Rick Green [00:00:07] Welcome to the intersection of faith and culture. It's the WallBuilders Show taking on the hot topics of the day from a biblical historical and constitutional perspective. And today you get to drive the conversation, send those questions in to radio@wallbuilders.com. That's radio@wallbuilders.com. Maybe a question about the founders, perhaps application of that constitutional or maybe historical or biblical perspective on some issue of the day that you're hearing about. So send those questions in and we love. To hear from you, we'll get to as many of those as we can today. I'm Rick Green here with David Barton and Tim Barton. Gosh. Foundations of freedom Thursday. Let's get into some foundations. You ready for some questions? 

Tim Barton [00:00:42] Uh, yeah, speaking of driving the conversation today, uh, my dad and I are both in a car right now. You're literally driving the conversation. Yeah. So, uh, fortunately we're both passengers, so we're not driving and trying to do a radio program all at the same time, but you know, if you hear maybe some directions, uh, across, or if you hear some car noises, probably there won't be any sirens related to us but we are literally driving right now. 

Rick Green [00:01:16] There's a possibility the sirens would not apply to David and Tim Barton. So they're not driving the car. 

Tim Barton [00:01:21] NEVER. 

Rick Green [00:01:22] But they are, well, no, no, we're letting the audience drive the conversation. So you guys are just background noise, no driving at all, I guess. Uh, okay. So first question is about the whole DOGE thing and, and the effort that's being made and Pamela said, I've heard the term forensic accounting to describe what they're doing. Is that a fairly accurate description? Um, you know, great question. This is kind of, I guess it's not entirely new territory. Reagan had, uh, David, um, Oh, I'm blanking on his name now, but you know, had his kind of cost cutting effort. Clinton and Gore had their cost cutting efforts. So it's not that we're totally blazing a new trail. It's just deeper and probably more forensic than we've seen in my lifetime. Anyway, what do you guys think? 

David Barton [00:02:00] I mean, if you can take the thought of a medical forensic, like an autopsy that a doctor does after you have a death of some kind or a body found or whatever, that's the kind of deep dive you're doing. What are the causes? What are the real things here that are beyond what you see on the surface? And in that kind of forensic accounting where you're really digging in, I think that's what they're doing. And I've been amazed at the fact, and I was asking some guys about it. We may have talked about it even last week. But the fact that these young guys with DOGE are able to walk into an agency with 300,000 guys and say, hey, um, in two days, we've already found where you've got, you know, hundreds of thousands of cases of fraud or whatever it is. And with audits that often go for months and sometimes a year, it has been absolutely amazing to see them go in and apparently that's because the aid of AI, they can go through so much so quickly. once they get into it, but it is forensic accounting in that sense. And they've been able to uncover fraud so much quicker. They have been able to uncover inconsistencies so quickly as Trump mentioned in the state of the union address, as he went through all these people who are getting social security checks and, you know, some of them are over 300 years old and they're still getting the checks and they're still being cashed. How come, how come in years and decades with people who fight fraud, we haven't been seeing that going on and they can fight it in two days. It's just amazing. 

Tim Barton [00:03:26] Well, and to clarify, I think what they identified is some of those names, like the 300 plus year old people on there, and not all those names were drawing social security checks, although their, their names were still on the list so that list has not been updated, cleaned or cleared, but there certainly were people on there that were getting checks, uh, that there's definitely fraud involved in that. But you know, dad, as you mentioned, even some of the AI stuff connected to it, uh, this week. We've been working on some writing projects and some future things with books. We're doing and we said hey Let's play around with this grok 3 thing. Let's see what grok can really do and Guys, I'm telling you I was blown away By how well grok performs by what it was able to find and by even saying, we're looking for the answer to this question using only original sources And it came back with multiple original sources answering that question Uh, we put in other things connected to military history wars, and I, I'm just genuinely impressed by how good it is. Uh, it's given me perspective maybe of some of the AI conversations, challenges, uh, benefits and difficulties we're going to be seeing in the future. But certainly it makes sense, given even what we're seeing that Grok can do right now for the general public, if they're applying that to a different kind of accounting books and whatever it might be, you definitely can see how it could go through incredible deep dives very quickly. And if you've given it the parameters of we're looking for where things might be off in certain areas and categories, it could find that very quickly. I'm very impressed with what Elon and his team have done with grok and certainly again, it makes sense why they might be able to find things so quickly. However, even if you didn't have grok 3 like the fact that some of these agencies have been doing such wasteful and fraudulent spending in areas. It's probably not because they didn't have grok It's probably because they wanted to do some of those wasteful fraudulent things but it is really great that there is a forensic deep dive to find where money is being spent, where waste has been. So finally, we can have some accountability in some of those areas. 

Rick Green [00:05:46] I got to tell you guys, I'm the same, man. I think it's something like 60 billion calculations a second or something insane that Grok does. And I, I just found it what last week, week before last started, you know, randomly when I had a question about something typing it in and the level as an attorney, I I'm telling you the shortcut here to search every statute on the planet in a matter of a minute or two, and have it summarize those things for you. Now, granted, and it always says, if you ask anything, it's like a legal. at all, legal question at all. It says at the bottom, Grok is not an attorney. Be sure and consult an attorney. But in terms of finding what the rules are or that kind of, it was absolutely amazing. And so I can only imagine what they're doing to uncover things and, and figure out the details and in these big agencies and the amount of information that has just been, you know, not exposed. Uh, it's, it's remarkable. So yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm fast becoming a Grok fan. I was even used it today. Asking us some questions about some different things and it's truly remarkable. I'll tell you what's really fun guys. I don't know if y'all have done this yet. Maybe I'm the only narcissist on the program, but I had to say, okay, who's this Rick Green guy and I'm not kidding you, it gave me a speech that was me. It was like, it was talking in my voice. It was like, it had phrases from my speeches and things. It had, it talked about how long I'd been with you guys at Wallbuilders. It's, it was a little bit scary. How much it knew, uh, pretty wild, man, pretty wild. 

David Barton [00:07:09] With that, Rick, there's a couple of things that are interesting, because we've got some good professor friends. They're really great experts in history, and man, their ethics level, their faith is also solid. We've been with them for years. We've been good friends for years. And they say that one of the things they're having to do now is having to come up with ways to check all the papers that are being turned in by students, so many of which are now being written by AI. And so instead of the students doing the work, they're going to like grok or something else that can do it in a matter of minutes and write their paper for them. And so it's kind of shortcutting education, but to that end, one of the things that I did in playing around with it was I, I don't trust. Look, I know there's human nature and I don't trust people except to be people until I've really gotten to know them, their character, everything else, and I just know that there's a sin nature in all of us, including me. And so I wanted to check some things in, in the AI and see what kind of bias I could detect, I asked the leading questions, really kind of opening the door for it to give back, um, wrong answers or biased answers. And so, and some of them will have, but Grok has done a really good job. And we've mentioned for Glenn Beck's a good friend and Glenn spends just a ton of time on technology and staying ahead. And so he spent three days on Grok just asking loaded questions, looking for, giving it pathways to give him the wrong answer. And he was really impressed with how well it did. And it was done by Elon Musk and his guys, but he actually asked a lot of negative questions about Elon to say, how did you program it? Did Elon program himself to be free from criticism? And it came back with the negatives that actually exists on Elon, the pauses about him. So it really was a very thorough, at least first start for us superficially, and who knows what it'll do as time goes on, because all these things are programmed by humans, and therefore, they're gonna have the human flaws in them. We talked a couple weeks ago about the fact that some of the AI programs are now giving deceitful answers, even blatantly wrong answers, and being caught at it, and where does that come from? It comes from programmers. So it's something you can't put all your faith in and confidence in, even if it starts really, really good, that's not a guarantee it's gonna end really good. But so far, particularly with what we've done with Grok, it has been a phenomenally surprising, very unbiased so far, based on our testing, tool that may be really good tool to use in the future. 

Rick Green [00:09:44] I will say to Elon's masterful at this the fact that they embedded it essentially in in in X So that it's easy for you know somebody that I used to consider myself tech savvy not at all anymore I've not been able to keep up with everything and I'm and I've kind of become that old dog no new tricks type thing and so I want it to be it's got to kind of flow within my the patterns I already have and so the way that they embedded it into X made it because I hadn't even tried chat GPT or any of the other ones even as long as they've been out Just because it was a new thing and I just didn't have time and didn't want to have to figure it out But Grok was like, you know, one button right there, one click right there, inside X and, and boom, man, it just opened up a whole world of research. So well done. I mean, really, really interesting. Uh, I think too, that'll, that'll make people more, um, more studious. I mean, I think they're going to be drawn to that easy access to so much information and as we have this appetite for history and, and, and, you know, Liberty and how to, how to be a good citizen and that sort of thing. I'm hoping that it's going to cause people to dig a little deeper in finding the secret sauce of what makes a good society. Um, another question for you guys, before we go to break, this one, I think is, uh, fairly easy because we've, we've actually covered this before. Back when we saw president Trump do the pardons of not only the J6rs, but the pro lifers and some of the others. And we had just been on the heels of all of the pardons by Joe Biden. And so Tim asked Tim Robertson, uh, wrote in and said, can Congress regulate restrict or determine what types of crimes relationships and individuals can receive a presidential pardon? The Constitution states pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment. So I guess he's asking, can Congress, through an act of Congress, I'm assuming he does not mean a constitutional amendment, but through just an act of Congress, limitations on the presidential pardon power, what do you guys think? 

Tim Barton [00:11:32] I think anything that Congress does, if it's not a constitutional amendment, is going to be challenged by a president that finds themselves limited by that law, because they might say, well, the constitution doesn't say, I can't do this, therefore for them to pass a law saying I can't, that's not constitutional. So I think it certainly would be challenged, but it does make sense in some level of checks and balances, um, that we could have this attempt and kind of see how it falls, but I do think it would be a really interesting battle, maybe legally also conversationally, that kind of battle of ideas of where does the separation of powers go? Does Congress have the ability and authority to tell the president the limits of his presidential pardon powers, or does that need to be more clearly defined in the constitution, not by Congress itself, because you do of things in the Constitution. where it does give the idea that Congress can determine the issues that, that the US Supreme court or that the executive branch can actually hear and decide on. That that's actually something you can find in the constitution, but you don't find the same idea that Congress can place the limits on the presidential pardon the same way they might can place limits on the issues that the courts would hear. So to me it would become a very interesting challenge in battle over what the separation of powers actually is based on the specific wording of the constitution. But I'd love to know what you guys think as well. 

David Barton [00:13:09] Yeah, I would go a step further and say not only separation powers, but I would just say on blatant constitutional wording. If the constitution says he can give pardons on anything arising under this constitution, there's, I don't think a proper court will allow anything to restrict that. It'd be like saying you have a guarantee for free speech in the first amendment, unless you criticize a Republican president or unless you criticize a Democrat. I mean, once you start trying to narrow what the constitution permits, it should be struck down by the courts. Although we'll say right up front, the courts are not supposed to be the final authority on the constitution either. I mean, all the branches are capable of interpreting it. But as long as the constitution has given such broad authority in the pardons power as it does in that language, and that's pretty explicit language, I think it's gonna be very, very hard to restrict it beyond that. And as Tim said, I don't think you're gonna be able to do it with separation powers because this is a presidential article to power. But even if they tried to do that, I just think the language of the Constitution will trump any attempt to restrict it beyond what the Constitution itself authorizes. 

Rick Green [00:14:21] Yeah, man, I, I agree with you, David. I think it's just, it's just a really plain language area. And the precedent is that, that, that there hasn't been a limitation on that. We kind of saw the boundaries being pushed with these, these date, uh, centric pardons, if you know what I mean, in, in, in other words, like with Hunter Biden saying from 2014 on or whatever it might be, that was, that seemed to get a little bit wonky, but no, no specific challenge. I, the only challenge I've heard that I think sounds really interesting. Is this latest one where they're saying that maybe these pardons and a lot of the stuff that was done with Joe Biden in the last few months was with this automatic signature machine and not his actual signature. And if there is evidence, you know, to solidly prove that he was incapacitated and that staff did those things instead of him, that would be very interesting. I don't know that we've ever seen anything like that. Certainly at the presidential level. Um, I'm sure there's some sort of, you know, cases for some, somebody, you know, sneaking through on a corporation or maybe even at the level or some other a ministerial duty of a government agent where somebody's literally using an automatic signature machine to push something through. And if you can prove that does that invalidate it or do you have to say, well, nope, the president, you know, he, it's fine for him to authorize that, that automatic signature. And there's no way to prove that he didn't authorize that. I don't know. Could be a really interesting challenge to some of those things that happened right there at the end. 

David Barton [00:15:40] Well, let me throw out something on that, Rick. Let me throw out a thought. I would say that it doesn't matter what the machine is that communicates the signature because the constitution doesn't require signature. So if the president knew about it and approved it, yeah, he could verbally say it. Yeah, that's right. That's right. If the president knew about it and did it, I think any way he gets it done is fine. Now, if it's staff that steps in and he was not cognizant or his awareness was not there, or they did it instead of him. Now I think you've got a real problem and the Constitution is not going to allow that to stand, but the method by which it's approved, as long as he's cognizant and willing and aware of his faculties, I think that's going to stand no matter how he signs it or doesn't sign it verbally, written, anything else. 

Rick Green [00:16:28] Yep. Yep. Yeah. In fact, that's probably why it won't actually get challenged. Cause you know, how do you, how do you prove that he didn't, he didn't give the nod, even if it was the machine. Um, but yeah, super interesting. Okay. Quick break guys. We've got a lot more questions to get to. We'll see how much time we have left when we come back. Stay with us. You're listening to the WallBuilder show. 

Rick Green [00:17:51] Welcome back, thanks for staying with us here on The WallBuilders Show, Foundations of Freedom Thursday. Thanks for listening always, but also for sending in those questions, radio@wallbuilders.com if you'd like us to get to one for you. This one, guys, comes from Nicholas. It's about Kash Patel and essentially swearing in. We're so used to seeing a swearingin on the Bible. Cash Patel, of course, is a Hindu, and so that's not what he was. He was not sworn in on the Bible. So that Nicholas says after recently watching the swearing in of Kash Patel is the director of the FBI was caught off guard by him placing his Hand on the Bhagavad Gita as opposed to the Bible. Is this unusual or is it normal to use other writings instead of the Bible? I love all you guys do and would love to hear not only your personal take on this but also the history of this in General, thank you much. And and I think guys the first time we ever addressed this was probably a good ten years ago When the Ellison guy from up in Minnesota forget his first name was sworn into Congress and then he became attorney general up there, maybe vice versa. And he used the Koran. That was the first time I remember seeing anything besides the Bible. So what do you guys think? 

Tim Barton [00:18:53] Yeah, I think Keith Ellison was his first name or Keith was his first name. Keith, that's right. Yep, yep. I think he was a congressman, then he went on to become, was he the attorney general, I think, of the state of Minnesota. And he was sworn on the Koran, but he was not the first congressman to actually be sworn in. And I really only know and remember that because we did a show on it. There was another congressman sworn on a Koran, but then other of the congressmen who were there actually witnessed him. He converted to Christianity. And so that did change. However, it is very unusual that someone has sworn in on anything other than a Bible for these political positions. And it's very unusual because the history and tradition of our nation has been the history and tradition of a Christian nation. Therefore, the Bible has been the most dominant, prominent book for the history of our nation. But it doesn't mean there's not exceptions like this. 

David Barton [00:19:49] And see, the other thing that goes to this is when you look at the requirements in the Constitution, it says you do it on oath or affirmation, and that affirmation opens some opportunities and doors. Now, there's no question if you're going to the original intent, the founding fathers, the original intent was set forth in the declaration. You got to believe in God. You have to have that belief in God. And that's the only way you can do a note. and all their writings on oaths, they refer to the scriptures, the way the scriptures describe oaths. And so everything was interpreted in that Judeo-Christian tradition. Now, you had Jewish individuals who were state legislators back then, they were sworn in, and they would be sworn in on still that Judeo-Christian tradition. But the fact that it says oath or affirmation in this day, with the way the Supreme Court has redefined religion to be. whatever you believe, including atheism. Back in 1968, I think it was, in the case Welsh, they even said atheism is a religion. So how can you be sworn in with a belief in God if you're an atheist, and what's the book you use? So the current interpretation today, oath or affirmation is what the Constitution says that was the Judeo-Christian construction then. I don't think anybody would apply it that way now whether that's right or wrong. 

Tim Barton [00:21:09] But it is one of the things that we've talked about before, probably much more off-air than on-air, you know, one of the things that we discussed with the Vivek Ramaswami, a brilliant young man communicator now running for governor of Ohio, and he's been very clear that he says we have God-given rights, but he's also Hindu. And for the Hindu, they believe in lots of gods. And the way he explained it is, well, we believe there's lots of gods, but you choose the god that maybe is the god for you or the god you're going to follow. And he says, so in our family, we've chosen a god, but he's never said who that god is. And that faith belief is very fundamental to your worldview because the founding father's idea was there's a God he gave rights to man. Government exists to protect those rights, and that's actually part of what the Bill of Rights was about. The things that we acknowledge were God-given rights that government can never touch, and actually instead the government's here to protect and defend our freedom of speech, our freedom of religious choice and expression, and you can kind of go through the Bill of Rights and identify all these. But this is where it does become interesting, Dad, even as you mentioned this idea of atheism. Whether you want to define it as a religion or not, certainly atheists have a world view. And every worldview is the basis of someone's religion or faith, whether there's a God identified to that or not. But in America, the more secular we become, or even the more anti-Christian we become, the more it changes the fundamental idea of the founding father's belief laid out in the declaration that there's a God who gives us rights and government exists to protect those rights. Because even if we look at some of the Islamic perspective. They certainly believe there's a God, and they probably would argue that God gave rights, and they would probably argue that government exists to protect those rights, but their belief of what the God-given rights are would be very different. Their belief of how the government exists to protect those rights would be incredibly different. And so this is where it does matter, the worldview of the leaders we choose. because they can't uphold these ideas or positions if they don't have the same perspective, which for the founding fathers was largely shaped by the Bible. This idea that there's a God, he gives us rights, government exists to protect those rights. And the idea of even what those rights were were things we learned from the laws of nature and the laws of nature's God, from creation and from the Bible itself is where we learned those rights. But that even going back to what the constitution says, oath or affirmation, The reason there was even this affirmation thought is because you had places like in Pennsylvania where there were so many Quakers and Quakers believed part of what Jesus taught in the New Testament that you shouldn't swear by anything. Let your yes be yes and your no be no until they say, well, we can't take an oath. We can't swear to something. The Bible, Jesus was very clear. We're not supposed to swear. but we will give you our word. Our yes will be yes, our no will be no." And that's where the affirmation thought came in, is there was certainly a thought in many religious Christian religious circles that you're not supposed to swear and therefore they would give their word and they're going to keep their word, but that's where you have the oath or affirmation. And so it is interesting that Kash Patel was, because of his religious faith, not sworn on a Bible, but on a holy book for him. The constitution is not against that by any means, but if we as a nation move in a more secular or a more anti-Christian direction, it shifts the worldview of our political leaders and the more that worldview of our political leaders shift, the more likely we are to get to a place that we either have people that don't identify there's a Creator. Or their view of that creator is different than what the founders view was, and therefore the view of what those inalienable rights are, are different than what the founding fathers laid out and what the Bill of Rights lays out. And to me, this is where it's much more telling, and we need to be much more aware and cautious of the kind of leaders that we are supporting, because everybody has a worldview. Everybody's worldview is their idea and ideas have consequences. And we want to make sure that the consequences don't lead to a place that we lose some of those fundamental God-given rights as identified and outlined by the founding fathers and exhibited and seen throughout biblical literature, the Bible itself, but certainly even thoughts and commentary surrounding it. 

David Barton [00:25:48] You know, one of the things I would add to that is something that Dwight Eisenhower said. He said, you can never interpret a document in a way that destroys the document. He specifically said, you can't interpret the Bill of Rights in a way that would destroy the Bill of Rights. You can't say there's a freedom of religion if that freedom of religion would destroy the rights that are inherent to the Bill of Rights. And there are some religions that do have that belief. So that would be the other caveat is while there's great latitude in the Constitution, You can never interpret it in a way that would cause it to be destroyed by the way you interpret it. And that's also a guiding principle. 

Rick Green [00:26:24] Alright guys, out of time for questions today. Send them in folks. If you haven't sent yours in yet, send it to radio@wallbuilders.com. We'll get to more of those next Friday. Tomorrow, we'll have a lot of good news for you. And don't forget what David said earlier this week. He's got 25 himself, so we're going to lock Tim out of the studio. You don't want to miss that. That will be fun as well. Catch us tomorrow. Good news Friday. You've been listening to The WallBuilder Show.