Bill on Securing America 11/1/22 Part 1

Frank Gaffney (00:10):

Welcome back. We’re joined, as we have the privilege of being each week about this time, by Bill Walton, the host of The Bill Walton Show, a former master of the universe on Wall Street at Allied Capital, also a president of the Council for National Policy, of which I’m very pleased to be a member, a very important conservative movement organization. He brings a wealth, in other words, of skills and background to all of the topics we discuss, and we’re anxious to get some thoughts from him on several that are top of my mind. Bill, I want to start with Brazil. In the past day or so, we’ve seen the last of the major nations of our hemisphere fall to the communists. Lula da Silva is, I think, without a doubt one, and he brings with him the help of the Chinese Communist Party, as do all of those nations that have now, I think, succumbed to the leftist temptation. Give us your take on what the implications are of this, not just obviously for the people of Brazil most immediately and the region, but for us as well.

Bill Walton (01:30):

Well, it’s another ominous development if you care about freedom and markets and human flourishing. Brazil has become the last country in Central America to go left, returning to Lula’s so-called leadership. And of course, Lula campaigned on giving the government a central role in the economy and supposed privatization of industries, and of course, he’s going to eliminate income taxes on anyone earning less than $950 a month, which is virtually the entire country, and he is going to tax rich. Well, the Journal reports this is the last Central American or Latin country to go left, but the Journal doesn’t reflect the fact that it’s really the entire Americas. If you look at the government with Trudeau and Canada and now Biden and his crew in the United States, the entire Americas have gone left. And what’s particularly ominous in South and Central America is the communist role in helping bringing this about, and so we’re up against it, Frank. It was a close election, supposedly. It was 50.5% to 49.5 where he beat Bolsonaro, and Bolsonaro’s not yet conceded. But my guess is that this is a fait accompli and it’s not good for freedom.

Frank Gaffney (02:54):

It’s definitely not good for freedom. I guess we’ll see what Bolsonaro does too as a result of some concerns about election fraud, which he expressed before the election as a matter of fact. But Bill, one of the bigger problems, as I touched on a moment ago, is that it’s not just these indigenous communists. It’s not just their organization around something called the Forum of Sao Paulo that Lula was instrumental in setting up when he was president of Brazil years ago, prior to his conviction on criminal felony charges. But we have a Brazil, Peru, Chile, Columbia, and the nations of Central America, by and large, right on up, as you say, to our own country and to Canada. In other words, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, now under the sway of governments that are, well, in the pocket of the Chinese Communist Party. I don’t know that that’s an exaggeration. They’re certainly subject to its influence in an extreme way, but it seems as though, mostly, they’re doing its bidding, and that is not just bad for freedom, that is bad fundamentally for our national security as well. Is it not?

Bill Walton (04:27):

Well, I think freedom’s part of that, Frank, but the Chinese are definitely there.

Frank Gaffney (04:32):

Sure.

Bill Walton (04:32):

They’ve been working continually at this for a couple of decades now, but there are other forces at work. There’s the usual Marxist ideology, but I think the climate change group are also involved in this because Bolsonaro very properly decided that, to save the rainforest in Brazil, private development of it would be far better than what was happening with it in government hands. It was being cut down by basically forest pirates and ruining it. So what was a very constructive environmental policy under him is now going to be reversed, and we’re going to go back to the bad old days. Brazil is in a very interesting case here, because when he was president 20 years ago or 15 years ago, Brazil had its wind at the back.

(05:18):

China was rising rapidly. They were exporting lots of food to China, and also they just discovered their energy reserves or more of them, and they benefited from that. None of that is true today, and in addition to that, the big forces at work, we’ve got the global de-growth crew that think that, “If the economy doesn’t grow, we just redistribute things. The world’s going to be better.” Well, that’s never worked, and the only thing that’s brought people, billions of peoples, out of poverty is a free market economy, and there are lots of forces to pushing back on that-

Frank Gaffney (05:56):

Amen.

Bill Walton (05:57):

… and this is just the latest chapter.

Frank Gaffney (06:02):

Well, on top of all of that, I think you’ve got, as you say, the globalists who are very much bent on the idea that the population of the world is too large and therefore, we need to engineer it so that there are fewer of us and-

Bill Walton (06:18):

Well, in fact, Frank, population growth-

Frank Gaffney (06:19):

… they’ll be redistributing the wealth among them, but it’ll be fewer and fewer.

Bill Walton (06:22):

Yeah. Well, they’ve got the demographics wrong. That may have been a worry 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago maybe, even though it wasn’t, but if you look at the population trends in all the major developed countries, they’re heading downward and including, I might add, China.

Frank Gaffney (06:39):

Yeah, they’re plummeting.

Bill Walton (06:39):

So they’re fighting the last century’s battle and we got a lot of work to do, Frank.

Frank Gaffney (06:46):

It’s a, I think, eugenic-sized bent on a much, much smaller population worldwide. Bill, we have to take a short break. When we come back, I do want to ask you about one piece of this that’s very troubling out of Mexico concerning the idea of a new transnational arrangement like the European Union for our hemisphere. We’ll get to that and much more with Bill Walton on the other side of a very short break, the host of The Bill Walton Show, a program that I strongly commend to all of you, as well as, of course, our visits with him here. We’ll be right back with more right after this.