Rick Green: 0:08
Welcome to the intersection of faith and the culture. We are so thankful for you, as a listener and being a part of this, for joining us at this intersection here at WallBuilders, where we take on all the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective. There is a resurgence happening in this country and you should be encouraged. I know there's a lot of bad, I get it. I get it. There's all kinds of evil marching across the nation, but one of the silver linings when that happens is that it awakens people. It causes us to realize the value of our freedom. It causes us to realize the uniqueness of American exceptionalism, just how different this has been in the history of the world, and we're just super thankful for it. And we're thankful for you, as a listener, also being awake and looking for ways to make a difference and take action. I'm Rick Green, America's Constitution Coach and a former Texas legislator, and it is my honor to serve here at WallBuilders with David Barton and Tim Barton. WallBuilders has made a tremendous difference in the culture, of course, being the tip of the spear for debunking the old separation of church and state myth and then, of course, equipping citizens to think biblically about what's going on in their neighborhood, their family, their community and, of course, our nation. And so it's an honor to be with these guys. David's, of course, America's premier historian and our founder at WallBuilders. Tim's, a national speaker and pastor and president of WallBuilders. I got to hear both these guys last weekend at the legislators conference that we do and just always remind it every time I get a chance to see the impacts live in an audience when they share the truths of America's story. It's just, it's just incredible. If you haven't done that, if you have not had a chance to take one of our biblical citizenship classes or Constitutional Live foundations of freedom, America's story, read the book of the American story, I mean all of these different courses and everything you can find right there at wwwWaltBoulderscom and dive in today and then invite your friends and family, make sure they know, share this program today. We got a special guest coming up today, kevin Freeman. I mean this is going to be a topic that I think is going to encourage you. I think it's going to make you realize the founders that they gave us some, some really good, good tools in the future, and I think that's the connection that have kind of slept there. You know they they haven't been used. I mean article five, the amendment process and states being able to overrule the federal government that's one of the ones that's been sitting there not being used. That now definitely needs to be used, to be used by the statescom, if you want to learn more about that. But then also the ability to control, at least to some extent, our economic future and our currency and the states having some power to do that with gold and silver, and that this is going to be a really interesting topic and and I hope that if you've considered this topic you're going to learn a ton. But even if you've, you know you've been someone that's, you know, paid attention to the golden silver and and you understand about the gold standard and all of those things. I think today is still going to be a big surprise to you what's in the Constitution and what we're allowed to do. So super excited about this Kevin Freeman, great friend of the program, and he and Marnie just great patriots and do a phenomenal job. Economic war room is their program. We're going to be bringing that, by the way, to PatriotU, where you can watch it right there on on PatriotU. That's PatriotAcademy.tv, where we're airing The Tavern, and in this conversation with with Kevin actually takes place in The Tavern. So we're going to bring it to you though our WallBuilders listeners, even before anybody else gets to hear it. So even before it's going to air on PatriotU or Warrior Poets Society or anywhere else, you get it first right here at WallBuilders. Not the whole thing can't give you the whole thing. I mean, then why would you go watch The Tavern? Right so, but you're going to get enough of it that you're going to be excited about this possibility and and probably going to want to go watch the whole thing over at at PatriotAcademy.tv. We're going to take a break first, then we'll go to my interview with Kevin Freeman. Stay with us, folks, you're listening to WallBuilders.

Tim Barton: 4:00
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 not 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? What is a 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 a 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 dot com. The American story.

Rick Green: 5:03
Thanks for staying with me. Great to have my good friend Kevin Freeman with me. Hey, brother, how about a little clank there with your economic war room mug? Yes, of course you do. There we go, love it, love it. Your topic is perfect for The Tavern because you know I'm always telling people hey, the founding fathers didn't just get into this mess because of you know, freedom as we typically think of it, economics was a huge part of this and economic war was a big part of it, leading up for years To the revolution. You get that and you teach on it every day. Anyway, appreciate you, man. Thanks for joining me in The Tavern. Oh, it's a thrill to be with you. Well, your new book is timely and very, very important. Pirate money, we've got man, we've got some huge challenges in our nation and certainly you know, economic war around the world, but within our own nation big time. And you've got some movements going in state legislatures across the country. We want to inform people about that. What is transactional goal? Talk about those sorts of things. But first, brother, just tell us about economic war room. Tell us about what you think is most important to educate people that have never thought about this side of the battle for freedom. What do you start people on when you're starting to get them to really think about economics?

Kevin Freeman: 6:17
Well, you know, we used to think in terms of economic warfare. You mentioned the Revolutionary War and the founders. What was the Boston Tea Party other than an economic attack? But people forgotten it. I think when the Berlin Wall fell and I've got a chunk of it, a faux version, but a chunk of it behind me here on the set when that fell, people stopped thinking of economics as an American issue versus other nations and started trying to think in a global terms. And then, at the same time, we just assumed that the American military was the only dominant military on the planet. The Soviet Union was gone, we rule the world and everybody's adopting capitalism. We got flabby. We used to be really good at economic warfare. That's how Reagan beat the Soviet Union without firing a shot. That's how you know. Economic warfare was a big part of World War II. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a bureau of economic warfare, but we've just kind of forgotten that if you crash to the American economy, we lose. We're done. If the American economy goes away, the American nation goes away because we're so economically. That's not true in China, by the way. It's not true in Russia. It's not true in many other nations of the world. The North Korean economy is terrible, but they don't disappear as a nation because of the nature of their system. But you take our economy away and we're done. So what I try and tell people is this is a real part of warfare that we've kind of forgotten because we've gotten flabby and complacent.

Rick Green: 7:51
And when you say flabby, I mean I certainly think fat and happy, and that's kind of what it is. We just spoiled for so long. I mean, we were on top for so long and could pretty much win, no matter what we did as a nation economically around the world because of our size and because of really living off of the sacrifice and hard work of previous generations. But we're not at that place anymore, are we?

Kevin Freeman: 8:12
No, we're absolutely not. And the Chinese are aware of it, the Russians are aware of it, their Korea, iran, they're all aware of it. Our enemies, or potential enemies, have all realized that's our vulnerability. They don't necessarily want to take the American military head on, they'd rather undermine us using economic means, which, by the way, esg is a type of economic means where China says hey, you're getting dirty air here. Look at who's saying that, china. They're telling us that we need to amp up our regulations on our oil and gas industry and so forth, so that we need to all move to clean solar. And who sells the clean solar stuff? China. It's economic warfare.

Rick Green: 8:53
Oh man, and all of this climate change stuff and the policies that the Biden administration are not only pushing and trying to get through Congress but actually doing through executive orders and through all kinds of regulations, all of that at the same time Weekends. America makes China stronger at every step of the way. I mean, even when you look at the electric vehicles and how all this stuff is made, I mean they've been five, 10 steps ahead of us the all way.

Kevin Freeman: 9:21
Yeah, no, and they've funded it. They bought and paid for members of this administration, both houses, both parties. So you see Republicans in the House and in the Senate and Democrats in the House and in the Senate, who were all bought and paid for by the Chinese Communist Party. And then you see Hunter Biden in the laptop, and you see all that and you realize that this is not a short-term plan. This is something they started about a quarter century ago in a book that they published called Unrestricted Warfare, and they pursued that strategy. They had two heroes, George Soros and Osama bin Laden, and they said if we could ever put the two of that capability together, well, that is economic warfare and financial terrorism.

Rick Green: 10:04
Man, kevin, you've known me long enough to know I'm not a doomsday kind of guy. I'm always glass half full, always try, you know, positive outlook, all that good stuff, but I have a hard time putting a happy face in my happy war. You know, reagan said let's be happy warriors out to take back a world. You know country and a world of freedom. I try so hard to do that. But I look at a lot of this stuff that's happening right now and I feel like there's some defensive measures that I've always been offensive, but there's some defensive measures we've got to start taking and you're really good at that and what you've been helping legislators begin to understand is how important it is that we recognize the dollar is in trouble and that we are potentially going to lose our ability to lead with currency and that we've got to take some measures at the state level because the feds just won't wake up on this. Talk to me about transactional currency. Talk to me about transactional gold. Talk to me about what you're doing in state legislatures to try to not hedge our bed. I mean literally, just take a good, positive step here.

Kevin Freeman: 11:06
Yeah well, we have $34 trillion of federal debt. We have a 5% interest rate give or take. That is $1.7 trillion of interest every year, which is the vast majority of our income tax receipts. It's a dangerous situation. The dollar is under threat by foreign enemies. It's under threat by the spending of Congress, and they're doing that because they have unrestricted paper money, fiat money that they can print at will and the Federal Reserve will buy any debt we produce and then they essentially create the money out of thin air. That is what the founders faced, that's what the Continental Congress did and it almost destroyed America. I've got a continental note that I carry around. It's actually a $4 continental note, and George Washington said about those he said you couldn't buy a wagon full of supplies with a wagon load of continental, so they just you know.

Rick Green: 12:00
And, by the way, you can't pay for your beer in The Tavern with that anymore either. So just don't eat your chicken, no, anyway.

Kevin Freeman: 12:06
So I mean that was unrestricted paper money and that's why Thomas Jefferson said paper is poverty. So they left a provision in the Constitution, article 1, section 10. They said states can't print their own money, states can't coin their own money, but states can make gold and silver coin tender within the states, and some states have done that. Recently We've seen tender laws, legal tender laws, pop up in Utah and a few other states. But the problem is is it's not transactional and so a state can say this gold coin or this silver coin and, by the way, when they talked about those they were talking about a gold, a blue or a silver piece of eight a Spanish mill.

Rick Green: 12:44
I'm going to hey, kevin, I'm going to read this for our audience real quick, just straight out of the Constitution, just so they know what you're saying is absolutely true and we're not making this up here. And I also want to point out nothing new under the sun, right? I mean the fact that they were dealing with this and thinking ahead. They've given us this provision to use now. So, yeah, like you said, article 1, section 10, no state shall, without the consent of Congress, lay any duty of tonnage, keep troops or ships of war in time of peace, enter any agreement or compact with another state or the foreign power, or engage in war unless actually invaded or in such imminent danger as will not admit a delay. That's a part of Article 1, section 10. We've been talking about for the border, actually closing the border and preventing the chaos that's been created there. States need to do their job here. Okay, but the part you're talking about is right at the beginning. No state shall enter into any treaty, alliance or confederation, grant letters to Mark and Reprisal coin money and mint bills of credit, make anything but gold and silver coin a tender and payment of debts. So now describe what that means.

Kevin Freeman: 13:36
Well, first off, no mint bills of credit means they can't produce paper money back by nothing. No coining money means that they can't put base metals together with gold or silver and produce coins. They had to use real coins so they couldn't put 1% gold in a coin and say it's worth $10,000. They have to actually have the value of the metal, the gold and silver coin. And what they were using was Spanish doubloons, which are gold doubloons, and Spanish mill dollars, also known as pieces of eight, which that's why I got the term pirate money right here, because you think gold doubloon and pieces of eight, you think Captain Jack Sparrow or you think Long John Silver, you think pirates, right. So they knew that. And in fact the term dollar from the Constitution was a common term and it didn't mean a dirty green piece of paper with George Washington's picture on it. It meant a Spanish mill dollar, which is a specific amount of silver 0.7734 troy ounces of fine silver. So they knew it exact silver content. And milled means that it was produced on a machine, so it had ridges around it, so it wasn't just hammered out that you could shave off and cut off a little piece of it. That's what they meant by dollar. When they referred to dollar, everybody in the world knew what a dollar was. It was that Spanish coin, also known as a piece of eight, that they would cut into eight pie shaped wedges, and those were bits, and two bits made a quarter, and four quarters made a dollar. You know, a shave and a haircut two bits, that's what that meant. That was one eighth, anyway. So they said that if you use gold and silver coins and they made those legal tender, and this is backed by so many Supreme Court rulings that I can bring up over the centuries that that can be made legal tender. Lane County versus Oregon, I think, was in the 1860s, 1868, where a state said we will only accept taxes in gold and silver coins. The county treasurer in Lane County says hey, I don't want to pay in gold coins, I'd rather pay in these greenbacks that the federal government is producing. They're legal tender too. And Lane County versus Oregon said, all the way up to the Supreme Court they said no, no, a state can demand payment in gold and silver coin. And they said but we're not producing any gold and silver coins. Well, there was another decision that same year, bronson versus Rhodes, where the federal government had outlawed the use of foreign coins like Spanish mill dollars and gold the balloons. But there was a contract between two individuals that said I'll pay it in gold and silver coins. And one the borrower who had to make the payment said well, I don't have gold and silver coins, so I'll pay you in these paper currency that the federal government has produced. And this went all the way up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said well, look, if you can't get gold and silver coins, you can pay in specific bullion, silver and gold bullion measured announces, because the court ruling says what is a coin other than the government stamping that it's a certain weight and a certain fineness of metal, gold or silver. So all the way through from the founding in 1787, which, by the way, the book sells for 1787 on Amazon in reference to the Constitution from 1787 till today, states have had the legal right to make gold and silver coins legal tender. They could do it in the form of bullion. And here's the neat trick. The neat trick is the state could take you Rick, you could send in to Texas if our bill's pass we have bills in 18 states under consideration or planning to be introduced you could send in $1,000 to the Glen Agar, the comptroller of Texas. He would take it and buy gold and silver on your behalf, hold it for you and then you could go spend it with a debit card. And all of that is backed by the Constitution, by there's another Supreme Court ruling, 1787 Briscoe versus Bank of Kentucky, where Kentucky was taking gold and silver on deposit and the issuing warehouse receipts and the warehouse receipts traded as currency. All of this means that we have an optional gold and silver standard available for the American people at the state level. That is real money. It's not in any way like a bank that loans out half of it or three quarters of it. It's not anything like paper money that's not backed by anything other than confidence in the federal government. This is a system that's available for the American people as soon as one courageous state passes it.

Rick Green: 18:30
It has real value. It has accurate, honest value. It's literally backed by exactly what the value of that gold or silver is. I have a technical question for you. I've never understood this. What is the as you were describing that? I was trying to make sure I understand this right. So what is the difference between tender and payment of debts, or is there? Is it just saying is that clause just saying that whatever your coin is, it's legal tender, that you can then pay a debt? And when we pay a debt, that also means just buying something, because that's a debt you incur to buy. That Is that. Am I thinking about that? Right, the payment of debts doesn't mean you can only use it to pay off something that you bought previously. You could use it to buy something right now. Yeah, no, no, I know I threw about work questions at you at once, but I know you got them.

Kevin Freeman: 19:16
Yeah, no, the legal tender laws are the reason. You look on one of your dirty green piece of paper that you have in your wallet and I've got one right here. Here's a United States dollar. It's not silver, it's a piece of paper. It says in God we trust. On the back and it says this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private. That is the government statement, that you have to accept it. This is legal tender. Now that's funny. There's a case that just came up I mean it's in the news today where somebody lost in court and they had to make like a $20,000 payment. So they went and got nickels and pennies and showed up to be a nuisance and to pay it. And the judge ruled that while it's legal tender, they're doing that obviously to be a nuisance, and so he ordered them to take the coins back and pay them in some normal fashion like bills or check or electronic or whatever. But the reason he felt he could do that is because legal tender means that this is legitimate money and you have to accept it. If you're in the United States and you refused to take my dollar but you would take euros or British pounds, the government can come after you and say Rick, you're making a mistake here, you need to take this. This is legal tender. So if the state makes gold and silver coin legal tender and makes it transactional, then not only do you have to take it, but it has one other amazing provision it means you can own gold and silver and you don't have to pay capital gains if it goes up or down in value. Oh, I love this one.

Rick Green: 20:50
Okay, wait, hold that one again. Just one more clarification so I get this straight in my head. So that provision of the Constitution, I love what you said earlier and I hadn't thought about it that way. It's literally saying you can't do paper money that's not backed by gold and silver. Basically saying to the states don't do what we later have Nixon doing when he takes us off the gold standard for our federal tender, but it wouldn't allow states to do that. But states can still make tender out of gold and silver, legal tender out of gold and silver. Have I got all that right?

Kevin Freeman: 21:19
Yes, and I want to throw something in there, because you're a constitutional teacher and I read the debates about whether or not the government could issue unbacked paper money the federal government. I read the debates and they put in a provision in the constitutional convention. They said we will allow the government to emit bills of credit, unbacked paper money. And Governor Morris stood up, argued against it and they almost unanimously decided to reject it. So the question comes up why did they not put a provision in the Constitution that said they could not do it when they prohibited the states from emitting bills of credit? Why? And the answer is because they thought it was automatically prohibited, because if they're not enumerated as powers to the federal government, then they don't get the power. They had to say the states couldn't do it. They had to say the states couldn't do it because that power would have been reserved to the people or the states, right? So they had to prohibit it. But and that was held true in a court case.

Rick Green: 22:25
No, you're right and I bet the part I don't remember that in the debates and I bet that was in Article I, Section 8 where it says they can borrow money on the credit of the United States. I bet that's where they were going to insert what you're talking about, that's very interesting.

Kevin Freeman: 22:37
But there was a court case that came out that was in I think it's 1869, late 1860s, because the entire Civil War, north and South, both paid for it by unbacked paper money, confederate dollars we know were worthless. The greenbacks issued by the federal government were ruled unconstitutional in a decision called Hepburn versus Griswold and I picture in my mind Catherine Hepburn yelling at Clark Griswold, you know from the vacation movies. And that was ruled unconstitutional. Ulysses S Grant then packed the court, added two new justices and Knox versus Lee. The next year, I think it was 1870, overturned Hepburn versus Griswold. That's why we can have unbacked fiat, because that very bad Supreme Court decision very terrible.

Rick Green: 23:31
Once again unelected lawyers in Washington DC making law changing the Constitution without permission. Oh okay, I derailed you for a minute there. I could geek out on this with you for a while, but I go back to what you were saying. We can own gold and silver. If one of these bills passes in any state, everybody in the US can tap into this. We can own gold and silver and spend it on what you call almost like a debit card, literally like a credit. I literally go pay for a Coke or whatever at the airport that vendors not even going to care or know, but it's going to be tapping our gold and silver that we paid for at whichever state ends up adopting.

Kevin Freeman: 24:09
Yes and this is the mechanics of it would be. Let's say we were in Utah and Ken Ivory and Marla Oaks, the treasurer, state rep. Ken Ivory big on this, they love it, they're going to introduce it. They say they'll be first. Florida's going to fight him. I'm going to fight here in Texas for us to be first. But you could take this dollar, send it to the treasurer, the comptroller. He would then buy a fraction of an ounce of gold and hold it for you, and it goes down as little as that. Then you would have an app that you could tap to pay with your phone, or you could use a debit card and you could just pay for it as if you were using a MasterCard debit card. But the beauty of it is is that your transactions would not be taxable. So in 1933, franklin Delano Roosevelt confiscated all the gold in America. They set people door to door and said if you have gold, you're hoarding it. You need to turn it in, and made it illegal to own gold in 1933, and he did that and he said I'll pay you for the gold. We confiscate it $20 an ounce. One year later he decided you know, this gold is actually worth $35 an ounce, and so he upped the price of the gold and it held at $35 an ounce until 1971 when Nixon took us off the last vestiges of the gold standard At $35 an ounce. If you'd bought gold and you sold it today at $2,000 an ounce, you would have essentially kept your purchasing power, because what $35 an ounce bought then you know we've lost 87 and a half percent of our purchasing power since we left the gold standard.

Rick Green: 25:50
Alright, hate to do this to you folks, but we're out of time for today for the full interview with Kevin Freeman. Go to www.PatriotAcademy.tv and watch the Tavern, and on the Tavern we get the full interview. He was just about to get into the IRS issues, the tax issues, and why this solution, this transactional gold solution, will save you on capital gains as well. Anyway, it's a really good deal. Lots of states looking at it. In fact, we had a great time again at the legislators conference, where not only David and Tim spoke, but Glenn Beck and all these other people, including Kevin Freeman, and I'm telling you, these legislators are racing to see which state will pass this first. This is huge. We've got to get it done. It's very, very important for our economy, for our future, for the country. So very thankful for Kevin Freeman being with us today. Thank you for listening. Today You've been listening to WallBuilders.