Rick Green

Welcome to the Intersection of Faith and the Culture. Thanks for joining us on Wall Builders today. We're always taking on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective. I'm Rick Green, America's Constitution Coach and former Texas legislator, here with David and Tim Barton David, of course, America's premier historian and our founder at Wall Builders, and Tim, national speaker and pastor and president of Wall Builders. But we're actually going to spend today where we spent yesterday, which is in a presentation called Constitutional Defense of your Family and Freedom. This is part of our training that we do in a program where you get handgun defense training during the day, constitution training in the evening, and we're finally going to be able to do that on the Patriot Academy campus. We'd love to have you there with us. April 22nd is our groundbreaking ceremony, our ceremonial groundbreaking ceremony, and then we'll have our first class starting the next day. Already, have the ranges going in, buildings going up. It's all going to be ready for you on April 22nd, class beginning on April 23rd. You can find out more at patriotacademy.com.

Let's pick up where we left off yesterday. All this week we'll get this presentation on that foundational principle of the right of self-defense. Here we go.

 Here's where we left off yesterday, with constitutional defense of your family and freedom, seated around him. You can kind of see in the picture. There we're about 15 or 20 of those Rangers that were still alive at the time. On the 40th anniversary Of the 225, only 90 survived the mission. Here's 15 or 20 of them seated around Reagan, and Reagan starts to recount the horrific, yet heroic, events of that day. He starts reminding them what it was like and talking about how one would fall and another would take their place. He's going through the whole thing and the camera starts kind of panning across these tough old Army Rangers, every one of them, tears welling up in their eyes as they're taken back to those days of sacrifice.

Here I was. I was probably 22 years old as I sat there and watched this on the screen. My dad's on my right. The guy on my left was a man named George McCormick. Now, mr McCormick was a bomber pilot in World War II. He was a great patriot, great American. And I'm sitting there and I'm watching this on the screen and I happen to look over at Mr McCormick as Reagan is taking us back to those days of sacrifice. And right there at that dinner, everybody in their tuxedos. Mr McCormick's just got tears running down his face and instantly it suddenly hit me.

For the first time in my life I began to understand the personal sacrifice of the man sitting next to me and that he had made that sacrifice for me so that two generations later I could be free. He was willing to go around the world and die for someone he didn't even know, a generation that he didn't even know, and today I get to live out the freedom that he was willing to die for. Well, that night I went home I said man, I want to become a student of freedom. I want to honor those who died for my freedom, those who were willing to sacrifice for my freedom. I want to keep this thing alive for future generations. And I go out and give speeches and I talk about man I was proud to be an American and I talk about why we needed to preserve freedom and how important it was for us to do those things. I talk about trying to honor those who had sacrificed for our freedom. And I started thinking about that scripture that says render honor unto whom honor is due. And I started how do you really do that? I mean, I don't, you know, I teach my kids to walk up to somebody in uniform and say thank you for your service. But I mean, what else can you do to truly honor that sacrifice?

And then I saw this movie Saving Private Ryan. You've probably seen the movie. You remember the story. It was a kid, all his brothers had been killed in action, and so the military figures that out and they're trying to find this kid, private Ryan, and get him out of the theater. The real story was actually based on a Navy story, but anyway they made it an Army story and Tom Hanks plays Captain Miller and the movie is all about Tom Hanks' team trying to find Private Ryan. And all through the movie his guys keep getting killed. They keep laying down their lives for Private Ryan, they're dying so that Private Ryan can hopefully live, and so all through the movie we're losing these guys. And finally, at the end of the movie they find Private Ryan.

And just as they find him, right after they find him, captain Miller gets shot and so Captain Miller's about to die and Private Ryan goes over and kneels down next to him and Captain Miller grabs Ryan by the chest and he pulls him in and he says two words, not just to Private Ryan but to every one of us. He said earn this, in other words, earn the sacrifice that we're making for you. All these guys had died so that Private Ryan could live. And that scene morphed from that young 19-year-old Private Ryan to 50, 60 years later. Now he's standing over the grave of Captain Miller and he kneels down and he says to Captain Miller he says tell me I'm a good man. Tell me I've lived a good life. Tell me I've lived a life worthy of the sacrifice that you made for me. Earn this. That's what tonight is about. It's about learning how to earn the freedom that others fought for and many died for so that we could enjoy it.

At the end of that movie you hear a general reading, a letter, and he quotes Abraham Lincoln from the Gettysburg Address and we've been to Gettysburg and of course, everybody grows up reading the Gettysburg Address. We all remember Forskoren and all that good stuff. The part of the speech, though, that is so powerful to me that it really speaks to what we're saying tonight is this part he said it is from these honored dead that we take increased devotion to the cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion that we highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, but that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people by the people for the people shall not perish from the earth. So the part I want to zero in on tonight is where he says we take increased devotion to the cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. In other words, the way we honor those who came before us and sacrificed is having an increased devotion, actually being willing to invest our time and our money and, as the founders would have said, it lives, fortune and sacred honor into this cause that they gave the last full measure of devotion. Well, what's the cause? What did they sacrifice for? They sacrificed for the American ideal. 

And that brings me back to what I was saying, where I started going out and giving these speeches and I talk about being proud to be an American. And before 9-11, if you got up in front of a group and you said I'm proud to be an American, they looked at you like you were corny. I mean, people look at me like I was just an old-fashioned. They didn't even understand what I meant when I said that. In fact, some people come up and challenge me afterwards and say American, I mean, what are you so proud of American? So what Big deal? What's special about being an American? You act like our way of life is better than other people's way of life, as if they kind of had this moral relativism of value systems, basically saying that any government formed in any way was equal to any other Americans. So what? I didn't know how to respond to that. I mean, what do you say to me?

Back then I was a legislator. I wanted to respond to them the same way I used to do in my legislative office. If somebody sent me a particularly nasty piece of hate mail, I sent them a form letter back and it just said Dear sir or ma'am, I thought you should know that some fool has stolen your letterhead and they're writing asinine letters on it. They're even signing your name and I thought you'd want to know about it. In fact, my former legislative assistant is here, deidre Voigt, judge Deidre Voigt, here with us all the way from Texas. Yeah, she wouldn't, deidre, never would let me actually send the letter out. She'd throw it away and write something nice and then sign my name. But anyway, oh, that's what I wanted to say to these people American, so what you know. I finally started asking them questions.

Why do you think we call the last century the great American century? Why is that? It's because we saved the world, not once or twice, three times from the evils of Nazism and communism and despotism. If you want a little piece of evidence, I mean, here's just one fact to show you how different the American value system is. We're the only people on the face of the planet, in the history of the entire world, to hold a technological advantage in war and not use it for conquest, but instead use it to free and liberate people around the world. Think about it 1945, we had the bomb. No one else. We could have taken that weapon and forced every nation on the planet to submit to us. We could have controlled the entire planet. That's been the way of the world throughout history.

Anytime a nation had an advantage in war, what'd they do? Conquer their neighbors and conquer as long as they could. We had the ultimate advantage. We could have conquered everyone, and instead we took that weapon. We used it to end a war and then we took our money and went and rebuilt the nations that had attacked us. Nobody's ever done that in history, folks, why would we do that? Because there's something different about being an American. We're making America great again, too, right, there is something different, there's something unique about this value system that we talk about, and there's a reason that we get attacked, right?

I mean, the terrorists didn't attack us on 9-11 for no reason at all. They wanted to destroy our patriotism and destroy. They wanted us to loathe America. I mean, frankly, the communists have loved the fact that we now teach that kind of loathing of America throughout our system now and in our university systems, but their attack on us actually rekindled that patriotism. There was this massive wave of patriotism after the attacks on 9-11, and people were waving the flag, some for the first time in their lives. I mean, people were standing together saying, you know, red, white, yellow, black or brown doesn't matter, we're not hyphenated Americans, we're just Americans. And there was this renewed patriotism, which is great.

But I would submit to you that, as the winds of catastrophe die down, as the shock of that day has now faded into history, and here we are, what, 17 years later? We need much more than just renewed patriotism. We need informed patriotism. See, an informed patriotism is born not out of fear because we've been attacked on our own homeland. It's born out of an understanding of who we are. It's so that we can wave that flag, understanding why that flag is worthy of being waved. It actually represents something. There's a reason that we stand for that flag. There's a reason that we say that. You know, when the national anthem is played, we get goosebumps, and there's a reason why the things that that represents moves our heart. It's not just because we're Americans, it's because what being an American is all about. And so tonight I want to try to take you back to the founding formula of what they gave us and how that relates to a defense of the Second Amendment today. You know, these guys created a system that we call American exceptionalism.

Today and I know some people don't like that word, they think that's bragging. You know? Look, I'm a Texan, I know a little something about bragging, okay, I mean, we folks back home in Texas, I mean we tend to think there's only two kinds of people there are Texans and there are those that want to be Texans. That's it. That's the only two categories out there. Okay, so that's not true, but it sounds good, that's bragging. All right, Exceptionalism in the form of American exceptionalism is not bragging. It's like my mama said if it's true, it ain't bragging. And exceptionalism, think of it like this. It's like saying the word extraordinary meaning extraordinary, not normal, not ordinary, beyond what anybody else has ever done, the exception to the rule and that exceptionalism produced the greatest nation in the history of the world. But it didn't happen by accident. There was something producing that, there was a cause for that effect, and so we want to dive into the cause of what created that exceptionalism.

We're going to start with this guy right here Now. I just want to tell you, as you look at that picture, a warning to you If you ever have hair that bad or you're ever that pale, do not sit for a portrait. It'll be around for a couple hundred years. Right, his is still here.

This is George Mason. He's the father of the Bill of Rights. His Virginia Declaration of Rights is a big chunk of what the Bill of Rights is based upon. He helped to frame the Constitution, did not sign it because it didn't have a Bill of Rights and a couple other reasons. But bottom line is he's one of our great founding fathers and he gave us a quote that'll kind of drive what we're going to do tonight.

He said that no free government. How many of you want to live in freedom? Okay, that's better. That's about much better group. Okay, if you want to have freedom. He said no free government, nor the blessings of liberty. Anybody want the blessings of liberty? You want to enjoy the blessings of liberty? Great, if you want freedom and you want the blessings of liberty.

He said you cannot have that without a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles. That means not just once, but a constant recurrence to fundamental principles. That means not just once, but a constant recurrence, constantly reminding ourselves what is it that works, what actually produces the results that we want to see in our system of government? Quick break, folks, we'll be right back. You're listening to Wall Builders.

Welcome back to WallBuilders. Thanks for staying. Staying with us. Let's jump right back in to constitutional defense of your family and freedom. Fortunately for us, they laid it out for us right there in the declaration of independence, right in the heart of the declaration 56 words that sum up what I call a frame of America. It's the frame that is holding your freedom in place. It's the frame that is making the picture possible for us to enjoy liberty, even to exercise our freedom.

This weekend I'm going to get some help tonight from a couple of my boys. Rhett's going to come up and join us and he's going to explain those 56 words, the basic principles behind them. All my boys have DGs, so they're all DGs in handgun here at Front Sight. My oldest son, trey, is the one that y'all met. If you came up and got a workbook for tonight and Trey came, he and I were the first ones to come to Front Sight. He DG'd at 16. He was the first one in our whole family to DG. Then my son, reagan, who you'll hear from in a little bit, decided he had to beat Trey and so at 14, he DG'd, and then Rhett decided at 13, he was going to beat both of them.

So y'all, please welcome Rhett Green. Come on up, buddy. All right, so I'm going to start us off by pulling from the actual declaration and then I'm going to go on to explain it. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Government Creator. They are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, but driving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Now, guys, in the words of the Declaration, there are four basic frames that really represent the frame of America. First, the Founding Fathers began with the basic idea that truth is real, it is obvious and it does not change. Second, they also made it clear that God is the source of freedom. Like the Declaration says, our rights don't come from any elected or appointed officials, but they come from God Almighty. Third, the just powers of government can only come from the consent of the governed, that's you and me. The word consent is used three times in the Declaration and 11 times in the Constitution. So obviously the Founding Fathers didn't want the government's use of power without our consent. They wanted us to always remember that the government's use of power without our consent is tyranny.

Now the last part of the frame is the pursuit of happiness. This is the free enterprise system that has made America the most successful nation in history. Thomas Jefferson once said A wise and frugal government that shall lead men free to regulate their own pursuit of industries and improvements and shall not take from the mouth of labor bread it has earned, this is the sum of good government. Now let's all do our part in preserving those four basic and yet extraordinary principles. Now please join me in welcoming back my dad. All right, good job, bud, there you go.

Well done, Well done, All right. So, well done, Well done, All right. Ok, let me dive in just a little bit on that. So he mentioned this, this frame, Right? This is the way we kind of look at the declaration. It's essentially holding your picture together, and you might have a different picture that you throw up there. I like the white picket fence and the American flag in the house, Right. But your picture of freedom is held together by that frame and if we lose the frame, the picture is going with it. So all the things you love about freedom require us to have this frequent recurrence to fundamental principles in order to hold on to that frame and to keep that frame in place. So there's a lot of principles we could talk about. I mean, I want to zero in specifically tonight on some principles that the founders felt were absolutely essential. In fact, they considered the first principle we're going to talk about tonight to be the palladium of all of our other principles, the protector of everything else that we enjoy. If you back up in the Declaration, one paragraph before what Rhett was talking about, where it says when it becomes necessary for one nation to dissolve the political bands which have connected them to another and assume among the powers of the earth that separate and equal station to which the the laws of nature, is what these guys were basing so much on. They were saying look, God's shown us in nature how the system should work and how people should treat themselves and be organized. And so the laws of nature were well known to the founding fathers.

And here's this guy, St George Tucker, a founding father that was a soldier in the American Revolution. He was a federal judge. He was a scholar, legal scholar. He was actually a professor at William and Mary and in fact he was trained by before I give you the quote from George Tucker he was trained by George White. Now George White is another founder you may not have heard of. When you look at the painting that John Trumbull did of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, you have to look all the way over to the left. He was not a leftist, by the way, but he's way over there. You can barely see him peeking around the corner there. And if you look at the $2 bill with the sign of the Declaration, poor George White didn't even make the cut man.

This guy helped to give us the Declaration of Independence. He actually was also the mentor not only of George Tucker, who we're going to talk about here in a second. He was also the mentor of Thomas Jefferson, trained Thomas Jefferson, Monroe, a lot of other folks. But Wythe had to leave. He wasn't able to be there for the signing of the Declaration of Independence. He was so respected by the other members there, and especially the other guys from Virginia, that when they went to sign the Declaration of Independence, because he couldn't be there on that particular day, they saved the spot at the top of the Virginia delegation so that when he came back in September he was able to be the first name listed on the Virginia delegation. I thought that was a pretty cool story. But Wythe we could talk about Wythe for a long time tonight. We don't have time to dive into that. He trained this guy, Tucker, and Tucker replaced him as the professor of law there at William and Mary. But here's what Tucker told us.

And, by the way, Tim Barton and his wife Gabbi are here with us and Tim and David have loaned some of the documents that they have in their library for us. David and Tim have the largest private collection of Founders documents. Is it in the world? I know it's in America. I mean it's a private collection anyway it's probably in the world. In the world, it's America, which is America, yes, which is like over 100,000 documents, right? So, yeah, y'all thank Tim and Gabbi Barton for being here with us this weekend, being a part of this as well. And Tim brought some of the documents from the library and the first one I want to show you tonight. I'm going to share two with you tonight and then we're filming. Tomorrow we're going to be doing the rest of this box set and we're going to show a ton of these during the DVD programs and if you're not on FrontSitetv, you'll be able to watch it there as well. So make sure you the law.

So he took Blackstone's commentary on the law and he basically mixed it with, or took it and applied it to our US Constitution and the Virginia statutes. And here's what he said in there that is so fitting for us tonight. He said the right of self-defense is the first law of nature. Now don't forget what Rhett was saying right Out of the Declaration. Right there, in the first paragraph of the Declaration, we're told that all these rights come from the laws of nature and nature's God.

So here's Tucker telling us that the first law of nature is the right of self-defense. He said most governments throughout history it's been a study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. In other words, government wants to restrict how much you can defend yourself, because government can't control you if you can defend yourself right. So he goes on to say wherever the right of the people and this is the warning for tonight wherever the right of the people to keep and bear arms is prohibited under any color or pretext whatsoever, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction. In other words, when you start limiting and you start restricting a person's right to defend themselves, liberty is in major danger. That's what Tucker was telling us. It's the first law of nature. No-transcript. He's the one that DG'd at 14, and he was supposed to DG at a young age just because he's been teaching on the Second Amendment for a few years. So y'all welcome Reagan Green. Love you bud.

All right, guys, real quick. Before I jump into the Second Amendment, I would just like to say thank you to Front Sight, their administrative staff and Dr Piazza for this incredible opportunity to not just do a class here but be able to film it and hopefully bring more people to these classes in the future. So, with that said, let's jump right into this. We're going to start off with a guy named Richard Henry Lee. Richard Henry Lee was the founding father in the Continental Congress that actually made the motion for America's independence on June 7, 1776. Now Lee once said that in order to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of all people possess arms and be taught how to use them, especially when young. Now that right there might help to explain why John Quincy Adams, sixth president of the United States, was out with the Massachusetts Minutemen. Guess what he was doing Muscular drills. Guess how old he was Eight years old. That's incredible. Does anybody in here have a son roughly around eight 10 years old? What's your son's name? Caden? Okay, so picture Caden out doing range drills with a SEAL team today. That's like John Quincy Adams doing musket drills with the men and men at eight years old. That is just plain awesome. But let's look here again what Richard Henry Lee said, that in order to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of all people possess arms and be taught how to use them, especially when young guys. Nobody on the planet is doing that better than right here at front site training Institute.

But let's just go ahead and let's take a step back here and let's actually look at the second amendment itself. Here's what it says A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Some people can get a little confused about this word militia, but if you just transport yourself back to the founding era it is clear. This word militia basically meant every man that could fire a rifle. So this freedom here it wasn't for an official military, it was for the militia or we, the people. That's why it says the right of the people, not the right of the US military.

So, guys, here's the bottom line, even if you don't enjoy hunting or guns or self-defense training as much as my family. But hey, you're here at Front Sight, so of course you do right. But there might be some people who are watching this on TV or DVD and they might say, gosh, you know what? I just don't have as much of a passion for self-defense training as you guys. Here's my message to you you would still be wise to do everything that you can to help protect the rights of families like ours, because, while I hope it never happens, there might come a day when we need to use these guns and this training that we're getting here at Front Sight to help protect you and all of your rights. All right, that's my little one to preach there. That's over.

Moving on One last thing, guys, and then I'm going to jump off here and hand it back off to my dad. We all understand the importance of living out the Second Amendment, but can somebody here give me an example of something you can do to not just live out the Second Amendment but also protect the Second Amendment? Somebody just shout out an answer Help me out, vote yes, educate yourself, absolutely. Those are all great answers, guys, and on top of those, like Ms Deidre said, I want to encourage you to become students of history. Continue to educate yourself, continue learning about the Constitution, like you are in this class, and then take this information home and send people to future classes here, send friends, send family and then further your training and further building your knowledge of the Constitution.

Our friends. We're out of time for today. We'll pick up again tomorrow. All throughout this week, this presentation on constitutional defense. It's all about that right of self-defense, that biblical right of self-defense. You know Proverbs 27, 12, as I mentioned yesterday, the wise person foresees danger and takes precaution. The simpleton, the fool, walks blindly on and suffers the consequences. I was the fool for most of my life and then I finally decided to get training and take those precautions and make sure that I was ready to defend my family. I hope you will do the exact same thing. You can learn more at patriotacademy.com. Click on that link right there on the homepage for constitutional defense.

Speaker 1: 26:04

Don't forget that July 4th we got this special constitutional defense course happening at the Patriot Academy campus. Learn to defend yourself and your family. Don't just buy a gun and start carrying it. Make sure that you're trained. It's a trained good guy or a good gal with a gun that stops a bad guy or bad gal with a gun. And we need to make sure that we're being that wise person in Proverbs 27, 12, that foresees danger and takes precaution, not the simpleton or the fool that walks blindly on and suffers the consequences. So come train with us, David and Tim Barton and myself will all be there July 4th at the Patriot Academy campus. Go check out patriotacademy.com and click on constitutional defense. Thanks so much for listening to the WallBuilders Show