Rick:

Welcome to the intersection of faith and the culture. You found yourself at WallBuilders where we’re talking about the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective. And on Fridays. It’s Good News Friday, we’re going to talk about a lot of good things that are happening out there in the culture, mostly things you probably have not heard anywhere else.

I’m Rick Green, America’s constitution coach. Here with David Barton, he’s America’s premier historian, and our founder here at WallBuilders, Tim Barton, national speaker and pastor and president of WallBuilders. So David and Tim Barton have lots of good news for us to share. And David gets the first piece of good news. David.

David:

I have got a note here from Ben in Michigan. Turns out he is definitely after my own heart. He says it’s already November, when will we hear Christmas music on WallBuilders live? Here it is, Ben. And by the way, we started it yesterday. Man, I needed this note about two months ago. I needed this back somewhere in August or September. Thank you, Ben, exactly what we needed. This is a good way to start Good News Friday.

Rick:

David, this is not near as fun because now we’re like, we’re actually into everybody’s doing Christmas music now. So instead of it being months early, where we can harass you for your love of Christmas music, we’re actually doing it when everybody else is doing it. So we’re way behind, we’re going to have to do better next year.

David:

Okay, I’m going to drag you guys in the right direction next year. With all the heel marks that will be in the carpet, I’m going to get you into Christmas about March and April…

Rick:

About January, you’re going to keep it going after Christmas.

David:

Exactly. Listen, it’s a new year. You start with Christmas, bro. I mean, hey, we’ll do the Hispanic thing of Christmas on January 6th, and that would work. We’ll keep that going in the Spanish world. So, I can find all sorts of ways to do Christmas this year.

Rick:

I shouldn’t have tempted him, Tim. I should have kept my mouth shut and just…

David:

No, it’s not temptation, it’s a challenge, bro. It’s more than temptation.

Rick:

So good news is Christmas music. What else do you have for good news?

David:

Well, I’ve got a piece of good news here that I wondered when it was going to happen. I believed it would happen, we kind of talked about this. But it relates to Disney. The Disney CEO abruptly resigns, and the previous CEO is back. What we’ve seen is they have gotten super woke, super LGBTQ+, they’ve been just out front with it. And as a result, they’ve been down in a lot of ways. The stock is down 40% this year, and their streaming business has lost $1.5 billion. People voted with their pocketbooks and with their feet and other things and said we’re not going where Disney is.

Tim:

Now I also would caution all parents out there, this doesn’t mean you should go back to Disney right away. And I mean, this original CEO, he was there for 15 years, the new guy came in, I don’t know earlier this year, he was not there very long. He was just much more open about their wokeness. But the original CEO, very woke still, he was just a little more strategic or subtle with some of the wokeness.

To me, it’s great that Disney is suffering after some of the craziness they did coming out right saying that 50% of their future stars or shows whatever it was, we’re going to be the LGBTQIA+ whatever else or a minority, where it’s obviously we have no problem saying, hey, minorities. But even then, well, find a good actor, actress. I don’t care who it is, if it’s Dwayne, The Rock Johnson, if it’s Daniel Craig, I mean, just give me somebody that I can enjoy and be entertained watching. But when you are saying we’re going to meet a certain quota, and especially when your quota is something that is counter-cultural to a moral traditional value, that’s a major problem.

David:

So the CEO they’re bringing back in is the guy who was there before the current CEO, and his name is Bob Iger, and he’s been there 50 years, overall Disney 15 years as CEO. And I really think that he’s going to have seen the handwriting on the wall, and he’s going to be a lot slower to move back into that stuff. I kind of think this is kind of like the Eisner moment they had 20 years ago in Disney when Disney really started to go woke, then people responded, and they got rid of Eisner. And they went back and became much more conservative for several years it looked like they’re really good, now they’ve gone off again.

So I’m really curious as to whether Iger is going to come back and try to moderate this and come back to reasonableness or whether he’s just going to do a slow crawl on this thing in the wrong direction. But Tim, as you said, don’t assume that it’s all fixed and solved when we go back and support Disney, got to wait and see. But the good news is they have recognised in the pocket book that the American people are not where they are and don’t want to go where they are. And I think that’s great news. Not that the Disney guy got replaced, but the fact the American people don’t want to go where Disney is going and they made that really clear with their pocketbooks and with their feet not showing up at stuff. I think that’s just really a good news healthy for America. And hopefully, it’s good news for entertainment if Disney gets back to some traditional kinds of entertainment that are family-friendly and sense of traditional family friendly.

Rick:

Yeah. And Tim, before I toss it over to you for the next piece of good news, I don’t know, guys, I struggle with this when I’ve had good friends, Biblically sound friends say, hey, Rick, you know, we need to redeem these kinds of areas and not run from them. And I’m like, man, I’m just done with Disney, they just went so far, so ridiculous and undermine so many things, that even if they make the changes, I don’t want to go back. You guys think, is that bad strategically? Should I be looking for ways to influence them? I don’t know, I just feel like it’s time to create new institutions in some of those ways, some of those areas.

David:

Well, one thing you know biblically, is you can’t redeem those who don’t want to be redeemed. If they have no interest in being redeemed, you can’t redeem them, you got to influence them. And one way to influence them, the one language that they hear more than any other is not their emails, is not what comes across, it’s what you do with your money. And that’s the best way to influence them. And so I think we should influence them too. And I think we did. I think people influence them with what they did. But you cannot redeem people who don’t want to be redeemed. It’s got to be their choice.

Tim:

It’s also different if we’re saying, hey, we want to redeem media as a whole, or we’re going to turn off media as a whole, no, you definitely can redeem things in a culture. This is where we’ve seen Prager University doing series for kids, it’s where we’ve seen Daily Wire committing $100+ million plus to new entertainment for young people. They are doing things to redeem entertainment for the next generation.

If you’re going to redeem Disney, then what you have to have is 10s of 1000s, probably, of Christians who are now working for Disney, whether it be with Pixar or Marvel, to have work with all these different franchises to be able to turn those around. And so yeah, there can be a long term goal to redeem those. But this is also going back to where sometimes people would argue, parents would argue, hey, we want to send our kids to public schools to be missionaries.

Well, if you want to, as an adult, go be a teacher to be a missionary in public school, man, good for you. But to think you’re going to send your child who’s 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, whatever they are, to go be a missionary when they don’t have the training, experience, expertise, what’s going to happen is much more likely they get corrupted than it is they turn that thing around. And so certainly, I believe in redemption. But at this point, I think we can redeem things in media with a different option and alternative media, with what The Chosen is doing, which guys, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about The Chosen. And the fact that even, I think the first and second episode of season three, which it’s not in my good news sack today, but it will be next week, but their first or second episode of season three, was outperforming nearly every single Hollywood movie in the theater. That is redeeming things and entertainment on some level. And that would be my push. I think definitely you can redeem but it doesn’t mean that we should keep our subscription to Disney while they are still doing bad things.

Rick:

Well, and I have to admit, you know what, I’ve had several events in Orlando last year or this year, I mean, and I see families and these parents taking their kids to Disney and I can’t help but think you’re a fool. What are you doing? You’re handing your kids to the wolves. You’re letting their hearts and minds be influenced by all this propaganda and all this sexual revolution stuff. And you know, so it’s just seems to me like it’s one of those times where it truly deserves a boycott and deserves an absolute, we’re not giving them another penny because it’s been so evil the things that they’ve done and even said that they wanted to do.

So I think you’re right though, David, Jury’s out, on Iger and whether or not he’s going to moderate them and bring them back. But I know for me and my house, no more money for Disney.

David:

Well, you know, I think the parents forget that God gave children, parents: He didn’t just bring children in the world and say, now grow up, you’re on your own. He gave them parents because they’re supposed to watch over nurture and care, that we’re told in the scripture you bring your children are up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. And hey, my kids need to be exposed this, I’m going to take them to Disneyland. Yeah, that’s a lot of fun. But you’re also exposing them to a lot of harm that you’re not they’re pointed out, unless you’re going through and saying, see that character. Don’t be like that character. If you’re going there for the fun, go to Six Flags or something.

Rick:

Right. Well, and I’ll even disagree with you there. I remember taking my kids to Disney, it’s not fun. You’re tired. You eat a bunch of junk. You walk around forever. You stand in line. It’s actually not even that fun whenever you’re corralling for kids. I’m just saying.

David:

But if you think you’re going to take your kids in there, and because you’re their parents, they’re not going to get contaminated with stuff, you’re crazy. You’re taking them in, and those characters they see and so many of those characters that are LGBTQI+, they’re there and they’re doing stuff and the kids are saying, oh, this is a lot of fun. What kind of character is that? And so they receive and accept a lot of stuff just because you’re not there saying that’s bad, don’t do that. God gave children to parents so that parents would raise the children with the right values and right viewpoint. And you don’t get that when you’re exposing them to stuff and not correcting as you go along.

Rick:

Yeah. And it’s not a small world after all anyway. Okay, let’s go to some more. Tim, you got a good news to give us before we go to break?

Tim:

I do. And this is going to be a little shorter as we’re coming up to a break. This is also connected and in that it deals with protecting children. So this year at our Legislators Conference, which we already will probably this winter, start airing some of those programmes, man, such great speakers, great content, really significant stuff for the legislators. It was the largest one, we’ve had to date, more than 200 legislators from around the nation from 34 different states, great content. But we had several sessions, dealing with things that could protect children and the rising generations.

And certainly, in the midst of that some of the transgender issue did come up because things right now that are called “gender affirming care” include things like doing surgical cuttings on children, and like literally, children, kids who aren’t even in double digits yet that can have their bodies surgically altered to change and remove part of their anatomy.

With that being said, the great news here is in Texas, there are already several state reps who have already filed legislation getting ready for the upcoming session, they’ve already introduced measures to deal with some of this. So one of them is a bill that is seeking to ban gender affirming health care. Again, gender affirming health care means that we’re going to go in and surgically alter the child for what they feel like being right now, which every parent knows how crazy that is. I have a three-year-old and earlier this week, she told me she was a dinosaur. I’m not going to surgically alter her to be a dinosaur. That’s ridiculous, right. Everything about this is crazy.

Nonetheless, with that being said, this is a piece of legislation dealing with that. There’s another one that deals with Rep Jerry Patterson introduced that measure to classify any business hosting a drag performance as a sexually-oriented business, which is great, because there are so many places now that are moving towards some of these drag shows that are bringing children to watch. And really what you’re talking about is you are talking about a transvestite stripper, that is what you are talking about because that’s what a drag show is. It’s people dressing, drag that are stripping doing this sexual things.

And so, in this bill would say anybody that’s not over 18-years-old cannot go, they can’t be part of this. They would be and to violate this would be a class a misdemeanour, it could be time in the county jail. It could be up to $4,000 fine. Rep. Cole Hefner, one of our friends, that we all know, filed legislation classifying gender affirming hormone therapy for transgender children as a form of criminal child abuse.

Because one of the things that it was arguable, well, if kids take these pills, it’s reversible, and they can change later. But the same pills they’re giving are what they use in many prison systems to medically castrate sex offenders. So this is not reversible the way it’s being promoted. Anyway, I don’t need to go too far down this. The great news is there’s already several pieces of legislation being filed in Texas alone right now dealing with this. But after our conference, legislators from 34 states, we dealt with these issues in some pretty significant detail. We have a lot of hope and confidence that stuff just like this is gonna be filed all over the nation this next year.

This is really good news, guys, that we’re doing things to protect kids, especially the vulnerable kids, to keep them safe, to not let doctors go in and do evil that’s going to do permanent physical damage to these kids. So this is from Texas. But I expect in the coming months to have many more Good News Friday articles covering where this has been introduced and other states around the nation.

Rick:

Well, that’s very good news. And even let’s not gloss over as we go to break here, just the good news that so many reps and senators from across the nation came together for a ProFamily Legislators Conference that they came together to exchange these kinds of ideas like you’re talking about nd to hear from all of these speakers. I mean, that in and of itself is good news, because sometimes people think they’re no good elected officials, all of them are horrible. And in fact, there’s actually a lot of good men and women that God has raised up to serve in public office. Quick break, we’ll be right back with more good news. You’re listening to WallBuilders.

THE AMERICAN STORY

Hey, guys, we want to let you know about a new resource we have at WallBuilders called The American Story. For so many years, people have asked us to do a history book to help tell more of the story that’s just not known or not told today.

And we would say very providentially in the midst of all of the new attacks coming out against America, whether it be from things like the 1619 project that say America is evil, and everything in America was built off slavery, which is certainly not true or things, like even the Black Lives Matter movement, the organization itself, not out the statement Black Lives Matter, but the organization that says we’re against everything that America was built on, and this is part of the Marxist ideology. There’s so many things attacking America.

Well, is America worth defending? What is the true story of America? We actually have written and told that story starting with Christopher Columbus, going roughly through Abraham Lincoln, we tell the story of America not as the story of a perfect nation of a perfect people. But the story of how God used these imperfect people and did great things through this nation. It’s a story you want to check out, wallbuilders.com, The American Story.

Rick:

We’re back here on WallBuilders. It’s Good News Friday and the day after Thanksgiving. So we get to be thankful yesterday, but we should be thankful every day. And today, we’re giving you a lot more to be thankful for that you even knew you had to be thankful for. Let’s dive into some more good news. David Barton’s got the next piece of good news.

David:

Next one deals with big tech. And the way that a lot of us have seen for a few years that they’re just flat censoring viewpoints that don’t like, they’re just putting people in ‘Facebook jail’ or deplatforming or whatever the message they don’t like. And we saw report several months ago where that it appears that now the Biden White House was directly collaborating with them on what messages they wanted out there and didn’t want out there, whether it was COVID, or anything else. And that’s a real problem, because the federal government is to uphold the Constitution, which includes free speech. And free speech is not the popular speech, it’s just speech is not popular, that’s what you particularly need to uphold.

Everybody’s going to let you speak about things that everybody agrees with. You need the protection to speak about things that everybody doesn’t agree with and that’s the dissenting viewpoint. And that’s where we’re told in Proverbs 18:17, one side always sounds good until you hear the other side. Well, if you take the other side away, then you become lockstep and now you’re no longer a free nation, you don’t have that ability to think and debate.

So this came out a few months ago. And what happened was a couple of attorney generals, you have the Attorney General of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, and the Attorney General at that time of Missouri, Eric Schmidt, and I think Eric has now been elected as US senator from Missouri, but these two Attorney General said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, if the White House is involved with that, that’s a federal violation. So they took this to federal court, and in federal court, the judge has been allowing this thing to move forward saying, hey, if there’s collaboration with the federal government silencing speech, silencing viewpoints, that’s a constitutional violation. So this thing keeps moving along slowly.

And by the way, this is like a lot of the COVID stuff. A lot of the best COVID lawsuits happened after COVID was no longer really an issue. You know, a lot of the best decisions came down after it was all over with. We wish those decisions would have been two and a half, three years ago, they weren’t. And that’s the same thing we’re finding here. We’ve been yelling about tech, and they need to take the exemption away from Section 230 out of the federal code, that these guys have their bulletin board shouldn’t be able to censor speech. And we’ve been talking about that for years, but now it’s starting to happen.

And so the most recent development in this as Jen Psaki, who was the press secretary for Biden, who is now over at MSNBC, she has now been subpoenaed to come give information on it because she was working with the White House. And she’s had some statements where she’s indicated that she was working with big tech to stop certain viewpoints. And so now this federal judge is letting all this stuff go forward. And what he’s doing is pulling in a lot of big name, high profile administration people. And of course, they’re all yelling for exemptions, and hey, I can’t do this. This is an undue burden, and it’s a hardship. And, you know, I’m on MSNBC, and I’m having to prepare for all my problems, and I can’t take days out to do depositions, etc.

And so she’s been fighting this and the judge said, well, it doesn’t matter, you’re going to do it anyway. He already said the beginning of this case that, look, I know this is going to burden public officials. But federal rules say that people fighting subpoenas have to prove an undue burden. He said, nobody wants to show up for deposition, it burdens anybody who’s got a deposition. But it has to be a really, really, really severe burden before I’m going to let you off. And so the good news is this thing is going forward, it looks like it’s getting traction, we don’t know what the results will be or how they come down on this.

But simply the fact that they’re looking into this, simply the fact that you’ve got federal judges moving this thing along, it may take a year or two years before we see anything. And if we get a good decision, it’s going to be appealed, and it’s going to work its way up to the courts, etc. So, it’s still may be a long time coming. But the fact is we now have judges that are at least saying, hey, this is not a good deal when the government starts limiting free speech and for that reason, we’re going to let this trial go forward. And if there’s evidence and there’s going to be problems. That’s really good news that the thing is starting to move.

Rick:

It’s good news, David. And just to emphasize, I mean, wills just to turn slow all that good stuff. I mean, it’s still important to do it, even if it comes after the fact to prevent it from happening again. And that’s the long term view these guys had and so glad that suit is going forward and so glad will ultimately, Lord willing, get to the bottom of that. Alright, Tim’s next with good news.

Tim:

Alright, guys, this one is dealing with the southern border. And everybody paying attention, you might have recognised that…

David:

I didn’t know we had a southern border. I thought we were borderless now.

Tim:

You know, it is questionable at this point. No, no, we have one, because the Biden administration told us that it’s secure. So we definitely have one. Now, if by secure, you mean, we have encountered more than 5 million people, and those are the ones who are encountered, 5 million people over the last two years that have primarily been turned loose into the US, if that’s what we mean by secure, well, then it’s a real secure. That’s the 5 million who have been encountered, not even getting to those who have gotten away. So here’s the good news.

The article headline says “Texas governor declares invasion at border, invokes constitutional powers in historic action.” Now, this is something that every governor should be doing on some level. Because if you have more than 5 million people that we can identify, again, estimates are that the number could be 2-3 times higher than that, that are actually in the nation, something’s actually over 20 million, which is just crazy. However, it’s certainly more than 5 million. That’s just 5 million there have been interactions with. If that’s who’s coming across the southern border, we know they’re in, well, I was just going to say all 50 states, I don’t know for sure what Hawaii and Alaska looks like.

But in the connected 48, they are in all 48 states connected down here. That means every governor is going to have this problem to deal with. And so every governor should be invoking some kind of declaration to be able to enforce the laws the federal government is refusing to enforce right now. So this is great that finally Governor Abbott is doing something he should have done literally a year and a half ago. It’s taken him a while to get there. And guys, we talked about even during COVID, as Texans, there were many things Governor Abbott did that we were not fans of. But when he finally did the right thing, we said, hey, no, it’s great, let’s give credit where credit’s due.

This is one of those that we could argue it should have happened a long time ago. And there probably should be more than just what has happened at this point or just what’s being announced. But this is good news that at least now there’s a public acknowledgement of the invasion at the border, which also then does put him in a place where he does have constitutional powers if he so chooses to use them.

Now, Rick, I know, we’ve talked about this some you have been pretty vocal about the fact that just because he’s declared it, the fact he’s now choosing not to use the powers he has, then why did you declare this an invasion if you’re not going to use the power you have? That’s crazy. So maybe there’s a little more to this story. Obviously, Rick, but you have acknowledged still, you think it’s still good news he’s declaring this, let’s give credit where credit’s due. But there’s a little more to that story.

Rick:

Well, I think it is important to give credit where credit’s due. And just the fact that he’s acknowledging the constitutional authority for a governor to invoke Article 1, Section 10, I mean, that’s a big deal I think we should very much focusing on. I didn’t even realise, guys, he had done this in July. So his first time to invoke it was with one of his executive orders in July, he mentioned that clause, and then the clause in the Texas Constitution that’s very similar. And so that’s just good. I mean, now it’s down to nuance; right now, it’s okay. Now that you acknowledge you have the power to declare an invasion has happened, and then repel that invasion, how do you strategically and tactically do that?

Whereas up until just a couple of months ago, July, he was not even willing to acknowledge that constitutional authority. And part of that because he comes out of the, you know, he was a district judge, and he was a Texas Supreme Court judge. And when you come out of that world, if the Supreme Court says something, for most people in that world, that’s the end of it. And so the US v. Arizona case from years ago, that Scalia dissented and said, no, states do have the right to deal with these issues. And that’s really an immigration case. It’s actually a little bit different in terms of legal footing than this an invasion case.

In fact, Ken Cuccinelli is really good on this, former Attorney General, and he was Trump’s main guy on dealing with a lot of this stuff. And so he says that the strategy and tactics of this needs to be that now that the governor has done this, we literally have to stop them from entering the country, and push them back over to the border. And when Governor Abbott actually does that, that’s when we will finally be taking the big steps. But right now he’s just taking them and handing them over to the border patrol, which means they’re just coming into the US.

And so it’s not really changing anything. His own staff says it doesn’t really change anything, but at least by acknowledging it, he can hopefully take the next step. If he just does it, whether it’s for good reasons or bad reasons, if he’s running for president or whatever, I’m just glad to see that we’re moving in the right direction on this thing. Okay, guys, we got time for one more. David.

David:

Quick one, on election night, there were two initiatives that we washed up in Oregon. One is the people of Oregon gave themselves healthcare is a fundamental right. So the state of Oregon is now going to be paying for health care apparently for everybody. The second one was a passionate issue, they said you can’t have a gun magazine with over 10 rounds in it. Well, that passed too. But guess what, the sheriffs of Oregon said, well, good for you, but we’re not enforcing that. We’re not going to go against the Second Amendment.

So great news, the sheriffs are once again standing up to this gun control stuff, and this is in Oregon of all places, but good wherever it happens.

Tim:

And it’s one thing to say that we will not sell large capacity magazines going forward and arguably a 12 rounds magazine is not large capacity, a 15 rounds is not large capacity. But it’s one thing to say we’re not going to sell those going forward. But the idea that that’s illegal to carry those, no police officer or sheriff in their right mind is going up to someone said, hey, take your gun out real quick, let me see the mag real quick. Like nothing about that make sense. So whether the sheriffs are thinking really constitutionally sound, which they might be or whether they’re just thinking practically logically, either way, it’s a great move for the sheriffs to say, yeah, that’s not right, we’re not doing it.

Rick:

Alright, folks, that’s all the time we have for good news today. There’s more on our website. Be sure and visit wallbuilderslive.com today. Thanks so much for listening to WallBuilders.