The environmental catastrophe in East Palestine, Ohio had many causes. Government incompetence and neglect played a role, as did both excessive regulation and deregulation under different administrations. Corporate “efficiencies” as well as domestic politics created the conditions that caused a terrible accident. The response was to prevent one type of disaster by creating another type of disaster.

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There’s a huge balloon floating over the nation. Everyone wants it gone, and we all worry what it might do to us.

It’s the national debt, currently about $30 trillion dollars. Your hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers tackle ways Congress might start to reduce the federal debt, much of which is the fault of spending on programs such as Medicare and Social Security, on the Drill Down with Peter Schweizer.”

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When Peter and Eric open this week’s show by talking about balloons and popcorn, you might be imagining wide-eyed little children at the county fair, not a sneaky communist regime committing economic and military espionage on America. But that’s what popcorn and balloons mean here at The Drill Down with Peter Schweizer.

Of course, the big story of the past week was Communist Chinese government’s spy balloon that floated across the US through Montana and 10 other states before being shot down by a missile fired by an F-22 fighter jet off the coast of Myrtle Beach, SC. Not since 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first satellite shot into Earth’s orbit, has a foreign government’s flight activity so captured attention and rattled so many Americans.

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Kenny Xu joins Peter and Eric on The Drill Down to talk about the dark side of “diversity and inclusion” efforts in America’s schools and universities. It’s a subject he knows very well as an Asian American who is president of a nonprofit group called “Color Us United.”

Kenny, 25, is also the author of the fascinating book, An Inconvenient Minority: The Harvard Admissions Case and the Attack on Asian American Excellence, which takes a deep dive into that dark side at what was once America’s premier university. In the case of Harvard, it shows up in a hazy admissions metric that no one at the university can really explain known as the “personality score.”

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The federal debt ceiling needs to be raised. Again. The White House says it won’t negotiate with Congress over raising the amount of money the US government can borrow, and Congress has not passed a normal budget since 1996. Peter and Eric welcome financial commentator and investment manager David Bahnsen to talk about big debt, big government, big mistakes, and why he believes there is still hope. 

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On the most recent episode, Eric Eggers admits to misplacing his keys. We all misplace things. But not all of us keep classified documents in a box in the garage. President Joe Biden did.

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Two things are worth remembering when you read about the long fight to elect a House Speaker. First, the dissenters were a mixed bag of principled conservatives and publicity hounds. Second, some good came out of the repeated voting to select Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) as the new leader of the House. On the most recent episode of The Drill Down, hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers explore the positive things that came from the chaos.

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On the most recent episode of The Drill Down, Peter and Eric shake off some holiday crud and plunge back into Washington crud. They start by breathing in the sooty exhaust of the Omnibus.

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On our most recent podcast, Peter and Eric introduce you to two unlikely muckrakers who take local corruption very seriously. And there are about 560 former officials in Illinois who have seen the business end of that seriousness.

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Rep. Mike Garcia (R-CA) is a badass who flew 30 combat missions more than 30 combat missions during Operation Iraqi Freedom in the skies above Baghdad, Fallujah, and Tikrit.

Now a congressman, Garcia confronts a greater adversary as a member of the House GOP’s China Accountability Task Force. He joins Peter and Eric on the most recent episode of The Drill Down to give us a preview of what the new majority will be focused on starting next year with respect to America’s “peer threat,” the People’s Republic of China.

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