Black LIES Matter – With Ryan Bomberger: Are people waking up to the failures of the progressive movement? Have people’s emotions overtaken their ability to recognize ridiculous narratives – like the lie of “an epidemic of police killing blacks”? Are churches who embrace CRT part of the problem? Tune in to hear Ryan Bomberger explain what is happening in churches and on college campuses across the nation and how we can bring solutions!

Air Date: 10/05/2022

Guest: Ryan Bomberger

On-air Personalities: David Barton, Rick Green, and Tim Barton

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Transcription note:  As a courtesy for our listeners’ enjoyment, we are providing a transcription of this podcast. Transcription will be released shortly. However, as this is transcribed from a live talk show, words and sentence structure were not altered to fit grammatical, written norms in order to preserve the integrity of the actual dialogue between the speakers. Additionally, names may be misspelled or we might use an asterisk to indicate a missing word because of the difficulty in understanding the speaker at times. We apologize in advance.

Faith and the Culture

Rick:

Welcome to the intersection of faith and the culture. It’s WallBuilders Live. We’re taking on those hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical, and constitutional perspective. That’s how you rebuild the walls. If you’re wondering what WallBuilders stands for, it comes out of that scripture here in Nehemiah that says, arise and rebuild the walls that we may no longer be able to approach.

If you think about those biblical days, if you didn’t have those outer walls, your city was run over. You got to rebuild the walls in order to rebuild the culture. In America, it’s the foundation that we’re rebuilding, it’s the foundations of principles of principles of liberty. It’s the idea that our rights don’t come from government, they don’t come from our neighbors, they come from God, that our freedom comes from God, that this system that we enjoy is because we did it the biblical way.

And we’ve lost those first principles. We’ve lost those basic ideas. We stopped teaching it in the education system. And so we have to start teaching that to ourselves, to our family, to the people in our church, to our neighbors. That’s what we do here at WallBuilders all week long, whether it’s interviews like we’ll have today, or it’s Foundations of Freedom Thursday, where we take your questions, or Good News Friday, where we talk about the results of infusing the principles of liberty into the culture all week.

It’s essentially about how to restore the culture, rebuild the walls, bring back the principles of liberty so that we can get the results in the culture that I think all of us want to see: prosperity, liberty, abundance, all of those things, it happens when you follow the biblical commands on how to treat your neighbors and how to form your society.  

Come Alongside Us

So thanks for joining us here on WallBuilders Live to talk about that. I’m Rick Green, a former Texas legislator and America’s Constitution coach. And I’m here with David Barton. He’s our founder at WallBuilders. He’s America’s premier historian. Tim Barton’s with us. He’s a national speaker and pastor and president of WallBuilders. And we’re glad that you’re with us as well. 

Check out our website today at wallbuilderslive.com. That’s the place where you can make a contribution if you want to come alongside us. It takes finances, of course, to do something like this and to reach more people. 

So your donations definitely make a difference. And that’s also where you can grab some of those links and share the program with your friends and family. Get it out there. Be a force multiplier, it’s great information being shared on this program. Don’t just listen to it. Make sure that other people are listening as well, and you are educating the people in your circle.

Alright, David and Tim, a little later in the program, we’ve got Ryan Bomberger with us from The Radiance Foundation. We had him several years ago, it’s been several years on a totally different issue. 

But man, he has been so outspoken and so articulate on just the communism of Black Lives Matters and all of the lies that were told over the last couple of years. So we’re going to get him back for a little update about what’s going on out there in that particular debate.

And of course, guys, we’ve said, we’ve been very plain on this program about the biblical concept of not having either Jew or Greek and that we should be following MLK’s dream of judging each other by content of character, not cover the skin. So I think it’s going to be an exciting program.

BLM and Other Black Leaders

Tim:

And it’s worth noting that in the midst of all that BLM was doing, there were several great black leaders who stood up and said this is not correct, this is propaganda. And it’s important because one of the things that certainly people tried to paint is when there were individuals like us coming out and saying, wait a second, guys, this does not make sense, the argument was, well, it’s because you’re white guys. It’s because you don’t understand that we can’t have an intellectual conversation about things like this if you’re a white person, etc, etc, etc.

Well, then you had some great black leaders coming out and acknowledging the same thing. And the irony of the Left is the way they throw slander, the way they throw things around. Very similar to what happened with Larry Elder when he was running for governor in California and the hit piece came out against him and said that he was the black face of white supremacy, so accusing him of being a white guy even though Larry Elder obviously is a black man. 

But I’m pointing this out because there were some great black leaders out there, Christian conservative leaders who were saying what was fundamentally true.

And I think now some more people are seeing this. Certainly, it’s not as prevalent as an understanding for most people recognizing the fallacy of BLM, but at least because of some of the recent headlines that have come out identifying the multimillion dollar mansions some of these leaders have acquired for themselves, some people are at least beginning to see that BLM has been a sham and in the midst of that, also communists and Marxist in what they’ve been doing.

The Failure of the Progressive Movement

David:

Significantly, when you look at BLM, they’re part of the progressive movement. And there’s, unfortunately, just a lot of black folks that have voted progressive. You mentioned Larry Elder, the conservative blacks get beat up as not being real blacks. And the progressive, they embrace all these other folks. And so many black folks vote values they really don’t hold, not realizing it. 

But one of the things I was thinking even this last week, more information out now on COVID and more information out on how the position taken with the CDC is so wrong and the evidence is now coming out. And these progressives were pushing this control thing, they were pushing all the vaccine stuff, they’re pushing all the masking and I thought about that, and I thought about all these movements progressive been leading.

And really, they should be telling the nation and the world, we’re sorry, we got it wrong, the evidence was against us. We didn’t recognize it. But being a progressive means never having to say you’re sorry. And whether that was eugenic stuff, whether that’s economic destruction, whether that’s the failed education system, whether that’s rising crime, whether that’s destroying families, they have never said they’re sorry.

Phyllis Schlafly

And now here Black Lives Matters, one of the groups they embrace in Harold and I was struck just a week or so ago, I was giving an address at a national banquet, and there’s a lady back in the 70s, her name was Phyllis Schlaflyi, she was just a normal housewife and she took on and led a movement that defeated the Equal Rights Amendment back in 72. And that Equal Rights Amendment.

 I mean, who would have thought you had a chance of stopping something that said women should be the same as men, and we’re going to put that in the Constitution. And so what it did was it singled out the group of women and said that needs to be protected in the Constitution. And she defeated that in 72, saying, that’s a bad deal.

And I was looking even at the victories we’ve had as conservative constitutionalists that came from the Supreme Court this year, that would not have been possible had she not been able to stop that progressive movement back in the 70s that was using women instead of race. At that time, women was the face of progressivism, and that’s what they were really linking their wagon to, to try to get people buy and stuff.

If the ERA had gone into the Constitution back in 72, it would be a constitutional amendment that said, hey, we’re going to give rights based on the group that you’re part of. And instead of saying, everybody gets the same equal inalienable rights, now we’re recognizing groups in the Constitution. And if that had become part of the constitutional amendment, you would then have to reinterpret, and rightfully so, you would have to reinterpret every aspect of the Bill of Rights, not on the relationship of individuals.

Religious Expression

But on which group is it. And so we would have enshrined in the Constitution that some groups have more protection than other groups, and so it would apply that way to the right to keep and bear arms while some groups have more protection than others; it would be that way for religious expression, some groups have more protection than others.

If that Equal Rights Amendment had gone through that progressive amendment back in the 70s, we would not have had a single victory we had this year as conservative constitutionalists on the Supreme Court, whether it’s live victories, religious liberty victories, Second Amendment victories, regulatory victories, we would be looking at groupthink rather than individual rights thing.

And so that’s the problem we got with BLM, it’s all about groups. And whenever you empower groups and you put groups and give them special privileges, you destroy liberty for the rest of the people. And so Ryan has been one of these guys that has been talking about that. And we’ve seen some of the work he’s done recently. 

And as a black man speaking about this and recognizing the constitutional foundations, the equality that comes through God, and he’s one of those voices that we really need to have more guys like him speaking out and saying BLM is wrong for this reason. And he points out even a lot of churches and a lot of faith people have gotten on board with this out of what you call it, compassion or whatever, but they’re taking a really, really bad position that’s destructive to their own liberties, their own rights, and the freedom of the nation as well.

Rick:

Ryan Bomberger, our special guest. Stay with us, folks, will be right back. You’re listening to WallBuilders Live.

A Moment from American History

This is Tim Barton from WallBuilders with another moment from American history. Many today wrongly claim our Founding Fathers were largely atheist, agnostics, and deists. Certainly, some founders were less religious than others, but even they were not irreligious.

Consider Benjamin Franklin, definitely one of the least religious among them. Yet when the delegates at the Constitutional Convention hit an impasse in their deliberations, it was Franklin who called them the prayer invoking numerous scriptures to make his point. As he reminded them, “God governs in the affairs of men; and if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? We have been assured in the sacred writings that except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. I firmly believe this.”

So, even the least religious of America’s founders urge public prayer and dependence on God. For more information about the faith of the Founding Fathers, go to wallbuilders.com.

Rick:

Welcome back to WallBuilders Live. Thanks for staying with us. Ryan Bomberger is with us. He’s chief executive officer and cofounder of The Radiance Foundation. Great article on Christianpost.com “Black Lies Matter”, Black lies, make sure you understood what I just said, “Black Lies Matter”. Ryan, hey, man, thanks for coming on with us today.

Ryan:

Hey, it’s great to be here with you.

Rick:

Hey, you took a lot of criticism from the beginning saying, listen, these folks are communists, they’re Marxist, and they’re also likely to be crooks, and they were; it turns out millions of dollars up scandal by the board members of Black Lives Matter. So, is anybody written that criticize you before or call you and said, hey, sorry about that, you were right?

Ryan:

Yeah. no apologies. I mean, especially the people who express so much hate, first of all, because typically I’m not black enough. It’s not the fact that I’m actually just giving you documented facts. But, no, there are no apologies. And the shame of it is this is so blatant that anyone should be awakened by the fact that this movement and these leaders are an absolute fraud.

Rick:

Well, you said not black enough, but didn’t President Biden saying you weren’t black at all if you didn’t vote..?

Ryan:

I know President Joe Biden is the authority on what being black is. I’m used to that kind of nonsense from a liberal who constantly says it’s identity politics, so they’re the ones you get to define who you are and what you’re allowed to believe. Yes, I don’t think Biden has it all together anyway.

Rick:

Well, do you think, you know, now, what has it been, has it been two full years at this point, a little over two years? And some of the exposure now, most people probably don’t even know about the million dollar houses and the $10 million and the $2 million salaries and all this crazy stuff. But for those that do know where it has gotten out, do you think people are backing off because a lot of really well-meaning people jumped on the bandwagon. 

Jumped on the Bandwagon

They just didn’t look deep enough, and they really said, hey, we want to be part of a righteous cause, especially young people. I mean, I’ve worked with a lot of young people, and they thought, hey, man, we’re on the right side of history here, and they didn’t realize what was happening. Do you think that’s changing, has the narrative changed enough?

Ryan:

I don’t think so. I think people are so beholden to an emotion that it doesn’t matter when the evidence arises. Now, there are some and part of what we do to The Radiance Foundation as we speak in college campuses and speaking a lot of different venues, and we help break and dismantle some of these ridiculous narratives. But I think overall, for those who are so devoted to the movement, it’s like they can do no wrong. 

I mean because they’re convinced that the premise of the movement, that there is an epidemic of killings by police of black individuals, they believe that that premise is true and it’s not. So it almost doesn’t even matter that, oh, wait, there’s more fraud. Well, just like the other groups, it’s white supremacy to blame as a fraud.

Rick:

They caused it.

Ryan:

No, it’s not.

Rick:

And so you’re saying those that are sold out to it mentally and emotionally, I don’t even know if they’re being mental because they’re not really thinking, but they’re sold out emotionally, that when they see the fraud, they’re just like, well, that’s just the cost of doing business, that’s okay. That’s not a big deal or that’s caused by all of the evil in the past. So then let’s talk about solutions. When you go to a campus, what happens? Like when those kids hear you lay out the facts, do you see some changed hearts sometimes?

Breakthrough is Vital

Ryan:

Absolutely. And as with anything, there’s not the seismic sort of thing that happens where it’s like everybody has now. But there are students who will come up afterwards and oftentimes students say, I wanted to hate you when I came in, but you actually presented the facts in a context that I had never heard before. 

And it really has me thinking. So this does happen, and not just in colleges, but in churches and that breakthrough is really vital, it’s really important.

Because the problem is there are so many things that there’s a political allegiance or there’s an emotional tie and people don’t want to see. And I have to acknowledge that there’s a spiritual dimension to this too where they’re just blinded to it. 

But we do see and hear people actually expressing whether in person or through DMs, emails or whatever, expressing, wow, I never thought about it from this perspective. Thank you so much for speaking the truth.

Rick:

Well, you mentioned churches, so help me understand The Radiance Foundation, the things that you do, because there’s obviously the campus outreach where it’s more of a secular message and you’re really just giving them the facts on history and culture and society and all the things in the history of America. 

On the race thing from a truthful factual perspective, acknowledging the sense saying, here’s the bad things that happened, look at the progress we made. And then the church side of it, it seems like saying, hey, there’s neither Jew nor Greek, we’re not supposed to be so hung up on race and when are we going to get the content of the character? How’s that message being received when you go into churches?

Churches Embracing CRT

Ryan:

Well, the problem is there are way too many churches that have embraced the lie Critical Race Theory, that embraced the lie in the antiracism movement, which is just Critical Race Theory in practice. And this is where the whole emotionalism takes over. As Christians, we have to fuse the emotional with the evidential. And there are so many Christians where CRT, Critical Race Theory is spreading like a cancer.

The crazy thing is the word isn’t enough and the world somehow has the solution that the church already has the answers to. And that’s why part of one of the things that we wrote during the whole summer of BLM was our manifesto “Christ Before Color”, and it really put to task these churches that just out of all this emotion. And without any scriptural backup, they just embraced the Black Lives Matter movement, embraced antiracism, and so we called that out in this manifesto, “Christ before Color, Christ before Anything”. 

And that’s Christbeforecolor.com, by the way, anybody wants to read that. But it really was shocking to me how many Christians capitulate. They think it’s compassion and they don’t understand, no, that’s not compassion, that’s capitulation. That’s not a biblical world view on these things.

Ryan:

And there are way too many churches that are embracing the lie that color how for some reason is preeminent and character doesn’t matter. I mean, that’s the whole BLM thing. It’s color is everything, character is nothing.

Rick:

So many things I want to unpack out of what you just said. I wish we had 3 hours. I always say I wish I was Joe Rogan or had a Joe Rogan show. But let me just start by repeating what you said that was so good. “In the church, the word is not enough and somehow the world has the answers.” That right there, man. 

The Heart of the Problem

You just put your finger on it. That’s the heart of all of our problems. Not in the world, so we’re not getting the truth and the real answers, so we’re going out here and finding the secular answers that are actually harming us instead of solving the problem. That’s powerful, man. We need more of that for sure.

I got to ask you a question because when I was saying exactly what you’re saying with friends of every color you can imagine, man, when all this stuff happened, I do these Zoom broadcasts and I had black, brown, red, my buddy from India, I called him the Bronze, so we had all these people and we were saying what you’re saying. 

And if I quoted MLK, okay oh, my goodness, the hate mail I got, it was like if I said content of character, not color of skin, we’re spitting on his grave… Oh, my goodness. I had people say, how dare you just quote this one black man and now you think…

How do you deal with that? When people say that, when you try to invoke MLK and say, I thought his dream was what we were all after? And now it’s almost like they just push that to the side and that was supposed to be the dream. What do you do with that?

Ryan:

And it is the dream. And I thank God that my family, for instance, where I’m from a family of 15, 10 of us were adopted and we’re white, black, native American, Vietnamese, mixed, we are the reward of the civil rights movement, more of the reward of the abolitionist fight. So it’s nonsense for them to just dismiss MLK. How about Frederick Douglas?

I mean, without Frederick Douglas, I don’t even know if abolition would have happened. And I love on his North Star paper, he has this motto that says “Right is of no sex, truth is of no color; We are all brethren. God is the Father of us all.” And all we need to take is that phrase right there.

MLK

So for the people who want to dismiss MLK, anytime we identify by our color and we separate ourselves by color throughout human history, it never goes well. And yet that’s exactly what this fake antiracism movement is pushing, that we constantly have to see things through the broken lens of race. I’d rather see things through the breakthrough filter of Christ.

Rick:

That’s good. Ryan, I want to see you in front of every church in America. How can we help? How can people pray for you, donate Radiance Foundation invite you in to speak? I’m assuming, churches, colleges, what are the kind of places would you be willing to go? We need this message more and more.

 Ryan:

Yes, we do about 60 events a year: colleges, rallies, youth conferences, churches, not enough churches, I’ll say that help raise millions for pregnancy centers. But the easiest way to find out our work and to book us is to go to Radiance.life.

Rick:

Radiance.life. And I don’t normally do this on the air. But Ryan, I got to get you to Patriot Academy next summer. Please come to the Texas state capital first week of August, we’ll talk off air, but I would love to have you part of that. Man, these kids would love to hear from you, the military veterans. We have a great group that comes together at the capital once a year for that and all kinds of secrets. We had a ton of great people last year.

But, brother, appreciate you so much. God bless you for what you’re doing. I pray God’s speed on you and just open the right doors. I would imagine you’re probably facing that situation of which doors to go through because there’s so many opportunities right now as people want to listen. So I’m just going to pray for discernment for you, the finances, I mean, everything that’s needed for you to be a voice in this culture that we desperately need. Appreciate you and appreciate you coming on WallBuilders Live.

Ryan:

Thank you so much, Rick. God bless.

A Great Collection for Your Young Person

Rick:

That’s Ryan Bomberger. And we’re going to be right back with David and Tim Barton. But visit the website today, we’ll have a link today at wallbuilderslive.com to make it easy for you. Go make a contribution. Invite Ryan in to come speak, share the article. We’re going to have that at the website today at wallbuilderslive.com. Stay with us, folks, we’ll be right back with David. and Tim Barton.

 

AMERICAN HISTORY

Hi, friends, this is Tim Barton of WallBuilders. This is a time when most Americans don’t know much about American history or even heroes of the faith. And I know oftentimes we, parents, we’re trying to find good content for our kids to read. And if you remember back to the Bible, to the book of Hebrews, it has the faith Hall of Fame where they outline the leaders of faith that had gone before them. Well, this is something that as Americans, we really want to go back and outline some of these heroes, not just of American history, but heroes of Christianity in our faith as well.

I want to let you know about some biographical sketches we have available on our website. One is called The Courageous Leaders collection. And this collection includes people like Abigail Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Francis Scott Key, George Washington Carver, Susanna Wesley, even the Wright brothers. And there’s a second collection called Heroes of History. In this collection, you’ll read about people like Benjamin Franklin or Christopher Columbus, Daniel Boone, George Washington, Harriet Tubman; friends, the list goes on and on. This is a great collection for your young person to have and read and it’s a providential view of American and Christian history. This is available at www.wallbuilders.com. That’s www.wallbuilders.com.

Frederick Douglass

Rick:

We’re back here on WallBuilders Live. Thanks to Ryan for joining us today. We’ll have links to his website in Radiance. In fact, I encourage you to get a hold of him, bring him into your community. What a great voice, guys. Back with David and Tim. I tell you, guys, I didn’t even ask Ryan how old he is, I’m guessing he’s in his 20s, he may be in his 30s. He looks young to me. 

But, man, I love voices like this that are just quoting Bible verses left and right. You can tell if it’s in the heart, out of the heart, the mouth speaks and just good common sense. So, really good to have him on today.

Tim:

Yeah. And Rick, I’m glad you invited the Patriot Academy, I think it would be a great addition and somebody that certainly I hope to connect with at Patriot Academy, if he is able to come. I was guessing he’s maybe in his 30s. But either way, to your point, he is a young person who did not get sucked in to this propaganda of the Left where they have done such a good job in entrenching this message in government run schools and in universities and of course on social media and all of these different personalities, whether it be from Hollywood or sports or whatever the case is where there is a prevailing message that is incorrect.

And yet so many of the rising generation, whether it be a millennial, whether it be a Gen Z, they’re buying into this narrative hook, line and sinker, which is so incorrect. And as he pointed out, you need to go back to Frederick Douglas, and part of what he referenced or quoted on the Morning Star there is certainly a lost idea that was the very American goal that was being driven for by the early abolitionists, the early Christian leaders trying to bring equality to America was that we shouldn’t look at people based on the color of skin.

And so when we have groups that are telling us we should evaluate merely on the color of someone’s skin, and then you categorize them based on the outward appearance, that’s clearly not what the Bible teaches. It’s very anti-Biblical for lots of reasons. When God created Adam and Eve in His image, they were equal, male and female, He made them in his image.

Imago Dei

Equality didn’t come based on someone’s outward appearance in the sense of we don’t even know what shape, size or color Adam and Eve were. And yet the reason they had values, because they were made in God’s image. We know the apostle Paul says that in Christ there’s not a male or female, there’s no Jews, Scythian, slave or free, we’re all one in Christ. This should be the common theme, that it doesn’t matter what someone looks like in the outward appearance. 

Even though we know that God told Samuel when Samuel was going to look to anointed king, God said, man looks at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart. If we’re going to be more godly, we have to get beyond the outward appearance. We can’t prioritize and focus on something that God said was less significant.

And certainly, it’s great that there are organizations out there like his that are working to do that.

David:

I thought it was really key, Tim, what he said was, look, BLM for them, color is everything and character is nothing. And as a black activist civil rights group, that’s exactly opposite to what all black activists had been before. 

Individual Over Group Identity

And you mentioned Frederick Douglas. But whether it’s Frederick Douglas or MLK, or whether it is George Washington Carver, whether it is Benjamin Banneker, whether it is anybody else in history, character has always been the number one issue. And they wanted character to be the judging point, not color. And so this is a complete reversal. And this is that progressive thing of having to do people in groups.

But I thought what Ryan said was really significant. He said, anytime in history, we separate ourselves by our color, it never goes well. And that is the lesson of history: groups don’t work well. Individual stuff does, but group does not work well in this group thing. But the other thing that he said that just really challenged me was he said, we have to fuse the emotional with the evidential, and we have to have a love of truth. And that really I thought, alright, love of truth, I wonder how many conservatives would give up a position they held if they found the truth was exactly opposite.

We’re all kind of loyal to our positions and how we’ve been trained. But if I believe something all my life, and I read something in the scriptures that contradicts that or if I find evidence that contradicts what I’ve been believing, am I willing to renounce a particular belief I have if I find evidence is there? If I love the truth, the answer is going to be yes. And so even as conservatives, we can’t get locked into our philosophy and agenda like BLM is locked into the progressive stuff, we have to love the truth.

Black LIES Matter And Truth Brings Solutions – With Ryan Bomberger

Now, so far, truth is what leads us to a conservative philosophy. But if I find an element of my philosophy that’s not based on the truth, I need to be quick to renounce that and get away from it because I want truth to be the basis of my philosophy. That is not the basis of progressives or BLM. And we should not be a conservative version of them with our group being the best group because we’re conservatives or whatever. It’s got to be based on individuals. It’s got to be based on character. It’s got to be based on truth.

Rick:

Alright, folks, thanks for listening today. Be sure to visit the website wallbuilderslive.com, lots more great information for you there, little tongue tied today. Anyway, check out wallbuilderslive.com and be sure to listen to those programs for yourself, but also share them with your friends and family. I just think being a force multipliers we said at the top of the program is such an important piece in terms of turning the nation around. We’re not going to be able to do this on our own. We’ve got to rally people.

And I’m telling you, I promise you, I hear the testimonials every day. If you will raise the banner, people will rally. I see this with our Constitution coaches all the time. We now have 11,000 Constitution coaches around the country that are teaching these principles. By simply sharing the videos, going through one of our Constitution courses, and then letting people share together, sharpening each other’s countenance. It’s a great way to be involved. 

If you want to be a part of that and host a Biblical Citizenship class, you can go to wallbuilders.com today, get the DVDs and the workbooks, you can go to biblicalcitizens.com today and sign up for some of the digital tools that we make available to you. But just get engaged. Start looking for ways to make a difference and impact the world around you. God bless you.

And thanks for listening. You’ve been listening to WallBuilders Live.