The Bill Walton Show

Listen in to a behind the scenes story meeting as the Bill Walton Show team speculates on what's going on in the world. Starlink satellites and all the junk flying around in space, Elon Musk vs Jeff Bezos, Ukraine, the domino theory, Biden's open borders, Alyona's Kazakhstan take on Russia, media's monolithic coverage of Ukraine, inflation, cooking oil and fertilizer prices, the insane (perhaps) Shanghai covid lockdown, the fragmenting world order and the dollar's reserve currency status, what's going on with China and Russia, corporate profits at all time highs … and more. Send us your thoughts about what we should cover.

We're more than two years into the Covid-19 pandemic. So by now, we should know enough to assess what we've learned about the measures our governments took to mitigate the virus? What worked? What didn't? Fortunately, we now have a comprehensive comparative study, published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, authored by University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan - and Steve Moore and Phil Kerpen of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. They compared Covid outcomes in the 50 states and the District of Columbia based on three variables: the economy, education and mortality. Their conclusion? "The correlation between health and economy scores is essentially zero," say the authors, "which suggests that the severe lockdown states that withdrew the most from economic activity did not significantly improve health by doing so." The bottom 10 are dominated by the states and D.C. that had the most stringent lockdowns and were among the last to reopen schools We can't let this conclusion go. We must absorb now what we've learned from what worked - and what didn't work. We can't mindlessly respond to the next pandemic - and we know there will be a next one - with failed policies. To dig into this, Phil Kerpen, President on American Commitment, an author of the Study, and a deep subject matter expert on Covid policies, joins me for a thorough look at how to avoid repeating the policy blunders of the past two+ years.

In this episode I'm talking again with Dr. J. Michael Waller, Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Policy, Mike's Secret Empire: The KGB in Russia Today predicted the rise of the KGB, and inevitably, a Vladimir Putin. He was also Annenberg Professor of International Communication at the Institute of World Politics, and instructor in SYOPS operation at the Kennedy Special Warfare Center School at Fort Bragg. In this wide ranging and of necessity, speculative conversation we ask whether, after the Cold War ended, the United States could have brought Russia into alignment with the West. There are many what if's. Here's some of what we speculate about. Is the war in Ukraine a product of Putin's aggression or US/EU fecklessness, or both? Why did President Bush 41's Administration fear the collapse of the Soviet Union? and even urged countries, such as Ukraine, to temper their hopes for a popularly elected government? After the USSR collapsed, the U.S. had a real opportunity to shape post-Soviet Russia. Why did we leave it to an unholy alliance of criminal cartels, oligarchs and KGB officers? Was Vladimir Putin's rise inevitable? Has he become unstable, or a master chess-player? Or something else? How good is US spy craft in understanding Putin's mindset? Who is Claus von Stauffenberg and what did he do? Hint: he's why Putin has a blast barrier under his 50' conference table. Has weak US national security leadership e.g. our catastrophic Afghanistan withdrawal, been provocative? Did Putin decide that with America's national security leaders obsessed with climate change and "white rage", not war fighting, there's been no better time to invade Ukraine? How did our main central European NATO ally - Germany - become completely dependent on Putin's good graces in order for its economy to continue? Mike Waller brings a lifetime of national security intelligence research and tradecraft to our conversation. His answers are fascinating.

This episode is a follow-up to my conversation a few weeks ago with Dr. Peter Vincent Pry about our concerns that our Administration's responses to the Russian invasion of Ukraine could lead to nuclear war. Today, we consider also an alternate possibility that Vladimir Putin is playing a much deeper game than most in the West have imagined. As Executive Director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, former Chief of Staff of the Congressional EMP Commission and Director of the US Nuclear Strategy Forum, Dr Pry brings a vast and imaginative knowledge of history and of modern warfare. "Most analysts, including myself, thought that the relevant scenario was Crimea and that the Russians would go for a quick, almost bloodless, victory," speculates Peter, "but there is another Russian way of war that was right under our noses. And that is a long protracted war … it's almost like they're deliberately doing everything they can to try to provoke the West to intervene, to jump into the war." There are a lot of strange things in the way the Russians have conducted the Ukraine War that have violated most all of the fundamental elements of their military doctrine. They didn't go for tactical and strategic surprise. They attacked openly in the face of the West. They haven't cyber attacked although the Russians have demonstrated the ability to isolate their cyber attacks to Ukraine itself. They haven't committed some of their best conventional forces. Their best and most modern tanks haven't been committed to Ukraine. Of their 20,000 tanks they're using mostly older models and only a small fraction of those. "The Russian air force has almost been absent without leave, hasn't been deployed in its best capabilities," explains Peter, "and has played a very limited role." Why? We need to consider the possibility that this whole thing right from the beginning might not be just about Ukraine. "It might be aimed at creating a long period of chaos in the center of Europe," reasons Peter, "that it's going to put such stress on its economies and the NATO Alliance that the NATO Alliance will come apart at the seams." Putin isn't returning phone calls from the White House and Russian general staffs are not talking to our Pentagon. "They've basically stopped communicating with us," says Peter. "That isn't the action of a country that's badly losing a war and is desperately seeking an exit." We should be cautious about what we believe of what we're being told in Ukraine and about the performance of the Russian army. We're told Russia is on the ropes, that it looks like it could lose the Ukraine War, Putin could fall from power and that he and the elites who support him and his family could be executed. But consider this: Putin has postured Russia's nuclear arsenal in such a way that they can launch most of their forces in just a few minutes without telegraphing any messages to us. This a time for America to stop saber rattling and develop a sober considered strategy to defuse the Ukraine tinderbox. Dr Peter Vincent Pry outlines some sensible and constructive strategies to wind down the hostilities, up to and including hitting the reset button with Russia, reminding us that our real object in our new Cold War is China. There's a lot to learn from this conversation. Please listen in.

Since the COVID-19 virus was loosed upon the world, either intentionally or accidentally, from Wuhan, China, the world has been fundamentally changed. The globalist economic and geopolitical fabric has been torn. There is no one single dominant power anymore and the post Cold War, unipolar world system is gone and is not coming back. Russia now is the first to take advantage of what they think is a window of opportunity. The Russian-Ukrainian conflict is but the beginning of many conflicts that will emanate over the next decade. So argues Brandon Weichert, my guest on this episode, publisher of the Weichert Report and author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower. Brandon, who has been called a "brilliant and anxiety inducing scholar," believes mainstream American analysts have been wrong from the start on the war in Ukraine. "Even if they have gotten some details correct, they are missing the picture: there is no rolling Russian power back in Ukraine and should Russia exhaust itself militarily, there is no guarantee that Putin will not attempt to escalate into a wider regional war–with WMDs having been deployed–nor is there a guarantee that any diplomatic settlement will be conducive to Washington or Kiev." Putin has banked his entire regime on the notion that he will reestablish the Russian empire by expanding Russia's geopolitical influence into the former Soviet Eastern European states, notably Ukraine. Is the Biden Administration playing with nuclear fire in its brinksmanship with Putin? The question answers itself. "You've got to think about escalating the conflict in the way the Russians do," explains Brandon. "The Russians look at tactical nuclear weapons as just big artillery pieces." America may be facing its most dangerous time since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. President Biden should be on the phone with Putin every day, trying to deescalate. But as far as has been reported, this isn't happening. "You look at the last 30 years, the people who've been running foreign policy and economic policy in this country are the same people who got us into Iraq," reminds Brandon. Agree or disagree, for a deep understanding of the dynamics at play, listen in to this conversation with Brandon Weichert.

"No borders. No walls. No USA at all." Chant by Antifa rioters marching in the streets of Denver. With Ukraine and Russia dominating the headlines, America seems to have lost focus on the border - and the war - that really counts. It's not Ukraine, it's America's southern border with Mexico. The Biden Administration seems simply to have "opened it up." Completely. And what's happening is an ongoing catastrophe that's fueling illegal immigration, human trafficking and drug smuggling. People from over 100 countries around the world have crossed the border illegally in the last year. We need to focus on this war on our own border here, at home - a strange war where it seems our adversary is our own federal government. What the Biden administration is doing is not incompetence at protecting our border, it's a deliberate policy to open it up. But we don't have to wait for a change in the Administration. "A plain reading of the Constitution gives border state governors war powers under Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3 to interdict and remove illegal aliens to Mexico without the permission of the federal government" says former Trump homeland security official Ken Cuccinelli. If the federal government won't protect the southern border, the states themselves can; moreover, governors from non-border states can also send help. Explaining how this could happen are my guests on this episode, principals in an exciting new policy shop, the Center for Renewing America. Russ Vought, the Center's president, Director of the Office of Management and Budget for President Trump's full term in office, responsible for overseeing the implementation of the President's policy, management, and deregulatory agendas across the entire Executive Branch. And Ken Cuccinelli, Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS) and Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) under President Trump. Ken also served as Attorney General of Virginia, where he was the first in the country to sue over Obamacare, and made critical advances against human trafficking, health care fraud, gangs and child exploitation. This is a fascinating discussion, and not only about how we might deal with our border crisis, but also the many ways we could get a federal government that works for us, rather than the other way around.

Thirty years ago, the United States, Europe, and Japan manufactured 90 percent of the global supply of the key ingredients for the world's medicines and vitamins. No more. China is now the largest global supplier. Millions of Americans are taking prescription and over-the-counter drugs made in, or with critical ingredients from China and they don't know it and neither do many of their doctors. This is becoming a grave concern. As we've seen, first with the global pandemic driven lockdowns and now, with the Russia/Ukraine war, the world's economy has acute supply chain interdependencies. And for America, among the top of our concerns, has to be our dependence on an increasingly hostile China for our pharmaceutical drugs. Sharing my concern and joining me on this episode are my returning guests: Rosemary Gibson, author of "China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America's Dependence on China for Medicine" And Frank Gaffney, founder of the Center for Security Policy, Vice Chairman of the Committee for the Present Danger: China and who hosts Securing America with Frank Gaffney on the Real America's Voice Network Some highlights: The FDA not only approves new drugs, but also inspects drug manufacturing plants. Worryingly, that's happening less and less with our drugs made in China. In the spring of 2020, the US was just weeks away from not having the most basic medicines. Why? Our dependence on India, and in turn China. Is Congressional leadership so compromised by its ties to China that it is not willing to address our growing supply chain vulnerabilities? We're told we pay more for prescription drugs to cover pharma's huge domestic R&D costs. Pharma's solution? Move its R&D to "low cost" China, a move that makes America ever more vulnerable to the whims of the CCP. These are complicated and important issues. Worth a listen as we work to dig into what's at stake.

Growing up Bozell. Stops Along the Way: A Catholic Soul, a Conservative Heart, an Irish Temper, and a Love of Life. Talking in this episode with L. Brent Bozell III, author of Stops Along the Way and who is one of the most outspoken and effective national leaders in the conservative movement today. Brent founded and is president of the Media Research Center, the largest media watchdog organization in America; and ForAmerica, which the New York Times declared was "one of the greatest unexpected influences on the 2016 election." Lecturer, syndicated columnist, television commentator, debater, marketer, businessman, author, publisher, and activist … Brent's done it all. He's also has the great gift for friendship. This episode though, is about a Brent Bozell that we don't know enough about. What was it like to grow up as one of 10 children as part of the nomadic family of amazing consequence of Brent Bozell Jr and Patricia Buckley? He, who headed the Yale debate team (with roommate and best friend William F Buckley Jr. as his second), who was ghostwriter of Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative, a seminal figure in the conservative resurgence and who died a Third Order Carmelite monk. She, a towering intellect, the closest sister to Bill Buckley, and who had a famous confrontation with T. Grace Atkinson, a militant feminist anti-Catholic who had been going around the country saying that the Virgin Mary had been knocked up. What happens when your parents move you and your menagerie of pets and siblings from the leafy suburbs of Chevy Chase out to a dilapidated estate in rural Virginia? What happens when, without batting an eyelash, your father sends you and your two brothers off to boarding school in Spain when you didn't speak a word of Spanish and who simply expected that as Bozell's you would thrive? This is just a sampling of an intimate and revealing conversation. Hope you'll find the time to listen in.

This is a very upsetting episode. I'm joined by my frequent guest Dr Peter Vincent Pry and we're talking about Ukraine and the likelihood of nuclear war. Dr Pry is executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, served as chief of staff to the congressional EMP Commission, and director of the U.S. Nuclear Strategy Forum. Just recently, he published a piece titled, "The Nuclear Crisis Nobody Knows" "I think we're facing an unprecedented danger that we've never experienced in the nuclear missile age, worse than Cuba, a circumstance where we are on the threshold of a nuclear war, nuclear attack, from Russia." Nobody knows what's in Putin's mind but apparently he going to just keep using his conventional forces to overwhelm the Ukrainians and eventually achieve victory in Ukraine at a conventional level. But many people predicted that the Russian conventional military would just steamroll through Ukraine in a couple of days, and that hasn't happened. So what's the probability Putin then decides, "I'm under pressure from my political enemies and I've got to wind this thing up. Maybe use a few tactical nuclear weapons in order to bring this to more rapid conclusion." If he did, how would the Biden administration respond? He knows that Biden's is the most anti-nuclear administration that we have ever had. There are many anti-nuclear activists in the Biden administration and their agenda is to deeply reduce US nuclear weapons and US dependency on nuclear deterrence. Peter explains, "these people don't believe that any rational actor would ever use nuclear weapons and, therefore, all you need is a bare-minimum deterrent. That's one of the things that makes the current nuclear crisis most dangerous, because Biden is acting as if Putin would have to be a mad man to use nuclear weapons, that it was not a rational decision that he would make, despite the fact that Russian doctrine calls for that, that they've exercised it, that their force structure is clearly designed for war fighting and surprise attack. And that's why the Biden administration are like children playing with nuclear fire." Most of our information about Ukraine is coming from two biased sources that have an interest in making the Russian army look as bad as possible: the Ukrainians and the Biden administration. Putin has put his forces on nuclear alert and there are reports that he has self-deployed himself to his nuclear bunker. Also, that the United States put its "Doomsday Plane" into the air last week. Is this true? Are we going to blunder into a nuclear war over Ukraine? Peter has a comprehensive grasp of the issues. Another listen well worth the time.

For a wide ranging overview of how and why the Biden's national and homeland security teams have made America more vulnerable on virtually every front, start here. I'm joined on this episode by Fred Fleitz, Vice Chair of America First Policy Institute's Center for American Security and who served as Deputy Assistant to President Trump and Chief of Staff of the National Security Council and John Zadronzy, Director of America First Policy Institute's Center for Homeland Security and Immigration, and who served as Deputy Assistant to President Trump in the office of Senior Advisor for Policy. As both Fred and John convey in our conversation, it's hard to overstate the security risks America is facing today. From Ukraine and Russia to China and Taiwan to our own wide open southern Border, the Biden Administration seems incapable or unwilling to protect us. Secretary of Defense Bob Gates wrote in his 2014 memoir that Joe Biden has been wrong about every national security question for 40 years. And now as President, "We have one of the weakest presidents in history, in leadership and in foreign policy and one year of disaster after disaster, especially the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was ordered by Joe Biden," worries Fred. And on the immigration front, "We work from a certain assumption that every American president means the best for the republic and fights to serve the republic and in any way possible," explains John. "I think though, what we're seeing in almost every immigration issue is a forced failure." Instead of an American first policy, Biden seems hell bent on an America last. In his State of the Union Address, he doubled down. No calls for smarter 21st century defense spending as Russia and China ramp up their militaries. No reset of his anti-fossil fuel agenda, that has gas prices heading towards $5 a gallon and beyond. China seemed absent from his concerns. Where is this going, and how does it end? Fred Fleitz and John Zadronzy offer an inside-the-White House perspective on all this, and more. We conclude with Fred's final thought, "as much as we feel for the Ukrainian people, we cannot get into a war with Russia." Wise words. Let's pray the Biden Administration has the savvy to avoid one.

In the past two years, measures taken to deal with Covid have resulted in extraordinary losses of freedom in the West - in fact, all over the world - driven by government mandates and lockdowns. Now that it's clear that we're no longer in the throes of a pandemic, what next? For how long are citizens prepared to accept these extraordinary extensions of state power and loss of their civil liberties? Have we slid into permanent tyranny in the name of "protecting us?" Joining me on this episode are two people who refuse to accept this tyranny. Dr. Naomi Wolf, author of seven best-selling books, who writes on Substack as the extraordinary and fierce "Outspoken with Dr. Naomi Wolf" (see below) and Jenin Younes, litigation council for the New Civil Liberties Alliance, NCLA, a former public defender, and a warrior against the massive encroachment of the Administrative State. Both Naomi and Jenin have made an intellectually and emotionally difficult break with the Left over governments' totalitarian response to Covid, and in this episode they explain why. It's not so much that they've changed their views, rather the ideological tectonic plates have shifted. Some excerpts: "I do think there's been quite a realignment" Jenin explains … "it's now more like authoritarianism versus freedom. I get contacted by disaffected Democrats every day. So I think a lot of people are seeing through this." "When I met Jenin maybe a year and half ago," says Naomi, "she and I were like refugees from the left. Having a glass of wine and saying, "What is happening to the people around us?" I agree with Jenin a 1,000% again. It is a realignment, a different axis of authoritarianism versus freedom" We're living in different information worlds. "We are, as a country getting two absolutely different information streams … I was always told that Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon are evil, but they're doing better reporting on this than the New York Times or the Washington Post, let alone CNN and CNBC." And it's driven people mad. "It's been called a mass formation psychosis, but there are other names for it. It's a kind of mass hysteria and you can't really chip away at it with facts or logic and that's sadder than anything. I mean, it's dividing families. It's dividing friends. "… it's scary to see people (on the Left) be unwilling to hear evidence to the contrary of what the narrative is. They've changed. They don't say, "That doesn't hold up or those sources are not good." They say, "Don't show me that" It's like a religion and that's scary." This episode is filled with insightful, brave and personal truths from Naomi Wolf and Jenin Younes. Another must listen. By the way, you have to love an author whose most recent essay is titled: "I'm not 'Brave'' You're Just a P---y"

James Lindsay is someone who truly understands Critical Race Theory and doesn't believe a word of it. As James explains in this episode of The Bill Walton Show, "Critical Race Theory is a disaster. Critical Race Theory is the tip of a 100 year-long spear that's being thrust into the side of Western civilization. In its simplest terms, CRT is Race Marxism." Like Marxism, CRT is a fundamentalist religion, a comprehensive belief system that claims to address the fundamental questions of human existence. CRT rests upon a belief that racism is the fundamental organizing principle of society. It claims that racism is systemic and that it was created and maintained by whites to maintain their privileges and advantages over every other race. According to CRT, racism - as a form of power - can only flow from "whiteness" and it lays the problems of society on the doorstep of "whiteness." Critical Race Theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including the principle of equality, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and the principles of Constitutional law. Like all other totalitarians before them, Critical Race Theorists are interested in reordering the world according to the vision contained in their Theory. But what its proponents are chiefly interested in is increasing power for themselves. James Lindsay, author of Race Marxism, is founder of New Discourses! which he calls a home for the politically homeless, especially for those who feel like they've been displaced from their political homes because of the movement sometimes called "Critical Social Justice." He is smart, engaging and funny - CRT easily lends itself to parody. Listen in and learn. It's worth your time.

The subtitle of Matt Schlapp's new book, written with Deal Hudson, sums up well why this book is a must read. Defeating the cancel culture mob and reclaiming one nation under God They write: "For half a century, people of faith have seen traditional ideas of morality undermined as a cascade of progressive revolutions impacted society. The waves of change hit the shores, but most nevertheless believed that families, the Church, truth, and education would all weather the storm. But we were overconfident. We fought, but we also rested in the confidence that common sense and decency would prevail. It was impossible, it seemed, that the basic values held by our parents and grandparents would ever be challenged by charges of racism and, for many, their "whiteness." Each day now brings news that defies common sense; it's as if the world has turned upside down and none of the old verities matter anymore. When a society begins to unwind, chaos ensues. It's now crystal clear that our opponents - The Desecrators - want to create confusion, undermine basic truths, and take down America." Matt and Mercy Schlapp join me for a compelling and highly personal conversation about our struggle to push back against these forces. "What's going on is much more diabolical than mere cancel culture," warns Matt. "Everything that's good, that's true, that's holy, that's inspirational, that brings people joy is under a coordinated attack." As a close personal friend, I've watched Matt and Mercy withstand the onslaught of the Left. They've paid the price for fighting back. Ending up on the Antifa execution list and "no hire" lists because they worked for Trump, accosted by neighbors, fired by clients… Matt and Mercy Schlapp have faced this hell, continue to fiercely speak out and, as I have observed, ended up stronger. Partly it's their love of country, but most importantly, it's their faith and family. "We feel very strongly that teaching our kids about our faith, getting them to church, praying together as a family is essential," shares Mercedes. The struggle America's struggle today is in part about principles and politics, but we need to face up to the reality that it is really about the brass knuckled raw exercise of power. "Conservatives have to stop talking about the past and lofty notions of the way life should be. We need to start talking about what we want to do in the present. We can't let ourselves be cancelled," asserts Matt. There's a lot to unpack in this conversation with Matt and Mercy Schlapp. I hope you'll find the time for their inspiring and trenchant observations.

There are growing calls among political elites in Washington for the United States to "do something" about preventing a Russian invasion of the Ukraine. But do we have the military capabilities to stop it? Why do we want Ukraine to join NATO? Does Ukraine matter? Why are American politicians who have been so soft toward Moscow for their entire political careers all of a sudden turn uber hawks against Vladimir Putin. Are we pushing China and Russia to make common cause with each other? Does the Biden foreign policy team have a clue what they're doing? To get some answers to these and many many other questions, two seasoned national security analysts - and returning guests - Peter Pry and Mike Waller - weigh in. J. Michael Waller, PhD, is Senior Analyst for Strategy at the Center for Security Policy and Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, is the former Executive Director of the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security Some sample observations: "Russia and China are already in an alliance that poses the most formidable combination that the Western democracies have faced in their history," warns Peter Pry It's worse than that. This combination also includes North Korea and Iran creating a new power block that Washington just doesn't seem to want to acknowledge. Russia can overrun Ukraine and the frontline NATO states in 72 hours. The Pentagon's had 18 Taiwan war games and in its own war games scenarios, we have lost every one of them. If you want a real and informed tutorial about the possibilities of war with Russia, Ukraine, China and Taiwan, this is a must listen. It's a sobering 60 minutes, but well worth your time.

On this episode we're talking with economist Steve Moore about his terrific new book Govzilla. It's a sobering, yet easy to read, tale of the gigantic expansion of government over the last 50 years, and especially over the last two years since COVID hit. "The virus became an excuse to massively expand the powers of government," says Steve, "the size of government, the regulatory reach of government, in ways that I think we would've found unimaginable a decade ago." With so many other issues before us: borders, education, mandates, Ukraine, election integrity, and on and on, it's easy to lose focus on Washington's catastrophic federal financial mismanagement. Watch this show to regain focus. And if you're looking for an excellent primer on economics, Steve's book is it. It's relatively short and easy to read. It's filled with very clear graphs. It covers all the major issues. It talks about who the heroes are (too few), who the villains are, what the money is going to, and what kind of future we're going to have if we don't put our financial house in order. Steve, in his usual entertaining style, weighs in on: Congressional accountability Canada's truckers protest Entitlements and the social security "lockbox" The 3 steps to a country's financial ruin What we ought to do with China's U.S. Treasury holdings Modern Monetary Theory Federal government accounting Republican Governors The 1619 Project and our "school choice moment" His support for tariffs on trade with China And much more. My agenda item would be to have Steve's book as part of curriculum in every school in America. Listen in. I think you'll agree.

America's founding ideals and our nation's rich Judeo-Christian heritage have been under constant attack from a so-called "progressive" Left for over a hundred years. Yet as they've marched through and deconstructed America's great cultural institutions, instead of the "progress" they claim, we're seeing the opposite. It's abundantly clear now that as the progressive elites prevail, the rest of us lose. And more and more we feel a growing urge to push back. We know now that America's flourishing will depend on prevailing in a successful cultural counter revolution. And it's beginning to happen. On the front lines leading this fight - and my guests for this episode - are President Ryan Anderson and Senior Fellow Roger Severino of the Ethics & Public Policy Center. Prior to leading EPPC. Ryan Anderson was the William E. Simon senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation He is also the Founding Editor of Public Discourse and the author of When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment and Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom. Before joining EPPC, Roger Severino was the Director of the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where he led a team of over 250 staff protecting our nation's civil rights, conscience and religious freedom. In response to the Biden administration's hostility to sound medicine and the rights of conscience, EPPC has launched a major initiative, its HHS Accountability Project led by Roger. As Ryan explains: "Ethics needs to be at the heart of public policy. Every piece of public policy, every piece of law embodies someone's morality, and we work to make sure that our laws embody true morality." "There's no such thing as moral neutrality when it comes to the law, whether it's private property, free speech, definition of marriage, or our laws about homicide." A fascinating conversation. Please listen in.

In this episode we get to talk with George F. Will about his latest collection of essays, American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020, and also about his magnum opus, The Conservative Sensibility. Joining in on the conversation are John Tamny, Vice President of FreedomWorks, editor of RealClearMarkets, and author of When Politicians Panicked, and Don Boudreaux, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, research scholar at Mercatus Center, who runs the go-to blog for free market economic thinking, Cafe Hayek. Always witty and erudite, George offers up his views on today's pressing concerns, queried, challenged and amplified by John and Don, two very smart men. Among our questions: How and when do Americans recover the liberties lost from over two years of government lockdowns and mandates? Why did so many libertarians acquiesce? Public choice theory says that people in government are not any different than people in the private sector. Is this still true? A prosperous and free society depends on trust. Will America's government health establishment be able to recover the public's trust? Can woke progressivism's long march through American institutions be reversed? And more: on families, voting rights, campaign finance, college campus fragility, social media's power, judicial restraint, closed questions in an open society, majority rule, self-regarding versus other regarding acts, China's future … almost everything except baseball. We'll get to that next time. Definitely worth a listen.

The 2022 winter Olympics in Beijing China opens a few weeks from now, and the International Olympic Committee's 2015 decision to have China host the event looks ever more dubious. Since then, it's become obvious to most observers that China, never a champion of human rights, is growing ever more oppressive. It's Communist Party leadership has become even more deeply committed to preserving its monopoly on power through state sponsored repression, surveillance, and indoctrination. Witness its takeover of Hong Kong, the internment of Muslims in Xinjiang, the disappearance of tennis star Peng Shuai, its totalitarian social credit system, the Covid coverup and mounting threats to democratic Taiwan. So why are democracies from all over the world moving ahead to send their athletes to a country so antithetical to their values? My guests for this episode provide a first hand and stark assessment as to why they should not. Chen Guangcheng, a Chinese civil rights lawyer, was imprisoned and under house arrest by the Chinese government for seven years for his human rights activism. Since escaping to America, he has remained a persistent voice for freedom, human dignity, and the rule of law in his native country. Reggie Littlejohn, who as the president of Women's Rights Without Frontiers, has spent years campaigning against China's forced abortion policies. and Yaxue Cao, who grew up in northern China during the Cultural Revolution, and went to college at Peking University in Beijing. She founded DC-based ChinaChange.org to inform the world about human rights, rule of law, and civil society in China - aspects of China's political landscape that are the most censored and least understood. China claims that the Chinese people "experience a broad, thorough and true democracy" and the China's National People's Congress "guarantees that the people are masters." To this Guangcheng responds "the Chinese people have never had a free election, the National People's Congress is made up entirely of the party's handpicked officials and the subject of democracy has been banned from kindergarten to university classrooms since 2013." Surveillance and social control are pervasive. Yaxue Cao explains, "If you speak any dissent on the internet, your accounts will be suspended or deleted. And not only that, policemen will quickly be able to identify who you are, and find you offline, and threaten you, sometimes take you away to the detention center." When the Olympic athletes go to China in a few weeks, they are entering into this surveillance culture. "They need to understand their movements are going to be tracked, all of their social media posts," says Reggie. "What if an athlete posts something that is very critical of the government? What's going to happen then?" It's not just governments, it's also the major multinational corporations, who are looking the other way. "The Chinese Communist Party is very calculating and has used China's market, the world's second largest, as an enticement," says Guangcheng. With billions at stake, the multinationals do not want to risk offending the CCP. These are but a fraction of the endless issues surrounding this Olympics. Why it's going ahead is not a mystery, but it is wrong. Listen in as my guests, with first hand experience of the CCP's iron hand, talk about what's at stake.

Unprecedented government measures to stop the spread of an unstoppable virus have morphed into mortal threats to our liberties and civil rights, not just here in the United States, but worldwide. First we were told that lockdowns, masks, and social distancing stop the spread of the virus. Do these things and we would be safe. There's no clear correlation between these measures and the spread of the virus. Then the CDC changed the definition of herd immunity on its website. They defined the concept to account for vaccines only, and erased the role of infections themselves. Winston Smith (1984) would understand. Now, it's only vaccines, vaccine mandates, vaccine passports that will do the trick. Natural immunity doesn't matter. Why? One big casualty of government responses to the coronavirus over the last two years is the loss of trust in our public health establishment. Joining me to talk about this is James Patrick, documentary filmmaker, whose film Planet Lockdown is coming out January 15th, 2022 and Jay Richards, frequent guest, author of Price of Panic, who is now the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow with the Heritage Foundation. Our larger concern is the damage being done to our free speech and our freedom to have open debate about what works and what doesn't. There are countless important questions we're not allowed to discuss. We're not allowed to talk about Ivermectin. We're not allowed to talk about whether the vaccines work, let alone whether they qualify as vaccines. We're not allowed to talk about the whether the pharmaceutical companies have an agenda. This is forbidden speech that's being monitored and chilled by the public health agencies, the corporate media, and social media companies. The censorship is growing more extreme. James interviewed Howard Berger, who's the chief epidemiologist and medical authority of Austria. James posted the interview the social media, which took it down, citing "medical misinformation." Are we to believe that YouTube censors know better than Austria's chief epidemiologist? Where is this going? How does it end? Vaccine mandates seem eerily to recall why we have the Nuremberg Code. Vaccine passports could easily turn into a Chinese-like social credit system. Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum has said the pandemic is an opportunity for "the great reset"—a restructuring of global capitalism for the 21st century. We need an open debate about whether this is the future we want. Jay Richards and James Patrick weigh in.

Today's episode is a treasure trove of important facts that we all should know about technology, society and the future. My guest is once again Mark Mills, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute - who specializes on science, technology, energy, and future manufacturing technologies - and who has just published The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and A Roaring 2020s Conventional wisdom as to how technology will change the future is wrong. And what is quite wrong is the view that the only technological revolution that matters will be found with renewable energy and electric cars. According to Mills, a convergence of technologies will instead drive a broad economic boom over the coming decade. It will come not from any single big invention, but from the confluence of radical advances in technology's three domains: microprocessors, materials, and machines. At the center of all of this is the Cloud, history's biggest infrastructure, which is itself based on the building blocks of next-generation microprocessors and artificial intelligence. For an optimistic take on what's ahead, Mark dives into this, and more. But we also talk about some of the dangerous dead ends we face if we plow ahead blindly with a promised "green" energy future. As we all know, today's elites are obsessed with climate change and replacing fossil fuels with solar and wind energy and other yet-to-be-invented technologies. But has anyone really thought this through? Wouldn't now be a good time to assess what actually doing this would look like. Mark Mills has thought it through and has a stark message - an inconvenient truth: "There won't be a world powered entirely by wind and solar or batteries. The reason I say that is because it is not possible. We don't have the materials and we can't afford it in either environmental or economic terms. " To switch from hydrocarbons oil, gas, and coal to wind solar and batteries, the quantity of materials acquired to be extracted from the earth to produce the same unit of energy goes up a thousand percent - that's ten times. Mark jokes that people believe in a new element "unobtainium" with perfect attributes: high energy density, it weighs nothing, costs nothing, and getting out of the earth is easy. "You have to mine stuff, build stuff. You always have to do that. Everything starts with mining." Take electric cars. The battery in an electric car weighs about a thousand pounds. Most people don't know that the thousand pound battery is replacing a 60 pound fuel tank. To make the thousand pound battery, to fabricate it, ou have to mine and dig up somewhere on the earth, 500,000 pounds of materials. Nickel copper, the manganese, lithium, carbonates, all of that. All of that requires mining equipment and mining machinery, almost all of which is oil fired. This is just one reality. Listen in as Mark also explains the true costs of solar and wind technologies. They are not what you thought. We need to be clear about what we're doing. The most valuable thing in the universe is the time that we have to live on earth. Much of what history has been devoted to is making our time available to do other things which translates into speed and convenience and comforts. And making time always takes energy. We need to stay smart about this and Mark explains how.

Albert Einstein said science can only flourish in an atmosphere of free speech. Today, despite claims about "following the science" with regard to Covid 19, this is simply not happening. Why? Because "they" have taken away one of the essential elements of science: allowing people to disagree based on facts learned through experiments and observation, reconciling practical knowledge and ends with scientific laws. This is how science works. This is how freedom works. This is how good things happen in a free society because people are free to get information and disagree. Nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth. By contrast, look at every totalitarian regime, what do they do? They squash free speech. And when that happens, people suffer. Who are "they?" I think we all know by now and it seems that they have the totalitarian playbook well in hand. Facebook, Twitter, all the tech giants and the mainstream media have all decreed that if you say something that is at odds with the CDC, the World Health Organization, they're going to censor you. An open debate about the Covid-19 virus and its variants - their origins, spread, lethality, vaccine effectiveness, governments' mandates to control their spread and on and on - is simply not happening. So to learn about what is true and what could be happening if we actually did follow the science, I'm joined in this episode by Jim Agresti, founder of an extraordinary shop, Just Facts. Just Facts a nonprofit institute dedicated to publishing comprehensive, straightforward, and rigorously documented facts about public policy issues. Some what we talk about: The effectiveness of vaccines versus natural immunity How different are Covid 19 variants from the original virus. Claims Joe Biden has made about the virus and its vaccines. You'd be better off listening to Dr. Jill. How the virus really spreads. Hint: it's not what the CDC originally claimed. The effectiveness of surgical masks (as documented by peer reviewed journals). Breathing CO2 all day is not good for you. Why nursing homes - and you - could benefit from a good UV disinfection system. The social and health costs of lockdowns versus their benefits. The CDC and the WHO have been patently wrong about many important things. "We've seen that time and time again, whether it's a death rate, how this thing spreads, the list goes on and on and on … misstatements by the World Health Organization," reveals Jim. Jim Agresti's hard work at Just Facts has revealed a lot of essential truths - and a lot about real science - concerning the virus and its aftermath. Listen in and learn.

Over the course of roughly four generations, from around 1950 to the present, American culture has been transformed from a culture that believed in the value of self-control into a culture that celebrates self-expression. And that "self-expression" has now twisted into a new form of anger - political wrath - which makes a performance art out of our darkest emotions. So argues my guest on this episode, Peter Wood, author of Wrath: America Enraged and 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project and President of the National Association of Scholars. "The question is not whether we didn't have to deal with anger before, but how we channeled it. What kind of cultural frame did we put around it? And that began to change. After World War II, the hero type of Gary Cooper who could maintain his cool under extreme pressure gave way to, think, of Allen Ginsberg, and his famous poem Howl." "We've brought anger into our music, movies, and personal lives; and now, having step by step relinquished our old inhibitions around feeling and expressing anger, we have turned anger into a way of wielding political power." But the "angri-culture," as he calls it, doesn't promise happy days again. It promises revenge…and a crisis that could destroy our republic. Are both sides equally to blame? No. Politics are not conservatives' obsession. Conservatives tend to see politics as just one part of life, and they've got other things going on, their family, their jobs, or church, their clubs, that sort of thing. And when you have a life, it's hard to take it terribly seriously that the other side is just simmering with rage all the time. It seems that if there is conservative rage in this era it is "further prodded by a progressive elite that seems to take sadistic delight in devising new ways to torment ordinary Americans," says Peter. 'Antiracism' is a psyops campaign aimed at institutionalizing discrimination against Whites. The 1619 Project is an attempt to erase American history and put in its place an elaborately constructed lie in which slavery explains everything. 'Critical race theory' (CRT) further amplifies the message that American success is built entirely of the bricks and mortar of White racial supremacy. The elite preaches and now practices the benefits of abolishing our national border and flooding the country with illegal immigrants, at the expense of working-class Americans. Progressives manipulated the Wuhan virus epidemic by turning a manageable health crisis into a major economic disaster, an excuse for stripping Americans of their civil liberties, and an incitement of mass hysteria. And progressives, claiming the need to protect 'voter rights,' seek to lock into place the subterfuges they used to elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris." The list goes on … and on. Adds Peter, "and now we have the recategorization after the fact of the events on Capitol hill as an insurrection, which strikes me as a deliberate effort to marginalize dissent in this country." Liberty loving Americans feel this tremendous anger and a sense of betrayal that our institutions have gone to the dark side. Yet we very much do not want to be provoked into something that we would all regret. Listen and consider as Peter and I wrestle with this difficult topic.

In this episode, we're talking again about the coercive power of the Administrative State and its serious threat to our constitutional freedoms. No other development in contemporary American law denies more rights to more Americans. Joining me to discuss is Mark Chenoweth, Executive Director, and Jenin Younes, Litigation Counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) a public interest litigation and pro bono advocacy law firm. NCLA represents both plaintiffs and defendants engaged with administrative state actions to make sure that their civil liberties are not being violated. Although Americans still enjoy the shell of their Republic, the administrative state has brought about exactly the sort of government that the Constitution was designed to prevent. "The kinds of protections that you would expect to have, if say a prosecutor from the Department of Justice were going after you in a federal district court, those same protections don't exist if it's a federal agency going after you in an administrative adjudication." "We're looking for cases where we can change the law," explains Mark. For example: Challenging Covid-19 regulations and orders imposed by executive decree. The NCLA class action suit for naturally immune federal employees against Covid vaccine mandates. When NASDAQ attacks! The problem with mandated diversity quotas for corporate boards. Is this the SEC's job? It's vital that many more Americans recognize the administrative state's unique threat to civil liberties. "If the government can get people in the habit of just doing what they're told and controlling them through administrative actions, then that makes it easier to accomplish whatever socio-political objectives that the government may have." Thomas Hobbes titled his book on politics Leviathan after the Bible's monstrous sea creature. Seems a pretty apt metaphor for what we're up against today.

Your eyes may glaze over when you hear people talking about the "administrative state." But if you care about liberty, it's long past time to start paying close attention to what it is and how impervious it has become to election outcomes. Today in Washington, we have what's become effectively a fourth branch of government: an unelected permanent bureaucracy of self-regarding "expert" progressive elites who staff and run the federal agencies. And if you believe they are hostile to conservatives you would be right.

In the past decade, America's big businesses have increasingly moved to the political left. For evidence, take a look at their actions and stances on critical race theory indoctrination, vaccine mandates, radical climate change agendas, boardroom "diversity", doing business and making common cause with a hostile China, etc … on issue after issue they align with the "woke" left. Now even the Federal Reserve and the Securities Exchange Commission are weighing in to support these agendas. What does this mean for ordinary Americans, and what can be done to push back? Joining me to explore this are: Matt Schlapp, Chairman of the American Conservative Union, which sponsors CPAC, founder of Cove Strategy, and long time advisor to major corporations, and Justin Danhof, Executive Vice President of the National Center for Public Policy, who has been waging a courageous battle against creeping corporate socialism for years. If you feel like American lovers of liberty are fighting against mounting odds, you are right. Even the big money management firms like Blackrock and Vanguard are pushing the left's agenda. Whether cynics, or true believers, they are putting their agenda ahead of investors as you will learn as we explore the dirty little secret of "ESG" investing. Also in this episode: Ford Foundation's backing Black Lives Matter, the "degrowth" people behind the climate change agenda, shareholder proposals that have nothing to do with companies … and other alarming things that you need to know about. There's a lot to unpack here, and Justin and Matt are outstanding guides to this terrain. We offer several lines of action. We can push back and must.

I open this show fondly quoting Shakespeare about how "one man in his time plays many parts." He could have been writing about my friend and one of my personal heroes Tony Perkins Tony's indeed a man of many extraordinary and effective parts. He's president of the Family Research Council. He's been chairman of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom and past President of the Council for National Policy. He's a syndicated radio host. He's an author of a terrific book called No Fear of New Generation Standing For Truth. He's a Baptist minister. He was a Louisiana State Representative, a TV reporter, a Marine, a policeman and when he was five years old, he led his father to Jesus. In this wide ranging conversation we talk about his journey, the importance of faith for a thriving society and economy, the threat from China, but at about 14 minutes in we get to the heart of matter. The number one thing we have to do is take back control of education in America. The lockdowns gave parents - and really forced parents - to pay attention to what their kids were being taught in the schools. They saw clearly that schools have morphed from teaching children to excel in the basics and instead are working to train "social justice" activists. And parents are revolting against the all across the country. Tony explains, "We've been working with activists across the country that are requesting documents through the FOIA requests." "My prediction is that this will eclipse the Tea Party movement of 2010 in the midterm election. Parents have had enough." The midterm 2022 election will see energized parents and families in a wholly new way. As Tony puts it, "I see this as really a... it's an army of mama bears that are being raised up across the country because if you get between a mama bear and her cubs you have a problem." Parents are given the authority and the responsibility to teach and to train their children. Now you can delegate the authority to a public school, a private school or to a tutor, but you can never delegate the responsibility. Parents are the ones ultimately responsible for the training of their children. And parents understand that. The government schools are now not working in the best interest of our children or our families. In fact, they've been driving a wedge between parent and child. That's the fundamental divide. Do you think that children should be raised by the state or do you think children should be raised by parents? Marxists say the State and our American education elite wholeheartedly agrees. Parents should just stay away from schools. Case in point, Attorney General Merrick Garland, who appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and defended his memo saying that because the parents are threatening the school boards with violence, he now is instructing the FBI and all the other instruments of the Justice Department to work with local authorities to prevent parents' speech in schools. So concerned parents, and all Americans really, need to take a stand. "This is now how I close my radio program," Tony clarifies. "When you've prayed, because He says that we're to pray, and when you've taken your stand, when you've prepared and you've taken your stand, when you've done all, you stand. There is no retreat, there is no surrender, we stand firm."

America is waking up to the capture of our institutions by the "progressive" woke Left. Beginning with K-12 education, universities, the media, and Hollywood, it's now moved into many churches, our military and corporate boardrooms. This didn't happen overnight. In this wide ranging and thoughtful conversation with Mark Meckler and Eric O'Keefe, we explore its roots going back to an obscure Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci writing in the 1920's and his strategy to gain control of cultural institutions. Eric explains that "Gramsci called it 'the long march through the institutions.'" It took 100 years, but now it's arrived. We also look at one of the drivers of the American Revolution: the contempt that elites in London held for Americans, even the successful ones. ==== Guests: Mark Meckler, one of America's leading grassroots activists, founder of Citizens for Self Governance, Convention of States, co-founder of the Tea Party Party Patriots and interim CEO of Parler. and Eric O'Keefe who chairs the Convention of States, co-founded U.S. Term Limits and the Wisconsin Club for Growth and a long time leader in the movement to re-establish citizen control of government. ==== Of grave concern to all of us is the ability of conservatives to communicate with each other through social media. Mark shares his experience as interim CEO of Parler, the social media company which was put out of business by Amazon. "What happened to Parler is, I think much more serious than most people understand," warns Mark. "Not only was Parler taken down, all the ancillary services that are required to be alive on the web, to have a presence on the web, disappeared as well." So sue Amazon? Amazon spends over a billion dollars a year in legal fees and was utterly unconcerned by any Parler lawsuit. Another looming issue is what Mark calls the "tech stack", the complex array of "many, many more layers, another 5, 10 layers below that of technical infrastructure that's required for any business or organization to exist in any sort of scale on the web." There's a lot of importance in this episode - Eric's chilling John Doe experience after defending Scott Walker, the Convention of States, Merrick Garland's attempt to chill parents speech, ways to cut the Administrative State down to size, and more - I hope you'll find the time to listen in.

It's almost two years on from the onset of the Covid virus and we know a lot now that we didn't then. Society should be healing. But we live in vitriolic and partisan times, and widespread disagreement abounds about what it was, what it is, what it isn't and how to cope with it. Yet to those who understand how economies work, this much seems clear: governments' blunderbuss one-size-fits-all lockdowns and mandates have turned a manageable public health problem into a social, medical and economic catastrophe. It did not have to be this way. Joining me on this episode to talk about the price we've paid and where we go from here are two of our most independent economic and social thinkers: Donald Boudreaux, professor of economics at George Mason University, who runs the "go to" blog "Cafe Hayek" which has become a critical resource for facts about Covid and sensible response strategies. And John Tamny, editor of Real Clear Markets, a Forbes Magazine editor and the author of "The End of Work" and "When Politicians Panicked: The New Coronavirus, Expert Opinion, and a Tragic Lapse of Reason". John and Don cover a lot of ground: the damage done to our civil liberties, the labor market, the politicization of "science", the madness of declaring businesses essential or non-essential, supply chains, social media censorship, how lockdowns were used to usher in the new era of mail-in ballots and how rule by experts - think Anthony Fauci - failed. We needed leadership wise enough to let sensible Americans take the measures we used in every pandemic over the last century. Instead, we got draconian lockdowns and mandates. As Don clarifies, "No doubt, a lot of these people thought they were acting in the best interest of society, but it's completely antithetical to the principles of a free society." Listen in here as we explore how to recover our Liberty.

First year economics classes usually begin the semester with the principles of supply and demand. You learn that incentives matter and that to suggest otherwise is to betray basic principles of economics - and human nature. You learn that you can ignore or violate these fundamental laws, but that you cannot change them. You learn that throughout history the societies that have succeeded recognize and respect these economic laws - they use them to their advantage. Well, someone needs to get this message to progressive Democrats - and soon - because they have become completely unmoored from economic realities. And their agenda will end in economic disaster. In fact, it's already happening. Joining me on this episode to talk about economics and his work with Donald Trump, is my old friend, Kevin Hassett, who served in the Trump administration as Senior Advisor to the President and as his Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. His latest book The Drift, analyzes America's slide into socialism and how to arrest the decline. Kevin shares many fascinating insights into Donald Trump's effective economic policies and his personality. "The public persona of Donald Trump is much, much different from what he was like when we were actually in the Oval Office or in the West Wing, working on real policy problems," Kevin shares. "Behind closed doors, he is an incredibly nice guy, who's very thoughtful and likes to see all the sides of the arguments." In Kevin's book, The Drift he goes far back into Socialism's roots. "Joseph Schumpeter, the famous economist, back in the 1920s, looked ahead to America's future," Kevin explains. "He said, the socialists are going to win. What's going to happen is capitalism's going to work for a while. And as we get really rich, we're going to send our kids to college. And the colleges are going to be basically places that indoctrinate folks to be socialists." "And the best universities are going to be the best socialists." It's hard to do to justice to Kevin's many brilliant insights in an email summary. So I do hope you'll join in listening to our wide ranging conversation about Trump, socialism, the internet, Marshal McLuhan, social media, and the need to stand together to get the truth out. "We control respectability, we control the truth. We need to have the confidence to stand up and defend capitalism because it's true and it works." He also shares whether he thinks Donald Trump will run for President again.

It is hard to overstate the assault on civil liberties we are witnessing in America today. What began over a year and a half ago as temporary government measures to keep us safe from a virus spread from China, have now metastasized into something much more sinister, spreading to all aspects of societies around the world. We need to name this thing, understand what's happening to us, and how to stop this threat to our freedoms. For some answers, in this episode I talk with Jefferey Tucker, founder of the Brownstone Institute and author of Liberty or Lockdown. Jeffery, a man with a serious message and mission, is a delightful and engaging raconteur who turns policy discussion into a fascinating journey into truth. This is not an episode to skip. Some highlights from Jeffrey: "We've dealt with pandemics in the past. In the modern age and the 20th century, we did very well intelligently. And suddenly 2020 comes along and we decided to forget everything and pursued this insane experiment in human separation, and mass management of the unmanageable. And the result has been demoralizing, and depressing, and shocking in terms of all things public health. It's contrary to all of our traditions of law, our belief in equality, and human rights, and freedom." The Role of the New York Times "On February 28, 2020, The New York Times published an op-ed by Donald J. McNeil. The title of the article was, 'To deal with the coronavirus, go medieval on it.' He said we need to reject all 20th century principles of public health where we just dealt with the pathogen, in terms of doctor patient relationships, and instead lock everybody down, shut the highways, ground the planes, freeze everybody to suffer in their disease ridden cities as if this is the Middle Ages." The Madness of Masks "It's just awful to see these children in masks, and mandates, and people screaming at each other, get that mask over your nose, and so on and so on. It's just all nutty. The things that we've done to control this virus that we can't see, this invisible enemy, it feels mystical, and magical, and superstitious." The Vaccine Mandates "This is serious stuff. This isn't just get the jab and shut up. People's lives have been ruined. Academia's being purged. The military's being purged. The public sector's being purged. We're turning our government into a single party state that seems to bear a lot of the marks of what we've come to see in China." Why We Have to Push Back "And I know this, if we do nothing, we will certainly fail, and we'll lose everything. So I'm happy to do something, whatever it is, to make a difference. And maybe we can save this. It's worth saving. Civilization is worth saving. Freedom is worth saving. Human rights means something, they built the modern world. We cannot just sit by and do nothing when we see it all unraveling before us." This episode is about one of the biggest issues of our day. Please listen in.

In this episode we talk with Ambassador Pete Hoekstra, formerly Chair of the House Intelligence Committee and now Chairman of the Center for Security Policy Board of Advisors. Some of the many things we explore: Biden's preposterous claim that "America is not at war" seemingly oblivious to China President Xi's aggressive global ambitions. And the Administration may be done with the Afghanistan war, but that doesn't mean Afghanistan is done with us. Its leaders still are driven to establish a caliphate and kill infidels, and now they have $85 billion in US military equipment to help them do it. While there are some differences among al Qaeda, the Taliban and ISIS-K, they agree on one important thing – they hate us and still want to destroy us. There's bipartisan agreement in Congress that Blinken, Milley and Austin failed us in Afghanistan. The honorable thing for them to do is resign. That's not going to happen. Another option: Congress should censure them. Donald Trump listened to European allies and left residual force troops behind in Syria. Biden ignored the same advice on Afghanistan. After Donald Trump, European heads of state, were thrilled to welcome President Biden to their club as a hoped for return to a cozier relationship. They are now furious with him over his botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. His club days are over. The Wuhan Virus: "Who in the United States would think that sending money to a military lab controlled by the Chinese Communist Party was a good idea?" Government programs live forever, no matter how bad they are. For Congress, the problem has been "solved" when a bill passes. After that? It's usually downhill from there. No one cares to look back to see if the programs have worked or the money well spent. For more common sense and wisdom from Pete Hoekstra, view/listen here.

Election Integrity: Why we don't have it, how we lost it and what to do about it. In the election of 2020 we saw a dramatic loosening of the chain of custody of ballots. We saw an indiscriminate use of mass mail-in ballots. We saw a verification process junked and pushed aside. And as a consequence, we saw major irregularities in that election. The result: a waning confidence among voters in the integrity of our election system. The issue is critical. If we don't get our elections right, we lose our American Republic. We lose our liberty. Joining me on this episode are two of our leading players in the fight to restore election integrity - and co-authors of a seminal piece in the Yale Law Review "The Other Voting Right". Ken Blackwell, in his role with The Center for Election Integrity of the America First Policy Institute. And Ken Klukowski, who was senior counselor in the US Department of Justice and the Trump White House. Right now, the Democrats in Congress are trying to push through a power grab to federalize election law and make perpetual the abuses we saw in 2020. The John Lewis Voting Rights Act (HR4) would essentially eliminate state's rights and the decentralization of power that the framers established by granting states the authority to set the time, manner, and place of elections. This Bill must not become law. Also, in this episode we explore what the gold standard should be to insure election integrity. In 2020, ballot harvesting was a big source of abuse and we talk about how Republicans in Virginia - where ballot harvesting is legal - could turn the tables on Democrats in this November's election. Listen in and learn from two of our top experts about how to restore the integrity of our elections.

The Reconciliation Bill, which Congress is rushing to pass in a matter of days, will push America over the brink into financial and social catastrophe. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is hellbent on this as her legacy project to turn the U.S. into a European entitlement state. No one can explain what is at stake more plainly than economist Steve Moore, my guest on this episode of The Bill Walton Show: "This Reconciliation Bill, and by the way, do not call it a $3.5 trillion spending bill, this is $5 trillion on top of the $2 trillion they spent earlier this year, on top of the $6 trillion budget that they are passing and on top of the broad $1 trillion infrastructure bill." "You add it up, in one year, Congress is authorizing $12 trillion of spending, which is more money than the United States government spent to finance the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War I, World War II, the moon landing, the transcontinental railroad and the interstate highway system." "We are on the beaches (of Dunkirk), we need reinforcements. The Left is surrounding us. They have control. They own Washington right now. They have the White House, they have the Senate, they have the House. They're trying to bulldoze the most left wing agenda in the history of the United States through Congress with a one seat majority in the Senate and a five seat majority in the House of Representatives." "This Bill is meant to transform America," says Joe Biden. It's hard to overstate how bad this legislation is. Even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce urges its defeat. "This reconciliation bill is effectively 100 bills in one representing every big government idea that's never been able to pass in Congress. It's an existential threat to America's fragile economic recovery and future prosperity." Listen in to learn what is at stake and what we can hope to do to stop it.

Joe Biden has mandated that businesses with more than 100 employees require every worker to be vaccinated or face weekly testing. It's estimated this will impact over 80 million people or almost two thirds of the country's workforce. Setting aside his dictatorial and offensive tone, does Joe Biden really have the power to do this or is it that under the guise of "keeping us safe," federal state and local governments have trampled our constitutional rights with draconian regulations and emergency orders with arbitrary executive decrees? This points towards even a bigger threat to our freedoms: an enormous and growing Administrative State and its threat to every American's constitutional rights. With me on this episode is Phillip Hamburger, the founder of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a scholar of constitutional law whose contributions are unrivaled by any US legal scholar in driving the national debate on the first amendment, government administrative power, and the separation of church and state. Also joining me is one of our favorite returning guests, Jenin Younes, litigation counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance, and a former public defender. After seeing governments throughout the nation violate human rights and civil liberties in their ostensible effort to mitigate the virus, she's now joined the fight against lockdowns and related policies. There's a lot to unpack here, including a troubling statistic that 58% of Americans appear to approve a federal mandate. Would they, if they knew how throughout history "emergencies" have been used to steadily erode all the rest of their freedoms? Listen in to learn about the totalitarian drift of an Administrative State's "rule by experts."

In this Part 2 of my show with John Mauldin, we range far and wide peering into an optimistic future for humanity. Near term, things look pretty bleak, but when you step back and look at the innovations and technologies that will end up enhancing and prolonging human life, the future holds a lot of promise. Billions of people have been lifted out of poverty in the past 50 years. Some excerpts: We're living in a financial bubble and a massive bubble of government promises that can never be fulfilled. "I see a reset ahead when these bubbles burst, and it will be a tough adjustment," explains John "It's not riding the tiger that's the problem, it's the dismount." "My job as an investment manager, as an economic thinker and writer, is to help my clients get through to the other side. What can you do? There are things that we can do and great companies that are still going to thriving on the other side of the great reset." There's a lot to be excited about and we can count on entrepreneurs, human ingenuity and technological innovation to create solutions. "There's a 95% chance that a 25 year old today will live to be 150 years old." Matt Ridley's notion that ideas have sex, creating ever more ideas. With China's demographic crisis and Xi shutting down its markets and entrepreneurs, it's possible that we look back 10 years from now and say, that kind of looks like Japan. The next decade will be the decade of biotechnological transformation. Gerontology research into something called induced tissue regeneration could be the "fountain of middle age." Why promising companies no longer want to go public, how this hurts the average investor and what we should do about it. And rule one: don't invest in something you do not understand. There's a reason John's newsletter Thoughts From the Frontline has over a million subscribers. He's truly ahead of curve. Listen in for his many intriguing speculations about our future.

The Afghanistan debacle. An in-depth look at its implications with Dr Stephen Bryen, Senior Fellow at the American Center for Democracy and Kyle Shideler, Director and Senior Analyst for the Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, both with the Center for Security Policy. So many questions. Why did we leave so precipitously? Who was behind it? Where do we go from here? Why, when President Trump proposed withdrawing US troops, did the US military tell him that was a bad idea and that they wouldn't do it. But then, when Mr. Biden announced a complete pullout and retreat, there wasn't a word from the Pentagon saying we shouldn't do it. In fact, they embraced it. And now Biden has the audacity to blame Trump for something he never did. What does this means for future of the United States? What was in our national interest by cutting and running from Afghanistan? The Taliban now have enough arms, including all the equipment that we left behind that it's larger now than seven or eight European states and Ukraine. Look at a map. China is eyeing the $1 trillion of minerals and wealth in Afghanistan that could be exploited. The Turks want the Kabul airport and Bagram Air Base. Russia is eager to court the Taliban. And Iran, who Obama and Biden want to replace the United States in the Middle East, is now back in the picture. Biden's intentions? "We are in the middle of a major strategic retreat," say Dr Bryen, "Not only in Afghanistan, but everywhere in the Middle East and the Pacific." For the first time ever, the Biden Administration directed our office of the Director of National Intelligence to do reports on domestic threats, not international threats. "I think there is definitely something about the Biden administration," says Kyle Shideler, "that they see actual enemies abroad as friends and they see fellow countrymen who disagree with them as enemies." So does Biden have no foreign policy? "No, he has a foreign policy," explains Stephen Bryen, "retreat from obligations to our allies and former allies as much as possible, line up with Iran and then find a way to make a deal with the Chinese. I think that's coming. I think we'd be fools not to realize that he's going to sell us out in China." Strong words. But after you listen to this, I think you will agree.

It's on everybody's mind right now. Emotions are raw. What were we doing there? Where we're going to go from here? What this means for the country, and the rest of the world, going forward, since we cannot trust this Administration's leadership to protect America. With me for some plain talk about this are some of my brain trust, the smart people involved with The Bill Walton Show. Today we've got Rich McFadden, Greg Corombos and Brian McNicoll. We get into what we're all seeing and feeling and what we think's going to happen next. Some predictions, mostly questions.

After decades of cuts to shipbuilding and maintenance, the United States Navy has been stripped down to a fleet barely larger than it was 100 years ago, in 1916. Meanwhile, China has dramatically increased its spending on its Navy, as well as on its Air Force, cyberspace and electronic warfare capabilities. Alarmingly, Beijing is building islands in the South China Sea, threatening trade routes and menacing allies. President Trump made it a priority to expand the American "blue water" fleet to 355 battle-force ships. His plan would have increased shipbuilding by only $6.7 billion and would have launched us on a trajectory to protect America's maritime supremacy. Shortly after taking office, Joe Biden slashed this from his budget. With me to explore this and many other national defense concerns - in a fascinating, wide-ranging and strategic conversation - is Russ Vought, the founder of The Center for Renewing America and the Trump Administration's Director of the Office of Management and Budget and Arthur Herman, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute focusing on defense, energy and technology issues and author of To Rule the Waves and Freedom Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II As a maritime nation, the US is dependent on control of the sea to protect its people as well as its flow of trade. At its founding, America understood that its strength lay in a strong navy. But in the last seventy years, the United States has wandered far from this wisdom, and suffered endless "boots on the ground" debacles. Emphasizing sea power - and air, space and cyber power - would get us back on track. This is an issue that is barely talked about, but needs to be.

On June 28th 2021, George Mason University announced its reopening policy related to the COVID-19 for the fall 2021 semester. The policy required all unvaccinated students and staff members - including those who can demonstrate natural immunity from prior COVID-19 infections - to wear masks on campus, physically distance and undergo frequent COVID-19 testing. On July 22, GMU emailed the policy to students and employees and threatened disciplinary action—including termination of employment—against any who do not comply with the vaccine mandate. The university's website describing its vaccination policy reiterated this threat. On August 3, 2021, GMU Professor Todd Zywicki, represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), filed a complaint in the Eastern District of Virginia, challenging GMU's so-called "reopening policy." "This coercive mandate violates my constitutional right to bodily integrity for no compelling reason," explains Prof Zywicki. "For those of us who have acquired natural immunity, vaccination provides none of the benefits of vaccination with all of the costs." At issue. Are GMU and other institutions across the country ignoring science, and within their rights, to force mandatory vaccines on even those with naturally acquired immunity. "Despite solid scientific evidence, GMU continues to refuse to recognize that Covid-19 vaccination is medically unnecessary for students, faculty, and staff with naturally acquired immunity demonstrated with antibody testing," says Jenin Younes, lead counsel in Zywicki's complaint. As it turns out, in this case GMU has ended up granting him a personal medical exemption, but it's unclear how far this would extend to others. There is a lot more to unpack from this case about "mandates" and our constitutional rights, as Todd and Jenin explain in this episode.

In this episode I'm joined by John Mauldin the best-selling author of Bull's Eye Investing: Targeting Real Returns in a Smoke and Mirrors Market and whose "Strategic Investors Conference" is considered among the best events in the business. This is the 21st anniversary of John's newsletter Thoughts from the Frontline aimed at helping individual investors and institutions develop a clearer understanding of the forces driving the global economy and investment markets. John has a lot of concerns, as do I, about the fate of the U.S. economy given the avalanche of spending and social engineering programs coming out of Washington. It's spending $6 trillion on a long list of progressive dreams, raising taxes and killing incentives for entrepreneurship and growth. "I don't know any other way to say it, but it's a guaranteed recession. It just is. You cannot take 15 to 20% extra out of the economy and expect it to perform," says John. What's happening is otherworldly. You can't raise taxes enough to pay for this kind of spending, so you're going to have to borrow, or you're going to have to inflate. On our present course, it's going to be both. John estimates total U.S. debt in 10 years to be around $50 trillion. We just seem to be adding to what John calls "fingers of instability." His metaphor being that we're building an unstable financial sandpile leading to a collapse. Long term, we're both believers in human ingenuity and expect huge advances in flourishing and growth. But today? "We have a bubble in both financial markets and government promises," warns John. How long does this go on before they pop? We are now getting ready to find out. Please join in for a sobering, yet enlightening conversation.

My guest this week is economist Steve Moore Our topic: the economy and how the trillion upon trillion dollar spending orgy in Washington is going to cause irreparable damage to America. "This is an extremely dangerous time for our country. What happens over the course of the next three or four months will have decades worth of repercussions," explains Steve. "The people who are running Washington right now are out of control. I think they're crazy. Joe Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer have an agenda to truly radically transform our country" and not for the better. "They are targeting the productive class, the people who produce things, the people who work, the people who save, the people who invest, the people who start businesses." They want to eliminate incentives for people to work, save and invest; all the key drivers of growth. By the end of 2021, federal debt held by the public is projected to equal 102 percent of GDP. Debt that high and rapidly rising increases the probability of a fiscal crisis, 70's era inflation and ultimately risks the U.S. dollar's role as the world's reserve currency. It is time to wake up to the fact that our country's financial destiny is being determined by people in Washington who have virtually no private sector business or capital markets experience. These are people who have no idea how to create wealth. Steve "looked at the top people in the Biden administration, starting with the top, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, the treasury secretary, the labor secretary are the people running the FTC, the SEC. Out of the top 40, how many years of business experience combined do these people have?" The answer is dismaying. This is an ugly story, but one you need to know. Listen in, then call Congress to tell them to stop this madness.

We are living in a complicated and dangerous time in America. American intelligence and national security should not be part of partisan politics but that is exactly what they've become. "We saw it towards the end of the Obama administration, and the transition into the Trump administration," according to my guest, Ambassador Pete Hoekstra. "The weaponization of intelligence and the intelligence community against an incoming president of the United States. And it has continued right up to today with reports that the NSA has been listening to Tucker Carlson's phone calls and screening his emails." As former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands, Pete has keen insights into the problems plaguing our intelligence community. Moreover, America's divisions over national security have never been greater, explains my other guest Fred Fleitz, President of the Center for Security Policy who served as Deputy Assistant to the President and as Chief of Staff of the National Security Council. "The globalist elite sees the U.S. as the main threat to international security. They would like to reign in the United States. They don't see China as a threat. They don't see Russia as a threat. They see America as a threat," By contrast, President Trump's foreign policy America First was so successful because it put the interest of the American people, American business and our economy first. It kept us out of unnecessary wars. The parisan divide is on full display in the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee. "The political environment has really gotten ugly in all of Congress but it may be the worst on the Intel committee, which is unprecedented," says Ambassador Hoekstra. "Nancy Pelosi has used the selection process to fill the committee with political lieutenants to do her bidding." Join us in this wide ranging conversation, as we hone in on these issues, and what we can do to resolve them.

Today we are witnessing a growing threat to our American military. A threat that is capable of doing what no foreign enemy ever could: Fracture the world's greatest armed forces from within, through divisive political indoctrination and controls. That threat is called "wokeness." At its root, "wokeness" imposes the resentful mindset of an extremist few onto society - in this case the American military. It has infected the Pentagon and its top leaders, and it has been metastasizing for years. Joining me to explore this alarming development is Lt. Gen. (Ret.) William G. Boykin, one of the original combat commanders of the U.S. Army's elite Delta Force. Jerry also commanded all the Army's Green Berets as well as the Special Warfare Center and School and served for four years as Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. "Our military should be about readiness, and its mission must be winning the nation's wars," explains Jerry. "There is nothing more important on the battlefield than cohesion - which wokeness undermines. You win wars because of cohesion, not because of technology." Also returning to the show is Dr. Michael Waller, Senior Analyst for Strategy at the Center for Security Policy where his areas of concentration are propaganda, political warfare, psychological warfare, and subversion. Among his many keen insights, Mike shares an astonishing fact: "The Defense Department publishes a dictionary of military and associated terms. It's almost 400 pages long. The word victory doesn't appear once, not as a term to define and not even a reference to it. And it doesn't even have a definition for the term enemy." The military's social experiments have already had a big impact. Retention rates are dropping. Young officers and noncommissioned officers are leaving the military. And the recruiting the right kind of talent is suffering. Listen in to this episode and you'll think again about the risks of imposing "wokeness" on our American military.

As COVID cases continue to climb in Tokyo, the nation is preparing to host the world in what may wind up being the most infamous Olympic Games ever. The Bill Walton show team discusses the role the virus is already playing and impacting athletes. There's also the issue of wokeness as members of Team USA are expected to protest the National Anthem, while the media and advertisers will be in their own competition to use every opportunity to promote social justice campaigns. Will it be worth watching? We debate that.

For the better part of a century, the Left has been waging a methodical - and largely successful - war to control American institutions. Our universities, K-12 education, the news media, Hollywood, federal government bureaucracies … to name just a few … have all fallen victim to what the Left calls their "long march." During most of that time American business and the military escaped infiltration and indoctrination. But now this has begun to change - and dramatically. In this episode we look at business and The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business with author Stephen Soukup. With stunning speed most of the elites running technology companies, banks, Wall Street investment managers and consumer product companies like Coca Cola and Nike have embraced "woke capitalism." What's angers the most is the arrogance of those running our biggest companies. Stephen terms them "Gnostics" who "believe they have the secret to attaining heaven on earth, and that if we'll all just shut up and follow them, that in the long run, they'll take care of everything for us." For example, they've drunk the climate change and stakeholder capitalism kool-aide so deeply, that we're now seeing our biggest investment firms voting to elect three new directors to the Board of Exxon who don't think it should be in the fossil fuel business. This story will not end well. The battle to bring these companies back to the business of simply running their business is not over, but it hangs in the balance. Listen in to learn what's at stake and what you can do about it.

It's becoming quite clear that one of the central aims of Critical Race Theory is to delegitimize and diminish the political and moral achievement that is the United States of America. And with their 1619 Project, the New York Times has weighed in to rewrite American history by deconstructing institutions responsible for our prosperity and our success: free market capitalism and the United States Constitution. How? On the grounds that they were deeply interconnected with and irreparably tainted by the institution of slavery in America. To assert their claim, they employ many "big lie" stratagems. Here are some of the biggest: America was founded as a "slavocracy" in 1619 and "anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country." Americans declared their independence from Britain to protect the institution of slavery. Half of antebellum U.S. GDP came from slavery and cotton production. Southern planters and slave owners were champions of capitalism. Abraham Lincoln wanted to move freed slaves to colonies because he was a racist. None of this is remotely true. To learn what is true, listen in to my conversation with Phil Magness who devastatingly debunks these claims. Phil, a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, is an economic historian specializing in the 19th century United States, and who has written extensively on the political and economic dimensions of slavery and is the author of The 1619 Project: A Critique. The truth is fascinating. Hope you'll join the conversation.

Identity politics, and charges of systematic racism and white privilege, pose an existential threat to the American experiment and risk tearing our country apart. In this episode, I talk with Charles Murray - one of America's greatest social scientists - who has now weighed in on this crisis with his latest book: "Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America" In it he argues that we must confront genuine race differences while at the same time defending our nation's historic commitment to a melting pot and the goal of colorblindness. What good can come of bringing such uncomfortable realities into the open? Here Charles explains: "Ignoring them is destroying America's most precious ideal, once known as the American creed: People are to be judged on an equal basis as individuals, not by national origin, social class, race, or religion. The ideology behind the charges of systemic racism repudiates this ideal, demanding instead that the power of the state must be used to favor some groups of people over others to advance social justice." This is a challenging conversation about a difficult issue, but in listening to it you'll learn that Charles is a careful and thoughtful researcher, and that he believes passionately in our American Experiment and that it survive and thrive. Charles Murray, Hayek Emeritus Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute burst into prominence in 1984 with the publication of Losing Ground, followed by The Bell Curve in 1994 and Coming Apart in 2012.

America has a problem. Positive attitudes toward communism and socialism are at an all-time high in the United States. Almost 40% of Americans now view them favorably and half of our kids in their 20s say they favor socialism. This demonstrates a stunning lack of knowledge of the evils of communism. In the last century, communism murdered more than 100 million people, and forced billions into Marxist tyranny. This horrific past is not dead. It's not even past. China and its Chinese Communist Party subjugates its own people with absolute controls over freedom of speech and movement while engaging in its strategy of "Three Warfares" to become ascendent globally. They assiduously work our world organizations like the UN and the WHO, while simultaneously engaging in genocide, slave labor and forced human organ transplants for sale on the world market. Meanwhile, in America we're seeing the rise of cultural marxism and ideologies derived from it like Critical Race Theory. Joining me on this episode to talk about these threats and what to do about them are two leaders with vast knowledge of the issues. Dr. Edwin J. Feulner, the Chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and the Founder and former President of The Heritage Foundation which he transformed from a small think tank with nine employees into the most highly influential research and policy institution in America. Ambassador Andrew Bremberg is the President and CEO of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and who most recently served as the Representative of the United States to the Office of the United Nations and Other International Organizations in Geneva.

This show comes at time that this episode's guest, Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, calls our "hinge of fate." Our topic is his riveting paper "Surprise Attack: ICBMs and the Real Nuclear Threat" where he lays bare the world's current and future nuclear warfare realities. It's an issue that many simply do not want to think about. As Peter puts it, "when it comes to nuclear weapons, U.S. and Western strategic culture mostly thinks and acts in a state of denial and unreality. Nuclear weapons of mass destruction are antithetical to our ethos." But as Leon Trotsky warned, "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." By contrast, totalitarian states - China, Russia and North Korea - love, celebrate, and parade nuclear missiles as symbols of their omnipotence and their potential "final solution" to the vexing existence of free peoples, like the United States. The U.S. "Triad" comprises decades old bombers, ICBMs and missile submarines, requiring years to modernize, while Russia, China, and North Korea have mostly new systems and are developing new delivery vehicles that have no counterparts in the U.S. deterrent, including ASBMs, nuclear-powered cruise missiles, autonomous submarines like Russia's Poseidon, and hypersonic strategic warheads. They believe they could win a nuclear war. The "unthinkable" is becoming increasingly "thinkable" and someday soon may become irresistible to them. Yet space-based strategic defenses can turn the technological tide, if the U.S. awakens and acts— before it is too late. Dr. Peter Vincent Pry has vast experience in national security, where he's served as Executive Director of the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security, Director of the United States Nuclear Strategy Forum, Chief advisor to the Vice Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and the Vice Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, and to the Chairman of the Terrorism Panel. Dr. Pry was an Intelligence Officer with the Central Intelligence Agency responsible for analyzing Soviet and Russian nuclear strategy. Give this a 50 minute listen to learn what's at stake for America.

If you think a show about financial regulation is likely to be boring, I ask you to think again. Financial regulations are really about money. And in particular, ordinary Americans' money. Consumer credit and credit cards Student loans Credit reporting Mortgage finance Fintech Crypto currencies How small businesses get financed And financial regulations have become yet another primary battlefield on which the Left hopes to fundamentally transform America through the prisms of race and social justice. Joining me to explain this at-first-glance arcane but critically important topic is Todd Zywicki professor of law at George Mason's Antonin Scalia law school and Brian Johnson who was deputy director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. They make this come alive. To learn what's at stake, listen in.