Rick Green: 0:11

This is the intersection of faith and the culture. It's WallBuilders Live taking on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective. All this week we're talking about Constitutional Defense of your Family and Freedom. This is a presentation that we did at our course on constitutional defense, which is both an intellectual and a physical course. In other words, you get the intellectual ammunition that you need to defend the Constitution, to know your constitutional rights and how to participate in the process. But you also get the physical training to defend your family with a handgun. It's the best handgun defense training on the planet. And it's just phenomenal. It's a great time of fellowship, we encourage you to join us, now at the Patriot Academy campus in Fredericksburg, Texas. Virtually every week, the rest of the year, we'll be teaching this course but the first one is April 23rd. That's the day after our ceremonial groundbreaking where John Rich and Congresswoman Lauren Boebert and others are going to join us. We would love for you to be there as well. Tim Barton, and I will both be there of course, and just gonna have a great time. So the groundbreaking is April 22nd. The course starts the next day, on April 23rd, you get signed up at PatriotAcademy.com. Let's jump right back in where we left off yesterday. This is Constitutional Defense of your Family and Freedom. If you missed the first three days, you can get those at our website right now, at WallBuildersLive.com . Alright folks Hang on one second. We got to take a quick break. We'll be right back and we'll jump right back into Constitutional Defense of your Family and Freedom. 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's your chance to experience this life changing week that trains champions to change the world visit 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 PatriotAcademy.com . Welcome back to WallBuilders live. Thanks for staying with us today. Let's jump right back in to Constitutional Defense of your Family and Freedom. James Kent's one of our two American founders of jurisprudence, he said “The municipal law of our country has likewise left with individuals the exercise of the natural right of self-defense. The right of self-defense is founded in the law of nature and is not and cannot be superseded by the law of society.” You guys getting the rhythm here? What are these guys saying? They’re saying this is an innate law of nature. God gave you this right, gave you this self-defense concept, and government should not take it away. Now, Joseph Story was one of our Supreme Court Justices early on that wrote most of the opinions during his tenure on the court, highly respected Justice. And he warns us, he says “The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered the Palladium of the liberties of a republic.” In other words, this is the foundation. Without this one, it’s the protector of all the other ones. Without it, you’ll lose the other ones. He said,“It offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers.” So see, this has nothing to do with hunting. This doesn’t even refer to that immediate self-defense against an individual attacking you. You hear how often they’re talking about protecting ourselves from what? Government, from a tyranny of a government. So it goes on to say it will enable the people to triumph over them. Here’s what’s happened. Okay. This is the danger we’re in. There is certainly no small danger that indifference, so Reagan was kind of addressing that a little bit earlier, when he said, you may not care about self-defense and training and guns and all those things like our family, so you might be indifferent to those things. But what happens? Joseph Story says that indifference may lead to disgust. So if you're not... you know, you haven’t studied these things, you haven’t trained, you may have never touched a gun before, never fired a gun before, you see all these school shootings, you think it’s got to be the gun's fault, it’s the gun. So indifferent leads to disgust, disgust to contempt, and then he says and thus gradually undermines all the protection intended by this clause of our national Bill of Rights. So he saying don’t let it start with that indifference. Now, I’m going to give you several Founding Fathers quotes here. Before I run through a bunch of these, let me just tell you, these are not something that Tim and I got together and made up. Alright? We go to these original documents. I mentioned Tim and I do the radio program. I didn’t tell you that sometimes we dig around in the library and find some really cool documents. Recently, we had some potential water damage, we had to move a bunch of stuff. And so Tim and I were down there we’re moving some old stuff behind the shelf, we found some stuff we didn’t even know that they had. And it’s pretty cool stuff. I mean, we haven’t released it publicly on the internet or on radio yet. But I wanted to share it with you tonight. So Tim, thank you for letting me have a copy. We actually found the original tweets of the Founding Fathers. Right there in the WallBuilders library! I don’t have all of them with me tonight, just use as few of them that were happening right when they were at the Continental Congress there in 1776. Thomas Jefferson is the first one. Tommy-J says hey, guys, working on a new draft of the Declaration, which unalienable rights do you want to include? #independence. John Adams responds, that Tommy-J, life, liberty and a Twitter app that doesn’t stink. Am I right?#independence. John Adams, by the way, who has pics in the last Continental Congress? I want to upload them to Facebook. You didn’t know Facebook was that old, did you? Paul Revere says, breaking: the British are coming. James Madison, hide your kids, hide your wife. British are coming! King George, you guys know I can see everything you’re tweeting, right? Thomas Jefferson settings, tweet privacy, protect my tweets. Okay, that’s from the folks at Mashable. It’s not actually from Tim. Sorry, Tim, I lied about you tonight. Don’t tell your dad. Alight. Let’s get back to the founders. So, George Mason, I mentioned earlier “Father of the Bill of Rights”, this is one of the very, very important Founding Fathers. He said, “40 years ago, when the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain, the British Parliament was advised to disarm the people, that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them, but that they should not do it openly, but to weaken them and let them sink gradually.” Sam Adams said,“The Constitution should never be construed to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceful citizens from keeping their own arms.” Patrick Henry, of course, we always hear give me liberty or give me death, he also said “The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able may have a gun.” Even George Washington himself “A free people ought to be armed.” James Madison “The advantage of being armed is an advantage which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation. In the several kingdoms of Europe, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.” John Adams, “Resistance to sudden violence for the preservation, not only of my person, my limbs, and my life but of my property is an indisputable right of nature”, back to those laws of nature,“which I never surrendered to the public by the compact of society, and which perhaps I could not surrender if I would. The maxims of the law and the precepts of Christianity are precisely coincident in relation to this subject.” Hamilton said something very similar. He said,“The Supreme Being gave existence demand, together with the means of preserving that existence. He invested man with an inviolable right to personal liberty and personal safety.” James Wilson, now this is the other book that I brought, ended up bringing tonight to share with you. And you could tell this is an old book. I can’t believe Tim, that you trusted me with this thing. I feel like this one is going to fall apart on stage, this is going to be caught on camera, and then I’m going to be in a lot of trouble. So I’m going to be really, really careful. But this is such a fantastic quote from James Wilson. So I let me set up James Wilson for a second. This is another name you may not know. But this guy signed both the Declaration and the Constitution, one of only six guys to do that. So we helped frame it and he signed both of them. He’s actually appointed by George Washington to serve on the United States Supreme Court. So he’s one of the original six on the United States Supreme Court. He gave us a very clear American explanation of the castle doctrine. He said “It is the great natural law of self-preservation that cannot be repealed or superseded or suspended by any human institution. The right of the citizens to bear arms in the defense of themselves shall not be questioned. Every man’s house is deemed by the law to be his castle. And the law while it invests him with the power, it joins on him the duty of the commanding officer. Every man's house is his castle, he ought to keep and defended at his peril, and if anyone be robbed in it, it shall be esteemed his own default and negligence.” You ever heard that before? If you get robbed in your house, whose fault is it? According to James Wilson, very important Founding Father and major legal scholar, he said, you get robbed in your house, it’s your fault. Why? Because we wouldn’t want a police officer to be in every house, right? We don’t want one on every street corner. We don’t want to police state. So we as individuals, not only have the right, but we have the duty to defend ourselves. That’s the castle doctrine that he’s talking about. That's not... didn’t just start with America. Some legal scholars would say that goes all the way back to the Old Testament. It was very clear you had the right of self-defense, even in the Levitical law and the way that it’s explained and how those things take place. So the Second Amendment is not what gives you the right of self-defense. The laws of nature and nature’s God give you the right of self-defense. The Second Amendment prevents the government from infringing on that right and as a reminder to the government that it is their job to protect and defend your right of self-defense. That’s why we train. That’s why we do what we’re doing this weekend at Front Sight is to be prepared to defend. But we’ve got to start defending it intellectually in a world that is turning against this concept of self-defense so that we can keep that indifference from turning to disgust and us ultimately losing this very, very important freedom. Part of our challenge that we need to be aware of and the reason we dive so much further, as we go into this particular course, this is just the beginning of the course, the reason we do this is because, I hate to tell you this as we are gathered for a Constitution class, but America is not governed by the Constitution anymore. The Constitution, the actual words of the Constitution no longer govern our land. In fact, we are governed by what I call the “courtstitution”. It is a new law of the land that these guys on the court, just five out of nine, unelected, unaccountable Justices throw a phrase in here, and they throw a phrase in there and they create this concoction we now know as the “courtstitution” and that becomes the law of the land. And what’s actually said in the Constitution doesn’t even matter. What matters now is what those Justices decide, what they actually write. What their opinion is, becomes the law of the land. Because we don’t understand how the Constitution actually was intended to work and we bought the lie that has been perpetrated on us by the legal community by the education system. And it’s our job to turn that around. We start by actually breaking the Constitution out ourselves, by actually studying this thing. I love these bumper stickers, you know, "Annoy liberal, read the Constitution, Got constitution, read the Constitution”. Of course, we need to be reading the Constitution. Because at the end of the day, even the Constitution itself is not going to save us, it’s not going to protect us. In fact, there was a guy at the original constitutional convention named John Francis Mercer, he actually said the Constitution is not even going to govern the United States. He said it’s a great mistake to suppose that the paper we are to propose will govern the United States. So wait a minute, framer of the Constitution is saying that the Constitution is not going to govern the United States, that's a mistake if you think that. He said no, it’s not the Constitution itself. It’s the men whom it, the Constitution, so if you’re following it, the people that it will bring into the government and the interest that they have in maintaining it and protecting the actual Constitution. The paper is only going to mark out the mode in the form men are the substance and must do the business. In other words, the document sets up the rules for how this game is going to be played. But who we put on the field, who we elect, who ends up on the bench, if they’re willing to govern around the Constitution, shred the Constitution, destroy the Constitution, ignore the Constitution, if they’re willing to do that, and we’re willing to sit back and let them do that, then the Constitution means nothing. And that’s how we’ve gotten in the mess that we are. So the first thing we’ve got to do is stand up and say, I refuse my consent to this. Declaration talks about the consent of the governed. We got to stand up and say, this is wrong, this has got to stop. We want to restore the Constitution. We want to come back to the original intent of what the framers intended. So part of what we’re teaching in Constitutional Defense is not only the importance of learning to train to defend ourselves physically, but the intellectual ammunition. We walk through the entire Constitution. It’s going to be seven episodes. Brad Ackman, and Eric Rogers and I go out to Philadelphia, we filmed there in Independence Hall and Congress Hall and all these places. I do the class, walking through the entire Constitution actually, in the room at Independence Hall. We actually put “Chasing American Legends” in the box. I mean, all of these things are available to you and you get to go visit all these places with us through that DVD set. So check that out. Here’s my challenge to you. And I know I need to be circling, I’m circling. Doesn’t mean I’m landing, it means I could land at any time, so be ready. Well, here’s my challenge to you. I honestly believe this. Some of you’re going to think I’m exaggerating. I truly believe that the fate of the free world depends on you. Now, you may say, Rick, you’re exaggerating. But what am I going to do about this? Just follow my logic here. How many of you would agree the fate of the free world still today depends on America? Do you agree with that? Okay. How many of you would agree that America, if we’re going to last, depends upon a restoration of our constitutional principles? Would you agree with that? How many of you would agree that restoring our constitutional principles depends upon the first three words of the Constitution, which is what? "We, the people." Right. So it depends on us. So just, you know, look, if the fate of the free world depends on American, if America depends on the Constitution be restored, if the Constitution being restored depends on we the people, take the shortcut, the fate of the free world depends on us. It depends on us doing our duty under the Constitution to restore these principles. It’s that serious. It’s that important. And we can’t wait. We got to do something now. We’ve got to start taking the action steps. We’ve got to be willing to stand up for the very things that others died for that they sacrificed so much for us to be free. So I’m going to leave with a couple of quotes. And I’m going to bring up one more special speaker that’s going to share with you a way that you can get involved and make a difference. This guy here is John Jay. He’s the first Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. He’s also one of the authors of the Federalist Papers. So as you begin to study the Constitution, the Federalist Papers are a great instruction manual, if you will. It’s a great way to be able to go in and say what do they really mean by this phrase or that phrase? Federalist Papers help us understand that. Here’s one of the three guys that gave it to us. But he also challenged us to study this thing. He said every member of the state ought diligently to read and to study. So the bumper sticker says, “Read the Constitution.” That’s not enough. We got to study the Constitution, which means we’re going to look at those words and not say, what does that mean today? We have to study what did those words mean 200 years ago when they were put into the Constitution? So we got to read and study and then we got to teach the rising generation to be free. We have to teach this next group of young people that’s coming up how to be free, what does it mean to be free, what is freedom, how do you define freedom, and how do we make sure that their generation is going to enjoy it? He says,“By knowing their rights, the sooner they will proceed with those rights have been violated and the better prepared they will be to defend and assert them.” That’s our job. So every one of us, every single member of states, that’s every citizen, you don’t have to be a teacher, preacher, whatever, you’re a citizen, you fall into this category. So every single one of us need to read and study the Constitution. We need to teach the next generation how to do this. And then by knowing our rights, by having this intellectual ammunition, we’ll know when they will perceive when those rights are being violated, which I think we’re all perceiving right now as we look into the culture, but then we’ll also know how to properly, constitutionally, peaceably defend and assert them. You see, we have all the tools we need at our fingertips right now to be able to peaceably influence our nation. We can have a revolution with ballots, not with bullets, with ballots. We can actually work the system. The system works, if we’re willing to get engaged. If we’re willing to work smart in this system, we can have a great influence. In fact, Tim and I do every Friday, a show called Good News Friday on our radio program. I encourage you to listen to that. Because if you’re getting frustrated right now thinking it’s all over, I got friends that say it’s all over, Rick, grab your guns and canned food, go hang out at the ranch, America’s done. Now, I would recommend buying the ranch and have the canned food. Okay, yeah. But it’s not over. There are so many good things happening in our country. The tools are all there. So what we do on Good News Fridays, man, Tim and David just fly through story after story after story of good things that are happening in our culture. So if you got a workbook tonight, in that workbook, you’re going to find this thing called the“Constitution Made Easy”, makes it very, very simple and easy. On one side of the page, it has the original language of the Constitution. But instead of having to flip back and forth between the amendments and try to figure out well, there’s five amendments that affect the presidency, so if I’m going to study the electoral college, I got to open up the 12th Amendment, the 20th Amendment, the 22nd Amendment, the 23rd Amendment, the 25th Amendment all at once, and try to put all that together. What my buddy, Mike Holler, did was he put all of those amendments into the language. And so on the right hand side of the page, you’ll see the “Constitution Made Easy”. But of course, I’m an originalist. So we leave the original on the left. And on the right you can, with modern language and all the amendments Incorporated, read through very quickly, the “Constitution Made Easy”. So here’s the challenge. We’ve got this duty and responsibility as citizens. The Reverend Matthias Burnett told us in 1801, he said “To God, and posterity, you are accountable for your rights and your rulers. Let not your children have reason to curse you for giving up those rights and prostrating those institutions, which your fathers delivered to you.” That’s our challenge: that our children, our grandchildren will not someday live in less freedom than what we’ve enjoyed. We’ve got to bring back what these guys did. They were willing to give everything, right? They gave. They didn’t just pledge, they didn’t just sign lives, fortune, sacred honor, they gave their lives, fortunes [and] sacred honor. And that’s what I’m asking you to do, to be willing to give of your life. That’s your time. That’s the time to actually study the Constitution. You’re doing this tonight, right. You took time. I know you’re tired. It was just a little bit windy today. Just a little bit, right? I mean, you’ve been out there all day on the range in that wind, you’re tired. I mean, you stayed and you came and you said I want to dive into this, I want to learn some things about the Constitution. This is the beginning. I’m challenging you to take this, hopefully, this will spark something in you to say, I got to dig deeper. I can’t believe the founder said all those things. Man, that’s ammunition. I can use that in my Facebook debates. I can use that in the Thanksgiving dinner where that cousin from wherever that thinks nobody should have a gun or whatever. This is your chance to begin to study so that you do have that ammunition. So life is your time. Okay, start investing some time in studying freedom. Become a student of freedom. Take some time to be willing to go out there and vote. Be willing to go out there and influence our government officials. If you think that somebody smarter than us is going to go solve all this stuff, folks, it’s us, we’re the ones that have to do it. In fact, Jefferson kind of responded to that idea that, oh, the people aren’t smart enough to do these things. He said, “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves. And if we think they’re not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.” That’s what we’re doing tonight.“This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.” We can learn these things effectively. I hope that you end up getting the DVDs and go to Independence Hall with us and those things and study the Constitution in depth. I want to recommend a couple other resources to you. I think Mark Levin’s book “Liberty Amendments”. is probably the most important book on the Constitution out there right now, because it gives the solutions for how we restore this thing. It’s absolutely essential that we do the things he’s talking about doing in there. So read his Liberty Amendments. You can get Constitution Alive with David Barton and myself. Listen to WallBuilders Live on a daily basis, we'll equip and inspire you. Get the tools you need to be able to vote intelligently. I don’t know about you. But I go into the voting booth, man, there’s 35 different races, I don’t remember all the people and what they stand for and all. Get voter guides and take them in there with you when you go vote. ivoterguide.com is a website where you can get... and as most states are covered by now, you click on your state, download some voter guides for yourself. So get involved in that way. But also start being a Paul Revere. Actually, be somebody that’s telling other people in your life how important it is to do those things. You have the basic much easier way to have a committee of correspondence than the founders ever had. You can use email and Facebook and all these great tools. Listen to our show, we'll equip and inspire you. We’ll give you some tools on that. And then lastly, in terms of your time, I’m going to ask you to invest in the next generation. We do a program called Patriot Academy where we raise up young people from across the country. We bring them into state capitals across the country, they live the life of a legislator, and they learn the Founding Fathers philosophy of how this system was designed to work. They get the skills they need, and now they’re out there leading all over the country in state legislatures and they’re making movies and television shows. They’re in the pulpit. They’re in business. They’re in every area of the culture. But they’re good citizens because they’ve been equipped with these things at a Patriot Academy across the country. Another distinguished graduate from right here at Front Sight is the governor of Patriot Academy this year, and he’s going to share a few minutes on Patriot Academy and then we’ll get you guys out of here so you can go get some sleep. You all please welcome Austin Griesinger, governor of Patriot Academy.

Austin Griesinger: 21:06

Well, thank you so much, Mr. Green. And thank you guys so much for being here. I am incredibly excited about what we’re doing right here at Front Sight in this room and out there on those ranges. Guys, what we’re doing is we’re being equipped and trained with two very important things. First, you’re being equipped with the knowledge of your inalienable rights to keep and bear arms and to defend yourself. And second, you’re getting trained with the skills to apply those rights if the need should ever arise. Well, like Mr. Green said, my name is Austin Griesinger, and I am the governor of Patriot Academy. And over the course of the last six years, I’ve had the privilege to meet and work alongside hundreds of other young men and women who are passionate about preserving liberty. That’s right. You heard me correctly. Young conservative leaders exist, and Patriot Academy is equipping them for the fight. So what is Patriot Academy? Think of Patriot Academy as Front Sight, except for worldview, leadership, and politics. You see, Front Sight is the premier Training Institute for firearms in America. Patriot Academy is the premier training institute for teaching young leaders the core principles of what makes America so exceptional. Patriot Academy is engineered to take a young person out of their, glued to their technology world of complacency, and put them in the hot seat. Like I said, we’re in the actual house chambers, sitting in the same chairs as real elected legislators being asked to tackle some of the toughest issues that we face today. Patriot Academy is a lot like going through a simulation house here Front Sight, which you guys are going to get to do tomorrow. When you go through that simulation house, your skills are put under intense pressure as if in a real-world scenario. Patriot Academy does the same thing for young leaders. And I’d like to compare Patriot Academy and Front Sight in one more specific way. At Front Sight, you learned those four rules of gun safety, you guys went over this morning, right? Well, at Patriot Academy we have four rules or more like principles that we consider anytime we take policy, worldview, any law that we’re looking at, that get run through this list of principles. We call them the LIFT principles that stand for limited government, individual liberty, free enterprise, and timeless truths. Anytime we consider policy, we run them through that so that we make sure that we’re considering those things out of a place of facts and data, and not just emotion. My fellow students and I really believe that if we begin to reapply those four principles, we can absolutely see a restoring of our constitutional republic form of government. I know what you might be thinking at this point. Why in the world with a 16-year-old, a 20-year-old, or in my case, a 22-year-old take a week out of their summer to go to a state capitol building and play politics?

Rick Green: 23:52

Alright folks out of time for today. Tomorrow, we get the conclusion the final day of Constitutional Defense of your Family and Freedom. Be sure to join us then and also consider joining us at the campus where you can actually do the Constitutional Defense of your Family and Freedom course. That means you get the intellectual knowledge, you learn how to defend the Constitution, you'll learn the foundational principle of the right of self defense as well as tons of other issues in the Constitution. It's a full fledged, full blown constitutional course in the evenings. But then the handgun training takes place during the day. Now you don't have to come to the groundbreaking and the very first class on April 23rd. That one's going to fill up, but it's not full yet. You've still got a few days here to to get into the class. You can come anytime throughout the rest of the year. We're going to have these almost every week. But there's something special about being at the first one. There's something special about being at that groundbreaking, that wonderful ceremony we're going to have on April 22nd. First of all, Tim and I will be there. So Tim Barton, Rick Green, you'll have Congresswoman Lauren Boebert. You got John Rich coming in to do the music. I mean, it's going to be an incredible, incredible day. That's April 22nd. And then the next day, April 23rd, we'll start the course. And just to give you a little bit of an idea, the course itself is a five day course it starts on Sunday afternoon, mostly classroom training and intellectual ammunition, learning the Constitution. And then the most incredible range instructors, regardless of whether you've ever touched a gun in your whole life, or you've grown up with guns and shot your whole life, you will be better by the end of this training, like way better. Not not a little bit better, lightyears ahead of where you are right now. We have a lot of people that come to this course that have never done any training before many that have never fired a gun before. We know how to take you from that point, from that ground zero point to being proficient and safe and effective with your firearm so that you can defend your family. A lot of folks carry a firearm, you know, I'm all for that. That's a constitutional right, you should be able to do that. But a lot of people do that, that have never had any training, I don't recommend that you do that. I recommend you get the training, first. And this is the training that you want to get. It's sometimes very expensive to get training. Most people charge you$200 or $300 bucks a day, for a five day training like this. That's starting to run into$1,000 or more just for the training. For us, It's $100 a day. So we do this so that we can get sheepdogs trained all over the nation. So that there's someone in every grocery store, every Walmart, every restaurant, every church that is a trained good guy or good gal with a gun that can stop the wolf if they show up. I pray it never happens to you, pray never happens to me or my family. But you should always be prepared just in case. So come join us, get this training, constitutional defense of your family and freedom and come to the groundbreaking. It's going to be fun. We're going to have a great time. And we want you there. You can get more information at our website, PatriotAcademy.com . Click on Constitutional Defense, and you'll be able to join us for that very first class. Alright folks tomorrow we get the conclusion. Thanks for listening to Constitutional Defense here on WallBuilders.