loader from loading.io

Episode 218: “The Ugly Truth About the White House, the FBI and the Social Media Companies” with Jenin Younes and Todd Zywicki

The Bill Walton Show

Release Date: 03/08/2023

Episode 229: “You May Not Be Interested in CISA, But CISA is Certainly Interested in You” with Ben Weingarten and Frank Gaffney show art Episode 229: “You May Not Be Interested in CISA, But CISA is Certainly Interested in You” with Ben Weingarten and Frank Gaffney

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...

info_outline
Episode 228: “Google’s Utopian Vision and the 2024 Election” with Dr Robert Epstein and Jenny Beth Martin show art Episode 228: “Google’s Utopian Vision and the 2024 Election” with Dr Robert Epstein and Jenny Beth Martin

The Bill Walton Show

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...

info_outline
Episode 227:  “It’s Time for the US to Use Its Power to Bring the War in Ukraine to an End” with Stephen Bryen show art Episode 227: “It’s Time for the US to Use Its Power to Bring the War in Ukraine to an End” with Stephen Bryen

The Bill Walton Show

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...

info_outline
Episode 226: Episode 226: "The Weaponization of Loneliness" with Stella Morabito

The Bill Walton Show

“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...

info_outline
Episode 225: “Protecting Investors from an Overreaching Regulatory State” with Chris Iacovella show art Episode 225: “Protecting Investors from an Overreaching Regulatory State” with Chris Iacovella

The Bill Walton Show

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...

info_outline
Episode 224: “The FBI’s Ambitious New Plans” with J. Michael Waller show art Episode 224: “The FBI’s Ambitious New Plans” with J. Michael Waller

The Bill Walton Show

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...

info_outline
Episode 223: The Differences Between Men and Women: Warriors and Worriers with Joyce Benenson show art Episode 223: The Differences Between Men and Women: Warriors and Worriers with Joyce Benenson

The Bill Walton Show

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...

info_outline
Episode 222: “What You Need to Know About Your Money and the Federal Reserve” with Cato’s Norbert Michel show art Episode 222: “What You Need to Know About Your Money and the Federal Reserve” with Cato’s Norbert Michel

The Bill Walton Show

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...

info_outline
Episode 221: “Are We Really Surprised We’re Having Another Banking Crisis?” with Alex Pollock and Steve Dewey show art Episode 221: “Are We Really Surprised We’re Having Another Banking Crisis?” with Alex Pollock and Steve Dewey

The Bill Walton Show

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...

info_outline
Episode 220: “Silicon Valley Bank: The Bill Finally Comes Due for Decades of Reckless Monetary, Fiscal and Regulatory Policy” with Rick Manning and Robert Romano show art Episode 220: “Silicon Valley Bank: The Bill Finally Comes Due for Decades of Reckless Monetary, Fiscal and Regulatory Policy” with Rick Manning and Robert Romano

The Bill Walton Show

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_outline
 
More Episodes

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 plaintiffs, including leading epidemiologists Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya and Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff. 

 

Government's role in social media censorship has been just as bad as we feared and worse. 

 

So what are the details, and what’s at stake? To explain, Jenin Younes, litigation counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance which is representing the private plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden, joins me on this episode with 

Todd Zywicki, Professor at George Mason's Scalia Law School and who was last on the show exploring with me whether “Chinese-Style Social Credit Will Be Coming to America”

 

The ugly truth.

We also now know that not only the White House, but also the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies have all played a major role in censoring Americans on social media, directing tech companies to remove certain types of material and even to censor specific posts and accounts. 

 

Apparently they even censored this show. 

“If you recall Bill,” reminds Todd, “the last time Jenin and I were here with you, was about when I sued my employer over trying to force me to get vaccinated even though I had natural immunity. And why that's so relevant to the conversation we're having today was that quite quickly that episode was removed from YouTube. It was taken down as violating the terms of service of YouTube. And to this day, we have no idea why.”

 

People were censored for saying things that we now know to be true. 

“Martin Kulldorff is among the most cited scientists in the world when it comes to infectious disease issues and vaccine safety,” says Jenin. “And he was censored on Twitter for saying that people with natural immunity and children don't need the vaccine.” 

 

The censorship regime has been widespread and relentless. Our argument here is that the companies, as private actors, have a right to do that, but that the government does not have a right to coerce private actors to do what the government wants them to do.

The White House emails demonstrate that the federal government unlawfully coerced social media companies in an effort to ensure that Americans would be exposed only to state-approved information about Covid-19.

 

The government’s unlawful, deceptive and dangerous conduct is the biggest issue of our day. We cover a lot in this episode: the First Amendment issues, public choice (government officials don’t have a monopoly on truth), shadow banning, Section 230 (protects the social media companies but is now abused by them) and how Twitter has changed with Elon Musk in charge. 

 

This is a fascinating and entertaining overview of the sometimes hard-to-understand issues. We taped this in-studio to amplify its importance, but if you don’t have time to watch, be sure to listen in.