The Bill Walton Show

A slew of financial crises that stretch all the way back to the banking Panic of 1907 have been exploited to justify erecting a financial regulatory system that has vastly centralized and expanded federal power over our money.

The irony is that these crises were largely caused, or at least exacerbated, by poorly designed government regulations.

What we have now is an unholy alliance of regulators, mega banks and entrenched special interests who are the chief beneficiaries our system of opaque and complex financial regulation. Adding to this mix is the progressive Left who are now using our financial system to push its DEI and climate change agendas.

Joining me on this episode to explore some of what should be our main concerns and to point the way to solutions are Chris Iacovella, the president of the American Securities Association and Norbert Michel, the director of Cato Institute's Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives. Both are deep subject matter experts who know their way around most every nook and cranny of the deep regulatory state.

Read More:

https://billwalton.substack.com/p/financial-regulation-boring-or-terrifying?sd=pf

This show only occasionally gets into election politics but we now have a candidate for U.S. Senate from Virginia who is superbly equipped to run a substantive campaign articulating the real issues facing Americans.

In this episode I'm introducing Scott Parkinson, who's running for the Senate in the Commonwealth of Virginia, to replace Virginia Senator Tim Kaine.

In a crowded primary field, Scott stands out as a candidate with the expertise to understand the mechanics of how to get things done in the Senate.

He has worked in the United States Senate for three Senators — John Ensign, Ron Johnson and Marco Rubio. Scott was the Executive Director of the Republican Study Committee (RSC), the largest caucus in the House of Representatives – under Chairmen Bill Flores and Mark Walker. He also was Chief of Staff to Representative Ron DeSantis and served as the Deputy Executive Director to Governor-Elect Ron DeSantis' transition team in Tallahassee, Florida.

Read More Here: https://billwalton.substack.com/p/its-high-time-to-retire-senator-tim?sd=pf

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".

Read more: https://billwalton.substack.com/p/defining-a-man-and-a-woman-whats

Two months ago I wrote "the war in Ukraine drags on at a terrible cost for all involved with no seeming end in sight. Ukraine is on the ropes and running out of manpower with its most of its elite forces destroyed. Missiles for its air defenses are depleted. Both sides are dragooning teenagers and old men for their armies. Russia's military command is in disarray."

Since then, the situation's grown worse - for both sides.

So I've asked my frequent guest Stephen Bryen back for another conversation for his take on what's likely to happen next. Stephen is a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy and the Yorktown Institute, and has over 50 years' experience in the arms trade and national security including several stints in the Pentagon.

As usual, there's a lot packed into our brief conversation, ranging from Zelensky's and Putin's future, and the Wagner Group uprising, to China's involvement and Xi's designs on Taiwan. And of course Tony Blinken's recent humiliation at the hands of the Chinese.

Read More: https://billwalton.substack.com/

"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.

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.

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.

Global streaming services are projected to reach over 1.5 billion subscribers in 2025 with worldwide spending on TV, film and documentary production reaching over $220 billion a year. Netflix, Disney, Amazon Prime, and HBO Max alone account for more than $75 billion of that spend with almost all of it on woke progressive themed entertainment. Looking only at documentaries and small independent features, the Left spends tens of billions of dollars each year.

The Left's successful decades "long march through the institutions" has captured Hollywood and it now owns the cultural narrative. Conservatives have paid a big price for downplaying the importance of culture, seeing its airy fictions as less serious than economics or politics.

The numbers show it. The right spends, maybe, only tens of millions of dollars on films and television, a spending gap of over hundreds of billions of dollars.

Joining me to explain how is Michael Pack, documentary filmmaker and the former CEO of the US Agency for Global Media. Michael's produced over 15 award-winning films for public television, and most recently Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words.

Conservatives who have basically surrendered the culture wars often claim, "We can't fight back because the left is naturally more artistic and given to storytelling."

Michael and I do not believe that's true and that the culture wars are winnable, but only if we take them seriously.

This episode provides a start, exploring the craft of making - and the business of financing - filmed storytelling and documentaries. We cover film schools, production facilities, cinematography, sound, editing, the foundations financing progressive filmmakers and much more.

We also talk about the pure fun of filmmaking and storytelling. It's a lot more fun than politics.

Based on my experience, the actors are all pretty good-looking, the creatives are fun to work with and it's a joy to be on a movie set. Getting into movies is not like taking your castor oil.

From the first cave paintings, to the Bible, to Shakespeare, to today, stories are how people learn to understand the world, and each story is a model for how the world works.

"People crave epic stories, meaningful life pursuits, and courageous figures who appear to stand for something," relates Michael. "Good stories are stories of heroic individuals, usually not without flaws, dealing with complex things and making choices."

"Contrary to conventional wisdom, I am much more optimistic about the culture, especially the story-telling media, than about politics and government."

Politics is actually a harder game to win. The administrative state has really dug in and civil servants have iron-clad protections.

"We have simply seeded that turf to the Left," says Michael. "We have simply let them have it. It's not a culture war when only one side has an army in the field and the other side just writes essays about how they don't like that army. "

We have to be making culture, not just complaining about it, and it is not that hard to do and we can do it.

Over three decades ago the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party began in earnest to develop and execute a strategy to bring about what its now President Xi Jinping calls "global governance, directed and enforced from Beijing."

Determined to avoid the fate of the Soviet Union's defeat in the Cold War by the United States, then President Deng is said to have declared to the Party that "a new Cold War has now begun between the United States and China, and China will win."

Thus began a comprehensive plan of "unrestricted warfare" that came to be known colloquially as the Hide and Bide strategy … "Hide your capacities, bide your time."

It was designed to assure that China become so integrated with the United States' open economy and society (e.g. through "elite capture") that the US would be strategically vulnerable.

In this, the CCP has wildly succeeded, and now the United States finds itself back on its heels against an openly aggressive China and its intention to replace the United States as the preeminent power not only in Asia but around the globe.

My guest on this episode, Frank J. Gaffney has done just that in his recent book, an across the board plan that addresses the many fronts to be fought on against China's "unrestricted warfare".

The book represents the fruits of a comprehensive effort to develop and champion a vigorous response to the China challenge. It draws upon a comprehensive program of some seventy webinars conducted by the Committee on the Present Danger: China addressing:

1) the CCP's decades-long self-described "Unrestricted Warfare" against America; and 2) the role America's elites have played in helping the Chinese Communists win.

"It identifies nine "criminal charges" that can be brought and prosecuted, at least in the court of public opinion, against the Chinese Communist Party and its American enablers."

"The Indictment also enumerates twenty specific actions that are intended to inspire and equip congressional investigators, patriotic executive branch officials, journalists, and the public at large to review these charges and recommended actions bring to justice and take down the Chinese Communist Party for its horrific criminal conduct—past, present, and that which is in the works—against its own people and countless others, including ours."

Frank J. Gaffney is the founder and executive chairman of the Center for Security Policy, a non-partisan organization that champions "peace through strength." He is the vice chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger: China and the host of Securing America with Frank Gaffney, a daily television program on the Real America's Voice Network.

Listen in for some of highlights from Frank's book and to learn what's at stake in what must now be our own "unrestricted war" with China.

"Overwhelming evidence suggests that federal agencies – led by among others, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), buoyed by senior executive branch officials and lawmakers, colluding with Big Tech, and a coterie of often government-coordinated and government-funded "counter-disinformation" organizations, have imposed nothing less than a mass public-private censorship regime on the American people." Explains Ben Weingarten, one of America's leading investigative journalists, at a recent Homeland Security Oversight hearing.

As you'll learn in this episode, the evidence is overwhelming.

Ben Weingarten is editor-at-large for RealClearInvestigations, contributor to the Federalist, Newsweek, New York Post, Epoch Times and author of the alarming book American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party.

Joining me as co-host is Frank Gaffney, host of "Securing America with Frank Gaffney" on Real America's Voice and the founder of the Center for Security Policy.

"CISA is a microcosm of a federal government censorship regime, and by proxy through social media platforms, that runs from merely shadow banning or flagging tweets and Facebook messages, all the way up to de-platforming and debunking people and even more alarming, actually throwing dissenters in jail for their views," explains Ben.

"It's rooted in an ideology which says that speech that the authorities don't like constitutes a "threat" to our democracy that is then used as a justification to engage in a slew of acts that I think most Americans would say violate their most essential civil liberties."

Some of what we talk about in this episode:

• The mission creep within our national security agencies which are increasingly turning from targeting foreign jihadists and instead to "domestic wrong thinkers" as America's preeminent threat.

• How Obama's DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson expanded its mandate to protect America's infrastructure to include "election infrastructure" as critical infrastructure which then became part of CISA's charge when it was established in 2018.

• Current CISA director Jen Easterly has now declared that the American mind is a "cognitive infrastructure"which means they're now targeting not only what we say but what we think. "CISA's tasks are to defend our most critical infrastructures and our most critical infrastructure is cognitive infrastructure … the American mind," she asserts.

• CISA's convening and coordinating meetings between national security and law enforcement agencies, and technology companies including Facebook, Meta, Google, Twitter, Reddit, Microsoft, Verizon, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Wikimedia Foundation, etc

• CISA's "Switchboarding" reports of purported misinformation and disinformation from state and local authorities and then forwarding reports of offending content to social media platforms for censorship.

• How the rosters of the censorship "trust and safety integrity" teams at Meta, Twitter and others are filled with former CIA officials, FBI officials, DOD officials, etc

• DHS targeted list of "inaccurate information" includes "the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine."

• CISA's previous Director Christopher Krebs claimed the 2020 election was the most above board cleanest election, most secure election in American history. But at the same time worked to censor "wrong think" about mail-in balloting and changes to election rules and policies, sometimes while they were still being debated.

The CISA agenda is aimed at not only what people say, but what they will refrain from saying in public, or in private.

"How much speech will never be out there for people to grapple with and consider because no one wants to go through the ordeal of potentially being broken by expressing wrong things," worries Ben. "The entire basis of our system rests on free inquiry, free speech, free thought, freedom to listen. Otherwise, you have tyranny."

This is a heart-of-the-matter issue for America and there's a lot packed into this episode about our alarming "security state." Definitely worth your time to listen and learn.

Voter and ballot fraud may just be a small part of the problem that conservatives face in the upcoming 2024 elections compared to the power of Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube.

Using its "total data collection" systems it can sway the opinions of millions of people and influence how they vote.

We've known about this issue since at least 2016 and it has not gone away. If anything, with the emergence of AI, the threat has grown even more ominous. Executives at Google have stated that "investments in machine learning and AI" are a big opportunity to address the "misinformation" shared by "low-information voters."

Shining a bright light on Alphabet's power is the comprehensive research done by my returning guest, research psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein, a California Democrat with a Harvard Ph.D, who has spent the last decade monitoring Google's manipulation of newsfeeds, search results and YouTube suggestions.

Joining me to co-host is Jenny Beth Martin, founder of the Tea Party Patriots, who also has an extensive information technology background.

"96% of Alphabet's employee's political donations go to Democrats and its homogeneous culture leans extremely left and the two founders are utopians," explains Dr. Epstein. "In their mind, they know what's best for the world. These are extremely arrogant people who think they have the power of gods."

An eight‑minute video leaked from Google called "The Selfish Ledger," starkly reveals Google's aspirations to re‑engineer humanity according to its utopian "company values."

Another leaked video after the 2016 election shows Google's co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and its CEO Sundar Pichai dismayed by Trump's win and essentially saying "never again." In it, they talk about Trump supporters as "extremists" and say the election outcome "conflicts with many of Google's core values."

Epstein estimates that Google shifted about 6 million votes to Joe Biden in the 2020 election by manipulating voters with things like biased algorithms, "get out the vote" messages and videos. (Over 70% of the videos that people watch every day on YouTube come from liberal sources suggested by its "up next" algorithm.)

Does anyone doubt that Google will be all-in on making sure the "correct" candidates win 2024 elections?

One source of its power is that Google knows with precision practically every voter's political preferences. They know who's going to vote, who's not going to vote, and how they're going to vote.

"If you've been using the internet for 20 years, Google has the equivalent of more than three million pages of information about you," according to Dr. Epstein. "They're doing surveillance at a massive level that J. Edgar Hoover couldn't even possibly have imagined. It's 24 hours a day, and it's over many, many, many different kinds of platforms that most people haven't even heard of."

Google has also partnered in the "Global Disinformation Index" and the release of the Twitter Files have shown how extensively the Executive Branch communicated and coordinated with technology companies for taking in moderation "requests" from the White House, the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, and even the CIA.

If Google is manipulating search results or YouTube suggestions it's impossible to trace because they are "ephemeral." They disappear once you click off the links provided, and can never be recovered.

However, there is hope, a potential counter-measure that Dr Epstein has developed to capture that ephemeral data by effectively "looking over the shoulders" of real users. He now has almost 8,000 registered voters in 50 states, who have given him permission to monitor and record their every Google interaction. Of course, challenging a $1 trillion tech colossus requires resources and it will take up to $50 million to fully build out his system. It's a big lift and we talk about what it will take to get it done. It's a critical project.

"With companies like Google, we're talking about control that's completely invisible to people," Epstein says. "We're talking about control by mainly one and to a lesser extent a couple of other private companies … the more I've learned about it over the years, the more concerned I've become."

We unpack a lot in this episode, including which email and browser you should be using to protect your privacy.