton Friedman called America’s highway system a “socialist enterprise” and he was right. America’s roads are in desperate need of repair and the federal government is clearly incapable of maintaining them efficiently. Drivers pay tens of billions of dollars in gasoline taxes every year and our infrastructure problems only seem to get worse.
Instead of taxpayers forking over trillions of dollars in new legislation to address the problem, why don’t we trust in private sector solutions, both to ease congestion on our roads and to finance their ongoing maintenance through robust competition? Why not allow private companies to run and care for our roads in the model of utilities like power, water, and gas companies? There are some perils with this approach, as we’ll see, but the concept is worthy of serious consideration.
No one understands the fruitlessness of the status quo or thinks about practical solutions to these problems more than Bob Poole, founder…
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Jun 12, 2018
Episode 23: China's Led by Engineers, the U.S. by Lawyers: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
How would you react if the government put facial recognition cameras everywhere and kept tabs on your every move - right down to to how many squares of toilet paper you are using? It's happening in China, as the communist government there clamps down on freedom and ramps up its economic and territorial ambitions in its quest to become the dominant player on the world stage.
A big part of that ambition is predicated on forced technology transfers or rampant and outright theft of intellectual property - largely developed in the United States. It's the ransom required for American companies to do business in China. We don't have a coherent plan to stop them from stealing our technological superiority. And China’s ambitions don’t stop here. They’re seeking to build a sort of Silk Road 2.0 called One Belt One Road and not just for commercial purposes but for their geopolitical ambitions. America’s visceral free-trade philosophy leaves us extremely vulnerable to the Chinese global…
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May 30, 2018
Episode 29: America’s Antiquated Air Traffic Control System with Bob Poole
Did you know when you text someone that you’ve landed at the airport, you’re using far more advanced technology than your plane’s air traffic controller? It’s a shameful fact that some of the methods they rely on today have not changed since the 1930’s. Over 60 countries – including all the developed nations - have modernized their systems but ours is stuck in the past thanks to politics and special interest turf wars.
To find out why, I asked Bob Poole. Bob is America's foremost expert on private sector solutions to transportation issues. He’s advised virtually every presidential administration since Ronald Reagan’s and is the founder of and director of transportation policy at Reason Foundation.
A better, safer air traffic control system could be right at our fingertips and the controllers themselves want those changes to happen. But progress is in a holding pattern until we demand that Congress act. Enough is enough.
Join us as we discuss common sense solu…
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May 15, 2018
The Schools We Need -with Jeanne Allen and Sarah Walton
America’s K-12 education system and institutions were designed in a different era for a different society, and we are at grave risk today from this obsolete system, which fails to prepare all children to succeed as adults. In fact, the system we have now was never designed or intended to reach all children.
Look into a classroom and it looks pretty much the same way it looked in the 19th century.
The results have been catastrophic. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, two-thirds of all students fail to meet grade-level proficiency in any subject. Not math. Not civics. Not reading, history or geography. The numbers are far worse for minority students, of whom only one in six are meeting grade-level proficiency.
It’s obviously long past time we did something about it, but why is it so hard to change things and what changes would actually work to prepare every single student for a career they can be passionate about?
For answers, I turned to Cent…
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May 8, 2018
It’s Time to Get Serious About China with Stefan Halper and Pat Mulloy
Just this year, the Chinese Communist Party held an election in the Great Hall of the People where Xi Jinping was voted “President for Life.” The vote was 2,958 for and six against. With this vote they proclaimed that China is now realizing its dream of national rejuvenation, and it’s grand strategy to restore its Empire.
This move only adds fuel to mounting evidence of Chinese economic and military ambitions that we’ve been learning about from Cambridge University Professor Stefan Halper and Pat Mulloy, a longtime member of the bipartisan China Commission.
Listen in as we discuss China's emerging empire, the economic and territorial ambitions that go with it, and President Xi's increased monitoring and repression of the Chinese people to stamp out any hint of dissent.
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May 1, 2018
The Politics of Nostalgia with Yuval Levin and Arnold Kling
Every day, we’re confronted by headlines that reveal the ever-widening chasm between left and right in America. What’s driving this hyper- polarization? And are there any solutions?
Thanks to a stimulating conversation with National Affairs Editor Yuval Levin of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and independent scholar and economist Arnold Kling, I’m learning that there are some pretty fundamental cultural trends that we need to understand if we want to get at the roots of our frustrations.
In part, they lie in what Yuval calls the “politics of nostalgia.” For Arnold, the author of The Three Languages of Politics, our speech is exacerbating America’s political divide.
Join me for this very important conversation about how our politics got to where they are today and how subsidiarity, a simple concept with a big name, is a major part of the solution.
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Apr 24, 2018
Markets, Terrorism, and Flourishing with Dr. Anne Rathbone Bradley
My guest this week, Dr. Anne Rathbone Bradley, the free market economist and moral philosopher, wants to sit down with Bernie Sanders over a cup of coffee to talk about how to achieve the goals he proclaims. There’s a right way and a wrong way, and he’s not going to get there the way he’s going.
“We need to stop villainizing people based on ideology and I would say, ‘Hey, I agree with you, I don't want the poor to be poor and I don't want the rich to be able to exploit’ but the question is the how. And I don’t think he knows how.”
“What is the way to make the poor rich and raise the incomes of everyone? This is a real concern that we all should have. He's right about that. But the how is very different. To me, what economics demonstrates, is that the past 250 years of human history have showed us is that markets empower ordinary people,” said Anne.
Anne is a professor at the Institute for World Politics and George Mason University. She is Vice President of Eco…
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Apr 17, 2018
China Then and Now: From a Century of Humiliation to a $4 Trillion Trade Surplus with Pat Mulloy and Stefan Halper
“You're looking at a country which is the most radical actor on the global stage since the French Revolution.”
China is plowing forward with an agenda of economic aggression, empirical ambitions, and a complete disregard for international law and customs. How did this happen? It turns out to be a toxic combination of long national embarrassment, Confucian thought, and terrible missteps by the U.S. and others.
To give us a much-needed Chinese history lesson, I brought in former Commerce Department official Pat Mulloy, who also served as a commissioner on the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, and Stefan Halper, a professor at Cambridge University who worked in the Nixon and Ford administrations.
Before we can chart an effective path forward, we have to understand where China has been, what it wants, and how it plans to get there. Listen here for a great discussion on this vitally important topic.
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Mar 12, 2018
Steve Moore and Veronique de Rugy talk China and Trade with Bill
Steve Moore and Veronique de Rugy talk China and Trade with Bill
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Mar 7, 2018
Foreign Trade with Ambassador Terry Miller and John Tamny
Foreign Trade with Ambassador Terry Miller and John Tamny
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Dec 21, 2017
Life After the NFL with Lamaar Thomas and Maureen O’Donnell
Life After the NFL with Lamaar Thomas and Maureen O’Donnell
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Nov 9, 2017
Tax Cuts and Jobs Act with Adam Michel and Rachel Greszler
Tax Cuts and Jobs Act with Adam Michel and Rachel Greszler
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Nov 9, 2017
Block Chain Technology, Tax Policy and the FCC’s Local Media Rule-Making with George Gilder and Hance Haney
Block Chain Technology, Tax Policy and the FCC’s Local Media Rule-Making with George Gilder and Hance Haney
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Oct 27, 2017
Republic For Which We Stand with John B. Henry, Bill Nitze and Bruce Fein
Republic For Which We Stand with John B. Henry, Bill Nitze and Bruce Fein
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Oct 10, 2017
The Education Debate with Jeanne Allen and Johnnie Taylor
The Education Debate with Jeanne Allen and Johnnie Taylor
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Oct 5, 2017
Philanthropy and Civil Society with J.P. DeGance and Leah Hughey
Philanthropy and Civil Society with J.P. DeGance and Leah Hughey
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Sep 21, 2017
Taxing and Spending with Romina Boccia and Adam Michel
Taxing and Spending with Romina Boccia and Adam Michel
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Aug 24, 2017
The Republican Party with Al Regnery and Matt Schlapp
The Republican Party with Al Regnery and Matt Schlapp
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Jul 27, 2017
The Bill Walton Story with John Tamny
The Bill Walton Story