This episode of The Bill Walton Show is a riveting discussion with two astute geopolitical analysts, Dr. Steven Bryen and Brandon Weichert. 

Together they dissect the exploding tensions in the Middle East, specifically the dramatic escalation by Iran’s air attack on Israel. 

And the big questions: How are global players like the US, Russia, and even China moving their chess pieces in this high-stakes game? 

The episode is a whirlwind tour through the strategies, fears, and potential flashpoints that will likely redraw the map of global power. 

Dr. Bryen, with over 50 years national security experience including many stints in the Pentagon where he became a leading expert on the arms trade, shares his insights into Iran's unprecedented missile and drone attack on Israel. Despite its scale, it was largely thwarted by robust air defenses from Israel, the US, and even regional players like Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Still, Iran considers it a success.

He highlights the remarkable and historic aspect of Arab nations rallying in defense of Israel.

Brandon Weichert, author of The Shadow War: Iran's Quest for Supremacy and known for his pulse-racing analyses, shifts the lens to the broader geopolitical chessboard, articulating how the Shia-Sunni divide and the shadows of the Abraham Accords are playing out in real-time. 

Weichert critiques the current US administration's handling of deterrence, and its tacit support of Iran which will destabilize the already volatile region. 

Dr. Bryen also skeptically views the Biden administration’s Middle East strategy while applauding CENTCOM's pivotal coordination role. 

Weichert and Bryen also debate potential military strategies that could weaken Iran's capabilities, while worrying about the critical weaknesses in the US and global defense arsenals.

This discussion shines a light on the complex and now dire landscape of international relations that the Biden Administration has wrought. 

Buckle up, listeners, because geopolitics just doesn’t get more electrifying than this!

In this episode Bill Walton is joined by Dr. Robert Malone in a wide ranging and engaging discussion about modern societal and financial control mechanisms. Their great concern is the relentless and growing overreach of both governments and corporations into personal freedoms through the guise of security, safety and public health. 

Robert W. Malone is an internationally recognized scientist/physician and the original inventor of mRNA vaccination as a technology. He holds numerous fundamental domestic and foreign patents in the fields of gene delivery, delivery formulations, and vaccines: including for fundamental DNA and RNA/mRNA vaccine technologies. He has developed some 100 scientific publications with over 14,000 citations of his work. 

He now focuses on daily podcasts, interviews, op-eds, advocacy with legislators and building a twitter feed of over a million people.

His life changed from that of a scientist to an advocate because of his personal experiences and concerns regarding the safety and bioethics of how the COVID-19 genetic vaccines were developed and forced upon the world. He discovered the many short-cuts, database issues, obfuscation and frankly, lies told in the development of the Spike protein-based genetic vaccines for SARS-CoV-2. 

Some of the topics covered: 

The regulatory capture of the federal government has warped and shaped the work of Congress and Federal agencies to such an extent that they no longer represent what is in the best interests of the nation, the world, and humanity.  

WHO's Pandemic Treaty is intended to override most of our national sovereignty in health policy decisions, effectively allowing a global body to dictate local health measures.

Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) which have the potential to be a sinister tool for government financial surveillance and social control. 

Financial Privacy Concerns The payment processor Stripe, which recently demanded Malone's financial details, reflecting broader concerns about privacy and autonomy in financial transactions.

Labeling Dissent as extreme, such as "far-right" or "Nazi," to delegitimize and silence criticism, comparing it to historical tactics used during the McCarthy era.

Surveillance and Control under the guise of safety and security, suggesting a slippery slope toward more intrusive governmental and corporate practices.

Robert Malone is a courageous and deep thinker, a man who should be listened to. 

On March 18, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case Murthy v. Missouri challenging whether the government can induce social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to censor constitutionally protected free speech.  

After achieving victory in the Cold War against the Soviet Union, US political leadership, starting with the Clinton Administration, has made a continuing string of strategic blunders that have brought the United States to the point where - after building China up for decades - we face an enemy determined to become the new global hegemon and that now possesses equal economic, military and diplomatic resources.

To learn how this came about, in this episode Bill talks with  James E. Fanell and Bradley A. Thayer, Ph.D, authors of 

Embracing Communist China: America’s Greatest Strategic Failure.

Jim Fanell, a retired U.S. Navy captain and the former Director of Intelligence and Information Operations for the U.S. Pacific Fleet, is now a Government Fellow at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy. 

Brad Thayer is an expert in Chinese grand strategies and the history of Chinese and Western strategic thought; and a former visiting fellow at Magdalen College, University of Oxford.

“How did China go from an underdeveloped country in 1990 with about 0.6 of 1% of world gross domestic product to over 20% of world GDP today?” asks Brad.

“The answer in large part is that the United States aided and abetted the rise of the Chinese Communist Party and kept it in power. That has never happened before in international politics where one state, the dominant state, has funded the rise of an enemy.”

U.S. foreign policy toward the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been dominated by the so-called “Engagement School” since the end of the Cold War. They believed that U.S. political and economic engagement with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would transform the PRC into a “responsible stakeholder” in the Western economic system and, ideally a democracy. Of course, none of that happened.

Instead, the Engagement School saved the CCP and ensured that the PRC became wealthier and more powerful year-after-year and used that power to re-make the international order to suit the CCP’s interests and to threaten U.S. national security, allies, and partners. 

“Engaging” with China has led to the offshoring of manufacturing jobs, the loss of intellectual property, and making the U.S. energy future dependent on China, just to name a few of our strategic blunders.

“We thought we could make China and CCP become more like us, that they would see the value of the being part of a US dominated system created in the post-World War II era. We assumed they would just naturally drift into becoming a liberal democracy. So we didn't fundamentally understand communism. We didn't understand the Chinese Communist Party's commitment to that ideology,” explains Jim.

The Trump administration began the difficult task of ending Engagement. However, under Biden, it has now returned in a supercharged form.

The Biden “reset” began in earnest in May when CIA Director Nicholas Burns made a secret trip to Beijing to meet with his Chinese counterparts. Then began a cavalcade of visits to the PRC from senior Biden officials: Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Climate Czar John Kerry, and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo who was most explicit regarding why nothing could jeopardize the approximately $750 billion per year trade relationship with the PRC.

“But the apotheosis of the engagement paradigm was the summit meeting in November between Xi and Biden. The meeting with Biden was just Xi’s doormat to get to what really mattered: the meeting with the 400 business leaders,” explain Jim and Brad.

“Never in our history have Americans so openly and brazenly celebrated a communist and murderous dictator. It was an appalling and shameful moment in American history.”

“The U.S. has little to show in return for all these meetings, except for the loss of face and its own national power—again, year-after-year. It is stunning that so few Americans have asked what good has America received from the Engagement School. The elite have gotten wealthier, so they and the CCP are the winners. But it’s the Chinese and American people that bear the costs.”

“What if in 1943 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his White House advisors had acted on an offer from high-ranking German officials that they were prepared to kidnap Adolf Hitler and all of his top cronies.  They would then turn Hitler over to the United States and sign an armistice ending the war with Germany.

The German high officials wanted then to join with the United States to stop the Communist Soviet Union from advancing in Europe. They had a well-thought out plan as to which units they knew were loyal, what units they knew would actually move on the Wolf's Lair, Hitler's Prussian, and the East Prussian headquarters.

FDR learned of this proposal from a man the Germans believed would be their most credible emissary:  

George H. Earle III, a Main Line Philadelphia millionaire, war hero awarded the Navy Cross, Pennsylvania governor, Ambassador to Austria and Bulgaria, friend and supporter of Franklin Roosevelt, generous donor to humanitarian causes, colorful playboy, and spy. 

Yet FDR did not act on the stunning offer, and the rest as they say, is History. The Soviets conquered part of Germany and all of Eastern Europe and closed it behind an iron curtain that would endure for over four decades.

Here to tell this story is Chris Farrell, who for the last 25 years has been the Director of Investigations & Research at Judicial Watch and author of “Exiled Emissary: George H. Earle III”    and 

Dr Shea Bradley Farrell, author of “Last Warning to the West”, the founder of Counterpoint Institute and who has written extensively about the agonies of Eastern Europe under Communism. 

“This is not one of these books that examines an alternative history,” explains Chris. “Everything in the book is documented, for example, from the National archives, the Pennsylvania State Archives in Harrisburg, or the Pennsylvania Historical Society in Pennsylvania. Or from personal records from the Earle family.”

Why this story matters today is not just that FDR did not act but why he didn’t. As records have become public, we have learned that were many staunch supporters of the Soviet Union and its Marxist social experiment in both the FDR and Truman White Houses. Alger Hiss was FDR’s key aide at Yalta. 

“What Earle was saying was, “Look, the real threat is the Soviet Union. We may have been allied during the war for whatever reason you want to explain, but they're a civilizational threat."” 

But many in the 1940s White House did not want to act against the Soviet Union. They supported it. 

The Soviets then. China today. The United States has a long troubled history of “elite capture.” 

Chris and Shea tell a compelling story. You can learn much about history from this episode. But it’s how it reflects on today that’s really chilling. What does John Kerry say when he’s meeting with the Chinese?