Rick Green

Welcome to the Intersection of Faith and Culture. This is the WallBuilder Show. We're taking on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective, and today we're actually live in front of an audience. David, Tim, we used to call it WallBuilders Live. We don't call it that anymore. We call it the WallBuilder Show. And now we're actually live. Do we need to change the name back?

Tim Barton

It does seem ironic, yeah, that the one time we're live we're no longer WallBuilders Live, but it is fun to have an audience and opening up to some questions, which I'm very curious what direction things might go, given where we are in the nation. Right, there was a presidential conversation between two individuals.

Rick Green

Was it a conversation I wouldn't call it a debate.

Tim Barton

I don't know what else. You would call it Appearance. It was an appearance. Yes, oh, by the way, we have people here from all over the country that still love America, still love the Constitution, still read the Word of God. They're looking to be good biblical citizens. So, David, we're not giving up man. We're actually working hard, leaning in and seeing some good news from across the nation.

 David Barton

Yeah, there's a lot of good news from across the nation, but it's an interesting time. I mean, the New York Times just ran this big op-ed that hey, keep your Judeo-Christian values to yourself. How stupid are you in that every single one of the Ten Commandments is embedded in American law. And this is the thing that's happened. Now we don't have education anymore, we have indoctrination. Because if you're educated, you know that the greatest single source, according to the University of Houston that shaped the US Constitution, is the Bible. 34% of all their quotes surrounding the creation of the document came out of the Bible. So if you want to keep our Judeo-Christian values to ourselves, we'll just have to take the Constitution away from you and let's see how well you like living in a country without a Constitution, and then we'll have to take all of our law enforcement and laws away, because things like don't murder and don't steal and those things, that has to go out the door. And all 50 states have a Good Samaritan law. That is what they are called in all 50 states.

Rick Green

It sounds like it maybe came from a particular book Samaritan, good Samaritan.

David Barton

Yeah, that's a Bible story. And then, of course, the first hospital still has the logo of the Good Samaritan on it, so we have to take that health care system. It is, how stupid are you? But that's the reflection of American education. Now, yeah, it becomes so secular. You have to work very, very, very hard to come up with the views that they hold, and progressives have gotten that and it's just. It's a. It's a great time, because most Americans and this is the thing we talked about before America is not in the position that it often appears to be, because when it came down to Bud Light and Disney and all those things, guess where the people went. But that's not the noise you hear from up top.

Rick Green

They came to the Patriot Academy campus instead of going to Disney, right, no money to Disney. Right, no money to Disney. So when you listen to loud voices like the New York Times, which is getting a lot of play, you think, wow, America is really. You know this is rough, it's a tough time, but it's not as tough as it appears. It's just the institutions are becoming really polarized. The people aren't. People are still pretty good on many issues.

Rick Green

Before we take questions, drill down a little bit on the whole idea of if you remove Christianity from a culture, people don't know all the things that Christianity did for the culture. You know when we say, treat your neighbor the way you want to be treated, they don't realize our blind justice laws and all of those things are a reflection of those Christian principles.

Tim Barton

Yeah, I mean the very idea that we have a Republican form of government. When that was established in America, it wasn't the era of republics, it was the era of monarchs. And we did something in America. Nobody else was doing at that time and it was because, before the pilgrims came to America, their pastor, the Reverend John Greenwood, he had told them right, the monarch was never God's idea. That was the opposite of what God intended. Which is why, if you go back and read in Samuel and Israelites are like we want a king, everybody else has one. And Samuel says that's a terrible idea, right, this is not going to go the way you think it is. The pastor of the pilgrims pointed out that the monarch was never God's idea and he said before that what God had established. And he goes back and points out from Exodus 18, from Deuteronomy 1, Deuteronomy 16, that God had told them you should choose out leaders from among you to represent the people. And so the very reason we have a republican form of government, it was the influence of Christianity from the pastor of the pilgrims teaching them how to do things before they came to America. The reason we have a freedom of religion idea in America.

That was not something happening at the time in Europe, because if you're in England you're an Anglican, right. If you're in Germany you're a Lutheran. If you're in France, you're a Catholic. That was not a normal notion for most of the world and it's still not a normal notion for most of the world today, because if you go to any major Muslim nation, they don't have the freedom of religion. This is not the norm around the world, but it's been the norm in America because of the influence of Christianity, because in Christianity God always gave people a choice. God gave Adam and Eve a choice in the garden when Joshua was leading the Israelites into Israel, where he says choose whom you will serve, whether the gods of the Amorites and right that your fathers lived in, right. And he goes to this list and he says but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. And God's always given people a choice. That was the reason in America that we did not have an establishment of religion, as outlined in the first amendment.

And we can go on and on and on through this but I'm going to go on with it by saying even the free market system that the New York Times loves, because that's where they get their money, comes from the pilgrims out of several specific Bible verses 1 Timothy, 5, 8, 2 Thessalonians, 3, 10. And the first free market business in a thousand years was in Aptucket, Massachusetts, with the pilgrims in 1627. Free market is what keeps the New York Times alive, and you want that gone.

Rick Green

Well. Now maybe I do understand why they keep wanting Christianity and the Bible, Any Judeo-Christian principles. If they take that out, they actually get what they really do want, which is Marxism and government controls, and none of the free market and none of the freedom that you're talking about.

Tim Barton

And this is also where, if we just did some basic reading of the Founding Fathers, George Washington's Farewell Address could not have made it much clearer when he talked about the indispensable supports of political prosperity. He says religion, morality, and in vain, with that man claimed, attributed patriotism. Who should labor to subvert these great pillars, George Washington, if you read his whole farewell address, he doesn't go through a list of 18 things that are the pillars of political prosperity. He says there's one thing political prosperity, one thing.

Rick Green

And this is a swan song. I mean, he's stepping off stage 45 years.

Tim Barton

Yeah, and that's what that's what he wanted to leave us with. He said religion, morality. The following year, when john Adams is elected uh, he then writes a letter to the militia of Massachusetts. And that's the letter, very famous line from it where he says that our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It's wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

The founding fathers knew it was the influence of Christianity, it was the influence of the Bible that allowed freedom to work in America. But to your point, for people that don't want freedom in America, they don't want the Bible, they want to remove those. And the more secular we become, the less freedom is working in so many places because we're no longer upholding standards of morality. And so if you steal less than a thousand dollars right in California, you're not prosecuted. Well, that's not gonna work for any business whatsoever. And now they're trying to figure out how they're gonna handle their economy, as their economy is appearing to collapse on itself. Right, because freedom doesn't work. The free market doesn't work. These basic principles of America don't work without the connection to their foundation religion and morality. That's Christianity and the Bible. But there are people attacking the foundation, not just because maybe it limits their perspective, but also because it limits the power and control they can have.

It limits the Marxism they can promote. But if you can secularize America, if you can demonize the founding fathers, then you can work to remove the constitution and you can usher in your communism, Marxism, which is what they think they want. Only if they were far enough sighted to look into the future they'd realize this isn't really going to produce what you think it will.

David Barton

Well, you know they hate the topic of history. That is the one academic topic that we do not test on. There are no end, of course, tests for history. And yet if they had that, they would know that they would be the first victims of the government they create. It's the revolutionaries that are the first killed by the leaders that come in. Because you don't want those revolutionaries, you want control, and revolutionaries don't give you control, they're just a great tool to help you win control.

Rick Green

And then you kill them and you get done and they know what works and what doesn't work if they're studying history. So they're not as that sound good. The socialist utopia that everybody. If you've studied history, then you know that never ends well. But if you're not teaching history, you're not testing that and you forget where you came from. Well, everybody that's here we talked this morning about. We're going to spend the next two years really working on reviving the principles of the Declaration and bringing these things back exactly what you just said, Tim, about what it takes to get there. So y'all are on board with us 

Tim Barton

Yeah. So the question then being what would public schools do if they knew some of the truth, the history, the heritage of the nation? Are there places applying that, or are the teachers either ignorant or are they intentionally being dishonest in what they do? I think is also an important part of the question.

So with that being framed. 

David Barton

There's been definitely a change in the way that Constitution Day has been handled in recent years and part of that is a change with the pedagogy of what goes in education. The younger group of teachers that have come out older teachers said look, here's what the textbook says. They're crazy, I know what it is, I'm teaching what history happened. The newer group says it's not in the textbook and I've got to teach a textbook and curriculum. So the newer group of teachers is pretty much bound by what they're given the older group of teachers. They had enough experience to say this stuff is crazy, I'm teaching what actually happened. But that's a generational shift that's happening now, so 

Rick Green

education is more about Because of the schools that teach the teachers.

David Barton

That's right they teach the teachers and the teachers teach the curriculum, and so there's really not a curriculum out there that's being advocated or used. It is a federal law. Nobody advocated or used. It is a federal law. Nobody talks about it. It's supposed to be happening on military bases, every federal installation.

Tim Barton

What's a federal law? Let's clarify.

David Barton

The federal law goes back. It goes back to actually something Truman did on Citizen Day and then in the 80s it was updated to Constitution Day and on that day every federal facility, anything that received federal money, is to dedicate that day to teaching the Constitution. So on that day they're supposed to sit aside and do it. So that means every military base, every agency, every government agency is federal or gets federal funds, all school. Well, 96 percent of schools get federal funds, so they should be doing everything that has federal funds supposed to teach that.

Rick Green

But there's by the way, I did not know that constitution day used to be called citizen day. I learned something today. So you said it was done in the 80s. So I was just you know, probably 12, but so it was. Citizen Day.

So it's the same thing, right, 

David Barton

it's the same law the public law enacted by Truman, I think, in 48, after after World War Two. You know an aftermath still in Reconstruction Japan and Germany. The public law on Citizen Day, which, by the way, that is one of the problems we have now with the influx of people coming in through the borders is you don't have any common values anymore. You don't teach citizens, you don't teach a document, you don't teach respect for the document. They bring their values in the founding fathers when they were doing the Constitution, nine of the founding fathers were what we would call foreign immigrants.

So nine of the founding fathers were not born in America.

They came here from elsewhere. 

Rick Green

Were they undocumented or were?

they. They would have been the Gentile.

David Barton

So they're the ones who put the provisions in the constitution about. You can't vote, you can't have any part of this government until you've been here several years. The ones that weren't natives.

The ones that weren't natives said one of them said. He said if I had voted when I first got here, I would have turned this country into what my country was like.

He said it's going to be a number of years.

He's the one who said you ought to be here 14 years before you're allowed to vote. They settled on five years, but there were 14 years, seven years, nine years, and it was the guys who came here from different countries who said people don't understand how different this is. If you've grown up here, you already have this. We came from the outside. You ought to require 14 years before you can, or whatever.

Rick Green

Is that why they did the pluribus unumum? Is that where that discussion came from, out of many one that we know people are going to-?

David Barton

Out of many values became one value. Okay, now we say out of many people became one people, but it's also out of many values became a common value, and that common value is what we taught and inculcated, which definitely is not happening today. Plus, you have a culture that is so opposed to any kind of values don't impose your values on me and they're so anarchist in that sense, they're so independent that there's no, and that's what the Constitution is. It's a supreme authority. But we don't want that. We want to choose our own path, and so it's tough to get progressives to teach something that's fixed, and education has become a very progressive institution. Yes, there's some good teachers in there for sure

Rick Green

 You used the word fixed.

You mean like that doesn't change it doesn't change. This is laws of nature and nature of God, don't you?

David Barton

That's right Laws of nature and nature Law of gravity will never change. There are moral laws that will never change, and those are moral laws. Now it's interesting to me. We were just looking this past couple of weeks. The Center for Disease Control had all these stats on there that virtually every single sexually transmitted disease originated with men having sex with men. You will not find that on the CDC website now. It's still true, but that's like imposing value. That might be saying that homosexuality might not be a good public policy 

Rick Green

Might hurt somebody's feelings, that's right.

David Barton

And we can't do that. So what we're going to do is I'll just have to point out there's six or eight incurable sexually transmitted diseases we've never found a cure for. But we're not going to say you're at risk for that, because if that's what you want to do and it's like, oh my gosh, you know how selfish you become that you're willing to injure people or not.

Let them have a healthy, full life because of your political philosophy and so

Rick Green

 maybe that same philosophy would cause you to lie to the American people about the cures for a virus going around, and then tell you that some other things might work.

We're going to have to take a break. I do want to say, ken, we have a one-day curriculum. It's a Constitution Day curriculum that you can take into your school. It's about a 45-minute program. It's got slides and everything. It's essentially a mini Constitutional Live, and so you can sign up to be a coach for free. Go to PatriotAcademy.com, sign up to be a coach for free and it's in your dashboard. And so between now and September 17th, start planning, go ahead and talk to the school board or a teacher or whoever and say, hey, if you don't have anything for Constitution Day, even though by law you're supposed to do something, I'm going to save you some time, or I'll give you these slides and you can go in and do it. We had a few hundred people do that last year at schools across the country. We'd love to see that get up over a thousand this year.

It's an easy tool to use, but honestly, there's a need for more, a lot more of that, especially with the younger ages. We're doing a little better with the older ones, but there needs to be a lot more with the younger ones. So let's take a quick break to the Wall Builder Show.

Break

Rick Green

Welcome back to the WallBuilders Show. Thanks for staying with us. We're coming to you live from the Patriot Academy campus with a great group of people here from across the country, and we're taking questions from the audience. And so next up, what's your question? Go ahead.

Question

I'm Shann Turner and I'm the chairman of the Lee County Republican Party and my question to you guys is there's a lot of gun grabbing. They're attempting to an attack on the second amendment. Where do you think we stand? What is the possibility that citizens will not be able to bear arms? I just want to see where y'all think we stand. Great question.

David Barton

I think we stand better than we've been in 25 years because of the courts.

Rick Green

Yeah, bruin was such a good decision.

David Barton

Both of those decisions that were written by Thomas. But now the lower courts are tricking, is matriculating down, and we're seeing. You know even what was it two weeks ago? Bump stocks, that was a. They got on that one in a hurry and said, no, bump stocks, it's unconstitutional. Limit bump stocks. And there was a lot of people, even on the conservative side, that said, well, maybe that's a step too far, but the courts have gotten the message from the, the, and so what we're seeing now is I don't know of a gun case that's come to the court in the last two years that we haven't won.

So I would say, 

Rick Green

refused a couple of them a week or two ago. Right, yeah, thomas had wanted to take them. I don't remember what the details were, yeah, so, but, like you said, some of the states and the local entities are ignoring Bruin, and so they're still trying to infringe and we have to challenge it every time all the way back up, Same thing with religious liberty.

We just did a few shows about that. We've won all these big cases. We've got more religious liberty, more Second Amendment liberty than we've ever had. But these local governments are ignoring it and so we have to constantly press. These guys just won a lawsuit. They had to fight just to be able to run ads about the Declaration of Independence and the founding fathers. Imagine that you've got to force these local entities to just follow the law.

Tim Barton

Yeah, and I would say with that, I think the fight is going to get worse For sure, and I do have more confidence that we will win those fights. But you know, if you go back to, for example, coach Joe Kennedy was the football coach from Bremerton Washington the one who was fired for praying by himself on the 50 yard line after the football game. He won that. It took seven years to win that.

And I think this is where there's a bigger challenge and problem to some extent is you're going to have some of these local entities or, depending on what appeals court, what district, etc.

You're going to have some leftists and liberals that are going to want to promote politics and they will attack some of these things, and you'll also even have some state legislatures that will do some things trying to limit what can be done in those states. And I think there's still some questions being determined in states of how far is too far, what can states do? Because states certainly 10th Amendment, states have certain powers, but those powers can't violate some basic rights, and where that line is, I don't think is fully clarified in some areas. Nonetheless, I think there's going to be some major problems that will take years to be corrected. They will be ultimately corrected, I think, but it's not going to be easy. So, even though we are winning, we're winning a lot of these cases. Some of these have taken several years because, like the bump stock ban, that was President Trump right and so we're talking about that's been years before some of us oh my gosh, you're never going to believe what I found in my safe that I thought had been thrown away.

Right, this is now legal again. 

Rick Green

If you know, you know.

And we're not tired of winning yet. Right, right, but isn't?

David Barton

it ironic that President Trump just got the decision on presidential immunity from the last election just in time for this election and that would be a pretty big issue and yet it took four years to get it done. But I think when you look at what's happening with stats on gun sales, stats on ammo sales, stats on training classes, definitely from the people side it's doing this.

From the leader side, up here with progressive guys, it's going the other way

Tim Barton

 when I heard Lieutenant Governor Winsome Sears out of Virginia, who was on an interview not too long ago and she identified that there's this incredible growth rate in people purchasing firearms and single women are the number one, and actually black single women are the top of that list and so there are more and more people recognizing based on how crazy things are that the firearm can be a great equalizer to many extents.

So, all that to say, I think there's going to be definitely wins, but I think there's some places where there's definitely leftists who are going to promote an agenda and still people buy into this false narrative that if you can remove all guns, there will be no gun crime, right, as if everybody's going to obey the law and criminals never find a way to get guns. There's still a lot of people buying into things that have never been proven to be true or accurate, and yet they're still promoting those same ideas, just like the people that promote socialism, right? I don't know why you think this is a great idea. This has never worked anywhere and yet they still do it. But I do think there's more wins coming.

David Barton

And I want to go back to that too, because socialism all right. The one course we do not test on in America is history. But if you did, you would know that there's 5,800 years of recorded history. There are thousands of nations, there's hundreds of constitutions and we're the only constitutional republic that's made it 248 years, and we want to get rid of this. There are thousands of nations that have been socialist and not a single one of them has ever survived, and yet we want to do it. It's like if you knew history, which we cover a lot, but that's the to me, that from a political standpoint, educational standpoint, that is the most underemphasized course and it's probably the most important course for government and for law and for everything else, because there's nothing new under the sun.

Rick Green

And there's probably some pretty good clues there in history. I mean like if your particular form of government killed 100 million people last century it might be the kind of thing you want to stay away from, but you got that from history.

Rick Green

So you know that from history.

You study history. And, by the way, we always say this don't just go buy a gun and start carrying, and go get training. Whether you get some local training wherever you live, or you come to the Patriot Academy campus and join us for a constitutional defense course. Get some training. All right, sir, you're next Go for it.

Question

Yeah, so the Supreme Court recently overturned the Chevron Doctrine. And to a layperson I look at that and say three-letter agencies just got gutted. Can you unpack a little bit of what that means in the short term and what that means in the long term.

Davis Barton

Three-letter agencies just had a weapon handed that can be used against them. But it's going to be a thousand more cases before it all gets settled Because FEMA, all the three-letter agencies, they're not going to stop doing what they were doing because there's a new decision. They're going to have to be sued. But now the courts have given the people a weapon to be able to use back against the government and we'll win those, just like we are on the gun cases. So it always takes a number of years for the culture to change in an area once you get that decision. But the deal is we'll start winning them now and we haven't been winning them. That's a big difference, Chevron.

Tim Barton

Well, along those lines, this is again very similar. Go back to the Coach Kennedy decision. In that decision, when the US Supreme Court overturned Lemon and said that the Lemon test was 1971, Lemon v Kurtzman, where they came up with a new test to examine religious activity in public and essentially they said if you're doing something religious in public for religious reasons, that's not constitutional, right, which is just a crazy thought. But I mean, that's  kind of the gist of it, right, as you can't do religious things in public is what they were getting at. Well, 7300 times, lemon was used to stop religious activity in public.

Well, when lemon was overturned in the Kennedy decision in 2022, everything we were told we can't do because of lemon now was back on the table, including in Louisiana, where they just passed a law saying the 10 commandments can be displayed in classrooms again as soon as Governor Landry literally the minute he is signing that the ACLU filed lawsuit because they said you can't do this, that's religious. Well, actually, you can now it's just we're gonna have to win these challenges. So, even though the Supreme Court has said here's the the new standard, it's going to take time because it's been two years now. Right, it's going to take time, and then a bunch of people willing to stand up and fight against people trying to say, no, you're not allowed to do that.

To actually show, yes, we can do this right, this is a freedom we have, this is protected Constitutionally right. We now have a new standard, a new precedent, and so I think it's going to be very similar with Chevron. It's going to be very beneficial in the long run, but it's going to take a long time before. Whether it's the environment and oil and gas, or I mean, go down the list right Whether it's the healthcare, it's going to take a long time before we see the implementation of that, but it definitely was a gutting. It's just going to be a while before it's realized.

David Barton

And let me give an illustration of how deeply permeated that is Mike Lee, a US senator from Utah, a good guy. He in his office keeps a box. That I think is really a good indication of bureaucracy, because if you go back to Obamacare, when it was done, part of the law said hey, we don't know how it's going to work out. So we create 187 new agencies and they get to write the law on Obamacare. So Congress didn't write the law. Pelosi shoved that all down to the agencies to let them write the law. So what happens is Chevron doctrine is going to severely impact that kind of stuff, but Mike in his office keeps a box of here's all the laws that were passed by the constitutional way, went through the House, went through the Senate, the president signed them or he ignored it. 10 days later it became law. So that box this is a couple years ago and that box had, I think, 127 laws that were passed by congress more like a file folder it was probably four inches tall 127 laws passed by congress.

The other box is all the federal laws that were passed by agencies and their federal laws in the sense that they are enforceable. You will go to jail if you violate them. They have penalties. The Department of Justice is going to enforce those and that stack was over 14 feet high. So you had about this much passed Constitutionally and this much passed on the bureaucracy side, and that's what the fight is going to be over with the new Chevron is how do you get that 14 feet back down to zero?

Rick Green

Well, and I'll just say this as we're closing. So, chevron, I agree with everything these guys just said Absolutely huge. And here's the best news is that it's moving us back towards a constitutional republic. So when a fourth branch that's unelected and unaccountable is doing all these things David's talking about, you're not a constitutional republic, You're being ruled by I mean, this is the 10th reason in the Declaration he's erected a multitude of new offices and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat our substance. Well, this fourth branch is way worse than King George ever was right. So we're moving further and further. We're starting to push away from that and back towards accountability. What should be happening is Congress itself, the members of Congress, should be holding these bureaucrats accountable, and if they pass a law to create an agency to do something and the bureaucrats go beyond that, they should be the ones defunding that. And they haven't been doing that for 40 years. They've used Chevron deference to kick it to the courts, knowing that the courts are then going to kick it back to the agencies, and so they love it when they don't have to be held accountable. So, chevron, getting rid of Chevron Loper allows us to at least start holding the agencies to a standard Doesn't mean it's the constitutional standard, but it is a standard.

And just to give you an idea of how bad it's gotten, the Loper decision is about a bunch of fishermen that were being told what they could catch and how much they could catch. That in and of itself is unconstitutional that the federal government would do that. But not only were they being told that, they were being told you're going to pay for a human monitor to be on your boat watching what you're catching and counting, and it's just ridiculous. It would be like the the police stopping us out here as everybody pulls into the property saying, hey, the county commissioners aren't paying us enough, so we need each of you to pay us 500. They're the bureaucrats, they're not elected and they're making you pay. That's how bad it is. So this was a big victory.

These guys are right on every front. Religious liberty second amendment that we've already talked about just the regulatory things, all of those things On the court level. We're moving in the right direction, but then we, the people, have to stand up and champion those things. So you need to go live out your freedom of religion, live all those things out. All right, thank you. That was a good way of cutting me off, because we are actually out of time. I'm Rick Green here with David and Tim Barton. You actually out of time. I'm Rick Green here with David and Tim Barton. You've been listening to the WallBuilder Show.