The Bill Walton Show

On June 28th 2021, George Mason University announced its reopening policy related to the COVID-19 for the fall 2021 semester. The policy required all unvaccinated students and staff members - including those who can demonstrate natural immunity from prior COVID-19 infections - to wear masks on campus, physically distance and undergo frequent COVID-19 testing. On July 22, GMU emailed the policy to students and employees and threatened disciplinary action—including termination of employment—against any who do not comply with the vaccine mandate. The university's website describing its vaccination policy reiterated this threat. On August 3, 2021, GMU Professor Todd Zywicki, represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), filed a complaint in the Eastern District of Virginia, challenging GMU's so-called "reopening policy." "This coercive mandate violates my constitutional right to bodily integrity for no compelling reason," explains Prof Zywicki. "For those of us who have acquired natural immunity, vaccination provides none of the benefits of vaccination with all of the costs." At issue. Are GMU and other institutions across the country ignoring science, and within their rights, to force mandatory vaccines on even those with naturally acquired immunity. "Despite solid scientific evidence, GMU continues to refuse to recognize that Covid-19 vaccination is medically unnecessary for students, faculty, and staff with naturally acquired immunity demonstrated with antibody testing," says Jenin Younes, lead counsel in Zywicki's complaint. As it turns out, in this case GMU has ended up granting him a personal medical exemption, but it's unclear how far this would extend to others. There is a lot more to unpack from this case about "mandates" and our constitutional rights, as Todd and Jenin explain in this episode.

In this episode I'm joined by John Mauldin the best-selling author of Bull's Eye Investing: Targeting Real Returns in a Smoke and Mirrors Market and whose "Strategic Investors Conference" is considered among the best events in the business. This is the 21st anniversary of John's newsletter Thoughts from the Frontline aimed at helping individual investors and institutions develop a clearer understanding of the forces driving the global economy and investment markets. John has a lot of concerns, as do I, about the fate of the U.S. economy given the avalanche of spending and social engineering programs coming out of Washington. It's spending $6 trillion on a long list of progressive dreams, raising taxes and killing incentives for entrepreneurship and growth. "I don't know any other way to say it, but it's a guaranteed recession. It just is. You cannot take 15 to 20% extra out of the economy and expect it to perform," says John. What's happening is otherworldly. You can't raise taxes enough to pay for this kind of spending, so you're going to have to borrow, or you're going to have to inflate. On our present course, it's going to be both. John estimates total U.S. debt in 10 years to be around $50 trillion. We just seem to be adding to what John calls "fingers of instability." His metaphor being that we're building an unstable financial sandpile leading to a collapse. Long term, we're both believers in human ingenuity and expect huge advances in flourishing and growth. But today? "We have a bubble in both financial markets and government promises," warns John. How long does this go on before they pop? We are now getting ready to find out. Please join in for a sobering, yet enlightening conversation.

My guest this week is economist Steve Moore

Our topic: the economy and how the trillion upon trillion dollar spending orgy in Washington is going to cause irreparable damage to America.

"This is an extremely dangerous time for our country. What happens over the course of the next three or four months will have decades worth of repercussions," explains Steve.

"The people who are running Washington right now are out of control. I think they're crazy. Joe Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer have an agenda to truly radically transform our country" and not for the better.

"They are targeting the productive class, the people who produce things, the people who work, the people who save, the people who invest, the people who start businesses."

They want to eliminate incentives for people to work, save and invest; all the key drivers of growth.

By the end of 2021, federal debt held by the public is projected to equal 102 percent of GDP.

Debt that high and rapidly rising increases the probability of a fiscal crisis, 70's era inflation and ultimately risks the U.S. dollar's role as the world's reserve currency.

It is time to wake up to the fact that our country's financial destiny is being determined by people in Washington who have virtually no private sector business or capital markets experience. These are people who have no idea how to create wealth.

Steve "looked at the top people in the Biden administration, starting with the top, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, the treasury secretary, the labor secretary are the people running the FTC, the SEC. Out of the top 40, how many years of business experience combined do these people have?"

The answer is dismaying.

This is an ugly story, but one you need to know. Listen in, then call Congress to tell them to stop this madness.

We are living in a complicated and dangerous time in America. American intelligence and national security should not be part of partisan politics but that is exactly what they've become.

"We saw it towards the end of the Obama administration, and the transition into the Trump administration," according to my guest, Ambassador Pete Hoekstra. "The weaponization of intelligence and the intelligence community against an incoming president of the United States. And it has continued right up to today with reports that the NSA has been listening to Tucker Carlson's phone calls and screening his emails."

As former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands, Pete has keen insights into the problems plaguing our intelligence community.

Moreover, America's divisions over national security have never been greater, explains my other guest Fred Fleitz, President of the Center for Security Policy who served as Deputy Assistant to the President and as Chief of Staff of the National Security Council.

"The globalist elite sees the U.S. as the main threat to international security. They would like to reign in the United States. They don't see China as a threat. They don't see Russia as a threat. They see America as a threat,"

By contrast, President Trump's foreign policy America First was so successful because it put the interest of the American people, American business and our economy first. It kept us out of unnecessary wars.

The parisan divide is on full display in the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee. "The political environment has really gotten ugly in all of Congress but it may be the worst on the Intel committee, which is unprecedented," says Ambassador Hoekstra. "Nancy Pelosi has used the selection process to fill the committee with political lieutenants to do her bidding."

Join us in this wide ranging conversation, as we hone in on these issues, and what we can do to resolve them.

Today we are witnessing a growing threat to our American military. A threat that is capable of doing what no foreign enemy ever could: Fracture the world's greatest armed forces from within, through divisive political indoctrination and controls. That threat is called "wokeness." At its root, "wokeness" imposes the resentful mindset of an extremist few onto society - in this case the American military. It has infected the Pentagon and its top leaders, and it has been metastasizing for years. Joining me to explore this alarming development is Lt. Gen. (Ret.) William G. Boykin, one of the original combat commanders of the U.S. Army's elite Delta Force. Jerry also commanded all the Army's Green Berets as well as the Special Warfare Center and School and served for four years as Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. "Our military should be about readiness, and its mission must be winning the nation's wars," explains Jerry. "There is nothing more important on the battlefield than cohesion - which wokeness undermines. You win wars because of cohesion, not because of technology." Also returning to the show is Dr. Michael Waller, Senior Analyst for Strategy at the Center for Security Policy where his areas of concentration are propaganda, political warfare, psychological warfare, and subversion. Among his many keen insights, Mike shares an astonishing fact: "The Defense Department publishes a dictionary of military and associated terms. It's almost 400 pages long. The word victory doesn't appear once, not as a term to define and not even a reference to it. And it doesn't even have a definition for the term enemy." The military's social experiments have already had a big impact. Retention rates are dropping. Young officers and noncommissioned officers are leaving the military. And the recruiting the right kind of talent is suffering. Listen in to this episode and you'll think again about the risks of imposing "wokeness" on our American military.

As COVID cases continue to climb in Tokyo, the nation is preparing to host the world in what may wind up being the most infamous Olympic Games ever. The Bill Walton show team discusses the role the virus is already playing and impacting athletes. There's also the issue of wokeness as members of Team USA are expected to protest the National Anthem, while the media and advertisers will be in their own competition to use every opportunity to promote social justice campaigns. Will it be worth watching? We debate that.

For the better part of a century, the Left has been waging a methodical - and largely successful - war to control American institutions. Our universities, K-12 education, the news media, Hollywood, federal government bureaucracies … to name just a few … have all fallen victim to what the Left calls their "long march." During most of that time American business and the military escaped infiltration and indoctrination. But now this has begun to change - and dramatically. In this episode we look at business and The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business with author Stephen Soukup. With stunning speed most of the elites running technology companies, banks, Wall Street investment managers and consumer product companies like Coca Cola and Nike have embraced "woke capitalism." What's angers the most is the arrogance of those running our biggest companies. Stephen terms them "Gnostics" who "believe they have the secret to attaining heaven on earth, and that if we'll all just shut up and follow them, that in the long run, they'll take care of everything for us." For example, they've drunk the climate change and stakeholder capitalism kool-aide so deeply, that we're now seeing our biggest investment firms voting to elect three new directors to the Board of Exxon who don't think it should be in the fossil fuel business. This story will not end well. The battle to bring these companies back to the business of simply running their business is not over, but it hangs in the balance. Listen in to learn what's at stake and what you can do about it.

It's becoming quite clear that one of the central aims of Critical Race Theory is to delegitimize and diminish the political and moral achievement that is the United States of America. And with their 1619 Project, the New York Times has weighed in to rewrite American history by deconstructing institutions responsible for our prosperity and our success: free market capitalism and the United States Constitution. How? On the grounds that they were deeply interconnected with and irreparably tainted by the institution of slavery in America. To assert their claim, they employ many "big lie" stratagems. Here are some of the biggest: America was founded as a "slavocracy" in 1619 and "anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country." Americans declared their independence from Britain to protect the institution of slavery. Half of antebellum U.S. GDP came from slavery and cotton production. Southern planters and slave owners were champions of capitalism. Abraham Lincoln wanted to move freed slaves to colonies because he was a racist. None of this is remotely true. To learn what is true, listen in to my conversation with Phil Magness who devastatingly debunks these claims. Phil, a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, is an economic historian specializing in the 19th century United States, and who has written extensively on the political and economic dimensions of slavery and is the author of The 1619 Project: A Critique. The truth is fascinating. Hope you'll join the conversation.

Identity politics, and charges of systematic racism and white privilege, pose an existential threat to the American experiment and risk tearing our country apart. In this episode, I talk with Charles Murray - one of America's greatest social scientists - who has now weighed in on this crisis with his latest book: "Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America" In it he argues that we must confront genuine race differences while at the same time defending our nation's historic commitment to a melting pot and the goal of colorblindness. What good can come of bringing such uncomfortable realities into the open? Here Charles explains: "Ignoring them is destroying America's most precious ideal, once known as the American creed: People are to be judged on an equal basis as individuals, not by national origin, social class, race, or religion. The ideology behind the charges of systemic racism repudiates this ideal, demanding instead that the power of the state must be used to favor some groups of people over others to advance social justice." This is a challenging conversation about a difficult issue, but in listening to it you'll learn that Charles is a careful and thoughtful researcher, and that he believes passionately in our American Experiment and that it survive and thrive. Charles Murray, Hayek Emeritus Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute burst into prominence in 1984 with the publication of Losing Ground, followed by The Bell Curve in 1994 and Coming Apart in 2012.

America has a problem. Positive attitudes toward communism and socialism are at an all-time high in the United States. Almost 40% of Americans now view them favorably and half of our kids in their 20s say they favor socialism. This demonstrates a stunning lack of knowledge of the evils of communism. In the last century, communism murdered more than 100 million people, and forced billions into Marxist tyranny. This horrific past is not dead. It's not even past. China and its Chinese Communist Party subjugates its own people with absolute controls over freedom of speech and movement while engaging in its strategy of "Three Warfares" to become ascendent globally. They assiduously work our world organizations like the UN and the WHO, while simultaneously engaging in genocide, slave labor and forced human organ transplants for sale on the world market. Meanwhile, in America we're seeing the rise of cultural marxism and ideologies derived from it like Critical Race Theory. Joining me on this episode to talk about these threats and what to do about them are two leaders with vast knowledge of the issues. Dr. Edwin J. Feulner, the Chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and the Founder and former President of The Heritage Foundation which he transformed from a small think tank with nine employees into the most highly influential research and policy institution in America. Ambassador Andrew Bremberg is the President and CEO of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and who most recently served as the Representative of the United States to the Office of the United Nations and Other International Organizations in Geneva.