Rick Green
This is the Intersection of Faith and Culture. It's WallBuilders. We're taking on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective and you get to be a part of that. Hope that you're sharing the program with your friends and family, being a force multiplier out there every day throughout the week, Monday through Friday, we're covering all kinds of topics. Typically Monday through Wednesday we have some interviews for you of someone that's out there on the front lines engaged in this fight for the heart and soul of America. We share that with you Monday through Wednesday. And then Thursdays we have our Foundations of Freedom Thursday programs, typically your questions driving those programs. You can send those questions into radio at WallBuilders.com. It might be a question about the Constitution or history or something about how to apply a biblical perspective to some of the things going on in the world today. You can send that question to radio@wallbuilders.com. That's Thursdays. And then today, Friday, most of the time, have a Good News Friday program. That's our opportunity to get through a bunch of the headlines and different stories out there. Frankly, that aren't headlines in the major media. There are a lot of good news stories that you may have missed. I know most of the time when David and Tim are sharing these good news stories, I have not heard about them. I really look forward to Fridays and getting a chance to get some of that good news. I'm Rick Green, by the way, America's Constitution Coach and a former Texas legislator, proud to be here with and when I say proud, that's hopefully not a sinful pride, that's a thankful gratitude, heart of gratitude. Proud to be with WallBuilders and here with David and Tim Barton. David's, America's premier historian and our founder at Wallbuilders. Tim's a national speaker and pastor and president of Wallbuilders. You can learn more about all three of us and the ministry at wallbuilders.com. Go to wallbuilders.com today when you can get all kinds of great information, lots of tools and educational materials and different things you can share with your friends and family. And then, lastly, I'll just ask that you consider making a one-time or monthly contribution there at the website. We're a listener-supported program and every dollar that you donate comes alongside us to help to amplify this voice of truth. As you well know, it's hard to find truth these days. It's hard to find sources you can trust and sources that will bring you the good, the bad and the ugly, and I believe we do a good job of that here at Wallbuilders, we hear from you all the time saying we do a good job of it. Well, if we do, then we need to get it out there more and more. We need more people to listen. So please consider being a part of that by making a donation today at wallbuilders.com. All right, we're going to jump into that good news, but we're going to mix things up. Tim Barton's going first today. Tim, where are we headed, man?
Tim Barton
All right. Well, this one is looking at some after effects at Harvard University. I've got a couple of articles that are from really the end of this last year, beginning of this year, and for those that don't remember, when a lot of the stuff had unfolded October 7th in Israel, and what some of those terrorists did in Israel and what Hamas was gloating about and taking credit for, and there were people in America saying we stand with Israel. Well then, there's this crazy growing movement that was we're not standing with Israel, we're going to say the Palestinian people and the Palestinians have been oppressed, and so there's this pro-Palestinian movement that comes out of it. And what was really crazy is there were many universities, Harvard being one of them, where they were having these pro-Palestinian which, by default, is a pro-Hamas rally in essence, as they're saying nope, we're not supporting Israel, we're not supporting the Jews because they've done this apartheid and they're evil and they're bad and we're pro-Palestinians and the Jews need to learn their rightful place. This is the stuff that's being said, and this happened at Harvard, and Harvard was shutting down the pro-Israel side. There were a Jewish students that were at Harvard and they talked about how fearful they were for their lives, et cetera. As this all unfolds, there were many donors who began to recognize if that's the position Harvard's going to take, we probably don't want to continue funding this. So this first article identifies there was another billionaire. How the article starts has slapped us check book shut to Harvard University, and this was businessman Len Blavatnik and his family foundation. They were giving millions of dollars in funding to Ivy League, but because of President Claudine Gay and her position, they said we're not going to do this anymore. That's not what we want to do. Now. Blavatnik is a Jewish individual and so, certainly recognizing these issues, he said that's not what we want to do. Also, maybe going even further, the article says this Ukrainian born billionaire, and so not only is he Jewish, he's Ukrainian, which is now also kind of an interesting thought with all that's going on in the world with Ukraine and Israel. But nonetheless he said he's not going to do it. The article goes through and identifies multiple other leaders that said they were pulling their funding. And then the next article I have identified that Harvard President Claudine Gay resigns following plagiarism allegations and anti-Semitism testimony, and that anti-Semitism testimony was, I believe, she was before one of the three of those university presidents that was before Congress and that their whole interview was just awful, where they were talking about free speech being allowed and people were calling for genocide of the Jews and they said, well, we can't censor free speech, we wouldn't wanna shut that down on college campuses. That was a position that largely they were taking, not to overlook the fact that also, as people began to investigate Claudine Gaye a little more deeply, they realized that a lot of the paper she had turned in there was a lot of plagiarism in them, with thoughts, sometimes specific sentences or paragraphs, sentence structures, what had been going on, and so she resigned, I would say, in shame. She was probably more angry than she was embarrassed or shameful about it. But the good news is that in the midst of Harvard and many Ivy League schools doing some really awful things when it comes to the position of actually supporting Israel or not being racist, not following into anti-Semitism which of course they were there was accountability, with donors saying we're not gonna keep funding this and we've talked about it so much, how people can vote with their dollars and if we would stop funding certain things and certain bad behavior would stop, where, by and large, we don't generally promote boycotts. There are definitely times we'll talk about that we said we're not gonna support Disney. After there, I think it was their CEO that came out and said that they were going to promote the LGBTQIA + agenda and they said, hey, from now on, like half of our characters are gonna be, or at least the leads, right, the stars of the show are gonna be LGBTQIA + or from a minority. And right, we, obviously we have no problem with minority, that's not a problem. But when you're saying you're gonna start promoting a sexualized agenda to children, that is a problem and that's not something we're gonna support. As much as I can help and I say if I can help it because they own so many things that some of us hard to know who all we're supporting. Like, if I'm buying a Coke, am I supporting Disney? I'm not really sure. So I'm not trying to support Disney, we're not going to Disney, but we talk about there can be an impact because of enough people say we're not gonna support you if you hold this position. It can cause them to change positions and certain things would happen at Harvard, where there was backlash, people said we're not giving money anymore, and also part of the backlash was simply a spotlight shining on what was actually happening, which, if we think back to COVID, during COVID, when parents were able to see for many of them for the very first time what teachers were teaching, it was simply a spotlight that was illuminating what was already going on. But because people were seeing it for the first time, it helped bring an end to some of the bad stuff. The old adage that sunlight can be the best disinfectant that's what was going on. That's what happened at Harvard University. So these are two articles that are at this point now are a couple of months old, but really it does highlight the positive impact of people saying we don't want to be racist, we're not gonna be anti-Semitic and we're gonna hold people accountable, we're not gonna give dollars where it shouldn't go. And in this case, it led to someone who probably never should have been the president of Harvard in the first place, who has very poor views and it looks like allegations are probably even cheated on some of her papers to get to where she is and led to her removal. So overall, it is good that we are seeing accountability in various areas in our culture.
Rick Green
Yeah, anytime we can say no to Disney and no to that negative agenda. That is good news. We want to see changes out there in the marketplace. David, where are you headed with our first piece of good news today?
David Barton
Well, I'm gonna pile on the stack here with Harvard, because what happened at Harvard is also showing up in other places as well. Now recall that one of the reasons that President Gay had to go testify at Congress was 30 different student groups on Harvard came out with a joint letter saying that all of the deaths that occurred on October 7th in Israel with Hamas, all of them were entirely the cause of the Jews. So 1200 Jews died because the Jews? It didn't even make sense, and so outrage went up. But that was 30 groups, it's not just one group on campus, that's a whole bunch of the campus groups. And so that's why she went to testify and she said oh, free speech, wait a minute, free speech? How come you don't let conservatives on your campus to talk? How come you don't let Christian your campus talk? How come you don't let really straight people today's you gotta be LGBTQIA +? So that didn't even hold up either. But on top of that, what's happened since then is you now have a lot of these boutique hiring firms that go in kind of headhunters for big corporations, and they used to go into Harvard really like going to Harvard, and those kids would come out with maybe their first year job being in six figures, I mean way up there. Well, some of these boutique firms say we're not hiring at Harvard anymore, we don't even want those, we're not going to help place them in the private sector, we're not going to help place them in the business world. If they've got that philosophy, we don't want that. And on top of that, grab this, applications for admission to colleges across the United States are up 41% this year. At Harvard they're down 17%. So you're looking at 58% difference between Harvard and other universities. Even the kids are saying I don't want to go to Harvard. So not only is Congress out there, not only is the public out there, not only are our headhunters and business people saying we don't like this, even the students are saying I don't want to be part of this. So you know, we'll see. Maybe the message gets through. But this DEI kind of stuff that they got going on. So, and by the way, we're throwing Harvard in the bus, but there's a lot of campuses that could be thrown in the bus. Every year there's about 1100 college campuses that do an anti-Israel day every year. How can you be surprised that these kids are against Israel when you have 1100 campuses every year that do an anti-Israel event? So there's a lot of colleges need to be thrown into the bus on this, but Harvard has clearly been the frontrunner and it is good to see that the public response is we don't like this, we don't want it and we're not going to support it.
Rick Green
And David, you mentioned headhunters. I think one of the you know where the rubber really meets the road here is. You know we used to say, wow, Harvard graduate, you want to hire a Harvard graduate! Employers aren't going to want to hire a Harvard graduate that are so brainwashed that they can't even make common sense decisions or see good versus evil, and it's going to have a huge, huge impact down the road. All right back over to Tim. What's your next piece of good news, man?
Tim Barton
Well, this is where it's coming from, Texas. Specifically, there is a professor who won his job back after he was fired for teaching biology. This was the case at First Liberty Institute from Dallas, at our good friend Kelly Shackleford over there and his incredible team of attorneys. The short of it is Dr Johnson Varky. He was an adjunct professor. He was fired for teaching standard principles about human biology and reproduction. You know controversial things like men and women getting together and having children and specifically the X and Y chromosomes and the women and their biological process that leads to their pregnancy. And he clearly defined the role of men and the role of women. And that offended some people who think that in 2024, biology no longer matters and they can just swap out whatever body parts they need and it's all going to work. And he said that's not how biology works. Because of that, students protested. He ended up being released. First Liberty stepped in and said wait a second, you, you can't fire somebody for this. And part of what he said is the reason he wasn't going to swallow, so to speak, all of this woke indoctrination people trying to pour down his throat is because he said it's. He's a person of faith as well as a professor in the science field. He said it's very clear in scripture God made male and female. It's very clear in biology it's male and female. And so first Liberty steps in, they are able to find a settlement where the college specifically this was the Alamo Community College District and it was against St. Phillips and the Alamo Community College District was the case. They came back and said, hey, that's our bad, he's welcome to come back. He can have some courses again this fall. So he is now reinstated at this college and will be teaching courses again in the fall. So it is a really great victory. And as we've been talking about some of these universities and some of the wokeness and the craziness going on, this is yet another example of some of the craziness at universities. It's one of the reasons that we're telling people now more and more, not just that parents need to be cautious of public school, but that really you need to think through if college makes sense for, for whether you are a young adult, listening right now, whether you're a young person, you're still pursuing kind of growing up and thinking of what you're going to be, or if you're a parent and a grandparent and you have kids at age of college, there are far more stories of kids going to college and having their entire foundation cut out from under them than there are stories of, at least over the last couple of decades than have kids going and having college strengthen their faith. Now, that does happen at some colleges, but it's probably a dozen out of hundreds of colleges that you're going to find that kids can go to and actually be encouraged in their faith, as opposed to having teachers try to undermine everything that parents and grandparents have been pouring in their kids for so long. Well, this is a good news win for this. Texas professor, Dr. Johnson Varky will be teaching again this fall.
Rick Green
All right guys. Quick break, we'll be right back. We've got more good news. Stay with us folks. You're listening to WallBuilders. Have you noticed the vacuum of leadership in America? We're looking around for leaders of principle to step up, and too often no one is there. God is raising up a generation of young leaders with a passion for impacting the world around them. They're crying out for the mentorship and leadership training they need. Patriot Academy was created to meet that need. Patriot Academy graduates now serve in state capitals around America, in the halls of Congress, in business, in the film industry, in the pulpit, in every area of the culture. They're leading effectively and impacting the world around them. Patriot Academy is now expanding across the nation, and now is your chance to experience this life-changing week that trains champions to change the world. Visit www.patriotacademy.com for dates and locations. Our core program is still for young leaders 16 to 25 years old, but we also now have a citizen track for adults. So visit the website today to learn more. Help us fill the void of leadership in America. Join us in training champions to change the world at www.patriotacademy.com. Welcome back to WallBuilders. It's Good News. Friday. Let's dive right back in David. Where are we headed, man?
David Barton
I'm just still pondering what Tim was saying in that story. How far do you think we are, I mean, if factual science gets in trouble? How close are we to getting fired for saying 2 plus 2 equals 4? Yeah, that's no less science than what he reported.
Rick Green
How dare you say there's only one answer to that question?
David Barton
It’s subjective! It's what I want it to be. If I think 2 plus 2 equals 6 and 2 thirds, who are you to say that? I don't know when do you stop this stuff. At some point truth has to win, and if truth doesn't win, then anybody's truth can be the standard. And if anybody's truth can be the standard, you got 330 million standards in the nation. Try running a nation with 330 million different standards. That'll never work. But back to the good news. This comes from the nearby county of Oklahoma, what we call North Texas around here.
Rick Green
That's right.
David Barton
Yeah, our Oklahoma friends. We will hear from them, for sure, but the superintendent of education up there is a really cool guy, Ryan Walters. He's now running for governor in Oklahoma, but Ryan is superintendent of education and as such, he's really made some things clear in Oklahoma, and particularly since the Supreme Court. Tim was mentioning Kelly Shackleford. Kelly has been involved in the last couple of sessions, the last couple of cycles of the court, and I think they have four Supreme Court wins in the last two sessions of the court, two cycles of the court, and so they're winning a lot of cases. And one set of areas where they're winning is restoring religious liberty into the public arena, into public schools, and so public schools now really are again, once again, wide open for reintroducing religious expression, and Ryan's aware of this. He's got all the support, all the attorneys he needs, et cetera, but he's really bold about it. Even though this can be done, a lot of communities are not bold about it because they don't want to have to stand up and take the fire that comes at them if that charge started to say hey, let's put the 10 Commandments back up in school. Hey, let's have prayer football games, let's have prayer graduations. All these things are now legal again, constitutionally and legally, so you can do that. Well, he's not ashamed to do this. And so he made it really clear at Oklahoma schools that three things are going to happen at Oklahoma schools. Number one we're going to he explained, we're going to bad diversity, equity and inclusion programs DEI. He said we're not going to do DEI anywhere in the state of Oklahoma. The superintendent of public instruction, he is and that's out. And what that means is you're not going to have sexually inappropriate materials in the libraries, you're not going to have drag queen shows. All of that is out the door. That's all DEI. We're not doing that, he said. The second thing is we're going to make sure that we focus on the basics. We're focusing on the basics in education, not all these add-ons like DEI. And third thing he said is we're going to welcome God back into our public school classrooms. We're going to create an environment where prayer and Bible reading are permitted in our schools. And he said it very broadly we're not going to let atheists bully our small towns and communities. So he's made it very clear and he's bringing the power of the state to defend the bullying that goes on. And so when an atheist says, hey, you can't post in God we trust on the wall of the classroom. He's not going to let that community be bullied. He's actually bringing to bear the resources of Oklahoma with all the legal resources they have to defend those schools, to protect those schools and to drive back the bullies that are wanting to shut down constitutional rights. So that kind of courage and leadership in Oklahoma needs to be rewarded. Think how fun that would be if he was the governor with that kind of backbone doing that for the whole state, standing up for what's right. That would be really refreshing. But Ron Walters is a really good guy doing the job of the school system in Oklahoma.
Rick Green
I think our listeners are in shock, David. We don't usually say good news Friday and public schools at the same time.
David Barton
So I thought about that, right? When I said that, how long has it been since we used public schools in there? But I was also thinking what Ryan is doing is further than some Christian schools go, and I mean that literally. We have some Christian universities that won't go as far as what Ryan is going with the public schools. In Oklahoma there's a lot of Christian universities that are real secular. Tim talked earlier about how many people lose their faith at college. The stats I had seen and this has been a few years back, but the stats I had seen was that if you're a person of faith, if you've been raised as a Christian in a Christian home, and you go to a secular university, between 81 and 88% of those kids will deny their faith by the time they leave the school. But if you go to a Christian university, 50% of Christian kids deny their faith at Christian universities. Now how is that possible? Because those Christian university professors got trained at Harvard and Princeton and all these other crazy places and come back and teach at a Christian university, but they teach the same secular stuff they were taught. So it is really fascinating and, Rick, like you, when I closed out that piece on Ron Walters, I thought, yeah, that's a public school doing Christian education kind of stuff, and it's not Christian education per se. It's just that they're open for that to be in there. You don't have to extinguish Christianity. It's not they are promoting Christianity, but they're not going to punish it. And that's such a different position from where we've been for the last 45 years.
Rick Green
Yeah amen. All right, Tim, you're bringing us home. Man. What's our final piece of good news today?
Tim Barton
All right, well, guys this one is going to Notre Dame, but actually to a judicial aspect. This article says Judge dismisses Notre Dame professors. Lawsuit against pro-life students who exposed her abortion advocacy. So the short of it is there was a paper on campus Notre Dame it is the Irish Rover and a Notre Dame, as listeners might imagine, is a religious university largely speaking, probably maybe more so than some other division, actually way more so than most other division one universities, but maybe more so than TCU, stands for Texas Christian University, but there's not a lot of Christian there. Baylor University is a Baptist university and they're maybe a little more Christian in what they do. Generally speaking, you think of Notre Dame as being a lot more oriented in faith. There are Catholic university and all that's giving some context because before Roe vs Wade, this happened, this started back in 2022. The Irish Rover did an article exposing this professor for her position and the professor is a sociology professor, Tamara Kay, and they were exposing what Kay had already posted, what Kay was doing on campus and it's a little bit like for those that know, there's a social media individual it goes by the title Libs of TikTok and she came to know to variety on TikTok. All she would do is go to different people's individual TikToks and they were posting videos where they're promoting wokeism and this crazy ideas they're using in schools, and she would just take those clips and she'd put them up on her page and say, hey, just so you know, here's what this teacher said in this school. As they're a second grade teacher, this teacher's a fourth grade teacher. Here's what they said. It literally is taking things they were already posting on their own social media and it was just putting it in one place, so kind of making it a very easy one stop shop to see where a lot of the crazy was out there. And all that to say Is this professor was posting these things online. This professor was writing these things. This professor was publicly doing these things. So the Irish Rover, all they did was collect some of what this professor was doing and say, hey, this professor is doing these things and clearly this is pro-abortion stuff. It's not good. And so this professor brought a lawsuit against the paper and the judge dismissed the case under Indiana's anti-slap laws, which aims to prevent frivolous lawsuits, and there are so many times you have attorneys that are looking for an easy way to make money and there were becoming so many frivolous lawsuits. This happens in a lot of states. Still, unfortunately, not all states have passed really good laws for this. Where we are, in Texas, there's much better laws than in some other states. But the idea is you can't bring up a frivolous lawsuit just to try to shame somebody you don't like, try to punish somebody, try to make money off of somebody, use it almost like a bribery scheme. You can't do those kinds of things. And so the judge dismissed this, saying that's all you're doing. But in the ruling this is the part I appreciate about the article the court ruling affirmed that Kay cannot voluntarily put herself into the national abortion issue, either on the campus of Notre Dame or in the broader national forum, by making multiple strong statements in favor of abortion rights and access to abortion and then expect that it will not become news worthy at Notre Dame and elsewhere. So the judge tells her hey, if you're doing all this stuff all over the place and a student happens to find out and they tell somebody else, you can't be mad at the students for sharing what you were publicly doing anyway. This is really good news. It does seem like a very common sense position from a judge. So this is great news for the paper at Notre Dame, for the students at Notre Dame, the student who wrote this article, all around good news.
Rick Green
All right, folks, that's it for the good news today. Then now you gotta listen next week to get more good news. Next Friday we'll have some more good news stories for you. Be sure and visit wallbuilders.com today. Get your copy of the American story building the Republic. This is installment number two, so this is the second book in the American story series just out this week. So get on the website today and get it. That one is going to sell out, I can promise you that. So check that out today at wallbuilders.com.. It's called the American Story Building the Republic. Appreciate you listening. Today. You've been listening to The WallBuilders Show.