Rick Green [00:00:07] Welcome to the intersection of faith and culture. Thanks for joining us today on the WallBuilders show. Visit our websites, wallbuilders.com and wallbuilder.show. Rick Green here with David Barton and Tim Barton later in the program. General Jerry Boykin will be with us guys. I think it's a, one of the best good news items we've talked about is the restoration of, of respect for the military and, and young people wanting to go into the military again, no nation can survive if their young people are not willing to serve in this capacity or a percentage of them willing the serve. So there's been a lot of concerns over the last few years at the lack of recruiting, the lowering of standards, just so many things we've covered on the program. And we've already talked about the increase in recruiting, but General Boykin is going to be great to get some thoughts on that, but this is, this is just a big deal. And David, I remember your book. What was it called? Celebrate Liberty or celebrate? Yeah, I think that's right. Celebrate liberty. It was the one that you had that Samuel Davies sermon that he did that, you know, to the military is they're getting ready to go fight. And I'll never forget that was probably 20 years ago, but just the It had on me of the biblical purpose of being willing to fight and being willing to defend your country. And I'm just so glad to see this restoration of the military. 

David Barton [00:01:12] You know, we're in the middle of writing the next book in the American Story series, and it deals with the wars, a world at war, some of World War I, but mostly World War II. And World War Two, what happened with us in World War 2 is exactly the opposite of what Trump is trying to do now. And the two words you keep hearing with the military now with Trump is, look, we have to have military readiness and military lethality. We have to have those two items and that's what the American military should do. Well, when we got hit at Pearl Harbor, we were not ready and we were not lethal. It literally took 11 months to rebuild the American military before we were ever able to go to Europe and start taking on Hitler who'd been fighting for at that point, almost two and a half, nearly three years, and that was 11 months after we declared war on Hitler that we couldn't even get over there to fight because we weren't ready. And it was so bad that, that literally,  General Patton, who tried to do a lot of the training over here, it was so bad. And he was a very wealthy individual came from very wealthy family, very afluent family, he actually went out and used his personal finances to get enough equipment stuff for his troops to be able to train in California. Cause there was nothing for them. Uh, they literally were taking broomsticks and painting them black. and using that for rifles and machine guns to practice like they were using machine guns. They had nothing to bathe in. He went out and bought them water basins and just, it was unbelievable how bad we were. And the belief was that progressive belief, Woodrow Wilson on was, you know what? If you're not a threat to anybody, nobody's gonna do anything to you. We were not a thread to anybody and they plastered us. And so Trump seems to have learned from that lesson is doing the right thing and it's really good to see. 

Tim Barton [00:03:07] Well, Woodrow Wilson is also the guy that started or helped form the League of Nations that became the United Nations. And the idea was, hey, if we just all work together, then we can all just be friends and they'll never be war again, was part of the idea behind it. Obviously very failed, but that, as you mentioned, like so many progressive ideas, they're coming from the wrong worldview. They don't have the basic understanding that all of us should have is that man is not basically good. We are basically bad and that's why Jesus came because we are sinners in need of a savior. But when you have the wrong starting place, you will often arrive at the wrong conclusions and you end up at the destination, which is what's happened so much under this progressive worldview. And this is where, guys, we've talked about before, but one of the hard things to navigate sometimes is are some of the results we're seeing because people have been very intentional about trying to destroy things in America, or where they ardent believers and really bad ideology and philosophy. Because we know there are some people that are adamant believers in socialism. They've been convinced through the educational process they've gone through that socialism is the best. It's the most fair. It's most equitable. We should all be socialist. And there are these sold out believers that have no idea. And so as you navigate some of what's happened in the military, I think it's to say some people were just very vocal, ignorant individuals that were promoting very bad ideology. And certainly we would probably agree there were some who were quite intentional knowing what it would do. But when you look at what was happening inside the military, we certainly can can point at Biden as someone that exacerbated the situation. But I say exacerbated because there were problems in the military long before Biden took over. You actually can go back to 2007, 2008, when general Boykin was actually removed from the military for upholding some basic Christian values and ideals. And so at least for the last, I mean, 15, no, coming up maybe on 20 years, we've seen some woke generals or at least generals didn't have the right ideology and they've become increasingly woke based on some of the promotions and even some of the presidents that have been there. But, but certainly this has been an exacerbated situation sometimes by people who didn't know what they were doing and sometimes by people who literally had those bad motivations. 

David Barton [00:05:37] And Tim, you mentioned General Boykin, and for those that don't know, General Boykin retired as his three-star lieutenant general. He's a great friend of WallBuilders and the program. We're great friends with him, and he does great work in Washington, D.C. now. After he got in the military, he went into the culture war, quite frankly, and is fighting for everything from pro-life through traditional family against the gender nonsense, et cetera. But he is such a distinguished warrior. He was part of the original Delta Force, and he led Delta Force. And anybody who may have seen the movie from what, 10, 15 years ago, Black Hawk down, that was his mission. He got shot on that. He was, he was the guy that got ambushed and attacked. And he's just such a courageous guy and such a great American hero. But a guy that definitely understands the military definitely understands how you have to be ready and lethal again, going back to the, the two things. And I'm so glad, not only that Trump is saying that, but all those Hegseth and all those down the chain of command are saying the same thing. Our military has to be ready to respond and it has to lethal when it does respond and that shortens conflicts and that's what General Patton used to say. The more you crush the enemy, the shorter the war will be and the more lives you'll save. And so that was always the objective, just crush them and then you save lives and that was understood. So we're back to that, but that's something that General Boykin understood literally decades ago in his distinguished service. And he is, he is a great guy and great perspective as a warrior who's been there and it was hit from the ground by anti-aircraft fire through his shoulder should have had to amputate his arm. They were able to put that together, blew his shoulder apart. He was in the helicopter and they shot machine guns upward at him and went right through his, his armpit out the top of his shoulder. So all of that to say that he is a warrior who's been there, who's done that and his perspective on what's happening right now and rebuilding the military is going to be really valuable to get. 

Rick Green [00:07:42] He also is not even just just military right? He just he also understands how to put that piece into the piece of the entire culture and how it all ties together so really great guy to have on today quick break we'll be right back general Jerry Boykin our special guest on the wall builder show 

Rick Green [00:09:02] Welcome back to the WallBuilders show. Always great to have General Jerry Boykin with us. General, good to see you. Thanks for coming on WallBuilder's again. 

General Jerry Boykin [00:09:10] Hey Rick, I'm glad to be with you, I always enjoy your program. 

Rick Green [00:09:14] Well, we've been thinking that you were probably very happy with the recruiting numbers and just how fast the reputation of the military and the desire of kids to serve has changed when you get good leadership and we wanted to get you on to just kind of tell us what you're thinking about all that. 

General Jerry Boykin [00:09:31] Well, I think exactly the same thing you do, I'm sure. And that is that the Biden administration essentially set our military back considerably. And I can't put specific numbers to it, but I'll tell you the decline in readiness and the decline and people's attitudes with regards to our military was just heartbreaking to me. And now I look at this and I see, I see highs, I mean, highs from where we had nothing but lows on the recruiting scale, we now have highs. And we've got a lot of young men and women coming in our military now, volunteering, and of course, it's all still a voluntary force. They're coming in, and they're coming in for one reason, and that is to be warriors in our military. It is not to be woke. It's to be warriors. And being a warrior is the first prerequisite to be valuable to this nation when you're in the military. You gotta be a warrior. And a warrior as somebody that has a transcendent cause, and they know what that cause is, and they're willing to make sacrifices for it. And I hope now that we're going to turn this all around, and I believe we will in the four years that Donald Trump has. We're going turn it around, and we're gonna see our military back to where it is, what it needs to be. 

Rick Green [00:11:15] Well, what you just described, not only changes the number of recruits, but the quality of recruits. In other words, we're getting the, the, used to be the best of the best that we wanted in, right. And then it, and then it became, we'll just take anybody. We'll lower the standards. This allows us to get back to that warrior ethos that secretary Hexeth talks about and, uh, and get those quality young men and women. 

General Jerry Boykin [00:11:37] Yeah, you're right. That was the way the Obama administration decided to handle their inability to recruit enough people, is lower the standards. Well, we've done that before in the history of the American military. We've done it before. We did it in Vietnam. And what did we get for it. We really got a generation of people that were not qualified to even be on the battlefield because you had the McNamara's 100,000. We brought in 100, 000 people that were below average on the IQ test, 100,00 of them. And I was, I sat on the board where we put several of them out after the Vietnam War was over with and we thought that was going to be a solution. Well, it wasn't and it won't work now. and it hasn't worked any time in history. So I'm glad that we've got a Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, that understands the imperative to have people that are fit to fight. Not only willing to fight, but they're fit to fight and there's nothing that I can think of, certainly in the part of the military that I spent my time in. There is nothing that is more rigorous than having a rucksack on your back and having miles to go and somewhere along the way getting disrupted by gunfire from the enemy. And let me tell you, it will tax you. It will tax your physically, it'll tax you mentally. And we need people that are physically and mentally acute, alert and ready to fight. 

Rick Green [00:13:35] You were one of the guys that told me a couple of years ago, maybe more than that, you know, I was, I have all these kids coming through Patriot Academy and they'll ask me about being in the military when it, when it was not desirable to be there and you were like, Rick, if, if we don't still have good kids going in, it's going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy and they're going to end up with all the, you know, leftists running the military. And how long do you think it takes now to, to turn that around, but you know filling the ranks, getting the right generals in place, getting Getting the recruits, you know, to not only come in, but then move up the ranks. I mean, how long does it take to, to, where you would, you would feel really good about where we were with the military. 

General Jerry Boykin [00:14:15] Yeah, well, that's that is really an issue of leadership and I'm glad you brought this point up because I've always said that the hardest part of restoring our military was restoring the leadership. And what we did, people need to understand this. This is how bad it was in the Biden administration. we had to tell up and coming promising young men and women that were eligible to be general officers, that there was no jobs for them and they needed to go ahead and go home and retire. And those were good people, and in their place what we wound up doing was bringing up people like this chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that we just got rid of. He was a guy that got his fourth star, all four of his stars because he was woke. So we have discharged, we've told people to go home that should have been in these top positions today and now we've gotta raise up the leaders that will sustain us for the next few decades, you know? Yeah. And that's the hardest part of the whole thing. Now I believe that between the leadership of Donald Trump and Pete Hickseth, I think that they're going to do a serious, no-holds-barred, a serious look at the leadership within the Department of Defense and all the services, and they're gonna go after the people that believe can take this military into the future and that can make sure that we come out winners if we do wind up getting in another war. 

Rick Green [00:16:17] Well, it's so encouraging to see the steps that they're already taking. General, before I let you go, Family Research Council, of course, continuing to do amazing work. Tony's got this new course, got in government out, the apps stand firm, starting to, you know, just so much education right now that needs to take place and people have an appetite for it, they're hungry for it. They're wanting to learn these things more than I've ever seen before. How's that going for Family Research Counsel right now? 

General Jerry Boykin [00:16:44] Listen, we're delighted about this God in Government thing, and I think it's safe to say that you and the WallBuilders team had a great impact on this, and we're getting a lot of really good feedback on it. So thank you for your support and help on this thing. and it's fascinating when you go through this and it is divided up into sections. And so if you haven't, any of your listeners, if you have not been on Washington Watch or listened, you need to get on it. 

Rick Green [00:17:26] and it's real easy to get the program. Just get to get in the app store, download the Stand Firm app, and you can get all things Family Research Council. General, Jerry Boykin. Always good to have you, brother. Thanks for coming on. Look forward to seeing you again soon. 

General Jerry Boykin [00:17:40] Good to be with you, Rick. God bless you. 

Rick Green [00:17:42] We'll be right back with David and Tim Barton. 

Rick Green [00:18:52] Welcome back to the WallBuilders Show. Thanks for joining us. Thanks to General Jerry Boykin for being back with us once again, back now with David and Tim Barton, and you can hear the hope in his voice too, right? I mean, he, here's a, you know, he's, he kind of a, I think I can say this respectfully, this is an old warrior, man, this a guy that's been around. He has seen multiple, multiple situations, not only on the ground with the special forces stuff you were talking about earlier, David, but politically the fight in DC to have a good military, and so I think he's a wealth of wisdom to assess this situation with. 

Tim Barton [00:19:22] Well, as he pointed out, when, when the standards were changed under, and Rick, I think you made the point and he confirmed it, but when the standard was changed under president Biden, and it was, we, we want to remove some of the really competent people and we just want to open it up and bring in people maybe who are going to be better at just following orders and not thinking for themselves. It was a significant downgrade and that's not going to inspire anybody to want to be part of this military. When you have a military. that's focused more on wokeness and on whatever kind of social programming and social agendas are happening with the woke extreme left that that's that's not the thing that are going to draw the best, the brightest, the fiercest warriors you need, as he points out, whereas the direct contrast is when you have a president who loves America and they love the troops and they are very open about it, when you have a President who is willing to take out bad guys. and even talk about it in very plain ways, it, it changes the mentality, even to people that want to sign up, because if you are someone growing up and, and especially if you live in a rural area, if you're in one of the states that are traditionally more conservative, you're a more conservative area, even of a very liberal state, you care a lot about the nation and then having a president that, that exemplifies and shows that same care and desire. You might think, you know what, if I serve for four years, if I sign up right now, I can serve all four years under this guy, the guy who's not in favor of never ending wars, the guy, who's willing to take out bad guys, the guy that loves America, loves our troops. It makes complete sense why there's an all time high of people signing up again. When you have a four year contract, signing up for the military, and he's gonna serve for 4 years, but also as General Boykin pointed out, this can be something that has a very long lasting effect. And we don't know what that's gonna look like, but what General Boykin said is you don't know but that some of these young men and women that are getting in now, they're gonna be the leaders that are gonna lead us into the future, having a military that can once again be the most lethal, be the more effective, and once again, be a military that people wanna be a part of, that are supported, that love the nation. And so certainly a lot of good thoughts from General Boykin on that. 

David Barton [00:21:47] You know, I would add to that, Tim, with what you're talking about. I think now that you also have some help from the commander in chief that will also make a real difference. And I've mentioned it once or twice, but I'm going to mention it again, that President Trump, when he was in the first time, he did not understand the military, at least the aspect that is political in the military. And that is that it's by merit that you get raised through so many ranks. They started putting DEI in the military and it wasn't by merit anymore. It was by what your physical characteristics were, whatever. But it used to be even a merit when Trump was there. And so Trump did not understand that when you get to be a three and a four star general, that is purely political. You're not getting promoted because you're a better warrior. You're now getting promoted, because you have viewpoints that align with those of the president and therefore you get placed in office. And so Trump had just kind of assumed that if you're in the Pentagon, man, you love America and you're here and you're defending the constitution and values and didn't understand all the DEI kind of nonsense that had come in. And so even as we saw with the end of his term, how some of the Joint Chiefs turned against him and he got Milley calling China, that's a clear constitutional violation. Say, hey, don't worry about how the election turns out. You guys are going to be okay. You can't do that. I mean, that's massively wrong, but that's political. And so this time it's very interesting to see Trump go in and put military leaders in and start promoting military leaders. As we already saw with the joint chief of staff,  he took out the former joint chief Brown, who had implemented the DEI programs under Obama and he put in Razin cane and raising cane was the guy who got his name because he does raise cane. He goes in and kicks the teeth out of the enemy. And we mentioned that the thing, I think a week ago where that when Trump first made his first visit over to Afghanistan, he was talking to generals, including General Cain, who was lieutenant general, and said, well, the experts have told us it's going to take about four years to get ISIS under control. And General Caine took him off the side and said sir, it doesn't take four years. It takes about four weeks. And, and Trump looked at him and said really? And he said, yeah. And so Trump said, okay, you got four weeks, do it. And he did it. He crushed ISIS in four weeks And those are the kind of generals that Trump now understands that is now putting in key leadership positions, guys that understand readiness and lethality and are not political guys. They are guys that are good at what they do and that's defending America, defending our rights, defending the Constitution. And that's, that's something that I think Trump has really grown into this term and we're already seeing that now and what he's doing with the people he appoints and the way he's handling the military. 

Rick Green [00:24:34] Yeah, and really it's across the board, right? I mean, there's a better awareness just with the bureaucratic machine, with the, with Congress. I mean just his ability to deal with these players that he, even though he donated to candidates, you know, it's supported military things. He had been around all that as a successful businessman and a TV star and all that kind of stuff. But, but man talk about an education. The best education was that first term having all those people that stabbed him in the back and, and let him down or undermined what he was doing. And so, yeah, what you're talking about, David, that he's doing with the military and handling it so much better, man, we're seeing it across the board. I think that's part of the reason he's able to move so fast and put the right people in place is just as a leader having a better understanding of the landscape. 

Tim Barton [00:25:15] Yeah, guys, I think it's a great point that he's, he, he is acting very different this time and it's almost like he's not trying to impress people that he knows he didn't have to impress anymore. His first term, I think he really still wanted to be liked. And this time I think he's like, I don't care. I know who the bad guys are and I don't care if you like me or not. But also I think is because he knows, he knows the people are behind him. And so he knows that the news commentators, whoever it might be, they pretend to represent the people. He knows, you don't represent the the people, the people are so supportive of what I'm doing. And so what he has done, even appointing some of these people like a Pete Hegseth, it seems like a disruptor. And yet what has the result been? One of the things we've kind of joked about offline is that we are recognizing that President Trump might be a lot smarter in this than we've ever given him credit for and he might be thinking down the road so much further than most of us have in these decisions. And so at this point, we are not second-guessing him nearly as much as we did his first term. We're looking going, you know what, do your thing, man, because overall we have been so impressed and pleased by what's been going on, not the least of which is change in the U.S. military. 

Rick Green [00:26:29] All good stuff, folks. Lots of lots to celebrate today. It's a Monday. I know, but it feels like a good news Friday and, and certainly for our military to be doing better, to get such a positive report from general Boykin. Just all the way across the board. Great stuff. Thanks for listening today. You've been listening to the WallBuilder show.