Rick Green [00:00:07] Welcome to the intersection of faith and culture. Thanks for joining us today on the Wallbuilders show, taking on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical, and constitutional perspective. Rick Green here with David Barton and Tim Barton and always. It's a good news every day. It seems like right now Christmas, every day, five, ten times a day. I got to pinch myself and say, wow. Another good thing, either from the president or or our state legislatures or whatever it might be, but just lots of great stuff happening, guys, and even the media might be getting it. Is it possible, is it possible that even an MSNBC or a CNN? I've even seen clips where some of their reporters are saying things that I didn't think they would ever say. So some great stuff happening all the way around. David. Tim, what do you think? 

Tim Barton [00:00:46] Well, there's no doubt there's a lot happening. And one of the things that every night before our girls go to bed, we do prayer time together. And I ask the girls a question every night. What's one thing we should thank God for from today? Because I want to teach him the attitude of gratitude. And it's interesting. You don't even really have to be looking very hard to find things to be grateful for these days. With all that's happening in the federal government now, with Kash Patel having been confirmed, and I mean, you've got all these these different disrupters, I think is the word that we've been using for them that are now in position to federal government. But it's also interesting. I actually had a cousin just last week that texted me, and she's in college, and she said, hey, is President Trump doing a lot of bad stuff? And I kind of chuckled back in the text like, no. Ha! Why? And she said, well, I just I'm hearing about all the bad stuff he's doing, that he's taking people's rights away. What rights is he taking away? And I said, that's the important question, right? When people are saying this, you need to ask some questions back. What rights are you taking away? Because other than him saying that there are two genders and that boys can't play in girls sports, I don't know what rights people would be arguing about that he could be taking away. But there is so much of the leftists mainstream deep state government favored media that's still carrying these narratives. And she actually said, look, my social media like this is what people are saying on there, which also is very interesting that we do know a lot of places with young influencers. There's been some that been very critical of President Trump and what's going on. So certainly that's out there. However, it's interesting that some of the the more mainstream outlets, their their viewership has declined so much. What back in 2015 and 2016, they were like at this incredible high because they were trashing Donald Trump and people were piling on to watch the trashing of Donald Trump. This time they're trying to trash Donald Trump, and it seems like they're really not getting very much traction anymore. 

David Barton [00:02:48] They're not getting a lot of traction. It's interesting, though, that they they keep the narrative about if this was the free market, most of those guys would be out of business. But when you have somebody like Soros with his 17 billion willing to fund this stuff, they don't care how bad it gets, but it does look like the things started to change. We just got word that Joyce Reid, for example, with MSNBC,. 

Tim Barton [00:03:08] Joy Reid yeah, there. 

David Barton [00:03:10] That's how much I listen to her. Joy. Joy Reid with MSNBC lost her, lost her spot. But, you know, even back to your cousin Tim. She's a conservative gal. I mean, she is conservative, but even on her feet as a conservative, she's getting so much trash and trying to get the free market back out there. There are so much propping up the negative narrative. If it actually was a free market for ideas and and if actually free market one out where the good stuff is funded, the best up is not because the people do it. We would have a different culture, but we just don't right now because we have funders like Soros and others, they keep put money into it. 

Tim Barton [00:03:46] But I do think more people are beginning to see through some of this. You know, we've all of us, we've dealt with cancel culture individually. I certainly wallbuilders, you know, people coming against even Patriot Academy, that there are people out there trying to cancel who we are, what we've been doing, I mean, really for more than a decade. Going back to even dad, when you were doing The Jefferson Lies, and there were people that came out trying to cancel that and some of them, right. Even identifying Christian and some of them maybe genuinely were Christian. Now, it certainly was ungodly the way they did things, because they they were not they there was two of them. So maybe they those two. Is that if they them, that's okay. Anyway, not to be distracted by this. Right. But there were these two professors. One of them I think genuinely was a Christian. One of them, and obviously we're not the one that judge souls, that's God. But just judging by the fruit and by some of the things they were supporting, doesn't it certainly didn't line up with biblical truth. And so maybe some questions there. However, the one that certainly is a Christian, when he came out and said, oh yeah, David Barton lies, WallBuilders  and make up, blah, blah, blah, whatever, the fact that you had known him, he knew you and he never once came and talked to you. Right. Kind of the Matthew 18 principle that if your brothers ought against you, you should go and talk to them. Go make things right is what Jesus told the disciples. And certainly this guy never followed that biblical principle. Nonetheless, with that being said, like there was this big cancel culture movement with the Jefferson Lies more than a decade ago. You then came out, I worked with some college professors and guys and said, okay, let's do this academically. Because what you were saying, it's not that you were saying things that weren't true, but you were saying things in a way that triggered some of the academics and said, okay, look, let's, let's, let's make this even tighter of a case because like when you said Thomas Jefferson was funding missionaries to the Indians and maybe more technically, okay, so the government funded a Catholic priest to go live among the Indians and build a mission and stay with them for two years. And you're like, yeah, that's called a missionary. I don't disagree, right. When you are somebody going to live with a people that doesn't know God and you're going to live with them for the purpose of telling them and teaching them the gospel like that. That is what a missionary does. But with that being said, you didn't came up with the Jefferson lies a clarifying some of what triggered these guys in the first place, making it more academically bulletproof. But ultimately it didn't matter because what they were doing was not based in, well intentions, good motivations. They were coming from a philosophical perspective that they didn't agree with the position that you were taking. Therefore they didn't care what was true. And we have we have seen this one. In fact, guys, even with Wikipedia, we have seen this on Wikipedia, where certainly the Wallbuilders page, the David Barton page, you know, the things they said about you. And when years ago, we actually hired a company to help go in and clean up the Wikipedia page, only to find out that we were not allowed to edit anything on the page and that we couldn't. 

Rick Green [00:06:45] About yourself. 

Tim Barton [00:06:47] Right about David Barton. Yeah, right. But like crazy. 

David Barton [00:06:52] Well, Rick, at the time, you and I both had defamation since we both won and a lot of the claims Wikipedia was making, we won. They were wrong that those claims are wrong. We won the defamation and we were not able to get him a change of nation suit. And we can say defamation because they said no, no, no, that's biased. Wait a minute. It's a finding of a court. It is a ruling. It is a settlement. And well, you can't mention that. I mean, Wikipedia's so one sided. It's just crazy. And even though one of their co-founders apparently has come out identifying now saying, hey, I'm a Christian at conversion experience, that's awesome. Wikipedia itself still has lots and lots of problems, and I think most people don't even fully understand how bad Wikipedia is. I think a lot of people are aware that you're not allowed to cite Wikipedia as an actual source, because it's an open encyclopedia, and people can go through and edit and change things whenever they want. So it's not a reliable source in any kind of citation perspective. But most people have no idea how biased Wikipedia is either. 

Rick Green [00:07:51] And they use it as their main source, right? Like it's always the first one to come up. Whenever you do some sort of a search, it'll be the first one to come up on, you know, any kind of a Google search. And so for a lot of people, that's the gospel. That's their source of all truth. So really important. This interview today, to get behind the curtain a little bit and find out just how biased it is and how we might be able to turn it in the long run, or at least get people to start going to other sources. So Dan Snyder is going to be with us. We come back from the break. He's over at Meteor Research Center, is going to give us some good input on this. Stay with us, folks. We'll be right back on The WallBuilders Show

Rick Green [00:09:26] Welcome back to the Wallbuilders show. Thanks for staying with us. Dan Schneider, with us from the Media Research Center. Dan, thanks for coming on, man. 

Dan Shneider [00:09:31] Hey. Thank you. Good to be with you. 

Rick Green [00:09:33] Well, hey, appreciate all that you guys are doing. Please give Brent our best. We appreciate him very much. And, you know, just thankful that there are some truth tellers out there. And you guys uncover a lot of this stuff. Just like Ellen's uncovering a lot of the waste. You guys are uncovering a lot of the abuse. And so apparently Wikipedia, which, you know, we've never considered a reliable source, but blacklisting conservatives now literally deciding who's a truth teller and who's not. 

Dan Shneider [00:09:58] Yeah. You know, Wikipedia was founded basically to democratize information. You didn't have to be a rich guy buying an Encyclopedia Britannica set. You could just go online and get it for free. But the problem is that radicals took it over, and radicals are making sure that if you look up somebody, whether it's a political figure or a cause or a company or anything, that you're only going to get the worst kind of description about that thing, that person. You're only going to get a radical view of that of the person. So if you. Yeah. And Wikipedia does this by first requiring that any information included on a Wikipedia page have a citation to it, but only left wing sources are allowed to be cited to literally conservative right of center media outlets are blacklisted, blackballed, excluded. 

Rick Green [00:10:58] And who makes that call? Like, how do they do that? Because like you said, it's supposed to have been this thing where, you know, anybody can get on there and, and, you know, comment or influence or have a, have a voice in it. 

Dan Shneider [00:11:10] Yeah. Well, Wikipedia has got a set of editors. That's what they call these folks. And these editors are almost universally left of center to radical. But even more significant than that, they've got their internal protocols, and we were able to gain access to these protocols on the back end of the Wikipedia page. And we found what they they literally they literally call it their blacklist. Wow. This is not our term. It's their term. A list of news outlets that are blacklisted and blackballed. And it you know, and so we compared all of the news sites that they they've got on this list to, you know, to all sides. All sides is a company that rates media outlets from left to right and in fact, 100% of right leaning outlets are blacklisted and blackballed by Wikipedia. Whereas 84% of left of center media outlets get the golden stamp of approval from. 

Rick Green [00:12:13] Wikipedia, of course. Yes. Okay, so what's the right way to correct this? Is it is it is it kind of like the Facebook years of, of, you know, four years in the desert there where we all just had to go find somewhere else to, to post things and to and to have an audience or is there a way to, to, to put pressure on, on Wikipedia to try to get a change, or do we just give up on it and somebody's going to have go create another one? 

Dan Shneider [00:12:38] Well, okay. There's a number of things to keep in mind. First of all, Wikipedia and its its owner company is actually Wikimedia. Wikimedia is a 501 C3 charitable organization. R.S. says that if you give money to it, if you donate money to it, you get a tax credit, just like if you gave money to your church. So maybe the IRS needs to look into this. Has Wikipedia abused its charter, its IRS approved charter, and should its tax exempt status be yanked? That's one very important question. A second thing. Yeah. And if you've ever listened to me or followed me here at the Media Research Center, you know that of all the social media platforms that we write about and investigate, the worst of them all is Google. Google is the font of all evil. But if you do a search for somebody's Google, it's either the second or first or third search result will be. 

Rick Green [00:13:43] Is going to be Wikipedia. Yeah. Oh, yeah. 

Dan Shneider [00:13:45] I mean, Congress should investigate this. What is the commercial interest, the commercial tie between Google and Wikipedia? Why? What do they have going? Because we have shown over and over and over how radical Google is, how how Google uses its corporate resources to try to sway elections. Now, what kind of deals have been cut between Google and Wikipedia? What is their purpose? Is it a political purpose? Because it certainly looks like it. 

Rick Green [00:14:12] Is there a has anybody done in any research on the difference in a Google search and how far Wikipedia ends up high on the list compared to, you know, I don't know, DuckDuckGo or or one of the other browsers? 

Dan Shneider [00:14:27] Yeah. It's interesting. We do searches, compare and contrast in Google with DuckDuckGo Brave Tusk, and most of those others use a use a Google algorithm to do their things. Tusk is different. Tusk. If you've ever heard of Tusk, Tusk will give you very different results from Google. You can actually use to ask Tusk either to give you left of center results, right of center results, or neutral results. If you ask for right of center results, you don't get Wikipedia, you know, at the top. But the others. Yeah. Everybody you know it. Yeah. Seems to favor Wikipedia. 

Rick Green [00:15:06] So you can actually with Tusk you can self-select. You basically say I want this this type of an answer. 

Dan Shneider [00:15:11] Yeah. Yeah. Tusk gives you the it puts the consumer in charge. You know, we get to decide if we want a biased search results or not. 

Rick Green [00:15:19] That's interesting. I did not know about that. I, you know, four years ago I remember looking at DuckDuckGo, DuckDuckGo versus Google results, and DuckDuckGo was so much better. And then I started hearing that. Now they're basically piggybacking basically what you just said. They're using a Google algorithm. So you're still going to get the same bias. Yeah. And so so the task one who is that. Who is that a do we know who. 

Dan Shneider [00:15:41] Yeah. He's he's an entrepreneur who just got so tired Google feeding him radical biased false information. He he he's not a Partizan guy himself, but he just thought a search engine should be neutral. A search engine should not be designed for political purposes. Yeah. 

Rick Green [00:16:02] Tusk. All right. I want to check it out. Dan. Well, thank you guys for what you're doing. And, you know, what would you say at this point? I guess before I let you go in this new world we're in, where the appetite is different out there and people are getting a little bit more media savvy, and they and they're a little bit more hungry for truth. How is that affected the landscape of of the mostly biased media out there? Are they getting the message? I felt like the marketers got the message in the Super Bowl ads. They just seem to be a totally different tone for 90% of those ads. Does the media wake up or are they just too sold out to the left wing? 

Dan Shneider [00:16:37] Cause, you know, I just the illegal, unlawful behavior that we saw exhibited for years of the Biden administration even before then was just so outrageous. Even before this election, the Republican commissioners on the Federal Trade Commission both vowed that they were going to investigate advertising firms, and whether they were colluding to try to dry up your revenues with with right of center media. We've seen a FCC commissioner now the chairman Trump has designated Brendan Carr's chairman of the FCC. He's launching his investigations. Congress is launching investigations. And President Trump signed executive orders ordering his agency heads to cut out all this censorship initiative from the Biden administration. I mean, over and over and over in the last three weeks, it's been a whirlwind of improvements. And then, of course, we've seen Mark Zuckerberg, you know, pledged that he's going to turn his Facebook and Instagram outlets into free speech outlets again. We've seen Amazon start to make improvements. I mean, it, it is a whole new world, but we still have lots of people out there who are trying to suppress our rights. 

Rick Green [00:17:55] Lots of work left to do. Last question for you, Dan. The exposure of USAID and the money go into Politico and all these other news outlets. How do you think that plays out? What kind of impact will that have? 

Dan Shneider [00:18:05] Again, this is unlawful behavior. Our government is not supposed to be putting its thumb on the news scale in favor of one entity over another. You know, and and if you're a politico or The New York Times and you've been doing all of this reporting in favor of Joe Biden in favor of Kamala Harris against Trump and never disclosed that you were on their payroll. Well, yeah. And that is, in addition to it, violating U.S. law. It's also unethical. 

Rick Green [00:18:38] Yeah. Yeah. No doubt about well. And I mean, yeah, the amount of money is outrageous, too. And the fact that that's taxpayer money, is it that the definition of a state run media, I mean, if you're funding that media now, granted, I don't know what that is of their total budget. It probably doesn't come close to Big Pharma's influence on them. But still, I mean, if government's funding your media, That's state run media. 

Dan Shneider [00:19:01] Look, if you're any of your listeners who runs a business, whether it's a subway sandwich shop or a plumbing business or a tech company, if I say you can improve your revenue, stream your profitability by 15 percentage points. People are going to, you know, jump over the moon to get that right improvement. You know, and if Politico was getting anywhere from 15 to 20% additional revenues just by the government handing it to them, that very well could have made the difference between going out of business versus being highly profitable. You know this, but it was all based on our tax dollars. And Politico spent years just attacking conservatives, Republicans, Christians, other people of faith, Donald Trump. You know. You know, Senate candidates, you know, just on and on and on. And now we see the Politico. POLITICO's been on the take the whole time. 

Rick Green [00:19:55] So good to have this stuff exposed. As Bill Bennett said years ago sunlight's the best disinfect Dan Snyder Media Research Center. God bless you, man. Thanks for coming. 

Dan Shneider [00:20:02] On. Thank you. 

Rick Green [00:20:04] Stay with us, folks. We'll be right back with David and Tim Barton. 

Rick Green [00:21:13] Welcome back to the WallBuilders Show. Thanks for staying with us. That was Dan Schneider for our special interview. Today. Media Research Center is the place to go. They are really good at breaking down a lot of these things, not only Wikipedia, but a lot of the other outlets that are out there. And and so I was actually thinking, before you come in on the interview, I was saying about what, Tim, what you said earlier in the program about, you know, your friend that called and, and the whole thing about Trump taking away rights. And I was actually thinking, no, no, he is taking away some rights. He's taking away your right as a guy to go into the girls bathroom or the girls locker room or the girls shower. That's not a place we're going to give you a right to be or to compete in girls sports. So you might have thought you had a quote unquote, right. And maybe I'm going to send us down the rabbit hole of what a riot is. But yeah, there's some things he is going to say and that we have been saying you should not have the right to do in our culture anyway. Didn't mean to derail us. Back to the earlier conversation, but what'd you guys think about what Media Research Center was saying? 

David Barton [00:22:05] Well, even with Wikipedia. But back to the rabbit hole you were with. It is if you look at Trump we've had the last three weeks. The good news Friday's, that is nothing but Trump. Trump, Trump, Trump. And we've had more good news in three weeks than we often have. And much when it comes to political stuff, federal stuff, federal level. And so it's we've been really good. And yet at the same time, guess what? I can also report the fact that Trump has more than 70 lawsuits filed against him right now, because he is so trampling the rights of so many people, the rights of immigrants and the rights of transgenders and the rights of questioning. And and he's just trampling there. Right? There's 70 lawsuits out there. So I could report that, but then I could also report the other side. And that's what we're wikipedia is this not doing this? Dan pointed out that you are you're not allowed to have a conservative citation anywhere on it. You have to cite two liberal sources only. And the problem with that, for anyone logically thinking, and we're not necessarily in a point of logic all the time, But you go back to biblically. Proverbs 18:17 one side sounds good until you hear the other. So you always try to get two sides. If you've got kids and you're raised with kids. Yeah, they'll tell you something, but you got to dig a little deeper because they have an agenda. I mean, they want to get the brother in trouble or the sister in trouble, or the teacher in trouble or something else. You got to get the rest of the story. But that also we embedded that in the Constitution with the due process. Right. You have a right to compel witnesses in your behalf. It's no longer the Star Chamber courts. We're just one side is going to be heard. But that's what Wikipedia does. It's going to be one side. And Stan pointed out it is the number one thing that pops up with all searches. Wikipedia is going to be the first thing up. And this is where people go. And it's just not a source of truth anymore. And you're not going to get the truth about about us or about Trump or about so many things when you go to Wikipedia. And that's what people need to be aware of, because right now it has been funded and supported by a lot of LEP people who don't want any voice from the right. And it's one thing when when you make a claim and you cite a source to allow people to go in and look and say, wait a second. So you're only quoting Fox News? Okay, I might be skeptical. You're only quoting CNN. I might be skeptical. But this is where you trust people to be able to make those decisions. And this is why if you look at Wikipedia, when there are claims, there's often a footnote by that claim. But as Dan pointed out, when you're only allowed to footnote to these very left liberal sources, that's why on some of the conservative Wikipedia page is they look like they're the worst, most awful, racist, bigoted, hateful people, etc., etc.. Because when you're only allowed to quote one side says about you, right? If you if you can only quote the things about Donald Trump that Hillary Clinton said about him, you can go, well, this guy's the worst ever. As opposed to if you can look at what both sides say and then you can draw conclusions for yourself, that would be the more intellectually honest thing. But certainly that's that's just not what we've seen from Wikipedia. And again, like we've known this for a long time, although I don't know that I that I would have realized it was as blatant as it was. To the extent that you can't cite a conservative outlets as a source on Wikipedia. I had no idea was that bad. I knew it was very left leaning. I knew a lot of the editors on Wikipedia were very leftist as far as the higher level. But to the extent that now conservatives are not allowed to have a voice, you cannot side or quote things from conservatives. It does indicate how troubling it is, and it is identified the fact that they're working with big tech to make sure that this is going to be the top thing that you see in the top 3 to 5 options that pop up are going to be Wikipedia. It's very telling because they really are working hard to shape the narrative in a very secular, leftist way. 

David Barton [00:25:41] But it's also good that now things like the FCC might be looking into it, because that helps sunlight shine on this stuff. And more people say, well, why are they looking into it? Or oh my, I didn't realize they were that bad. It's like our interview with Dan today. We've learned a lot of stuff about Wikipedia that even we didn't know, but that FCC investigation could help bring some sunlight, which could bring some moderation on some of their positions, which would certainly help America since they are a primary source of information, albeit false. 

Rick Green [00:26:07] Well, it can't help to go back four years, guys did to David when you were doing your truth and courage presentation across Georgia and talking about you got to work a little harder, a lot harder, actually, at finding truth. Be smart about your resources, guys. Pay attention to your your diet of information. As our friend Nicole Tice likes to say out in Delaware, you just got to make good choices. And sometimes it takes doing some homework. And of course, listening to the WallBuilders Show and will help give you some good resources here as well. But as we've always said it wallbuilders hey, check us as well. Check our resources. Don't just take anything for granted. Thanks for being wise out there folks. Men and women of this record that understand the times and know what to do. You've been listening to the Wallbuilders show