Rick Green
Welcome to the Intersection of Faith and Culture. It's the WallBuilders Show. I'm Rick Green here with David and Tim Barton, and it's Good News Friday, so we're going to be jumping into that good news. But be sure and visit our websites today wallbuilders.show for the radio program, and then wallbuilders.com to get all kinds of great materials for yourself and your family, and also a great place to make a one-time or monthly contribution. And then I also want to encourage you to check out today patriotacademy.com and click on the constitutional defense course.
And if you want to join us, July 4th, Independence Day, we're going to have a great class at the new Patriot Academy Fredericksburg campus and it's just going to be a blast. We're going to have fireworks that night, but we'll do the handgun class during the day and then we'll be studying the Constitution together and David and Tim Barton will be there with us, so it's going to be a fun time. If you're a WallBuilders listener, it'd be a great time for you to come hang out with us for the weekend. Go to patriotacademy.com today to find out more. All right, fellas, I'm stuck on yesterday's program. If you have a piece of Oregon good news in your stack, David, you should pull it out and it'll make me sound like I really knew what I was talking about, rather than just rambling. Look, he's trying to find one. Everybody, you can't see him.
David Barton
Six, degrees of separation. I can get you to Oregon, bro, I can connect you to Oregon All right, let's do it.
So what I've got is optimism on the horizon. It's not actually yet a piece of good news, but it's the first step to what I hope becomes great, great great news. It is the underpinnings of a lawsuit that has been filed and it's on one of the things I think we've abused more than anything else in America, and that's private property rights. I'm a huge fan of the Fourth Amendment. I love the James Otis stuff that happened back in 1761, the writs of assistance and how he argued that, listen, the government does not come into your house, your person, your property, your effects, all of that. You can't do it without probable cause and without a sworn affidavit and without explicitly listing what you're looking for. And it all goes back to a Supreme Court case in 1924.
And in 1924, the Supreme Court came up with what they call the open fields doctrine, and I'd never heard of this, but I knew it was out there and it bothers me. It allows any government agent to walk onto your property at any point in time, even if you have no trespassing, as long as they don't come into your house. So what they call the curtilage. The court said your curtilage, which means your barn, your house, your garage and a few feet around it, but if you have a hundred acres, they can go through 99.7 acres of your place and you can't stop them. And so, whether it be wildlife, wildlife game commission, whether it be ATF, anybody else, 96% of land in America is not protected under the fourth amendment because of that decision by the court in 1924. Now imagine that 96% of property in America the government can go on to anytime they want to, they can check what they want to. They don't have to have a search warrant. It is just not a good deal at all. And one of these guys who's in the lawsuit, he had 100 acres, I think, and he was at home and he was playing basketball with his boys and he looked up and saw camouflaged bodies moving in the forest and what's that? And well, it turned out to be game wardens checking on stuff, coming through, checking. They have no authority, no right to do that, except the 1924 decision.
And so I think that this lawsuit they filed to get back to the Fourth Amendment, because in 1924, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who's a big progressive back then, he said well, he said you know, under the Fourth Amendment what you have is you have a right to your person, your house, your papers and your effects. It doesn't say your land. Well, that's part of it, that's part of my effects, but they took such a narrow reading that it's only those four things. It's all the Fourth Amendment applies to and I tell you I am thrilled that this suit is being filed. I like the way they're going at it. I like the course in which they filed it. I think we have a really good chance of getting government agencies thrown off our properties unless they can come in with a legitimate constitutional search warrant. So I'm excited about this. We'll see. But it's being filed against wildlife departments and Fish and Game and others trying to get private property back in the hands of individual citizens, and I think that's great. I love it, absolutely love it.
Rick Green
You know, David, your family has dealt with these bureaucrats and some of the endangered species stuff on ranches and just the craziness of what they're able to do. And I had dinner with a rancher the other day and he was telling me and it goes all the way back, you know, 25 years when they were going Cheek Warbler and Cape Verdeo Spider or whatever it was. I can't even remember what they were, but anyway I learned so much about just how abusive these agencies are and what a lack of due process exists when they decide they want your land. And he was telling me about neighbors that they just essentially ran out ran out of town, I mean finally pushed them so hard that they sold to the government. And now the federal government owns like 40,000 acres outside of Austin as a result of all of that and you can't even go use it. It's like nobody gets to use it.
And you know that's a whole other thing with the land use. But when they're violating your property rights or even the cattle industry and the things they do from down at the border over the fever tick and their ability to just go right onto your property and then make you round up your cattle and spend time and money and days. It is bad, and so any attempt to curb that and get back to the idea of property rights and due process is really, really good. And before we move to the next piece of good news, did you say it's the suit has already been filed? Are they preparing the suit?
David Barton
No, the suit has been filed. It's filed in Louisiana in federal court, and so we'll be working its way up through, and good news is that's the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. It's over Louisiana. So I really like the path they've taken. I like the way they've gone at it, I like the guys they've chosen, because these guys have done nothing wrong. The government was accusing them of doing stuff wrong, went in a search and they were doing nothing wrong and so they are blameless. And they had all these what I would consider illegal searches, because the government couldn't find anything they were looking for and they didn't come with a warrant. So I think this is a great setup, a great case to start with,
Tim Barton
and I would throw the caveat based on all available information and evidence right.
David Barton
Good caveat. That's based on everything we know, based on what we've seen in the filings. We don't know these people individually. You're right, there could be something out there. That's the rest of the story that we don't know. But based on what we see, you're exactly right, Tim.
Tim Barton
And based on the fact that we have seen overreach of the federal government in so many ways like this. So if this is some scenarios like some that we are familiar with, where you have individuals just living their normal lives doing nothing wrong and government agents for arbitrary purposes come on abusing rights of individuals, private property rights, et cetera, so all that to say is it certainly looks like this could be the exact case that is needed to help overturn some really really bad precedent and something we've seen, guys, over the last several years. Is a Supreme Court willing to uphold a constitutional perspective, overturning really bad prior precedent, not the least of which would be a Roe vs. Wade decision or the Lemon v Kurtzman decision that produced a lemon test, would they overturn that? They've overturned several significant things that should be very readily evident to anybody who understands the Constitution and has studied history at all that the Supreme Court has made some very unconstitutional decisions over time, and so now to have a Supreme Court body, specifically at least four or five, six justices on whatever given day, that are going to stand for the original intent of the Constitution, it does seem like a really good time to bring this challenge, with the potential for a great outcome that could impact Americans in all 50 states in really positive ways.
Rick Green
Tim, I know you've got some good news. I just want to stay on this one more second, and that is to say, these things take time. When you wrote Original Intent, oh, 20 years, 25 years, how long has it been? When you first admit the separation and then it became original intent? It's been a couple of decades. Let's just say that, right. When you make the case in original intent for not bowing to stare decisis and just always saying, because a previous court said it, we have to follow it. But instead go back to actual Original Intent and actual constitutional principles, I mean that's a long time ago, right, and you've been out there teaching people, and some of the people that you had taught 20 years ago are now on these courts or they're the attorneys in the courtroom making the case. So it takes a generation sometimes to get to that point. And Clarence Thomas has been trying to accomplish what you talked about in original intent on the Supreme Court for years now, and only in the last two or three years has he been able to persuade enough of his colleagues to look past previous Supreme Court decisions and be willing to overrule them based on what the actual original intent is or the proper constitutional principle. So anyway, I just want to say it takes time for these things to happen for people at home that have thought about giving up, or they don't get the results they want in that first election. No kidding, David was writing about this stuff a generation ago and we are now seeing people accomplish those tasks, but it took that long to get there. So anyway, Tim, next piece of good news Go for it bro All right.
Tim Barton
Well, this is an article from the Epoch Times. The Epoch Times. It says COVID-19 vaccine litigation against Mayo Clinic revived by federal court, and the article highlights that there was a lawsuit that a judge threw out in 2023. There were five individuals that filed a lawsuit against the Mayo Clinic, which is a nonprofit up in Minnesota. It's a health facility, and these individuals the Mayo Clinic required people to get the COVID jab and these individuals, for religious reasons, said that we're not going to do that. Well, they had this lawsuit in 2023. It goes before Judge John Tunheim and I'm obviously saying that wrong, but that's the way it looks on paper and he said that the plaintiffs did not prove that they hold religious beliefs in opposition to the mandate or show the testing requirement conflicts with their beliefs. He said because all you've done is tell me that you disagree with it and you haven't really proven it to me reasons one of the chief reasons is because we're against abortion and we've heard that in these vaccines there was cells for aborted babies that were used in this and we would never want to put that in our body. The judge said well, have you got other vaccinations? And they said well, yes, they said well. The judge said well, then, that disvalidates your entire argument, because you've gotten vaccines before, you can have no religious convictions against this one. So he throws the case out, which just seems utterly ridiculous for lots and lots of reasons.
The good news is the Eighth Circuit they came back. This was appealed. The Eighth Circuit came back and they found that the judge's findings were erroneous. The words from this article and it goes through, highlighting what the Eighth Circuit determined and why this lower court judge was incorrect in the assessment, and not the least of which going through walls that are in place to protect employment from discrimination so right, a kind of equal opportunity commission kind of stuff. What's what's great about this is the eighth circuit. It was a unanimous decision from the three judge panel where all three judges said yeah, this is crazy, this. This judge arbitrarily decided that your religious convictions weren't your religious convictions and therefore decided you couldn't protest this.
So the good news is this case was now revived. So the case has not won yet, but at least for there to be a panel in the Eighth Circuit to recognize you can't have religious convictions against putting certain things in your body, that does exist. That's a real thing. People are going to really have those convictions, and now those five individuals are able to pick this case back up. All of them lost their jobs in the process and so part of this goes into the wrongful termination.
So something else that we can track, and hopefully we'll have some really great news at the end of their decision, when there will be a court recognizing that you can't terminate somebody for choosing not to put a foreign substance, that there is no long-term data of any kind of side effects and where, at this point, so much data has been hidden from individuals that are being forced and mandated to take something that again untested, unproven with any kind of long-term data. So, again, lots of reasons. People could or should be hesitant about the jab in general, but in this case, great that the Eighth Circuit picked this back up and is letting them continue their case. Overturning this Eighth Circuit, overturning what a lower court judge had tossed out saying, yeah, that judge was wrong, you have the standing to continue this case. That's good news.
Rick Green
Well, as we go to break, guys, Tim, I think we're going to have more and more good news on that front. With cases like that, even on the military front, I mean so many people that were harmed as a result of the overreactions and the just incalcitrant just like you're going to do it our way, no matter what, regardless of what the data shows. So many people were harmed in their lives because of that and not allowed to make decisions about their body and their health and all of those things. So this is one of many cases. But I'll be honest, guys, I never thought it would take this long, but here we are. We're finally starting to win some of these. I thought the whole thing would be over in a few months if we actually followed constitutional law, but here we are four years later and some of these people that were severely harmed by the actions of their superiors finally getting their day in court. So that's very good news. Quick break. We'll come back in just a moment, folks, with more good news. You're listening to the WallBuilder Show.
Break
Rick Green
Welcome back to the WallBuilder. Show Thanks for staying with us today. It's Good News Friday, and next up is David with our next piece of good news.
David Barton
Okay, guys, if I say that somebody or something has been Bud Lighted or Disneyed or targeted, what does that tell you? Let's see if I get the interpretation right here. What does that mean?
Tim Barton
Well, if you said Disneyed, I would think you were talking about somebody becoming transgender or queered, but if you said Bud Lighted, I would think they were being canceled.
So it depends on what you're saying
Rick Green
tells me they had a really dumb marketing team that did not know who their audience really was or just cared not who their audience was, only cared about their very radical leftist agenda and wanted to push it on them yeah, and then the market pushed back and said no,
David Barton
I was going the other way.
I was saying it's a case where the people are not as crazy as all the leaders thought they were. And the people said you guys, you guys are crazy and rejected them. It was the people canceling the crazies is kind of the way. I look at it.
And I actually have a story coming out of Portland, Oregon. You remember back with all the BLM movements, black Lives Matters and Portland. You know how long did Portland burn? How many days did that go on? It was crazy man.
Rick Green
It was a long time, man. They had their own city. Remember they cordoned off that whole area. Was that Seattle or Portland or both? I think they both had crazy stuff, which, by the way, I was looking for, that Oregon story at the beginning, David. You must have dug through on the break and found that.
David Barton
Oh yeah. I like this story because the DA there who refused to enforce all that just got tossed out in Portland by the voters and a new DA has come in and said I, there's a new sheriff in town, we're enforcing the law, we're not going to let this stuff go on and wait are you saying there was a DA that was too crazy for Portland? I, I thought there was no limit on, on Portland,
David Barton
and that's what I mean. This is a Disney moment, this is a Bud Light moment, this is a Target moment. The constituents, the customers are saying you guys, you don't understand who you're marketing to here. And just because people have been quiet for so long doesn't mean they didn't exist. And I think those guys were listening to echo chambers where they were talking to themselves and they were talking loudly each other, so they thought everybody else was talking because they were talking loud and it's just not working out that way.
Speaker 2: 17:33
So you know, we talked about San Francisco a couple of weeks ago, the initiatives they had there and the people in San Francisco saying, hey, we don't want, we want homeless people being drug tested before they get welfare we have. It's just going against all these liberal policies, even in the most liberal cities. And so here in Portland, of all places, they've elected a new district attorney who is tough on crime kind of guy. You know those woke guys at BLM were, hey, we don't want to punish criminals or crime, and that's just. People didn't go with that. We thought they did for a long time because that happened for so long in the cities. But now, with the cities, you're given a choice. Here it is. It's some years after that happened, but nonetheless the people said we don't want that guy. This is what he did in Portland. Let it burn. We don't want that, and I think that's absolutely phenomenal to see that even in blue areas, there's still a lot of common sense among the majority of the people there.
Rick Green
All right, Tim, you got our last piece. Well, no, we might get two in. Go for it, brother.
Tim Barton
Well, this one is surrounding Harrison Butker's speech only because we haven't covered it on Good News Friday. Hopefully people are already familiar with some of this. The backlash has been ridiculous. But the Chiefs kicker right Super Bowl champion kicker for the Chiefs, Harrison Butker, he gave a speech.
Rick Green
Goes viral for doing something good, not bad. Wait, an NFL player goes viral for doing something good, not bad.
Tim Barton
Oh, but the irony, right? The irony of it is the NFL comes out apologizing for him, not apologizing for the guys that are beating up their girlfriends, that are fathering children with untold numbers of women and abandoning them, not for committing crimes. So if you don't know Harrison Butker, he is a Catholic. He went, was the speaker at the graduation for a small Catholic university and he gave a speech, and in his speech it should not have been controversial, but he gave just a couple of lines that caused the internet to explode. Let me read you a couple of those. He's talking to the graduates and then he says I think it is to you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you. Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world. I can tell you that my beautiful wife, Isabel, would be the first to say her life truly started when she started living her vocation as a wife and as a mother. He goes on to speak, talk about his wife, ends up breaking down, crying, talking about how wonderful his wife is.
Well, the internet, the leftists, the woke mob loses their minds over this, because they said that he was saying that women's only role is to be a wife and a mother, and then they can't be professionals and et cetera, et cetera, which is not at all what he said. I mean, not even close to what he said. And he was speaking to a religious audience and he's not incorrect. I mean, this is a Christian espousing some pretty basic Christian views in many regards and not saying that women can't or shouldn't do things in the marketplace. He said you might be very successful in your careers, but I bet for a lot of you, right your top goal you want to be a wife and a mother. Yeah, that's a reality for most Christian girls growing up. It's a lot of their dreams and ambitions.
With, that being said, all kinds of backlash. It was enough that the NFL came out and the NFL issued an apology and the NFL senior vice president said Harrison Butker gave a speech in his personal capacity. His views are not those of the NFL as an organization. The NFL is steadfast in our commitment to inclusion, which only makes our league stronger, which is also super funny, because the idea of inclusion is saying no.
We believe that men and women are equal. And if they're super equal, I would like to know how many women are in the NFL right, which there actually were people suggesting that the Chiefs should fire as a gesture right of equality and goodwill. They should fire Super Bowl champion kicker Harrison Butker and hire a woman in his place, because, they said, we know women can do that same job just as well. The irony a lot to this, but here's the amazing part of the story. The amazing part of the story is in the midst of the blowback. The number one selling jersey for the next week in the NFL was Harrison Butker's jersey. Now, guys, I got to tell you. I wanted to be part of this statement as well. I bought a t-shirt from the Chiefs fan page because I wanted them to know that, yes, yeah voting with your dollars right this.
This guy's not crazy. What he said is not crazy. What he said represents the views and values of the majority, I would argue, of Americans still to this point and for, for so often, the woke mob has been louder, and because they're, people think they're the majority. The loudest is not always the majority, and in this case, the fact that so many people came out to support him have bought his jerseys, and I am not. I'm not usually a guy who wears somebody else's jersey or shirt, right, that's not what I do, but I'm going to tell you I will travel around and I will wear this shirt when I travel to the airport. I will be glad to have that conversation and let people know that what he said was not crazy. Traditional values.
So the good news in all this article goes into other details about other people that came out supporting him. Among those was Tavia Hunt, the wife of chief chairman and CEO Clark Hunt, uh, and her daughter, Gracie. There's a lot of people that have surrounded them. There were members of his own team that came out, and some I mean some members of the team. They were really kind of squished. You, though, like hey, I don't agree with all his views, but I think he's a good guy. Okay, I mean, you know they're trying to toe the line and make both sides happy, but the reality is that he got overwhelming support and in the midst of woke people trying to cancel him, in the midst of the NFL trying to appease two woke people.
It was great to see that a top selling jersey in the NFL during this whole blowback was Harrison Budker, the guy who said some fairly obvious things that if you're a Christian girl, we know that probably one of for many of you, one of your top goals would be a wife and a mother. That should not be controversial. That should be basic understanding. And again, he didn't say that you can't go and do great things. That for many of you, you'll be very successful in your careers, et cetera. It's not what people made it out to be, but I'm still guys. I'm still seeing videos on social media of leftists melting down over this. So it's great news that not everybody melted and that so many people have supported him I think there's two things that stand out about this story.
David Barton
I think it's even a bigger story than what it looks like. When's the last time a kicker had the number one jersey in the nfl?
that's right, a kicker you know maybe quarterback, maybe, you know, maybe some great defensive back, but a kicker kickers don't get that kind of coverage. So you got a kicker in the NFL and I I'm just shocked that the NFL had to say that, that, that that did not reflect their view. I thought everything every player said reflected view of the NFL. I can't believe they actually had to distance himself from this. I mean, every time I hear an NFL player talk I think he's talking on behalf of the NFL. How crazy is it that you have to say he's not representing us?
Tim Barton
Well, and the NFL doesn't come out right. When somebody's accused of beating up a girlfriend, when someone's accused of doing a crime drugs, DUI’s the NFL doesn't come out and say that doesn't represent and reflect our values. They never say that, except in this situation of a Christian saying something that should not be that controversial. It's basic kind of Christian thought in many ways. Nonetheless, still great news that you have a kicker leading in Jersey cells during the midst of all this blowback Really cool.
Rick Green
You mentioned, some of his teammates came out in support. There was some guy named Travis that was going to, but he was too hungover. I don't think he. I shouldn't say that that's so, so bad, but what a tale of two players. I've seen so many memes that show Taylor Swift's boyfriend just doing ridiculous, bad example stuff for fans, and then this kid just being a great example of a godly man and fans. And then this, this kid just being a great example of a godly man and, uh, for you know, for such a time as this, we need some of those. Uh, so we can do what William Wilberforce said and make being good fashionable again. So thank you to Harrison for doing that and thank you to Tim Barton for spending his big budget on the t-shirt. Did you notice? He said t-shirt. He didn't get the jersey, he got the t-shirt. So if it had been a basketball player, he'd have gotten the whole thing right, right like twenty dollars different to get the jersey.
Tim Barton
But I thought I will never wear a jersey. I might actually wear a t-shirt, right?
Rick Green
same, yeah, same. That's all right guys. Thanks for all the good news. We'll have more for you folks next week. Be sure to visit our radio site at wallbuilders.show. If you want to go into the archives and get some more of that good news right now, you can do that. Or go to wallbuilders.show. If you want to go into the archives and get some more of that good news right now, you can do that. Or go to wallbuilders.com. Make that one-timer monthly contribution and pick up some good materials to educate and equip and inspire your family. Thanks for listening to the WallBuilder Show.
