The Bill Walton Show

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 is hard to overstate the assault on civil liberties we are witnessing in America today.

What began over a year and a half ago as temporary government measures to keep us safe from a virus spread from China, have now metastasized into something much more sinister, spreading to all aspects of societies around the world.

We need to name this thing, understand what's happening to us, and how to stop this threat to our freedoms.

For some answers, in this episode I talk with Jefferey Tucker, founder of the Brownstone Institute and author of Liberty or Lockdown. Jeffery, a man with a serious message and mission, is a delightful and engaging raconteur who turns policy discussion into a fascinating journey into truth.

This is not an episode to skip. Some highlights from Jeffrey:

"We've dealt with pandemics in the past. In the modern age and the 20th century, we did very well intelligently. And suddenly 2020 comes along and we decided to forget everything and pursued 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.

In this episode we talk with Ambassador Pete Hoekstra, formerly Chair of the House Intelligence Committee and now Chairman of the Center for Security Policy Board of Advisors.

Some of the many things we explore:

• Biden's preposterous claim that "America is not at war" seemingly oblivious to China President Xi's aggressive global ambitions.
• And the Administration may be done with the Afghanistan war, but that doesn't mean Afghanistan is done with us. Its leaders still are driven to establish a caliphate and kill infidels, and now they have $85 billion in US military equipment to help them do it.
• While there are some differences among al Qaeda, the Taliban and ISIS-K, they agree on one important thing – they hate us and still want to destroy us.
• There's bipartisan agreement in Congress that Blinken, Milley and Austin failed us in Afghanistan. The honorable thing for them to do is resign. That's not going to happen. Another option: Congress should censure 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.

Election Integrity: Why we don't have it, how we lost it and what to do about it. In the election of 2020 we saw a dramatic loosening of the chain of custody of ballots. We saw an indiscriminate use of mass mail-in ballots. We saw a verification process junked and pushed aside. And as a consequence, we saw major irregularities in that election. The result: a waning confidence among voters in the integrity of our election system. The issue is critical. If we don't get our elections right, we lose our American Republic. We lose our liberty. Joining me on this episode are two of our leading players in the fight to restore election integrity - and co-authors of a seminal piece in the Yale Law Review "The Other Voting Right". Ken Blackwell, in his role with The Center for Election Integrity of the America First Policy Institute. And Ken Klukowski, who was senior counselor in the US Department of Justice and the Trump White House. Right now, the Democrats in Congress are trying to push through a power grab to federalize election law and make perpetual the abuses we saw in 2020. The John Lewis Voting Rights Act (HR4) would essentially eliminate state's rights and the decentralization of power that the framers established by granting states the authority to set the time, manner, and place of elections. This Bill must not become law. Also, in this episode we explore what the gold standard should be to insure election integrity. In 2020, ballot harvesting was a big source of abuse and we talk about how Republicans in Virginia - where ballot harvesting is legal - could turn the tables on Democrats in this November's election. Listen in and learn from two of our top experts about how to restore the integrity of our elections.

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.

Joe Biden has mandated that businesses with more than 100 employees require every worker to be vaccinated or face weekly testing. It's estimated this will impact over 80 million people or almost two thirds of the country's workforce.

Setting aside his dictatorial and offensive tone, does Joe Biden really have the power to do this or is it that under the guise of "keeping us safe," federal state and local governments have trampled our constitutional rights with draconian regulations and emergency orders with arbitrary executive decrees?

This points towards even a bigger threat to our freedoms: an enormous and growing Administrative State and its threat to every American's constitutional rights.

With me on this episode is Phillip Hamburger, the founder of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a scholar of constitutional law whose contributions are unrivaled by any US legal scholar in driving the national debate on the first amendment, government administrative power, and the 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."

In this Part 2 of my show with John Mauldin, we range far and wide peering into an optimistic future for humanity.

Near term, things look pretty bleak, but when you step back and look at the innovations and technologies that will end up enhancing and prolonging human life, the future holds a lot of promise. Billions of people have been lifted out of poverty in the past 50 years.

Some excerpts:

• We're living in a financial bubble and a massive bubble of government promises that can never be fulfilled.
• "I see a reset ahead when these bubbles burst, and it will be a tough adjustment," explains John
• "It's not riding the tiger that's the problem, it's the dismount."
• "My job as an investment manager, as an economic thinker and writer, is to help my clients get through to the other side. What can you do? There are things that we can do and great companies that are still going to thriving on the other side of the great reset."
• There's a lot 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.

The Afghanistan debacle.

An in-depth look at its implications with Dr Stephen Bryen, Senior Fellow at the American Center for Democracy and Kyle Shideler, Director and Senior Analyst for the Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, both with the Center for Security Policy.

So many questions. Why did we leave so precipitously? Who was behind it? Where do we go from here?

Why, when President Trump proposed withdrawing US troops, did the US military tell him that was a bad idea and that they wouldn't do it.

But then, when Mr. Biden announced a complete pullout and retreat, there wasn't a word from the Pentagon saying we shouldn't do it.

In fact, they embraced it.

And now Biden has the audacity to blame Trump for something he never did.

What does this means for future of the United States? What was in our national interest by cutting and running from Afghanistan?

The Taliban now have enough arms, including all the equipment that we left behind that it's larger now than seven or eight European states and Ukraine.

Look at a map. China is eyeing the $1 trillion of minerals and wealth in Afghanistan that could be exploited. The Turks want the Kabul airport and Bagram Air Base. Russia is eager to court the Taliban.

And Iran, who Obama and Biden want to replace the United States in the Middle East, is now back in the picture.

Biden's intentions?

"We are in the middle of a major strategic retreat," say Dr Bryen, "Not only in Afghanistan, but everywhere in the Middle East and the Pacific."

For the first time ever, the Biden Administration directed our office of the Director of National Intelligence to do reports on domestic threats, not international threats.

"I think there is definitely something about the Biden administration," says Kyle Shideler, "that they see actual enemies abroad as friends and they see fellow countrymen who disagree with them as enemies."

So does Biden have no foreign policy?

"No, he has a foreign policy," explains Stephen Bryen, "retreat from obligations to our allies and former allies as much as possible, line up with Iran and then find a way to make a deal with the Chinese. I think that's coming. I think we'd be fools not to realize that he's going to sell us out in China."

Strong words. But after you listen to this, I think you will agree.

It's on everybody's mind right now. Emotions are raw.

• • What were we doing there?
  • Where we're going to go from here?
  • What this means for the country, and the rest of the world, going forward, since we cannot trust this Administration's leadership to protect America.

With me for some plain talk about this are some of my brain trust, the smart people involved with The Bill Walton Show. Today we've got Rich McFadden, Greg Corombos and Brian McNicoll.

We get into what we're all seeing and feeling and what we think's going to happen next. Some predictions, mostly questions.

After decades of cuts to shipbuilding and maintenance, the United States Navy has been stripped down to a fleet barely larger than it was 100 years ago, in 1916.

Meanwhile, China has dramatically increased its spending on its Navy, as well as on its Air Force, cyberspace and electronic warfare capabilities. Alarmingly, Beijing is building islands in the South China Sea, threatening trade routes and menacing allies.

President Trump made it a priority to expand the American "blue water" fleet to 355 battle-force ships. His plan would have increased shipbuilding by only $6.7 billion and would have launched us on a trajectory to protect America's maritime supremacy.

Shortly after taking office, Joe Biden slashed this from his budget.

With me to explore this and many other national defense concerns - in a fascinating, wide-ranging and strategic conversation - is Russ Vought, the founder of The Center for Renewing America and the Trump Administration's Director of the Office of Management and Budget

and Arthur Herman, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute focusing on defense, energy and technology issues and author of To Rule the Waves and Freedom Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II

As a maritime nation, the US is dependent on control of the sea to protect its people as well as its flow of trade. At its founding, America understood that its strength lay in a strong navy.

But in the last seventy years, the United States has wandered far from this wisdom, and suffered endless "boots on the ground" debacles.

Emphasizing sea power - and air, space and cyber power - would get us back on track.

This is an issue that is barely talked about, but needs to be.