Rick Green [00:00:07] Welcome to the intersection of faith and culture. It is the WallBuilders show and man, the new year is here. We're going to kick it off with some pro-family legislative conference speeches that were amazing, that we think would be a fantastic way to start the year. And of course it's the 250th. So, if it's 250th anniversary of the nation, we're celebrating the Declaration of Independence. We're celebrating the birth of the nation, then we need to know what we're celebrating. We need to be constantly reminding ourselves throughout this year. What are the principles that made America so great in the first place? So, what better way to start that off in 2026 than Bob McEwen, Bob McEwen, former Congressman from Ohio, great friend to this program and WallBuilders. Just a fantastic teacher on those very principles. So, we're going to be sharing with you today and tomorrow, his presentation at the Pro Family Legislators Conference just a few weeks ago in which he addresses exactly this, what is the fundamental difference between America's Constitutional Republican and other forms of government. What is it about our wealth creation that works so well? All of these things. So, Bob McEwen, Pro Family Legislators Conference. We'll jump right into that. I'm Rick Green, by the way, here with David and Tim Barton. And you can learn more about all three of us at our websites, wallbuilders.show for the radio program and wallbuilders.com for everything else WallBuilders related. It's gonna be a great 2026. Let's jump right in with Bob McEwen at the Pro Family Legislators Conference. When we return from the break, you're listening to The WallBuilders Show. 

Rick Green [00:02:37] Welcome back to The WallBuilders Show. We're gonna jump right in with Bob McEwen at the Pro Family Legislators Conference. 

Bob McEwen [00:02:44] Hasn't been a fun time. This is a great opportunity for those of us who love America and love politics and to get everybody together that thinks the way we think and do the things we do. But fortunately, David's thought it all through for us and for that I'm grateful. Let me just say, I got involved in politics, probably not unlike the rest of you, for two reasons. One, I loved America, and number two, I hated communism. And fortunately, the Lord arranged it that I could be around at a time we back in those days when I first ran for was in the legislature we didn't have what was called RINOS they call them RINOS now back in those days they were called they were call Rockefeller Republicans and  we had a governor who was a Rockefeller Republican and when when Gerald Ford became president the first thing they did was get the state party to endorse him and all. And a couple of us that were conservatives and pro-Reagan, we went out to, we were at dinner one night in the legislature and we got ourselves so worked into a froth, we decided we were gonna put Ronald Reagan's name on the ballot. And so we went and did that because Mr. Ford, if you didn't know whether or not he was a Rockefeller Republican, he chose Rockefeller as his running mate. And so, so we put Reagan's name on the ballot and that just really upset the folks out in California a great deal. They said, you know, we don't have money to compete the whole folks against us and we're going to, if you're a friend of the governor, you'll get his name off the ballot. And we were called every name in the book, but we didn't give up anyway. They didn't give us a bumper sticker, a yard sign, didn't even give us anything. And then finally, the last weekend before the election, May 5th on Tuesday, they said, all right, the governor will come in on Saturday, you got two events and then that's it. And we'll leave. And so, we did, and I did the one in Columbus, and my wife is from Akron and Canton, and the other legislator that we named ourselves co-chairman for Reagan campaign, and he did that, and he got 45% of the vote. But then, as you know, out in Kansas City, he failed by 11 votes, and Gerald Ford got the nomination. When the balloons dropped the band plays the carrying on, they cut away to Reagan in his suite and they said Well tell us governor if you had it to do over again would you do anything differently and he immediately said I would have spent 24 hours in Ohio. And to which I never let him forget that. Every time from then on if you'd listened to me, you know we'd still have the Panama Canal and you've been president instead of Khomeini being in Iran and all those things. So, it turned out to our best. But now that that's kind of righted itself, there's two things that I still care about very much, very deeply, and that is that, and I incorporate it in virtually every speech that I give, I take the first two to four minutes of virtually every speech to talk about the greatness of America, because you might have seen the other day that Fox was interviewing these young people, and they said, if we gave you $30,000, would you move to a foreign country? And virtually every one of them said yes. So, then they ask them, what country would you like to go to? Now, that's a stretch for them. I don't know, I don't know. They not only didn't know what countries there were but and of course didn't know anything about what those countries were like and that's a source of concern to me and then secondly is that as a great aggravation is that people do not know how wealth is created and if you grew up on a farm you learned that and Thomas Jefferson expressed his concern for that when you get all these city folk you know they won't know how to do this and we see that we have AOC who by the way, all the politicians who won her primary against the head of the Democrat caucus, the fourth highest ranking member, and she only got 12,000 votes. She didn't win by 12,00 votes; she got 12 thousand votes. And this country is being whipsawed by this woman who obviously who went to college and got a degree in economics, so therefore knows absolutely nothing about economics. And as suggesting so when these people say that the new elected mayor of New York and all that but why don't we just take from these people give to another. So that concerns me and those are the two things that while I'm trying to talk about something else obviously slip them in the let's just talk about America for a second. Four percent of the population of the world they call themselves Americans. And yet, every year, they write more books, more plays, more symphonies, more copyrights, more inventions than the other 96% combined. Over a third of all the goods and services on the planet are created by this little 4% of the population of the world. For thousands of years, people hoped to someday fly, and it was Americans. Now, some of this is kind of parochial because they're from my congressional district. But they... The Wright Brothers, the airplane, and then the light bulb and the telegraph, the telephone, the global position. There's a ship parking in Hong Kong and in Singapore at this very moment using a global position, as a plane flying over Africa, there's truck delivering products in Syria using a Global Positioning System conceived, invented, and maintained by Americans. Now by the way, isn't it a wonderful thing? I just how many of you have a fold up paper map in your car anymore? Do you have any more of those? And you imagine? If you went someplace, you had to read all of the signs when you went, instead of somebody saying in a quarter of a mile, you turn and say, thank you ma'am, I appreciate that. And Americans did, America did that for the world. The, in Mexico, car dealers ordering a part from Tokyo and Buenos Aires, Mercedes dealer ordering apart from Stuttgart using an internet conceived invented and maintained by Americans. Only this country put men on the moon and from all that the benefits that come from all those things. We started prayer breakfast in in Ukraine some years ago, and we were on a street corner kind of talking to some young people one time about the difference in America and a plane very low came across had his landing gear down and I just started pointing I said let's just take that airplane. You know, it was because developed by Americans. Look at the tires. There are tires on that airplane, there's tire on every there's tires on every car in the world. Why? Because an American, by the name of Charlie Goodyear from Akron, Ohio developed the vulcanization process forever. And there's lights flashing on the airplane because a fellow from Milano, Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. And then there's skyscrapers all over the world. Why? Because an American from Rutland, Vermont, Elisha Otis invented the elevator and there's places where it's 100 and 120 degrees. Why? Because an America named Willis Carrier, God love him, invented the air conditioning and the entire world has been blessed by this nation as no other nation in the history of the world. And so, his, you know, we could do this, we can just do this forever. Charles Kettering was from there in Dayton, he was talking to Edison one day, he said, what you working on? He said, I'm working on a battery. How's it going? Not very good. He said it doesn't last very long. He said would it last long enough do you think that we could hook up electric motor to it and it could turn an engine? And Charles Kethering patented the electric starter. So, it used to be, you had to be a full-blown man to get out there and flank that thing around. And now you can get a little girl can climb up in a big locomotive and just turn the key because of the electric starter. That this nation and you have to ask why is that? And that's the fundamental part of where we go next. That is that America is different because it was founded upon spiritual values now when you do things God's way righteousness exalteth the nation, sin is a reproach to any people when the righteous are an authority the people rejoice when the wicked beareth rule the people mourn. Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord. And so, this nation is so wealthy that we have to just hunt around for our definition of poverty, and so one of the things I come from Appalachia, and so we like to talk about poverty a lot. So, we either go the Ozarks of Appalache and take black and white pictures of people sitting on the porch and say isn't this really horrible but when you when you look at in the concept of what the world is like you know the second richest, first of all half of people on earth live on less than the cost of a Starbucks. And half of those, that'd be a fourth, live on less than half of that. The second richest spot on earth is Western Europe, France, Germany, Britain. In America, we have a level below which we will not permit a person to sink. You come to this country, sit down on the park bench, gripe and complain about the country, we will bury you with stamps for food, a roof over your head, a bed to sleep in, unlimited healthcare for you and anybody you've ever met, unlimited education. A person living in poverty in America, this is not my opinion, this is the Rector study done by the Wall Street Journal and Heritage Foundation every 24 months for the last 37 years. A person living in poverty in America is more likely to have a telephone, a television, an air conditioner, an automobile, eats more meat, and has more square footage space than the average resident of the second richest spot on earth, Western Europe. In fact, the poorest state in America, the median income of Mississippi is number 50, and it is higher than every nation in the European Union except three. Higher than Great Britain, for example. And So, I repeat, the question has to be why, and our definition is so skewed that... Those in poverty live a king's ransom elsewhere in the world. America has not only blessed prosperity, it's also more generous than any place in the world. In Rwanda, as you know, without God, man always ends up killing. That's what makes America different. Our rights come from God who protects life. And when you don't have a God and protection of life, so... Some folks have democracy, and democracy is ruled by the majority. And as you know, the word democracy does not appear in any of our founding documents nor any of the constitutions of the 50 states because our rights don't come from the majority, you can vote 95 to 5 to kill Jews in America, can't do it. Why? Because rights don t come from a majority, they come from God and is protected by the Constitution. We have folks that misrepresent that by saying we are a democracy because we democratically elect people to office, and we call that democracy because we'd democratically elected them to run the republic. There's only certain things that they can do, and as that good immigrant is now going to be the mayor of New York, he's going to learn that in this country, you're not allowed to do all the things that you thought you could do. But not only are we the most generous, in Rwanda, where they decided that the 80% are HUTU 20% are Tutsi. So, if rights come from the majority, the Tutsis in trouble, right? And they were. And over the course of 90 days with machetes, they chopped a million people in pieces. And thereafter, when they finally stopped and we tried to restore, they brought in some Americans. And our daughter went to live in Rwanda for a year and try to restore order. And she would, as you know, most third world countries, they don't walk on the sidewalk. If you've experienced when they move into your neighborhood, they don't walk on a sidewalk either. They like to go in the road a lot. And so, we had about two miles to, we were walking with her to where she was going to work and there'd be people at the intersection. Little, I remember one fellow didn't have any legs. He was on a little scooter and he'd wait for her to come and give her a hug and things. And we'd go through and we stopped in a little shop and she ordered flowers so that in the evening she'd come back, they would have flowers. As we were leaving, she said, she said, you know, I'm the only person that can do that And I said, what's that, sweetheart? She said, nobody else can order flowers without paying up front. Said, they won't do anything for me unless they pay them in advance. She said they know the Americans will keep their word. Americans will pay it back. They absolutely know that. So, one of the things that we were doing was we went out to visit this one gal out in the woods and we drove as far as the car would go and then we went back a path across a river on a log that was laying there. And eventually we came upon these kids. That had these plastic buckets, and they were frightened at our skin color, and a little communication, and we eventually followed them, they went out to... They were getting water. They were gathering water. And there, in the middle of the heart of Africa, was this clean water pump. And there across the top is said, this a gift of the people of the United States of America. That little 4% has blessed the world as no one ever has. So, continuing on, how did it do it? We did it because we obeyed God's commands. America is the standard for righteousness in the world. If a ship is attacked on the high seas, this happens between 300 and 500 times a year. To whom can you appeal? What maintains peace and prosperity on the planet? If you're a yacht in the Caribbean, if you're a trawler in the South China Sea, if you're British tanker in the Straits of Hormuz and you're being attacked by Somalian pirates, to whom can you appeal? Only the 327,000 Americans who wear the uniform of the United States Navy. That's the standard for righteousness in the world. We can then follow them; we can make them pay. And just as a little aside, never in the history of the United States has an American ship ever been attacked on the high seas with impunity. It doesn't make a difference who you were. You attacked America, you're going to pay. With the single exception of 2021 to 2025, when we had a sleeping not something in the White House. That allowed us they would come out and shoot at American ships and we could see where they were and they would send this little crazy drone up there that they paid five or six hundred dollars for and the Americans would use a million-and-a-half-dollar rocket to shoot it down. You'd have to be a Democrat to be that dumb. Nevertheless, in the process of it, of the standard for righteousness, that is that when Britain was the strongest nation on Earth, how did it do that? How did it rule Britannia? Britannia rules the waves. Wherever there was a tight spot, at Gibraltar, one end, so if you control the two ends, you control Mediterranean Sea. If you control Cape of Good Hope, Cape of Horn, Cape Horn, you control all traffic between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific and the Atlantic. The South China Sea, 60 to 70% of all maritime traffic goes through the South China sea. And that's why they... Singapore and the British controlled all that and after World War II, world leadership was thrust upon America. Never in the history of the world has a nation become the premier nation on earth, but what it didn't seek it, whether it be the Athenians or the Romans or the Greeks or the Spanish, the British one, with the single exception of the United States of America after World War II, they had world leadership thrust upon, a people that didn't seek it and didn't ask for it. And yet people said, that's the nation that I trust. And so the South China Sea is protected by American sea lanes, but there's competition there. So the Chinese know how to do this. They've watched. And the Chinese want to control that sort of thing. So, they took these little atolls and they militarized them. They put landing and military personnel, and so Mr. Obama was told... That that wasn't a good thing. And so, when Xi came to visit, he said, I would wish you wouldn't do that. And Xi Jinping, the president of China, said, that's fine, we won't do that. Yes, sir, that's right. And all the press said, isn't that wonderful? What a great victory. Didn't faze them a bit. They went ahead and did the same thing that they wanted until we elected a leader, a leader that was an American. And he'd been a developer in New York at one time. And by the way, do you know what a developer does? A developer sits at his desk and every 20 minutes somebody comes in and says, you can't do that. You understand that? You can't. You can get the permit to do that. You can't use those kinds of bricks. We can't get electricity to your place for another year and a half. You cant bring your trucks down that road. You have to... And so all they do is say no no no and he has to negotiate with those people except in New York they say you know if you don't use our bricklayers union your wife is going to be floating in the East River so he's used to that so he goes to Washington and he said this is a piece of cake I mean this is not I'm used to doing with these folks in the in the process of it the when he was president the entire world said America has leadership. Now, while we're on the topic, let's just talk about this. Everything, if you were to ask me, what is the most important thing you've ever learned in your entire life, it would be this. That is that everything in life is either physical or spiritual. And wisdom is the capacity to tell which is which. The Lord refers to people who are lost that because of the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, but a person who is spiritually dead, he thinks if I have enough physical relationships, I'll find love. No, you won't. Love is not physical. Love, is spiritual. Joy. If I have a new car, if I just get my own airplane, if I had my own, then I'll be happy. No, you won't, happiness is not physical happiness is spiritual. Peace. Peace. If you just drink this at five o'clock, if you just shoot yourself, you just smoke this man would be at peace, man would... No, no, peace doesn't come physically, peace is spiritual. Now, once you find that, you can start to speculate. What else is spiritual or physical? And personally, what Kevin was saying, you know, money. Now there's one for you. Money? Is money physical or spiritual? If I put a one-dollar bill, and a ten-dollar bill and a hundred-dollar bill. Physically? They're all exactly the same. Spiritually, that's what we trust. That's why the stock market goes up and down. When it falls 10%, do all the buildings reduce 10%? No, it's because our faith and our confidence in things. I say all that to say this. What is leadership? Leadership is spiritual. That is, it is what you see in a football team when you see the momentum shift. Physically nothing's changed, but spiritually things have changed. And to have a leader, we need a leader that people can trust. And when we had one, so when Mr. Trump said, we don't want you doing that anymore, they obeyed. Mr. Putin, he had gone into Crimea. And just as a little aside, you know how we got Alaska? We got Alaska because Russia was financially broke because of the fight in Crimea. And so, they sold it to America, and here we are 150 years later, back to square one. But America stands for banking laws, for copyrights, for patent law. The world has functioned because America is trustworthy and reliable and true. For example, the Panama Canal, if a person shows up at the Panama Canal, the ships they get in line one after another. America treats people the same. When Mr. Carter, who unlike Donald Trump does not recognize, is perhaps the second worst president in the history of America. And if you want to challenge me on it, I will bury you with facts of why this man was really, really bad. But one of the things he did was give away the Panama Canal. And on both ends of the Panama Canal are now Chinese bases. And we haven't seen what it's like if America is not the superior nation on earth. What if China controls that and says that you can't use the canal unless you get rid of your nuclear weapons. Japan, fourth largest economy in the world, imports 100% of their oil. It comes up through the South China Sea. What if China controls the South Chinese Sea and says to Japan, you know, unless you break relations with Israel, you're gonna have to send your ships around the other way and increase the cost of everything and collapse your economy, and then they would have to sit, the diet would have decide which is the best interest to us. We haven't seen, fortunately none of us alive, have seen what it's like when America is not the supreme nation on earth. But when you're right, that means you're always under attack. And that's why it's important that we be careful what we do and how we do it. As I mentioned that I wanted to mention how wealth is created. So let me jump through very quickly. The three principles is to where all this came from. There's a principle that has used on how governments should operate. And it was given to a fellow by the name of Moses. He got to live with three and a half million Jews in the middle of a desert. I'll bet that was fun. And he said, and so one day his father-in-law came up and he said Hey Mo, he said God and I've been talking about you, yeah. He said you're gonna wear yourself out son, you're overdoing it here. He said what you need to do, you need to set up a federal, state, and local government. You need to have people in charge of thousands, hundreds, and tens. And listen, Mo, I can't give you a course in government. I'll just tell you, here's the three things that you have to look for. He said, first of all, what you need to do is you need have people who recognize God, that is, fear God. That's the old English term. He said you fear the king, honor or respect the king. He said now first of, this is our starting point. You need people who respect God, Moses. And while we're on the topic, by the way, there's only two options. Either you think you're God, or you think He's God. And that's the competition that goes on forever. And they said, you don't want people who think they're God. As I say, while we are here, let's just take it a little bit further. You don't to marry a person who thinks they're God. And also, you don't want to go into business with a person who thinks they're God. And furthermore, you want to elect people to office who think that they're God. So that's what we got to do first. So, our founders understood that. 

Rick Green [00:26:34] All right, everybody, out of time for today. We will catch you tomorrow for the conclusion with Bob McEwen speaking at the Pro Family Legislators Conference. You have been listening to The WallBuilders Show.