The Bill Walton Show

Is 2024 going to be the year that determines whether the United States remains as the global superpower or whether it truly becomes a declining power surrounded by rising powers, especially China?

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

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

Just some of conversation:

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

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

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

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

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

• Brandon's Amazon author page is here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Would love to get your thoughts about this episode.

World-class gymnast, author, filmmaker, and next-in-line to become CEO of Levi Strauss, Jennifer Sey talks pandemic-era school lockdowns and the backlash she received for speaking out against the school shutdowns with Bill Walton.

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

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

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

So she left.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We're inundated with reports from media, governments, think tanks, and "experts" saying that our climate is changing for the worse, and that it is our fault because of man-made CO2 emissions. But despite apocalyptic predictions about climate, our earth, the planet is improving.

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

It is possible that Co2 is not a pollutant?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• For human advancement, warmer is better than colder.

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

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

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

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

In this candid and insightful episode of the "Bill Walton Show," Stephen Bryen, a seasoned expert with over half a century of experience in national security and arms trade, shares his incisive views on the current state of global geopolitics.

Stephen Bryen's been called the Yoda of the arms trade. He was the Pentagon's top cop, the man whose job it was to ensure that sensitive technology would be kept from enemies, potential enemies and questionable allies.

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

Some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can't fix what is wrong in the world if you don't know what's actually happening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Chinese Communist Party sees technology innovation as the main battlefield of its industrial policy - and its ultimate weapon for achieving global dominance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Winsome Earle-Sears sent shock waves across Virginia and the country at large when she pulled off her stunning upset victory in November 2021 and became the first lieutenant governor of Virginia who is a woman, the first naturalized female citizen, the first female veteran elected to statewide office and who also happens to be black.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

China is the single most formidable strategic threat the United States has ever faced. It alone has the potential to replace the United States as the world's hegemon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the United States just four networks: Netflix, Disney, Amazon Prime, and HBOMax spend almost $75 billion every year on film, TV and streaming content. And most of this spending goes toward woke, progressive-themed entertainment.

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

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

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

In this episode of the Bill Walton Show, my conversation is with Amy Chua, a provocative and original thinker about culture, world politics, and political tribes. Our main topic is her latest book, The Golden Gate, is a novel set in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1930s and 1940s.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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