- George Orwell

On The Bill Walton Show, Mark Mills strips away the Newspeak surrounding the innocuously named "Inflation Reduction Act" (IRA) to reveal it as perhaps the most audacious experiment in government-directed industrial planning in U.S. history.

Mark P. Mills is the executive director of the National Center for Energy Analytics, and author of The Cloud Revolution.

Like Orwell's Ministry of Truth, which turned lies into official doctrine, the architects of this legislation have manufactured their own reality. They call it the "Inflation Reduction Act" while knowing it will create profound inflation. They promise "affordable clean energy" while mandating the replacement of working systems with ones that are demonstrably more expensive. They speak of "climate justice" while building a system that will impoverish the middle class.

The numbers tell their own stark story: Between $3-6 trillion in total spending – approaching the inflation-adjusted cost of World War II. But unlike that war, which mobilized American industry to defeat fascism, this massive expenditure aims to dismantle our existing energy infrastructure in favor of an unproven alternative.

Mills, speaking with the precision of his physics background and decades of energy expertise, reveals the dystopian preview already unfolding in Europe. In Germany, the green energy transition has led to a 300% increase in energy costs, shuttered factories, and a 70% collapse in foreign investment.

The corruption inherent in the Inflation Reduction Act would be comical if it weren't so tragic. Mills points to organizations receiving billion-dollar grants mere weeks after their formation. One entity, showing a previous annual income of exactly $100, received $940 million in taxpayer funds. Kafka himself couldn't have designed a more sinister bureaucracy.

But perhaps most chilling is the corrupting political engineering at work. Like the chocolate ration increases in "1984," which actually masked decreases, the IRA's architects have carefully distributed funds across red states to create dependency and prevent future reform. It's a masterclass in political manipulation.

And there's more:

• Electric vehicle manufacturers losing up to $100,000 per car even with $30,000+ subsidies

• Wind and solar projects requiring massive new transmission infrastructure that ratepayers, not taxpayers, will fund

• Bureaucrats, with no experience in managing large grant programs, suddenly overseeing billions in climate funds

• A guarantee of higher electric bills sold as "savings" to the American public

Key moments from this essential conversation:

00:57 Origins of Deception - How partisan reconciliation birthed history's most expensive energy legislation

02:11 The True Ledger - Analysis revealing $1-4 trillion in direct costs plus $2-3 trillion hidden in future utility bills

04:27 Electric Dreams Meet Reality - The mathematical impossibility of current EV economics

05:34 European Prophecy - Germany's de-industrialization preview of America's possible future

13:05 Following the Money - The labyrinth of newly-formed organizations receiving billions

17:39 Political Engineering - How strategic fund distribution creates dependency across red states

25:50 Inflation by Design - The inevitable consequence of printing trillions while mandating expensive energy

29:57 The Forbidden Discussion - Scientific context about CO2 that challenges the narrative

34:19 Gates' Admission - Why even complete implementation won't change 2050 outcomes

38:40 Hope for Reform - The urgent need for transparency and oversight

As Mills notes, comparing this to World War II spending isn't hyperbole – it's mathematics. But unlike that war, which united Americans in common cause, this massive expenditure threatens to divide us while weakening our industrial base and energy security.

Don't let this crucial conversation be memory-holed. Subscribe to the Bill Walton Show on Substack, YouTube, Rumble, and major podcast platforms to stay informed about the critical issues shaping our nation's future.

Remember: Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.

In this deep dive episode of The Bill Walton Show, Brandon Weichert and Brian O'Shea reveal how traditional military threats and internal subversion have merged into an entirely new form of conflict. Beginning with Russia's game-changing Oreshnik missile, they trace how modern warfare has evolved into something that would leave even a Kissinger struggling to define a workable world order.

Brandon J. Weichert is a national security analyst at The National Interest and the author of four bestselling books, most recently "A Disaster of Our Own Making: How the West Lost Ukraine."

Brian O'Shea is an Investigative Journalist at Daily Clout, Inc (Daily Clout.io) and Host of INVESTIGATE EVERYTHING on DailyClout.io. https://rumble.com/c/InvestigateEverythingOnDailyClout. He has spent almost 30 years in the fields of military intelligence, U.S. Government Intelligence, Competitive Intelligence (private sector), private investigations, executive protection.

The discussion exposes an uncomfortable truth: the traditional mechanisms of state power have been subverted by what O'Shea calls "fifth generation warfare." International organizations now use public health initiatives like "One Health" to extend their reach into American communities, while defense contractors and permanent bureaucracies have effectively created their own principality, operating independently of democratic control. "Ukraine has become a replacement for the ATM machine that Afghanistan had been," O'Shea explains, revealing how perpetual conflict serves the military industrial complex' bureaucratic interests.

Even more disturbing is how local regulations - from veterinary reporting requirements to land use restrictions - have become sophisticated tools of control that bypass traditional democratic oversight. As Weichert notes, "The bureaucracy has a method for dealing with bosses they don't like. They're going to clam up and drag their feet and basically wait him out." Machiavelli would recognize this as power - an emerging "healthcare" industrial complex - operating most effectively when disguised.

As America approaches a critical transition of Presidential power, these interconnected threats pose unprecedented challenges. Putin's strategic patience in Ukraine, China's global ambitions, and the race by Federal agencies to cement their authority against the threat of Trump's DOGE , all point to a new kind of conflict - one where the traditional balance of power has been replaced by a complex web of institutional warfare.

What emerges is a stark picture of modern national security challenges that would baffle yesterday's strategists: how do you maintain sovereignty when the threats come not just from foreign missiles but from your own institutions? How do you balance power in a world where bureaucracies have become their own principalities?

Brian O'Shea, Brandon Weichert and Bill grapple with these questions, and more, in this episode of The Bill Walton Show.

Key issues:

[00:05:06] WARFARE'S EVOLUTION - Russia's hypersonic weapons represent not just military superiority but the collapse of traditional deterrence theory that underpinned Cold War stability

[00:09:09] INSTITUTIONAL DECAY - Deterioration of US nuclear arsenal reveals how bureaucratic self-interest has replaced strategic necessity as the driving force in defense planning

[00:15:01] NEW POWER DYNAMICS - Putin's calculated restraint in Ukraine demonstrates how traditional military conflict now serves as just one element in a broader strategy of systemic disruption

[00:29:14] BUREAUCRATIC PRINCIPALITY - Ukraine conflict exposed as mechanism for maintaining bureaucratic power and funding, creating what Machiavelli might recognize as a state within a state

[00:43:51] SOVEREIGNTY'S NEW THREATS - "One Health" framework shows how international organizations have learned to bypass traditional state authority through seemingly benign initiatives

[00:47:54] FIFTH GENERATION WARFARE - Modern conflict operates through multiple domains simultaneously: military, bureaucratic, regulatory, and economic - defying traditional strategic responses

[00:50:24] ADMINISTRATIVE STATE POWER - Health agencies' complex influence networks reveal how bureaucracies have created their own form of sovereignty outside democratic control

[00:53:23] REFORM'S CHALLENGES - Trump's DOGE initiative faces sophisticated resistance from what has effectively become an independent power center within the American state

[00:57:50] CHINESE ADAPTATION - Xi's shift toward Marxism reflects recognition that modern power requires control over both traditional state apparatus and broader societal institutions

[01:00:03] DEMOCRATIC DEFENSE - Discussion reveals how preserving sovereignty now requires fighting on multiple fronts: military, bureaucratic, and institutional

Subscribe to the Bill Walton Show on Substack, YouTube, Rumble, and major podcast platforms to stay informed about the critical issues shaping our nation's future.

Dr. Stephen Bryen, a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy, has over 50 years national security experience including many stints in the Pentagon where he became one of the world's leading experts on the arms trade.

Speaking with precision born from decades of defense expertise, Bryen explains how this new missile travels at Mach 20, pulverizes underground bunkers without explosives, and can strike anywhere in Europe. More concerning: the United States has no equivalent weapon and no defensive system to stop it.

Drawing on a recent German think tank report, Bryen also exposes NATO's military unpreparedness, challenging comfortable assumptions about Western military superiority. His analysis is clinical, factual, and deeply disturbing for anyone concerned about U.S. and European security.

Key Revelations:

[00:53] Game Changer - Russian missile hits targets at 15,224 mph with unstoppable force

[06:20] Bunker Killer - Missile turns underground facilities to dust without explosives

[10:02] Defensive Gap - U.S. Patriot systems useless against hypersonic threats

[08:25] Strategic Shift - All European capitals now within Russian strike range

[09:21] Capability Gap - U.S. attempted similar weapon; Lockheed program failed

[15:23] Intelligence Failure - U.S. knew about weapon but ignored implications

[19:51] Ukraine Reality - Ukrainian forces losing 1,000 soldiers per day

[24:48] Depleted Arsenal - U.S. weapons sent to Ukraine leaving Pacific allies exposed

[21:54] Negotiation Leverage - Putin seeks sanctions relief, not just military victory

[28:50] Warning Signal - Bryen urges immediate halt to escalation before transition

Timestamps:

00:00 Start

2:25 Waller's stark assessment

3:25 The FBI's questionable origins

6:45 Cultural transformation since Obama era

13:45 Shocking revelation from former CIA station chiefs

19:24 FBI's broken chain of command

24:35 Promotion requirements

31:15 Intelligence failures

41:05 Ideological capture

45:53 Inefficient intelligence gathering

47:56 Reform strategy

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The New American Surveillance State

Remember Reagan's famous warning that the nine most terrifying words were "I'm from the government and I'm here to help"? Today's version might be: "I'm from the federal government, give up your personal data, and as long as you don't step out of line, we will keep you safe."

The Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) represents an unprecedented federal power grab:

• Massive Scope: 33 million small businesses, employing 61.7 million Americans, must submit to federal surveillance

• Selective Targeting: Only businesses under $5 million revenue and fewer than 20 employees are affected

• Draconian Penalties: $591 daily fines and up to 2 years in prison for non-compliance

• Strategic Exemptions: Giants like BlackRock, Amazon, and Big Tech escape scrutiny

• Global Data Sharing: Your information gets shared with 170 countries through the shadowy Egmont Group.

The Historical Echo

We've seen this movie before. Remember the IRS targeting scandal, where conservative groups with words like "tea party" and "patriot" faced extra scrutiny? The CTA creates a similar vulnerability for small businesses. As Mcilvennapoints out, it paves the way for an anti-second amendment bureaucrat to search the database for businesses with "gun," "firearm," or "freedom" in their names?

A Digital Iron Curtain

While the CTA surveils American businesses, the EU Digital Services Act (DSA) creates a parallel threat to free speech, with the power to levy fines of up to 6% of a company's global revenue – including revenue from unrelated businesses. This means Elon Musk's SpaceX could be penalized for X's content moderation policies, a clear attempt at financial coercion.

"It is ridiculous and chilling," Mcilvenna notes "Musk's other companies have nothing to do with the platform policies of X. It is simply an unhinged coercive measure designed to break Musk."

Mcilvenna describes how UK political operatives, through organizations like the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), are actively working to "Kill Musk's Twitter" while strengthening ties with various political campaigns. This isn't just UK domestic policy – it's part of a coordinated international effort to control both commerce and communication.

Why This Matters Now

The January 1, 2025 deadline for CTA compliance is approaching, while the DSA's censorship machinery is already in motion. This combination creates an unprecedented threat and the window for action is narrowing, but resistance is building:

- Multiple states have challenged the CTA's constitutionality

- Business associations are filing lawsuits

- Popular movements across Europe are pushing back against censorship

- Independent platforms are fighting for survival

As Peter Mcilvenna warns, "This needs to be a front and center issue to protect over 33 million small businesses from an egregious overreach by the Federal government."

Timelines:

• 00:03 - Introduction: Peter Mcilvenna's connection to Lord Thatcher's administration and Brexit

• 01:28 - Corporate Transparency Act introduction: Trump's veto and subsequent revival

• 05:19 - Federal overreach: Small businesses must register by January 1st deadline

• 08:56 - FinCEN's expanded role beyond traditional financial crimes enforcement

• 10:55 - BlackRock & large corporations exempt from CTA requirements

• 14:31 - Egmont Group: International sharing of business data across 170 countries

• 18:06 - Digital Services Act targeting speech censorship in UK

• 21:38 - Labour Party operatives working with US political campaigns

• 23:17 - CCDH attacks on free speech platforms

• 26:07 - EU threatening 6% global revenue fines against Musk's companies

• 29:20 - Rise of populist resistance movements across Europe

• 37:30 - Push for CTA to become central campaign issue for 2024

In The Israel Test George provides much needed context for today's war in the Middle East. His theory about the root causes of the conflict dramatically reframes the issues and makes it clear why we need to support Israel in this defining moment in History.

Despite comprising only 4% of the Middle East's land area, Israel has cultivated a preeminent high-tech economy, functioning as a liberal democracy with free elections, a critical press, and robust human rights protections—including for its 2 million Arab citizens, who enjoy the same civil liberties as Jewish citizens.

The Israel Test posits that one's reaction to others' success—whether through admiration and emulation or envy and hostility—reflects broader attitudes toward capitalism and free enterprise. Historical and contemporary instances of antisemitism, can be attributed in part to envy over Jewish excellence in so many fields and Israel's extraordinary achievements and its pivotal role in global innovation.

George explains "the heart of the Israel Test is how you react to people who excel you in intellect, creativity, wealth, accomplishment. Do you admire them, and emulate them, and learn from them or do you envy, and hate them, and try to tear them down? And this is really the test of capitalism or test of free enterprise, is whether you regard your competitors as expanding opportunities for you and exploring the frontiers of creation for you in the image of your creator, or whether you regard them as somehow a menace to your future."

Smart people are society's most valuable resource, yet the modern egalitarian movements relentlessly undermines recognition of individual talent and achievement.

George reminds that "we are all dependent on a small minority of geniuses really, who opened the horizons of the future for the rest of the world. And in recent history, a disproportionate number of them have been Jewish."

Based on a new study by Just Facts, 10% to 27% of "non-citizen" adults in the U.S. are estimated to be illegally registered to vote. Aggressive attempts to debunk the study have completely failed.

With roughly 20 million adult non-citizens living in the United States, about two to five million of who used to be called illegal aliens are now illegally registered to vote. This means that there are enough votes to overturn the votes of the American citizens in the upcoming congressional and presidential elections.

Here's another big issue to consider: 2020 was the first time an election was conducted by mass vote-by-mail. It was a train wreck. According to federal data, election officials do not know what happened to nearly 15 million mail ballots in 2020. Biden's victory margin was smaller than the number of missing and undeliverable ballots. Vote-by-mail is the worst way to run an election, yet we're plowing ahead with this once again.

To dig into these, and many other voting issues, Bill Walton is again joined by

Cleta Mitchell, Senior Legal Fellow at the Conservatives Partnership Institute and one of the leading election integrity experts in America, and

James D. Agresti, the president and cofounder of Just Facts, a research institute dedicated to publishing extensively researched and documented facts about public policies.

Here's some of we talked about to ensure free and fair legitimate elections:

• 03:30-05:14 Demand proof of citizenship for every voter registration—no proof, no vote.Without citizenship verification, the integrity of the entire election is at risk.

• 07:30-08:15 Purge voter rolls of ineligible non-citizens—it's not suppression, it's fairness. Dirty voter rolls lead to dirty elections. Clean them up or lose democracy.

• 05:14-06:44 Ban driver's licenses for non-citizens if used for voter registration—enough loopholes! Driver's licenses should never be a backdoor for illegal voting.

• 06:30-07:00 Expose left-wing groups enabling illegal voting—they're undermining your vote. Billions of your tax dollars fund left-wing groups assisting non-citizens to vote.

• 12:21-12:56 Enforce strict penalties for non-citizens caught voting—deportation and prison. Voting is a sacred right; illegal participation should have real consequences.

• 17:10-17:39 End the Democrats' reliance on non-citizen votes—stop the "great replacement." Changing the electorate to maintain power? That's the real threat to democracy.

• 33:21-33:30 Make Election Day a national holiday—end the endless election season madness. Voting must be a one day event, not a season. Stop the manipulation of election outcomes through extended voting

  .

• 35:30-37:13 Challenge media and big tech bias—Google is rigging elections through search results. Big Tech is controlling what you see, steering elections. Push back or be silenced.

• 28:30-28:49 Block all mail-in voting unless citizenship and identity are verified—no excuses. Voting by mail without checks is an invitation to fraud. Time to stop it.

• 18:00-18:51 Stop treating non-citizens as political pawns—vote manipulation is the real voter suppression. Non-citizens dilute the votes of legitimate citizens. That's the ultimate suppression.

• 18:00-18:51 Every illegal vote nullifies a legitimate citizen vote—don't let them cancel you out. Your vote should not be diluted by an illegal vote cast by someone who is not a citizen

• 12:00-12:21 Push for criminal prosecutions for anyone facilitating illegal voting—no more leniency. It's time to hold people accountable for undermining elections—starting with those enabling the fraud.

These are the bullet points. For a fuller understanding, listen in.

Key Takeaways:

• (00:25) The episode kicks off with Bill Walton likening the show to "Seinfeld," but instead of "nothing," it's a "show about everything," signaling a deep dive into pressing global issues.

• (02:10) Mercedes Schlapp addresses the palpable political exhaustion among Americans but rallies for renewed focus and energy with critical elections just weeks away.

• (02:45) A sharp critique is leveled at Kamala Harris, questioning her competence in articulating economic plans and her ability to connect with everyday Americans.

• (03:17) Doubt is cast on polls showing Harris with nearly 50% support, suggesting inaccuracies and highlighting concerns over early voting and election integrity.

• (04:23) Matt Schlapp observes a notable shift of racial minorities, especially those who fled communism, moving toward Trump due to his stances on immigration and economic freedom.

• (05:31) Bill Walton argues that the Biden-Harris administration has neglected economic growth in favor of social agendas like climate change and diversity, impacting Americans' prosperity.

• (07:14) The panel criticizes Harris's economic speech in Pittsburgh for lacking substance, emphasizing that "inspirational" rhetoric doesn't address real economic issues.

• (13:44) A stark contrast is drawn between Republicans adhering to election laws and Democrats allegedly exploiting legal loopholes to gain advantages.

• (15:58) Mercedes Schlapp raises alarms about potential foreign interference from China and Iran, suggesting they favor Harris to weaken the United States.

• (16:39) Concerns are voiced about the safety of political figures, noting that Donald Trump has faced serious threats, and calling out the media for insufficient coverage.

• (19:11) Criticism is directed at Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo for saying they need to "extinguish Trump for good," warning that such rhetoric is dangerous and divisive.

• (21:08) Bill Walton connects the U.S. election to a global freedom movement, mentioning Argentina's Javier Milei and highlighting CPAC's international efforts to promote democracy.

• (27:33) The discussion highlights growing support for Trump among Hispanic and Black voters, attributing it to dissatisfaction with economic conditions under current policies.

• (42:22) Matt Schlapp reflects on Trump's resilience through past challenges, suggesting it indicates a significant role he is yet to play in shaping America's future.

• (46:41) The conversation concludes with optimism about Trump's unique leadership, expressing confidence that he aligns with crucial issues that will positively impact the nation's direction.

With few other options granted other than attending their residentially assigned district public school most Americans cannot conceive that there are other alternatives to educate their children. School reform efforts are ferociously resisted by the education monopoly.

It's not just teachers unions and school boards. It's the curriculum developers, the textbook publishers, consultants, the teachers colleges. The list goes on and on. Schools and school administration are also the largest source of patronage for big city, mayors, and governors in every state. They are not going to give up control of this.

But the dynamics may be changing.

What happened during COVID, and the prolonged school closures, was a great parent awakening. Parents had a front row seat into their child's classroom and they were able to see what was being taught as well as what wasn't being taught. They didn't like what they saw, and now millions are beginning to explore and create other ways to educate their kids.

The person to talk with about this movement is Dr. Keri D. Ingraham Director of the Discovery Institute's American Center for Transforming Education. She is also a Senior Fellow at Independent Women's Forum.

Here is what we agree on.

We need to create new types of schools from the ground up. There are new, more effective ways to teach our kids. Let the old institutions atrophy and die out.

Some Key Takeaways:

• The fastest, most effective way to reform K12 public education is to allow families to exit the system. 03:24

• Public school education's roots are in the progressive era in the 19th Century. 6:29

• On the world stage US students are not competitive. 09:07

• Critical race theory is embedded in the curriculum 10:09

• Progressive bias dominates textbook publishing, college schools of education, and teacher certifications 12:05

• The bar is low to enter teacher college programs. It's typically the easiest field to go into within the university. 15:50

• Teacher college curriculums ignore subject matter expertise. 16:23

• Don Graham, former publisher of the Washington Post and a history major at Harvard, couldn't teach in DC public schools because he didn't have a teaching certificate. 18:12

• Is there any examples of a government monopoly or any big bureaucracy that has successfully reformed itself? 20:46

• Big cities' schools are among their mayor's largest form of patronage. 12;10

• When schools say "We're underfunded. We need more money." It means the want to hire more non-teaching administrative staff. 24:19

• Great books classical education has exploded. 28:26

• Do we really need to have kids go to school and sit there for eight hours a day? 29:46

• What do you do about the inner city kids that don't have parents that are that involved? 35:29

• How do we change the teacher certification rules? 38:42

• From the beginning of the progressive era over a hundred years ago, schools were designed to get kids off the streets and under the control of what they then called the "education trust" 40:44

• In 1919, the "education trust" advocated taking children from the family into the hands of the custody of "community experts." 41:37

• California's Gavin Newsom recently signed a law saying that schools are not required to tell a parent of their child's gender ideology unless that child gives permission. 42:51

• In 1934, the president of the National Education Association, wrote, "we expect to accomplish by education what dictators in Europe are seeking to do by compulsion and force." 46:02

• We're not going to be able to reform the existing public government owned K12 schools. What we can do is to create effective alternatives that are better, cheaper, more humane, and teach good values. And if we create these alternatives, this ends the K12 monopoly. 48:22

~ Frederick the Great of Prussia

This episode examines the three explosive national security crises the United States and world are embroiled in today, any one of which could escalate into igniting a World War III.

Ukraine/Russia, Israel/Hamas and Taiwan/China.

Disturbingly, there's a lot of sabre rattling with far too many politicians in both Europe and the United States engaged in reckless rhetoric.

To provide cogent analysis and a healthy dose of sobering realism at a time when we face dire risks, Bill is joined by national Security experts and returning guests Stephen Bryen and Brandon Weichert.

Dr. Stephen Bryen, a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy, has over 50 years national security experience including many stints in the Pentagon where he became one of the world's leading experts on the arms trade.

Brandon J. Weichert, author of The Shadow War: Iran's Quest for Supremacy is publisher of the Weichert Report and author of the soon to be published A Disaster of Our Own Making: How the West Lost Ukraine.

Some excerpts:

"The neoconservative, neoliberal cabal running Washington believe fully that they have to fight everywhere all the time to preserve America's unipolar standing and our hegemony in the world. But this quest for hegemony has led to the absolute destruction of America's post-Cold War primacy," warns Weichert. "And if we are not careful, in the next six months, we will not only lose that primacy., but we may become like the declining Ottoman Empire or Austro-Hungarian Empire on our way out. We've overcommitted and overextended, and we're paying the price."

"NATO is flirting with war and extinction," worries Bryen. "France is now "officially" sending troops to Ukraine and NATO countries are demanding strikes deep inside Russia. Meanwhile the US has secretly made a "policy shift" that somewhat falls short of what Zelensky wanted, but opens the door to deep strikes by the US on Russian territory."

"It's very hard to see how NATO could defend Poland or the Czech Republic or Estonia. These are not easy countries to defend, and NATO doesn't have today the core countries of NATO, the French, the Germans, the British, it doesn't have the wherewithal to do it. It doesn't have the army or armed forces. It doesn't have the air defenses. It doesn't have the air forces, it doesn't have the tanks. It doesn't have anything sizable enough, and the ability to actually logistically move it to the battlefield."

"So the notion of NATO fighting a war, which is what French President Macron and all these clowns are essentially taunting the Russians with, is a very dangerous thing because it means that Europe could be enveloped in a war can't win."

"Russians have developed a pretty sizable air defense capability," explains Bryen. "They have very good artillery capability. They have increasingly shown their capability with drones and drone warfare, none of which we're prepared for, and our best tank, the Abrams, which our only tank, we've put all our eggs in this one tank. The Abrams is a disaster."

"The think tank community and the Biden Administration have a plan to contain Russia by rolling it back to its medieval borders, so that it's never again a threat to Europe and the West," marvels Wiechert. "This is utterly fantastical thinking, this is childish thinking. Russia is not going to let it happen without a fight."

"Well, their plan not going to happen," agrees Bryen. "The underlying error, and I think it was a huge error, was that we should confront a nuclear power, a significant nuclear power with the dismemberment. We were going to break up the Soviet Union, now Russia. We're going to dismember it, and we're going to sponsor the opposition in Russia, and somehow create this great transformation. But we're messing around with a nuclear power."

"We've essentially forced the Russians into the arms of the Chinese through our policies, which was complete stupidity," says Bryen.

The neocons are very explicit the US must be the unchallenged superpower. In every place in the world, in every region, we must dominate.

This is the thinking that got us into the Middle East. This is the exact thinking that led us down the wrong path in Iraq and then the Arab spring.

"They believed the notion that there was going to be only one superpower and it was going to be the United States,"reminds Bryen. "And since we were to be the only superpower we had to take on these responsibilities. Well, we weren't the only one superpower, and today, we're just one of three, and increasingly the weaker of the three."

Yet today there is a widespread and growing belief that technology has become the root of all evils with all sorts of claims being made that it destroys privacy, spreads misinformation, undermines trust, and democracy, eliminates jobs, discriminates by race, and gender, increases inequality, rips off the consumer, harms children, and even threatens the human race.

This is quite a bill of indictment! But is any of this true?

Bill's guests on this show, Rob Atkinson and David Moschella, believe this is mostly agenda driven bunk and have written a persuasive book to prove it.

"Technology Fears and Scapegoats: 40 Myths About Privacy, Jobs, AI, and Today's Innovation Economy"

Robert D. Atkinson is the founder and president of ITIF, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, and author of many books including "Innovation Economics: The Race for Global Advantage"

David Moschella is a nonresident senior fellow at ITIF and previously was head of worldwide research for IDC, the largest market analysis firm in the information technology industry.

"America's always flourished more than anybody else in the world," declares Atkinson, "because we have had this underlying faith in innovation, in the future, in taking risks, in going forward into the unknown. And now, that's really at risk. People are saying things like, 'Wait a minute, we shouldn't deploy facial recognition because it's racially biased' or that 'technology innovation has not improved the average worker's living standards.'"

"Well, both those statements are wrong. They are 100% myth."

"As someone who grew up in the Boston area in the 60s and 70s," says Moschella, "Massachusetts was considered a dead economy with no future. And then, this thing called the minicomputer was designed out of MIT, and created companies like Digital Equipment, and Prime, and Wang and all the others. And all of a sudden you had the so-called Massachusetts Miracle. People are forgetting these realities."

Some of the most damaging myths stem from a deep-seated rejection of the Western capitalist system. But to gain traction for this agenda, anti-capitalists must first convince voters that the current system is failing, and a top target is technology driven innovation.

"Also, what's happened is that some of the legitimate criticism of globalization has morphed into criticism of automation," says Moschella.

"People didn't like globalization, but then said, 'Well, automation is really more the cause than globalization, and of course technology drives automation, so we can blame technology automation for the problems globalization has created.''"

"I've actually heard members of Congress say, 'The pace of change is so rapid and we have to slow it down,' worries Rob.

"Now think about that. When has America ever said that? That the average person can't handle change. That it's too fast. We've got to slow things down."

In this episode we also take on the myth that the pace of technological change is accelerating.

Compare current era to the early 20th century, which saw the introduction of transformative technologies like electricity, radio, automobiles, and airplanes. The perception of rapid change today is often skewed by the digital revolution's visibility, but in reality, the physical and infrastructural advancements of the past were probably more transformative.

America has shifted its focus from delivering technological wonders to preventing "harmful" change. Once widely seen as a savior of humanity, technology is increasingly used as a scapegoat for just about every societal ill.

But if we see innovation as a necessary force for good, with government's role as a constructive enabler, there will be thoughtful innovation policies and more innovation

But if the dominant narrative is that technology is an out-of-control force for harm, there will be destructive policies and a stultifying future.

Agree or disagree, this conversation wanders into some interesting waters and challenges a lot of today's conventional wisdom about technology.

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We often use the phrase follow the money. Scott and Kristen are among the best at doing just that.

Centerpiece of the discussion is Scott's new book Arabella: The Dark Money Network of Leftist Billionaires Secretly Transforming America.

In it, he reveals the vast influence that the Arabella Network - by deploying billions of dollars - plays in American politics under the guise of progressive philanthropy.

To name just a few issues, Arabella has played a major role in battles over Supreme Court nominations, abortion, men in women's sports, school discipline, Medicare for All, environmental policies, fake local news outlets, and the "Zuck Bucks" used to manipulate elections. Many believe that most of the attacks on American institutions by the Left are financed and organized in part by Arabella.

This episode's conversation gets into revealing detail about how this network operates as a "dark money" brain trust with a for-profit manager (of course) at its epicenter, commanding several billion dollar nonprofit action groups.

These funds in turn create hundreds of "pop-up" entities that appear suddenly, giving the appearance of huge popular groundswells, when in fact they're the creations of Arabella and other similarly deeply disguised operations on the Left.

Rather than being innocent grassroots outfits, they are the creation of their secretive dark money operations.

The sheer quantity of money that has flowed through Arabella's channels is staggering. In the 2020 election cycle, Arabella's nonprofits took in $2.4 billion, more than the fundraising of the Democratic and Republican National Committees combined. In the 2022 election cycle, Arabella's fundraising rose to $3 billion.

Arabella is a big part of the reason for the Left's stunning advantage in money and sophisticated political machinery that shapes our lives and elections.

Scott and Kristen describe the "three rivers of money" flowing into politics.

"With the first river of hard dollars, traditional political giving, the Left has an advantage, but it's slight," explains Scott. "In the second river, the independent expenditures, dark money and super PACs, the left has a little advantage, but it's also slight. But in the third river," and here Scott grows animated, "where the Left's charitable public policy groups operate, it's not even close. It's over a 10 to one in the Left's favor and totals to over a $35 billion advantage. This is really the death star for the lefties."

It's shocking to learn how Arabella has covertly developed the darkest of "dark money" networks. It's also shocking to learn who has been by far the largest single individual contributor to the abortion industry to the tune of $6+ billion. (Revealed at the 18:36 minute mark)

In fact, the further you go in this episode, the more disturbing the political swamp and the people behind it reveal themselves to be.

If you really want to follow the money, start here.

Drawing from his upcoming book, "The Secret of Directional Investing: Making Money Amidst the Red-Blue Divide," Pinkerton—a veteran of the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and a long-time Fox News contributor—unpacks the intriguing idea that political polarization, while daunting, can be a goldmine for the astute investor and entrepreneur.

The conversation digs into a deeper exploration of Federalism and the concept of states as laboratories, not just of democracy, but also micro-economic innovation hubs. Pinkerton paints a picture of a "United States of Arbitrage," where individuals and businesses pick states for their cultural climates and regulatory frameworks, much like how businesses today scout for tax havens.

Bill and Jim weave through topics with ease, touching on the explosive potential of AI and its voracious energy demands, the dynamics of state-driven economic incentives, and the possible futures shaped by these forces. They muse on how states compete to attract burgeoning industries by aligning social policies with corporate needs, imagining a nation where your address might reflect your ideology as much as your lifestyle.

"If a red state were really on its game, thinking for itself," says Jim, "it would announce to the world that any student who got an 800 on his or her math SAT would get a free ride."

The episode doesn't just dissect current trends; it offers a visionary look at how today's divisions could be tomorrow's opportunities, making it a must-listen for anyone intrigued by the intersection of politics, economics, and the future of innovation in America.

Also, you'll learn which state seems to think its idea of economic development is transgender surgery, hoping to become to transgenderism what the Cleveland Clinic or Johns Hopkins are to cancer.

Together they dissect the exploding tensions in the Middle East, specifically the dramatic escalation by Iran's air attack on Israel.

And the big questions: How are global players like the US, Russia, and even China moving their chess pieces in this high-stakes game?

The episode is a whirlwind tour through the strategies, fears, and potential flashpoints that will likely redraw the map of global power.

Dr. Bryen, with over 50 years national security experience including many stints in the Pentagon where he became a leading expert on the arms trade, shares his insights into Iran's unprecedented missile and drone attack on Israel. Despite its scale, it was largely thwarted by robust air defenses from Israel, the US, and even regional players like Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Still, Iran considers it a success.

He highlights the remarkable and historic aspect of Arab nations rallying in defense of Israel.

Brandon Weichert, author of The Shadow War: Iran's Quest for Supremacy and known for his pulse-racing analyses, shifts the lens to the broader geopolitical chessboard, articulating how the Shia-Sunni divide and the shadows of the Abraham Accords are playing out in real-time.

Weichert critiques the current US administration's handling of deterrence, and its tacit support of Iran which will destabilize the already volatile region.

Dr. Bryen also skeptically views the Biden administration's Middle East strategy while applauding CENTCOM's pivotal coordination role.

Weichert and Bryen also debate potential military strategies that could weaken Iran's capabilities, while worrying about the critical weaknesses in the US and global defense arsenals.

This discussion shines a light on the complex and now dire landscape of international relations that the Biden Administration has wrought.

Buckle up, listeners, because geopolitics just doesn't get more electrifying than this!

Robert W. Malone is an internationally recognized scientist/physician and the original inventor of mRNA vaccination as a technology. He holds numerous fundamental domestic and foreign patents in the fields of gene delivery, delivery formulations, and vaccines: including for fundamental DNA and RNA/mRNA vaccine technologies. He has developed some 100 scientific publications with over 14,000 citations of his work.

He now focuses on daily podcasts, interviews, op-eds, advocacy with legislators and building a twitter feed of over a million people.

His life changed from that of a scientist to an advocate because of his personal experiences and concerns regarding the safety and bioethics of how the COVID-19 genetic vaccines were developed and forced upon the world. He discovered the many short-cuts, database issues, obfuscation and frankly, lies told in the development of the Spike protein-based genetic vaccines for SARS-CoV-2.

Some of the topics covered:

The regulatory capture of the federal government has warped and shaped the work of Congress and Federal agencies to such an extent that they no longer represent what is in the best interests of the nation, the world, and humanity.

WHO's Pandemic Treaty is intended to override most of our national sovereignty in health policy decisions, effectively allowing a global body to dictate local health measures.

Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) which have the potential to be a sinister tool for government financial surveillance and social control.

Financial Privacy Concerns The payment processor Stripe, which recently demanded Malone's financial details, reflecting broader concerns about privacy and autonomy in financial transactions.

Labeling Dissent as extreme, such as "far-right" or "Nazi," to delegitimize and silence criticism, comparing it to historical tactics used during the McCarthy era.

Surveillance and Control under the guise of safety and security, suggesting a slippery slope toward more intrusive governmental and corporate practices.

Robert Malone is a courageous and deep thinker, a man who should be listened to.

A sinister web of federal agencies, the White House, social media platforms, NGOs and others are orchestrating a vast system of censorship to suppress viewpoints that contradict "preferred government narratives"about COVID-19 policies, climate change, election integrity and other issues that should be open to free & fair debate.

The Supreme Court is being asked to decide on a lower court injunction that ruled that the Biden White House, the FBI, the Department of Justice, the Surgeon General, the CDC, the Department of Health and Human Services and many other federal agencies are not permitted to communicate with or coerce 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."

Joining Bill in this episode are two people who were inside the Supreme Courtroom on March 18, plaintiff Aaron Kheriaty MD and his lawyer Jenin Younes.'

Aaron, a physician specializing in psychiatry, was fired from the University of California after challenging its Covid vaccine mandate in Federal Court.

Jenin's with the New Civil Liberties Alliance and served as senior special counsel on the Weaponization Subcommittee.

To learn how this came about, in this episode Bill talks with James E. Fanell and Bradley A. Thayer, Ph.D, authors of

Embracing Communist China: America's Greatest Strategic Failure.

Jim Fanell, a retired U.S. Navy captain and the former Director of Intelligence and Information Operations for the U.S. Pacific Fleet, is now a Government Fellow at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy.

Brad Thayer is an expert in Chinese grand strategies and the history of Chinese and Western strategic thought; and a former visiting fellow at Magdalen College, University of Oxford.

"How did China go from an underdeveloped country in 1990 with about 0.6 of 1% of world gross domestic product to over 20% of world GDP today?" asks Brad.

"The answer in large part is that the United States aided and abetted the rise of the Chinese Communist Party and kept it in power. That has never happened before in international politics where one state, the dominant state, has funded the rise of an enemy."

U.S. foreign policy toward the People's Republic of China (PRC) has been dominated by the so-called "Engagement School" since the end of the Cold War. They believed that U.S. political and economic engagement with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would transform the PRC into a "responsible stakeholder" in the Western economic system and, ideally a democracy. Of course, none of that happened.

Instead, the Engagement School saved the CCP and ensured that the PRC became wealthier and more powerful year-after-year and used that power to re-make the international order to suit the CCP's interests and to threaten U.S. national security, allies, and partners.

"Engaging" with China has led to the offshoring of manufacturing jobs, the loss of intellectual property, and making the U.S. energy future dependent on China, just to name a few of our strategic blunders.

"We thought we could make China and CCP become more like us, that they would see the value of the being part of a US dominated system created in the post-World War II era. We assumed they would just naturally drift into becoming a liberal democracy. So we didn't fundamentally understand communism. We didn't understand the Chinese Communist Party's commitment to that ideology," explains Jim.

The Trump administration began the difficult task of ending Engagement. However, under Biden, it has now returned in a supercharged form.

The Biden "reset" began in earnest in May when CIA Director Nicholas Burns made a secret trip to Beijing to meet with his Chinese counterparts. Then began a cavalcade of visits to the PRC from senior Biden officials: Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Climate Czar John Kerry, and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo who was most explicit regarding why nothing could jeopardize the approximately $750 billion per year trade relationship with the PRC.

"But the apotheosis of the engagement paradigm was the summit meeting in November between Xi and Biden. The meeting with Biden was just Xi's doormat to get to what really mattered: the meeting with the 400 business leaders," explain Jim and Brad.

"Never in our history have Americans so openly and brazenly celebrated a communist and murderous dictator. It was an appalling and shameful moment in American history."

"The U.S. has little to show in return for all these meetings, except for the loss of face and its own national power—again, year-after-year. It is stunning that so few Americans have asked what good has America received from the Engagement School. The elite have gotten wealthier, so they and the CCP are the winners. But it's the Chinese and American people that bear the costs."

The German high officials wanted then to join with the United States to stop the Communist Soviet Union from advancing in Europe. They had a well-thought out plan as to which units they knew were loyal, what units they knew would actually move on the Wolf's Lair, Hitler's Prussian, and the East Prussian headquarters.

FDR learned of this proposal from a man the Germans believed would be their most credible emissary:

George H. Earle III, a Main Line Philadelphia millionaire, war hero awarded the Navy Cross, Pennsylvania governor, Ambassador to Austria and Bulgaria, friend and supporter of Franklin Roosevelt, generous donor to humanitarian causes, colorful playboy, and spy.

Yet FDR did not act on the stunning offer, and the rest as they say, is History. The Soviets conquered part of Germany and all of Eastern Europe and closed it behind an iron curtain that would endure for over four decades.

Here to tell this story is Chris Farrell, who for the last 25 years has been the Director of Investigations & Research at Judicial Watch and author of "Exiled Emissary: George H. Earle III" and

Dr Shea Bradley Farrell, author of "Last Warning to the West", the founder of Counterpoint Institute and who has written extensively about the agonies of Eastern Europe under Communism.

"This is not one of these books that examines an alternative history," explains Chris. "Everything in the book is documented, for example, from the National archives, the Pennsylvania State Archives in Harrisburg, or the Pennsylvania Historical Society in Pennsylvania. Or from personal records from the Earle family."

Why this story matters today is not just that FDR did not act but why he didn't. As records have become public, we have learned that were many staunch supporters of the Soviet Union and its Marxist social experiment in both the FDR and Truman White Houses. Alger Hiss was FDR's key aide at Yalta.

"What Earle was saying was, "Look, the real threat is the Soviet Union. We may have been allied during the war for whatever reason you want to explain, but they're a civilizational threat.""

But many in the 1940s White House did not want to act against the Soviet Union. They supported it.

The Soviets then. China today. The United States has a long troubled history of "elite capture."

Chris and Shea tell a compelling story. You can learn much about history from this episode. But it's how it reflects on today that's really chilling. What does John Kerry say when he's meeting with the Chinese?

The claim is that increasing levels of greenhouse gases are purportedly driving atmospheric warming to dangerous and unprecedented levels which is said to be leading to ever increasing natural disasters, severe weather events and human health concerns.

But what if these claims are wrong, catastrophically wrong.

What if, rather than being at unprecedented high levels, CO2 is at one of its lowest concentrations in the long history of the Earth and that the modest warming anticipated from increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases will be benign. More carbon dioxide will bring huge benefits to agriculture, forestry and life in general.

Returning guests Dr Will Happer Professor Emeritus of Physics at Princeton University and geologist Greg Wrightstone, both with the CO2 Coalition, make a convincing case in this episode for just that. Atmospheric CO2 is the primary carbon source for life on Earth.

Carbon dioxide concentrations - in part due to human emissions - are slowly growing from near-famine, pre-industrial values toward levels that are optimum for plant growth and which have prevailed over most of the geological history of higher life forms.

Carbon dioxide, at a current concentration of about 420 ppm, represents just 0.04% of the atmosphere, or about 420 molecules out of every million. Current levels are an incredibly small percentage of the atmosphere, albeit a critical one, as advanced plant life could not survive without at least 150 ppm. Recent declines in concentration have pushed the world dangerously close to that 150 ppm "line of death."

Nearly all great leaps in human history occurred during warm periods. Before climate science became politicized, historians called warm periods "climate optima" because Earth's ecosystems and humanity benefited from the blessed warmth.

Contrary to the demonization of the gas, CO2 is essential to life on Earth. CO2 is not a poison. Without CO2, there would be no photosynthesis, no plant food and insufficient oxygen to breathe. Just some of the benefits of CO2:

• Increasing crop growth

• Increasing soil moisture

• Shrinking deserts

• Expanding forests

• Lengthening growing seasons

• Declining cold-related mortality

What we should be worried about is that throughout most of Earth's history, carbon dioxide existed in beneficially high levels that were multiples of our current concentration. Geological sequestration of CO2 into fossil fuels has depleted our atmosphere to levels below the optimum for plant growth.

The great irony is that through the burning of fossil fuels, the carbon stored in the remains of ancient plants and organisms is now being liberated and helping to return the planet's atmosphere to more beneficial levels of CO2.

We can correctly refer to fossil fuels as "natural solar-powered energy" or, if you like, giant solar energy storage batteries!

Without fossil fuels there would be no reliable, low-cost energy worldwide and less CO2 for photosynthesis to make food. Eliminating fossil fuels to attempt to reduce CO2 emissions would be disastrous for the world's people, especially for the two billion impoverished poor.

An underreported consequence of the "green" energy transformation is the loss of habitats and species.

The "green" solution to a non-existent climate crisis is to encourage a great acceleration in habitat loss by abandoning efficient fossil fuels for inefficient wind and solar energy that requires vast swaths of forest, grasslands and farmlands for solar and wind installations and further habitat loss through:

• open-pit mining of minerals needed for batteries, photovoltaic cells and electric transmission,

• conversion of diverse jungle habitat to plantations for biofuel,

• large-scale electricity transmission lines and

• destruction of mature forests to make wood pellets as biofuel.

So-called green energy is causing the destruction of massive numbers of birds, bats and insects slaughtered by wind turbines. Offshore wind projects are killing whales, dolphins and other cetaceans.

We have been seized by a great madness.

Under the false claims of coming calamity, bureaucrats and politicians seek to shut down coal-fired power plants, kill the internal combustion engine, ban natural gas for home use and advance the misguided objective of a "net zero" economy.

"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."

- Charles MacKay

"What historians will definitely wonder about in future centuries is how deeply flawed logic, obscured by shrewd and unrelenting propaganda, actually enabled a coalition of powerful special interests to convince nearly everyone in the world that carbon dioxide from human industry was a dangerous, planet-destroying toxin. It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world—that carbon dioxide, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison."

- Dr. Richard Lindzen

"I don't see a whole lot of difference between the consensus on climate change and the consensus on witches. At the witch trials in Salem the judges were educated at Harvard. This was supposedly 100 per cent science. The one or two people who said there were no witches were immediately hung. Not much has changed."

- Will Happer

Until now the World Health Organization has been largely an advisory organization. If voted in, these changes would make its edicts compulsory.

The proposed amendments replace the word "may" with "shall" over 100 times and the word "non-binding" has been deleted to make the recommendations of the WHO binding.

The agreements authorize the Director-General to declare unilaterally a potential or actual "public health emergency of international concern" and the imposition and enforcement of sanctions on nations that don't comply with WHO dictates.

Some of the directives that the Director-General could issue to the 196 sovereign state members could include: quarantines, masks, mandatory testing, vaccination requirements, lockdowns, and border closures coupled with vaccine passports.

This has the full support of the World Economic Forum, the European Union, the World Bank, Bill Gates, Big Pharma, the Chinese Communist Party and the Biden Administration.

Their aim is to substitute "global governance" for the sovereignty of the U.S. and the 195 other state parties to the agreement, ultimately eroding most all of our personal medical freedoms.

To explain the planned WHO power grab, and what we can do to prevent it, are two of the founders of the Sovereignty Coalition:

Dr. Meryl Nass, the founder of Door to Freedom, a physician and researcher who proved the world's largest anthrax epidemic was due to biological warfare. A leader in the fight for healthcare freedom, her license was suspended for prescribing COVID medications and "misinformation."

Reggie Littlejohn is the founder and President of Women's Rights Without Frontiers. A graduate of Yale Law School and an experienced litigation attorney, she is an acclaimed international expert on China's human rights offenses.

The proposed Pandemic Treaty establishes global surveillance requirements and commits governments to censor dissenting views "with the aim of countering and combating false, misleading misinformation or disinformation."

Struck from the IHR is the crucial guarantee of human rights as a foundation of public health:

"The implementation of these Regulations shall be with full respect for the dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms of persons…" has been replaced with "shall be based on the principles of equity, inclusivity, and coherence..."

Worse, the agreements embraces a "One Health" approach which includes not only human health, but also the health of animals, agricultural plants and the environment. The WHO essentially is claiming control over every aspect of existence on earth. The Director General could declare "climate change" as a "public health emergency of international concern."

"The best thing is simply to get out of the WHO. Just say this is going in the wrong direction and we're out. The WHO doesn't do anything for the United States," advises Meryl. "How have we benefited from this organization?"

This a huge issue that isn't being covered in the so-called mainstream media. If you thought the nightmare of the last heavy handed response to the pandemic was over, think again.

Listen in and learn from two passionate and knowledgeable defenders of our healthcare freedoms.

To learn where this might be headed next, I'm back talking in this episode with my go to guru on all things national security Stephen Bryen - Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Policy

Some takeaways from our conversation:

• The head of NATO Jen Soltenberg's reckless statements and actions are escalating the situation in Ukraine and increasing the risk of a full-scale war.

• The Biden Administration's objective of regime change in Moscow has failed. Russia seems certain to prevail. At this point, they have few incentives to stop the fighting.

• Ukraine has suffered massive casualties, perhaps up to 800,000 killed, and is on its third army. Ukraine President Zelensky is on the way out, we just don't know how or when.

• Sanctions against Russia haven't worked. China has replaced the European Union as Russia's top energy buyer and goods supplier, giving Russia both the cash and the manufactures it needs to sustain itself.

• Total trade between China and Russia has reached $240 billion in 2023, more than double what it was in 2018. Russia now has become China's biggest supplier of crude oil, second for coal and third for natural gas.

• Stephen predicted that Victoria Nuland would be out as acting Deputy Secretary of State. She resigned this week.

• The Biden administration aims to drag the war out as long as possible. Biden doesn't want Ukraine to collapse while he's running for president.

• Sending more money to Ukraine for ammunition and armaments doesn't address its real issues: its lack of manpower and low morale.

Finding a peaceful solution and stabilizing the situation in Ukraine should be our highest priority. Up to now, it hasn't been.

As always, Stephen provides a deep and informed take on events. Definitely worth a listen.

Motorhome Prophecies: A Journey of Healing and Forgiveness.

As you'll learn, the book is much more than her riveting and heartwrenching personal story. It is a beacon, reminding us that even the direst circumstances need not dictate the outcome of our lives.

Carrie Sheffield grew up fifth of eight children with a violent, mentally ill, street-musician father who believed he was a modern-day Mormon prophet destined to become U.S. president.

His obsessions led Carrie, her mother and seven siblings to live as vagabonds, remaining on the move across the country, subsisting in sheds, tents, and motorhomes, enduring a dysfunctional drifter existence, camping out in their motorhome in Walmart parking lots.

She eventually seized control of her life, transcended her troubled past, and overcame her toxic inner voice (and a near death experience)—thanks to the power of forgiveness, cultivated through her conversion to Christianity.

She left the Mormon church when she 22, then went through a period she calls secular agnostic hell, became a Christian at age 35, transforming her life.

She evolved from a scared and abused girl to a Harvard-educated professional with a passion for empowering others to reject the cycles of poverty, depression, and self-hatred.

"I see my life in some ways as a microcosm of what's happening with the West," she shares.

"The West is committing suicide, rejecting all of our foundational Western principles, because the West has not been perfect. No society has."

"Destructive and alienating ideas like CRT and DEI have us throwing the baby out with the bath water. This is what I did when I became a secular agnostic because I was so angry at a flawed Judeo-Christian interpretation that had been forced on me by a toxic family environment."

Carrie Sheffield is a compelling young woman. Listen in to learn about her journey and its lessons for us.

The CIA and the FBI, along with the rest of the intelligence community, have become essential players in a growing surveillance state, attacking its perceived political enemies and spying on ordinary American citizens, even parents who push back against the radical teachings of cultural Marxism in America's public schools.

These are serious charges, but they've been thoroughly documented in a revealing new book by J. Michael Waller Big Intel - How The CIA and the FBI went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains. He knows the terrain well. As the Senior Analyst at the Center for Security Policy he concentrates on propaganda, political warfare, psychological warfare, and subversion.

Brilliant, fully documented yet easy to read. Explains how Cultural Marxism has permeated the CIA and FBI, damaging our country's strongest defenders. Big Intel names names and pulls no punches. It also shows the moral rot within the intelligence community from top to bottom.

"What if you combined the dark, anti-human politics of the academic left with the unfettered power and impenetrable secrecy of the national security state? You'd have pretty much what we have now…Mike Waller explains how we got there." -Tucker Carlson

So there must be a lot going on with Hungary that we should understand. I see it as a microcosm for the political and economic conflict in the greater world.

So to dig into this, I'm back with Shea Bradley-Farrell, PhD, who is president of Counterpoint Institute for Policy, Research and Education and is an expert in foreign policy, national security, and international development, and has also spent a great deal of time thinking about, studying, and traveling to Hungary.

Why is Hungary such a target of the left yet so appreciated by the right?

Listen in and Find Out:

To explore how we can go about finding what's true and what is not, Jim Agresti, the founder of Just Facts, returns to help clarify our thinking.

Just Facts is an institute dedicated to publishing facts about public policies and teaching research skills using exacting Standards of Credibility to determine what constitutes a fact and what does not. The vision of Just Facts is to equip people with facts "to make truly informed decisions. This means facts that accurately and fully convey reality—not pseudo-facts, half-truths, or talking points."

"Do you have the information you need to make quality decisions in your life and in the voting booth? You can rarely get the full picture of what something is about from an 800-word news article or commentary. You have to dig much deeper," explains Jim.

In this episode we talk about Just Facts exacting Standards of Credibility that is uses to produce research that is accurate and truly informative. Here's a summary:

• Comprehensiveness: It's a simple thing to distort reality by selecting only facts that align with partisan views while ignoring others. Half the truth can amount to a total lie.

• Primary Sources means identifying credible primary sources instead of secondary ones that often reflect an "interpretation" of the facts instead of the actual facts.

• Rigorous Documentation means documenting facts far more thoroughly than academic standards require, footnoting every fact with creditable sources, and citing quotations or data exactly. Harvard's Claudine Gay should have consulted with Jim.

• Raw Data presents data in its rawest comprehensible form to safeguard against data corrupted by errors, rhetorical mischaracterizations, or statistical manipulation.

• Verification uses different sources, methodologies, and calculations to double-check verifiable facts. If they'd done this, NASA wouldn't have lost a Mars Climate Orbiter because they mixed up metric and English units when coding the mission software.

• Clarity means using language that is precise and unambiguous in order to minimize the potential for misinterpretation.

• Balance: In this age of raging partisanship, almost no one does comprehensive accuracy or tries to balance views. Instead, sound bites are laced with rhetoric and misinformation, and opposing views given short shrift.

Of course, not everyone is interested in a disinterested discussion rooted in a dispassionate comparison of facts.

Vladimir Lenin - and most all on the Left who have followed him - said that "moral and factual considerations are irrelevant when it comes to how to sway the public most effectively. Our morality is entirely subordinated to our interest of advancing communism."

So the question we have to ask is: even if we know what's factual and true does it matter in today's world of raw power politics?

Listen in to decide for yourself.

It's a wild, even dangerous sounding term and almost no one knows what it means. So in this episode, Jeffrey Tucker and I dig into what Javier Milei and the philosophy of anarcho capitalism are all about.

Jeffrey, a brilliant and prolific author and founder of the Brownstone Institute was a protege of Murray Rothbard, the economist who developed the ideas and coined the term.

Javier Milei campaigned by bluntly declaring the failures of socialism, communism, fascism, central planning, and political despotism over society. His push for free-market reforms was backed up by his 20 years as a university professor of economics, with two master's degrees in economics and author of more than 50 academic papers and myriad books on the matter.

He celebrates the virtues and beauties of freedom itself, how business needs to be free of regulations, the critical interrelationship between private property and freedom and the enforcement of property rights at all levels of society.

He believes that society doesn't require an entrenched entity of legalized compulsion and coercion called the State in order to provide these things. An astonishing and bold claim.

Yet he won convincingly with almost 56% of the vote and his victory has sent shock waves through the political establishment, not only in Argentina, but throughout Latin America.

Milei now faces the daunting task of taming out of control inflation (Argentina's year-on-year inflation rate hit a staggering 142 percent during election week), a bloated self dealing administrative state, a corrupted court system and an entrenched elite opposition that's determined to preserve its power and prerogatives.

"How does one man take all this on?"asks Jeffrey. "We don't really know the answer to this question. No leader of a Western democratic developed nation has ever attempted a full-scale routing of a corrupted establishment on this level."

Milei's wasting no time. Forty-eight hours after taking office on December 10th he unveiled measures to cut public spending by 3% of GDP. He devalued the peso, pledged to slash subsidies, and eliminated nine of 18 government ministries. One week later he decreed that state-owned companies would be privatized, price controls would be eliminated, and labour laws reformed.

Of course we're now seeing headlines like this one in The Economist: The fightback against Javier Milei's radical reforms has begun. Argentina's powerful trade unions are preparing to strike on January 24th

Our hope is that Mr. Milei is just the beginning of a movement that could spread throughout the world. People are fed up and are ready for a radical new agenda to stop the relentless march of the forces of tyranny in Western nations.

NACs would be empowered to manage every type of property: federal, state, and private land, including conservation easements to maximize their so-called "ecological value."

Critically, what they are not allowed to do is anything considered "unsustainable" including: mining, agriculture that uses traditional fertilizers and machinery, managing timberlands, grazing, hunting, and most every type of recreational activity.

Instead of maximizing traditional economic value, NACs would put this land off limits from any productive purpose involving oil, gas, coal, yellowcake production, lithium mining and processing, steelmaking and anything else essential to national defense that produces CO2, which is their definition of sustainability.

In other words, everything that makes land valuable to ordinary human beings and to America's national security.

The goal is to create not only a new kind of company, but also a new asset class that could attract billion of investment dollars, including from global sovereign wealth funds from, say China, Russia, or other nations. (What better way for a foreign adversary to cripple the United States than through locking up America's natural resources without a fight?)

The greed factor is also front and center in this proposal. By some estimates, trading markets in "natural assets" could reach $100 to $150 trillion with market makers like Black Rock, Goldman Sachs, and big green energy utilities like NextEra, in the thick of the action.

If these numbers seem fantastic, consider this new math.

Today the value of our existing real economic land assets is estimated to be about $1.5 quadrillion dollars globally. Proponents of these new Natural Assets claim the value of "ecosystem services" to be $5 quadrillion dollars.

The problem with this estimate is that you can't get there using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles which measures basic cash flows to describe value and net present value. Instead, it is based on a new accounting system called SEEA EA, invented out of whole cloth by the United Nations, which claim to be able put a monetary value on the ability of NACs to block others from putting land to productive uses.

There are massive problems with this accounting system.

There are massive problems with this whole Scheme.

The SEC and the New York Stock Exchange must know this. To avoid scrutiny and opposition, they have put it on an unprecedented fast track for approval. To read the filings, it looks intentionally confusing, and intentionally made to make it difficult to weigh in on. The Intrinsic Exchange Group is partly owned by the New York Stock Exchange and is backed by the Rockefeller Foundation.

But one thing is clear: it's their desire to permanently embed the mechanism and monetary values for the disuse of federal lands, easement properties and ultimately private properties in our federal securities laws.

Joining me to unpack this proposal and its underlying agenda, is Margaret Byfield, the Executive Director of American Stewards of Liberty, a non-profit organization working to protect private property rights and the liberties they secure.

It's going to be very important to take direct action, make comments, reach out to your lawmakers and try to stop NACs from becoming a reality.

Lots of strong views in this episode as Brandon Weichert again joins The Bill Walton Show to discuss geopolitics and national security. It's filled with some dire warnings, as well as gallows humor. At one point during the conversation we wondered whether we'd need to put a warning label on the episode:

"Beware gloomy scenarios. This is dire, children."

Just some of conversation:

• The Houthi in Yemen have been lobbing every sort of drone and missile at shipping in the Red Sea. They're also attacking US bases. And of course, we know they're backed by Iran, and we haven't responded, leading us towards a potential 21stCentury Suez Canal crisis.

• Biden, like his former boss, Obama, very badly wants to have an appeasement or accommodation to make a deal with Iran. There are deep and dark reasons for this that Brandon reveals in detail.

• If we don't respond, it's likely the Israelis will, leading to a full scale conflagration in the region, drawing in dozens of participants, each with multiple and conflicting interests.

• From the beginning, the odds of Ukraine defeating Russia were vanishingly small, and it now looks like if they haven't already lost the war, they certainly are not going to win. Congress is likely to pull the plug on more money, further sealing their fate. How does that play out?

• Brandon's new book titled "A Disaster of Our Own Making" is about US diplomatic blunders. The Ukraine/Russia conflict was never a morality tale. It's about interests. When will Zelensky depart the stage? Is he a tragic figure?

• Brandon's Amazon author page is here.

• Why chaos is a ladder for China's interests.

• Homeland Secretary Mayorkas tells us border crossing "immigrants are fleeing climate change"

• The United States Space Force is now headed by a man who dresses as a woman.

• Our genius strategists ( Joe Biden, Jake Sullivan, Victoria Nuland and Tony Blinken) are thinking about seizing Russian dollar assets to the tune of almost $300 billion, jeopardizing the dollar's reserve currency status.

There's much more in this lively conversation, yet we do manage to end on a positive note.

"The problems we face are massive--and growing--and while a new president will not solve all our ills, many of these foreign policy crises will be resolved if we get the right POTUS in November."

Would love to get your thoughts about this episode.

Jennifer was a seven-time member of the U.S. Women's National Gymnastics Team and the 1986 U.S. Women's All-Around National Champion. Her transition from the world of sports to the corporate arena saw her rise to a pivotal leadership role at Levi Strauss, contributing significantly to its resurgence. Along the way, she produced a documentary "Athlete A" and wrote a book "Chalked up" exposing the abuse of children and young women gymnasts that spurred radical change in the sport.

Sey was ostracized in deep blue San Francisco for publicly opposing the closures of schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. She felt compelled to speak out for the children whose development and education were detrimentally affected by the isolation of virtual school.

Levi Strauss top management and the board told her to shut up or leave.

So she left.

"I think what people failed to predict, which I saw from the beginning, societally, we sent children the message that their education was not a priority, that they were not a priority, and in fact, if they missed things like having friends and an everyday life and key milestones, like graduations and football games, they were selfish, horrible people. Imagine what that does to a child's psyche. So, now, the depression, the anxiety persists, not surprisingly, and we're seeing record high levels of absenteeism," Sey said.

She is now determined to make these effects clear to the American public with a documentary film titled Generation COVID. The documentary will highlight the stories of ten different families and the struggles of their children in the post-pandemic education environment.

The damage to be wreaked upon children by school closures was abundantly clear to many of us at the time.

"But the mainstream outlets like the New York Times vilified any dissenters," reminds Jennifer. "Even renowned doctors, people like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford, Martin Kulldorff from Harvard, Sunetra Gupta from Oxford. These are not fringe scientists or fringe epidemiologists, but they were shunned and delegitimized by the mainstream press."

Yet seemingly forgetting the principal role it played in keeping the lockdowns in place, we now read this from the New York Times:

"The evidence is now in, and it is startling," it exclaims. "The school closures that took 50 million children out of classrooms at the start of the pandemic may prove to be the most damaging disruption in the history of American education."

There's a lot to be answered for here, starting with the amnesiac NYT.

This episode is more than just a conversation; it is a call to arms.

Why? And why aren't we hearing about it?

It is possible that Co2 is not a pollutant?

Rather, that it's a miracle, and not a curse?

In this episode of The Bill Walton Show Dr. William Happer, Co-Founder and Chair of the CO2 Coalition and Gregory Wrightstone, its Executive Director explain why they believe this to be true.

The CO2 Coalition, an independent, non-profit organization, aims to provide scientific facts and data to counter the prevailing narrative on climate change and promote a more balanced understanding of the role of CO2 in the environment. Available scientific facts have persuaded Coalition members that additional CO2 will be a net benefit.

• First and foremost, CO2 is plant food. Green plants grow faster with more CO2. CO2 increase is enhancing corn production… a lot.

• The 140-million-year trend is that the CO2 level is dangerously decreasing.

• Observations show no significant change in extreme weather, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, or droughts.

• Rising sea levels and melting glaciers confirm modern warming predated increases of CO2.

• We are living in one of the coldest periods ever. For most of Earth's history, it was about 10°C (18°F) warmer than today.

• Temperatures changed dramatically during the past 10,000 years. It wasn't us. An "ideal" temperature is not that of 150 years ago.

• IPCC models have overstated warming up to three times too much.

• For human advancement, warmer is better than colder.

"The true horror will be when the next cold period comes. Because we look back over the last 5,000 years of human history, the warm periods have been hugely beneficial to humanity and the cold periods have been horrific." Greg Wrightstone.

Dr. Happer is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Physics at Princeton University, has published over 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers and served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director of Emerging Technologies on the National Security Council.

Mr. Wrightstone, a geologist, is the bestselling author of Inconvenient Facts and has published more than 200 papers, publications and commentaries concerning climate change and energy.

Listen in to learn some of the surprising truths about CO2 that you won't hear from the self-interested parties pushing "solutions" to a declared climate change crisis.

Stephen Bryen's been 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.

As both the wars for Ukraine and Gaza Strip have the potential to widen, even while Taiwan looms, Bryen warns about the United States' diminishing influence in global affairs that have led to a weakened strategic position, particularly in relation to China, Iran and even Russia.

Some excerpts:

• "We're not controlling events. Events are controlling us. And we're doing some things which are reckless."

• "Yes, we're a nuclear power. We have a strong air force, a less strong army and an even less strong Navy, except for submarines, but we're being challenged by Russia. We're being challenged by China. We're being challenged by countries like Iran, and we're letting them get away with it.

• "We're emptying our arsenal to support Ukraine, leaving NATO exposed, very exposed, if the Russians really chose to be troublesome in Europe"

• "One of the amazing truths about the US and its NATO allies supplying millions of tons of ammunition and hardware to Ukraine is that the allies paid almost no attention to contingencies and freely raided stockpiles that were put there for US and NATO national security defense needs."

• We're still sending billions of dollars to Iran, serving interests that are not our own. "Our national interest is not to allow Iran to conquer nearby countries. And to destabilize the Middle East because it's not in our interest, it's not in Europe's interest, it's not in the world's interest."

• "Iran's equation is different than ours. They think in terms of how they can destroy Israel, how they can take over that whole crescent of territory … Iraq, Lebanon, Syria."

• "In Asia, we're weak. There's no doubt about that. The Chinese have been building up and building up, and we have failed to set up any kind of defensive scheme or alliance that works to put pressure back on China. Taiwan has been simply left out of the equation. The only real hope against the China threat is that internally, it can't compete. China's biggest roadblock to global domination might just be itself."

• "It's got troubles, economic problems, political problems, internal clashes of interests. So maybe it'll implode, but if it doesn't, we're in for a hard time."

Tough words from a savvy and clear-eyed observer of global conflicts.

These are not what you're hearing from the national security state complex. All the more reason to listen in.

Polls show that most smart people tend to believe that the state of the world is getting worse. In the United States, almost 3/4 of Americans believe the world is getting worse and only 6% think it's getting better.

But according to Marian Tupy, our guest on this episode, "this dark view of the prospects for humanity, and the natural world is, in large part, badly mistaken."

As a senior fellow at the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, coauthor of the Simon Abundance Index and editor of the website HumanProgress.org, he has produced compelling research on this topic.

Abundant evidence from individual scholars, academic institutions, and international organizations shows dramatic improvements in human well-being throughout much of the world. In recent decades, these improvements have been especially striking in developing countries where there's been a significant decline in extreme poverty and improvements in child mortality rates.

For thousands of years, the average income around the world was about $2 per person per day. Today, globally, it's $35. So the average inhabitant of the world adjusted for inflation is 18 times better off than he or she was 200 years ago.

"These days, young people especially are freaked out about the environment. They think everything is bad," observes Marian. "That is not true. The United States and the European Union have added 35% more new forests in recent decades. China, 15% more forests."

Unfortunately, there is often a wide gap between the reality of human experience, which is characterized by incremental improvements, and public perception, which tends to be quite negative about the current state of the world and skeptical about humanity's future prospects.

"Journalism is about things that happen, not things that don't happen," explains Marian. "When a bunch of crazy fanatics fly an airplane into a building in New York, it ends up on all the front pages. But what is never covered is human progress, the things that are happening in the background every year, like how by quarter of a percent or half a percent, absolute poverty is declining and growth is increasing."

Tupy emphasizes the importance of economic and political freedom in driving these positive changes, and that we do need to worry that these freedoms are under attack throughout the world.

To innovate, people must be allowed to think, speak, publish, associate, and disagree. They must be allowed to save, invest, trade, and profit. In a word, they must be free.

Tupy brings abundant historical and real world evidence to support this assertion. We ignore these basics at our peril.

The United States and the Biden Administration needs to confront the reality of what has been called China's "brute force economics" and abandon the possibility that competing on a level playing field with China's is possible.

We have to face up to the fact that we are not simply in an economic competition with China. We're in a war.

Joining the Bill Walton Show to explore this troubling reality is our returning guest: Robert D. Atkinson. Rob is the founder and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, one of the world's top think tanks for science and technology policy.

China's tactics are not merely an assortment of cutthroat moves made by individual actors. Rather, they are features of Beijing's long-term strategy and are backed up by the full force of the country's party-state system, creating a challenge that Washington cannot afford to ignore.

Beijing is intent on employing predatory and mercantilist practices to acquire leadership positions in virtually every emerging and advanced industry that matters.

It's doing this through market access restrictions, massive industrial subsidies that fuel overcapacity, technology transfer requirements for market access, preferential financing and procurement contracts for domestic firms, intellectual property theft, cyber- and human-enabled espionage, coercion and bullying, forced labor and other poor labor conditions, and other market-distorting policies.

They've already established dominance in industries including steel, solar panels, drones, shipbuilding, pharmaceutical ingredients, high-speed rail, and telecommunications equipment; and are making rapid progress in artificial intelligence (AI), aerospace, semiconductors, biotechnology, networking technologies, and electric vehicles and batteries, cloud computing, flat panel displays, advanced materials, autonomous systems, and LiDAR technology.

Fortunately, as Rob explains, there are some straightforward and implementable actions the United States can take to push back against China's agenda.

If you've been wondering about what the economic battle with China is all about, this conversation is a great place to understand its essentials.

Not relying on identity politics, she earned intense national coverage because of her unwavering support for Second Amendment rights and her strong commitment to education opportunity for all students.

A devout Christian, Winsome believes in the promise of the American Dream. Her father was approved to immigrate to the U.S.A. and left Jamaica, arriving in America on August 11, 1963, with only $1.75 in his pocket. Winsome joined him when she was just six years old, and ever since has been on a mission of service with dozens of community groups ranging from leading a men's prison ministry and serving as director of a women's homeless shelter for the Salvation Army to serving as a hard-charging vice president of the Virginia State Board of Education.

Her unyielding belief in the fundamental righteousness of America stands in stark opposition to the increasingly pervasive ideologies that are dividing the country.

Instead, Winsome encourages Americans to never stop fighting for their country and shows us how to chart a new path forward.

She concludes her recent memoir, How Sweet It Is, with this quote from John L. Mason who once said,

"You're born an original. Don't die a copy."

Definitely an original, Winsome has never ceased enthusiastically bucking conventions, defying expectations, and charging straight toward challenges.

Join in this episode for a revealing and inspiring conversation with Winsome Earle-Sears. You will be hearing from her in the years to come.

China is not a typical foreign adversary on another shore, gathering behind its army, aggressive, thinking about land warfare, even nuclear warfare. This is an enemy that's permeated the United States, it's infiltrated into our culture and China's strategy of "elite capture" is working. A lot of the leadership class in America seems to be in the pocket of the Chinese.

Deng Xiaoping, probably the greatest strategist of the 20th century, determined that China was not going to be vulnerable the way the Soviets were and that he was going to enter the world's economic and governance ecosystems with prodigious assistance from the West. He was going to make partners with Wall Street, the Chamber of Commerce and of the Democrat, and in time the Republican, parties and the fear today is that he has succeeded.

Joining The Bill Walton Show in this episode to discuss the China Threat are:

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is the founder and executive chairman of the Center for Security Policy. He's coauthor of The Indictment: Prosecuting the Chinese Communist Party, vice chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger: China and the host of Securing America with Frank Gaffney on the Real America's Voice Network, and

Bradley A. Thayer is Director of China Policy at the Center for Security Policy and the coauthor of Understanding the China Threat and How China Sees the World: Han-Centrism and the Balance of Power in International Politics.

Together Frank and Brad have a profound and clear eyed assessment of China's history, its strengths and weaknesses, and its intentions on the world stage today.

Whether the United States can maintain its position as the preeminent force for free and open societies in the face of the China Threat is the defining element of international politics in the 21st-century.

After listening to this episode, you will understand China in an entirely new way.

The progressive Left has come to dominate our institutions and our culture and they've been remarkably successful in using the art of narrative storytelling to promote their agenda.

Conservatives complain that they are losing the culture wars And they are. But that won't change until they actually begin producing cultural content that embodies their values and commit real money to the business of storytelling.

You can't win unless you are in the Game.

Best known for her Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a memoir about her parenting journey using strict Confucianist child rearing techniques, she is a highly accomplished professor at Yale Law School, and has been named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people, The Atlantic's "Brave Thinkers" and Foreign Policy's "Global Thinkers."

The Golden Gate is compelling historical thriller that paints a portrait of a California from another era beset by the crosswinds of a world at war and an American society about to undergo massive changes in how race and class define the essence of power, sex, and justice. It's also filled with fascinating details, like groundbreaking forensic advances, the story of the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge and the presence of China's Madame Chiang Kai-shek in Berkeley in the 1940's

Amy brings to this book - and our conversation - her depth of understanding about class structures, culture and ethnic divisions seen in her non-fiction writings.

Her first book, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, explored the ethnic conflict caused in many societies by "market dominant minorities."

In her Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance - and Why They Fall examined seven major empires and the theory that their success depended on their tolerance of minorities.

Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, examined how group loyalty often outweighs any other ideological considerations and argues that the failure to recognize the place of group loyalty has played a major role in the failure of US foreign policy.

The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America was called by the Financial Times' Lucy Kellaway, "the best universal theory of success I've seen."

This is a wide ranging and fun conversation. Highly enjoyable. Listen in.

"There is almost no such thing as heart disease: it's just natural aging and you can manage it," declares Josh. "We now look at aging not just as a bag of diseases, but as a process."

While health issues are not normally among our Show topics, unlike our polarized politics, our personal health is something we can actually do something about.

The biology of aging is no longer mysterious. If we start paying attention when we are young, heart and blood vessel health is knowable, measurable, and manageable.

In You Can Prevent a Stroke, Dr. Joshua Yamamoto and Dr. Kristin Thomas help us understand what we can do, and what we can ask of our doctors, to manage the effects of aging on our circulation so that we do not have a stroke.

Josh Yamamoto is one of America's leading cardiologists with a degree in physics from Princeton University and who trained at Dartmouth Medical School, The Johns Hopkins Hospital, National Naval Medical Center and Georgetown University. He was the cardiology consultant to the US Congress and Director of Cardiac Imaging and served in Kuwait as the theater cardiologist for the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Old school" medicine said that if something isn't broken, don't fix it. A great emphasis was placed on symptoms. What are your complaints? If you don't have a complaint, then all must be well. Not necessarily.

To keep your brain (and yourself as a whole) healthy, you need to know the answers to the questions:

1. What is the actual health of my heart and circulation?

2. What can I do, or what can I do differently, to keep my circulation working as safely and efficiently as possible?

Fundamentally, these are the only questions you need to ask. The questions are simple, but the answers are different for every one of us.

"The leading cause of death is supposedly heart disease. And I always roll my eye at that notion because heart disease isn't simply one thing. It's like if you take your car to the mechanic, and he says, "Oh, I know what's wrong. You have engine trouble." Really? How did that help? So, you have to understand what are all the processes affecting the heart."

"A famous bioethicist once said that there is no meaningful life after the age of 75, so why should anyone go to the doctor after that point?"

"In my practice, I can spend an entire day and see no patient younger than 90. And they are active and healthy, and enjoying life. I have 96-year-olds still wearing suits to the office. I have a 106-year-old complaining that no one will dance with her. I have an 89-year-old who wanted a stress test to make sure he could keep up with his new girlfriend (who in fact is older than he). I prescribe plenty of Viagra."

This is just a sampling of Josh's original thinking, deep insights and humor. Listen in and learn how to anticipate, navigate and manage the aging process.

This year Burning Man was much in the news because of the sensationalized coverage about the rain that fell on it. But was it as bad as the press made it sound?

In this episode of Backstage with Bill Walton, we get a first hand account from someone who was there: our producer/director Kenny Reff. An experienced journalist - Kenny was one of CNN's first White House producers - he's been a Burner since 2012. For this show he's jumped to the other side of the camera with entertaining stories and a captivating description what goes on there.

"To read the recent press accounts about Burning Man and the rain there this year," Kenny explains, "you'd think it was an unmitigated disaster. For those who were there it wasn't. Far from it. And so this was fascinating for me because it's rare to be at an event and know really what happened and then see the reporting on it."

It seems like there's a personality type that goes to Burning Man that wants to be adventurous, wants to be self-reliant and is looking for experiences. As its founder Larry Harvey put it "All real communities grow out of a shared confrontation with survival."

Many of the people there - mostly young, the median age is 37- thought there was something special about sharing a weather event and living to tell the tale. And a lot else, shares Kenny:

"People change there. One of the reasons people go back and keep on going back is that it's a totally different environment. For one week, you're in this community that has a different set of rules, a different set of ethos. People are fun. They get into deep conversations. They're fun loving. And it's so different from what burners call the default world."

Of course, it's also an extravagant week-long party for those with the stamina to take it all in. Kenny's one of them. This episode is best watched rather than listened to since Kenny incorporated many pictures and video from Burning Man.

www.thebillwaltonshow.com

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:

• Is the Earth warming in any meaningful way?

• If the Earth is warming, are we causing it?

• If Earth is warming, and we're causing it, is that bad?

• 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.

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

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:

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Economists and statisticians disguise the fact that that GNP is wildly overstated for government services and wildly understated for private sector business contributions.

• 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.

• 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."

• The prevailing notion that there are magical people in a government office that can protect us from bad things is just wrong.

• The truth is that material resources are essentially infinite. They are not scarce. Humans keep inventing new materials from what was previously thought useless.

• 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.

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.

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:

• the White House

• the FBI

• the Department of Justice

• the Surgeon General

• the CDC

• 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.

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.

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:

• Jay Powell and the Federal Reserve Board

• The Biden Administration's massive spending and its obsessive focus on diversity equity & inclusion and its climate change agenda.

• The Women's Bill of Rights and IWV's work with a more traditionally leftist feminist group called the Women's Liberation Front.

• Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) and the roots of "trans theory" in cultural Marxism.

• 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

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

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 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.

Today we find ourselves in a position where our most important trading partner - China - has essentially revealed itself to be our mortal enemy.

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.

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.

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."

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

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

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

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 recent humiliation at the hands of the Chinese.

Read More: https://billwalton.substack.com/

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.

"China's President Xi Jinping has identified biotechnology as one of the key fourth industrial revolution industries that China must dominate in order to achieve his China Vision 2049," warns Brandon.

Amidst this pursuit, China has been utilizing CRISPR-Cas9, the gene editing tool originally developed in America. "China's using CRISPR-Cas9, the gene editing tool that we in America developed and we shared with China, which allows scientists to go in, and at the genetic level, splice human genes and either take out unwanted or undesirable aspects of that individual's genome or input," reveals Weichert.

Read more at https://billwalton.substack.com

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.

Mark Mills probably knows more about this than anyone. He's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, focusing on science, technology, and energy issues. He's also faculty fellow at the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern, where his focus is on future manufacturing technologies and a strategic partner in an energy software venture fund.

This episode defies a brief description. Mark provides tour de force explanations that are well worth an hour of your time to understand. With them you will be equipped to properly understand and debate energy realities. If we are to push back against the dystopian future that a fully-realized climate change agenda guarantees, we need to be armed with informed arguments.

Just a few of the highlights:

• "All energy systems used to deliver useful power to society require building machines, every energy system. So, what you really want to know is how much material does it take to build the machines to make windmills and solar panels. For wind turbines, the amount of concrete glass, polymers, plastics, and steel you need per unit of energy goes up tenfold per unit of energy produced compared to a gas turbine"

• "You'll have to increase the total supply of metals and minerals, copper, nickel, lithium, aluminum, molybdenum, neodymium, etc. Not by a little but by a lot, tenfold. We will need hundreds of new mines, not a few, hundreds of new mines."

• "By one estimate, nearly 400 new giant mines … but at what price …environmentalists are broadly sweeping under the rug the consequences, the environmental, economic and human consequences"

• "Climate Change advocates have fundamentally thrown under the bus all of the environmental issues they used to care about. Everything. Land use, use of toxic chemicals, visual pollution, habitat destruction, species protection …because the quantity of materials you need to produce the same unit of energy by moving to wind and solar increases by at least 1,000%."

• "If you multiply the number of mines we need for solar, for wind and also for batteries … it's hundreds and hundreds of mines … hundreds of thousands of square miles. We're going to be killing habitat and species all over the planet."

• "The quantity of plastic in one small wind farm is greater than all the plastic used to make all the world's plastic straws."

• "We import roughly 80 to 90% of the manufactured solar modules we use to make solar panels in America … from China."

• "Wind turbines being built today are about the size of a Washington Monument, two to three megawatts each. So a field of 50 covering 100 square miles could power a small town of say 20,000 to 50,000 people … A single gas turbine whose gas pipe is bare and you can't see, the size of a tractor trailer, can provide the same amount of electricity."

Congress has appropriated trillions of dollars to what should now be properly called the Climate Change Industrial Complex which is growing richer by the day. "When you say, "Oh, we need to replace all hydrocarbons with wind, solar, and batteries," you're not making a small subsidy distortion. You're now saying, "I have to subsidize by definition, all American energy production.""

• "The Inflation Reduction Act (aka the Green New Deal) included provisions intended to override local communities and state's objections to transmission lines. The climate agenda would not only change our energy systems, but also seek to make it yet another federal power."

• "A Dutch government sponsored study concluded that Netherlands green ambitions alonewould consume a major share of all the world's minerals."

• "The CO2 emitted to build the electric cars batteries and mine the materials will offset most, if not all, of the CO2 then not emitted by not burning gasoline in the first place. So you get nothing in CO2 terms or very, very little, for the price of exporting of jobs, geopolitical dependencies, and environmental impacts somewhere on the planet for no benefit."

• "What they're essentially saying is that there is no possibility, and I agree with them, on cutting the planet's carbon dioxide emissions, absent, huge degrowth, which is a euphemism for massive global recession … they're overtly engineering a society in which you will be happy without economic growth."

Meanwhile, people are getting rich from the green agenda, and if you consider the vast worldwide habitat and species destruction that will be caused by substituting wind and solar for hydrocarbon energy … and all the other social and economic costs … the climate change agenda should be called villainous, not virtuous.

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.

Joining me to explain how is Michael Pack, documentary filmmaker and the former CEO of the US Agency for Global Media. Michael's produced over 15 award-winning films for public television, and most recently Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words.

Conservatives who have basically surrendered the culture wars often claim, "We can't fight back because the left is naturally more artistic and given to storytelling."

Michael and I do not believe that's true and that the culture wars are winnable, but only if we take them seriously.

This episode provides a start, exploring the craft of making - and the business of financing - filmed storytelling and documentaries. We cover film schools, production facilities, cinematography, sound, editing, the foundations financing progressive filmmakers and much more.

We also talk about the pure fun of filmmaking and storytelling. It's a lot more fun than politics.

Based on my experience, the actors are all pretty good-looking, the creatives are fun to work with and it's a joy to be on a movie set. Getting into movies is not like taking your castor oil.

From the first cave paintings, to the Bible, to Shakespeare, to today, stories are how people learn to understand the world, and each story is a model for how the world works.

"People crave epic stories, meaningful life pursuits, and courageous figures who appear to stand for something," relates Michael. "Good stories are stories of heroic individuals, usually not without flaws, dealing with complex things and making choices."

"Contrary to conventional wisdom, I am much more optimistic about the culture, especially the story-telling media, than about politics and government."

Politics is actually a harder game to win. The administrative state has really dug in and civil servants have iron-clad protections.

"We have simply seeded that turf to the Left," says Michael. "We have simply let them have it. It's not a culture war when only one side has an army in the field and the other side just writes essays about how they don't like that army. "

We have to be making culture, not just complaining about it, and it is not that hard to do and we can do it.

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 intention to replace the United States as the preeminent power not only in Asia but around the globe.

My guest on this episode, Frank J. Gaffney has done just that in his recent book, an across the board plan that addresses the many fronts to be fought on against China's "unrestricted warfare".

The book represents the fruits of a comprehensive effort to develop and champion a vigorous response to the China challenge. It draws upon a comprehensive program of some seventy webinars conducted by the Committee on the Present Danger: China addressing:

1) the CCP's decades-long self-described "Unrestricted Warfare" against America; and 2) the role America's elites have played in helping the Chinese Communists win.

"It identifies nine "criminal charges" that can be brought and prosecuted, at least in the court of public opinion, against the Chinese Communist Party and its American enablers."

"The Indictment also enumerates twenty specific actions that are intended to inspire and equip congressional investigators, patriotic executive branch officials, journalists, and the public at large to review these charges and recommended actions bring to justice and take down the Chinese Communist Party for its horrific criminal conduct—past, present, and that which is in the works—against its own people and countless others, including ours."

Frank J. Gaffney is the founder and executive chairman of the Center for Security Policy, a non-partisan organization that champions "peace through strength." He is the vice chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger: China and the host of Securing America with Frank Gaffney, a daily television program on the Real America's Voice Network.

Listen in for some of highlights from Frank's book and to learn what's at stake in what must now be our own "unrestricted war" with China.

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 and the founder of the Center for Security Policy.

"CISA is a microcosm of a federal government censorship regime, and by proxy through social media platforms, that runs from merely shadow banning or flagging tweets and Facebook messages, all the way up to de-platforming and debunking people and even more alarming, actually throwing dissenters in jail for their views," explains Ben.

"It's rooted in an ideology which says that speech that the authorities don't like constitutes a "threat" to our democracy that is then used as a justification to engage in a slew of acts that I think most Americans would say violate their most essential civil liberties."

Some of what we talk about in this episode:

• The mission creep within our national security agencies which are increasingly turning from targeting foreign jihadists and instead to "domestic wrong thinkers" as America's preeminent threat.

• How Obama's DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson expanded its mandate to protect America's infrastructure to include "election infrastructure" as critical infrastructure which then became part of CISA's charge when it was established in 2018.

• Current CISA director Jen Easterly has now declared that the American mind is a "cognitive infrastructure"which means they're now targeting not only what we say but what we think. "CISA's tasks are to defend our most critical infrastructures and our most critical infrastructure is cognitive infrastructure … the American mind," she asserts.

• CISA's convening and coordinating meetings between national security and law enforcement agencies, and technology companies including Facebook, Meta, Google, Twitter, Reddit, Microsoft, Verizon, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Wikimedia Foundation, etc

• CISA's "Switchboarding" reports of purported misinformation and disinformation from state and local authorities and then forwarding reports of offending content to social media platforms for censorship.

• How the rosters of the censorship "trust and safety integrity" teams at Meta, Twitter and others are filled with former CIA officials, FBI officials, DOD officials, etc

• DHS targeted list of "inaccurate information" includes "the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine."

• CISA's previous Director Christopher Krebs claimed the 2020 election was the most above board cleanest election, most secure election in American history. But at the same time worked to censor "wrong think" about mail-in balloting and changes to election rules and policies, sometimes while they were still being debated.

The CISA agenda is aimed at not only what people say, but what they will refrain from saying in public, or in private.

"How much speech will never be out there for people to grapple with and consider because no one wants to go through the ordeal of potentially being broken by expressing wrong things," worries Ben. "The entire basis of our system rests on free inquiry, free speech, free thought, freedom to listen. Otherwise, you have tyranny."

This is a heart-of-the-matter issue for America and there's a lot packed into this episode about our alarming "security state." Definitely worth your time to listen and learn.

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 Beth Martin, founder of the Tea Party Patriots, who also has an extensive information technology background.

"96% of Alphabet's employee's political donations go to Democrats and its homogeneous culture leans extremely left and the two founders are utopians," explains Dr. Epstein. "In their mind, they know what's best for the world. These are extremely arrogant people who think they have the power of gods."

An eight‑minute video leaked from Google called "The Selfish Ledger," starkly reveals Google's aspirations to re‑engineer humanity according to its utopian "company values."

Another leaked video after the 2016 election shows Google's co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and its CEO Sundar Pichai dismayed by Trump's win and essentially saying "never again." In it, they talk about Trump supporters as "extremists" and say the election outcome "conflicts with many of Google's core values."

Epstein estimates that Google shifted about 6 million votes to Joe Biden in the 2020 election by manipulating voters with things like biased algorithms, "get out the vote" messages and videos. (Over 70% of the videos that people watch every day on YouTube come from liberal sources suggested by its "up next" algorithm.)

Does anyone doubt that Google will be all-in on making sure the "correct" candidates win 2024 elections?

One source of its power is that Google knows with precision practically every voter's political preferences. They know who's going to vote, who's not going to vote, and how they're going to vote.

"If you've been using the internet for 20 years, Google has the equivalent of more than three million pages of information about you," according to Dr. Epstein. "They're doing surveillance at a massive level that J. Edgar Hoover couldn't even possibly have imagined. It's 24 hours a day, and it's over many, many, many different kinds of platforms that most people haven't even heard of."

Google has also partnered in the "Global Disinformation Index" and the release of the Twitter Files have shown how extensively the Executive Branch communicated and coordinated with technology companies for taking in moderation "requests" from the White House, the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, and even the CIA.

If Google is manipulating search results or YouTube suggestions it's impossible to trace because they are "ephemeral." They disappear once you click off the links provided, and can never be recovered.

However, there is hope, a potential counter-measure that Dr Epstein has developed to capture that ephemeral data by effectively "looking over the shoulders" of real users. He now has almost 8,000 registered voters in 50 states, who have given him permission to monitor and record their every Google interaction. Of course, challenging a $1 trillion tech colossus requires resources and it will take up to $50 million to fully build out his system. It's a big lift and we talk about what it will take to get it done. It's a critical project.

"With companies like Google, we're talking about control that's completely invisible to people," Epstein says. "We're talking about control by mainly one and to a lesser extent a couple of other private companies … the more I've learned about it over the years, the more concerned I've become."

We unpack a lot in this episode, including which email and browser you should be using to protect your privacy.

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 at the Pentagon where he was known as the Yoda of the arms trade, he's been following closely the details and the ins and outs of the war in Ukraine.

What was initially sold by the Biden Administration as humanitarian aid to Ukraine has had from the very start a deeper agenda: The White House wanted this war to bring about regime change in Russia.

"For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power," declares Joe Biden. And this: "Our objective is to exhaust and degrade Russian forces so they cannot fight anywhere else in the world," warned Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin last year.

So has their proxy war been a smart move? So far, hardly. It ranks right up there with their catastrophic exit from Afghanistan and the mess they've made in the Middle East. It's also driven Russia into the arms of our real geopolitical enemy China.

"If you want to break up Russia, it's a fool's errand, it won't work," says Stephen. "Russia's not going to break up. It's a big powerful country and a nuclear power. So why tempt the furies with that kind of nonsense? It doesn't make any sense. It's not in the United States' national interest. It's not in the Europeans interest, although you'd never know it from listening to them. Having a war in Europe in this day and age would be a horrible tragedy. It would destroy the West. So why would anyone risk that?"

Henry Kissinger says that conditions are right for negotiations on Ukraine by the end of the year.

"But negotiations won't start unless Washington wants them to start," says Stephen. "Or unless Zelensky and his crowd are gone and someone else takes over in Ukraine. But if things stay the way they are, there's not going to be any negotiations. Biden doesn't want them. He wants a victory, a total victory over Russia in Ukraine."

But if things stay the way they are there will be no victory. This will grind on and on, there'll be many more dead, more destruction, and let's not forget the risk of bringing nuclear weapons into play.

It's time for the US to use its power to bring the war in Ukraine to an end now. It's in our interest. It's in the world's interest.

This episode is a treasure trove of Stephen Bryen's nuanced and penetrating insights. I keep bringing Stephen back on for his wisdom and he never disappoints. Well worth your time to listen.

"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 Central Intelligence Agency where she focused on methods of Soviet propaganda and disinformation, and its state-controlled media.

Some excerpts from our conversation:

The underlying dynamic of totalitarianism is the same: a machinery of loneliness that threatens to turn people into social pariahs in order to extort compliance. History is filled with vivid examples - Cromwell's England, Robespierre's France, Lenin and Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, Mao's China - of the damage done by totalitarian regimes that impose the machinery fueled by the conformity impulse and terror of isolation.

"Isolation and how tyrants use it to control people, is really the greatest threat to freedom, no matter what level of tyranny it is. It can be a gaslighting partner, it could be a cult leader, it could be a world-class dictator. I finally concluded that there is a machinery at work—a machinery of loneliness. Tyrants operate that machinery—wittingly or not—in order to disarm those they wish to control."

When signals surfaced in America —such as anti-speech codes written into federal law in the 1990s allegedly to curb hate—we tended to shrug them off. It was too frightening to believe those speech codes could really lead to direct attacks on freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment.

Yet a new kind of authoritarianism has multiplied over the course of decades, usually with the claim that they were needed to ensure justice against racism or sexism. Multiculturalism took root, then morphed into identity politics and intersectionality.

When the canon of Western civilization came under direct attack in the 1980s, few expected it to be followed by direct attacks on free speech on college campuses. But it was, and with a vengeance.

"The weaponization of isolation and loneliness drives just about everything in human affairs. The threat of social isolation tends to determine what we say or don't say. Then it begins to regulate what we think and how we behave."

"Oppression is inevitable in one-party states that sustain themselves through constant propaganda and censorship and the subversion of any independent institution. They're driven to control the speech, thoughts, and, therefore, the associations of their presumed subjects, usually through some form of demonization."

So we need a line of action against this tyranny and can start by asking what is its essential weakness?

The short answer is … free speech.

"People say, "Oh, it's so daunting. What can I do?" Well, the thing to remember is that even one voice makes a huge difference, because they're always trying to shut down every single solitary voice."

"Our strength as human beings really comes from our connections in the private sphere of life. Just a single honest voice can make a big difference."

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 episode Chris Iacovella, "the amount of paper, the amount of costs that are being heaped on companies, not just in the financial services space, but in every sector of our economy, are far outweighing whatever good they are supposed to be doing."

Chris Iacovella is in a position to know. He is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Securities Association, and has deep expertise in the equity, fixed income, and derivatives markets, as well as growth capital and wealth management. Prior to becoming CEO of the ASA, he was the CEO of the Equity Dealers of America and Director of Global Government Affairs at Bloomberg LP.

"Gensler claims that he has to do this because investors are clamoring for this disclosure, but it's not investors that are clamoring for it. It's Wall Street asset managers, investment banks, and institutional investors who are pushing an ESG political agenda into the boardroom that they can't get through Congress."

This is just one of the many concerning issues we get into in this episode. Some others:

• The higher fees Wall Street charges for its ESG funds.

• Klaus Schwab (of the World Economic Forum) and his "stakeholder" capitalism and how Wall Street has adopted many of his views.

• Public company security regulations seeping into private businesses.

• A long segment about how the Chinese have used the US capital markets to access to American capital and allowing them to fund their military and economic rise with our money.

• Something obscurely called the Consolidated Audit Trail where the SEC has decided to add to its surveillance capabilities, the ability to collect all of the personal and financial information of every investor who has a share of stock in our capital markets.

"Can you imagine if the SEC entered into a memorandum of understanding with the IRS? Then the government would have a true and complete picture of not only your securities holdings, but also any businesses that you might own that are private, any real estate that you may own. It's would be complete picture of what your wealth is."

There's a lot to unpack in this episode, but I think you'll find it worth your time.

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 rather than a law enforcement agency. Case management has been centralized in its headquarters in Washington DC rather than as before in the field offices around the country. It did this to place so-called operational decisions in the hand of what they've called "politically sensitive" individuals at headquarters.

What this means in practice it that the political biases of FBI leadership, and some of its investigators, have come to influence the conduct and public perception of the agency's most consequential investigations.

Joining me to talk about the planned building, the FBI's history and what it's become today, is my frequent guest and astute observer of US intelligence agencies, Mike Waller.

J. Michael Waller, is a Senior Analyst for Strategy at the Center for Security Policy where he concentrates on propaganda, political warfare, psychological warfare, and subversion. Mike's author of a soon to be published book about the CIA and the FBI.

The FBI hasn't revealed a reason or strategy for its colossal new HQ but we do know this according to the GSA specs:

• "Riveted into its new project are woke regulations to ensure that the FBI center will comply with diversity, equity, LGBTQ+, and climate change political goals," explains Mike.

• The site, design, and structure of the new FBI headquarters must "advance racial equity and support for underserved communities through the Federal Government," as part of Joe Biden's Executive Order 13985 calling for "an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda."

But the problem with today's FBI runs deeper.

"After 9/11 the FBI has been stuck in this netherworld of being a law enforcement agency and an intelligence agency, and you can't combine those with the same people in the same organization or you get political police."

Is this what we want from our FBI?

There is a lot packed into this episode about a woke and politicized FBI.

Mike explains how we got here - from the 1920s to today - and it's a fascinating, and disturbing, story.

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 of human nature – than a library of conventional social science."

An engaging conversationalist, Joyce quickly deconstructs the notion that being male, or female is simply a matter of "sex assigned at birth."

Human history is a story of men and women genetically built to specialize in different behaviors necessary to ensure the survival of their children to adulthood.

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 some dials and cranking up unemployment or cranking down inflation or cranking up GDP, it's just not true."

In this episode we delve into this, and a lot of other news in the headlines about our money. Like whether the United States dollar is likely to lose its status as the world's reserve currency.

The United States enjoys an enormous gift which is also a curse: with the world's reserve currency, it can run massive federal budget and trade deficits as long as other countries want to hold dollars. That's not likely to change in the near future.

"The US economy is still about a quarter of the global economy. And then almost another quarter of the global economy is China. Well, who on Earth wants to hold Chinese currency when it's controlled by the Chinese Communist Party? And so you're really left with no place else to go."

Norbert is also one of true experts in the very real threat to our liberty that the Biden Administration (along with many other governments worldwide) is cooking up: a central bank digital currency.

"Our paper dollars today are technically liabilities of the Federal Reserve; but with a CBDC, your checking account is with the Fed, giving it potential control of every transaction."

"On Cato's website we have direct quotes from international government officials talking about how great it is going to be to control what everybody does with their money. So this is real. This is coming."

Given how complicated all this stuff is, Norbert and I try to keep the conversation from getting too dense. Listen in. These are important matters that do concern you and your money.

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 Pollock and Steve Dewey. Both are grizzled veterans of the banking and regulatory world, which, as Alex points out, has been hit by a major crisis every decade since the 1970s. Together we have many decades of experience in financial markets. Alex and I have been conversing with each other, and interrupting each other, for almost fifty years.

Alex is a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute and was Principal Deputy Director of the Office of Financial Research of the U.S. Treasury Department in 2019 and through 2021. He was also my second boss in the commercial banking world almost 45 years ago and was on my board at Allied Capital Corporation as we worked through the 2008 crisis and its aftermath.

Steve Dewey worked for several years in Asia during the Asian financial crisis and for the FDIC during and after the 2008 financial crisis where he was involved in the resolution of failed banks.

According to Alex, "We are still living in the aftermath of the long manipulation of interest rates and financial markets by the Federal Reserve and the club of central banks worldwide: the vast expansion of money and suppression of interest rates to an abnormally low level. Now we're seeing the results."

Meantime, rather than being the above-the-fray dispassionate wise actor, the Federal Reserve has become part of the problem: Just in the last six months, the Fed itself lost $44 billion which exceeds its capital of $42 billion. A big portion of its $8.7 trillion in assets are highly vulnerable to rising interest rates. Ironically, the Fed's interest rate risk is similar to SVB's.

So, what's going to happen next?

The Fed and the Treasury seem likely to take more control in the name of risk management. The banking system holds $17 trillion of deposits and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently declared that these would be de facto insured by the Treasury, the Fed and the FDIC.

But consider this: the FDIC's deposit insurance fund is $128 billion, which is - putting it mildly - a little short of $17 trillion. Also, if the Fed continues losing money on its mortgage-backed securities, it will be losing over $100 billion a year.

Republican Senator Everett Dirksen, the Minority leader during the 1960s Kennedy-Johnson years, once said "a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon we're talking real money." Now we're talking trillions. Has the banking system become to big to save?

Will the "solution" be a nationalized bank and a digital currency to prevent a collapse of the system? Or something else? How do the woke climate and equity agendas figure into this?

There's a lot to speculate about here. Join in our conversation for our take on the crisis.

As always, we try to make complicated things easier to understand and nothing right now seems more complicated than our money.

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 canaries in the coal mine, potentially the first of many regional bank balance sheets to blow up.

The root cause for this – and the Fed is almost entirely responsible - is the 14 years of free money policies and asset price inflation driven by the Fed. Since 2008, banks have been borrowing from depositors at near 0% interest. With "free money", bankers forgot how to be bankers matching assets and liabilities, interest rate risk and duration.

As they have during the banking crises of the past quarter century, the regulators have pulled out their default playbook: making more institutions "systemically risky," foisting the tab on taxpayers and giving regulators more control.

But there's also something new: the troubling problem of regulatory mission drift. The Fed's historical mandates are to promote price stability and full employment and a safe and sound banking system. Instead, the Fed (and the Treasury) have changed their priorities to promote the progressive priorities of climate change and equity. Case in point: SVB received its first "outstanding" rating from examiners for fulfilling the SF Fed's social and climate agenda. These didn't cause SVB to fail, but it sure looks like examiners became more permissive of - or overlooked entirely - its balance-sheet risks.

The scenario playing out here is potentially accelerating toward something much worse:

What better way to push us towards a correct climate change and equity agenda than a wholly government-operated banking system where everyone's bank is effectively the Federal Reserve. In this system, our money will become a so-called "central bank digital currency" giving the federal government power over most of our personal financial matters.

Far-fetched? I don't think so. Read about the "Overton Window."

Joining me to talk through how we got here and where this may be going is Rick Manning, president of Americans for Limited Government, and its Vice President, Robert Romano.

Rick describes the banks recent "doomed-to-fail strategy, owning and trading government debt, dependent on falling interest rates to create a guaranteed profit." When those trends reverse, crashes ensue and bailouts occur.

These bailouts, from the Savings-and-Loan Associations of the 1980s to Silicon Valley Bank's today, have helped drive financial centralization as big banks get saved and little ones go under. After 2008, the Dodd-Frank Act made takeovers easier, setting up an arbitrary mechanism based on whether a bank is deemed to be a "systemic risk."

Rick explains how this can be politicized:

"They determined that Silicon Valley Bank had "systemic risk" because politically connected people were investing in woke capitalism and the green agenda. But if you're invested in drilling, you're not going to get bailed out."

Says Robert: "it's a lethal threat to the private sector if Treasury and the Federal Reserve can just label a bank 'systemically risky' and take it over."

Rick and I served on President Trump's transition team, and we know that sound ideas can get lost in the politics. Still, change has to start somewhere. What about solutions?

We have many but there's so much in this episode, it almost resists description. Listen in for yourself. I worry that we're seeing the weaponization of our money. We lay these issues out and you decide.

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 Action Project and introduced us. No one I know has a better grasp of the big picture and the minutiae of labor laws and regulations.

The New York Times calls Pat "a movement conservative" who when he was appointed was "far more consequential than those of the many acting secretaries that have served..."

The legislation creating the Labor Department was signed into law by a reluctant President Taft on his last day in office. Since then its power has grown "like a rolling stone relentlessly gathering more moss" as Pat puts it.

In this wide ranging conversation we talk about how Labor is radically ratcheting up regulatory costs on productive industry and is pushing "environmental, social and governance" aka ESG initiatives that promise to dramatically reduce investment returns for pensioners.

The threat to Americans' pension returns from ESG investing is that its principle focus is on the climate change agenda, even though it's utterly clear that high, or even positive, ESG returns don't exist except through government subsidies.

(Trillions of dollars in federal spending in the past two years went to climate subsidies, in the form of tax credits, favorable financing for climate-related projects, and the like.)

The Biden Administration is obsessed with pushing its ESG climate agenda: this week Joe Biden's first and only veto was to reject a bill passed by Congress that would have reversed a Labor Department rule effectively promoting ESG investing.

We also talk about Labor's threat to the so-called gig economy - independent contractors - who comprise 15 to 20 percent of America's workforce.

Gig labor benefits from the free-market principle of voluntary exchange: you can make a contract with me because you can discern what's in your own interest; so can I. We're adults.

Not surprisingly, many adults in America like this arrangement: proposals to eliminate it have been voted down even in California.

Nevertheless, the command-and-control Labor Department is preparing a rule "that makes it more difficult for people to be classified as independent contractors" and easier for unions to organize.

Listen in to learn some surprising and unsettling things about Labor, a boring-sounding agency which we need to watch like a hawk, because its actions are major threats our liberties.

The brute force of top-down government is no friend to freedom—and a friend to freedom this Department is not.

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, joins me on this episode with

Todd Zywicki, Professor at George Mason's Scalia Law School and who was last on the show exploring with me whether "Chinese-Style Social Credit Will Be Coming to America"

The ugly truth.

We also now know that not only the White House, but also the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies have all played a major role in censoring Americans on social media, directing tech companies to remove certain types of material and even to censor specific posts and accounts.

Apparently they even censored this show.

"If you recall Bill," reminds Todd, "the last time Jenin and I were here with you, was about when I sued my employer over trying to force me to get vaccinated even though I had natural immunity. And why that's so relevant to the conversation we're having today was that quite quickly that episode was removed from YouTube. It was taken down as violating the terms of service of YouTube. And to this day, we have no idea why."

People were censored for saying things that we now know to be true.

"Martin Kulldorff is among the most cited scientists in the world when it comes to infectious disease issues and vaccine safety," says Jenin. "And he was censored on Twitter for saying that people with natural immunity and children don't need the vaccine."

The censorship regime has been widespread and relentless. Our argument here is that the companies, as private actors, have a right to do that, but that the government does not have a right to coerce private actors to do what the government wants them to do.

The White House emails demonstrate that the federal government unlawfully coerced social media companies in an effort to ensure that Americans would be exposed only to state-approved information about Covid-19.

The government's unlawful, deceptive and dangerous conduct is the biggest issue of our day. We cover a lot in this episode: the First Amendment issues, public choice (government officials don't have a monopoly on truth), shadow banning, Section 230 (protects the social media companies but is now abused by them) and how Twitter has changed with Elon Musk in charge.

This is a fascinating and entertaining overview of the sometimes hard-to-understand issues. We taped this in-studio to amplify its importance, but if you don't have time to watch, be sure to listen in.

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 dealmaking comes from seeing the other side as an opponent. They'd do better to listen like musicians rather than as lawyers.

"When you saw the Dead over time in many different venues, in many different cities, a thousand seats to a hundred thousand seats, you realize that they took into account, whether it's conscious or unconscious, that this is a different audience, these are different acoustics. I'm in a better mood, I'm in a worse mood. It doesn't matter," explains Marc.

"So the fact that you played something five nights ago one way, doesn't mean you're going to play it that way tonight."

"In the deal world, I think of each counterparty as my audience and in every deal I've got a different counterparty with different needs."

A wise and creative man, Marc's also has taught at UC Berkeley and is on the boards of both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Rex Foundation, which was started by members of the Dead.

This is a fun and enlightening conversation and Marc has a lot to teach us. Backstage and off the beaten path.

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 governors and legislative leaders. We're creating a community where each of the governors understands fully well that most other Republican governors are phasing down to zero or significantly cutting tax."

"How does Florida pay for it? Florida 22 million people. New York, 20 million. Florida spends a $100 billion on state government. It's a lot, a $100 billion. New York, twice as much, 200 billion."

"But the roads aren't any better up in New York. Public safety and cops aren't any better. Schools aren't any better. They hire more government employees, pay them more and have ridiculous pensions. That's what you get for twice the cost of state government. New York wouldn't need an income tax if they spend half as much. So the key is spending restraint."

Of course politicians have figured out a lot of other ways to tax us besides the income tax. Sales taxes. Property taxes. Excise taxes. Capital gains taxes. Cigarette taxes. Estate taxes. Alcohol taxes. Disguised taxes (aka licensing fees). And on and on.

We get into these and learn how for example "red states have gotten suckered into subsidizing their blue cities."

One big takeaway: A simple tax system is the friend of the taxpayer. Complicated tax systems? The more confusing and opaque, the more governments love them. Grover explains why having a single tax rate makes it tougher for them to raise taxes.

"All taxes are raised to the breaking point, to the point where politicians careers are broken."

Also discussed in this episode: the FAIR tax which aims to eliminate the IRS, school vouchers, Janet Yellin's quest for an international minimum corporate tax, what to negotiate for in the debt ceiling fight and the significance of ATR's no tax increase pledge.

Listen in. There's much to learn here.

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.

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 Senior Staff Director of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and several stints in the Pentagon where he was known as the Yoda of the arms trade.

David is also the Washington Fellow at the Claremont Institute and has vast subject matter expertise and has written extensively on international affairs and security matters.

This was a disturbing conversation framed in part by US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley's recent statement that "it would be very, very difficult to militarily eject the Russian forces from Ukraine in 2023" and that the casualties on both sides are very high.

"This is something that Ukrainians keep trying to hide, but it's not a symmetrical conflict. It's an asymmetrical conflict," explains Stephen. "The Russian side is much heavier, much bigger, more troops, more capabilities. In a war of attrition, Ukraine loses."

"A few dozen tanks are not going to really make any difference in the strategic balance," concurs David.

"Ukrainians have fought very well and very hard, and they've been, from a command and control point of view, superior to the Russians overall, but remember that the troops they started with are not the troops they have now."

Among Ukraine's urgent call for more weapons is a 100-mile ground-launched long-range bomb known as ATACMS which would shift the war from Ukrainian to Russian territory. Putting this sort of weapon in Ukrainian hands will likely result in a wider war in Europe. And the US decision to ship upgraded nuclear bombs to Europe leads the Russians to conclude that a tactical nuclear war may be NATO's response if Ukraine collapses.

"Should it commit US forces or US air power to Ukraine?" asks Stephen. "If it did so, how quickly would the war spread in Europe? Would NATO, always far more boisterous than can be justified by reality, support sending NATO forces to Ukraine? Or would NATO's knees finally buckle?"

David says it's time for a gut check: "The United States should step back and ask what our strategic interests are. Do we have an existential or even an important strategic interest in Ukraine?"

"The Biden Administration, personified by Victoria Nuland, believes with religious fervor that Russia is destined to be a liberal democracy and that our goal in one way or another should be regime change, to get rid of Putin."

But from the Russian's perspective, explains Stephen, "They lost their entire buffer, which was their award for winning a big part of World War II, when the Soviet Union collapsed. The Russians extracted promises from us that we wouldn't expand NATO further, and certainly not to Ukraine, and we broke those promises. Absolutely broke those promises."

"By making this a war effectively for regime change and threatening the Russians with not just asset seizures, but also war crimes and tribunals, this has caused everyone to rally around Putin," David warns. "If we wanted to ensure his absolute leadership there, we couldn't have done it better."

The Russians firmly believe that the only negotiation is with Washington. It's time for some grown up diplomacy and for Washington to push for what up until now it has strictly opposed: a peace settlement.

Stephen and David have a surprising candidate from within the Administration who might be able pull it off.

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 the United Nations that masquerades as a scientific research community to push climate hysteria for globalist political purposes.

Created by the United Nations in 1988, the IPCC has led the "consensus science" effort to advance the argument that man-made CO2 emissions resulting from burning hydrocarbon fuels are "causing a climate change disaster of unprecedented proportions."

Yet aiming for "net zero carbon emissions" by eliminating hydrocarbons and mandating wind and solar power, will essentially shut down a modern economy that has lifted billions of people out of poverty.

The IPCC itself concedes this.

Its 2018 IPCC Special Report on Global Warming warns that "limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require "rapid and far-reaching" transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport, and cities. Global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching 'net zero' around 2050. Limiting warming to 1.5°C is possible within the laws of chemistry and physics but doing so would require unprecedented changes. The effectiveness of such techniques are unproven at large scale and may carry significant risks for sustainable development"

What's happening now is not about the climate, energy, or the environment. Instead, an unscientific and purposeful climate scare is being perpetrated by a new class of power elites to impose their will and right to rule over the rest of us. It is a backdoor way for progressives to impose central planning, socialism, and progressivism on once-free democracies.

"They had to find something that created an existential threat," observes Jerry, "where they could warn 'we're all going to die unless you do what we say.'"

It is also about money. About three quarters of the money that President Obama spent on green energy went to people who were on his finance committee. Under President Biden, trillions have flowed to the green energy lobby, benefiting almost entirely Democrat donors.

These are strong statements but the more you dig into the faux science and the unstated agenda of the climate change regime, the more they ring true.

Dr. Jerome Corsi received a Ph.D. from Harvard University and has published over twenty-five books on economics, history, and politics, including six New York Times bestsellers, two at #1 "Unfit For Command" and "The Obama Nation"

Jerry is an erudite and charming guide to climate realities. Well worth a listen. I believe his book will become a must-read classic.

(By the way, you'll be relieved to learn that, contrary to what AOC and Greta Thunberg believe, we're not burning the mystical remains of long dead dinosaurs as "fossil fuels." Jerry explains why.)

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 sexual orientation. Have these tribes band together to oppose a supposed "white privilege" majority. Racially discriminate to end discrimination.

Open its borders. End any difference between citizens and residents.

Muzzle speech. Cancel or shadow-ban anyone who questions the "consensus" about January 6, the efficacy of Covid vaccines or election integrity.

Weaponize the FBI, CIA, and Department of Justice.

All these things are happening. This list could go on and on. The patterns are there. The questions become: is there a plan and who is behind it?

For some answers, I've turned to Kevin D. Freeman, my guest on this episode, who has written an all-encompassing new book - According to Plan, the Elite Secret Plan to Sabotage America.

Kevin's considered one of the world's leading experts on economic warfare and financial terrorism. He is a co-founder and host of the Economic War Room on BlazeTV and of the National Security Consultant Institute. Kevin also serves as a Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Policy.

In According to Plan, Kevin Freeman lays out a clear case that the current attack is an intentional one aimed at all the pillars of freedom that have made America great.

"I wrote According to Plan to show that there is a pattern," explains Kevin. "A equals B, B equals C. Isolated facts don't persuade, but showing people the pattern can."

Join us on the episode to learn about the disturbing patterns - the plan - and the people behind them.

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 Siguler Guff and was formerly CEO of Allied Capital after leading its very successful commercial real estate business.

"What COVID forced us to do is cram 50 years' worth of commuting to the office to working wherever you wanted to work into two years" explains John.

One big beneficiary of the office exodus has been residential housing prices, which rose in some markets up to 50% fueled by people wanting to get bigger houses so they can have a home office.

With people not wanting to return to the office, demand for office leases has collapsed from 250 million square feet of office space signed for in 2019 to about 50 million in 2022.

Microsoft is reportedly giving up office in Seattle - a million square feet of space - and Reebok and hundreds of big companies have concluded to dramatically cut back as well. Allstate is getting rid of their suburban Chicago campus, because 75% of their people are now working remotely.

So this is an interesting story about how businesses and markets adapt to changing fortunes. Will empty office buildings be converted to condos? Will tech workers be lured back to work with promises of private offices? Did businesses need all those employees to begin with?

After all, Elon Musk fired 80% of Twitter's so-called workers and its seems to be operating just fine.

One of the fascinating aspects of this story is how entrepreneurs take advantage of distressed markets and can turn despair into opportunity. With the prices of office buildings falling, is this actually a good time to invest?

John and I also talk about what's happening to hotel and retail properties, and where the future is not as bleak as it looked just a couple of years ago.

I asked John where he would invest today and his answers were intriguing.

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." Our topic: his speech at Hillsdale College and related article about"The Economic Disaster of the Pandemic Response."

From the beginning - and starting with Donald Trump's response - the idea of "the economy" – viewed as mechanistic, money-centered, mostly about the stock market, and detached from anything truly important – was pitted against public health and lives," reminds Jeffrey.

When governments started declaring some businesses essential and others non-essential what they did not understand is that everything in a economy is interconnected. It's woven. It's never obvious, but if you cut even one thread, all of a sudden the whole fabric can start to unravel. You cannot just turn off an economy and expect that you can restart it with a snap of your fingers.

The same thing was done with medical procedures and treatments and hospital beds. Some were declared "essential", others not. Perversely, spending on healthcare plummeted during the pandemic. Non-virus health conditions worsened and life expectancy in America fell.

"We lost two years of education, substance abuse and addiction rose and hundreds of thousands of businesses were destroyed," says Jeffrey. "Vaccine mandates led to more than a million people being displaced from their jobs."

In the almost three years after the virus emerged from Wuhan China, "we face an economic crisis without precedent in our lifetimes, the longest period of declining real income in the post-war period, a health and educational crisis, an exploding national debt plus inflation at a 40-year high, continued and seemingly random shortages, dysfunction in labor markets that defies all models, the breakdown of international trade, a collapse in consumer confidence not seen since we started tracking it, and a combustible level of political division."

So here we are. We all need to be deeply concerned about not just this one crisis, but authorities response to the inevitable next "crises" as well.

"To this day, the educated elites in the public health establishment defend every last thing they did. Not a single power that they used to lock us down before has been diminished," worries Jeffrey. "Yes, the courts have cut this policy or that policy a little bit here and there, too little, too late. But in general, all the policy, all the powers that they had before, they have now still, and they will use them again."

We can't afford to sit on the sidelines and let this happen. Listen in as Jeffrey and I explore what happened and what we need to do to prevent it next time.

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 their skin, by their immutable characteristics instead of seeing each other as unique individuals who are united by our shared humanity."

What we must be doing instead is to share and teach what it means to be pro-human.

These so-called "anti-racist" ideologies have manipulated language in a way that makes it very difficult for normal people to oppose them. Suppose somebody comes in and says, "I'm bringing anti-racism to your institution," and they tell you anti-racism means ending racism, who could be opposed?

"Our approach is to reclaim the words, reclaim the language," explains Bion.

"We're just insisting on what those words really mean to the vast majority of people. For example, the word equity means the quality of being fair and impartial."

"And we're not going to give up on the word diversity. Diversity is a good thing and just because somebody's pushing conformity and calling it diversity doesn't mean that we give up on the word diversity."

In just a year and half, FAIR a mostly volunteer organization, has grown into a national grassroots network of 1,000s of people with chapters in over 40 states.

With its compelling aim to promote a common culture based on fairness, understanding, and our common humanity, FAIR's big tent has attracted people from across the political spectrum with diverse backgrounds, ancestries, ideologies to advance civil rights and liberties for all Americans.

"I think what most people need is to feel that they're part of a community," explains Bion, pushing back against these toxic ideologies. "They need to feel that there are people backing them up, supporting them, who can help them with messaging and how to talk about how we are unique individuals with a shared common humanity. We call it being pro-human."

pro-human

adjective \ 'prō-'hyü-men \

Advocating for one human race, individual civil rights and liberties, and compassionate opposition to racism and intolerance rooted in dignity and our common humanity.

The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racismis an idea whose time has come. Listen to Bion Bartning explain its work and then sign up to support the FAIR cause.

I know I will.

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 the student government berated, bullied and insulted her at their next meeting. They began by announcing that her social studies teacher would be present. Together, the three adults told her that the principal himself found my stance "appalling." She had made them and the school "look bad," they told her. One teacher said the situation gave her "hives." Another said "If you're not on board with systemic racism, I have trouble with that, girlfriend."

The adults in the room were teachers who had the power to grade and affect her prospects of getting into college.

After that, there were a series of tense meetings between Sahar and the administration and her parents, resulting in stalemate.

Sahar, whose mother escaped revolutionary Iran, and grandfather escaped the Nazis, wouldn't back down.

"The experience prompted me and a few like-minded others to look into our school's curriculums. What we found was an arsenal of lopsidedly race-obsessed lesson plans."

One was the American Psychological Association's "Apology to People of Color" for its role in "Promoting, Perpetuating, and Failing to Challenge Racism." Another asserted that America is a place where racism is "no better today than it was 200 years ago."

So what does she do? She presents her findings in an audacious speech to the school board and receives a standing ovation - from other students parents, not the school board.

"This was about speech," she explains. "These are the values that we protect and the reason why my family came to this country."

Sahar's story is inspirational. I'm sure we'll be hearing much more from her in the future.

By the way, she taped this show from her Yale dorm room, where she also shared what a terrific time she's having in her Freshman year.

She's a fun and engaging interview. Listen in.

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 bonfire. Inflation is not a natural disaster. It is a politician-made disaster brought about by massive Federal spending and tax subsidies.

The Inflation Reduction Act lavished massive spending on green energy and climate change. Almost $400 billion in subsidies for wind power, solar power, carbon capture and storage, credits for buying electric vehicles and a myriad of yet to be proven technologies.

But as we all know, in Washington you need to follow the money. Who are the lobbyists? Who benefits? Who is getting this money?

One of the biggest recipients is what Myron Ebell calls the "Climate Change Industrial Complex."

The climate change industrial complex is thrilled with the Inflation Reduction Act. "The climate economy is about to explode," crows Robinson Meyer writing in The Atlantic. "Many of the IRA's most important provisions are "uncapped" tax credits. That means that as long as you meet their terms, the government will award them and theIRA's total spending is likely to be more than $800 billion, double what the Congressional Budget Office projects."

These wind and solar subsidies benefit already wealthy investors who want to have a guaranteed return on their investment and the federal tax credit is necessary to assure that. The Manchin-Schumer Permitting Bill, which failed by only one vote in the Senate, contained even more massive tax subsidies for transmission lines and vastly expand the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's (FERC) authority over the electric grid.

It's scheme was to allow the FERC to put climate goals ahead of electric reliability and affordability.

According to Myron, "The total costs of transmitting intermittent and unreliable electricity from locations where the wind blows or the sun shines to the distant places where most Americans live in order to achieve "net zero emissions" have been estimated at trillions of dollars."

Green energy mandates and subsidies reduce real wages and real GDP by shifting resources from high-productivity uses such as fossil-fuel extraction toward low-productivity and unreliable green energy projects with unproven technologies.

But isn't it all worth it if we "save the planet?" Perhaps, if wind and solar green energy could actually deliver the goods. But it can't.

"People have no idea how stuff is made," explains another The Bill Walton Show guest Mark Mills. "Wind turbines, electric cars, solar panels use far more copper than the products they replace, and no one in the world has any kind of plan to meet this explosion in demand."

"Want 100 megawatts of electricity?" asks Mark.

"You could build a natural gas turbine which fits inside the footprint of a residential house. From wind? You'll need 40 Washington Monument sized, wind turbines spread out over a hundred square miles."

If we were to try to provide all the energy America needs using just wind and solar, the physical land area would have to occupy close to half the continental United States.

Myron again: "Wind and solar are a dead end. They cannot provide the power we need unless we want to go back to living lives where most of the work is done by human beings manual labor and draft animals like horses and mules."

Europe is now waking up to these energy realities. Led by Angela Merkel, who says she has no regrets, Europe's energy system became so fragile as a result of their green energy policies that now with Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the sabotage of the gas pipelines, they are faced with a crisis of enormous proportions. It's not just high energy prices. It's people freezing to death and entire industries closing down because they don't have enough energy to stay warm or to keep the plants operating.

German inflation, largely driven by skyrocketing energy prices, is running at 10.9%.

It gets worse. Europe now has to worry about food. "Modern agriculture, which is really machines plus energy plus fertilizer, and the fertilizer comes from natural gas and petroleum," reminds Myron.

Faced with this, Germany is bringing coal-fired power stations back into use and dismantling a wind farm to make way for a coal mine.

"The climate change industry's Green New Deal is a back-to-the-dark-ages manifesto."

Has anyone asked the American voters whether they want to pay this price of lower wages and slower growth and their tax dollars going to subsidize wealthy "green investors?"

Climate considerations are being used to justify projects that cannot be justified on the grounds of increased reliability or lower electric rates.

The case has not been made that the trillions of dollars going into green energy is "settled science."

The present era is one of the coolest and least carbon-intensive periods of the last 600 million years. The warming that we've had since 1880 is mild and its impacts so far have been modest and mostly positive.

"The greening effect, the indirect effect of carbon dioxide, has undoubtedly increased food production due to higher CO2 levels."

Republicans need to make this a politically toxic issue for the Democrats and their elitist and rsqa globalism over American prosperity.

Reeling back the Climate Change Industrial Complex should be a kitchen table pocketbook visceral issue: even though it sounds nice to be green, it's wrecking America.

"We were energy dominant and in 2020 and 2019, the United States was the world's largest producer of oil and natural gas combined."

Wouldn't this be a winning issue for Republicans in 2024?

"Yes. Well, of course," reminds Myron, "that was the agenda pursued by Donald Trump when he ran for president and it's the one that he implemented when he was elected."

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 interests?

To learn more about what's increasingly looking like madness, I'm talking again with the very wise Dr. Stephen Bryen, a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy and the Yorktown Institute. Dr Bryen has over 50 years national security experience with a long resume that includes serving as Senior Staff Director of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and several stints in the Pentagon where he was known as the Yoda of the arms trade.

"How many Ukrainians have to die before we sort this thing out?" asks Stephen. "What's the end game here?"

Ukraine has never been of strategic importance to the United States. We have no treaties or agreements with Ukraine. The Ukrainians are now saying they need air defenses. Where are we going to get them? We would have to take them out of our inventory of active systems and move them to Ukraine.

The Biden Administration has been bent on regime change in Russia from day one. There were any number of things that could have been done to deter Putin's invasion of Ukraine, but we did not do them.

"It's clear, this is an American war, using the Ukrainians as proxies," says Stephen.

And now the war is escalating beyond what most "official Washington" could have imagined. Putin has installed a new commander, whose nickname is "General Armageddon" for his ruthless annihilation of Syria. Ukraine's President Zelensky has called for nuclear weapons.

"They're calling tactical nuclear weapons at 15 kilotons tactical. The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was 11 kilotons," reminds Stephen "Nuclear war is nuclear war. If we get into a nuclear war, the chance of global nuclear war is very high indeed."

"This is not a Nintendo game. This is a deadly, serious, dangerous, globally dangerous situation, and we're not handling it responsibly."

Strong and upsetting words. But true words. You won't find Dr Stephen Bryen's wisdom covered by the mainstream media. His is a voice that must be listened to.

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 election coming up November 6 and we need to be sure it is a lawful one.

Joining me on this episode of The Bill Walton Show to talk about what's at stake and what to do about it, is a great American, Cleta Mitchell, who has spent a lifetime fighting for free and fair elections, calling out the left's tactics and encouraging Americans to take an active role in their local elections. Cleta runs the Election Integrity Network and hosts the podcast "Who's Counting."

Her goal is to make 'easy to vote and hard to cheat' a reality in every voting jurisdiction in America.

"Voting has already started in multiple states, including Virginia which has 45 days of early voting,"explains Cleta. "Absentee ballots have been sent out all over the country. So we no longer have Election Day. We have election two months. We have election season with massive extensions of early voting and voting by mail, no excuse absentee voting, so that our election process has essentially been wrenched away from its moorings."

In our brief conversation, Cleta provides a sobering - yet also energizing - overview of what Republicans are up against in this election. The 2020 playbook has been revealed and there's a lot we as individuals can do to neutralize it.

Start by listening to Cleta's insights here, and then go to her website whoscounting.us to download her "Citizens Guide" for some powerful lines of action.

There's a lot we can do to matter, and Cleta Mitchell shows the way.

"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 development, national security, foreign policy and aid, women's empowerment, and human rights.

The State Department's job is to keep us out of war through effective diplomacy. Instead, Anthony Blinken et al has put us at risk of a wider war in Europe, out of control inflation, a steep recession, massive food insecurity, and a nuclear confrontation.

The Biden Administration's brinksmanship tactics have driven Russian and China into an even deeper partnership that has ominous implications for future of the U.S. and its European allies.

With the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline, Germany's economy is on the brink of collapse. German industries and households are starved for energy that grows more expensive with each passing week.

Why has the United States encouraged this war to proceed, sending over $60 billion of American taxpayers money?

It now seems apparent that President Biden and the State Department's aim has been regime change - an ouster of Vladimir Putin - through a proxy war in Ukraine.

This is reckless and dangerous. The United States has a miserable track record in "regime change" - think Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.

The Biden Administration has blundered us into the most dangerous situation in American foreign policy since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

It is time to negotiate peace.

This is not the conventional view in America at the moment. Listen in as Dr Shea Bradley-Farrell makes the case.

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 malls, they lost their right to travel. They were made into non-persons.

Could this happen in America? My guest on this episode Todd Zywicki, Professor at George Mason's Scalia Law School and who served as Chair of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's Task Force on Consumer Financial Law, is quite concerned.

"In contrast to China, at least for the time being, American government is constrained from imposing social credit criteria on Americans. But it wouldn't necessarily have to do it directly.

The technologies and systems are in place so that social credit scoring could be implemented through our financial services system: banks, brokerage firms, credit rating agencies, insurance companies, etc."

At the World Economic Forum - home to the Global Reset agenda - their meetings have hosted presentations about rolling out credit cards that would monitor our individual carbon footprints.

Also openly discussed were systems to implant chips to monitor vaccine booster shots. The system would remind you to get one, and if you didn't do it, then you'd be shut off from access to public spaces.

These would be implemented by private sector actors but with the nodding approval of government agencies, much like Twitter has censored speech at the behest of federal health authorities.

Who is pushing social control in America and why?

Are these paranoid imaginings, or are social credit scores coming to a American house near you? Maybe your house.

There's a lot we need to know about these developments and Todd and I cover a lot of ground to examine the many issues. Worth a listen.

"What's the difference between reality and conspiracy theory? About three months."

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 something or can they mean anything?"

What the EPA has been saying is 'We are going to set the CO2 levels such that the coal plants can no longer operate. We want to put the coal plants out of business completely.'

This was not its intended mandate.

Join me as I talk with John Vecchione and his colleague Casey Norman, both with the New Civil Liberties Alliance, about the EPA decision and what it means.

If you're looking a lively, engaging and plain English conversation about the issues, this is the place to start.

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.

• Russia, Ukraine and the prospects of a nuclear war.

• China's mounting threat to envelop Taiwan, a world leader and supplier of semiconductors and information technology.

• Collapsing political stability in the Middle East thanks to the administration's blunders that have helped Iran's quest to obtain nuclear weapons.

• The mostly unreported Chinese and Russian quest to dominate outer space. The country that controls space controls the world.

• 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 have been emboldened by America's weakness.

Like Thema and Louise, Joe Biden seems determined to drive us off a cliff.

Joining me on this episode to see what we should and can be doing to keep America safe, is my returning guest, the brilliant Brandon Weichert, publisher of The Weichert Report. And author of "Winning Space" and the soon to be published "The Shadow War: Iran's Quest for Supremacy".

Brandon, who has been called a "brilliant and anxiety inducing scholar," has emerged as one of our most well-informed, original defense intellectuals since the great Herman Kahn.

He tells us what we do not want to hear, but need to know, about the gathering threats to our freedom and prosperity. He also offers solutions.

A few highlights:

• Steve Schwarzman started Blackstone with a unique strategic plan. There's a tremendous lesson in how he approached building his firm.

• 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."

• 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.

• One of my favorite Steve Schwarzman Rules: "Worrying is an active, liberating activity. If channeled appropriately, it allows you to articulate the downside in any situation and drives you to take action to avoid it." Great advice.

• Private equity's been demonized by a lot of people with agendas and who know nothing about it. True, it's a competitive and tough business, but it's created a lot of value over the past 4-5 decades. Look at the record.

• Do companies become woke because their young woke new hires demand it? Disney employees clearly seem to be running the asylum, not its CEO. Is this also true for Wall Street?

• One of ways our culture has changed, and not for the better, it that we seem to have lost the ideal of pursing excellence. In my private equity experience, making an investment successful was exhilarating.

• Under President Xi, China's becoming "uninvestable" for Western businesses. Even Chinese private equity investors say China's turned hostile to capitalism. No longer simply a competitor, China's turned enemy.

• In "What It Takes" Steve Schwarzman writes that had we not had FAS 157 mark-to-market accounting, the meltdown we had in 2008 would not have happened. I agree.

• One history's great ironies is that Dodd-Frank, the bill to supposedly cure the ills of the 2008 meltdown, is named after Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, who pushed banks to drop their underwriting standards to promote housing.

• When you're running an investment company there's a real tension between the roles of CEO and CIO (chief investment officer). It's a balancing act you must get right to succeed.

John Tamny is Vice President of Freedom Works and editor of Real Clear Markets, and author of the terrific book, When Politicians Panicked, which is about the government mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic. John's other books includeWho Needs the Fed, Popular Economics and The End of Work.

He asks some tough, penetrating questions and we hope you'll find the answers illuminating. Steve's book holds many many stories and lessons about "what it takes" to be both a leader and investor.

Hope you'll listen in.

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" to winnow out CCP controlled or influenced companies. But are there deeper purposes at work?

Joining me to talk about this alarming development is Frank Gaffney, Host of Securing America with Frank Gaffney, Founder and Executive Chairman of the Center for Security Policy, and Vice Chairman of the Committee for Present Danger: China.

And Roger Robinson former Senior Director of International Economic Affairs at the Reagan National Security Council and Chairman of the Congressional US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

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.

Next, the U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) directed social media platforms including Twitter to censor alleged "misinformation" about Covid-19. They also demanded that the tech companies turn over information about individuals who spread such "misinformation," a clear intimidation tactic that HHS has labeled a "Request for Information".

And "after the Biden administration started their campaign to silence Covid policy opponents, there's been a massive increase in Twitter suspensions."

The speech ban has included information the Government later conceded was true but that conflicted with the Government's messaging on Covid-19 at the time.

This censorship strikes at the heart of what the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect—free speech, especially political speech.

But the heart of the matter is that by instrumentalizing tech companies, including Twitter—through pressure, coercion, and threats—to censor viewpoints it deemed "misinformation," the Surgeon General has turned Twitter's censorship into state action.

And this has to be brought to an end.

Jenin Younes and John Vecchione of the New Civil Liberties Alliance explain why and how it can be done.

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 governments' totalitarian response to Covid, and in this episode they explain why. It's not so much that they've changed their views, rather the ideological tectonic plates have shifted.

Some excerpts:

"I do think there's been quite a realignment" Jenin explains … "it's now more like authoritarianism versus freedom. I get contacted by disaffected Democrats every day. So I think a lot of people are seeing through this."

"When I met Jenin maybe a year and half ago," says Naomi, "she and I were like refugees from the left. Having a glass of wine and saying, "What is happening to the people around us?" I agree with Jenin a 1,000% again. It is a realignment, a different axis of authoritarianism versus freedom"

We're living in different information worlds.

"We are, as a country getting two absolutely different information streams … I was always told that Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon are evil, but they're doing better reporting on this than the New York Times or the Washington Post, let alone CNN and CNBC."

And it's driven people mad.

"It's been called a mass formation psychosis, but there are other names for it. It's a kind of mass hysteria and you can't really chip away at it with facts or logic and that's sadder than anything. I mean, it's dividing families. It's dividing friends.

"… it's scary to see people (on the Left) be unwilling to hear evidence to the contrary of what the narrative is. They've changed. They don't say, "That doesn't hold up or those sources are not good." They say, "Don't show me that" It's like a religion and that's scary."

This episode is filled with insightful, brave and personal truths from Naomi Wolf and Jenin Younes. Another must listen.

By the way, you have to love an author whose most recent essay is titled:

"I'm not 'Brave'' You're Just a P---y"

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, including the principle of equality, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and the principles of Constitutional law.

Like all other totalitarians before them, Critical Race Theorists are interested in reordering the world according to the vision contained in their Theory.

But what its proponents are chiefly interested in is increasing power for themselves.

James Lindsay, author of Race Marxism, is founder of New Discourses! which he calls a home for the politically homeless, especially for those who feel like they've been displaced from their political homes because of the movement sometimes called "Critical Social Justice."

He is smart, engaging and funny - CRT easily lends itself to parody.

Listen in and learn. It's worth your time.

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 are already in an alliance that poses the most formidable combination that the Western democracies have faced in their history," warns Peter Pry

It's worse than that. This combination also includes North Korea and Iran creating a new power block that Washington just doesn't seem to want to acknowledge.

Russia can overrun Ukraine and the frontline NATO states in 72 hours. The Pentagon's had 18 Taiwan war games and in its own war games scenarios, we have lost every one of them.

If you want a real and informed tutorial about the possibilities of war with Russia, Ukraine, China and Taiwan, this is a must listen. It's a sobering 60 minutes, but well worth your time.

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 going to, and what kind of future we're going to have if we don't put our financial house in order.

Steve, in his usual entertaining style, weighs in on:

• Congressional accountability
• Canada's truckers protest
• Entitlements and the social security "lockbox"
• The 3 steps to a country's financial ruin
• What we ought to do with China's U.S. Treasury holdings
• Modern Monetary Theory
• Federal government accounting
• Republican Governors
• The 1619 Project and our "school choice moment"
• His support for tariffs on trade with China

And much more.

My agenda item would be to have Steve's book as part of curriculum in every school in America.

Listen in. I think you'll agree.

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 of When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment and Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom.

Before joining EPPC, Roger Severino was the Director of the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where he led a team of over 250 staff protecting our nation's civil rights, conscience and religious freedom.

In response to the Biden administration's hostility to sound medicine and the rights of conscience, EPPC has launched a major initiative, its HHS Accountability Project led by Roger.

As Ryan explains:

"Ethics needs to be at the heart of public policy. Every piece of public policy, every piece of law embodies someone's morality, and we work to make sure that our laws embody true morality."

"There's no such thing as moral neutrality when it comes to the law, whether it's private property, free speech, definition of marriage, or our laws about homicide."

A fascinating conversation. Please listen in.

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 sector. Is this still true?
• A prosperous and free society depends on trust. Will America's government health establishment be able to recover the public's trust?
• Can woke progressivism's long march through American institutions be reversed?

And more: on families, voting rights, campaign finance, college campus fragility, social media's power, judicial restraint, closed questions in an open society, majority rule, self-regarding versus other regarding acts, China's future … almost everything except baseball.

We'll get to that next time.

Definitely worth a listen.

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 imprisoned and under house arrest by the Chinese government for seven years for his human rights activism. Since escaping to America, he has remained a persistent voice for freedom, human dignity, and the rule of law in his native country.

Reggie Littlejohn, who as the president of Women's Rights Without Frontiers, has spent years campaigning against China's forced abortion policies.

and

Yaxue Cao, who grew up in northern China during the Cultural Revolution, and went to college at Peking University in Beijing. She founded DC-based ChinaChange.org to inform the world about human rights, rule of law, and civil society in China - aspects of China's political landscape that are the most censored and least understood.

China claims that the Chinese people "experience a broad, thorough and true democracy" and the China's National People's Congress "guarantees that the people are masters."

To this Guangcheng responds "the Chinese people have never had a free election, the National People's Congress is made up entirely of the party's handpicked officials and the subject of democracy has been banned from kindergarten to university classrooms since 2013."

Surveillance and social control are pervasive.

Yaxue Cao explains, "If you speak any dissent on the internet, your accounts will be suspended or deleted. And not only that, policemen will quickly be able to identify who you are, and find you offline, and threaten you, sometimes take you away to the detention center."

When the Olympic athletes go to China in a few weeks, they are entering into this surveillance culture.

"They need to understand their movements are going to be tracked, all of their social media posts," says Reggie. "What if an athlete posts something that is very critical of the government? What's going to happen then?"

It's not just governments, it's also the major multinational corporations, who are looking the other way.

"The Chinese Communist Party is very calculating and has used China's market, the world's second largest, as an enticement," says Guangcheng.

With billions at stake, the multinationals do not want to risk offending the CCP.

These are but a fraction of the endless issues surrounding this Olympics. Why it's going ahead is not a mystery, but it is wrong.

Listen in as my guests, with first hand experience of the CCP's iron hand, talk about what's at stake.

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 out January 15th, 2022 and Jay Richards, frequent guest, author of Price of Panic, who is now the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow with the Heritage Foundation.

Our larger concern is the damage being done to our free speech and our freedom to have open debate about what works and what doesn't.

There are countless important questions we're not allowed to discuss. We're not allowed to talk about Ivermectin. We're not allowed to talk about whether the vaccines work, let alone whether they qualify as vaccines. We're not allowed to talk about the whether the pharmaceutical companies have an agenda.

This is forbidden speech that's being monitored and chilled by the public health agencies, the corporate media, and social media companies.

The censorship is growing more extreme. James interviewed Howard Berger, who's the chief epidemiologist and medical authority of Austria. James posted the interview the social media, which took it down, citing "medical misinformation." Are we to believe that YouTube censors know better than Austria's chief epidemiologist?

Where is this going? How does it end? Vaccine mandates seem eerily to recall why we have the Nuremberg Code. Vaccine passports could easily turn into a Chinese-like social credit system.

Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum has said the pandemic is an opportunity for "the great reset"—a restructuring of global capitalism for the 21st century.

We need an open debate about whether this is the future we want.

Jay Richards and James Patrick weigh in.

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 is at odds with the CDC, the World Health Organization, they're going to censor you.

An open debate about the Covid-19 virus and its variants - their origins, spread, lethality, vaccine effectiveness, governments' mandates to control their spread and on and on - is simply not happening.

So to learn about what is true and what could be happening if we actually did follow the science, I'm joined in this episode by Jim Agresti, founder of an extraordinary shop, Just Facts. Just Facts a nonprofit institute dedicated to publishing comprehensive, straightforward, and rigorously documented facts about public policy issues.

Some what we talk about:

• The effectiveness of vaccines versus natural immunity
• How different are Covid 19 variants from the original virus.
• Claims Joe Biden has made about the virus and its vaccines. You'd be better off listening to Dr. Jill.
• How the virus really spreads. Hint: it's not what the CDC originally claimed.
• The effectiveness of surgical masks (as documented by peer reviewed journals).
• Breathing CO2 all day is not good for you.
• Why nursing homes - and you - could benefit from a good UV disinfection system.
• The social and health costs of lockdowns versus their benefits.
• The CDC and the WHO have been patently wrong about many important things.
• • "We've seen that time and time again, whether it's a death rate, how this thing spreads, the list goes on and on and on … misstatements by the World Health Organization," reveals Jim.

Jim Agresti's hard work at Just Facts has revealed a lot of essential truths - and a lot about real science - concerning the virus and its aftermath. Listen in and learn.

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 slide into socialism and how to arrest the decline.

Kevin shares many fascinating insights into Donald Trump's effective economic policies and his personality.

"The public persona of Donald Trump is much, much different from what he was like when we were actually in the Oval Office or in the West Wing, working on real policy problems," Kevin shares.

"Behind closed doors, he is an incredibly nice guy, who's very thoughtful and likes to see all the sides of the arguments."

In Kevin's book, The Drift he goes far back into Socialism's roots.

"Joseph Schumpeter, the famous economist, back in the 1920s, looked ahead to America's future," Kevin explains.

"He said, the socialists are going to win. What's going to happen is capitalism's going to work for a while. And as we get really rich, we're going to send our kids to college. And the colleges are going to be basically places that indoctrinate folks to be socialists."

"And the best universities are going to be the best socialists."

It's hard to do to justice to Kevin's many brilliant insights in an email summary. So I do hope you'll join in listening to our wide ranging conversation about Trump, socialism, the internet, Marshal McLuhan, social media, and the need to stand together to get the truth out.

"We control respectability, we control the truth. We need to have the confidence to stand up and defend capitalism because it's true and it works."

He also shares whether he thinks Donald Trump will run for President again.

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 this insane experiment in human separation, and mass management of the unmanageable. And the result has been demoralizing, and depressing, and shocking in terms of all things public health. It's contrary to all of our traditions of law, our belief in equality, and human rights, and freedom."

The Role of the New York Times

"On February 28, 2020, The New York Times published an op-ed by Donald J. McNeil. The title of the article was, 'To deal with the coronavirus, go medieval on it.' He said we need to reject all 20th century principles of public health where we just dealt with the pathogen, in terms of doctor patient relationships, and instead lock everybody down, shut the highways, ground the planes, freeze everybody to suffer in their disease ridden cities as if this is the Middle Ages."

The Madness of Masks

"It's just awful to see these children in masks, and mandates, and people screaming at each other, get that mask over your nose, and so on and so on. It's just all nutty. The things that we've done to control this virus that we can't see, this invisible enemy, it feels mystical, and magical, and superstitious."

The Vaccine Mandates

"This is serious stuff. This isn't just get the jab and shut up. People's lives have been ruined. Academia's being purged. The military's being purged. The public sector's being purged. We're turning our government into a single party state that seems to bear a lot of the marks of what we've come to see in China."

Why We Have to Push Back

"And I know this, if we do nothing, we will certainly fail, and we'll lose everything. So I'm happy to do something, whatever it is, to make a difference. And maybe we can save this. It's worth saving. Civilization is worth saving. Freedom is worth saving. Human rights means something, they built the modern world. We cannot just sit by and do nothing when we see it all unraveling before us."

This episode is about one of the biggest issues of our day. Please listen in.

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 them.
• Donald Trump listened to European allies and left residual force troops behind in Syria. Biden ignored the same advice on Afghanistan.
• After Donald Trump, European heads of state, were thrilled to welcome President Biden to their club as a hoped for return to a cozier relationship. They are now furious with him over his botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. His club days are over.
• The Wuhan Virus: "Who in the United States would think that sending money to a military lab controlled by the Chinese Communist Party was a good idea?"
• Government programs live forever, no matter how bad they are. For Congress, the problem has been "solved" when a bill passes. After that? It's usually downhill from there. No one cares to look back to see if the programs have worked or the money well spent.

For more common sense and wisdom from Pete Hoekstra, view/listen here.

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 are on the beaches (of Dunkirk), we need reinforcements. The Left is surrounding us. They have control. They own Washington right now. They have the White House, they have the Senate, they have the House. They're trying to bulldoze the most left wing agenda in the history of the United States through Congress with a one seat majority in the Senate and a five seat majority in the House of Representatives."

"This Bill is meant to transform America," says Joe Biden.

It's hard to overstate how bad this legislation is. Even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce urges its defeat. "This reconciliation bill is effectively 100 bills in one representing every big government idea that's never been able to pass in Congress. It's an existential threat to America's fragile economic recovery and future prosperity."

Listen in to learn what is at stake and what we can hope to do to stop it.

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 separation of church and state.

Also joining me is one of our favorite returning guests, Jenin Younes, litigation counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance, and a former public defender. After seeing governments throughout the nation violate human rights and civil liberties in their ostensible effort to mitigate the virus, she's now joined the fight against lockdowns and related policies.

There's a lot to unpack here, including a troubling statistic that 58% of Americans appear to approve a federal mandate. Would they, if they knew how throughout history "emergencies" have been used to steadily erode all the rest of their freedoms?

Listen in to learn about the totalitarian drift of an Administrative State's "rule by experts."

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 to be excited about and we can count on entrepreneurs, human ingenuity and technological innovation to create solutions.
• "There's a 95% chance that a 25 year old today will live to be 150 years old."
• Matt Ridley's notion that ideas have sex, creating ever more ideas.
• With China's demographic crisis and Xi shutting down its markets and entrepreneurs, it's possible that we look back 10 years from now and say, that kind of looks like Japan.
• The next decade will be the decade of biotechnological transformation.
• Gerontology research into something called induced tissue regeneration could be the "fountain of middle age."
• Why promising companies no longer want to go public, how this hurts the average investor and what we should do about it.
• And rule one: don't invest in something you do not understand.

There's a reason John's newsletter Thoughts From the Frontline has over a million subscribers. He's truly ahead of curve. Listen in for his many intriguing speculations about our future.