The Bill Walton Show

The war in Ukraine drags on at a terrible cost for all involved with no seeming end in sight. Some estimate that there have been almost 400,000 total Russian and Ukraine casualties so far, although both sides claim their losses are much lower.

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.

But no one knows what is really going on. A key problem understanding the war in Ukraine is the reliability of sources of information and the fact that both sides specialize in disinformation and fake news.

To sort through what might be true, and where events are leading us, I'm joined again by an astute observer of the world scene, Dr. Steven Bryen, Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Policy and the Yorktown Institute. With over 50 years national security experience, including many stints at the Pentagon where he was known as the Yoda of the arms trade, he's been following closely the details and the ins and outs of the war in Ukraine.

What was initially sold by the Biden Administration as humanitarian aid to Ukraine has had from the very start a deeper agenda: The White House wanted this war to bring about regime change in Russia.

"For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power," declares Joe Biden. And this: "Our objective is to exhaust and degrade Russian forces so they cannot fight anywhere else in the world," warned Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin last year.

So has their proxy war been a smart move? So far, hardly. It ranks right up there with their catastrophic exit from Afghanistan and the mess they've made in the Middle East. It's also driven Russia into the arms of our real geopolitical enemy China.

"If you want to break up Russia, it's a fool's errand, it won't work," says Stephen. "Russia's not going to break up. It's a big powerful country and a nuclear power. So why tempt the furies with that kind of nonsense? It doesn't make any sense. It's not in the United States' national interest. It's not in the Europeans interest, although you'd never know it from listening to them. Having a war in Europe in this day and age would be a horrible tragedy. It would destroy the West. So why would anyone risk that?"

Henry Kissinger says that conditions are right for negotiations on Ukraine by the end of the year.

"But negotiations won't start unless Washington wants them to start," says Stephen. "Or unless Zelensky and his crowd are gone and someone else takes over in Ukraine. But if things stay the way they are, there's not going to be any negotiations. Biden doesn't want them. He wants a victory, a total victory over Russia in Ukraine."

But if things stay the way they are there will be no victory. This will grind on and on, there'll be many more dead, more destruction, and let's not forget the risk of bringing nuclear weapons into play.

It's time for the US to use its power to bring the war in Ukraine to an end now. It's in our interest. It's in the world's interest.

This episode is a treasure trove of Stephen Bryen's nuanced and penetrating insights. I keep bringing Stephen back on for his wisdom and he never disappoints. Well worth your time to listen.

"Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other.… Therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about." — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

"Americans have long sensed a new kind tyranny creeping into our lives. This disquiet has hovered in the background for a long time, though most of us couldn't put our finger on it. Trends to control speech and behavior are isolating us from one another, and they have begun to intensify rapidly and spread throughout society's institutions." — Stella Morabito

In this episode Stella Morabito returns to talk about her recently published book The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer.

Stella, a prolific author at The Federalist, writes incisively about the social fallout of propaganda, mob psychology, and the cult mindset, drawing in part from her years as an analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency where she focused on methods of Soviet propaganda and disinformation, and its state-controlled media.

Some excerpts from our conversation:

The underlying dynamic of totalitarianism is the same: a machinery of loneliness that threatens to turn people into social pariahs in order to extort compliance. History is filled with vivid examples - Cromwell's England, Robespierre's France, Lenin and Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, Mao's China - of the damage done by totalitarian regimes that impose the machinery fueled by the conformity impulse and terror of isolation.

"Isolation and how tyrants use it to control people, is really the greatest threat to freedom, no matter what level of tyranny it is. It can be a gaslighting partner, it could be a cult leader, it could be a world-class dictator. I finally concluded that there is a machinery at work—a machinery of loneliness. Tyrants operate that machinery—wittingly or not—in order to disarm those they wish to control."

When signals surfaced in America —such as anti-speech codes written into federal law in the 1990s allegedly to curb hate—we tended to shrug them off. It was too frightening to believe those speech codes could really lead to direct attacks on freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment.

Yet a new kind of authoritarianism has multiplied over the course of decades, usually with the claim that they were needed to ensure justice against racism or sexism. Multiculturalism took root, then morphed into identity politics and intersectionality.

When the canon of Western civilization came under direct attack in the 1980s, few expected it to be followed by direct attacks on free speech on college campuses. But it was, and with a vengeance.

"The weaponization of isolation and loneliness drives just about everything in human affairs. The threat of social isolation tends to determine what we say or don't say. Then it begins to regulate what we think and how we behave."

"Oppression is inevitable in one-party states that sustain themselves through constant propaganda and censorship and the subversion of any independent institution. They're driven to control the speech, thoughts, and, therefore, the associations of their presumed subjects, usually through some form of demonization."

So we need a line of action against this tyranny and can start by asking what is its essential weakness?

The short answer is … free speech.

"People say, "Oh, it's so daunting. What can I do?" Well, the thing to remember is that even one voice makes a huge difference, because they're always trying to shut down every single solitary voice."

"Our strength as human beings really comes from our connections in the private sphere of life. Just a single honest voice can make a big difference."

When Walmart went public in 1970 and soon thereafter listed on the New York Stock Exchange, its SEC disclosure prospectus was 20 pages long.

Today, a prospectus requires massive numbers of mostly obscure disclosures imposing very real liabilities for the issuing company - but which no one reads, except for lawyers who charge $2,000 an hour to read it and to write it - and which can run upwards to 300 pages or more.

Under President Joe Biden's whole of government effort to weaponize federal agencies, this regulatory creep has become an outright onslaught of new regulations. Except now it brings an overt political agenda to promote ESG and "equity" outcomes.

Case in point is the SEC under Chairman Gary Gensler (who was Hillary Clinton Campaign's CFO), which has proposed 55 new rules and massive climate change disclosure requirements without any mandate from Congress.

"Over the last two years, we've seen more rules than we've ever seen before," explains my guest on this episode Chris Iacovella, "the amount of paper, the amount of costs that are being heaped on companies, not just in the financial services space, but in every sector of our economy, are far outweighing whatever good they are supposed to be doing."

Chris Iacovella is in a position to know. He is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Securities Association, and has deep expertise in the equity, fixed income, and derivatives markets, as well as growth capital and wealth management. Prior to becoming CEO of the ASA, he was the CEO of the Equity Dealers of America and Director of Global Government Affairs at Bloomberg LP.

"Gensler claims that he has to do this because investors are clamoring for this disclosure, but it's not investors that are clamoring for it. It's Wall Street asset managers, investment banks, and institutional investors who are pushing an ESG political agenda into the boardroom that they can't get through Congress."

This is just one of the many concerning issues we get into in this episode. Some others:

• The higher fees Wall Street charges for its ESG funds.

• Klaus Schwab (of the World Economic Forum) and his "stakeholder" capitalism and how Wall Street has adopted many of his views.

• Public company security regulations seeping into private businesses.

• A long segment about how the Chinese have used the US capital markets to access to American capital and allowing them to fund their military and economic rise with our money.

• Something obscurely called the Consolidated Audit Trail where the SEC has decided to add to its surveillance capabilities, the ability to collect all of the personal and financial information of every investor who has a share of stock in our capital markets.

"Can you imagine if the SEC entered into a memorandum of understanding with the IRS? Then the government would have a true and complete picture of not only your securities holdings, but also any businesses that you might own that are private, any real estate that you may own. It's would be complete picture of what your wealth is."

There's a lot to unpack in this episode, but I think you'll find it worth your time.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is proceeding with plans to build a new headquarters which would be twice the size of the The Pentagon, the world's largest office building.

The new FBI headquarters is to be built on one of three sites in suburban Virginia and Maryland. Those sites are large parcels of 58, 61, and 80 acres.

The Kremlin in Moscow —a walled fortress containing the administrative offices of the Russian central government, the official presidential residence, massive auditoriums, an arsenal, a museum, four palaces, three cathedrals and several churches—is just over 66 acres in area.

Vatican City in Rome, the seat of the Roman Catholic Church, is tucked into 110 acres.

The FBI is proceeding with its plans at a time when Americans have grown increasingly alarmed about the mission creep of an institution we once regarded as the world's greatest law-enforcement agency.

After the 9/11 attacks, the Bureau's mission changed to become an intelligence operation rather than a law enforcement agency. Case management has been centralized in its headquarters in Washington DC rather than as before in the field offices around the country. It did this to place so-called operational decisions in the hand of what they've called "politically sensitive" individuals at headquarters.

What this means in practice it that the political biases of FBI leadership, and some of its investigators, have come to influence the conduct and public perception of the agency's most consequential investigations.

Joining me to talk about the planned building, the FBI's history and what it's become today, is my frequent guest and astute observer of US intelligence agencies, Mike Waller.

J. Michael Waller, is a Senior Analyst for Strategy at the Center for Security Policy where he concentrates on propaganda, political warfare, psychological warfare, and subversion. Mike's author of a soon to be published book about the CIA and the FBI.

The FBI hasn't revealed a reason or strategy for its colossal new HQ but we do know this according to the GSA specs:

• "Riveted into its new project are woke regulations to ensure that the FBI center will comply with diversity, equity, LGBTQ+, and climate change political goals," explains Mike.

• The site, design, and structure of the new FBI headquarters must "advance racial equity and support for underserved communities through the Federal Government," as part of Joe Biden's Executive Order 13985 calling for "an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda."

But the problem with today's FBI runs deeper.

"After 9/11 the FBI has been stuck in this netherworld of being a law enforcement agency and an intelligence agency, and you can't combine those with the same people in the same organization or you get political police."

Is this what we want from our FBI?

There is a lot packed into this episode about a woke and politicized FBI.

Mike explains how we got here - from the 1920s to today - and it's a fascinating, and disturbing, story.

What are the evolutionary differences between men and women, and how do they survive and thrive through differing competitive strategies?

In this episode, Dr. Joyce Benenson talks with Bill about her book, Warriors and Worriers, which draws her extensive lifelong research on children's interactions. The result is fascinating array of studies and stories that explore the ways boys and men deter their enemies, while girls and women find assistants to aid them in coping with vulnerable children and elders.

Dr. Benenson, a retired professor of psychology at Emmanuel College and an associate member of the Human Evolutionary Biology Department at Harvard University, turns upside down the conventional wisdom that women are more sociable than men and that men are more competitive than women.

E.O. Wilson of Harvard praises her work as:

"brave, thoroughly documented, and written with unusual clarity … her book explains more about the fundamentals of gender differences – and the meaning of human nature – than a library of conventional social science."

An engaging conversationalist, Joyce quickly deconstructs the notion that being male, or female is simply a matter of "sex assigned at birth."

Human history is a story of men and women genetically built to specialize in different behaviors necessary to ensure the survival of their children to adulthood.

Is the Federal Reserve a godlike Zeus able to control our money and the economy, preserve financial stability and keep a lid on inflation?

Or is it like the Wizard of Oz? A little man behind the curtain pulling levers to create smoke and noise to terrify and control people, but in the end only one market participant among many worldwide.

If you're a bond trader in New York, trying to predict minute day to day changes in interest rates, it's more like Zeus. For the rest of us, I believe, it's like Oz.

Trying to figure out the Fed is a complicated business and I'm delighted to be joined again on this episode by one of my favorite guests and good friend Norbert Michel, who's vice president and director of Cato Institute's Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives.

"The Fed does set an interest rate target," says Norbert, "and they do administratively set a policy rate that they pay on reserves. But the idea that the Fed is sitting down in a basement and turning some dials and cranking up unemployment or cranking down inflation or cranking up GDP, it's just not true."

In this episode we delve into this, and a lot of other news in the headlines about our money. Like whether the United States dollar is likely to lose its status as the world's reserve currency.

The United States enjoys an enormous gift which is also a curse: with the world's reserve currency, it can run massive federal budget and trade deficits as long as other countries want to hold dollars. That's not likely to change in the near future.

"The US economy is still about a quarter of the global economy. And then almost another quarter of the global economy is China. Well, who on Earth wants to hold Chinese currency when it's controlled by the Chinese Communist Party? And so you're really left with no place else to go."

Norbert is also one of true experts in the very real threat to our liberty that the Biden Administration (along with many other governments worldwide) is cooking up: a central bank digital currency.

"Our paper dollars today are technically liabilities of the Federal Reserve; but with a CBDC, your checking account is with the Fed, giving it potential control of every transaction."

"On Cato's website we have direct quotes from international government officials talking about how great it is going to be to control what everybody does with their money. So this is real. This is coming."

Given how complicated all this stuff is, Norbert and I try to keep the conversation from getting too dense. Listen in. These are important matters that do concern you and your money.

It looks like the bill is finally coming due after decades of reckless monetary policy and out of control federal spending. After 40 years of relatively stable prices, we now have raging inflation. Interest rates have risen dramatically. Mortgage rates have more than doubled. And commercial banks are now sitting on more than $600 billion of unrealized bond losses.

Of course, and as expected, with the Silicon Valley Bank bailout, the Regulators have pulled out their default playbook declaring yet another institution systematically risky, taking another step toward the federalization of our banking system.

But there's also something new to worry about: regulatory mission drift. The Fed's historical mandates are to 1) promote price stability and 2) full employment and a safe and sound banking system. But instead, the Fed - and the Treasury - have changed their priorities to promote the progressive policies of climate change and equity.

Joining me to talk all this through are Alex Pollock and Steve Dewey. Both are grizzled veterans of the banking and regulatory world, which, as Alex points out, has been hit by a major crisis every decade since the 1970s. Together we have many decades of experience in financial markets. Alex and I have been conversing with each other, and interrupting each other, for almost fifty years.

Alex is a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute and was Principal Deputy Director of the Office of Financial Research of the U.S. Treasury Department in 2019 and through 2021. He was also my second boss in the commercial banking world almost 45 years ago and was on my board at Allied Capital Corporation as we worked through the 2008 crisis and its aftermath.

Steve Dewey worked for several years in Asia during the Asian financial crisis and for the FDIC during and after the 2008 financial crisis where he was involved in the resolution of failed banks.

According to Alex, "We are still living in the aftermath of the long manipulation of interest rates and financial markets by the Federal Reserve and the club of central banks worldwide: the vast expansion of money and suppression of interest rates to an abnormally low level. Now we're seeing the results."

Meantime, rather than being the above-the-fray dispassionate wise actor, the Federal Reserve has become part of the problem: Just in the last six months, the Fed itself lost $44 billion which exceeds its capital of $42 billion. A big portion of its $8.7 trillion in assets are highly vulnerable to rising interest rates. Ironically, the Fed's interest rate risk is similar to SVB's.

So, what's going to happen next?

The Fed and the Treasury seem likely to take more control in the name of risk management. The banking system holds $17 trillion of deposits and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently declared that these would be de facto insured by the Treasury, the Fed and the FDIC.

But consider this: the FDIC's deposit insurance fund is $128 billion, which is - putting it mildly - a little short of $17 trillion. Also, if the Fed continues losing money on its mortgage-backed securities, it will be losing over $100 billion a year.

Republican Senator Everett Dirksen, the Minority leader during the 1960s Kennedy-Johnson years, once said "a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon we're talking real money." Now we're talking trillions. Has the banking system become to big to save?

Will the "solution" be a nationalized bank and a digital currency to prevent a collapse of the system? Or something else? How do the woke climate and equity agendas figure into this?

There's a lot to speculate about here. Join in our conversation for our take on the crisis.

As always, we try to make complicated things easier to understand and nothing right now seems more complicated than our money.

This week, Americans for Limited Government published a provocative and insightful piece about the banking system asking, "Has the United States banking system become too big to save?"

In the past three years, to finance massive federal spending, the Treasury has issued almost $8 trillion new treasury bonds with almost $4 trillion bought by US banks during the tail-end of the Fed's era of zero interest rates.

US Treasury Bonds? Sounds like a safe investment for a bank, but here's the problem. After 40 years of relatively stable prices, we now have raging inflation caused by reckless Federal spending. To try to fight this price inflation the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates which reduces the value of the commercial banks treasury bond investments. (We explain why this happens in this episode.)

The result: banks are now sitting on more than $600 billion of unrealized bond losses. Silicon Valley (SVB), Signature, and First Republic banks look to be canaries in the coal mine, potentially the first of many regional bank balance sheets to blow up.

The root cause for this – and the Fed is almost entirely responsible - is the 14 years of free money policies and asset price inflation driven by the Fed. Since 2008, banks have been borrowing from depositors at near 0% interest. With "free money", bankers forgot how to be bankers matching assets and liabilities, interest rate risk and duration.

As they have during the banking crises of the past quarter century, the regulators have pulled out their default playbook: making more institutions "systemically risky," foisting the tab on taxpayers and giving regulators more control.

But there's also something new: the troubling problem of regulatory mission drift. The Fed's historical mandates are to promote price stability and full employment and a safe and sound banking system. Instead, the Fed (and the Treasury) have changed their priorities to promote the progressive priorities of climate change and equity. Case in point: SVB received its first "outstanding" rating from examiners for fulfilling the SF Fed's social and climate agenda. These didn't cause SVB to fail, but it sure looks like examiners became more permissive of - or overlooked entirely - its balance-sheet risks.

The scenario playing out here is potentially accelerating toward something much worse:

What better way to push us towards a correct climate change and equity agenda than a wholly government-operated banking system where everyone's bank is effectively the Federal Reserve. In this system, our money will become a so-called "central bank digital currency" giving the federal government power over most of our personal financial matters.

Far-fetched? I don't think so. Read about the "Overton Window."

Joining me to talk through how we got here and where this may be going is Rick Manning, president of Americans for Limited Government, and its Vice President, Robert Romano.

Rick describes the banks recent "doomed-to-fail strategy, owning and trading government debt, dependent on falling interest rates to create a guaranteed profit." When those trends reverse, crashes ensue and bailouts occur.

These bailouts, from the Savings-and-Loan Associations of the 1980s to Silicon Valley Bank's today, have helped drive financial centralization as big banks get saved and little ones go under. After 2008, the Dodd-Frank Act made takeovers easier, setting up an arbitrary mechanism based on whether a bank is deemed to be a "systemic risk."

Rick explains how this can be politicized:

"They determined that Silicon Valley Bank had "systemic risk" because politically connected people were investing in woke capitalism and the green agenda. But if you're invested in drilling, you're not going to get bailed out."

Says Robert: "it's a lethal threat to the private sector if Treasury and the Federal Reserve can just label a bank 'systemically risky' and take it over."

Rick and I served on President Trump's transition team, and we know that sound ideas can get lost in the politics. Still, change has to start somewhere. What about solutions?

We have many but there's so much in this episode, it almost resists description. Listen in for yourself. I worry that we're seeing the weaponization of our money. We lay these issues out and you decide.

Under President Joe Biden and his Administration the whole of government has been weaponized to promote a so-called Diversity Equity and Inclusion agenda that, in fact, will bring about just the opposite of what these words mean.

Case in point is an assertive, left-wing, anti-family Department of Labor with its power to regulate and attempt to social engineer virtually every aspect of the American workplace.

Congress has granted it a stunning amount of power to administer more than 180 federal laws and thousands of regulations affecting more than 10 million employers and 150 million workers.

And almost no knows what it does.

There's probably no one better equipped to explain this threat to liberty than my old friend, the very honorable Patrick Pizzella who served as Deputy Secretary of Labor for three years under President Trump, and as Acting Secretary for a few months in 2019.

I've known Pat since former Attorney General Edwin Meese brought me into the Conservative Action Project and introduced us. No one I know has a better grasp of the big picture and the minutiae of labor laws and regulations.

The New York Times calls Pat "a movement conservative" who when he was appointed was "far more consequential than those of the many acting secretaries that have served..."

The legislation creating the Labor Department was signed into law by a reluctant President Taft on his last day in office. Since then its power has grown "like a rolling stone relentlessly gathering more moss" as Pat puts it.

In this wide ranging conversation we talk about how Labor is radically ratcheting up regulatory costs on productive industry and is pushing "environmental, social and governance" aka ESG initiatives that promise to dramatically reduce investment returns for pensioners.

The threat to Americans' pension returns from ESG investing is that its principle focus is on the climate change agenda, even though it's utterly clear that high, or even positive, ESG returns don't exist except through government subsidies.

(Trillions of dollars in federal spending in the past two years went to climate subsidies, in the form of tax credits, favorable financing for climate-related projects, and the like.)

The Biden Administration is obsessed with pushing its ESG climate agenda: this week Joe Biden's first and only veto was to reject a bill passed by Congress that would have reversed a Labor Department rule effectively promoting ESG investing.

We also talk about Labor's threat to the so-called gig economy - independent contractors - who comprise 15 to 20 percent of America's workforce.

Gig labor benefits from the free-market principle of voluntary exchange: you can make a contract with me because you can discern what's in your own interest; so can I. We're adults.

Not surprisingly, many adults in America like this arrangement: proposals to eliminate it have been voted down even in California.

Nevertheless, the command-and-control Labor Department is preparing a rule "that makes it more difficult for people to be classified as independent contractors" and easier for unions to organize.

Listen in to learn some surprising and unsettling things about Labor, a boring-sounding agency which we need to watch like a hawk, because its actions are major threats our liberties.

The brute force of top-down government is no friend to freedom—and a friend to freedom this Department is not.

Newly released documents show that the White House has played a major role in censoring Americans on social media.

Email exchanges between Rob Flaherty, the White House's director of digital media, and social-media executives prove the companies put Covid censorship policies in place in response to relentless, coercive pressure from the White House—not voluntarily as the government has claimed.

The emails emerged last month in the discovery phase of Missouri v. Biden, a free-speech case brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana and four private plaintiffs, including leading epidemiologists Stanford's Jay Bhattacharya and Harvard's Martin Kulldorff.

Government's role in social media censorship has been just as bad as we feared and worse.

So what are the details, and what's at stake? To explain, Jenin Younes, litigation counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance which is representing the private plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden, joins me on this episode with

Todd Zywicki, Professor at George Mason's Scalia Law School and who was last on the show exploring with me whether "Chinese-Style Social Credit Will Be Coming to America"

The ugly truth.

We also now know that not only the White House, but also the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies have all played a major role in censoring Americans on social media, directing tech companies to remove certain types of material and even to censor specific posts and accounts.

Apparently they even censored this show.

"If you recall Bill," reminds Todd, "the last time Jenin and I were here with you, was about when I sued my employer over trying to force me to get vaccinated even though I had natural immunity. And why that's so relevant to the conversation we're having today was that quite quickly that episode was removed from YouTube. It was taken down as violating the terms of service of YouTube. And to this day, we have no idea why."

People were censored for saying things that we now know to be true.

"Martin Kulldorff is among the most cited scientists in the world when it comes to infectious disease issues and vaccine safety," says Jenin. "And he was censored on Twitter for saying that people with natural immunity and children don't need the vaccine."

The censorship regime has been widespread and relentless. Our argument here is that the companies, as private actors, have a right to do that, but that the government does not have a right to coerce private actors to do what the government wants them to do.

The White House emails demonstrate that the federal government unlawfully coerced social media companies in an effort to ensure that Americans would be exposed only to state-approved information about Covid-19.

The government's unlawful, deceptive and dangerous conduct is the biggest issue of our day. We cover a lot in this episode: the First Amendment issues, public choice (government officials don't have a monopoly on truth), shadow banning, Section 230 (protects the social media companies but is now abused by them) and how Twitter has changed with Elon Musk in charge.

This is a fascinating and entertaining overview of the sometimes hard-to-understand issues. We taped this in-studio to amplify its importance, but if you don't have time to watch, be sure to listen in.