Ep 56 | History in Clay Pots | David Barton | The Glenn Beck Podcast

It is my joy to sit down with a friend and one of the best men I have ever, ever met, David Barton.

David is an interesting guy.

He is the founder of Wall Builders, which is this great pro-family organization that teaches principles, preserves history, teaches principles.

He speaks to over 400 groups every year.

David himself has authored authored many books.

One of them, I remember when I was just starting to wake up in my 30s, one of them I read and I loved the book and then forgot about it.

And one day I met David Barton and I'm like, hey, you're the guy that wrote one of my favorite books.

He has been involved in Supreme Court cases.

He is very involved in national politics, local politics.

He is even a guy who has, under a

nom de plume, helped write some of the history books in many states to make sure that our standards and schools are right.

And that is so faltering now.

But David is on a mission to preserve our history and teach it.

He is described as America's historian.

Time magazine called him a hero to millions, including some very powerful politicians.

I have no idea what we're going to talk about.

I know he's brought some treasures in with him, but David Barton is always a fascinating interview.

I think if I could have any job,

it would be the two of us in a van doing American pickers.

You are the guy who has taught me probably more about America than anybody else.

I've learned so much from you, David, and I also learned how to make a compelling argument from you.

I have learned what a good friend is.

I've learned what a good Christian is because of you.

And we, I don't even know how we first met,

but I think you're probably like...

I can tell you part of that story.

And by the way,

thank you for the kind words but it's very much reciprocal as well what i've learned from you and depth and maturity and vision and patience a lot of stuff wow balance thank you you you've been it's been great it's been iron sharpens iron bible verse i think maybe we helped each other hopefully yeah i think we have you were going to do something called the american revival and the american revival arena events tampa phoenix etc

and you were doing faith hope and charity and you called me and said i've got the guy for Hope.

I've got the guy for charity.

And this past weekend, three or four people gave me the same book, Original Intent, and it had you on it.

And I've seen something from you earlier.

I have, I should have you autograph it.

I have my probably first edition copy

of that book that you wrote in the 90s, right?

I think it was 92.

Yeah.

I think it's 92.

And I loved that book.

And I didn't even know it was you until people started handing it.

And then I was like, oh, I know this book.

I love this book.

And that's when you said, so why don't you do the faith thing?

And so we did those arena events.

And so that was pretty early on.

And so that was the first time we really got connected.

And I think the Founders Fridays came after that, as I recall.

I think it was.

Yeah, we did Founding Fridays, Founders Fridays, every Friday.

And the network

hated it.

Fox hated it.

Hated it.

Hated it.

They gave me so much grief.

They really.

Oh, my gosh.

You know that, don't you?

Did I not?

I didn't know they gave you grief.

Oh, my gosh.

The Jack and the cameraman of the guys really loved it.

No, the floor crew, regular people loved it, but

Fox didn't like it.

No, I didn't know.

Fox didn't like it.

But it was fun.

And

what I learned from you, David,

and this is where we make such a good good team, what I learned from you is

it's one thing to say

Ava Braun was a monster, was a monster, just as much as Hitler was, monster.

And another thing to say,

Ava Braun was a monster.

She even had her hats made

by a Jewish woman

who ended up in Treblinka.

She didn't care.

Killed at Treblinka.

Killed at Treblinka.

Killed at Trebre.

And that is Eva Braun's hat.

Right, right,

right.

There is such a difference between telling a story and then having something

that is

verifies.

It's not imagination anymore.

Now you've got something tangible in front of you and it shifts the whole argument.

It's not what are your credentials.

It's, oh my gosh, that's the real one.

Shifts everything.

Here's what kills me: is you used to be,

you've been a collector forever.

You were buying George Washington stuff when it was like a dime a dozen.

They couldn't give it away, right?

So when I was buying George Washington's stuff, the highest priced George Washington letter I saw was

500 bucks.

Oh my gosh.

And if I bought everything now,

I would own Trump Towers.

Oh my God.

We know a guy who's been offered a million dollars for a single George Washington letter.

One million.

One.

For one letter.

I see them typically go 40 to 60.

I've seen them up to 200,000.

I don't have one.

We have some.

Yeah, I know.

I don't.

You've got the badge of merit stuff, and you've got Stony Point.

So you've got some good Washington stuff.

Yeah, I guess I do.

I guess I do.

You've got some Washington stuff, yeah.

But again, you know, back when we were doing it, and it's interesting,

when we started out, we drove everywhere because I had three kids.

We couldn't fly to five, couldn't afford to fly five people everywhere.

So I drove all over the United States.

So we retired three vans with 300,000 miles on each van.

So nearly a million miles driving the country.

And as we were going through places, we would see old junk stores, old second-hand shops, thrift shops, would stop at any...

Did you ever get to love that?

Yeah, they didn't know anything else.

I mean, that's how they they grew up.

That's what they did.

Hate it.

I go to, I drive, and just like my mother, I drive and I see an old antique store or something, and

everyone in the car is like, please, Dad, no, no, no, no.

And I'm like, well, just kind of run in and just see what they have.

And I'm there.

I've realized I'm a hoarder.

I'm just a very

correct rich hoarder.

I had somebody come over to my house and

they

were trying to help us on interior design on something.

And she said,

you're a hoarder.

And I said, is she really?

I said, well, I mean, nothing's stacked up and I don't have to use it as aisles.

And she said, no, she said, don't get me wrong.

She said, I don't think you could live in a smaller house.

She said, because you're a hoarder, not of stuff, you're a hoarder of stories.

Yeah.

She said, everything in your house has a story.

And I realized it's true.

I can't get rid of stuff because I

this is a story.

Most people would be like, what are you going to do with that?

Are you kidding me?

This is Ava Braun.

I can tell the story of 10 stories just based on this hat.

That's right.

And that's the fun part about history, especially the way we go at it, is, you know, I think the Bible is God's word.

But at the very least, it's a history book.

So if we say it's a history book, and if we say God was was the author, it always strikes me as interesting.

We ask people this: what year did David kill Goliath?

Answer is, nobody has a clue.

That's because it's not important.

See, what we focus on today is all the years and the dates.

Back then, it was stories.

Now, I can tell you the story of David killing Goliath.

That's a cool story for a teenage kid to take on a seven and a half-foot guy.

And the story is what it's all about.

And so, when God gives us history, it wasn't with the way we do it today, which really is pretty boring.

It was about ⁇ so I would say the Bible is also a hoarder of stories.

I mean, whether it's the three Hebrew children or Daniel.

David, that is what history is.

It is.

It is.

No, it's so boring the way it's taught.

It's so incredibly boring.

And I believe, now that I've done my homework, I believe intentionally so.

I think they've wrecked the story of history.

Because if you can wreck history, you don't know who you were.

You don't know where you came from.

You don't know anything.

Well, the thing that I've always seen is that you can't remake your history until you first stop teaching history.

What you can do is attack it, then you stop teaching it, then you come back with a whole different story.

Did you see the article in, I think it's Texas Monthly?

Did you see this?

No, I actually have it at my house.

I haven't finished reading it yet.

I was going to bring it to you.

I wish I had it now.

The new Texas history, on the cover of Texas Monthly, it says, Are you ready to remember the Alamo, the Civil War, and

something else,

Texas differently?

Yeah.

And I'm like,

no, no.

I mean, if it's true,

this group came out and they looked for a great writer.

They didn't look for a historian.

The guy's not a historian.

He's a journalist.

And the quote that jumped out at me

was at the top of the article.

I just

am,

I can't remember exactly, but it was like, I am just repelled by the standard big picture of Texas.

And you're going to write the history?

I think that's the historical

right, right.

I mean, what people don't understand and why we make such a good team.

That's like letting an OU guy write the history of the University of Texas.

That's not going to go real well.

It's ridiculous.

It's like having Chevy write the

history of Ford or Chevy probably could, but Dodge or

Tesla, you're not going to have them write it.

Of course not.

But the thing I think that makes

you so interesting and the two of us so deadly is

when I first met you,

You were all about the best things.

And your collection,

how many founding letters do you have in papers?

Total is 120,000 documents,

originals, copies before 1812.

How many letters?

I don't know.

I mean, just the documents.

Documents, 120,000.

And our collections combined, if I'm not mistaken, are

only surpassed

This is something I heard a while back and you'd know better only surpassed by the Library of Congress and the National Archives.

What we're told is the collection we have collectively is the largest privately held collection of founding era materials.

And so if that's accurate, then that means the National Archives, Smithsonian, Library of Congress, they're bigger, but as far as

an institution.

You collect all those great, wonderful,

game-changing things.

I've always collected the dark

and Hitler's napkin where they tried to blow him up.

Well, that's actually a positive one.

I mean I have the witch trials and

all the witch trial stuff and everything else.

But it's a good combination because you tell the good, the bad, the ugly.

You tell all of it.

And this is the problem with taking statues and monuments down, is I can tell you as much from bad as I can from good.

And I I can give you just as many life lessons from the bad as I can from good.

If you erase William, no, not William, Nathan Bedford Forrest.

If you erase him, we don't have anything to learn from.

He is an abomination of a man.

Yes.

And there were statues up.

I mean, the first time I...

There were elementary schools named after him.

Named after him.

Yeah.

And if you don't, if you don't, if you just erase him,

we fail to learn from that.

And I remember a friend has his sword.

Oh, wow.

And yeah, and he said...

Well, I wouldn't want to test the DNA on that.

I know.

Fort Pillow?

Yeah.

Oh, no.

Yeah.

No, no, no.

He was.

So if anybody doesn't know who he is, he's the guy who, during the Civil War, and Fort Pillow, look it up.

Massacre.

Horrible.

After they surrendered.

After they gave up.

It wasn't just a massacre of soldiers.

It was a massacre of surrenders.

So it's like a massacre POW display.

And it was mainly black that he killed.

It was black.

And then he skinned many of them

and took their skin and nailed them to sides of barns like pelts to say, mess with us and this is what happens.

After the war, he's the guy who was the founder of the Ku Klux Klan.

He's horrible.

Horrible.

You can't erase a guy like that.

Let's talk about him.

Yes.

Because you've got lessons you can learn from him and his thinking.

I'm intrigued with going to Israel.

I mean, we've got the cruise, we're going to be in Israel.

And when we get there, we've got monuments to Absalom.

We've got streets named after King Ahab.

I mean, those are some of the worst guys ever, but they remember them because you can learn from the bad as well as the other.

You know, as much as I disagree with many things going on in Germany, you know, their economic system, their view of rights, and the

European court, everything else, what they do well is they don't tolerate Nazism because they have kept alive museums to show what the Nazis did,

what they believed.

They got all these collections.

They have so much.

Again, I mean, I'll push back a bit.

I don't like the fact that you can't read Mein Kampf.

I read Mein Kampf when I was trying to do my own homework and figure out,

did the German people know,

you know, only 30%,

did the German people know what he was going to do?

Well, Mein Kampf sold more copies than the Bible.

It was everywhere.

Every German had to read it, and it's very clear.

Especially the last part, what he's telling you.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, up to the first part, most people would say, no problem with this.

But then he takes it all and turns it to a conclusion.

Now, here's what we do.

And you go, oh, my gosh.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And reading that, yeah.

But you can't.

In Germany, I think it may have just been lifted, but you can't read.

Yeah, no.

You cannot have a copy of Mein Kampf.

Yeah.

So

you forget about things like this, which fascinates me, David, that you just are these are these mercury?

Are these yours?

They're things that I bought on the last trip to Poland and brought back and put in the Mercury One collection.

I really despise the fact that you have the sewing machine that's.

A sewing machine that was made to use SS uniforms.

Jews

were using it to make SS uniforms, and it's crazy.

And they didn't have health care problems because once you hit 65, they just killed you.

Oh, yeah.

So I mean, you don't need to worry about that.

Do you know much about Kurt Garon?

No, I don't.

Oh, gosh, David.

We got to find some stuff on Kurt Garron.

Kurt Garon was a comedic actor in Germany.

He was huge.

He was, I mean, who's the biggest comedic actor?

He was like a Tom Hanks kind of guy, okay?

And everybody loved him, but he was Jewish.

And for a while, he got away with it under the Nazis until they finally started rounding people up.

And he was still kind of on the edge, but they started rounding people up at the studio.

And they said, all Jews, get out.

He was allowed to stay for a little while longer.

And then he realized they're going to get me, too.

And so he fled to the Netherlands.

And

he was working in the Netherlands.

And he was the first guy to make fun of Hitler.

in the cabarets.

He had made fun of him for years and mocked him before he came to power.

Hitler hated him.

And so the Germans, when they, you know, they overtook Holland and Amsterdam and everything else, they went in to find him.

They brought him in and brought him to just the outskirts of Auschwitz.

I'm trying to remember the name of the town, but they had built this town, walled it off.

and built this town to be idyllic.

And it was just as Germany was starting to say,

you know what is happening with all the Jews?

And Hitler was saying, that's all conspiracy theory that we're killing.

We've shipped them to a place of their own.

They've got their own place.

And people were, it was starting to come undone a bit.

And so he told Kurt Garon, they built this whole town, filled it with Jewish people.

They said the Jewish people, when the trucks came and opened up, they started to see instruments that they had never seen before.

And they thought, good God, what are they going to do to us?

It was film equipment.

And they said to Kurt, they said,

These people and you, you're all going to be dead in three days unless you make this film.

And so they made, he agreed to it, made this film.

David, it was the most cruel thing ever.

They dressed everybody up.

They put all this food on the shelves.

They made it this beautiful little town.

They had the symphony.

They had the greatest, all of the intellectuals.

If you were famous or known, you went to this town.

And

so Kurt Garon

filmed the whole thing.

They had the Nazis just offside the camera.

And when they were showing how they were eating, you'll never see any of them put food in their mouth.

You'll see the spoon come up.

And you were, these people were starving.

You were beaten to death if you ate anything.

So you had to film like you were happy and eating and then put it down and not eat.

He finishes the film.

They edit the film and it's a masterpiece.

You can watch it

on YouTube.

It's a masterpiece.

They rounded everybody up, put them on trains.

They were dead the next day.

And Kurt Caron was the last one, and they say that he was last seen in the town square pleading for his life, but I did everything you said

I needed to do.

You can't take me and my family.

And they did.

They did.

And he was known, I can't remember the name of the song, but it's a well-known song.

And he was known for singing that song in his comedies.

And as he was lined up in the shower, they forced him to sing that

happy song while he was doing that.

While he's done it.

Horrible.

Wow.

Horrible.

Never heard of him.

Yeah.

No, you should look him up.

We have to find some stuff for him.

He's a martyr.

Yeah, and

just an interesting kind of what would you do in his situation kind of thing.

So these are stamps for passports?

One is Jewish.

It's an official stamp out of the ghetto, the Warsaw Ghetto.

And that's where they rounded up Jews to eventually kill them, shut them off, kill them.

The other, I forget the name of the concentration camp.

It was one of the death camps, and it was a really brutal death camp.

And there is very little known.

The Germans tried to destroy a lot of the death camps in Poland.

They burned Treblinko, they blew it up.

And that came from one of those death camps they tried to destroy.

Poland lost

20% of their population.

It's the most more people were lost

population percentage in Poland than I think any place else.

I've been to Poland a lot of times, take congressional delegations there.

Poland is such a cool country.

So good.

They love America.

The two biggest statues in Poland, Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan.

And those are the two.

And the train station.

They leave the train station.

Have you seen the train station in Warsaw?

Yes.

It was a gift.

People were starving.

That's right.

And Stalin, I think, said...

They built it with slave labor.

Yeah.

And it's this ugly monstrosity.

And they won't tear it down.

They won't tear it down because they want it for.

It's a reminder.

William Bedford Forest and those schools and everything else.

Remember what this is.

And they point to that and all the brutality of the Soviets, what Stalin did to them and that's why we remember.

So what's amazing about Poland is you can

if you go two kilometers in any direction, a little over a mile, 1.2 miles, you will come on a mass burial site throughout the entire nation of Poland.

You cannot go more than two kilometers without hitting a mass burial site.

And so if they put in a parking lot for Walmart, they have to stop because they will uncover three or four mass grave sites.

It's just amazing to imagine living in a country where they lost that many

much of their population.

I went there.

Did I go with you that time?

No.

No.

No.

I went there and I,

you know, I saw all of the sites.

And

when I was there, I was so angry at the people, the churches, basically.

Where the hell were you?

I mean, as you're driving away from

Auschwitz, and we had George Lang going with us because we were making a documentary.

And Tanya and I will look at those pictures once in a while.

You know, just keep them on the computer, and once in a while, I'll be looking through pictures and stuff, and we'll see those.

And without anything in the background, we know which ones were

taken at Auschwitz

because

you see it in us.

It's just bone-crushing to be there.

And I remember driving away thinking, where were you?

One point, you know, two miles away in any direction, and you've got a burial site.

Where were you?

And the chief rabbi of Poland said,

there were more, what did he say, 7,000 righteous among the nations that saved

Jews.

And I said,

that is depressing.

And he looked at me and said, depressing?

Do you know what those 7,000 people had to go through to save?

And it really spun things around.

But

I just,

until recently, I couldn't believe the cowardice

of the mass population.

But you look at...

Have you ever read the book,

oh gosh, what was it?

Average gentleman or something?

I can't remember.

It's a study on one of the police forces that became one of the most brutal killers in Poland.

And it was, how did they get there?

They were one of the greatest police forces that were so great and integrated in the community and everything else.

And within a month, they're just slaughtering the Jews.

Wow.

And how did they do it?

Ordinary gentlemen or ordinary, something like that.

And it's fascinating to read, David, because if you read read it, you start to see patterns on how you just break people down a little bit at a time.

And before you know it,

you're not the same man.

Yeah, that's right.

And it is a little by little, and that's what happened to the German people because when Hitler comes in 33, by the time you get to 45, you're 12 years.

And you've had propaganda going.

Plus, he not only killed 6 million Jews, he killed 7 million Gentiles.

So he killed both sides.

Just anybody that opposed him.

We've been working on this documentary that I just have no time to finish, but we are going to finish it.

And it is on

the myth of Christianity being that Hitler was Christian.

That was a Christian movement.

I had a Holocaust survivor tell me that once, said, it's you Christians.

Hitler was a Christian.

Actually, he killed Christians, actually more Christians than he did Jews.

But I get the deal.

If you were a a Lutheran, he's state-established church, he's in Germany, every German's a Lutheran or a Jew.

Right.

Got it.

The German churches actually, within, I think it was the first 12 months of Hitler taking over, they were actually saying, we should get rid of the Old Testament because it's Jewish.

I mean,

the core, that's why people like Bonhoeffer, who were really

right, the ones who actually believed in Christ, the ones who actually did it, they didn't say, sing louder, play the organ louder so we can't hear the train going by.

They did something.

They did something.

Well, we've been, there are 200 righteous among the nation left today in Poland.

And so we've been making trips over where we're getting,

for example, one of the cool ones, a 60-year-old Jewish lady,

maybe 70-year-old, and a 95-year-old Christian guy.

He saved her.

And so get them back together.

And so it's really cool stuff.

And just,

we talked to a guy, he's nearly 100 years old, and he ran a factory in Poland, and he saw what's happening to the Jews.

And so he would find corrupt German guards, and he would buy Jews from corrupt German guards, get them to his factory, get them a Polish name, get them a Polish identification.

He had 50 or 60 Jews working in his factory.

He bought, he scraped together everything he had, turned it in gold, and give it to Nazi soldiers and buy Jews.

And he said, one of them I like so well I married her.

So he got his wife out of one of these that he bought.

But the stories of what these guys did, we went to two hiding places, only two known hiding places left in Poland.

And one was a farm.

I mean, it was so far out of the sticks.

And what happened was there was a family of, I don't know, eight or ten in the family.

And the youngest son had gone to town.

And the Germans came and found a hiding place, nobody in it, but they saw the remnants of a Jewish book or Jewish science.

So they took every one of the family members out, shot them at the barn, killed them all, burned them, burned the barn down, top of them.

The kid gets home to find what was there, but the hiding place is still there.

And the family still has that hiding place that was under the barn.

I mean, just you see what these guys went through.

And if you were caught collaborating to help a Jew, the price you paid, and they made sure the whole nation knew about it, you know, you're not going to help a Jew because if you do,

burn down on your head.

David, the only reason to really know history is: A, it's great stories.

So, if you like great stories, the great stories are there.

Yeah.

Every story is there.

But also, if you're smart, you look at patterns because we repeat.

I have been impressed recently that I think Nike, Google,

Facebook, the NBA, they're going to be remembered as Nazi collaborators.

What's happening in China is

Hitler's dream.

It's Hitler's dream.

You know, Hitler worked with IBM, and that was something.

And that's how they were able to suppress the people.

So, was it 16 categories they found?

You know, we know the preachers, we know the Jews, we know the homosexuals, we know the gypsies, we know the dissenters, we know all of them.

And they were just starting to get that.

IBM did it, and they denied it for a long time.

But a friend of ours actually wrote the book, IBM and the Holocaust.

They smeared him for a decade.

He kept researching, and he proved it absolutely positively.

And IBM actually had to come out and apologize to him and apologize for it.

And their position today is: oh, yeah, that's old news.

Everybody knows about that.

I don't know.

I know.

Just blow it off.

But now we are seeing the same kind of stuff happening in our day.

And you're not hearing about people being smuggled out.

I mean, some pastors are smuggling people out, but you're not hearing of these heroes yet.

I don't know if they exist there.

And the world is just turning a blind eye.

And I find myself saying, be careful how you judge the past

because it's just, it's right there and it's right in front front of us.

This time we know it.

We all know it.

It was rumors and whispers.

We have satellite pictures.

We know it.

Yeah.

And we're not doing anything about it.

But the same thing with slavery.

We are so captivated with slave trade and black slavery in America, et cetera.

All right.

380 years of slave trade, there are 12.7 million and 380 years, nearly four centuries.

Today, there's 40 million.

You're captivated on something 380 years ago that involved 12 million.

It was all bad.

It shouldn't happen.

How about today?

When the next generation looks back and says, you guys had 40 million slaves, did nothing about it.

And they'll condemn this generation the same way you're condemning the past generation.

And it repeats itself.

And so the problem today are right in the middle of it.

Right.

And the problem today is

as

two guys who have tried to wake people up on slavery

and and these concentration camps and what's happening in the Middle East.

I completely understand the founders.

I completely understand

they didn't surrender.

They couldn't get anyone to pay attention to it.

No one wants to look at horrible things.

And it's how you get away with it if you're a horrible monster of a human being.

You just switch the channel now.

And, you know, even on the pattern of how we learn from history.

This to me

is one of the most cherished pieces of history that nobody knows about.

I'm intrigued.

And by the way, let me go back because we were talking about Holocaust and what we do with history now.

We have

the current, it started in September of 2014.

The AP History is the last history course a high school kid will get.

It's the equivalent of college course.

It serves for general history in college.

They get in high school.

It's the last course they get for history.

460,000 kids a year take it.

And the September 2014 standards came out.

And in World War II, there were

four bullets of what World War II is about.

Let me guess.

One had to be that we dropped the atomic bomb.

That's it.

Okay.

I don't know what the others might be.

We had segregation of the military.

We had segregation of the military.

turned the Japanese.

And women didn't have full rights.

There is no mention of Hitler or the Holocaust.

Hitler or the Holocaust?

Not even there.

Nazi?

Hitler?

Holocaust is not there.

You don't have any of the Japanese genocide, killed 10 million Chinese, made sex slaves out of the Koreans.

None of that.

Everything is how bad America is.

So even, I mean, the outcry was so bad that they went back and in September 2015 revised that they added two things.

They did mention Hitler and the Holocaust.

Nothing else.

They don't go into, you don't get D-Day.

You don't get anything about Battle of the Bulge or Midway.

There's nothing in World War II except America did four bad things.

And as they say in the standards, it raised questions about American values.

Oh, my gosh.

You come out thinking we're bad guys.

So you look at something like this today.

I mean, you said...

You look at the pictures you and Tanya at Oshawash, you can tell.

68% of millennials do not know what Oshawa is, and 22% of millennials have never heard of the Holocaust.

Have no clue what it is.

How many?

22% of millennials have never heard of the Holocaust.

68% of millennials do not know what Oshawa is.

So that's the history.

And by the way, the other thing I find intriguing is we've not only beat up our history, we now have, I think, 24 colleges in California where you cannot even get a history major if you want one.

If you want one, you can't get it.

University of Wisconsin can't get a history major if you want it.

So they are not even offering history majors.

If you're doing, if you have a history major of world history, it's my understanding that America is not included in that.

American history is not included in that.

Don't even go there.

Just take a history major.

And the top 76 universities in America, if you go there as a history major, as 64 of the 76, you will not have a single course on American history, not one.

And you're going there as an American history major.

How do you tell the story of the world from the Enlightenment to today without America?

You show how good the world would be if America hadn't had slaves and if America hadn't done all the bad things it did, if America hadn't oppressed civil rights.

We got 3% of the slaves in the slave trade.

3%.

2.3% actually.

Sorry.

Sorry.

2.

Out of the 12.7 million slaves, 10.5 million made it to their destinations.

Of the 10.5 million in four centuries of slave trade, 46%

went to Portugal and Brazil, 26% went to Great Britain, 11% went to France, 10% went to Jamaica, 2.3% went to America.

Now, everybody today thinks America is the only one involved in the slave trade for four centuries.

Now, we shouldn't have had 2.3%.

I mean, no question, no excuse for that, but we are 2.3%.

And by the way, America was the first nation to pass a ban on the slave trade and the second nation to end slavery.

Well, no, no, no.

Mexico is the same.

That's right.

Third nation.

Oh, how could I forget that?

Mexico was.

Mexico was.

Well,

they signed a law and said in a hundred years.

We're banning slavery today, it'll end in a hundred years.

Right, it'll end in a hundred years.

So technically, Mexico is too, but yeah, they kept it for 100 years.

So, I mean, all this stuff, but back to this.

We cherish, or at least used to cherish, certain rights in America.

And this little piece right here

is an amazing piece, the case, well, you read it.

The case and trial, spelled with a Y, of John Peter Zanger, never heard of him, of New York, printer, who was lately tried and acquitted for printing and publishing a libel against the government.

You see, I've read about this.

I just, oh my gosh, this changed everything.

It changed everything because the law said the law, excuse me, the law said you cannot criticize the government.

He did.

And they took him to court and said the law is really clear.

You can't criticize the government.

He said, but what if it's true?

And he went through and pointed out that everything he said in criticism was true.

And the jury said, you know what?

He's right.

And this is where they came up with the doctrine that truth is an absolute defense against libel.

You can libel, you can slander, but if it's true, it's not liable to slander.

And so this is what secured freedom of the press.

This is where in the Bill of Rights we have freedom of the press.

It goes to this trial right here.

And here's the old system.

Horter and me wants it so bad.

We've got it, bro.

We've got it.

Good.

So

this is where, back in the day, this is the power of the jury.

The jury had the right to set aside the law as well as the sentence.

And so in the case of William Penn, the law in Great Britain called the Conventicle Act said you cannot assemble with more than five people unless they're from the Anglican church.

They didn't want anybody else.

And so he would get with Quakers, and they were Quakers.

And because he got with Quakers, he spent eight months in the Tower of London, dungeon kind of stuff.

Eight months.

William Penn.

William Penn.

Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania.

Eight months in the Tower of London.

And when he got to trial, he argued for freedom of conscience and trial.

And the jury said, you're exactly right.

This guy should not be punished.

And the judge was so mad at the jury that he threw them in jail.

He took away food, water, and heat from the jury until they changed their verdict.

Now, they never changed their verdict.

The higher court overruled him.

But this is where we have the love of trial by jury.

But what happened was in about 1890, the Supreme Court of the United States said, you know what?

Juries have too much power.

We judges should have the power.

And so that's when they ruled that juries could no longer...

That's the beginning of the death of common sense.

It is.

It was.

And that's that progressive era.

Yeah, they wanted, I mean, I know Jefferson talked about how do we build juries?

And there were people that said, oh, we got to get the best doctors and the best educated people.

And he said, no.

Of your peers.

I want people who have their hands in the dirt, who are farmers, who are regular, hardworking guys.

And that's what they had.

And so back then, under the Constitution, it's called trying the law and the fact.

So you could try the law and the fact.

And the people in Great Britain said the Conventicle Act is a crazy law.

We disagree with it.

Now, what happens today, and this is the evolution of American courts, we used to have what were called courts of justice.

Our objective was to make sure we had justice.

And if that meant striking down a bad law, we would do that.

Holy cow.

Then we got into what were called courts of law.

And that's when the Supreme Court changed in the 18 late 80s or 90s.

And they said, look, we'll tell you what the law is.

You just decide the facts.

And we'll tell you whether the guy's got to be guilty or not.

You can decide, but we'll tell you what the law is.

You know what's crazy, David?

And by the way, today we don't do law or facts.

The courts are defined, the definition of a court is a place to settle disputes.

No, that's not what courts are for.

They're to uphold the law to give justice.

I've talked to several Supreme Court, I'm not Supreme Court, federal judges, and they have said they are now seeing the craziest verdicts from judges.

There is no underpinning anymore.

They're like

Constitution, law, nothing.

They're going going off of feelings now.

I will tell you that I am more excited right now about what is happening with judges than any time in my life.

I've got more gray hair than you do because I've got several years on you.

And I am seeing things happening with the First Amendment that has never been available in my lifetime before.

Tell me about it because

I'm going to wreck it for you after you tell me about it.

I'm going to pull out

something because I've got a list of cases I just want to hit.

Let's go back to 1962-63.

That's when the Supreme Court said, hey, religion, we're going to redefine all that.

And so that's when they said no more voluntary prayer in schools, no more Bible.

And then came graduations, then came Ten Commandments, then came Nativity scenes, any religious, all gone.

And all that hinges really on two cases.

One's called the Lemon case, because in 62, 63, when they struck everything down, for the next 10 years, people said, well, we've been doing this for centuries.

And that's got to go.

And so they keep ruling against all these religious expressions that we had for so long.

And they said, Let's just come up with a test on how you know whether it's constitutional or not.

Why not use the Constitution to know, but we're not going to do that.

So, in the case Lemon v.

Kirchman, 1973, after about 10 years of all these cases, they came up with it.

And here's their new test.

They said, In 1973, 1973, called the Lemon Test.

And it says

a religious activity in public will be constitutional if the primary purpose of that religious activity is secular.

Oh.

Can you name a religious activity whose primary purpose is secular?

No?

Well, I could say if they wanted to

do a pageant of hello dolly.

But they're all one church is doing it, sure.

But you can't win under that standard, which is why even the Ten Commandments came out, because even though it says don't steal and don't kill and don't purge yourself, even though there's more than 50 depictions inside the U.S.

Supreme Court of the Ten Commandments, even though it's there, they said, well, the primary purpose is not secular.

So we've gotten rid of this now?

Oh, yeah.

This is what happened three months ago.

Three months ago, there was a decision that came to the Supreme Court Bladensburg, and here was the deal.

The Fourth Circuit, back in 1919, after World War I, 49 mamas in Prince George County, Maryland, lost their sons in World War I.

And they said, we want to do a memorial to our sons.

I remember this.

And they erected what's called the Bladensburg Cross.

It's been there for 100 years.

They erected it to honor their sons and others who died in the war.

And the church has had to mow the lawn because

no government money could be spent on upkeep or something like that.

That was a different one.

That's Solidad.

This was done, and it's done by the city, and it was a government cross.

And so I think it's the Fourth Circuit out there.

They said, look, we hate this, but you've got to tear the cross down because you can't say the primary purpose of that cross was secular.

You could have done an orb.

You could have done a pyramid.

You did a cross.

And there's no way to say the primary purpose is secular.

That's a religious symbol.

So, and the court said, we don't like this, but this is what the Supreme Court has told us, and we're stuck with doing it.

And so

this goes to the, and the problem with this is the Fourth Circuit is what's over Arlington Cemetery.

And it's not the private crosses of in Arlington Cemetery that get torn down.

It's a memorial in Arlington Cemetery.

Two crosses that are part of memorials.

And so when it got to the Supreme Court, this was one that was really big because is this Marine Corps?

See, the way this had been dealt with before, like Mount Soledad Cross, Korean War Cross, and in California, the city just sold it to a private group and said, you guys have it.

Now it's not a city cross anymore, so you can keep the cross up.

And so that went through, I think, 14 lawsuits before they got this idea of selling it to private groups.

And so it gets gets to the U.S.

Supreme Court, and the U.S.

Supreme Court said, you can keep the cross.

You keep the Bladensboro cross, you leave it up, do not take it down.

And the city gets to keep it.

It's not in private hands.

It's not in private hands.

This is a government cross on government property.

And the statement the court made, this is really key.

They said long-standing, religiously expressive monuments, symbols, and practices requires a strong presumption of constitutionality.

In other words, if you've been doing this for a while, we're going to say it's constitutional.

We're going to presume it's constitutional.

See, the position we have now is you have to presume it's unconstitutional unless you can prove it is constitutional.

They've now said, we're going to presume it's constitutional unless you can prove otherwise.

And so the whole landscape has shifted.

So what they did was, as a result of that, they came back and said, you know, we've got this World War II cross in Pensacola, Florida, and the courts have said it has to come down.

You're going to leave it up because it's been there for a long time.

It's a World War II crowd.

You're going to leave it there.

Then they had another case, case is now at the court cited in Florida, said football prayer.

We've been doing that for a century.

How many years we had football teams?

So we shouldn't have stopped prayer at football games.

So the courts now deciding that one, but we wouldn't have had a shot on that before.

But now we've got one that's there.

We've also got one, the VA department had missing, it's a table like this, missing man table.

It's an empty chair.

it's a table sitting, and no one there because P-O-W-M-I-A, and they had a Bible there because it was actually a World War II Bible, and they had to take it down because there's not a secular purpose for having a Bible on a missing man table.

Well, the court came down with a decision.

The VA department goes back and said, we've been having military Bibles since 1680.

This is a long part of the military.

We're putting Bibles back in every VA hospital, and you can give out Bibles, and you can have Bibles.

They completely shifted the policy in the VA because of this decision three months ago.

Then we've got a decision out of, I'm going to show you a picture here.

I want you to see this picture.

Look at that picture.

County of Lehigh, Pennsylvania.

It's got a cross.

I think there's a pretty visible cross there.

Yeah, right in the middle.

Isn't it invisible?

Yeah, it's bigger than the Liberty Bell.

In my lifetime, we have never won a cross in a city seal.

Even Los Angeles, City of Angels, had a tiny little, a tiny cross way up there.

This is not a tiny cross.

There's nine symbols I count.

That's a center.

And

in LA, they had to take the cross out.

Even Zion, Illinois, what's Zion named after a religious town?

It's got to take it out.

Las Cruces, New Mexico, lost

the crosses.

We've got to take them out.

So we've lost every case.

The court came down and said, no, no, no, this has been 70 years.

This is constitutional.

We're leaving.

That's a big cross in a city seal.

That's not a small one.

So we won that.

So you can't put new stuff in.

Well, you don't have to get rid of old stuff.

At this point, we're going to be able to put new stuff in because the court's done something else that's pretty cool.

And by the way, there's one more just came down in Pennsylvania a couple weeks ago where they challenged having prayer at the legislature because Pennsylvania says

we open our legislature with prayer and you've got to believe in God to pray.

And atheists said, that's discriminating against us.

You can't do that.

You can't discriminate against.

We want to have a devotional or say an inspirational statement.

And the court came back and said, no, no, no.

We've been having prayer open to Congress since 1774.

It's fine to require a belief in God to pray.

I mean, we're winning stuff we've never won in my lifetime, and it's coming down every couple of weeks now.

We're seeing another one going, oh my gosh, this is.

Now, the other thing, the other case that's given us real trouble is back in 1980, the Supreme Court said, you know what, we can regulate your free exercise of religion.

And so since 1980, even though the Constitution says they can, since 1980, in a case called Oregon v.

Smith, they said we can regulate.

So since 1980, we don't get to argue religious expression to the court.

We argue free speech.

So when Coach Joe Kennedy up in Washington State, after a football game, went over by himself and took a knee without the kids, and he just knelt down and said, thank you, God, nobody got hurt in the game.

Because he took a knee, they fired him because they said that's prayer, you can't do that.

So in arguing the case, we can't say he has the free exercise of religion.

What we have to say is he has the right to free speech.

And that's his expression.

So we can't argue religion.

We have to argue speech.

So this case made it up to the Supreme Court last year.

The Supreme Court sent it back down and said, we notice here that you didn't challenge the Oregon Smith decision.

We want you to re-argue the case and challenge the Oregon Smith decision.

Give us something to work with.

So they're asking this case to come back so they can deal with Oregon Smith, which is the other thing that's killed religion for the last 60, 70 years.

So the court has not only given us Bladensburg, which is the establishment clause, they're now asking for a case to get the free exercise clause back.

So we're looking at a First Amendment concerning religious speech we haven't had in 70 years, 60 years.

So

it's a change.

It's a good change.

It's a good change.

And I don't think people understand how much

the court systems are changing, both for the good and the bad.

The 10th Circuit decision we just had up in Oklahoma and Tulsa and the stuff with the park that nudity in public is now fine.

And so all throughout that district, and so they had these big topless rallies, and you know, that's a complete reversal.

And you're going, my gosh, what are you thinking?

Yeah.

And so, you're getting crazy decisions, but you're getting good decisions.

So, here's the problem,

David.

I think, you know, I've always hated the argument.

The founders couldn't have seen this.

Yeah, really?

Yeah.

Yeah, they did.

They didn't see it exactly the way it's happening.

The technology

and things like that.

That's right.

But

they were open enough to see the principles, what would happen, and give you the right as future generations to augment the Constitution to fit anything that didn't fit right now.

That's right.

Here's one thing that I, for the first time, I've thought,

I don't think they saw this, and you'd be the guy to correct me.

Great, the Supreme Court is doing that.

But we are entering a time now where the Supreme Court, the government is covered by the Constitution and Bill of Rights, but corporations aren't.

And corporations now are

there.

My free speech in the public square, well, it used to be the actual public square, the town green.

It's Facebook.

It's Google.

You know, I have a right to

my own voice and to let it be heard.

Not now.

Not now.

And they'll relegate you.

Oh, no, you can speak.

Go outside in your house.

Speak all you want.

But

they're not covered by the Constitution.

And it's a flaw in the thinking of conservatives that we haven't had a real conversation about it.

Where we always say, hey, private company, they can do what they want.

And I believe that.

However, they are now

the virtual world, which I don't think our founder saw, the virtual world is becoming more important than the actual world.

So all these changes to the Supreme Court, it may not matter in 10 years if we don't get a handle on the virtual world.

Part of what happens is

they didn't protect that

because the Bill of Rights was not meant to protect.

It was meant to limit the federal government.

And so it wasn't about protecting rights.

It was about keeping the government from getting to the right.

Right.

So did they see,

because that's what the Bill of Rights ⁇ The Bill of Rights is handcuffs.

That's right.

Handcuffs.

It's not rights.

It's you will not violate these rights

as the government.

Did they ever think?

I mean, they had the, you know, what was it, the West India Trading Company or whatever.

They had monopolies in those days.

They had had monopolies.

So

did they ever talk about

how do you protect against a world run by corporations?

Yeah, and they did it.

It was a virtuous and informed, educated citizenry.

They got together and said, we're dumping all the tea in the harbor.

You've got a monopoly on the tea, and we're not going to do that.

And so many times it was the people got together and put their foot down.

We are so accustomed to convenience today that we are willing to sell our, to use the old phrase, our birthright for a mess of pottage.

And so we are not standing up.

We don't like what they're doing.

And, you know, and so Prager, you, they're suing a federal and state court and trying to,

it's a mess.

We've allowed monopolies to get in a place where they were not.

Under the Constitution, you didn't have monopolies.

I mean, that just wasn't an option.

The founders, I don't think, saw

a world controlled controlled by

corporations that were bigger and more powerful than the government.

And that were tyrannical.

Correct.

More tyrannical than the British government ever was.

Oh, yeah.

What's happening right now?

There's no rhyme or reason, and nobody can hold them responsible.

Yeah, you could have held them responsible because under the Bill of Rights, you could take them into all 50 courts.

Now they're a national corporation.

But if you get the feds out of this and get this back into the hands of the states, and Texas starts going after Google and

they are.

And so what happens is

what we're looking for and what we have seen and what Justice Breyer is complaining about is that the federal Supreme Court is starting to respect the 10th Amendment and give jurisdictions back to the states.

It's going to be a whole lot easier to whip Google in state courts than it is in federal courts.

I mean, this is the thing that

people don't understand.

They really think that if you're a conservative or if you believe in the Constitution, you want to use it for your own

thing.

If you, I mean, there are some, the conservatives that are like, oh, we'll get them.

But I will give you, conservatives, constitutionalists will give protection on those rights unlike anyone else

because it's the philosophy that you have that right and I have no place to interfere with you

and we have we have

we've lost that idea and so it's we're we're not we're not fighting the right fight

we're not and we're not fighting at the right levels one of the things

a little commentary on what I think is one of the things that's that's seriously wrong right now is we I don't care where you get your news 24-7 365 news will all be national now.

You have to work really hard to get local news.

So we see everything from a more global perspective.

And as a result,

I don't know if anyone, I don't know, and I've got friends everywhere, you do too.

I don't know of anyone who can call the Supreme Court and say, are you guys just stupid?

Change your vote.

We can't get them to change the vote.

I can't get the Senate to get rid of the stupid Rule 22 filibuster rule.

Let's get back to a majority like the founders wanted.

I can't call Pelosi and say, Equality Act, are you crazy?

You're violating every constitutional principle.

I can't do that.

And so what happens is if I can't do it, if you can't do it, and we're well connected, what's the average citizen going to do?

And so what happens?

And so you get paralyzed.

You get totally paralyzed and you store up your hands.

What I love about the American Revolution is when you look at the first four battles in the Revolution, if you take the Battle of Lexington, the Battle of Concord a couple hours later, a couple hours after that, the road to Boston, 19-mile battle.

And then if you go to the fourth battle, Bunker Hill,

nobody called headquarters nationally and said, George, what do you want us to do?

In Lexington, Reverend Jonas Clark said, this is my town.

I'll take care of it.

And he got 70 guys from his church to go out and fight the 800 British.

Two hours later in Concord, Reverend William Emerson had 300 guys out there, fought the British.

And British said, this is bad.

We've got to get out of here.

They turned and run the 19 miles to get back to Boston.

And all along the way is between 4,000 and 5,000 Americans taking them on locally.

It's Reverend Payson Phillips, Reverend Benjamin Boss, all these guys got the church out there because the church was the leader in that day.

But nobody went to George and said it's a national battle.

We actually won the revolution not by having national battles.

We won all the local battles.

George filled in where we needed him.

It is, it's the same thing.

People talk about first responders, and it drives me nuts.

That started in the 70s with Jimmy Carter talking about first responders.

We are the first responders.

We're the first responders.

When somebody breaks into your house, you are the first responders.

But you know, James Wilson,

who one of only six guys who signed the Declaration and the Constitution, George Washington puts him on the U.S.

Supreme Court as an original justice.

He writes, he starts the first law school in America.

He teaches law in the law school while he's sitting on the Supreme Court.

We've actually got his law books.

And when it comes to the Second Amendment stuff, he says, if someone breaks into your home and something happens, you're the only one responsible.

It's not the response time of police.

It's your house.

It's your castle.

You're supposed to stop.

If I'm not mistaken, if you had somebody break into your house and you didn't stop them, the next house they robbed, you were responsible.

Right.

Because you didn't.

And see, this is where we don't have the mentality.

If I'm going to do everything I can do right now, we're looking for somebody else to do it.

And

let me just use a Christian example, us being Christian.

Let me take that example.

We have missionaries all over the world because we think the Christian faith is terrific.

You know, we've got a fulfilled life and we have purpose and worth and fulfilled destiny.

So what we've been doing in the Christian church for 2,000 years is sending missionaries everywhere.

And so now 32% of the world is Christian because we put billions and hundreds of billions into doing that for 2,000 years.

Here's a novel idea.

What if every single individual Christian just said, you know, I'm going to share my faith with somebody else?

32% of the world, if we did that one person, that's all we're doing.

One person this year.

I don't care about any, I'm going to do it one person.

At the end of this year, we're 64% of the world Christian.

At the end of two years, the whole world is Christian.

If just individuals say, I can't do anybody else's, I'll do one.

And if I do one, but see, that's what wins the American Revolution, is I'm going to fight the battle in my community.

I don't care what's happening in New York.

I don't care what they're doing in California.

I have no interest in Alabama.

I live right here in Jack County, Texas, and I'm going going to win this battle.

You know, I think what's happening with the EU right now and how it's, that thing is just, that's a mess.

That's a mess.

Yep.

And a lot of those young nations are really, really giving them fits in the right way.

Good.

Good.

What's happening in the EU is if they would have done the American thing, not now, but originally, they would have gone to them and said,

Italy, you're fantastic.

You've got all this culture and everything else.

You know how to run your country.

That's right.

You run your country.

When it comes to trade, we're going to make sure that you and Germany can trade and it's easy to get along.

But be yourself.

Fly that flag.

You know,

you could fly the EU flag because we're all together, but fly it underneath even or fly it side by side.

Fly your state flag and fly the United States.

Correct.

Correct.

And that's where we were.

People don't understand that where we went wrong, really seriously wrong, was in around 1880 when you started having this philosophy coming out of the German universities.

The people who trained the Nazis were the ones who gave us this kind of theory.

And we didn't have a doctrine.

It got into education, it got into church, it got into everything.

Everything, politics, it was.

Everything.

And it's German.

And what that led to were the nazis

you know and and communism yeah and

everybody's just shoving them in you know

i

when i was growing up you could go to a town and it would be different it would be different now because of you know

mass marketing and and and uh you know all good things you know you could go to and get a gap anywhere but it's all the same

traveling is not nearly as fun as it used to be because you'd see the people were different and they were okay with that and you could go oh my gosh you've never been here you've got to go because the people are doing this

and if it was a good idea you'd take it back home and you'd do it in your state you know right now California is so freaking screwed up so is New York Texas is doing really well I don't have any problems with California.

Except California is requiring me to pay for their besides.

Yeah, that's right.

And they expect everyone else to live to their standard.

If they want to do that to their state, go for it.

Go for it.

The coerciveness that we have right now is the highest it's been in my lifetime.

The intolerance is high, but it's not just intolerance.

You're going to do what I want.

You're going to do what I say.

And so California now is, we have six states punishing nine states because six states, actually in Texas, we think there ought to be a male and a female bathroom.

You know, California doesn't, but they're not not allowing.

California can do that.

Fine, but they're not allowing any of their government employees to come here.

And that's what the founders call the right of expatriation, and that's the right to travel freely among the states.

And that's what we had in the Constitution two clauses.

And now we have six states saying, we disagree with that state, you can't travel to that state.

You got to stay out.

No,

we got the right to travel freely among states.

Now, I may not live in California.

I may visit there and I like their beaches or I like whatever, but I'm going to live in Texas or wherever I choose to live.

And I'll live by their rules while I'm visiting.

While I'm there, you know,

they've got crazy gun laws.

Right.

And if I decide to move there, I'll work to change the laws.

That's right.

But don't try to bring California.

Force me to do it.

That's right.

My whole life I've wanted to live in California.

I'm a West Coast guy.

I grew up in Seattle.

When I land land anywhere on the Pacific seaboard,

I'm home.

No matter where I am, Oregon, Washington, doesn't matter.

Vancouver.

You're home.

I'm home.

And I feel that way.

I've always wanted to live there.

It's my favorite weather.

It's my favorite everything.

It's my favorite time period even of all of the housing and everything else.

I wouldn't live there

if you paid me a bazillion dollars a year.

I wouldn't.

Yeah, I wouldn't live there.

I'm fine with that.

I'm fine fine with that.

Why are you making me live like you?

And we're making me subsidize

your mistakes.

Look, it's crazy that we are still talking about universal health care nationally.

Vermont, and it's no coincidence that the press didn't cover this.

Vermont,

as we're doing all of this Obamacare, Vermont decides they're going to do whatever it is.

It's like, I don't remember, it's

maple syrup care or whatever the hell it was.

It's one of those.

I I think it's, I'm pretty sure it's Vermont.

It may be New Hampshire.

I think it was Vermont.

I think it's Vermont.

Vermont.

You know this?

Yeah.

So

they started their own universal health care and they said, we're going to do it and we're going to do it right.

It went bankrupt.

Bankrupt.

They couldn't quickly do it.

It didn't last.

David, is there any doubt in your mind?

You're a lifelong Texas, born and bred in Texas.

Is there any doubt in your mind if Vermont had a way to come up and pay for everybody's health care, and it was great, and it was working.

Is there any doubt in your mind that Texans wouldn't say, you know what, let's look at that?

Oh, no,

if they came up with it and it worked,

everybody would

voluntarily adopt what works.

Correct.

We're selfish enough to say, I want what's good for me.

Right.

The only reason why this isn't tried state by state is because every time it does, it doesn't work.

It fails, and states can't do one thing that the federal government can do: print money.

Well, you know, it's an interesting argument.

It's not logical, but with the LTP program that we have in the summer for youth leadership,

Mercury One

joins with you, Glenn, who helped

let kids know about it.

But we'll bring in kids in the summer for two weeks, and they get to handle all these documents.

They learn the origins of all of our rights and how to protect them, et cetera.

But they get apologetics on history, on American exceptionalism.

Explain apologetics, because most people don't even know what apologetics is.

Apologetics means know why you believe what you believe and be able to defend it.

It's that simple.

Most people know what they believe, they can't defend it, and they don't know why they believe it.

Roger Ailes,

I did an interview with Roger Ailes at Fox, and

he invited me out to dinner twice, and we just talked.

He was charming and fine, and it was great.

And then he wanted to talk to me about working there.

And so he said,

come have dinner.

And I was like, okay, that's great because they've been fun.

We talk about George Washington and all kinds of stuff.

And I sat down with him and he said,

no chit-chat.

First thing he said to me.

So no warmth at all.

No, no warmth.

Wow.

And he said,

what are your thoughts on the 1972 treaty with China?

And I went.

That's your opening conversation.

Yeah, that was first question.

He didn't even say, I think he may have said hello.

And he said, he asked me that, and I said,

I don't know anything about the 1972 treaty.

I haven't spent any time on that.

And he went, hmm.

He didn't talk to me for like five, six minutes, not a word.

Didn't look at dinner with him, just cutting his steak and just nothing.

And I'm like, okay.

And then he said,

so,

Eisenhower,

tell

Tell me the five best things about the Eisenhower administration.

And I sat there and I thought to myself, I'm dead.

I'm doomed.

And I said, you know, Roger,

I have two ways to play this.

I could either bluff, but I think you're smart enough to know that I'm bluffing, or I could just come clean and say,

I don't know that one either.

And if I do that,

think I'm probably not going to get any job.

But I'm going to go with that one.

He didn't talk to me for another five minutes.

Oh, wow.

He threw me up against the wall for two and a half hours.

He said, what's your problem with the Catholic Church?

And I said, what?

He said, you left the Catholic Church to join your religion.

Why would you do that?

What was wrong with the Catholic Church?

He threw me up against the wall over and over and over and over again.

And I had to think on my feet and I had to be honest.

He ended the conversation.

I thought, I mean, I think I lost 10 pounds just in sweat.

And

my head was spinning as we got up from dinner.

And he said to me,

I thought there's, you know, this was just a nightmare.

And there's no way we're ever going to see each other again.

And he put his coat on and he looks at me.

And for the first time, he smiles.

And he puts his hand out.

And he said,

it's really rare that you get to have an evening of conversation with somebody who knows what they know, knows what they don't know, and can defend themselves.

That's apologetic.

That's apologetics.

He wanted to know: A, are you going to crack under pressure?

Are you going to lie under pressure?

Are you going to be arrogant and think that you're the smartest man in the room?

But more importantly, why do you believe the things you believe?

That's game-changing.

In a human's life, that's game-changing.

It's game-changing, and that's where so many young people get attacked by professors who are very good.

And one of the greatest forms is mockery.

I can't believe you actually believe.

And they don't know why they believe it, and they've been made fun of for whatever they believe, and so they'll abandon it very quickly.

And as a result, they can't defend what they believe.

They've been kind of coerced into it.

I was doing a little article the other day.

I don't mean to be logical here, but let me be logical for a minute.

The thing that happened a week or so ago where they had the 3,600 strikes of young people because of climate change and all the signs of, well, you're enjoying your life.

We'll be dead.

And so all this fear that's out there.

And so I started looking.

Do you know how many?

I'm asking.

Do you know how many hurricanes we have a year?

Oh.

I don't know.

15, 20?

Typhoons on one hemisphere?

I have no idea.

I don't know.

Maybe 10.

And then if you throw in tornadoes, you know, we have about 200 a year in the United States.

I don't know where it is elsewhere.

And then

when you throw in volcanoes, I guess maybe 10 or 12 golf, I don't know.

According to NASA, one hurricane is the equivalent of 10,000 nuclear weapons.

One hurricane.

One volcano is 10,000 atomic weapons.

And I started looking at, I said, so every year we've got like 2 million atomic nuclear weapons going off and the planet still seems to be pretty good shape.

So what is it we think we're going to do to damage the planet?

I mean,

if nature itself has that much destructive planet and we can't even tell the difference, what are you kids worried about?

I'm not quite sure I understand this.

Well, it's a carbon dioxide.

Yeah, but the carbon dioxide that comes out of one erupting volcano is more than you'll produce in a generation.

And it's like, we're not even logical, but they have been so scared into certain things and, you know, ashamed and mocked

into it.

So there's a thing about people.

Nobody wants to be a pariah.

Nobody wants to be a pariah.

You know, are you born gay?

Well, I think some people are.

I think some people, you know, choose whatever.

But

nobody except a sadist goes,

you know, I want to be an outcast.

I want to be mocked and ridiculed by everybody.

You all, everyone wants to be a part of the cool kid table.

Yeah.

They do.

Right.

And so when the cool kids are mocking you, you grew up.

And see, that's where if you can get, if you can get young people to get their feet down, know why they believe it, know what the benefits are.

You've seen both sides.

You've examined all the evidence.

It's like a jury.

And that's what we kind of do with the leadership training program is we kind of have them be a jury.

Give you both sides.

Look at it.

The first thing that happens is the leadership training program, which, again, Mercury One does.

Wall Builders is a partner in that.

And

we bring these 40 kids in for two weeks, and we do it three times during the summer.

And they come in, and some of them are very clear on what they believe and what they don't believe.

But the first thing you do is you just ask them questions.

We just deconstruct them.

What do you believe?

We don't care what they believe, what side they're on.

We just make them a decision.

I believe in Jesus.

Really?

Why?

Yeah.

You know, even things that we believe in,

they'll come in and say,

you have to tear them down.

You have to get to a place to where they go, well, I don't know.

I never thought about it.

Good.

That's the beginning.

Well, the thing that comes out with socialism, because the stats we've seen, we see stats that right now up to 75% of college students support socialism.

It's 69% of millennials support socialism, and 41% of the entire nation supports socialism.

That's crazy.

So, which means that, you know, a typical kid coming in, three out of four are going to believe socialism.

And so we'll just ask them, why do you think that's a good deal, et cetera.

And then we'll ask them, okay, the world's been around 5,500 years recorded history, several thousand nations history of the world.

Can you name a single nation?

Can you name any nation where socialism has produced prosperity and freedom?

Yeah.

The Netherlands, Sweden, they're great.

Yeah.

And Sweden,

it's interesting to see even their social media in Sweden.

Quit saying we're socialist.

We're not socialist.

The prime minister flew over here to give a press conference to say, stop saying this, we're not.

They are actually more free in business than we are right now.

That's right.

And so when we eventually get the kids down to it, we say, why have they all failed?

And they say, well, they've never done it right.

And we say, what would you do different that would make it work?

And they can never give an answer to that.

They never provide an answer.

And so we've gotten into this thing of

we just respond to what's out there.

We were talking about Google and everything.

We don't even know why we believe what we believe on that or how we haven't thought through how would I do,

how could I get Google, what could we do that would get them to respond differently?

We don't even think about that.

We look for somebody else to solve the problem.

And until we become self-sufficient individuals who are confident with what we know, and you know, you were talking about founding fathers, things that they didn't foresee, and I firmly believe that.

I was asked to go to Ukraine to help them do a constitution.

So in Ukraine, they They became an independent nation from Russia, I think, in 92.

They didn't have experience of freedom.

They threw together the constitution.

It's not great.

They got a lot of corruption.

So spent time in their law schools and in their government schools, et cetera.

What does an American tell a Ukrainian about how to do a Constitution?

Copy the American Constitution?

That doesn't help them.

And so

what I did, and what I think is so significant, what I think the Founding Fathers did so well, I went over there.

I bought some really old books, 1,400s, 1,500s, 1,600 books.

I bought Gross, books by Hugo Groschis and Samuel Pufendorf.

I took books by Blackstone and Montesquieu and Locke.

And so I took these five over, and then I had a bunch of science books.

So Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton got his science books.

You got Kepler.

You got all these guys.

And so I said, you know, these guys, Boyle lived 500 years ago.

I mean, 500 years ago, he gave us Boyle's laws of gases.

It's because of Boyle's Laws of Gases that I scuba dive.

Now, I guarantee you, 500 years ago, he did not think anyone would ever be underwater breathing.

Never crossed his mind.

Doesn't matter.

We took the principles he gave us, and we used different technology with the principles.

The principles are sound.

Newton gave us the laws of gravity and the laws of motion.

I'm a pilot.

The only reason I can fly a plane is because I understand the second law of motion, Bernoulli's principle.

Now, Newton never thought anybody would be in a plane flying above the earth.

It doesn't matter.

We take his principles.

And that's what I think we miss so often is we don't understand the principles that undergird what we do because we can add technology all day long and it does not change the principle.

That principle will not change.

And what the Founding Fathers gave us with a set of principles that have lasted, the average Constitution lasts 17 years in the history of the world.

We're now 232 years.

Those principles work.

And so

all this pressure that they're outdated, and we now have Justice Breyer, who wrote a book saying we've got to get away from the Constitution.

We have Ginsberg who looks to the South African Constitution,

which is already folded.

Already folded.

I guess she likes mentoring.

She spends her three months traveling young nations and helping their judiciary.

Consistently says, do not use the American Constitution.

Terrible.

Use Nigeria, use South Africa, use whatever.

We've got Judge Richard Posner, who just came out with the book, says judges need to stop following the Constitution.

It's folded.

It's outdated.

It's like saying the laws of gravity are outdated.

It's like saying the Kepler's.

All men are created equal and endowed by a creator with certain inalienable rights.

It never goes out of date.

It was the greatest mission statement ever.

And so getting kids to understand that, which is, you know, what we see with the leadership training program is transformational stuff because I kind of look at them like the founding fathers.

They actually use their brain.

They think.

They now know how to reason through.

They can defend their beliefs.

And they're willing to change their beliefs if they get evidence for it.

We teach them to go after truth.

Wherever truth leads you, that's where you want to be.

And sometimes it's very uncomfortable.

Very uncomfortable, and sometimes it's not what your tribe is saying.

Sometimes you have to be with the other tribe because that's what truth is.

And so, the ability to follow truth rather than belong to a tribe-that's a big deal in today's culture because the tribalism is massive.

Because we've lost the most important tribe, and that is the tribe that believes all men are created equal and endowed by the Creator with certain rights.

Because we no longer believe that,

we have to break up into little tribes, and it doesn't work.

We were having dinner last night with a university

president.

Yeah, really nice guy.

And he said,

I am starting to tell people now, when parents ask me, I'm now starting to say, don't send your kids to college.

I was floored by that.

Say university president.

And he said they're so

very successful one, by the way.

Yeah.

And he said, they are so off track.

He said Hillsdale and University of the Ozarks, right?

And that's the new College of the Ozarks.

He said, other than that, he said, everything's off tracks.

It's just,

they are indoctrination camps.

And I said, I keep telling my wife this.

Why would I...

We've spent 18 years trying to mold these kids and to teach them how to think, not what to think, how to think.

I'm going to just, I'm going to pay somebody to

destroy that?

Yeah.

And pay a high price to destroy it.

And by the way, there was a University of Connecticut study that came out.

Even if, I mean, I'm with you, destroy faith and worldview and philosophy, terrible.

But the University of Connecticut came out with a study that proved what they called negative learning they actually followed kids through four years of college at what are considered elite universities and they found that testing the kids going out as seniors they actually knew less academically than when they came in as freshmen they actually lost knowledge in that period of time so you pay extensive money six-figure money to have them lose their faith their character their belief and they lose knowledge along the way so we were we were talking last night because we were talking to this guy about our leadership training program.

And well, I don't want to break any news and make an announcement.

We are actively engaged in, A, collecting all of this history,

but then

giving access to this at home and also teaching it.

Because he said,

get an apprenticeship

and then take

then take real specific courses on what you want to learn skill courses and and what you want to learn and then look for great teachers of

how to think that's on certain subjects not what to think not what to think that's right and um

and i'm i have to tell you david uh

I'm really excited about what we're working on.

And I think

we've been talking this vision for 10 years.

10 years, I know.

And we're now

looking over the threshold, getting close to seeing this come in the house.

And it really is.

Can we share the conversation that we had recently about how I've said we have to change?

Do you think that's worth saying?

David and I, we've been partners now for a long time, and we both have the same heart and we both have the same vision on so much.

And

our priorities have been to

first

teach people how to help themselves locally.

That was the first goal of Mercury One, is let's not reinvent the wheel.

Let's help people who are actually making a difference

in their communities.

That's right.

And find the people who are making those changes with the least amount of waste.

You know, we look at charity as an investment in people.

I want to invest in somebody that's going to be able to make the biggest impact in their community.

So that was the first one.

The second goal was to

gather the history.

Something that came, you know, 10, 11 years ago.

And I think I first told you before anybody else, I keep feeling and hearing clay pots.

And I think that means one of two things.

And I think it actually means both.

Preserve the history and then put it in a safe place, but also...

And by the way, that is the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were in clay pots, had been put away for 2,000 years.

That's why they exist.

That's why they exist, because clay pots preserve that history, preserve the faith.

Right.

So I saw that at that time, and David and I were talking, and I said, we need to preserve this history.

And we need to have a place where it is safe for whatever might come our way.

Because I don't trust,

you know, if the government goes rogue and they have all of the documents and everything else,

you know, you're not going to see it.

So do that, but also look at our children as clay pots and plant it deep inside of them.

And

so we have been focused on the first part of clay pots, and we have dabbled.

strongly, I think, in planting it in.

We've been testing it for a few years and it's working really well.

And testing it and

and I think because of the time we live in David and I just had a conversation just recently about how

I don't want to build a building I don't want I it we're losing too much time

we've got to teach children yeah and it is it's one of the reasons why we we're meeting with and we've got to teach them principles and not indoctrinate them no

i mean if you

that's what's so exciting about the ltp when i this when i come because i come at the very first day so i meet everybody the first day and i know the ones who are like you know got a chip on their shoulder or they came because somebody said you should go there and you should talk to these guys because you'll rat them out you know or whatever and i so i see where everybody is And then I see everybody at the very end.

And most of them are crying when they come up to me and they're like, this has totally changed my life.

And it's exciting.

It is exciting.

It's exciting.

And

I don't know how to say this well, but every session we've had at least one kid who's gone back and changed their professor by asking their professor the questions they were asked and their professor can't answer the questions.

And

good for the professor, we're willing enough to look for truth that they actually changed.

But one of our students was actually teaching their professor.

That's right.

Every Tuesday, the professor said.

It was great.

Yeah,

he got this student's essay back or paper back and wrote on it, you are either the dumbest person ever and you deserve an F because you're making stuff up or you know stuff I don't know.

Come see me.

And she went in and said, no, professor, it's here, here, and here.

let's look it up together and he said I didn't know any of this yeah I didn't know any of this and she actually was asked to come to his office once a week he said where did you learn this yeah she said I just went to this leadership training program for a couple weeks and we went through all the original documents and we went through the stuff and we and he said That's it.

Let's come in once a week.

I want you to show me the stuff that you learned.

And she took her notes from the summer and just started taking him through all those things.

So let's end this here.

We need a couple of things.

And didn't really talk about doing this, but I think this is a good place to do it.

We need a couple of things.

We need an army of people that

can

take original documents, handwritten documents, and then

write them out.

Transcribe them for you.

Transcribe them

and accurately transcribe them.

And we, you know,

if we had 120,000 people, we could get it done in one day.

That's right.

Just your collection.

So we need people that are willing to carefully, prayerfully, and patriotically really go and look at them and make sure those things are right.

Some of them aren't that

earth-shattering, remarkable.

You know, they may be a land deed.

They may be a

jury summons.

We don't know what they are, all of them.

We just know they're handwritten, and a lot of them are by founding fathers who signed the documents.

And it's just got to be transcribed.

Because what we're doing is we're building a website, and hopefully it'll come out and be ready maybe next year, at least to start

where you'll be able to find, you know, Dave and I were talking yesterday.

I want to be able to go,

you know, free speech and it'll pull up all the original documents and you'll be able to do your own research there and you will have the greatest footnote.

I loved what you said.

about one of the LTP students that came just last year and said

goes to a really good university and said, I've never been asked for so many footnotes, ever.

Yeah.

Because we are rigorous on that.

Well, you know, after we get them for a week and a half and they start knowing that we're giving them a lot of knowledge and a lot of things on both sides, we get to where we say, why do you believe what I just told you?

You should be asking me, how do you know that?

Where did you get that information?

Just because we've had you for a week, why are you believing us?

Don't trust us.

That's right.

Don't trust us.

And that's where they get that footnote stuff.

Go back and find a footnote for everything and you document, and you can't use Wikipedia as a source.

Sorry, you got to use an original source somewhere.

Right.

I'd also ask if you have

things, even things from today.

Like, people think it's crazy, but,

you know,

as an object, we just bought

those Betsy Ross Nike shoes because that's a part of American history to tell the story of how screwed up these companies were.

I'm trying to get a pair of vans now because they had vans had the sneaker made for the Hong Kong

protests.

Oh, wow.

And vans pulled them off because it offended China.

But

we need you to collect even things today

that will be historic and just let us know if you have things that you would like to be preserved, we can preserve those things.

If you just don't know what to do with them, we can also, if you have something of real value, we may end up purchasing it, or we can put you in touch with people who

do that for a living.

Or if you want to contribute it, we'll take that.

Yeah, we'd love to have you contribute.

The other thing is we want to make an offer, and that is send your kids to our leadership program.

Right now, it is only happening in the summer, but

we'd like a very long waiting list.

And so you just go to mercury1.org.

I think it's under leadership training.

And you can sign up.

We are hopefully going to be opening this up for more ages, age groups and families in the future.

But right now, we're taking anyone 18 to 25.

And sometimes a little lower than that if you're going to college at 17 instead of 18.

Fine.

But we're designing courses right now.

We've been working on the 18 to 25 year olds.

We'll be designing things for younger and for older and for family.

And we would love for you to

have your children sign up for this.

Or if it happens to be you and you're 18 to 25, we'd love to see you.

You will get an experience for two weeks that nobody gets.

Nobody gets.

For instance, you'll get to.

Now this is a gentleman's magazine.

When I was growing up, a gentleman's magazine did not look like this.

And it had pictures in it.

This doesn't look like it.

No pictures.

No pictures.

And your gentleman's magazine did not have poetry in it.

Yes.

This is May 1773.

Why is this important, David?

Because a little black girl named Phyllis Wheatley has a poem in that.

And the story of Phyllis is such a cool story, how she got to America

as a slave and the Wheatley family that bought her and raised her as a daughter.

And so so she's the first black published poetess in America.

And there you go right there.

Was she our first,

what do you call those,

poet laureate?

Wasn't she?

No, she wasn't?

That wasn't going at the time.

But she became good friends with Benjamin Franklin.

She wrote a poem about Benjamin Franklin.

She wrote a poem about George Woodfield.

She wrote a poem about the Stamp Act, the repeal of the Stamp Act.

She wrote poems about Washington.

Washington actually had her come to Cambridge and read poetry to the troops, kind of like a USO, you know, like bringing Bob Hope in.

And so, I mean, she's just a remarkable, remarkable lady.

And

she was someone that Benjamin Franklin, who was really a strong abolitionist, I mean, really paid for it dearly in the end,

brought her around

to

like stage shows, if you will, and had her read poetry just to convince those stupid people yeah that

no uh you know what blacks are just like you she is black and she's a lot smarter than a lot of you a lot smarter than you that's right a lot smarter than you david thank you thanks bro all right

just a reminder i'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people