Rick Green [00:00:07] Welcome to the Intersection of Faith and Culture. It's The WallBuilder Show, taking on the hottest topics of the day from a biblical, historical, and constitutional perspective. But today we're gonna limit those topics to good news topics. So we're gonna be rapid fire at you. David and Tim have been collecting some of the best good news stories of the week. I don't think there's any way we'll get to David's goal of 25 good news stories just from him. And no, we were not able to stop Tim from getting in the studio because David and Tim are still on the road. So somehow he was able to get into the show today. So David's not gonna get to dominate with all the good news. We'll go back and forth. and let both of them share, but it's going to be exciting. We'll get a lot of good news for you going into the weekend. And if we don't have enough for you today, be sure and hit our website, wallbuilders.show, and you can listen to some of those previous Good News Friday programs. I'm Rick Green here with David and Tim Barton. Let's jump in. David, what's our first piece of good news? 

David Barton [00:00:54] Okay, Rick, I've been telling you I had all these stories, and now I'm going to start through some of them, and I'm not going to get through all of them, but there's just a bunch of good ones. The first one I've got deals with military issues. The top title says Pentagon Shakeup, and it deals with the fact that Trump just fired the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or at least asked for his resignation, immediately calls for firing. But he asked for the resignation of Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Charles Brown. He's nominated Lieutenant General Dan, or it's actually John Dan, uh, Razin Caine as the new Joint Chiefs of Staff. And so let me back up. What's the Joint Chiefs of Staff? What do they do? So by law, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, these are the highest military officials that represent the six military branches. And growing up, we only talked about four military branches, but now they're six. And so what you got is you have the army and the air force. the Navy, the Marines. Now you have the Space Force, and now they consider the National Guard a separate branch. So each one of those branches has a chief of staff over that branch. So the top army official is the chief of staff for the army, et cetera. And what those chief of staffs do is they're to directly advise the secretary of the army, which is his civilian position. So all six military branches have a civilian boss over them, which is what the Constitution establishes. The Constitution never lets the military be in charge. It makes sure the civilians are in charge of all military officials. So the law that was passed in 1986 says that each of the six branches, they form a council and there is to be a chairman and a vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So when you put all those together You have two more positions, chairman and vice chairman, and that's eight people in the joint chief of staff. Now the joint chief of staff, whoever that's going to be, and right now he's nominated general Raizin Caine and Raizin Caine is the nickname, but general Caine he's been nominated and he is and his purpose is to get the advice from all the other six and then go to the president and the secretary of defense. So when that law was passed in 1986, what it did was it said, Hey! We are not going to let the military guys go and run any operation. They have to run all operations through the president and through the secondary defense, which is what the constitution requires. All military stuff has to go through civilian stuff. So back to, back to the chairman, chairman Brown, who was the former chairman, the Trump resignation. Trump spoke very highly of him back in 2020 at the end of Trump's first term. He's the one who actually put chairman Brown in over the Air Force. He was the chief over the Air Force, but Biden elevated him to chairman of the Joint Chiefs and in his tenure is when Biden put in all the DEI stuff. So Chairman Brown was over the implementation of all the DEI stuff that Biden wanted to do in the military and all the changes that were made, the transgender stuff, etc. And it appeared that the chairman was supportive of what Biden was doing. You know, he's got to do whatever Biden says anyway, that's his role, that's his job. But it looks like he was supported, but that didn't really matter because Trump wanted a whole different attitude in and so he chose General Dan Razin Caine. Now, the first time I got I was made aware of General Razin Kaine. And again, that is his nickname is General Dan Caine. But he was Razin Caine. That was the way he was always known in the military for decades. I found about him From Trump himself, we were invited to Ben Carson's birthday party and who showed up at Ben Carson's birthday party, but Donald Trump. So we're there with Ben Carson celebrating his birthday. Trump comes in and Trump got to talking about the war in Afghanistan and what was going. And he said that when he made his first trip over and it was shortly after he was inaugurated, one of his first trips was over to Afghanistan. He said we was over there. He was talking to various generals on the ground And he was just talking to generals on the ground. He said, well, I've gone through all the council and all the joint chiefs tell me that it's gonna take about four years to get ISIS gone and the caliphate destroyed. And he went through and talked about that with all the leaders. And so we're looking at an extended fight here. And he said that as he was talking, when he got done, he said that General Caine kind of took him aside and said, hey, sir, you don't have to do this in four years. He said, we can do this in four weeks. And Trump looked at it like he was crazy. It's four weeks? He said, yes sir, we can do it in four weeks. And so Trump said, okay, you're now authorized to do it. And General Caine got ISIS destroyed in four weeks. I mean, that was one of those things in Trump's first term that was moving just as quickly as what we're seeing at the second term with his appointments and stuff. And so he's always liked General Razin Kaine because he went in and said, hey, Joint Chiefs are wrong. We don't have to do this in four years. We can do this in four weeks. and he got it done. And so he is now the guy that Trump has selected and picked to be the new Joint Chief of Staff. And by the way, General Caine had just retired in December of 24. And that's a month after Trump was elected. And so Trump said, hey, you're not in retirement anymore. I'm calling you out of retirement. I want you to be the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff. So I think that's a great, great move. You got a guy here who thinks outside the box. Uh, and Trump definitely wants that and he's already proven himself for decades in the military, uh, he was, he, he was an air force general, but he was a combat guy as well. And so it's just, I think he's a great move. That's a great guy. I think that's good news for America to have Dan Razin Caine as the new chairman, joint chiefs of staff. 

Rick Green [00:07:02] Well, and David, I don't know if it's part of the order whenever the president names the joint chiefs in this case, uh, whether or not we're now ordered to eat at Raising Cane's once a week is that part of the deal here and I'm going to lose all of our Christian listeners. When I say I actually like Raising Cane's, maybe even better than Chick-fil-A I know totally unrelated, but you know, it's Friday. So we have fun on Fridays. So that's a great one to start with David, Tim. What's your first piece of good news today? 

Tim Barton [00:07:26] Well, this one is something that we've been seeing in the news. Actually, my article is from nearly two weeks ago. So there's already updates we know about, but it's it says Trump admin ends majority of USAID contracts, State Department grants. And the article goes through highlighting how he wants to get rid of approximately 90 percent of the USAID grant and operations, try to eliminate fraud. It says that the administration stand or stated rather, that it would eliminate $5,800 of the $6,200 multi-layer USAID contract awards for a cut of $54 billion. It goes through, and this is back when it was speculating a lot of what might happen. I think I saw an article earlier this week that already 83% of USAID contracts have been cut. Of course, there was the challenge for the, I think it was $2 billion. that Trump was trying to cut and a judge said, wait a second, that was for work already completed. You do have to pay that contract. And Trump or his team appealed and said, we're going to we're going to make sure it wasn't incorrect activity money being spent. But it's stuff that we're already seeing happen in real time with USAID fraud being exposed. And guys, actually, this morning, literally this morning, as I was looking at some stuff on social media and tracking some stuff, I saw somebody posts and it's it's somebody I've been friends with since college and for all of us we've had friends that we've been around for decades and certainly some of their views don't reflect or represent our views which is sometimes healthy to know what maybe some of our liberal friends might think about some of these things and I saw him acknowledge how concerned he was. He said Trump is being controlled by these billionaires and putting billionaires in charge of these various things. And I just, I'm so concerned for what they're doing with USAID. And he named it specifically. And I just thought this is what's so interesting is how out of touch some of these people are that their major concern is not how much fraud and waste has been in the federal government. Their major concern is that Elon Musk, who is absolutely a billionaire, but that Elon Musk is bringing in a team of volunteers to come do the auditing of these federal programs and federal agencies to try to eliminate fraud and waste and abuse and actually save the taxpayer money. but the framing of the left Has been so concise that there are literally people out there saying this is so bad. Donald Trump and these billionaires are controlling America as if there weren't billionaires on the Democrat side who have been working to control America as if like the George Soros of the world have not existed, haven't been involved and done things. So it's just so interesting to see some of the optics of what's going on, of where the concern of some people are. And certainly when I see posts like that, my first thought is, well, I know what news outlets you've been watching, because, right, this is. clearly not coming from some of the people on the outside, when the majority of Americans are supportive of going through and reviewing this and trying to cut waste and tax abuse and fraud, etc. Anyway, which is very interesting seeing that this morning, that there is still concern from some of the Democrat liberal individuals out there of what's happening. But overall, man, just incredible that we are able to start identifying. some of this waste and nonsensical spending and working to eliminate that. So really great news. 

Rick Green [00:11:17] Yeah, there's something about the inability to actually focus in on what matters most. It's like if you're a real DEI, you know, affirmative action person, if your house is on fire and the firemen show up and they're not the right color, would you actually, you know, turn down them, them putting out the fire? And that's essentially, you know, focusing in on the silly, shallow things that that the left has adopted as their most important values these days. But the majority of the country is certainly, just as you said, the majority of the country, man, the polling data is off the charts for supporting this, recognizing that we have to do this, not go bankrupt as a country. That's one thing that continues to just encourage me is to see how much people are excited about this. It's not, I was afraid President Trump and JD Vance and the whole team was, you know, Elon, everybody's gonna go in there, bull on the china closet. It's not gonna be popular, but they're gonna do it anyway. But man, they're doing it and it's popular. So that's very, very good. Votes well for the whole thing we've said about getting momentum now. during this first year and a half so that we can keep this going throughout his term and then hopefully get that four generations and not just four years. All right, David, how about another piece of good news before we go to break? 

David Barton [00:12:22] Hey, before I do, just a real thought comment is listening to the story that Tim is talking about and what his friend posted on social media, et cetera, I just, I get struck again with how that what American education has produced for the last several years is a real lack of thinking and thinking just being objective. Just look at it. I mean, if you're so been out of shape over billionaires, did you say anything about Mark Zuckerberg with Biden? Did you say anything about sorrows providing? Did you identify all the billionaires that are around Biden calling policy shots? And by the way, if you had the chance to be a billionaire, would you turn that down and say, no, billionaires are inherently wicked. I'm not going to be wicked. I refuse to be a billionaire. I don't know of anybody who would do that. And yet they have the pandering kind of lines that they pick up from other people without thinking where that if you're a billionaire, you have to be evil. And if you're around Trump, that's what's running policy. Wait a minute, that happens all the time. Okay, point made, anyway, it just goes back to education for me and so that's one that just strikes me as really goofy when people do that. 

Rick Green [00:13:30] Well, it just means we got that much more work to do, man. That's why we do what we do and why so many people out there are joining us and helping to educate, raise that civic literacy in their community, join us in educating people in their neighborhood, in their church, whoever they can get together to do one of the biblical citizenship classes or one of the other courses. But that's, man, everybody's got a responsibility to be a part of that, for sure. Well, let's go ahead and go to break. We'll be back in just a second. We've got more good news, folks. Stay with us. You're listening to The WallBuilders Show. 

Rick Green [00:15:02] Welcome back to The WallBuilder Show. Thanks for staying with us on this Friday. We've got Good News Friday today, and David was about to dive in on that next piece of good news. 

David Barton [00:15:09] It still deals with the military. So my second story is about the military and it deals with the fact that Trump has really said, we're gonna stop not just the DEI stuff in the military, which you kind of mentioned in the first story, but we're gonna stop this LGBTQIA plus transgender insanity in the military. And so Trump keeps saying, look, we want a military and Hegseth says this really well as well, we want a military that's ready and able and lethal. The big deal is being a lethal military that's ready to move whenever it needs to move. And so he says as part of that, we can't have the transgender stuff going in the military. And he, and he went through a number of reasons why he, he, first off, he's reversing another Biden policy because Biden is the one who put all this transgender stuff in the military. And it's just, it reduces lethality and readiness. And quite frankly, Hegseth in a book that he did back on this, and he's the Secretary of Defense, this is what he had in his book, but I've known this outside his book, but I think his book said it really well. He said, in 2016, the Obama administration conducted a study to test whether it was a good idea to allow transgender soldiers to openly serve in the military. That study found that post-surgery transition soldiers, so, and a lot of what we heard at the time was, soldiers are going in the military because it takes about $170,000 upfront to get the surgery. And if you're there with the military and the military covers it, then all that is not out of pocket. It's not out of insurance. Let the government cover it. But once that happens, once the surgery, the study found, and this Obama study, the study found that post-surgery transient soldiers would be non-deployable for 238 days. So you're looking at roughly a year. And so you put somebody in the military, They're there to serve a function. And you're not going to be able to use them for a year afterwards. And, and, you know, we thought before our family, we got two kids in the military. And one of them was part of, of what will create a new standup division in military. Cause special forces guys were being tapped by the military, by Obama and others and says, Hey, you need to train the special forces in other countries while you're over there. So when we're in Iraq, instead of our guys taking out the bad guys, They're training the Iraqis. on how Special Forces is supposed to work. And we trained our guys to be lethal and to take out the bad guys, not to be teachers. And so they created a stand-up unit kind of called the Brown Berets, where they said, okay, we will take good guys, really good at what they do, and we'll send them in to train the other military so that we can get out of there. And when the Americans get out, they can maintain the war against the bad guys. And so they created units of about 12 guys. You had a comms guy, you had a mortar guy, you had an art or a guy really good with artillery direction. You had a medic, you had all these different guys, and they would go into these teams of 12. And so what would happen? They created these teams, and they were sending them overseas to teach. But some of these transitioning trans guys got in there, and they suddenly were not deployable. And you're sending these guys over to foreign nations to teach them how to take out the bad guys, and now one of your 12 team members is not deplorable. So you have to go over and pick up a team member from another guy and move them into your position, but that hurts the team you took them from. And it just got to where these teams were being handicapped because some of these transitioning members of the military, they just, they weren't deployable. So headset was really after this in his book, back when he wrote the book and he summarized your tax dollars pay for mentally unstable boys to become girls chop off their body parts and then sit out training for a year. and then pay for ongoing medical treatments and demand that we call them a new name. And as he pointed out, when you get deployed to these nations where we were sending the guys, there's not even medical services there available to continue your medicine, to continue your treatments. And so not only you're non-deployable for at least a year, you're non-deployable to a whole lot of the world where we send our guys. And so Trump has signed in on this and said, yeah, we're not doing this anymore. And so that is good news. because now our military is becoming more lethal and more ready. Hopefully we never have to use it, but if we do, we don't want to be handicapped by social programs and social attitudes that keep our guys from doing what they're supposed to do in the military. So that's really good news to have that change officially going on in the military now. 

Rick Green [00:19:44] Yeah, seems like we've had at least one piece of military good news every week. And of course, the recruiting, all of it, the results speak for themselves. The fruit is incredible. Tim back over to you, man. 

Tim Barton [00:19:56] All right, well, my headline says Trump's newly appointed pardons are outline specific marching orders for role. Uh, there's a lady, her name is Alice Marie Johnson. She was pardoned back in 2018 during Trump's first term. Uh, she had been convicted life in prison, um, for non-violent drug offenses, and she was in a really bad family situation, had lost her son and ended up. being kind of an in-between communication person for a drug trafficking ring. So she says she never touched drugs, really just was communicating and helping that process. Well, Trump pardoned her after I think it was like 21 years that she had been in prison in Alabama. And when she was pardoned, she was one of many great stories about people who's kind of were doing their life back. She's a great grandmother now. And Trump put her in charge of reviewing all the pardons for future individuals. And there was parameters around it that they kind of agreed on. They need to be people that if they're pardoned, they have a job lined up. They have a home and family to help them kind of reintegrate into society. And she's reviewing all of this. And it's, it's one of these unsung hero kind of stories that If this were somebody on the Democrat side, the liberal leftist news outlets would be hailing her as one of these all time great hallmark kind of recovery stories from her life going to brokenness and now being the one overseeing this. And it's such an interesting contrast where for Joe Biden on his way out, when you look at some of the people he pardoned, there were reports about him pardoning these pedophiles and... uh, actual murderers and different people, not to mention, of course, Anthony Fauci and his family and all these people that Biden pardoned on his way out. Uh, and, and the contrast of who Trump has put there and some of the boundaries and even the redemption testimony for Alice Marie Johnson, just, just a really neat story, certainly a contrast, but a really neat story of how Trump is setting up and actively saying, looking, kind of saying if there's people, that have been over-sentenced, that have maybe served their time, and that we can pardon, he is very open to doing that. So just a piece of good news coming from the Trump administration. 

Rick Green [00:22:31] All right, David, we actually have time left for us. We didn't get to 25 pieces of good news from you, but we do get to get an extra one here. 

David Barton [00:22:38] I got a great one on DEI. I had talked about DEI in the military, how Trump has now changed to Joint Chief of Staff and he's got the DEI stuff going out. But Trump is also rooting this out anywhere he sees it. And one of the big problems we've noted with DEI is that it makes you focus on groups. You don't look at individuals, and of course God looks at the individual, not the group you're with, and it's your individual behavior that determines everything with God. It's not the group you're with that determines stuff with God. And so this DEI stuff is so wrong. It's built on that Marxist philosophy of pitting one group against another and emphasizing groups. In America, we've always talked to it the individual. The individual is created by God. He has inalienable rights that come from God. Government's there to protect the inalienable rights of every individual. Individuals get rights, not groups. So Trump is now continuing this DEI campaign of getting rid of that nonsense and education. And it's interesting, the story I've got here, talks about as they're trying to get DEI out of education, getting DEI out of education just in five school districts is saving the federal government over five billion dollars. Now grab this, these are grants that were coming from Biden to school districts and maybe this is why our school districts are producing people that don't think because they're doing all this DEI stuff, but you take the five school districts... You take New York City, you take Chicago, you take Miami, you take Las Vegas, you take those five districts. Just New York City alone received $2.2 billion to teach DEI in New York City schools. Now New York City has nearly a million students in it, and so instead of teaching thinking or instead of teaching math or science or STEM or all these other things. We're teaching DEI, and so that's $2.2 billion that has now been saved on programs that certainly have been hurting America, not helping America. But you take in addition to that, you go to Los Angeles. And Los Angeles got nearly a billion dollars in grants to teach DEI kind of stuff. Hey, come on, guys, let's teach how to read. You know, we've talked about the fact, and I saw stats even just a week or so ago, that only about 30% of students in public schools right now can read at grade level. So, that is terrible. If you can't read, you're handicapped for the rest of your life, and you do have to rely on what people tell you, what you hear, what little social memes you see that you can easily read. So, that is great news that he's not only getting DEI out of the military, but out of- out of the public education system, at least where federal grants are concerned. He can't stop it from being taught, but he can stop the federal government from funding you to teach it. And that's really good news. That indicates that what we hope is a very positive change that we'll see in the future as these kids grow up. 

Rick Green [00:25:42] Well, guys, that's a great reminder of just how much work we have left to do as well, because just think about all those billions of dollars. I mean, you know, a billion here, a billion there, two billion here, a hundred billion there. I mean, they spent so much money pouring the poison of cultural Marxism into the minds of the children of America. So there's a lot of indoctrination that took place. There's a lot of these kids that got, you know, that became their value system. And so undoing that is going to take some time. Now, stopping the flow of that poison is first. But then, you know, we're gonna have to go in and got a lot of sick people basically that have been given that poison and it's one reason that everybody gets to be a part of the solution by helping to be force multipliers and educate and bring the truth. So of course the sunlight is the best disinfectant. Yes, the light will dispel the darkness. Absolutely. The salt has to be put into the meat to preserve it, but that takes some effort. We have to be his hands and feet. So all of us get to be a part of that. Thanks for all the good news guys. We'll get to more good news next week. And of course, we'll have some great interviews early in the week and foundations of freedom Thursday as well. Have a great weekend, everybody. Thanks for listening to the WallBuilders Show.