Rick Green: 0:12
This is the Intersection of Faith and the Culture. It's the WallBuilders Show, where we're taking on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective and we're asking you to not only learn those things, but then go out and apply those things. It's Good News Friday, so we're going to have some good news for you. My name is Rick Green. I'm America's Constitution Coach and a former Texas legislator, and I serve here with David and Tim Barton. What a privilege to get to work with these guys, man. They've got the largest private collection of founding fathers documents in the world. We go to original resources, just a wealth of information, and the Bartons have been at this a long time. They've done so much to restore America's constitutional republic, to give us that civic literacy that we need to save our nation, that biblical literacy that we need to save our nation. Tim Barton's our president here at WallBuilders. He's a national speaker and pastor. David Barton's our founder and he's America's premier historian, and we're all three thankful that you're here. Hope you visit our website today at wallbenderscom. Wealth of information, lots of good tools and things there that you can share with your family and just personally get educated and equipped to be able to help save this nation. There's so much that we can all do. You know, this is not a situation where we have to just hope for the best and, you know, maybe elect somebody president, or you know one person, or maybe governor of our state, and that's going to solve everything? Not at all. Folks, it's not part of it. But, man, it's up to each and every one of us to do what's necessary locally, and that requires us getting educated, getting equipped and then going out and taking action. And I don't know about you, but for me, I like to have some good news to remind me that these things actually work. And so Fridays are a special day around here at WallBuilders, and we hope you enjoy watching it, but we also hope you'll share it with your friends and family. They need to hear the good news as well. Hi, David, Tim, let's jump into some good news and share as many stories with folks as we can, all across the nation. Good things are happening, folks, and we know the bad, and the ugly is there. We're not ignoring that or shying away from that on this Friday, but we do want to emphasize the good today so that you can see where God's principles are not only right. They work best when we apply them and we're active in our citizenship. David, what's our first piece of good news today?

David Barton: 2:08
Well, as you can imagine, it deals with Christmas. I like Christmas anytime I can get it July the 4th or September the 6th, on Labor Day or any day, I don't care. I like Christmas, I'm actually surprised.

Rick Green: 2:19
it's December and we're just now talking about Christmas. This is not the norm. Normally, David is pushing Christmas on us, like months and months and months ago, and I don't remember you doing that this year, man.

David Barton: 2:32
Well you guys have, so beat me down. I'm trying to be sensitive to you, so beat me down.

Tim Barton: 2:37
Rick, I think you're blocking out what happened in July this summer, when I'm pretty sure we heard Christmas music. Maybe it was August, but we definitely heard something this summer you might just be in that post-traumatic stress, or you're blocking it out.

Rick Green: 2:51
Yeah, that's what it is. I just, yeah, I just blocked it out. I forgot about all the therapy I went to for that. Okay, yep, go ahead, David. Alright, have your Christmas again. Here we go.

David Barton: 2:59
Okay, so I want you guys to tell me what institution or what facility, what famous Christmas tree has the standing policy that decorations on that tree cannot include religious symbols. It's a public Christmas tree and it's one that's well recognized, well known, it's big at this time of year and they have a standing policy that says decorations cannot include religious symbols. Which Christmas tree is that?

Tim Barton: 3:26
The one in front of the ACLU, or the Freedom from Religion Foundation.

David Barton: 3:30
You're right about that, but they don't even have a Christmas tree and that's not a notable public tree. So you messed half the parameters on that one.

Rick Green: 3:39
Man. The only thing I could guess is with this particular occupant of the White House. Maybe there's one at the White House somewhere, I would say either.

Tim Barton: 3:46
New York City, the Big Apple.

Rick Green: 3:49
Times Square kind of thing.

Tim Barton: 3:51
Right Times Square, or possibly it could be the Presidential Tree. But that would surprise me. Knowing some of the presents we've had, I would think they would have done something religious. But it wouldn't surprise me if the Big One up at Times Square in New York, if that one did not do religious things.

David Barton: 4:08
Alright, get ready for a shock, because this was a shock to me. It is the US Capitol Christmas Tree, the one at the US Capitol.

Rick Green: 4:16
Not the White House, the Capitol, and we get somebody fringed in Congress. How is?

David Barton: 4:19
this gone for so many years. Well, it's no longer the policy this year. We have a new speaker of the house and there have been a number of things that have changed under Mike Johnson and I'm not saying he's directly responsible for this, but now that he's speaker, it's suddenly okay to have Christmas decorations and have religious symbols. Can you imagine Christmas being a religious holiday? I mean, it's just the birth of Jesus. It's just a federal holiday to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Why would you have anything religious without? I don't know what they were thinking. Of course you can't have religious. Now there is a change and that's goodness in the Capitol that they've done this and that's really, really cool. And the Christian Defense League, Reverend Patrick Mahoney. They've been trying to get Congress to change this for years, but it got done this year and it doesn't say who did it or why. But I'll just correlate the fact that we have a new speaker and there's a new tone in town with a whole lot of stuff. But I am shocked that the US Capitol has had that policy for years and they rescinded that policy for this Christmas this year. Hopefully it stays that way going forward, so that's really good news. While we're in the people's house.

Rick Green: 5:24
There's a new wise man in town. Get it like a new sheriff in town.

David Barton: 5:28
See, I had to think about it.

Rick Green: 5:29
I was trying to think what would be the right. Right, you know, corollary to the sheriff in town. I could only think, wise man, I don't know Well said yeah by Johnson, I'll go with that.

David Barton: 5:39
Yeah, that's good. The other one that I'll go with on the People's House is they recently had a vote related to Israel and particularly so much of the Israel stuff that's going on right now. The other side of that is Iran. Iran is funding the Hezbollah. Iran is funding the Hamas on the South end and Hezbollah in the North end and over with Yemen and other stuff out of Syria coming from the Eastern side. So all the enemies that are right now are being funded by Iran. And strangely, as this stuff started, biden actually lifted the prohibition on funding for Iran and started releasing some funds and made things going back in. Well, the House has just put through some specific measures and tried to avoid the shutdown, and Mike Johnson's done a good job of trying to move those bills forward. But they just voted to cut off the administration's ability to allow any funding to go to Iran. So the president can't free up any account, can't free up anything that's frozen, and nearly 90 Democrats voted with the Republicans on that. So that really indicates a split Democrat party over support for Iran. I love the fact that 90 Democrats were willing to jump on with the Republicans on this, and so it was initially focused on just that $6 billion that Biden has been trying to move into Iran. But they made it a lot more than that, and so they made this thing where you can't do any kind of funding for anything, you can't free up any sanctioned money. There was $10 billion that they recently freed up from Iraq and they allowed Iraq to buy their electricity from Iran, paying Iran $10 billion. No, no, no. You want Iran going under. You don't want $10 billion coming in. They claim it's for electricity. It's probably electricity they use for their nuclear program. They're trying to blow Israel up, but nonetheless, this provision says you can't come up with any funding for Iran out of any bucket whatsoever. You can't do it. And then they also part of the measures that night where they also voted to add language to condemn Hamas. So language condemning Hamas, which is a big deal. This administration was doing that early on. Then the State Department got involved, then they backed away from that and they're trying to make comparative stuff between Israel and Hamas and they both have trouble and they both whatever. So it's really good that the House has come up with this and it's really good that 90 Democrats were unwilling to continue funding for Iran. So good news out of the People's House on a couple of fronts.

Rick Green: 8:13
Yeah, and let's emphasize that right, because a lot of people are saying, well, they're still not doing anything. They're still not. There's still no good news because they haven't. Some of the big ones, you know, again, with a five vote or whatever it is majority, it's very difficult to get the big victories. This sounds like a lot of good stuff, tim. Alright, man. How about you? Where are you headed with some good news today?

Tim Barton: 8:30
Well, this one is going to something happening in major corporations, major institutions in the nation. The headlines is corporate support for DEI and the workforce is dropping. Now DEI is diversity, equity and inclusion, and one of the things that we saw, man, the last couple of years at least, is there's been a big push from a lot of the woke crowd saying that we have to do a better job of hiring based on a ratio. So instead of saying let's hire the most talented person, regardless of who they are, we're saying no, we should hire people based on their race, their gender, their ethnicity, not based on the skill, which we saw airlines saying that they're going to start hiring pilots on a DEI scale.

Rick Green: 9:17
We made fun of that saying yeah, I feel much safer in flying now. I mean, I want my surgeon and my pilot to be chosen based on the color of their skin, not on their skills, of course.

Tim Barton: 9:26
Both early medical schools, law schools and airlines were saying they're going to follow this DEI program and that's how they're going to get students into their law school, students into med school, or how they choose pilots to fly planes Again, utterly ridiculous. We made fun of it internally. The good news is is corporate support is dropping. Now to say it's dropping and it's worth noting that this data came from 143 organizations they're employing numbers in the hundreds of thousands and it dropped from 58% last year to 54% this year. So it's still the majority of companies are doing, or of these big corporations, right. So whether it's an Amazon or Google or whatever, these big corporations these big companies are, the majority of them are still doing it, but the number is going down, and even the companies that said they have embraced a DEI strategy dropped nine points, with 60% last year saying they have a strategy to implement DEI to 51% this year. So the good news is that a lot of companies and corporations are recognizing that this wokeness is not helping. It's not solving the problem. In fact, many of these corporations acknowledged that there was far more controversy in doing this than they thought or realized there would be, and they cite a few reasons why that they get might be, but which also includes some political figures, and they include a lot of politics in this. But what is what is kind of a great conclusion about? This is or, I guess, maybe the greatest explanation but companies that are like at Google that are still embracing DEI. They only add and this is for 2019, they spent 114 million on an initiative aimed at increasing and promoting diversity and their workforce was only 3% African American. But they were able to say, hey, we did all this training so that they're able to check the woke box without actually changing any of their ultimate hiring fractures for executive, etc. The economist published findings. They suggested that DEI programs do more to protect against litigation than to reduce discrimination. So it's not actually these companies that are pretending to be so self-righteous and woke. All they're doing is something that allows in the path themselves in the back, that allows in the cast, to get others for not being as woke as they are, even though it's not actually reflecting how they operate their business. So the ultimate good news, as I read this article, is that wokeness is not succeeding the scale we thought it might when it was being loaded a couple years ago. It is declining, which is great news that the corporate world is recognizing at least some of them are that this direction is not what is going to be the most productive or profitable or even beneficial for their company. So it's really great news that DEI is on the decline, even though it's certainly not gone away with. It is declining, and that's really good news.

Rick Green: 12:37
Yeah, and unexpected, honestly, man, because that stuff is such a cancer, you know, it usually just keeps spreading, keeps spreading, you know, and it goes deeper it's tentacles, deeper into culture and into those areas. So this is almost. It kind of gives me hope that we can in fact interrupt that pattern of you know, the tough times make for tough men. Tough men make for good times. Good times make for soft men, soft men make for tough times. You know that we've got enough pain that instead of having to go full tilt tough times, maybe, maybe we can use these tools the founding fathers gave us and interrupt this thing and prevent from going full left. Okay, guys, quick break, we'll be right back. We've got more good news for you folks. Stay with us. You're listening to.

Tim Barton: 13:25
The Walborder Show. Hey, this is Tim Barton with Walbuilders, and, as you've had the opportunity to listen to WallBuilders Live, you've probably heard the wealth of information about our nation, about our spiritual heritage, about the religious liberties, about all the things that makes America exceptional, and you might be thinking, as incredible as this information is, I wish there was a way that I could get one of the WallBuilders guys to come to my area and share with my group, whether it be a church, whether it be a Christian school or public school or some political event or activity. If you're interested in having a Walbuilder speaker come to your area, you can get on our website at wwwwalbuilderscom and there's a tab for scheduling and if you'll click on that tab, you'll notice there's a list of information from speakers bios to events that are already going on, and there's a section where you can request an event to bring this information about who we are, where we came from, our religious liberties and freedoms. Go to the WallBuilders website and bring a speaker to your area.

Rick Green: 14:28
We're back here on Walbunners, got some good news for you today. Be sure and tune in every Friday for a lot of good news and then share it with your friends and family. Get it out there, because a lot of people feel like man, the culture is lost. There's no good news. There's actually a lot of good things happening. We've got some tough battles Certainly tough battles ahead, some real bad nuggly out there, but there's a lot of good stuff that keeps us motivated to fight for the things we believe in. David, what's our next piece of good news, brother?

David Barton: 14:51
Well, kind of doing a tag team with what Tim had on how Woltness is really not doing well in the public marketplace. Here's another couple to throw with that. These are showing how Woltness is not doing well with where people put their money, not just the philosophy of DEI, but actually when it comes to financing Woltness, people aren't liking it. We've talked about this group so many times, but probably the crusader, the number one crusader for Woltness may be Disney and had been for a few years, and now they've been really punished for it. Here's another one. Over the holiday season, thanksgiving era, they came out with their new movie, wish and that movie. They had put $200 million into producing that movie and it brought in $19.5 million. They got pounded at the box office. The previous holiday movie they'd released, a Strange World, and they put about looks like about $210 million into that and they made less than $12 million on that movie. Whether you look at all the other things they have done the marbles, whether you look at the Indiana Jones, all these things they were doing they have not done well. When you look at these movies they've got, they're just not doing well, and Disney was the face of Woltness there for a good while as they were taking over to the Sanctus in Florida and refusing to follow all the standards that were going on. They were their own entity and that's just not done well for them. The other one that we have talked about before as well. That's also fading, according to the Wall Street Journal, the ESGFAD the environmental, the social, the government's measurements that the woke people wanted to use to punish those who didn't have their views, reward those who did it's now crashing when you look at Wall Street. There were so much investments about what is it $30 trillion? I think it was $10 trillion, was it $30 trillion? Anyway, some huge trillion number that they were putting into funding entities and funding started businesses. Funding businesses existed that would follow these woke standards of ESG we talked about before. That WallBuilders have been one of the leaders through our profiling legislative network and really fighting that at the state legislative level with our state legislative network. Other states have passed anti-ESG laws, but now investors are weighing in because they put money into investment groups like BlackRock and they expect to make money when they invest money, whether it be retirement funds or teacher funds or anything. You put money in there, you can at least put it in a savings account and make interest, but supposedly you put it in investment, you make more interest and they're finding that they're getting less interest rather than more. Their money is being used to finance an agenda that is producing something that is not productive, that is not helping them with their finance or anything else. So Wall Street Journal came out with this chart showing how that there had been all this rise and investment of ESG companies, and now not only is it declined, but people are pulling their money out of these investment groups that are financing ESG. That's another measure that wokeness is not doing well. It does not have public support. People are pulling their money. Jesus tells us where your money is. Where's your heart also, and people's their heart's just not in this woke kind of ESG stuff because they're definitely pulling their money out. They're not willing to finance it at any kind of expense, and that's another piece of good news. To go with what Tim had before the break. There's just a lot of indications right now that the wokeness, the DEI, the ESG, all the other acronyms that are out there it's just not doing well with the people.

Rick Green: 18:29
Again, guys, I've not, I would not have predicted this at all. Right, I just thought and maybe it's because, maybe it's because the American foundation, you know, was still stronger than what we expected that enough people are realizing how bad this stuff is and they're seeing the pain. They didn't see it initially because we are so civically ignorant, I guess, but I mean those are the two big areas that they were making so much progress on the left so fast. And to hear that good news. Of course it doesn't mean it's gone. It means we still got to fight this battle, but it means a lot of those people that had given in kind of dipped their toe in the pool and started playing around with Marxism they're going. Hmm, marxism ain't so great, tim. Next piece of good news man.

Tim Barton: 19:11
Well, this was dealing with abortion clinics closing and states becoming abortion-free. The headline says 49 abortion centers closed this year and that's 2023. Now 14 states are abortion-free and the article highlights those 14 states Alabama, arkansas, idaho, indiana, indiana as a little asterisk, because their laws went into effect in 2023. And so there were seven abortion clinics that were forced to close, which ends up leading to now Indiana being abortion-clinic-free, kentucky, louisiana, mississippi, missouri, north Dakota, oklahoma, south Dakota, tennessee, Texas and West Virginia All of those states are now abortion-free, so really good news. In fact, over the last two years, there's a total of 136 abortion clinics that have closed, so they've stopped killing babies. This article was from LifeNewscom. It's really kind of fascinating. It's a very long article breaking down a lot of what's happening in the abortion industry in this post-Rovie Wade world, what states are doing to fight against abortion, and one of the things they point out is that in 2023, there were actually 53 new clinics that opened or resumed abortion operation. And so, even though we're seeing some states that are now able to say we're not doing abortion in our state anymore, there are other states where some of these abortion providers and that even seems like a wrong word some of these people that chill babies. They go to some of these other states where they now see there's an opportunity for them to maybe expand what they do. And even in this breakdown, it's quite interesting that the vast majority of these abortion clinics that have opened or reopened they are pill-only abortion clinics, meaning that they send these abortion-inducing drugs to individuals. And where this article gets interesting, as they break it down, is, even though right now there's 670 abortion clinics in operation, which is a lot those that's in 36 states, kind of what they point out is that some of this is yet to be decided and determined in the long run, because there's a lot of pending lawsuits over these mail order abortions, because for a lot of states they've prohibited these mail order abortions and so there are some states, for example, that maybe they're sending them to O-Global Arkansas, Texas or whatever state it is, but maybe in these states they've said that we do not allow these abortion drugs to be mailed into our states. That's not something that we think is permissible in our states, right? So this is like illegal drugs coming in the state is against the law. So there's a lot of lawsuits in place again, which could become very interesting how this factors down. So the bottom line is that and we knew this all along that in a post-Rowe versus Wade world that abortion was not going to be over, that now the fight is merely in the states, and it has to be one of the states and there's 36 states where abortion clinics are still open. Obviously, even in those 14 states where abortion is illegal, there are people that are still seeking or pursuing abortions, and so we definitely have to work to win the hearts and the minds of people on this issue. The good news is we are making some significant strides in certain states, but now that the abortion industry are finding other ways to continue to make money and they're beginning to find a way to manufacture and send pills all over the nation, it is changing the tactics and changing the strategy. So we definitely want to continue working to fight and combat this evil of murdering unborn children. But the good news is we are seeing a net gain in abortion clinics closing. So even though there's some opening in other states, the ones that are closing down are still outnumbering the ones that are opening or reopening in other states. So that is a really good news that we are making some significant strides again on this pro-life issue, but there is definitely a lot of work still to be done.

Rick Green: 23:29
Yeah, definitely an area where we need to be like the men of Isacar, understanding the times and knowing what to do, thinking through that strategy, watching what you know, because evil is going to, they're going to do their thing. We've got to, we've got to be able to, like you said, change strategy and tactics necessary to respond to that. Hey, David, you got a quick one to close us out with today.

David Barton: 23:44
I do, I do, I this. This is a real simple one. The holy city has now elected its first Republican mayor in 146 years. So there you go, the holy city. By the way, the Vatican, what is the? What is holy city?

Rick Green: 24:00
Wait, let's see, it's not Los Angeles, that's angels, right.

David Barton: 24:03
That's right. City of Angels, it's not that one.

Rick Green: 24:06
What is the holy city? What city is this?

David Barton: 24:08
thing, I'll help you. It's one of the original. It's in the original 13 colonies. It was a city that had so many churches. They called it the holy city.

Rick Green: 24:20
Oh, I know this.

David Barton: 24:21
It's a city where George Whitfield did a whole lot of preaching. South Carolina, yes, which city?

Tim Barton: 24:30
Rick, I'm trying to help you, bro. I said South Carolina.

Rick Green: 24:33
Oh, I'm just. Oh, that's South Carolina.

Tim Barton: 24:36
It's because that's the only part I remember the story it was in.

David Barton: 24:39
South Carolina somewhere and, by the way, commercial. If you want to go to America's Hidden History Season 2, Tim and I do about 22, 23 biographies. And we were in South Carolina. We were at a church where George Whitfield preached and a young black man got saved and just set the world on fire in a good way, John Morant. So go to America's Hidden History Season 2. A lot of good stories, but the Holy City. Yes, charleston, that's it. Charleston has got so many steeple, so many old churches, so many. It is called the.

Rick Green: 25:10
Holy City. Oh, so the city name doesn't mean Holy, it's just that's the nickname.

David Barton: 25:15
That's the nickname of that city. That's the nickname okay.

Rick Green: 25:17
And what you're saying is that Tim was filming there and talking about this. It's just that it was more than three nights ago when he slept.

David Barton: 25:24
That's right, that's right.

Rick Green: 25:27
But I didn't even know the state, so I'm like way off. So okay, so what was the good news?

David Barton: 25:32
I got some caught up in what was the city called Holy.

Rick Green: 25:34
City. What was the good news part?

David Barton: 25:36
They've elected a Republican mayor. It's a city of 700,000. It's a large city. So they've elected a Republican mayor for the first time since 1877. So it's a first time in 146 years. And this is another. We covered some of this last week over how many of these large cities are losing their sorrow-selected people. People are turning against the large city philosophy, the really deep blue philosophy in so many cities, and here's one in Charleston, which has been a reliably blue city against since 1877. They now have a Republican mayor first time in 146 years.

Rick Green: 26:12
Very good news. I could tell you now how Right Wing Watch will report on our program today. They'll say David and Tim Barton and Rick Green said that because a Republican got elected, the city is now holy. That'll be their headline, which is, of course, not what we said, but they will love to twist this whole story around, so you got to play back the episode to figure out what we actually said. Thanks for listening. Today, folks, you've been listening to the WallBuilders Show.