Rick Green [00:00:07] It's Good News Friday. Welcome to the WallBuilders show, the place where we take on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective. And on Fridays, it's good news. It's a, it just a, a little, little smattering. What's the right word? A little sprinkling, just a little bit of the good news because there's so much happening. There's no way we can cover it all. And so I'm going to keep my intro very short today because I want to get the David and Tim and all these stories we've got. So Rick Green here with David and 10 Barton and guys, let's jump in. David first piece of good news today. 

David Barton [00:00:33] Well, we've been covering the first 100 days, or I don't think we've covering the 100 days. But in the first hundred days, we have covered dozens of good news stories. So we just, they keep rolling out and rolling out. And now we're past the first hundred and days by a week or so. And Trump has now rolled out his first group of judicial nominees. I think he has 46 vacancies to fill at this point. And so he rolled out his first one for a federal court of appeals, which these are really important. We've talked about how that these more than 100 lawsuits been filed against him. As they go up toward the court of appeal, as you have really some, I think some of the better constitutional attorneys on there, and he's winning so many more of those cases, and he is winning a lot of Supreme Court cases too. So as you move up that level, and so among these first six nominees, there's five that are federal district courts, I think. Four or five of those are in Missouri, which they have, they have a lot of vacancies in Missouri they need filled. But the one that he's nominated for the Federal Court of Appeals is, this is a name I may butcher, but it's Whitney Hermendorfer. And so she's a lady that has been in Tennessee, the Attorney General's office in Tennessee working there. She heads the litigation unit for the AG in Tennessee. And by the way, he's looking at putting her on the sixth Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. And that's the one that looks at cases coming out of Kentucky and Michigan and Ohio and Tennessee. So you got a couple of red states in there and one that's blue and one is kind of purple. So this is not necessarily conservative section of the country in that area. So a justice on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals is gonna have a lot of opportunity to stand for constitutional things out of a couple states that may not always give you constitutional things. She clerked previously, she clerked for Alito and Barrett and Kavanaugh, so she's clerked for the conservative justices, and she's been pro-life. She defended Tennessee's abortion ban. And so it's just good news to start having good justices being appointed again. He's just picking up where he finished his first term with putting really good people on the court, and it looks like it's going that way right now. So we'll see what happens in the Senate. The Senate right now is not able to keep up with all the appointees he's got that he wants from the administration, but now they're gonna have six more to look at on the judicial side. But good news that we got some good judges coming down the pipeline. 

Rick Green [00:03:03] I was thinking about the fact that, you know, first term, as lousy as he did with some of the cabinet positions and people that undermined him, he did pretty good on the judges, right? We got, we got mostly good judges. So he doesn't even have to improve that much, right. This to go around on the judge is for it to still be stellar. And for us to end up with a, what do you think probably? I mean, by the time it's over, he'll have a couple of hundred appointees for, district judges and, appellate judges altogether. Maybe,  you don't know, three or 400. And I bet he does even better. I mean, if there is room for improvement, I, cause he's learned even some of the decisions from Amy, Amy Coney Barrett and some of Supreme Court justice. He's scratching his head going, I must've, I didn't look close enough there. So I, I bet the vetting is going to be even better this time. 

Tim Barton [00:03:43] Yeah. And I think he's learned more of the voices of who he should and should not listen to, uh, even during his first term, right? The, the, the voices he was listening to that last year, year and a half were very different than the voices. He was listening to his first couple of years when it came to who the good judges were, who he should appoint. And, and Trump has been a guy his, maybe his entire life. I mean, certainly it seems to be the case. 

Rick Green [00:04:08] Well, yes, he has been a guy. He has been guy his entire life. I just want to clarify. Oh, that is. 

David Barton [00:04:12] Oh, that is well done, Rick. Well done. 

Tim Barton [00:04:14] That was a clarification. He's been the kind of guy that would find good people and then trust them in their competence to do a good job. And he, he lets them go until they show they can't do a good job and then he finds somebody else. And he has learned so much more over from when he first started through those eight years to when he was finally, in DC again in his second term. He now has a lot better idea of who the right kind of people are to listen to, to trust, et cetera. And so to your point, I think that the justices, the judges we will get this go round will be even better because some of those recommendations, again, as mentioned, there are Supreme Court justices that we can look at and we can shake our head and be very disappointed with some of their decisions. And some of it was known about them already. Uh, from some of their lower court rulings, et cetera. But he had people telling them, no, this is the best candidate. This is, this the one we need. This is one that'll get to the Senate, et Cetera. And I think he's beyond that. Now he's, he's learned to recognize the right kind of voices and, and we know some of those people around them. So we definitely have a lot more confidence in him getting the right kind advice this time. 

Rick Green [00:05:28] Yeah. And there's, there's a lot of good efforts being done out there from American Family Association to First Liberty and others. And of course our friend, Kelly Shakelfordcomes on the program a lot. Uh, just got appointed to that religious Liberty. I don't know what they're calling it commission committee, whatever it is. So there's there's yeah, it's really cool to see. And then of course, Cassie Doolin is there in the faith office, with First Liberty, and I'm in one of our great friends at wall builders and Patriot Academy, and, it's just kind of cool to sees the right people there to have the ear. I don't want to say king, but you know, the ear of the leader, the ear of the, of the president. I always think biblically. So the year of the king, but anyway, so good stuff. All right, Tim. So what's your first piece of good news? Courts? No, something else. 

Tim Barton [00:06:03] No, this one is even more fun for me. It is the defunding of NPR and PBS. 

Rick Green [00:06:10] Yes, can we cue in some cheering? Is there any cheering and maybe like a party sound? I mean, even like a kazoo, what do you call them? The little thing that goes, anyway, all right, that was terrible, sorry. Yes, I just wanna celebrate this, this is so cool. 

Tim Barton [00:06:23] I was trying to think of, of some kind of Sesame Street celebration, um, that I could quote or sing along or something and ultimately what, what we recognize NPR is, is by far the easier example because of how biased they are of the reporters they have, of the team they've compiled is overwhelmingly liberal Democrats, um left-leaning progressive, and that's how their reporting and coverage has been. And so for the government to fund this with our tax dollars, that is something that is, is not genuinely, uh, just unbiased information. I know it's even hard to identify what that might look like anymore, but they, they don't do the idea of why they were created, but also it's one of these things that as we look back, sometimes there's ideas that people have and go, hey, we really need this out there, but If we look at where we are now, with how much media is available, we are overrun. There's not enough hours in the day to listen to all the podcasts, to watch all the things going up on X and all the things we could stream. There's so much out there. And so the idea that we're still taking tax dollars and we're still propping up this incredibly left-leaning liberal Democrat organization to provide quote unquote unbiased news, it doesn't make any sense. And as president Trump has been looking at cutting taxes, that's what he identified. And of course, there's been challenges from liberal groups, not the least of which, NPR and PBS, saying that this is inappropriate and that it's gonna be detrimental and et cetera, et cetera. In fact, the CPB, who is the corporation for public broadcasting, they're the ones that have kind of been over NPR and PBS. And they have a lawsuit with Trump and trying to figure out what they're gonna do. And ultimately, they've already been funded through September of 2027. So even cutting funding now, it's undetermined if that's going to impact them over the next year or two, if they get to keep going and how that's all going to unfold. All of that to say, the good news is that our tax dollars are no longer funding an incredibly biased organization. Who is bent on woke-ifying rising generations. And even though there's probably some decent shows on PBS, there's some things that aren't bad on PBS and I'm not trying to knock necessarily just PBS. There's so many networks and organizations that have found ways to fund this without having to be government funded. And if these are good shows and programs, then guess what? There's gonna be a network that's gonna pick them up. And by the way, probably there's gonna networks that pick them up because there probably are some great shows on PBS for kids. And even as I say that, I know there's going to be people out there going, wait a second, how dare you say there's good shows on PBS? I know nobody's gonna happy no matter which side I take on this, but. 

Rick Green [00:09:23] But let the market decide, right? 

Tim Barton [00:09:24] That's the reality. Is if these shows are good, there's gonna be somebody that wants to pick them up and there's going to be funding for it as opposed to, again, taking our tax dollars and funding very left networks and outlets that are promoting biased ideology instead of this unbiased information or pure entertainment as they were marketed and alleged to be. 

Rick Green [00:09:46] You know, guys, it's kind of cool to watch this because David, when we did constitutional Alive 10 years ago, what's it been 10, 12 years ago? We talked even about in article one, section eight, you know,  the whole idea of inventions and, education and entertainment it's to protect those things, not to fund those things, to actually give them the money to, to go produce that program or have that radio show or to do that scientific study, so we're actually seeing some of the things we said a long time was outside the purview and jurisdiction of the government actually get trimmed away. So this is, this is a pretty cool fact. We mentioned in Constitution Alive PBS and big bird. And, you know, a lot of the,  a lot of the other things that they've been funding on that. And so it's kind of cool to watch this. 

Tim Barton [00:10:30] Well, and Rick, to your point of this is something outside the purview of what the federal government is supposed to do constitutionally speaking. It's also interesting that some of the things that are in the pur view of what constitution says, like the post office, if we really want our mail to get somewhere, we're probably gonna be using FedEx or UPS or some private service, because we've seen that so often it's the private side that does a far better job than does a government-run organization. And so it does raise the question. Of at what point should we be questioning and considering, is it time to privatize some of these things that have been under the federal government? I know that's a different conversation, it's not part of good news necessarily, but as we're looking at things like, again, PBS, NPR, outside the purview of what the Constitution says the role of the federal governor is. We shouldn't be funding that, that's not the purpose of what government does, but just recognizing that if you are good in the market, then there's gonna be probably space for you in the markets, so whether they get picked up ABC, CBS, right, whatever it is, or Netflix, or Amazon Prime, or Hulu, some streaming service might pick them up. Sure, whatever is going to happen to them, there's opportunity, but recognizing that in the private marketplace, it is often a place where things do better because competition often increases the performance of different organizations, and certainly we've seen that with even things like the mail. And so, this is more of a foundation of freedom thought. That we would have on a Thursday conversation, but it has made me wonder many times, is it time to even revisit some of these things the federal government says, Hey, we should do it. And back when we didn't have. 

Rick Green [00:12:09] It's a different animal. There was no competition. There was nobody in the private market doing post offices or, post roads. And, of course, now any young people listening won't get this, but the rule should be if it's in the yellow pages, government shouldn't do it. They don't know what the yellow page is were. So the yellow Pages was where you could list. You had all the businesses in the community. And so if there was somebody in the market doing it, there's no need for government to do it well. If there had been a yellow pages back in the founding era, there wouldn't have been FedEx and UPS listed. In the yellow pages that didn't exist. So it made sense to do it. And to your point, Tim, about the waste and they don't have the accountability, that sort of thing, we just have Bob McEwen on and he talks all the time about how every government transaction is a third party transaction where that government person is spending your money on me. So if they're spending your money, then price doesn't matter to them. And if they spend it on me, then quality doesn't to them because it's not that bureaucrat that's actually using it. And that's such a good way of explaining it because every government transactions fits that. Doesn't mean we don't have government. It's just we only wanted to do what only government can do because it's always going to be wasteful and it's not going to respond to the market as well. And so if the market can do it get government out of it. I know it should have been foundation of freedom. David has a lot more good news to get to. So let's let's switch gears. We'll take a quick break. We'll come back to good news here on The WallBuilders Show. 

Rick Green [00:14:33] Welcome back, thanks for staying with us here on The WallBuilders Show. It's Good News Friday today. We appreciate you staying for more good news here in the second half of the program. David, next piece of Good news.. 

David Barton [00:14:40]  Well, Tim was talking about the money they got cut from NPR and PBS, et cetera. I'm going to talk about the Monday that cut. This is another Doge cut and this is out of the department of agriculture. They cut $620,000 grant from the department  agriculture and being the department of Agriculture, this makes perfect sense. I don't know why they want to cut this, but it was a $620000 grant. That was allocated for research on the menstrual cycle of transgender men.

Tim Barton [00:15:15]  I could've solved that problem for him you could have given me that money and I could have given you the answer back in less than an hour. It would not have been a problem. 

David Barton [00:15:25] Well, I was just thinking of this from the irony of, okay, okay, this is the Department of Agriculture, okay? I'm sitting here in the middle of the ranch right now and sitting in the little ranch, we all know what cows are and what bulls are. And we know what mares are and we do. 

Tim Barton [00:15:44] Hang on. You said we do. All of us listening right now know what cows and bulls are. 

David Barton [00:15:51] Let me put it this way, everybody who has a ranch and everyone who works in the field of agriculture for a living knows that you don't need to study between the nanny goats and the billy goats. There's two genders and certain things happen with each one that don't happen with the other. We could have say six, and it takes doge to cut something that stupid from the Department of Agriculture? Are you kidding?

Tim Barton [00:16:18] But guys, this also just makes me wonder how many moments have we missed out making some serious bucks if we could have gone and said, hey, let us do a study for you. Give us all kinds of money and we will do a study and come back and give you this brilliant insight that you need us for and give us half a million dollars. Like we. 

Rick Green [00:16:41] I feel like Stacey Abrams has joined the program. 

David Barton [00:16:44] Well, I actually thought. 

Rick Green [00:16:45] She got two billion, right? It was even more. Yeah Yeah,. 

David Barton [00:16:50] I thought Tim was gonna say if you'll give us the doe, we'll tell you about the bucks So I missed that one too. I heard the door part coming and it missed the other side of that. So I 

Rick Green [00:17:00] It actually fits what we were talking about before the break though. Like here's an area that there's no reason government should be doing this federal department of agriculture. We've got all our state department of agricultural, let alone, I don't know. We know a lot of ranchers, right? Have you ever run into a rancher that said, you know, I could, I could do a lot better with my cattle if the government would just tell me how to do it. I've never met one that ever, never that ever. 

David Barton [00:17:24] And the reason is because if the government is run by people who can't tell whether men have menstrual cycles or not, you don't want them close to your ranch or your farm or anything you're doing if they think this is worthy of us. So, all right. So I got that one. One more that I'll throw out is DOGE also canceled a bunch of projects, 701 grants canceled in the national science foundation. And this should be just as easy. I think everybody knows what science is. Apparently not. I mean it's supposed to be for science and engineering and that's not supposed to be the role of government anyway. You mentioned earlier Rick, it's not the role of government to fund that is to encourage science and the arts. It's not that the role of the government to find that in the constitution. But 701 and they're all about DEI and so one of them here's a huge grant to San Jose State University to train students as climate justice action researchers and change agents. Here's one big grant to Georgia Institute of Technology for racialized privileges in the STEM classroom in STEM. That's science and engineering and mathematics. And so racialized privilege is in those areas. And here's one for Northwestern University for STEM education through the framework of racial equality. How in the world that helps science? Who knows, but it's really good news that those programs have now been cut. And that's I'm loving this this is what we saw for the first hundred days and it's not slowing down apparently and DOGE is still turning out the nonsense 

Rick Green [00:18:59] And I know I keep taken us back to being a foundation of freedom Thursday, instead of a good news Friday, but since we've mentioned it so many times and you, and you just paraphrased it as well, David, I just want to read that clause real quick because so many of your stories apply to this and article one, section eight of the constitution, it says to promote the progress of science and useful arts comma by securing for limited time to authors and inventors, the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. In other words, the way to promote is and encourage, as you were saying, is to make sure that their invention is going to be protected, not to fund it not to, you know, have PBS and all these other things that we've been talking about or some of those scientific things. So yeah, just really good. We're really literally getting back to the Constitution by taking these steps. Alright, Tim, where are we headed next? 

Tim Barton [00:19:39]  All right, well this is an article from the Daily Wire and they're highlighting one of the significant accomplishments from Trump's first 100 days and it's dealing with border and border security. What they point out is through a combination of policy changes, arrest, deportation, sanctions and coordination with foreign governments, Trump's administration claims they facilitated a dramatic 99.9% drop in border encounters. Now to give a little comparison, and maybe even context for this, the article highlights that illegal immigration was so dramatic under Biden that the foreign born population surged to a new high of 53 million. Two thirds of the growth of the foreign-born population during the Biden presidency is estimated to be due to illegal immigration. There are approximately 18.6 million illegal aliens currently present in United States according to the federation. For American immigration reform. Now, again, that's 18.6 million illegal aliens currently in the U.S. According to Federation for American Immigration Reform. The Trump administration recorded a 93% drop in illegal border crossings in the 11 days after his inauguration. The decline proved to be even more precipitous by March when Vice President, JD Vance visited the Southern border and boasts of a 98% reduction in border crossings, et cetera. This is one of several areas where we have seen incredible results. Of course, where President Trump said, when referencing Joe Biden saying we need Congress to pass more laws and Trump says, turns out you shouldn't need a new president. Right, when you have somebody in the executive branch who's actually enforcing the laws that are on the books, It makes a difference and one of the things this article points out is not only is Trump, he's not just enforcing the laws on the books, he also stopped a refugee admissions program. Now we knew the Biden administration had flights coming into the U S of illegal aliens from other nations. This points out that there were flights coming from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Columbia, and which the Biden administration used to streamline more than 300,000 migrants into the interior of the United States. Our government was flying them in. They weren't even having to walk to come across the southern border. And so not only is Trump enforcing laws in her place, he's saying, yeah, we're not doing that anymore. We're not flying in people from all over the world. And now with Christine Ohm being Homeland Security Secretary, she said, if you're a criminal alien Considering entering. America illegally, don't even think about it. If you come here and break our laws, we will hunt you down. Criminals are not welcome in the United States. And guys, what a tone shift that is to have a Homeland Secretary saying, we're going to track you down. If you come here illegally, you break our laws, which by the way, coming here illegally you've already broken the laws. But of course we have talked about how Trump has prioritized the violent criminals as the top of the list of the illegal aliens he's targeting. And Christian Ohm says, we are going to find you. We're tracking you down and we're getting you out of here. Again, it's a very, very different tone from the last administration. It's very refreshing. And it's why... They are boasting a dramatic 99.9% drop in border encounters. An article goes on to point out that he has, I think, about 9,000 additional personnel down at the border. A lot that he's done to ensure safety and security of the border, but overall, one of the really good things that's happened in the first hundred days is securing of the borders. Oh, here it is. Roughly 9, 000 active duty soldiers were at the southern border by early March. So using the military to keep Americans safe, part of what they're supposed to be doing anyway, overall good news, just one more of those things we've already talked about, but this is an article just highlighting even more of the success of what Trump is doing at the Southern border. 

Rick Green [00:23:52] Tim, you got to repeat that. What was that number? 99%, 99.7%? 

Tim Barton [00:23:56] 99.9% drop in border encounters. 

Rick Green [00:24:01] I mean guys, that's like, I mean, you got to pinch yourself and go, that's a 90 debt year, a hundred days that we've gotten to that point. And they acted like they couldn't do anything about it. First, they lied and said the border safe. It's not a problem. There's no cry. And then they just started acting like they couldn't doing anything about. I mean this is, this is absolutely remarkable. Super good news. All right, David closes out with one. 

David Barton [00:24:20] Well, every year we kind of talk about the American Bible Society's State of the Bible Report. And we talk with George Barna and get stats on the year. And the last several years have not been very good years, quite frankly. We've seen a drop of about 29 million Americans stopped reading the Bible, no longer doing that. This year, we've seen the dramatic turnaround. Just reading here some of the stats. For the first time since 2021, we're seeing an increase in both Bible use and scripture engagement. Particularly among younger adults and in men. About 10 million more Americans read the Bible outside of church. 29% more millennials read the bible this year compared to last year. Men's bible use has increased by 19% from just a few years ago, and men and millennials used to be considered the least likely to read the Bible. This year, we have Gen Zs at 15% engagement, Melenials at 17% now just last year. Those two numbers, instead of being 15% were 11%, and instead of 17% were 12%. So that's a fairly significant increase in one year. So even Barna is seeing the same kind of thing. Barna has shown in his studies that young people and men's belief in Jesus is growing rapidly and has been growing since 2001. So really good news that there seems to be a spiritual awakening. We talked about this with just looking at the number of baptisms that are going on, the number things going on college campuses. And church seems to be growing, at least the conservative churches seem to be going. And so this is just another indication, and it's really good news when scripture engagement goes up, and with people wanting to follow after a Christian lifestyle, a biblical lifestyle, that's good for America, good for those families, good for everybody involved. 

Rick Green [00:26:05] Well guys, I know we, we mixed a lot of foundations in here. So it was kind of a Thursday, Friday program combined but what you just said makes total sense. David its like, you don't, you, you get the, you don't get the Liberty without the law. So it's just like the America, the beautiful song, Liberty in law. And you don' get God's best blessings without being within his boundaries. So by restoring these foundations, by getting back to the constitution, we get the good news. So really that's, that's we, I don't think we planned it that way, but that's kind of how our programs worked for 20 years is you do the foundations on Thursday. And then you get the good news on Friday. Not that it happens that fast, but it is in that order. You gotta get the foundations right if you wanna have the good new. Folks, hope you enjoyed it today. We got more good news for you next week. Have a great weekend, and thanks so much for listening to The WallBuilders Show.