ESG, WallBuilders History, And Recalling Representatives – On Foundations Of Freedom: How do you know if companies you’re invested in support ESG? Have you heard the amazing history of WallBuilders? How did God move David Barton teaching science and math to discovering true history? How can you recall a sitting representative? Tune in to hear the interesting answers to these questions and more on today’s Foundations of Freedom program!

Air Date: 06/30/2022

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 are impacting the culture with our faith. That’s right. 

Biblical citizens actually take their faith and they become salt in light in the community. We’re doing that here at WallBuilders Live. And we know that you’re doing that in your home, in your community. 

You’re probably the catalyst for the biblical principles being restored and the constitutional principles being restored in your community. And that’s why you’re listening to WallBuilders Live. So thanks for being a part of our program.

Be sure to visit the website wallbuilderslive.com today. That’s where you can make a one-time or monthly contribution. And we greatly appreciate you coming alongside us, locking shields with us, financially supporting us. 

When you put fuel in the tank, we’re able to reach more people, we’re able to educate more people, work with more pastors and legislators, young people, all the different things we’re doing, it’s because of your help. So thanks for being a part of the program.

My name is Rick Green. I’m a former Texas legislator and America’s Constitution coach. And it is my honor to work with the Bartons. David Barton, he’s America’s premier historian and our founder at WallBuilders, Tim Barton, a national speaker and pastor and president of WallBuilders. You can learn about all three of us at our website wallbuilderslive.com.

Alright, David and Tim, we’ve got tons of great questions in the queue. We won’t get to all of them today. But we’re going to get to a few. Here we go. First one from Sheila in Lexington, North Carolina. She said “I was just listening to your show today about ESG scores and David said that he and Tim check their personal investments to make sure they weren’t contributing to organizations that support ESG. 

ESG And Your Investments

But how do I find this information out? Any guidance would be great because I need to do that too. Thanks for all you do for the fight to educate Americans.” Oh, she said, “PS: Rick, it was a pleasure to get to meet you in Raleigh at our COS rally. Thanks for coming out and speaking.” Well, I had a great time there, Sheila, what a great rally.

Alright, David and Tim, how do you know if people that you’re investing with or stock that you’re buying or whatever it might be that they’re buying into this whole ESG thing?

Tim:

Rick, one of the things that that is fortunate about this is a lot of these companies right now are putting it literally on their websites, so you can go there and search. And what you’re looking for is on ESG, we’re really seeing companies that are concerned with the environment, and so, the global issues going green, etc. But it’s the environment, it’s social, which is really kind of like social justice and then it’s governance, it’s how well you do what you’re told by the government.

And there are companies literally saying that this is who they are and what they do. They are proud of ESG. And so fortunately, you don’t have to look very hard or far into the organizations. What we do know is that right now, the majority of the major banks, and I’m saying majority, could be every single one of the major national banks that are holding to these positions. And I actually do think it is every one of the major national banks. But the good news is…

David:

It’s all the big banks, all the really big banks in America.

Tim:

But the good news is you can check on their website.

And again, at this point, they’re not hiding it. They are promoting that they are part of this. The one place we’ve mentioned before that we would highly recommend people to go to do more research on this, Glenn Beck has a book called “The Great Reset”. 

And “The Great Reset” goes through a lot of this ESG position, well, going back to the World Economic Forum, going back to America’s role in some of this, and what’s happening in America now on these investments in these finances, and lots of crazy stuff down kind of a spiral this rabbit hole of what’s going on.

But the good news is, in Glenn Beck’s book, “The Great Reset”, there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of footnotes back to actual government documents, back to actual speeches from some of these government leaders and politicians, where they’re actually laying out a lot of these plans. And the media hasn’t covered it. They haven’t highlighted it. But it is there. And so certainly, I would say the number one thing is look on the website to see where things are.

And we would want to be able to say well just talk to your banker, talk to your investor. But the reality is a lot of these bankers and investors, they don’t even know what these different investment firms or some of these portfolios are made up of. Some of these bankers have no idea that their own banks are taking these positions. So it’s something that you really do have to do research on, which is not a new thing for us to encourage people to go do research on this. And again, the good news at this point is that, by and large, these banks are proud of this nonsense, so they’re not covering it up. So it is something that you can identify from their website by and large.

David:

And the thing we’ve seen as well as dealing with legislators on this because legislators are trying to pass measures to protect their citizens.

And ESG is applied in certain ways. 

It says, for example, West Virginia is doing this. 

Their State Treasurer there Raleigh Moore has done a great job. But in West Virginia, banks are saying, oh, you’re a coal miner? Oh, no, no, you’re really bad for the environment. Sorry, I can’t give you a house loan because you’re in the wrong industry. If you’ll get out of coal mining and do something else, like make batteries for Tesla or something, maybe we’ll give you a loan.

So it’s really using the bank to try to change your behavior in ways that they think are harmful. As a result, state legislatures are working on this. So as we’ve seen different groups lobby the legislators either for or against ESG, kind of what we’ve seen is what’s called the ABA, the American Banking Association. That’s pretty much the big boy banks in America. They’re all for ESG. And they tell legislators, oh, don’t pass anti-ESG stuff, you really want this ESG stuff.

And the other is what we call the Community Bankers. I think it’s National Community Bankers Association, something like that. But it’s a small banks, community banks. And most of them are pretty much ESG. Although, if you talk to your local Banker about ESG, he’s going to say what! I talked to a banker recently on 15 different local banks and she told me, I got this stuff all the time on ESG, I just didn’t have a clue what it was until you asked me. I can’t believe they’re trying to do this. And her banks didn’t support ESG. But she didn’t even know what that meant.

So it’s kind of thing of finding out and what we mentioned on previous program was we looked at all of our investments and the investments we had, sometimes you give it to a broker to invest, I don’t know, Merrill Lynch, or Edward Jones, or whoever it is, Raymond James and those guys go out and make investments.

Well, we told our investment guy, check every single thing in our portfolios. And if it’s supporting ESG, we don’t want to help that company. We don’t want to help them destroy America. And so the guy who runs our investments, was able to create some brand new funds that were totally free of ESG. And your investment person may be able to do that.

If you got investments, or 401K or whatever, say, hey, if you don’t want me to leave my investments with you,

you got to make sure that none of this money is going to support ESG type banks

that are trying to destroy our liberties. So that’s a way of finding out and that’s what ESG is about and that’s what we were talking about on a previous program.

Rick:

Alright, guys, well, next question comes from, let’s see, we’ve got Christie and the family all the way from Missouri. And they asked this, “Your radio show is very popular and educational in our home. We’ve been listening for years, and that made me stop and wonder, when did WallBuilders begin? How did Rick meet the Barton family? How and when was WallBuilders Live born?”

Oh, great questions, Christy and family, WallBuilders began all the way back when Nehemiah walls were being rebuilt. I mean, when Nehemiah was rebuilding the wall, that’s when WallBuilders began; we’re just the next iteration of it. Actually, I’ll let David and Tim answer when WallBuilders started. But I will tell you how I got to be with WallBuilders.

I was given a speech at a Republican event many years ago, and I had memorized all of David’s stuff. I had a university on wheels in my truck, a box of David Barton cassette tapes and so I was regurgitating all of David’s stuff. Little did I know, his parents were in the audience. And, I think the way it went was they went to David, and they said, hey, this kid stealing all your material, you might as well hire him.

That’s how I got hired by WallBuilders and been with David Barton, Tim Barton ever since. So David remind, what was it, 87 or 88 when you start WallBuilders or somewhere in there?

David:

It would have been 87. In 87, I was a school principal, was teaching math and science, coaching basketball, very happy in the country, very grateful to not be in a big city somewhere, and was pretty much oblivious to everything going on in the country, in the nation. And at that point in time, we had an invitation to visit Washington, DC and talk to our congressman, it’s from a national prayer group, and they said

Come to DC

and meet with your Congressman. So I got no interest in DC. I definitely got no interest in meeting with a congressman.

We prayed about it, really felt the Lord kind of put it in our hearts that we should go. So as I was getting ready to go, the Lord put a couple other thoughts in my heart and I looked at some statistics that had happened related to education, and saw that it was a really interesting correlation that when the court said no more prayer and Bible reading in the school, academic scores plummeted at that point in time, ACT, SAT, other scores.

Then, when I got to DC and met with a Congressman, I just showed that to him, said, “You ever seen anything like this?”

“Never seen that,” and so he said, “We really ought to study that.”

He literally got the Department of Education involved in it. We were for the next several months doing stuff with Department of Education. Then, I started looking to see if there were other statistical correlations where when the court took out some value or something that had been part of our culture, if we could measure societal change based on that.

So in that period of time, we were working with 47 different government agencies statistics, and looking at stats and correlating things. And, as I was reading all these cases, the Supreme Court kept saying, now, the reason we can’t have prayer and Bible in schools is the Founding Fathers didn’t want it. So here we are in 1962-63, we’re going to take it out. 

The reason we can’t do character education is the Founding Fathers didn’t want it because that promotes religion. And so in the 1980s, we’re going to take that. Reason you can’t see the Ten Commandments at schools as the Founding Fathers didn’t want it because you might obey the Ten Commandments, and that’s a religious teaching.

So the court kept saying the Founders didn’t want it. And that was fine with me because as far as I knew that was right. And I think the Lord just kind of slapped me one day and said, if the founders didn’t want it, why didn’t they take it out? I mean, the founders, we’re talking 1790s 1800, 1810. Why wait until 1960 or 1970 to take out stuff the Founders didn’t want? I thought, great question. So I went to the Voelkl law library, it’s Tourney County Law Library.

 

And I told them:

I want to see cases from the original Supreme Court back in 1789.

And they said, original Supreme Court cases? I said, yeah. They said, we’ve got them, but they’re in boxes in the basement, haven’t been opened for over 100 years. I said, well, I’m going to see them. And this is before anything was online. 

You had to go to actual books, to actual library, read the law books. So they went down to the basement, I remember going down the basement, dusty boxes, man, boxed away. They pulled out Supreme Court records from 1789, etc, and I started reading them.

I got into some cases, I remember one particular case, where that it was unanimous 8-0 decision. The Supreme Court quoted several Founding Fathers and said, hey, if it’s going to be a government-run, government-funded school, you got to teach the Bible. I mean, if it’s government-run, it’s got to be teaching the Bible. “Wait a minute, that’s opposite of what the Court told me.” 

And so the more I looked at old court cases, the more I saw how different it was. And that’s what got me interested in history because I never liked history.

But I found out that what had been taught for most of my adult life, and most of my academic life was not anywhere close to accurate what the original documents had. And so we started collecting original documents. And now 30 some odd years later, we’ve got well over 100,000 original documents and artifacts going back to that era. So that’s what WallBuilders just got started.

And it’s that original study came out back in 87-88. That’s when the US presidential election was going on between Bush and Dukakis. And at that point in time, it was a big issue in the presidential campaign, should we have prayer back in school?

Should we put prayer back in schools?

And George HW Bush said, yes, prayer should be back in schools. And Dukakis said no, should not be in schools.

So I just written the book that had the statistics in it showing the effect of prayer been taken out of schools, and all of a sudden, that went national. And I started getting invites from all sorts of national TV and radio programs and conferences. Hey, come tell us about this study you did on prayer and the effects since the court took it out.

At that point in time, it just got to be so busy, so much traveling on the road. I had to decide whether to keep on being a principal or get into full time speaking. There were just so many people that wanted to hear the information.

And I felt like I was pretty vicarious for most Americans. I didn’t like politics, government, or law. Leave me alone. Stay out of my life. I like being a country town. I just felt like a whole lot of people felt like I did. That’s what got us started. So that’s WallBuilders.

As we were doing that, my dad made a comment, he said we ought to call people to rebuild the walls, just like Nehemiah did. He got the people together said, hey, let’s rebuild our own communities, rebuild what’s around us. And he said that and that’s what stuck, was hey, let’s called people to rebuild the walls like Nehemiah did, let’s be WallBuilders. And so that’s where it came from at that point in time was WallBuilders.

Now, how WallBuilders Live got started, oh, my goodness, I don’t remember. Rick, Tim, do you all remember how we got WallBuilders Live started?

Rick:

I remember. But wait, before I do that one, David, I got to ask you. So was it hard for you to switch your brain from being a math and science guy to reading Supreme Court? I mean, I went to law school thinking I love this stuff. And I don’t like reading those things. They get bogged down. For a math and science guy, that had to be just painful.

What made you like that and then decide?

And also and same question for you wanted to stay home. You didn’t want to travel. But you were willing to do so because you cared enough about what was happening. You almost had to make yourself change what you loved and what you were doing to do WallBuilders

David:

Yeah, it was so amazing the way came about and I felt like that’s what God said. I really didn’t like the stuff I got into. I mean, that wasn’t my gig. As matter of fact, I’m not a people person at all. I’m much more of a leave me alone on the ranch; and if I don’t see anybody, I love it. And so I’m in the midst of everything that would not be my preference. But I really felt like the Lord very providentially had led me into the stuff that I found, the correlations that were there because that was consistent with math and science.

But then when I felt like the Lord kind of put that question on my heart, well, if the Founders didn’t want it, why didn’t they take it out? I think that question turned things. It’s not a question I would normally think of myself because I wasn’t in history at all, wasn’t in the founders at all. So when I found that there was so much history back there that was opposite to what I had been taught.

When I felt like I was kind of vicarious for so many other citizens, I felt like okay, God wouldn’t have done this, wouldn’t have given me this to just sit on and not share with other people. This is the kind of stuff people need to know, to make a difference and turn things.

So at that point in time, it was not about what I wanted, it was about what does God want to do? Is this something that will help the nation? Is this something that will help the culture, help lives?

And so at that point, that’s where we got into it and it did turn into a full time thing, man. It was just I went from being a full time principal to being full time on the road speaking and sharing stuff. And in between times, research and stuff, and because I didn’t know history, I got all these old history books: Founding Father history books–not just public school ones.

I started reading the writings of George Washington and the writings of John Adams,

the writings of Franklin and Jefferson, and all these different guys, Benjamin Rush and John Jay. I kept finding stuff there that I had never heard in my life, never been taught, and it was big stuff.

So then I would get some more books from that era and read that. That’s where we started getting into collecting things and finding things. I collected things because it was opposite to what I’d been taught. And so once I found evidence that what my education told me was inaccurate, then I kept the original documents to show the other side.

And quite frankly, one of the things that had turned me against history was, for anybody that can’t see me, I got a lot of white hair. So I’ve been around for a long time. And I was in elementary school in the 1960s. And my sixth grade history teacher in the 1960s and you don’t think of that as being an activist time, but in the 1960s, my history teacher, sixth grade, told me that George Washington had 26 illegitimate children giving new meaning to the phrase Washington slept here.

Now, as a sixth grader, I’m not real interested in that kind of history or that kind of founder, if that’s what our first president who was, count me out. And so as it turns out, every bit of that was false. But one of the things that got me was as an adult, as I started looking into what the Founding Fathers believed.

I actually came across George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address, and that became maybe the most famous political speech ever given by any president of any time. For generations, we studied and memorize that farewell address, took test on it. It’s just amazing.

And in that, when I read it, George Washington said, the only things that make our government work are religion and morality. They’re the indispensable supports. He talked about if you try to take religion and morality out, you’re not a patriot.

It’s like you’re a traitor if you do. He said that the pious man equal with the mere politician. Whether you’re a citizen, that’s a religious or whether you’re a secular politician, you’ve got to respect religion and morality. 

And I’m going wait a minute,

this is the guy that I was told was immoral, this is the guy I was told had 26 element, gentlemen, children, and here he is taking the nation on and saying, don’t ever become a moral, don’t ever get away from religion. I said, that’s not what I was taught. So then I found out well, what I was taught was not true.

Again, I felt kind of vicarious. I just felt like every other student that went through history classes, because I wasn’t history student. And that’s where I got started sharing. So that’s really got what got WallBuilders started back in the beginning was this thing of God very providentially putting me in that direction. You’re right, Rick, it’s not what I would have chosen. 

The four things I did not like back then was history, law, government and politics, those four things. And so guess what I’m doing now? History, government law and politics; and those are the four things I tried to stay away from for all those years back as a young adult.

Rick:

Well, the fact that you were obedient and that you did that and the impact that it’s had on the country, the culture, I’m always meeting state reps and congressmen and governors and others that say, I ran for office because of David Barton’s book on this or book on that, or I heard David speak here or speak over there. So God’s usually in a mighty way.

And I think the lesson for the listeners, for all of us, is that we’re at a time where as a listener, you may need to step up and do some things that you think you’re not accustomed to or trained for or that you enjoy. But like David, you realize the culture needs us to step up as citizens and have an impact. 

It’s kind of like the World War II generation,

you had people that wanted to go do careers of certain things, but they had to stop that for a while and go fight in order to save freedom. And I think a lot of people are going to be asked to do the same thing.

So if David was willing to do what he did a man, imagine if I have all of you out there as listeners will do the same thing and be obedient in the same way. What a cool, cool story. Short answer as we go to break a WallBuilders Live, I thought I wanted to be Rush Limbaugh. We talked about doing a radio program in 2006. 

I was doing a Sunday night like once a week program in Austin. And I was like I didn’t have enough in my head to keep the program going. I was like, well, if I can talk to David, I always learn from David every time I talk to David. So I’ll just get David talking and that’ll make a great program.

And so I pitched you on doing WallBuilders Live and we started adding stations. And sooner or later, we got American family to do their stations and then bought radio and it just kept growing. But we’ve had so much fun doing it. And I think people have enjoyed the learning, just a chance to hear about all these subjects that they don’t typically get a biblical perspective on. 

And it’s been fun. So, great question, Christie, you got us to go down memory lane there on some of that history. Quick break, we’ll come back and get another question before we close out for the day. You’re listening to WallBuilders Live.

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Rick:

Welcome back to WallBuilders Live. Thanks for staying with us on this Foundations of Freedom Thursday. Last question is from Mary out of the Woodlands, Texas. She said “What can we do as citizens to recall a rep or senator in Texas, especially when they are doing things to trample our Constitution? Can the 10th Amendment help because in Texas, there’s no way forward to do a recall on them?”

Okay. So David and Tim, to make this fit for our listeners outside of Texas as well, we’re seeing recall elections in California and other places sometimes for governor or whatever it might be. But that’s not always the case. A lot of states don’t have recalls are easy to do recall. So it’s just different everywhere, I think, as far as I can tell.

David:

Yeah.

It’s interesting that…

at the Constitutional Convention, they actually talked about having a mechanism for recalling congressmen at the convention and they rejected that. And so what happens is there has never been a mechanism in place to recall federal representatives or senators. You have to wait till elections. Even when they tried to impeach a US Senator William Blount, a signer of the Constitution, way back 200 years ago, they said, no, that’s what we got elections for, you can’t do that.

So every court has held to this point that you can’t do a recall on federal. Now, the Constitution says that the states get to determine the time, place and manner of federal elections. And so the states can set the boundaries on it, but they can’t set the qualifications for federal congressmen or removing them. The qualifications for being a federal congressman or senator come from the Constitution; you got to be 25 and 9 years of citizen or whatever it is. And it’s the same with removing them, the Constitution doesn’t give away for doing that.

Recall elections started becoming popular at about 1903-1905, they started recalling local officials or state reps. Actually, there’s not been that many recall elections. There’s only been four governor recall elections in the last century, last 125 years. Gavin Newsom, what was the one a couple years ago, he won; four Governor recall elections, two one, two last. 

There’s been probably 50 or 60 state representative, state senator recall elections, you can do that. There’s been a number of local official recall elections. But a federal one, you just got to wait for an election and do something in election or get something stirred up where people want that person out of office and are willing to do something. So there’s no provision for recall on federal elections. It’s just city and state elections where you can do that.

Rick:

Okay. And it’s a little different in each state, I think, right? It’s not always the same in terms of not every state has it and not every state does it the same way.

ESG, WallBuilders History, And Recalling Representatives – On Foundations Of Freedom

David:

Yeah, it is. It’s the constitutional idea of every states, its own laboratory and stuff like that. And so states do have their own mechanisms and methods for doing it, how many signatures do you have to get or what has to happen. It’s all controlled by the states. Again, a lot of states didn’t have that in 1800s. It’s something that really started coming in the 1900s. And a lot of states still haven’t really addressed it because there hasn’t been much need.

As you look at all the thousands and tens of thousands of officials we’ve had in the United States, and you look at recall elections, I mean, you’re 1/10 of 1% maybe, is all that it is. So it just doesn’t happen all that often, although, more and more people are frustrated today, and more and more people want it today. But it’s just not been something to happen much in history. And so you’re right, Rick, a lot of states don’t have it, or every state controls how it happens in that state and you just have to find out.

But if you’re trying to impeach a US senator or a US Congressman, good luck, that’s probably not going to happen. At least it never has happened at this point. It’s been tried in a lot of places and a lot of courts have said no, Constitution controls that, not the state Constitution.

Rick:

Well, and this might seem counterintuitive to folks, because we’re often talking about the frustration with politicians that aren’t doing the right thing. But I’ve never been a fan of recall elections because it’s like you’re just having constant elections all the time if you make recall elections really easy. And the most important positions are typically every two years, I was House members anyway. And so, if you’re doing a recall in the off year, then you’re just constantly dealing with that. It’s hard enough to get people to pay attention to the actual elections that are already happening.

Alright, folks, we’re out of time for questions today. Thanks for sending them in. You can send in more questions for next week by emailing those to [email protected] You’ve been listening to WallBuilders Live.