The Bill Walton Show


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Real conversations with leaders, creatives, and thinkers … freedom, innovation … what’s true

Episode 262: Are you on a CIA or FBI list? with J. Michael Waller

Once upon a time, the FBI and the CIA fought America's criminals at home and enemies abroad. Now, at our great loss, they've become captured by the ideology and agenda of cultural Marxism. Moreover, as Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Mike Benz revealed, the national security state has evolved into a main driver of censorship and election interference in the United States.

The CIA and the FBI, along with the rest of the intelligence community, have become essential players in a growing surveillance state, attacking its perceived political enemies and spying on ordinary American citizens, even parents who push back against the radical teachings of cultural Marxism in America's public schools. 

These are serious charges, but they've been thoroughly documented in a revealing new book by J. Michael Waller Big Intel - How The CIA and the FBI went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains. He knows the terrain well. As the Senior Analyst at the Center for Security Policy he concentrates on propaganda, political warfare, psychological warfare, and subversion. 

Brilliant, fully documented yet easy to read. Explains how Cultural Marxism has permeated the CIA and FBI, damaging our country's strongest defenders. Big Intel names names and pulls no punches. It also shows the moral rot within the intelligence community from top to bottom.

“What if you combined the dark, anti-human politics of the academic left with the unfettered power and impenetrable secrecy of the national security state? You’d have pretty much what we have now…Mike Waller explains how we got there.” -Tucker Carlson 




Episode 261: Last Warning to the West with Dr. Shea Bradley-Farrell

Hungary is a small country with less than 10 million people, landlocked in the middle of Europe. Seemingly irrelevant, it is hated by the woke globalists and it's the focus of angry smear campaigns against it and its president, Viktor Orbán. Yet at the same time, it's praised as a global leader for freedom and as a model of conservative values.

So there must be a lot going on with Hungary that we should understand. I see it as a microcosm for the political and economic conflict in the greater world.

So to dig into this, I'm back with Shea Bradley-Farrell, PhD, who is president of Counterpoint Institute for Policy, Research and Education and is an expert in foreign policy, national security, and international development, and has also spent a great deal of time thinking about, studying, and traveling to Hungary.

Why is Hungary such a target of the left yet so appreciated by the right?

Listen in and Find Out:




Episode 260: How do we know what we think we know is true? with Jim Agresti

In this age of fake news, disinformation, shadow banning and government agencies like CISA aiming to manipulate what it calls our “cognitive infrastructure” it is hard to answer this question. 

To explore how we can go about finding what’s true and what is not,  Jim Agresti, the founder of Just Facts, returns to help clarify our thinking. 

Just Facts is an institute dedicated to publishing facts about public policies and teaching research skills using exacting Standards of Credibility to determine what constitutes a fact and what does not. The vision of Just Facts is to equip people with facts “to make truly informed decisions. This means facts that accurately and fully convey reality—not pseudo-facts, half-truths, or talking points.”

“Do you have the information you need to make quality decisions in your life and in the voting booth? You can rarely get the full picture of what something is about from an 800-word news article or commentary. You have to dig much deeper,” explains Jim.

In this episode we talk about Just Facts exacting Standards of Credibility that is uses to produce research that is accurate and truly informative. Here’s a summary:

  • Comprehensiveness: It’s a simple thing to distort reality by selecting only facts that align with partisan views while ignoring others. Half the truth can amount to a total lie.

  • Primary Sources means identifying credible primary sources instead of secondary ones that often reflect an “interpretation” of the facts instead of the actual facts. 

  • Rigorous Documentation means documenting facts far more thoroughly than academic standards require, footnoting every fact with creditable sources, and citing quotations or data exactly. Harvard’s Claudine Gay should have consulted with Jim. 

  • Raw Data presents data in its rawest comprehensible form to safeguard against data corrupted by errors, rhetorical mischaracterizations, or statistical manipulation. 

  • Verification uses different sources, methodologies, and calculations to double-check verifiable facts. If they’d done this, NASA wouldn’t have lost a Mars Climate Orbiter because they mixed up metric and English units when coding the mission software.

  • Clarity means using language that is precise and unambiguous in order to minimize the potential for misinterpretation. 

  • Balance: In this age of raging partisanship, almost no one does comprehensive accuracy or tries to balance views. Instead, sound bites are laced with rhetoric and misinformation, and opposing views given short shrift. 

Of course, not everyone is interested in a disinterested discussion rooted in a dispassionate comparison of facts. 

Vladimir Lenin - and most all on the Left who have followed him - said that “moral and factual considerations are irrelevant when it comes to how to sway the public most effectively. Our morality is entirely subordinated to our interest of advancing communism.”

So the question we have to ask is: even if we know what’s factual and true does it matter in today’s world of raw power politics? 

Listen in to decide for yourself. 




Episode 259: The Virtues and Beauties of Freedom with Jeffrey Tucker

When Javier Milei was elected president of Argentina in November, Argentinians empowered the first self-proclaimed “anarcho capitalist” as a head of state in modern history.

It’s a wild, even dangerous sounding term and almost no one knows what it means. So in this episode, Jeffrey Tucker and I dig into what Javier Milei and the philosophy of anarcho capitalism are all about.

Jeffrey, a brilliant and prolific author and founder of the Brownstone Institute was a protege of Murray Rothbard, the economist who developed the ideas and coined the term.

Javier Milei campaigned by bluntly declaring the failures of socialism, communism, fascism, central planning, and political despotism over society. His push for free-market reforms was backed up by his 20 years as a university professor of economics, with two master’s degrees in economics and author of more than 50 academic papers and myriad books on the matter.

He celebrates the virtues and beauties of freedom itself, how business needs to be free of regulations, the critical interrelationship between private property and freedom and the enforcement of property rights at all levels of society.

He believes that society doesn't require an entrenched entity of legalized compulsion and coercion called the State in order to provide these things. An astonishing and bold claim.

Yet he won convincingly with almost 56% of the vote and his victory has sent shock waves through the political establishment, not only in Argentina, but throughout Latin America.

Milei now faces the daunting task of taming out of control inflation (Argentina’s year-on-year inflation rate hit a staggering 142 percent during election week), a bloated self dealing administrative state, a corrupted court system and an entrenched elite opposition that's determined to preserve its power and prerogatives. 

“How does one man take all this on?”asks Jeffrey. “We don’t really know the answer to this question. No leader of a Western democratic developed nation has ever attempted a full-scale routing of a corrupted establishment on this level.”

Milei’s wasting no time. Forty-eight hours after taking office on December 10th he unveiled measures to cut public spending by 3% of GDP. He devalued the peso, pledged to slash subsidies, and eliminated nine of 18 government ministries. One week later he decreed that state-owned companies would be privatized, price controls would be eliminated, and labour laws reformed.

Of course we’re now seeing headlines like this one in The Economist: The fightback against Javier Milei’s radical reforms has begun. Argentina’s powerful trade unions are preparing to strike on January 24th

Our hope is that Mr. Milei is just the beginning of a movement that could spread throughout the world. People are fed up and are ready for a radical new agenda to stop the relentless march of the forces of tyranny in Western nations.

 




Episode 258: Natural Asset Companies: A Scheme to Profit From the "Degrowth" Agenda with Margaret Byfield

On September 27, 2023, the New York Stock Exchange and the Intrinsic Exchange Group submitted a proposal to the Securities and Exchange Commission to create a new type of company called a “Natural Asset Company”, or “NAC” whose primary purpose would be to manage and grow so-called “ecosystem services” on land throughout the United States.

NACs would be empowered to manage every type of property:  federal, state, and private land, including conservation easements to maximize their so-called “ecological value.”

Critically, what they are not allowed to do is anything considered “unsustainable” including: mining, agriculture that uses traditional fertilizers and machinery, managing timberlands, grazing, hunting, and most every type of recreational activity.

Instead of maximizing traditional economic value, NACs would put this land off limits from any productive purpose involving oil, gas, coal, yellowcake production, lithium mining and processing, steelmaking and anything else essential to national defense that produces CO2, which is their definition of sustainability. 

In other words, everything that makes land valuable to ordinary human beings and to America’s national security.

The goal is to create not only a new kind of company, but also a new asset class that could attract billion of investment dollars, including from global sovereign wealth funds from, say China, Russia, or other nations. (What better way for a foreign adversary to cripple the United States than through locking up America’s natural resources without a fight?)

The greed factor is also front and center in this proposal. By some estimates, trading markets in “natural assets” could reach $100 to $150 trillion with market makers like Black Rock, Goldman Sachs, and big green energy utilities like NextEra, in the thick of the action. 

If these numbers seem fantastic, consider this new math.

Today the value of our existing real economic land assets is estimated to be about $1.5 quadrillion dollars globally. Proponents of these new Natural Assets claim the value of “ecosystem services” to be $5 quadrillion dollars. 

The problem with this estimate is that you can’t get there using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles which measures basic cash flows to describe value and net present value. Instead, it is based on a new accounting system called SEEA EA, invented out of whole cloth by the United Nations, which claim to be able put a monetary value on the ability of NACs to block others from putting land to productive uses. 

There are massive problems with this accounting system. 

There are massive problems with this whole Scheme. 

The SEC and the New York Stock Exchange must know this. To avoid scrutiny and opposition, they have put it on an unprecedented fast track for approval. To read the filings, it looks intentionally confusing, and intentionally made to make it difficult to weigh in on. The Intrinsic Exchange Group is partly owned by the New York Stock Exchange and is backed by the Rockefeller Foundation.

But one thing is clear: it’s their desire to permanently embed the mechanism and monetary values for the disuse of federal lands, easement properties and ultimately private properties in our federal securities laws.  

Joining me to unpack this proposal and its underlying agenda, is Margaret Byfield, the Executive Director of American Stewards of Liberty, a non-profit organization working to protect private property rights and the liberties they secure.

It's going to be very important to take direct action, make comments, reach out to your lawmakers and try to stop NACs from becoming a reality.  




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