The Bill Walton Show

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.

In one of our most talked about episodes, Stella Morabito came on the show in May to talk about her book The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer. We talked about the dangerous tyranny of thought creeping into American lives. Government, social media and a new kind of “ruling class” are increasingly working to control speech and behavior and isolate 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 type of tyranny it is,” explained Stella. Read more; https://open.substack.com/pub/billwalton/p/the-surgeon-general-now-wants-to?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

This is a different kind of episode of The Bill Walton Show. My guest is the charming and insightful polymath Carrie Sheffield who is a columnist and broadcaster now with the Independent Women’s Voice. We were slated to talk about economic and women’s issues, which we do for the first 25 minutes and cover a lot interesting ground: 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. More than curious, I decided to call an audible, forget about Jay Powell, and take us “Backstage” to learn about her book and where my format is to explore personal and cultural issues. 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. She and her mother and her seven siblings lived as vagabonds as he moved them across the country preaching, and subsisting in sheds, tents, and motorhomes. It was a dysfunctional drifter existence, camping out in their motorhome in Walmart parking lots. Carrie attended 17 public schools and homeschool, all while performing classical music on the streets and passing out fire-and-brimstone religious pamphlets. “My father had amazing credentials,” shares Carrie. “He was a hand selected protege of Andrés Segovia, who was the world’s premier classical guitarist from Spain. He was a professor of guitar at Brigham Young University, and he won the National Young Composers Contest.” “But he got radicalized when he served on a Mormon mission to England and was eventually excommunicated by the LDS church for his extremism.” Carrie was the first of her siblings to escape the toxic brainwashing of her father’s creed. Declared legally estranged from her parents, Carrie struggled with her mental health for most of her adult life. But 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. How she evolved from a scared and abused motorhome-dwelling girl to a Harvard-educated professional is a riveting story. That’s the story she tells, in part, in this episode.

For regular listeners, you know I like to take on complicated subjects, and try to make clear what’s at stake for all of us. In this episode the Bill Walton Show we take a another deep dive into one of the most complicated and contentious areas of economic policy: International trade. International trade negotiations are incredibly complex multilevel games—there are negotiations not just with America’s trading partners, but with Congress, domestic constituencies, and rival factions within the executive branch. There are sharp – almost theological – differences in how trade policy ought to work. I was taught that protectionism was terrible and that free trade was the highest good, but then found few examples of countries that actually practice it. It’s now clear that we cannot simply trust the principles of “free trade” to solve our problems — that every trade policy represents a balancing of interests. The stakes have never been higher. Today we find ourselves in a position where our most important trading partner – China – has essentially revealed itself to be our mortal enemy. Trade is no longer a boring topic. To break all this down I’m delighted to be joined in this episode by Robert Lighthizer, our US Trade Representative in the Trump Administration. For more than 40 years, Bob Lighthizer has litigated, negotiated, and editorialized against the policies of one-sided “free trade” first in the Reagan Administration as Deputy Trade Rep and as a private lawyer. As President Trump’s U.S. Trade Representative, he fought against globalists, importers, lobbyists, foreign governments and big businesses whose interests diverged from those of the American workers and American security. Now Bob’s published a illuminating book “No Trade is Free” that for anyone interested in understanding the realities of international economic policymaking, this is the book. Part memoir, part history, and part policy analysis, Bob lays out in detail what he sees as the objectives of a practical approach to trade policy. Bob’s views on this subject have been remarkably consistent since the late 1990s when he editorialized against granting China admission to the WTO. At that time, he was a lonely voice in the wilderness. Now his views are mainstream. We cover a lot a ground in this episode, from the role trade disputes played in the American Revolution, the American System of tariffs used to build up American industry to the pivotal entry of China into the World Trade Organization. Since then China has become trade issue Number One. After China’s entry “it created an ecosystem and learned about the subsidies and started doing all the other things that made it go from being an enormous problem to being a cataclysmic one,” explains Bob. “There is no private sector in China.” “Outsiders make money in China only as long as the Communist Party of China allows you to make it. And when you’re not benefiting them, you’re out. And we have all these clever American businessmen who think, “Oh, I’m making money in China.” They don’t realize they’re simply being allowed.” “China’s purpose is for you to transfer know how, transfer technology, and help their ecosystem to get more business. And then you’ll see after a period of time, you won’t be useful anymore. And then, at that point, you’ll find yourself with a Chinese competitor who’s not only taken over your entire market in China but is now threatening your market in the United States.” “So the number one thing has to be decoupling with China without question. And there’s a number of specific steps, many of which I have outlined in the chapter on the China prescription. We have to right this ship. There’s a lot that needs to be done.” Listen in for a great overview of trade issues and what to do about China.

Until recently, no precise legal definition of sex—and especially the terms “male” and “female”—was needed because no one contested it. Up to now. Gender activists are rapidly moving to redefine sex in federal laws and regulations, such as Title IX, to include “gender identity.” If this succeeds, it will subvert all preexisting legal references to sex, contrary to their plain intent. The movement to redefine sex to include “gender identity” is part of a larger agenda to dissolve sex as a stable legal category and create chaos. This is a massive and infuriating issue and we need to understand the deeper agenda that lies underneath it. For some answers I’m joined in this episode with Dr Jay Richards, Director of the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at the Heritage Foundation about his recent essay on “Why States Must Define Sex Precisely”. “Why do we need to define male and female precisely? Well, as everyone now knows our institutions - our schools, corporations, government and our military - are now almost entirely suffused and saturated with something called gender ideology.” “Gender ideology denies the reality, or at least the adequacy, of describing human beings as male and female in biological terms. That sounds crazy and extreme to people. So they think that can't be what's happening. But that is exactly what's happening.” We need to win the fight to define the terms. The federal government under Joe Biden has been moving rapidly to redefine sex in federal law and regulations to include gender identity. Title IX, the law that guarantees women equal treatment in federally funded high schools and colleges sports programs, will be gutted. We know why we separate men in women's sports. It's based on justice and a recognition of these fundamental differences between men and women. That would be denied here. Defining sex as gender identity in Title IX means that if a man wants to compete in female sports and is denied that, he will have his civil rights violated simply if he identifies as a woman. Or in another instance, if a man who has raped and murdered women is sentenced to a men's prison, and then self identifies as woman, he will have to be moved to a women's prison. The Deeper Agenda The gender identity issue is part of a mosaic of a larger effort to deconstruct every institution in society. It’s roots lie in cultural Marxism, in something called conflict theory - as conflict between two groups - oppressed and oppressors. “The cultural Marxists tell us that you really can only properly explain social reality, human beings, society and culture in terms of a conflict between oppressors and the oppressed. It’s a cartoonish type of sociology.” Look at the real meaning of the term “queer” in LGBTQ. It’s a verb. “To queer is to de-center or destabilize our categories of reality. You're thinking sex, you're thinking boy and girl. What they're claiming is that mere stereotypes have been imposed upon us by doctors, namely our sex assigned at birth. The oppressors.” “This has never been about the one in a hundred thousand adult men who want to cross dress. It's never been about drag queen shows. It's about the sexualization of children and the destruction of the reality of the sexual binary in our culture and our language, and in our laws. That's what this is about.” They’re driving to redefine things that everyone in all times and places knows and understands, and disparage them as Western oppressive categories. “It's a cultural wrecking ball. This is not serious philosophy, this is certainly not serious science. These are power hungry utopians using whatever tools are at hand to destroy the present order.” There’s a lot more about their agenda in this episode. Listen in.

"Would you want your DNA and other healthcare data going to an authoritarian regime with a record of exploiting that data for repression and surveillance? Let’s be specific, would you want it going to China?” That’s just one of the questions my returning guest national security expert Brandon Weichert and I cover in this far-reaching conversation about China's BioTech ambitions and their alarming implications. Brandon Weichert, author of Biohacked: China's Race to Control Life is a leading expert in geopolitics and emerging technologies and who been described as a “panic-and-anxiety inducing scholar.” He lives by Dr. Herman Kahn’s mantra that “I’m against fashionable thinking” and you won’t hear much of that in this disturbing, yet at the same time entertaining conversation. In the realm of cutting-edge biotechnology, the relentless drive of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to exploit emerging BioTech technologies casts a dark shadow over the global stage. "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. This strategic vision of bio-dominance, under Xi's ambitious plan, underscores China's determination to gain a formidable edge in shaping the future. 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

This episode is about the catastrophic dead ends we face if we plow blindly ahead with the promised “green energy”future. Powerful forces obsessed with CO2 and climate change are determined to replace hydrocarbon fuels with solar and wind energy and other yet to be invented technologies. It’s a obsession fueled by a toxic mix of religious fervor, old fashioned greed and a “degrowth” agenda aimed at dismantling the modern global economy. But setting these agendas aside, has anyone anywhere adequately explained the physics and the economics of the so-called green utopia? My guest on this episode, Mark Mills, has thought it through and has a stark message for us, an inconvenient truth. “There won’t be a world powered entirely by wind and solar or batteries. The reason I say that is because it is not possible. We don’t have the materials and we can’t afford it in either environmental or economic terms.” Mark Mills probably knows more about this than anyone. He’s a senior 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.

Backstage with Bill Walton - In this episode I compare notes and share stories with veteran dealmaker and entrepreneur Marc Morgenstern. In today’s polarized world, where people seem intent on not agreeing, Marc has had a long and successful career helping opposing sides come to agreement. He’s completed billions of dollars of M&A transactions, buying, selling, and financing businesses as a managing partner of law firm Kahn Kleiman and as a venture capitalist. Marc’s new book The Soul of the Deal: Creative Frameworks for Buying, Selling, and Investing in Any Business creatively reframes and radically changes how we can approach dealmaking of any type. Marc is a brilliant synthesist who weaves in, for example, what he’s learned as a successful door-to-door encyclopedia salesman, as a leader of several rock bands in college (Yale) and as a lifelong fan of The Grateful Dead. He’s come to believe - and I think this is right - that much of the conflict in 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.

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine grinds on, it’s nearly impossible for the ordinary observer to figure out what’s really happening. One of the problems is that war news is generated primarily by Ukrainian propaganda, which is endlessly parroted in the Western media. Anytime there is contradictory information – for example, mention of Ukraine’s high casualties – Kiev pushes back so hard that Western leaders go silent. But what is clear is that looming on the horizon is the very real possibility of a nuclear war, as more and more European countries are drawn in to the conflict. The stakes could not be higher. To understand what’s happening as the Ukraine situation grows more dire, I’m joined on this episode by my frequent guest Dr. Stephen Bryen, a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy and by David P. Goldman – Spengler columnist and Deputy Editor for Asia Times and PJ Media. Stephen has over 50 years national security experience that includes serving as 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. Washington is facing dangerous choices. “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?” “Reality is starting to set in a little bit in Europe that the next Russian target is not going to be in Ukraine. It’s going to be in Europe.” 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.” So here we are. Ukraine is being reduced to rubble. Russia is not going to be a liberal democracy. “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. Will Russia be willing to sit down and discuss a deal? Stephen and David have a surprising candidate from within the Administration who might be able pull it off.

"Commuting to office work is obsolete. It is now infinitely easier, cheaper, and faster to do what the 19th century could not do, move information, and with it office work to where the people are, the tools to do so are already here. The telephone two-way video, electronic mail, the fax machine, the personal computer, and so on." Peter Drucker (1989) In 2020, over 30 years later, futurist and management guru Peter Drucker’s prediction came true with a bang. With the mandated COVID lockdowns, suddenly everybody had to learn to work from home. Office occupancy plummeted from 90% to 10% and we all learned about how to Zoom. Since then people are going back to the office, but occupancy still averages only 40 to 50% depending on the market, and in New York lower. So what’s going to happen next? In this episode, I talk with commercial real estate expert extraordinaire John Scheurer about the prospects for office work and office buildings. John heads the real estate investing arm of 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.

In this episode we get to talk with George F. Will about his latest collection of essays, American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020, and also about his magnum opus, The Conservative Sensibility. Joining in on the conversation are John Tamny, Vice President of FreedomWorks, editor of RealClearMarkets, and author of When Politicians Panicked, and Don Boudreaux, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, research scholar at Mercatus Center, who runs the go-to blog for free market economic thinking, Cafe Hayek. Always witty and erudite, George offers up his views on today’s pressing concerns, queried, challenged and amplified by John and Don, two very smart men. Among our questions: How and when do Americans recover the liberties lost from over two years of government lockdowns and mandates? Why did so many libertarians acquiesce? Public choice theory says that people in government are not any different than people in the private 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.

The 2022 winter Olympics in Beijing China opens a few weeks from now, and the International Olympic Committee's 2015 decision to have China host the event looks ever more dubious. Since then, it's become obvious to most observers that China, never a champion of human rights, is growing ever more oppressive. It’s Communist Party leadership has become even more deeply committed to preserving its monopoly on power through state sponsored repression, surveillance, and indoctrination. Witness its takeover of Hong Kong, the internment of Muslims in Xinjiang, the disappearance of tennis star Peng Shuai, its totalitarian social credit system, the Covid coverup and mounting threats to democratic Taiwan. So why are democracies from all over the world moving ahead to send their athletes to a country so antithetical to their values? My guests for this episode provide a first hand, clear eyed 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 China Change.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. Listen in as my guests, with first hand experience of the CCP’s iron hand, talk about what’s at stake for the cause of freedom in the world.

First year economics classes usually begin the semester with the principles of supply and demand. You learn that incentives matter and that to suggest otherwise is to betray basic principles of economics – and human nature. You learn that you can ignore or violate these fundamental laws, but that you cannot change them. You learn that throughout history the societies that have succeeded recognize and respect these economic laws – they use them to their advantage. Well, someone needs to get this message to progressive Democrats – and soon – because they have become completely unmoored from economic realities. And their agenda will end in economic disaster. In fact, it’s already happening. Joining me on this episode to talk about economics and his work with Donald Trump, is my old friend, Kevin Hassett, who served in the Trump administration as Senior Advisor to the President and as his Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. His latest book The Drift, analyzes America’s 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.

It’s almost two years on from the onset of the Covid virus and we know a lot now that we didn’t then. Society should be healing. But we live in vitriolic and partisan times, and widespread disagreement abounds about what it was, what it is, what it isn’t and how to cope with it. Yet to those who understand how economies work, this much seems clear: governments’ blunderbuss one-size-fits-all lockdowns and mandates have turned a manageable public health problem into a social, medical and economic catastrophe. It did not have to be this way. Joining me on this episode to talk about the price we’ve paid and where we go from here are two of our most independent economic and social thinkers: Donald Boudreaux, professor of economics at George Mason University, who runs the “go to” blog “Cafe Hayek” which has become a critical resource for facts about Covid and sensible response strategies. And John Tamny, editor of Real Clear Markets, a Forbes Magazine editor and the author of “The End of Work” and “When Politicians Panicked: The New Coronavirus, Expert Opinion, and a Tragic Lapse of Reason” John and Don cover a lot of ground: the damage done to our civil liberties, the labor market, the politicization of “science”, the madness of declaring businesses essential or non-essential, supply chains, social media censorship, how lockdowns were used to usher in the new era of mail-in ballots and how rule by experts – think Anthony Fauci – failed. We needed leadership wise enough to let sensible Americans take the measures we used in every pandemic over the last century. Instead, we got draconian lockdowns and mandates. As Don clarifies, “No doubt, a lot of these people thought they were acting in the best interest of society, but it’s completely antithetical to the principles of a free society.” Listen in here as we explore how to recover our Liberty.

America is waking up to the capture of our institutions by the “progressive” woke Left. Beginning with K-12 education, universities, the media, and Hollywood, it’s now moved into many churches, our military and corporate boardrooms. This didn’t happen overnight. In this wide ranging and thoughtful conversation with Mark Meckler and Eric O’Keefe, we explore its roots going back to an obscure Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci writing in the 1920’s and his strategy to gain control of cultural institutions. Eric explains that “Gramsci called it ‘the long march through the institutions.’” It took 100 years, but now it’s arrived. We also look at one of the drivers of the American Revolution: the contempt that elites in London held for Americans, even the successful ones. ==== Guests: Mark Meckler, one of America’s leading grassroots activists, founder of Citizens for Self Governance, Convention of States, co-founder of the Tea Party Party Patriots and interim CEO of Parler. and Eric O’Keefe who chairs the Convention of States, co-founded U.S. Term Limits and the Wisconsin Club for Growth and a long time leader in the movement to re-establish citizen control of government. ==== Of grave concern to all of us is the ability of conservatives to communicate with each other through social media. Mark shares his experience as interim CEO of Parler, the social media company which was put out of business by Amazon. “What happened to Parler is, I think much more serious than most people understand,” warns Mark. “Not only was Parler taken down, all the ancillary services that are required to be alive on the web, to have a presence on the web, disappeared as well.” So sue Amazon? Amazon spends over a billion dollars a year in legal fees and was utterly unconcerned by any Parler lawsuit. Another looming issue is what Mark calls the “tech stack”, the complex array of “many, many more layers, another 5, 10 layers below that of technical infrastructure that’s required for any business or organization to exist in any sort of scale on the web.” There’s a lot of importance in this episode – Eric’s chilling John Doe experience after defending Scott Walker, the Convention of States, Merrick Garland’s attempt to chill parents speech, ways to cut the Administrative State down to size, and more – I hope you’ll find the time to listen in.

I open this show fondly quoting Shakespeare about how “one man in his time plays many parts.” He could have been writing about my friend and one of my personal heroes Tony Perkins Tony’s indeed a man of many extraordinary and effective parts. He’s president of the Family Research Council. He’s been chairman of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom and past President of the Council for National Policy. He’s a syndicated radio host. He’s an author of a terrific book called No Fear of New Generation Standing For Truth. He’s a Baptist minister. He was a Louisiana State Representative, a TV reporter, a Marine, a policeman and when he was five years old, he led his father to Jesus. In this wide ranging conversation we talk about his journey, the importance of faith for a thriving society and economy, the threat from China, but at about 14 minutes in we get to the heart of matter. The number one thing we have to do is take back control of education in America. The lockdowns gave parents – and really forced parents – to pay attention to what their kids were being taught in the schools. They saw clearly that schools have morphed from teaching children to excel in the basics and instead are working to train “social justice” activists. And parents are revolting against the all across the country. Tony explains, “We’ve been working with activists across the country that are requesting documents through the FOIA requests.” “My prediction is that this will eclipse the Tea Party movement of 2010 in the midterm election. Parents have had enough.” The midterm 2022 election will see energized parents and families in a wholly new way. As Tony puts it, “I see this as really a… it’s an army of mama bears that are being raised up across the country because if you get between a mama bear and her cubs you have a problem.” Parents are given the authority and the responsibility to teach and to train their children. Now you can delegate the authority to a public school, a private school or to a tutor, but you can never delegate the responsibility. Parents are the ones ultimately responsible for the training of their children. And parents understand that. The government schools are now not working in the best interest of our children or our families. In fact, they’ve been driving a wedge between parent and child. That’s the fundamental divide. Do you think that children should be raised by the state or do you think children should be raised by parents? Marxists say the State and our American education elite wholeheartedly agrees. Parents should just stay away from schools. Case in point, Attorney General Merrick Garland, who appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and defended his memo saying that because the parents are threatening the school boards with violence, he now is instructing the FBI and all the other instruments of the Justice Department to work with local authorities to prevent parents’ speech in schools. So concerned parents, and all Americans really, need to take a stand. “This is now how I close my radio program,” Tony clarifies. “When you’ve prayed, because He says that we’re to pray, and when you’ve taken your stand, when you’ve prepared and you’ve taken your stand, when you’ve done all, you stand. There is no retreat, there is no surrender, we stand firm.”

In the past decade, America’s big businesses have increasingly moved to the political left. For evidence, take a look at their actions and stances on critical race theory indoctrination, vaccine mandates, radical climate change agendas, boardroom “diversity”, doing business and making common cause with a hostile China, etc … on issue after issue they align with the “woke” left. Now even the Federal Reserve and the Securities Exchange Commission are weighing in to support these agendas. What does this mean for ordinary Americans, and what can be done to push back? Joining me to explore this are: Matt Schlapp, Chairman of the American Conservative Union, which sponsors CPAC, founder of Cove Strategy, and long time advisor to major corporations, and Justin Danhof, Executive Vice President of the National Center for Public Policy, who has been waging a courageous battle against creeping corporate socialism for years. If you feel like American lovers of liberty are fighting against mounting odds, you are right. Even the big money management firms like Blackrock and Vanguard are pushing the left’s agenda. Whether cynics, or true believers, they are putting their agenda ahead of investors as you will learn as we explore the dirty little secret of “ESG” investing. Also in this episode: Ford Foundation’s backing Black Lives Matter, the “degrowth” people behind the climate change agenda, shareholder proposals that have nothing to do with companies … and other alarming things that you need to know about. There’s a lot to unpack here, and Justin and Matt are outstanding guides to this terrain. We offer several lines of action. We can push back and must.

Your eyes may glaze over when you hear people talking about the “administrative state.” But if you care about liberty, it’s long past time to start paying close attention to what the Administrative State is and how impervious it has become to election outcomes. Today in Washington, we have what’s become effectively a fourth branch of government: an unelected permanent bureaucracy of self-regarding “expert” progressive elites who staff and run the federal agencies. And if you believe they are hostile to conservatives you would be right. Joining me for a first-hand look at this is Michael Pack, who was selected by President Trump to run the U.S. Agency for Global Media in March 2017, two months after President Trump was sworn in. Agency leadership, along with others in the federal bureaucracy and eventually Democrats in the Senate, blocked his confirmation for three years and three months. As a celebrated film-maker who knew what he was doing, he was too dangerous to their agenda. The USAGM has a vital responsibility for all government international broadcasting – including Voice of America – to broadcast to over 350 million people a week in over 70 languages. When he was finally sworn in as the Agency head, Michael Pack’s essential goal was to return the news services to their legally mandated mission: to report news that is “accurate, objective, and comprehensive” (in the words of the VOA charter, which is U.S. law), and to promote American ideals like democracy and human rights around the world. “But from the moment Donald Trump was elected president until the day he left office, government officials refused to follow his orders that conflicted with their own views, in spite of their obligation to serve whoever is president.” Michael calls this the “death of democracy.” “Democracy dies when the elected president doesn’t have a chance to implement his agenda,” Michael explains. When Voice of America was established in the 50’s, the American consensus was to project an image of American democracy and freedom and constitutional government to the rest of the world as an example of how they could live and as a beacon of freedom. But today that consensus has vanished. The American left now sees America as fatally flawed, and those views predominate among the USAGM hierarchy who produced a five part series targeted to Africa celebrating Black Lives Matter that portrayed America as a racist society. What’s happening in the USAGM is a microcosm of what’s happened at bigger agencies like the Justice Department, State Department, the Department of Defense, and the intelligence agencies. “No matter that Donald Trump was the duly elected president of the United States, federal bureaucrats did not accept that. After all, they knew better how to run the country, so that is what they did. This is tyranny, pure and simple — government by unelected bureaucrats, subverting the will of the majority.” This is a riveting story. Please listen in.

In this episode, we’re talking again about the coercive power of the Administrative State and its serious threat to our constitutional freedoms. No other development in contemporary American law denies more rights to more Americans. Joining me to discuss is Mark Chenoweth, Executive Director, and Jenin Younes, Litigation Counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) a public interest litigation and pro bono advocacy law firm. NCLA represents both plaintiffs and defendants engaged with administrative state actions to make sure that their civil liberties are not being violated. Although Americans still enjoy the shell of their Republic, the administrative state has brought about exactly the sort of government that the Constitution was designed to prevent. “The kinds of protections that you would expect to have, if say a prosecutor from the Department of Justice were going after you in a federal district court, those same protections don’t exist if it’s a federal agency going after you in an administrative adjudication.” “We’re looking for cases where we can change the law,” explains Mark. For example: Challenging Covid-19 regulations and orders imposed by executive decree. The NCLA class action suit for naturally immune federal employees against Covid vaccine mandates. When NASDAQ attacks! The problem with mandated diversity quotas for corporate boards. Is this the SEC’s job? It’s vital that many more Americans recognize the administrative state’s unique threat to civil liberties. “If the government can get people in the habit of just doing what they’re told and controlling them through administrative actions, then that makes it easier to accomplish whatever socio-political objectives that the government may have.” Thomas Hobbes titled his book on politics Leviathan after the Bible’s monstrous sea creature. Seems a pretty apt metaphor for what we’re up against today.

Unprecedented government measures to stop the spread of an unstoppable virus have morphed into mortal threats to our liberties and civil rights, not just here in the United States, but worldwide. First we were told that lockdowns, masks, and social distancing stop the spread of the virus. Do these things and we would be safe. There’s no clear correlation between these measures and the spread of the virus. Then the CDC changed the definition of herd immunity on its website. They defined the concept to account for vaccines only, and erased the role of infections themselves. Winston Smith (1984) would understand. Now, it’s only vaccines, vaccine mandates, vaccine passports that will do the trick. Natural immunity doesn’t matter. Why? One big casualty of government responses to the coronavirus over the last two years is the loss of trust in our public health establishment. Joining me to talk about this is James Patrick, documentary filmmaker, whose film Planet Lockdown is coming 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.

Over the course of roughly four generations, from around 1950 to the present, American culture has been transformed from a culture that believed in the value of self-control into a culture that celebrates self-expression. And that “self-expression” has now twisted into a new form of anger – political wrath – which makes a performance art out of our darkest emotions. So argues my guest on this episode, Peter Wood, author of Wrath: America Enraged and 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project and President of the National Association of Scholars. “The question is not whether we didn’t have to deal with anger before, but how we channeled it. What kind of cultural frame did we put around it? And that began to change. After World War II, the hero type of Gary Cooper who could maintain his cool under extreme pressure gave way to, think, of Allen Ginsberg, and his famous poem Howl.” “We’ve brought anger into our music, movies, and personal lives; and now, having step by step relinquished our old inhibitions around feeling and expressing anger, we have turned anger into a way of wielding political power.” But the “angri-culture,” as he calls it, doesn’t promise happy days again. It promises revenge…and a crisis that could destroy our republic. Are both sides equally to blame? No. Politics are not conservatives’ obsession. Conservatives tend to see politics as just one part of life, and they’ve got other things going on, their family, their jobs, or church, their clubs, that sort of thing. And when you have a life, it’s hard to take it terribly seriously that the other side is just simmering with rage all the time. It seems that if there is conservative rage in this era it is “further prodded by a progressive elite that seems to take sadistic delight in devising new ways to torment ordinary Americans,” says Peter. ‘Antiracism’ is a psyops campaign aimed at institutionalizing discrimination against Whites. The 1619 Project is an attempt to erase American history and put in its place an elaborately constructed lie in which slavery explains everything. ‘Critical race theory’ (CRT) further amplifies the message that American success is built entirely of the bricks and mortar of White racial supremacy. The elite preaches and now practices the benefits of abolishing our national border and flooding the country with illegal immigrants, at the expense of working-class Americans. Progressives manipulated the Wuhan virus epidemic by turning a manageable health crisis into a major economic disaster, an excuse for stripping Americans of their civil liberties, and an incitement of mass hysteria. And progressives, claiming the need to protect ‘voter rights,’ seek to lock into place the subterfuges they used to elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.” The list goes on … and on. Adds Peter, “and now we have the recategorization after the fact of the events on Capitol hill as an insurrection, which strikes me as a deliberate effort to marginalize dissent in this country.” Liberty loving Americans feel this tremendous anger and a sense of betrayal that our institutions have gone to the dark side. Yet we very much do not want to be provoked into something that we would all regret. Listen and consider as Peter and I wrestle with this difficult topic.

Today’s episode is a treasure trove of important facts that we all should know about technology, society and the future. My guest is once again Mark Mills, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute – who focuses on science, technology, energy, and future manufacturing technologies – and who has just published The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and A Roaring 2020s Conventional wisdom as to how technology will change the future is wrong. And what is quite wrong is the view that the only technological revolution that matters will be found with renewable energy and electric cars. According to Mills, a convergence of technologies will instead drive a broad economic boom over the coming decade. It will come not from any single big invention, but from the confluence of radical advances in technology’s three domains: microprocessors, materials, and machines. At the center of all of this is the Cloud, history’s biggest infrastructure, which is itself based on the building blocks of next-generation microprocessors and artificial intelligence. For an optimistic take on what’s ahead, Mark dives into this, and more. But we also talk about some of the dangerous dead ends we face if we plow ahead blindly with a promised “green” energy future. As we all know, today’s elites are obsessed with climate change and replacing fossil fuels with solar and wind energy and other yet-to-be-invented technologies. But has anyone really thought this through? Wouldn’t now be a good time to assess what actually doing this would look like. Mark Mills has thought it through and has a stark message – an inconvenient truth: “There won’t be a world powered entirely by wind and solar or batteries. The reason I say that is because it is not possible. We don’t have the materials and we can’t afford it in either environmental or economic terms. ” To switch from hydrocarbons oil, gas, and coal to wind solar and batteries, the quantity of materials acquired to be extracted from the earth to produce the same unit of energy goes up a thousand percent – that’s ten times. Mark jokes that people believe in a new element “unobtainium” with perfect attributes: high energy density, it weighs nothing, costs nothing, and getting out of the earth is easy. “You have to mine stuff, build stuff. You always have to do that. Everything starts with mining.” Take electric cars. The battery in an electric car weighs about a thousand pounds. Most people don’t know that the thousand pound battery is replacing a 60 pound fuel tank. To make the thousand pound battery, to fabricate it, ou have to mine and dig up somewhere on the earth, 500,000 pounds of materials. Nickel copper, the manganese, lithium, carbonates, all of that. All of that requires mining equipment and mining machinery, almost all of which is oil fired. This is just one reality. Listen in as Mark also explains the true costs of solar and wind technologies. They are not what you thought. We need to be clear about what we’re doing. The most valuable thing in the universe is the time that we have to live on earth. Much of what history has been devoted to is making our time available to do other things which translates into speed and convenience and comforts. And making time always takes energy. We need to stay smart about this and Mark explains how.

Albert Einstein said science can only flourish in an atmosphere of free speech. Today, despite claims about “following the science” with regard to Covid 19, this is simply not happening. Why? Because “they” have taken away one of the essential elements of science: allowing people to disagree based on facts learned through experiments and observation, reconciling practical knowledge and ends with scientific laws. This is how science works. This is how freedom works. This is how good things happen in a free society because people are free to get information and disagree. Nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth. By contrast, look at every totalitarian regime, what do they do? They squash free speech. And when that happens, people suffer. Who are “they?” I think we all know by now and it seems that they have the totalitarian playbook well in hand. Facebook, Twitter, all the tech giants and the mainstream media have all decreed that if you say something that is at odds with the CDC or 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. 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.

The Reconciliation Bill, which Congress is rushing to pass in a matter of days, will push America over the brink into financial and social catastrophe. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is hellbent on this as her legacy project to turn the U.S. into a European entitlement state. No one can explain what is at stake more plainly than economist Steve Moore, my guest on this episode of The Bill Walton Show: “This Reconciliation Bill, and by the way, do not call it a $3.5 trillion spending bill, this is $5 trillion on top of the $2 trillion they spent earlier this year, on top of the $6 trillion budget that they are passing and on top of the broad $1 trillion infrastructure bill.” “You add it up, in one year, Congress is authorizing $12 trillion of spending, which is more money than the United States government spent to finance the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War I, World War II, the moon landing, the transcontinental railroad and the interstate highway system.” “We 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.