The Bill Walton Show

Last month Atlantic ran a hit piece on President Trump that was notable, even by today's low standards of journalistic practice, for its invisible sourcing.

It remains news because it typifies the realities of our increasingly fact-free media environment.

"It's based on four anonymous sources and has in addition the strange sideshow of other media outlets 'confirming' the anonymous sources" says my guest, veteran journalist Brian McNicoll.

"It's a classic illustration of how to do bad journalism that destroys the credibility of journalists," emphasizes Mark Tapscott, a member of the Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame.

Join me in a clarifying conversation about how the standards of what's called journalism have eroded over the years.

How today's reporting compares to the Watergate story.

How the distinctions between "opinion" and "news" have become fainter and fainter.

Why the Society for Professional Journalists no longer plays the role of trusted guardian.

And more.

As Brian McNicoll concludes, "There's a reason why only about 12% of Americans trust what the media says."

"If you wanted to aim at the heart of the matter to bring about a more virtuous Washington DC where would you start?

For Mark Tapscott, the award winning investigative journalist, editorial page editor and founder of HillFaith, the answer is clear: share the Good News of His Gospel with congressional staffers on Capitol Hill.

"If you were asked, who's the most influential but least well-known group in Washington, DC, if you really understand how things work in this town, you would say immediately, 'Congressional Staff.' There are about 20,000 of them. They are mostly young men and women, highly educated, very motivated, and very smart."

Mark, a member of the Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame and recipient of the CPAC Conservative Journalist of the Year, explains further:

"I knew that God was calling me to some sort of ministry and I kept coming back to the fact that virtually everything I'd done in my career included, directly or indirectly, contact with Members of Congress and especially with Hill aides."

"They have a passion for public service and politics, who are also routinely over-worked, underpaid, and almost nothing gets done in Congress without them. They have tremendous power by virtue of their positions to influence public policy in this country, yet they may well be the most invisible power center in the nation's capital."

What's unique about Mark's ministry is his focus on Christian Apologetics, based in logic, on science, history, on wherever the truth can be accessed. "While all truth is God's truth", says Mark, "Apologetics is the ideal way to reach young people, particularly those on the Hill, unfamiliar with the truth of Christianity."

Mark is a remarkable man.

"The human costs of the emergency response to Covid-19 have vastly outweighed its benefits."

So argue, backed by a vast amount of research, scholars Jay Richards, William Briggs, and Douglas Axe, authors of "The Price of Panic."

For the first time in history, the world has shut itself down - by choice - for fear of a virus whose dangers have been dramatically exaggerated. Governments, with the support of most Americans, have ordered the closing of thousands of small businesses, schools, colleges, churches, sports events and most all of our civil society institutions. Overnight, "social distancing" - masks, 6 foot rules, no handshakes, no hugs - have become a moral obligation. We are now living under a "tyranny of experts" explains Dr Jay Richards.

The world will reopen, and life will go on, but we are never going back to "normal."

And we need to recognize that whatever the future holds, we cannot make the same mistakes again. What have we learned? What will have been the total cost in lives, dollars and livelihoods in relying on advice from "science"? Who will be held accountable for the enormous human costs imposed by our leaders blundering "one size fits all" policy responses?

Join me in my conversation with Dr Jay Richards who digs deeply and thoughtfully into the answers to these questions.

And another big, big unknown.

As the health risks of Covid-19 have begun to subside, a bigger and more dangerous pandemic remains: a pandemic of fear. Social media, 24/7 cable news coverage and political agendas have whipped up social contagion, a climate of fear far beyond the real risks of the virus.

Where is this going? How does it end?

Talking with John Tamny about his upcoming book "When Politicians Panicked: The New Coronavirus, Expert Opinion, and a Tragic Lapse of Reason." His premise, and I agree, is that experts aren't the answer to crisis, they are the crisis. What was needed at the onset of the virus was leadership wise enough to let sensible Americans figure out how to protect themselves.

Information coming from China in January and February made it very clear that the virus was/is many things, none of them remotely justifying the enormous health, social and economic costs imposed by our panicked political response to it.

Instead, our political leaders needed to provide information guidelines about the risks, take steps to protect the vulnerable and their caregivers, and otherwise let people take care of themselves and each other. Give them the facts and a little bit of guidance, and their intelligence and common sense will see them through. Pretty much what South Dakota and Sweden did.

John writes, "One-size-fits-all lockdowns have crushed the global economy, left us in a worse position to fight the virus and has pushed hundreds of millions back into poverty, which is the biggest killer of all."

We will be paying the price for years.

Confused about what's going on with the Post Office?

I am. So I asked my friend Brian McNicoll, who has written about the post office for many years and has a real feel for its economics and the politics, to clarify what's going on.

In our conversation he tells me, "the Post Office has a monopoly on two things. Only the post office can put something in your mailbox and only the post office can handle first class mail. But the number of first class letters have dropped by almost 40% in the last decade. And in the last 15 years, the U.S. Postal Service has lost some $60 billion and is expected to lose some $10 billion this year."

But its package delivery business is growing like gangbusters, and it it also losing money on that. Why? Turns out U.S. Taxpayers are subsidizing Jeff Bezos's Amazon and other package delivery companies, big time.

So we dig into post office economics 101. I think it could break even, especially with its new Postmaster in charge.

But it isn't just its bad business model that has it in the news. The presidential election has made it into yet another partisan political football.

We dig into the differences between mail-in and absentee voting, bundling ballots, ballot harvesting, election fraud (e.g. last election they found 120 000 ballots in trash cans in a dumpster in Nevada), why mailboxes are being taken off the streets, post office closings, whether the Post Office could handle mail-in ballots, and much more.

It's Saturday in September and there's no Big Ten football being played today.

But in a not-so-surprising reversal, just weeks after Kevin Warren, the Big Ten commissioner, pointedly said the decision not to play this year would "not be revisited", they revisited.

They just announced that it will start up its fall football season October 24. Why the change?

Of course it faced pressure from coaches, players, parents and fans but the decision looks like it has everything to do with politics and money, and very little to do with "science."

Last week, before the Big Ten's change of heart, I talked about the cultural phenomenon, politics and money of college football with my friends and frequent collaborators, John Tammy, author of When Politicians Panic and Brian McNicoll, a veteran newspaper and sports reporter.

Both are "certified college football fanatics" and do a great job explaining to me what's happening with the college football season this fall.

It seems to be a crazy mishmash. Some teams are playing, some canceling their seasons. Some with fans, others not. In the Big Ten states, they're playing high school and professional football, but not college.

We speculated that the Big Ten's decision, wouldn't hold, coming as it does in the Presidential battleground states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, etc.

And of course there's the money. College football is a $4 billion business, supports a lot of other minor sports and is a keystone for college fundraising.

Listen in here to our fun and wide-ranging conversation:

Jean Shepard ("Shep"), the legendary 60's and 70's WOR NYC late nightradio show humorist and storyteller, romantically described the differences between what he considered to be "day people" and "night people." Day people were conformists, night people were non-conformists, and he was proud to be one of them.

Well had he lived to see the streets around the White House last week he would be hard pressed to feel romantic about its new "night people."

"From early March 2020 on, the best-known authorities on epidemics—the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control— have presented the COVID-19 respiratory disease to the Western world as a danger equivalent to the plague.

But China's experience, which its government obfuscated, had already shown that the COVID-19 virus is much less like the plague and more like the flu.

All that has happened since followed from falsifying this basic truth."

So writes my guest Angelo Codevilla, Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute and professor emeritus of International Relations at Boston University and author of The Covid Coup (hyperlink this).

He continues:

"What history will record as the great COVID scam of 2020 is based on:

1) a set of untruths and baseless assertions—often outright lies—about the novel coronavirus and its effects;

2) the production and maintenance of physical fear through a near-monopoly of communications to forestall challenges to the U.S.. ruling class, led by the Democratic Party,

3) defaulted opposition on the part of most Republicans, thus confirming their status as the ruling class's junior partner.

No default has been greater than that of America's Christian churches—supposedly society's guardians of truth."

But despite the enormous human, social and economic costs imposed by locking down the country, more than 44 percent of Americans are in favor of shutting it down again. (Epoch Times' national survey of likely voters conducted by Big Data Poll.)

And almost 2/3 of Democrats (63.2 percent) support a nationwide shutdown.

Something has to give.

There is no historian like Howard Zinn.

Certainly no other history book has taken the place of the Bible at the swearing-in of an elected official . But in 2019, Howard Zinn's "A People's History" was the sacred object on which newly elected Oklahoma City council member JoBeth Hamon chose to place her hand for her oath of office .

"For one of the great enemies of the American idea, Howard Zinn, our history "a story of defeat, despair, and domination … a tragedy in three acts: what we did to the Indians, what we did to the African-Americans, and what we did to everyone else," explains my guest Dr. Mary Grabar the author of "Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America"

Because of Zinn and other historians like him, American schools have largely stopped teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the history of the world.

"An all-important question has opened up a great chasm between Americans: Is the essence of our civilization—our culture, our mores, our history—fundamentally good and worth preserving, or is it rotten at its root?" asks my other Guest Jarrett Stepman the author of "The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America's Past".

Zinn's rhetorical strategies are more than "radical." They are fundamentally and grossly dishonest. Yet when Purdue University president Mitch Daniels sought to eliminate Zinn's book from classrooms, he was roundly excoriated.

"Zinn's conception of American elites" such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton "is akin to the medieval church's image of the Devil."

The College Board, which is largely replacing states and localities as the shaper of both textbooks and teacher training promotes Zinn's version of history in its advanced placement training seminars.

Join me as I learn from Mary and Jarrett about some of the root causes why America is being torn apart by radical ideologies that have entered the mainstream of America's schools.

There is no historian like Howard Zinn.

Certainly no other history book has taken the place of the Bible at the swearing-in of an elected official . But in 2019, Howard Zinn's "A People's History" was the sacred object on which newly elected Oklahoma City council member JoBeth Hamon chose to place her hand for her oath of office .

"For one of the great enemies of the American idea, Howard Zinn, our history "a story of defeat, despair, and domination … a tragedy in three acts: what we did to the Indians, what we did to the African-Americans, and what we did to everyone else," explains my guest Dr. Mary Grabar the author of "Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America"

Because of Zinn and other historians like him, American schools have largely stopped teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the history of the world.

"An all-important question has opened up a great chasm between Americans: Is the essence of our civilization—our culture, our mores, our history—fundamentally good and worth preserving, or is it rotten at its root?" asks my other Guest Jarrett Stepman the author of "The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America's Past".

Zinn's rhetorical strategies are more than "radical." They are fundamentally and grossly dishonest. Yet when Purdue University president Mitch Daniels sought to eliminate Zinn's book from classrooms, he was roundly excoriated.

"Zinn's conception of American elites" such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton "is akin to the medieval church's image of the Devil."

The College Board, which is largely replacing states and localities as the shaper of both textbooks and teacher training promotes Zinn's version of history in its advanced placement training seminars.

Join me as I learn from Mary and Jarrett about some of the root causes why America is being torn apart by radical ideologies that have entered the mainstream of America's schools.