Episode 207: “The Red Trickle: Where Do Our Elections Go From Here?” with Paul Teller PhD
Release Date: 11/16/2022
The Bill Walton Show
Newly released documents show that the White House has played a major role in censoring Americans on social media. Email exchanges between Rob Flaherty, the White House’s director of digital media, and social-media executives prove the companies put Covid censorship policies in place in response to relentless, coercive pressure from the White House—not voluntarily as the government has claimed. The emails emerged last month in the discovery phase of Missouri v. Biden, a free-speech case brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana and four private...
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The Biden Administration - and a majority of Republicans in Congress - persist in their bellicose rhetoric about an “existential war to defend Ukraine” telling the Russians that “we're going to destroy your regime and dissolve the Russian Federation.” Really? After sending more than $100 billion to Ukraine to fight a proxy war against Russia, have they thought through whether the US is capable of doing this? They are calling for actions that only a global hegemon might possess. But a hegemon that no longer controls its own borders, has crumbling critical infrastructure, hollowed...
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Backstage with Bill Walton In this episode I compare notes and share stories with veteran dealmaker and entrepreneur Marc Morgenstern. In today’s polarized world, where people seem intent on not agreeing, Marc has had a long and successful career helping opposing sides come to agreement. He’s completed billions of dollars of M&A transactions, buying, selling, and financing businesses as a managing partner of law firm Kahn Kleiman and as a venture capitalist. Marc’s new book creatively reframes and radically changes how we can approach dealmaking of any...
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For an excellent primer about how the politics of our over-complicated state and local tax systems operate, this conversation with Grover Norquist is absolutely the place to start. It's comprehensive, easy to understand and often humorous, as only Grover knows how to make it. (When Grover is not doing taxes, he’s doing stand-up comedy. For real, and he’s good at it.) As founder of Americans for Tax Reform, which opposes all tax increases as a matter of principle, no one in modern times has fought harder than Grover Norquist to shrink the state by keeping the issue of high taxes...
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Events are picking up pace rapidly on the world stage and I’ve asked my frequent guest Brandon Weichert to join me to help explain what’s happening. Brandon, geopolitical analyst and publisher of The Weichert Report, is among the best at connecting the dots globally with his bold and unnerving forecasts. Among the many issues brewing that we get into: Russia is amassing up to 400 thousand troops on Ukraine's borders for a winter offensive, objectives unknown. Nuclear escalation looms. The Chinese sent a satellite balloon hovering ominously across the entire United States as it...
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As the Russian invasion of Ukraine grinds on, it’s nearly impossible for the ordinary observer to figure out what's really happening. One of the problems is that war news is generated primarily by Ukrainian propaganda, which is endlessly parroted in the Western media. Anytime there is contradictory information – for example, mention of Ukraine’s high casualties – Kiev pushes back so hard that Western leaders go silent. But what is clear is that looming on the horizon is the very real possibility of a nuclear war, as more and more European countries are drawn in to the...
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“This whole climate hysteria seems to focus on a molecule - carbon dioxide (CO2) - which we humans exhale and which we release into the atmosphere by burning so-called fossil fuels,” explains my guest on this episode Jerome Corsi, PhD. But what are realities of CO2, who is behind the agenda to demonize it and - most importantly - who benefits? Dr. Corsi, author of the tour de force book The Truth about Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change: Exposing Climate Lies in an Age of Disinformation, has the answers. Drawing extensively on scholarly published peer-reviewed...
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If someone wanted to weaken, then destroy a sovereign and free United States, what would they do? Well they might start with surrendering its energy independence. Make war on reliable fossil fuels oil and gas, coal and nuclear power. Induce it to rely on wind and solar energy sources that are certain to lead to rolling blackouts and the ultimate failure of America’s electrical grid. And while they’re at it, persuade America to rely on China for most all of its wind and solar energy production technologies. Inflate its currency. Have the Federal Reserve print trillions of dollars of...
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"Commuting to office work is obsolete. It is now infinitely easier, cheaper, and faster to do what the 19th century could not do, move information, and with it office work to where the people are, the tools to do so are already here. The telephone two-way video, electronic mail, the fax machine, the personal computer, and so on." Peter Drucker (1989) In 2020, over 30 years later, futurist and management guru Peter Drucker’s prediction came true with a bang. With the mandated COVID lockdowns, suddenly everybody had to learn to work from home. Office occupancy plummeted from 90% to 10%...
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In 1974, with annual inflation raging over 12%, President Gerald Ford introduced WIN (“whip inflation now”) buttons telling Americans: “To help increase food and lower prices, grow more and waste less. To help save scarce fuel in the energy crisis, drive less, heat less.” In other words, the responsibility to fix inflation fell to ordinary Americans. It didn’t work - because they didn’t cause it in the first place - and it would be another eight years before Fed Chairman Paul Volcker tamed the inflation beast. With draconian measures, like draining bank reserves, the Fed funds rate...
info_outlineTo put it mildly, the expected massive Republican Red Wave in the recent 2022 midterm elections didn’t materialize. Even though 75% of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track, the election gave us status quo. Virtually every Governor, Senator and House incumbent won reelection. Trump states elected Republican Senators and Biden states elected Democrats. And despite House Republicans getting six million more votes than Democrats (52.3% compared to 46.2%), these votes did not translate into a surge of seats for Republicans. With more and more districts tightly gerrymandered, Democrat incumbents hung on if only by narrow margins. So what happened? Was it the issues, the money, the candidates, local factors, or something else? Joining me to explore this question, and where we go from here, is Paul Teller PhD, the Executive Director of Advancing American Freedom who served in the Trump White House as Special Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs, and then as Director of Strategic Affairs for Vice President Mike Pence. Paul was also Chief of Staff for Senator Ted Cruz. Issues and candidates matter, but how we vote now may matter much more. The COVID lockdowns in 2020 provided the pretext of crisis to radically change American elections to mail-in and early voting, and in ways that now vary wildly state-by-state. Election Day is a thing of the past. Mail in ballots start coming in months earlier. Returns are not counted for days and ballots are both cast and counted under radically different and often suspicious conditions. “The reason in-person voting was always so important was someone else checks you in,” explains Paul. “A different person gives you a ballot, maybe a different person shows you how to in insert your ballot. Just different eyeballs. And so there's less chance for fraud because there's so many different kind of checks in the system.” The Democrats—with overwhelming media and money advantages—have mastered the arts of massive and unprecedented early, mail-in, and absentee voting. Democrats have far more control of the election machinery and almost total control of the American media and Republicans don't. Still, Republicans seem bent on winning “hearts and minds” and on energizing their voters to show up on Election Day. But it is far easier to finesse and control the mail-in ballots than to “get out the vote.” Since the advent of massive ballot mail-in and collection drop-off processes, “votes” have become increasingly less valuable and “ballot collection” has become a key to Democrat party success. Case in point: In Pennsylvania, Oz drew 500,000 more voters to the polls on Election Day than Fetterman did. But Fetterman’s mail-in total exceeded 868,000, four times Oz’s mail-in total, netting a 655,000-vote difference in Fetterman’s favor. With boxes of ballots always seeming to show up at the last minute in close elections to push Democrat candidates into the win column, more and more American will likely never again trust our election results. There is an alternative. Same day voting. In person. With paper ballots. On a Sunday, or make it a national holiday. If Brazil can hold an election and on the same day get the results tabulated by 10 pm, we can too. Paul and I also talk about the great work Advancing American Freedom is doing and their Biden Accountably Tracker which monitors all the bills that Biden proposes, bills he signs, executive orders he issues, letters and directives the White House issues to the agencies, regulations they put out for comment and on and on … all the horribles of Biden’s bad policy choices. Elections matter.