Speaker 1 0:07

Thomas Jefferson said In questions of power, then let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down for mischief by the chains of the Constitution.

Speaker 2 0:18

This is the Intersection of Faith and Culture. It's Wall Builders. We're taking on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective. You can check us out at our website, wallbuilderscom. I'm Rick Green, america's Constitution Coach and a former Texas legislator. Here with David Barton, america's premier historian and our founder at Wall Builders, and Tim Barton, national speaker and pastor and president of Wall Builders, you can get copies of the programs, the archives, sharing with your friends and family, get some good tools that will educate, equip and inspire you and your family, all at wallbuilderscom. That's wallbuilderscom.

Speaker 2 0:49

And if you're not familiar with the program or never heard of it and you're wondering, what do these guys do, do they actually build walls? Yeah, we rebuild foundations. That's what we do. So think about the scripture in Nehemiah that says arise and rebuild the walls that we may no longer be a reproach. Back then, if you didn't have the outer walls, you were run over. I mean, you couldn't defend your city, you couldn't defend your nation, and for us, it's the foundation, it's the principles that have been destroyed and without those we lose our nation and obviously are not even defending our nation at the southern border. So we're all about rebuilding the walls, meaning rebuilding the foundations of America, which means you got to go back and know what the foundation is. You got to study who we are as a nation. You got to study our founding documents, study the founding fathers.

Speaker 2 1:28

What was the mindset that went into creating the nation? Why did they think equal justice was so important? Not social justice, but equal justice, which is biblical justice. Why did they think it was so important for you to have due process? Why did they think it was so important for you to have the freedom of religion, the freedom of speech, the ability to be the press or to have a free press, the ability to petition your government for a redress of grievances, the ability to assemble all of those things? There was a reason that they put that into our Constitution. There were reasons that Jefferson even used the language in the Declaration of.

Speaker 2 2:00

We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that we're endowed by our creator. Not Congress, not government, not our neighbors. So all of that it's for a reason and it builds a strong nation and it's why America became the greatest nation in history. And running from those things is why we're falling apart. So we got to get back to those foundational truths. So we call Thursday programs Foundations of Freedom Thursday because it's a chance to talk about whichever one of those foundational truths you want to talk about. So be sure and send your emails in, ask your questions and we'll get to as many of those as we possibly can. All right, david and Tim. Foundations of Freedom Thursday means we're taking questions from the audience. Anybody out there that wants to send them in, please do to radio at wallblowerscom.

Speaker 2 2:42

I love this first question, guys Really going to talk about some action items today. Scott sends in a question saying I love the way you guys always encourage us to get engaged with the culture, but I need more. I want to get engaged, but it's hard to know where I best fit in to the grand scheme. Can you talk about that, or even have a regular part of the show that dives deep into this? So, guys, I mean, we do often recommend Action Steps for people. We often have guests that are doing things that people can plug into. But I guess, generally speaking, what do you say to somebody like Scott that's just saying, hey man, I hear the call, I want to do something. What would be some low-hanging fruit for him?

Speaker 3 3:14

Man, I'm going to start with an analogy. It may be a poor analogy, but I'm going to throw it out. You've had an American history a few times when a dam has broken and you've had a flood and it washed out towns and it washed people down the river and down the canyon, et cetera. So imagine that you're standing on the shore and the dam is broken and people are being swept by you all down the river and you just see somebody going by and you say, what can I do? What you do is you pick one and go save one. You find one thing to do. Don't get overwhelmed with the amount that's out there. You save what you can save, and so don't get captivated at the fact that everything is blowing up right now. There are so many areas to get involved because there's so many goofy things going on. There is no shortage of areas to contend, and so you've got to get in something. So part of it comes back to okay.

Speaker 3 4:04

The Bible says that God is. He will give you the desires of your heart. Part of that is what is the desire of your heart? What is it that you're really interested in? What do you like? What do you get into? Is it school stuff or is it military stuff or what is it that is a passion for you? And try to follow some of that passion. And if you're really concerned over the condition of education, then start looking around for something to do there. But if you're really concerned about next generation or the culture or the condition of the church or the condition of anything, find out what it is that really concerns you and that you wish you could change, that. If there was one thing you could change, what would it be? Start looking for ways to get involved in that area.

Speaker 3 4:44

And so there are things that you can fix. You're not going to be able to fix everything. You can't save everybody. It doesn't matter. You have to judge yourself by getting involved and doing something, not what the results will be. There's a phrase we use a lot around here from John Quincy Adams, founding father, president, legislator, who was in a battle and he lost most of the battles he was engaged in. But his attitude was duty is ours, results are God's and that's what you have to do. You say, all right, I'm getting involved in something, Maybe I'm just mentoring one person, Maybe I'm taking my pastor aside and helping him learn. Whatever it is. Find something to do it, and then you may find that other doors open up and you'll do two or three things, or the one you've been working on gets bigger and you have more opportunity. But you just got to find something you can sit your eye on, focus on, find where your heart takes you, what are you interested in and passionate about, and get involved at that level. That's a good starting place.

Speaker 2 5:37

Yeah, I think it's so important, david, for people to realize they don't have to do it all, they don't have to solve every problem that's out there, because it's a whack-a-mole situation right now. Everywhere you turn, there's a place that you could put your hand to the plow and make a difference. And we get to hear the testimonials all the time of people that have made a difference at their local water district or their school board or maybe it was a congressional thing that they were dealing with. But just, you said something really important not to be overwhelmed, not to be intimidated by how big it all is, but find something, one of those people that's floating by, that you can help, and everybody out there can be a part of that. Just critical to do that and not get overwhelmed by just the bigness of all of it.

Speaker 3 6:16

You know, there's a great Bible passage I think it's the second Kings. But you have Israel. They've been overwhelmed by an enemy, they've been surrounded, they are starving to death, everything is going wrong. And here's four lepers sitting outside the city they're not even allowed in their own city because they have leprosy and they're sitting outside the gates and of course, the enemy doesn't want them. The Israelis don't want them because they have leprosy and they're sitting out there and they just look at each other and say we're dying out here. The enemy's got Jerusalem's, got the capital boxed off, nobody's getting food, nobody's getting anything.

Speaker 3 6:48

And they said why sit we here till we die? And so those guys got up to go see if they couldn't do something. And they're the ones that actually found out that God had struck the enemy and they brought the word back to the Jewish people and they were saved and they got out and, as it turned out, god had wiped the enemy out and instead of them all starving to death, being confined inside the walls, these guys said, hey, why don't we go do something? And so, even a situation where that's not the people you would have chosen to bring the news, that's not the people you would have chosen to find that God has changed things, but the attitude is right. Why sit we here till we die? And that was the thing they said to each other let's go get up and do something. Just sitting here is going to kill us. Let's go do something. And that's a great attitude to have.

Speaker 2 7:34

Yeah, I remember in my twenties, when I first started getting involved, I heard this story. You guys may think it's trite or cheesy, I don't know, but it's this story of a grandfather walking with his grandson along the beach and all the starfish have been washed up on the beach and the grandson's like what's going to happen to them? And the grandfather says they're going to die if they don't get back in the water. And so he bends down and picks one up and throws it back in the water and the grandson's like okay, grandpa, but that was only one. Look at all these other ones. How could you possibly make a difference? And his grandfather said well, I made a difference to that one. So may sound cheesy, but it's true, and you don't know how much of a difference that one person that you're helping.

Speaker 2 8:13

I'll tell you guys another real story, real quick, and that is in a state where they were having real problems with the education policies coming out of the state board of education. One of our constitution coaches had a class and only one person signed up for the class. And so the coach called into the office and said should I do the class? It's only one person. And our team said yeah, always do the class. Don't shun small beginnings. You just don't know who it might be or you'll double yourself if you do the class. So come to find out. The guy that came to his class ended up on the State Board of Education. Come to find out the guy that came to his class ended up on the state board of education within just a few months. And then in the next election cycle, two more people that had come through our constitutional live classes and biblical citizenship classes got on the state board of education. And guys, we just won a primary with a fourth biblical citizenship graduate getting elected to that state board of education. So they will have the majority come January of this year. Think back to that first class one person coming to that state board of education. So they will have the majority come January of this year. Think back to that first class one person coming to that class. You just don't know how much of a difference it's going to make those little steps that you take. So really good stuff.

Speaker 2 9:14

So I hope that that's enough, scott, that you'll look for something locally. We can give you recommendations. Definitely. Listen to the program Every day of the week. There's usually somebody that we talk about, that's doing something locally that you can probably get plugged in with. Well, joe's got a great question for us. He said before the income tax came in, where did the federal government get its money? And I'm really curious about your answers on this, david and Tim, because I heard that even President Trump said the other day something about doing more tariffs and less income tax.

Government Revenue and Economic Policy

Speaker 3 9:45

Well, the answer to where they get the money the federal government gets the money from the pockets of other people. It's real simple. I mean, they don't have anything. Everything they have comes from people. So the question is, how much are we going to let them take from people? Or how did they used to do it?

Speaker 3 9:59

There used to be a belief that you're not supposed to tax or overtax the people. You're supposed to have minimal services. That's why the Constitution has the enumerated powers. There's only 17, 18, depending on how you count it, but the clauses are the same Only 17 or 18 things the federal government can do. And if they would stay with that, you wouldn't have the economic needs that they seem to have for unlimited amount of money, which right now they are, every 100 days, $1 trillion more in money, and they don't have more gold to back it. They're just printing it. So they have a need for money.

Speaker 3 10:35

So when you look at it, going back to what you just mentioned, rick, the founding fathers were really pretty serious about trying to get money from as many other sources as they could and not tax. And the Bible talks about Jesus in Gospels talks about hey, do you tax the children or do you tax the foreigners? And the answer was obviously you tax the foreigners, not the children, and so they would use tariffs and they would use excises and imports and other things. They would try to get money off of products coming in from other countries. So what Trump did in his first administration? China, using slave labor, was able to create steel at an incredible low price because it's slave labor. So instead of paying workers, everybody works for the state and you're producing steel and to put the American steel market out of business, which means the Chinese would be able to sell in more markets because they have less competition they brought that steel to the United States and was able to sell it so cheap that it was putting major American steel companies out of business. It's an unfair advantage that the Chinese had because they're using slave labor. And so what Trump did was what was? He doubled or tripled the amount of import tax coming in and it made the Chinese price competitive. And at that point you start buying from American purchasers again and you start keeping American businesses going, which means American families going, which means kids being able to have what they need.

Speaker 3 11:55

So that's the way governments have always looked at doing it. They didn't want to create an unfair advantage against their own people. So they look for ways to take taxes elsewhere. But it is the tendency of government to find ways to tax everything. Under John Adams they had what they called a window tax. However many windows you had in your house, that's what you got taxed for, and so the more windows, you must be wealthier so you can pay more. They had window taxes. They had liquor taxes. Anything they could tax on, they were taxing on, and so that's the way government always goes is depending on who's in charge. They're gonna take more and more and more money because they want the government to do more and more and more. So that's why the Constitution coaches. What they're teaching is look, keep the government limited to what it's supposed to do, and then you'll keep their desire for money at a much lower level, because they're only doing those things that the founding fathers said they could do in the Constitution.

Speaker 2 12:48

All right, guys, we've got a quick break. Then we're coming back with some more questions from the audience. Stay with us. You're listening to the Wall Builder Show.

Foundations of American History and Government

Speaker 4 13:02

Hey guys, it's Tim Barton and I want to tell you about our new book, the American Story Building the Republic. We start with George Washington as president and we've already become a nation. So really now it's how do we function as a nation? And if we look back in American history, the stability, the prosperity, success we enjoyed as Americans is because of the foundation that our early presidents laid, because of the examples they set. How do we live in America under the Constitution? What is the role of federal government and really what part did each one of these early presidents play? We go through the first seven presidents and a lot of people probably know the names Washington, adams, jefferson and Madison. Very few people know about Monroe or John Quincy Adams or Andrew Jackson. Now, we might know some of their names, we really don't know their stories. We want you to relearn, rediscover American history and see how it applies to today. Go to wallbuilderscom and get your copy of the American Story Building the Republic.

Speaker 1 14:01

President Calvin Coolidge said the more I study the Constitution, the more I realize that no other document devised by the hand of man has brought so much progress and happiness to humanity. To live under the American Constitution is the greatest political privilege that was ever accorded to the human race.

Speaker 2 14:18

Welcome back to the Wall Builder Show. It's Foundations of Freedom Thursday, so we're taking your questions and the next one comes from Nicholas. Foundations of Freedom Thursday, so, and that sort of thing, but I don't remember specific appropriations. But this has been kind of like a ping pong ball back and forth between the parties on whether or not to secure the border.

Speaker 4 14:54

Well, what I definitely remember is that Trump was not able to get $20 billion approved to build the border wall, because that's outrageous. We don't have that kind of money, but we'll spend hundreds of billions of dollars sending it to Ukraine. We'll give billions of dollars to Iran, as in they're funding the attacks on Israel, but we don't have enough for the border wall. So it's the levels of irony here. I hope enough people have paid attention that when they say we don't have money for certain things, that's their code for I don't want to fund that, I don't like it, because if it's something they care about, they find the funding. In fact, they print new money that, as you mentioned, the mass amount of printing in the last segment, I think you said every 100 days, is like another trillion dollars that's printed. It's an insane amount of money they are printing. And so they say, hey, we have money for everything. Right, we can spend money anywhere, except in things we don't really care about, right? So securing the border, where of course, biden is saying, no, it's Republicans' fault, that's why we can't secure the border All of this is just the magician saying right, watch over here and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain right. That's all that's going on in the midst of this.

Speaker 4 16:11

Now, dad, you might have and Rick you might have better recollection too. My recollection was that it wasn't that Congress appropriated new money for the border wall. It was that they found ways to cut in other areas so they had money that could be spent on the border wall, although it does seem like maybe they didn't get the full amount. But they were able to get $4 billion, $5 billion, something going to the wall. But my recollection was and now we're talking, man, it has been quite a few years ago, it was pre-COVID which that changed everything too. Memory has changed a lot, trying to remember how life used to be before Fauci and the World Health Organization and everybody else got involved in it. But it does seem like that they found ways from was it defense spending, something else? They found money that was designated for a general purpose that could be reallocated for the border wall. Dad, do you remember exactly what that was?

Understanding American Sovereignty

Speaker 3 17:12

Yeah, it was even more specific than that. They did find specific funding. They did get funding. It wasn't everything he wanted, but they did give it Evidence by the fact that I guess it's probably been five or six months ago now the federal courts came in and said hey, Biden, this money was appropriated, you have to spend it. You can't take because he was deflecting the money for the wall to other projects he wanted to spend on. And so the federal courts actually upheld that when you have designated money that is appropriated for a purpose, you can't reappropriate it just because you don't like the purpose. So that actually is a very good upholding of federal law, federal policy just because is one of the things that we have really discovered, I'm finding right now is really we have the American story one and two out now and we're working on future volumes of the American story to tell more of the story.

Speaker 3 18:04

And as you get into World War I and World War II, there's a lot of empires. There were only about 60 nations in the world back at the time of World War I and there's almost 200 now, and that's because you had these huge empires. You had the Habsburg Empire, the German Empire, the Japanese. All these people had dozens and dozens and dozens of colonies and they're going across the world conquering nations to make them their colonies. And all these academics are talking about how that America is an imperialist nation, that America is going out creating colonies Wait a minute time out. It's not America. You had several Democrat presidents who went out and tried to take Cuba or tried to take the Philippines, and then colonies they go. Wait a minute time out. It's not America. You had several Democrat presidents who went out and tried to take Cuba or tried to take the Philippines, and then Republican presidents would come in and say no, no, no, we don't do that. They're independent people. We're not going to take their nation. It's not America's imperialists. You get leaders that are imperialistic. It's like John Quincy Adams upheld Indian treaties I mean, he did a really good job and you're going to hear that, oh, all the American treaties were broken by the government. No, Andrew Jackson broke more than 70 of those treaties by himself. So it's not that America is a bad nation per se. It's the leaders that are in power, and that's exactly what you see here with this type of stuff. It is the leaders who are in power who make those kinds of decisions.

Speaker 3 19:17

So Biden gets in. He doesn't like anything keeping sovereign borders. I mean, this is the other thing about secular progressives is these guys believe there are no borders except global borders, and that's why they want World Health Organization or United Nations or whatever group that let them make policy for US, Whereas if you tend to be conservative and biblical, you understand that God makes nations, he sets the lines of nations. That is his choice and we respect nations and respect those boundaries. So what we're talking about is it doesn't matter what the appropriation was, because it was there. Biden does not like it and he's not going to spend money on it and he's going to find a way to delay it, however long it takes, or he's going to make it really tough to get that money out of the coffers, wherever they are.

Speaker 3 20:00

And something's happened and we didn't understand. There's going to be an excuse because he does not like it. And that's where you have to understand that the worldview of the people you elect is going to go way beyond anything they take in their oath. Their oath says they take an oath to uphold the federal laws and the Constitution. Biden's not doing that. He's not upholding the constitutional aspect to protect borders. He's not upholding the federal laws to protect borders, because that's not his belief. So the Constitution means nothing, unless you have an attitude that the Constitution is something to be protected, and that's what's happening right now with the border. Is Biden is going to find a way. It doesn't matter what the courts tell him. He's going to find a way to get around doing that or he's going to push it off for so long that it's not going to make a difference when he does do it.

Speaker 4 20:47

And Dad. One more point to that we had this week earlier. We had Josh Burkina on, in fact, today's Thursday, that was yesterday. We had Josh on yesterday, a from Oklahoma, and when we were with him just last week he was telling us that one of the battles he's having, even with congressmen, when they are drafting legislation, it's going through committees and they're trying to get stuff done that he sometimes will review it. And one of the questions he always asks is where does the constitution grant us the authority to do the thing that you are trying to legislate? And he was giving us one specific example.

Speaker 4 21:19

I won't mention names, but he said he was talking to one congresswoman and he said that the thing you're trying to do with this piece of legislation, it completely violates what's in Article 1, section of the Constitution and this is something you shouldn't be doing because it's not constitutional.

Constitutional Ignorance in America

Speaker 4 21:38

And he said that she looked at him and said why does that matter if it's constitutional or not? And he at that point realized oh, my goodness right, these people have no idea and this is part of the reality of the situation that we can ask these really important questions. Wait, shouldn't Congress be doing this? Shouldn't the president be doing that, and so often the answer would be yes, they should be doing X, y or Z, they should be doing A, b and C. But if you have people Dad, to your point who don't respect the Constitution or maybe right, some of them just don't understand it or they have embraced this cultural relativism, that truth is subjective and it's their truth and so they're interpreting it based on their whims of the other things. But again to this point, there's a lot of people who, just in their ignorance, they want to promote their agenda. Not even recognizing their agenda might be totally anti-constitutional in many situations, and you know.

Speaker 3 22:55

That's a great point, Tim, because so many conservatives run on the point that they're going to uphold the Constitution and yet if you started asking them basic questions about the Constitution, like Congressman McKean did, you're going to find they really don't know anything about it. That's become kind of a mantra to say I'm conservative and the proof is I support the Constitution. Well, let me make a little commercial here. One of the things we did I think last year, tim is that when we did the Stansberry book I think last year, I think so, yeah, last year we went back and we took a textbook that had been used in early America literally for decades, and it was from elementary level.

Speaker 3 23:33

You're teaching the Constitution because this is the document of the land, and I'm gonna say that people who don't respect the Constitution, because this is the document of the land, and I'm going to say that people who don't respect the Constitution also don't respect the Bible, they don't like standards, and it's really hard to find somebody who respects the Bible and doesn't respect the Constitution, because if you believe in law and order and standards outside yourself, those two documents there's a law for both of them.

Speaker 3 23:53

You know, god shows you how to live and we also have a Constitution that shows you how to operate. I, we also have a constitution that shows you how to operate. I'm not making the constitution divide inspiration, but I'm just saying that those two mentalities tend to go together. But you need to know what that is, and that congresswoman should have been able to say oh well, josh, that's in Article 1, section 8, paragraph 3, but she's not able to, and most Americans aren't able to. So commercial. We reprinted that 1826 book. It is a catechism on the Constitution. It has the answers as well as the questions.

Speaker 4 24:24

And it's called Stansbury's Elementary Catechism on the Constitution. So if someone goes to the Wallblower's website or Amazon wherever you buy your books, right. But on the Wallblower's website, if you look for Stansbury's Elementary Catechism on the Constitution, it was from 1828. We went through, modernized some of the spelling, some of the explanations, and then we added a few things, because when that was done in 1828, there were still many amendments that had not been added, like the 13th, 14th, 15th and everything beyond that. So we went through and we updated some of the things to make it relevant and try to be helpful.

Speaker 4 24:57

That, as you mentioned, this being the elementary catechism. This was considered like the beginner's understanding of the constitution, and when you look at what was considered beginning level understanding just starting in the base level and it is important for people to understand a little bit when you're going through catechism, it's like a building block. So it does start with a really simple foundation and it builds as it goes. So as you get further into the book, you're getting to the deep end of the pool. Right, there's some serious stuff here, but we would venture to say that most politicians, most Americans, would struggle to be able to answer some of the basic questions that we used to have elementary students in many cases go through back in early education. So we've reprinted that as Stanbury's Elementary Catechism on the Constitution.

Speaker 2 25:43

All right, folks, be sure to send those questions radio at wallbuilderscom, radio at wallbuilderscom. I hope that today, actually after you get more of these foundations, after you learn from these questions and we go back into history and we study these things, I hope that you'll be motivated to do more, that you won't just sit on the sidelines Faith without works is dead that you will take your faith. You'll live out your faith in every area of the culture, including how we treat our neighbors and what our society looks like. Get educated on these things. Get more information at wallboulderscom. Take our biblical citizenship class, host that class, become one of our constitution coaches and host those classes in your home or at your church.

Speaker 2 26:25

Just got back from a coaches conference. Got to hear all these great testimonials of what's happening in communities where they're hosting these classes. It's absolutely phenomenal and you can be the catalyst for a restoration of those biblical values and constitutional principles. You can be the one to lead the way in your community. Every single one of us can do something. Every single one of us has a voice that needs to be heard. Our values need to be counted. Step up and be a part of the solution. Folks, thanks so much for listening to Wall Builders.