Episode 214: “Ukraine, The Balloon and the Loss of US Hegemony” with Brandon Weichert.
Release Date: 02/10/2023
The Bill Walton Show
“Overwhelming evidence suggests that federal agencies – led by among others, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), buoyed by senior executive branch officials and lawmakers, colluding with Big Tech, and a coterie of often government-coordinated and government-funded “counter-disinformation” organizations, have imposed nothing less than a mass public-private censorship regime on the American people.” Explains Ben Weingarten, one of America’s leading investigative journalists, at a recent Homeland Security Oversight hearing. As you’ll learn in this...
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Voter and ballot fraud may just be a small part of the problem that conservatives face in the upcoming 2024 elections compared to the power of Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube. Using its “total data collection” systems it can sway the opinions of millions of people and influence how they vote. We’ve known about this issue since at least 2016 and it has not gone away. If anything, with the emergence of AI, the threat has grown even more ominous. Executives at Google have stated that “investments in machine learning and AI” are a big opportunity to address...
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The war in Ukraine drags on at a terrible cost for all involved with no seeming end in sight. Some estimate that there have been almost 400,000 total Russian and Ukraine casualties so far, although both sides claim their losses are much lower. Ukraine is on the ropes and running out of manpower with its most of its elite forces destroyed. Missiles for its air defenses are depleted. Both sides are dragooning teenagers and old men for their armies. Russia’s military command is in disarray. But no one knows what is really going on. A key problem understanding the war in Ukraine is...
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“Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other.… Therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism “Americans have long sensed a new kind tyranny creeping into our lives. This disquiet has hovered in the background for a long time, though most of us couldn’t put our finger on it. Trends to control speech and behavior are isolating us from one another, and they have begun to intensify rapidly and spread throughout society’s...
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When Walmart went public in 1970 and soon thereafter listed on the New York Stock Exchange, its SEC disclosure prospectus was 20 pages long. Today, a prospectus requires massive numbers of mostly obscure disclosures imposing very real liabilities for the issuing company - but which no one reads, except for lawyers who charge $2,000 an hour to read it and to write it - and which can run upwards to 300 pages or more. Under President Joe Biden’s whole of government effort to weaponize federal agencies, this regulatory creep has become an outright onslaught of new regulations. Except...
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The Federal Bureau of Investigation is proceeding with plans to build a new headquarters which would be twice the size of the The Pentagon, the world’s largest office building. The new FBI headquarters is to be built on one of three sites in suburban Virginia and Maryland. Those sites are large parcels of 58, 61, and 80 acres. The Kremlin in Moscow —a walled fortress containing the administrative offices of the Russian central government, the official presidential residence, massive auditoriums, an arsenal, a museum, four palaces, three cathedrals and several churches—is just over 66...
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What are the evolutionary differences between men and women, and how do they survive and thrive through differing competitive strategies? In this episode, Dr. Joyce Benenson talks with Bill about her book, Warriors and Worriers, which draws her extensive lifelong research on children’s interactions. The result is fascinating array of studies and stories that explore the ways boys and men deter their enemies, while girls and women find assistants to aid them in coping with vulnerable children and elders. Dr. Benenson, a retired professor of psychology at Emmanuel College and an associate...
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Is the Federal Reserve a godlike Zeus able to control our money and the economy, preserve financial stability and keep a lid on inflation? Or is it like the Wizard of Oz? A little man behind the curtain pulling levers to create smoke and noise to terrify and control people, but in the end only one market participant among many worldwide. If you’re a bond trader in New York, trying to predict minute day to day changes in interest rates, it’s more like Zeus. For the rest of us, I believe, it’s like Oz. Trying to figure out the Fed is a complicated business and I'm...
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It looks like the bill is finally coming due after decades of reckless monetary policy and out of control federal spending. After 40 years of relatively stable prices, we now have raging inflation. Interest rates have risen dramatically. Mortgage rates have more than doubled. And commercial banks are now sitting on more than $600 billion of unrealized bond losses. Of course, and as expected, with the Silicon Valley Bank bailout, the Regulators have pulled out their default playbook declaring yet another institution systematically risky, taking another step toward the federalization of...
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This week, Americans for Limited Government published a provocative and insightful piece about the banking system asking, "Has the United States banking system become too big to save?” In the past three years, to finance massive federal spending, the Treasury has issued almost $8 trillion new treasury bonds with almost $4 trillion bought by US banks during the tail-end of the Fed’s era of zero interest rates. US Treasury Bonds? Sounds like a safe investment for a bank, but here’s the problem. After 40 years of relatively stable prices, we now have raging inflation...
info_outlineEvents 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 presumably took surveillance photos. Strangely, the Biden Administration, which is all in to defend the borders of Ukraine, refused to protect America’s own airspace. Why wasn’t it shot down sooner? Our southern border with Mexico has been left wide open for over two years. The United States’ enemies - and its friends - have watched us admit almost five million undocumented aliens, whose purposes and destinations are unknown. South Korea's president is having a public meltdown about no longer having reliable American nuclear protection. He has reason to be concerned. Joe Biden, just two weeks ago, declared that “global warming is the single most existential threat to humanity we have ever faced, including nuclear weapons.” Did the way Biden fail to confront the Chinese balloon sooner than he did reflect this priority? Brandon conjectures: “A political decision in the White House was made to let it just pass by quietly because the Biden administration didn't want to rock the boat going into their global warming negotiations with China. They worried that if they shot it down, that the Chinese would freak out and leave the meeting before anything could get done”. “If it wasn't for a local Montana newspaper, we wouldn't have known about any of this. This would have been just another conspiracy theory on the internet.” With Ukraine, United States strategic objectives could have been the preservation of the Ukrainian core in the western portion of the country and a speedy end to the fighting. Instead, the Biden administration continues to insist that Ukraine drive the Russians completely out. If this means sending in U.S. combat jets and long range missiles, the massive risk is that this widens the war, triggering our NATO agreements, leading to a general - and possibly nuclear - war in Europe. The German general von Clausewitz told us that “war is an extension of politics through other means.” Well, politics and our politicians seem to have gone mad. Worryingly, the United States is playing a weaker and weaker hand. Brandon warns that “America’s political and cultural system is collapsing here at home. The rest of the world sees that. Especially in China, they talk about this all the time. China believes the Americans are declining.” There’s a lot to unpack in this episode. Please listen in.