Las Vegas Mayor John Lee Leaves Democrat Party And More – North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee joins the conservative trend growing across the Country, Michigan Judge rules in favor of the First Amendment and more!

Air Date: 04/23/2021

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.

 

Rick:

You find your way to the intersection of faith and the culture. Thanks for joining us today on WallBuilders. Live. We love talking about the hot topics of the day, but we always look at those topics from a biblical, historical, and constitutional perspective. We appreciate you being a part of the program with us today.

Also, thankful, David Barton is with us today. He’s America’s premier historian and our founder at WallBuilders, and Tim Barton, national speaker and pastor and president of WallBuilders. My name is Rick Green, I’m a former Texas legislator and America’s Constitution coach. You can learn about all three of us at wallbuilderslive.com. And that’s also where you can look back into the archives and catch some of the programs over the last few days or weeks if you miss those, and then of course, make that one-time or monthly contribution. We really do appreciate you considering that. And want to give a shout out and thanks to all of you across the country that have been doing that for a while; and some of you, new contributors over the last month or so, thank you very much for coming alongside us.

The more money is that’s donated, the more people we reach. It really is that simple, guys. I mean, every dollar goes into reaching more people, whether it’s training pastors, and training young leaders or training legislators, or it’s adding stations, it’s a great investment in freedom. We need truth in our culture today. And that’s what WallBuilders Live is bringing to folks.

David:

Yeah, Rick, it is something that we’re able to bring to folks today. And you know, just over the last year or so, as we’ve seen so much going on with the COVID, we have really seen the numbers of the programs just shoot up. I mean, quite frankly, the number of contacts we get, and people said, and all this constitutional stuff going on and the programs you’ve done, we’ve never even heard this part of the Constitution before. We didn’t even know this stuff.

And so the last year has really been a time to be able to show how practical the Constitution is, how practical the principles are. And so, you know, as we say here, we want to try to restore America’s moral, religious, and constitutional heritage. And what’s gone on in the last year has really brought that to the top and people have really responded to that.

And by the way, it does take us a lot of time, effort and money to do that. And so, if you want to help partner with us, and help come alongside so that we can continue presenting this information, you can donate right there on the radio side at wallbuilderslive.com. And we appreciate that support. And it is something that right now we’re seeing that the nation is willing to be educated in a way that we haven’t seen in years and years. I mean, all three of us are on the road. And we’re seeing hunger from people that are saying, hey, this is a really serious time, and these are some really good solutions. And yeah, they are, they’re all solutions, and they still work.

And so this is a good time. So help us spread that message. And for those who already alongside us, thank you for helping us do this message. But this is an important time to keep those moral, religious, and constitutional principles out there.

Rick:

Well, we know that when people implement the things that they hear on the program, it creates good news that we then get to turn around and share on our Good News Friday programs. So let’s share some of that good news with folks and also encourage them to hit the website for some additional good news there. So let’s dive into that good news. David, what’s our first piece of good news going to be today?

David:

You know, we’ve seen some trends in recent weeks that are really exciting in some ways. I mean, as you look at the culture, there’s so many things out there with the polarized nature of the culture and with what’s happening with so much of the world culture and what’s happening over race and over violence, and over police and so many other things, and it’s turned out that a lot of people have just kind of, they get clear opinions, but they’re keeping their mouth shut, and they just kind of sitting back and not saying anything.

And we’ve seen polling that says 77% of traditional value Americans are now self-censoring, because of the hostile in the climate. We saw for example, Major League Baseball, they said, well, we’re leaving Atlanta for the all-star game, we’re going to Denver. Because Atlanta just passed this law on voter security. You go well, you guys did that decision. But as it turns out, polling showed that 72% of the nation actually supported that kind of law that was just passed in Georgia.

And by the way, 35 states have that voter ID law. And by the way, where you just moved to in Denver, that’s the law they already have on the books in Denver. And by the way, you said you’re doing this because it discriminates against black people, what, you get 51% of Georgia being black and only 9% of Colorado being black and you say you’re taking your business out because you want to stand firm for the black community, time out. There’s $100 million economic impact that goes with the major league all-star game. And you’re taking that out of Atlanta, which has the highest black population in the state of Georgia, and you’re going to a state where that doesn’t make that same kind of impact in the community you say you’re supporting? I mean, this is not logical.

Well, that relates to the next story, which goes to the state of Nevada. Now, Nevada, used to be a very red state, they became a purple state, and now they’re pretty hardcore blue state. And a lot of that is because the large city of Las Vegas. That population center in Clark County, all those folks who live in that part of Nevada, they pretty much drive the rest of the state. It’s like, Illinois, a fairly conservative state, except you got so much population in Chicago that drives everything else. And Washington State’s pretty conservative, except you have so much population, Seattle that drives the rest of the state.

And so Nevada is really a very conservative state, except for that population center. Well, Clark County, it doesn’t just have the population center of Las Vegas, which is about 600,000, it has other towns in that area as well. And one of them is North Las Vegas, which has nearly a quarter million population. And it just came out that the mayor of North Las Vegas, Mayor John Lee, has just left the Democrat Party. He’s had it. He’s fed up. He said this is crazy stuff.

Because in Nevada, they just had the election for the leadership of the state Democrat party in Nevada. And so they had the partisan leadership there and there’s five slots up for grabs. And four of the five spots went not to Democrats, but went to open socialist. So the Democrat Party of Nevada is now led, for the five top spots are led by card carrying socialists, not necessarily Democrats. And he said that’s just too much. This is his explanation, said “The Democrat Party in Nevada, they had an election recently for leadership and 4 of the 5 people were card carrying members of the Socialist Party. He said, this is not the party that I grew up with 25 years ago in this environment, and it’s not the party I can stand with anymore.

And so he talked about after that, he said, the working class, the women and men of this country, also the small business owners, they’re not a part of the conversation anymore. And see, that’s the same thing that just happened with Atlanta about moving the all- star game, you took all the small business impact in Atlanta, took it right out. He said, “It all has to do with the elitist, and it all has to do with the socialist: that is not the agenda I have in mind for this country or for the future.”

And he concluded he said, “When you’re a pro-life Democrat, a pro-gun Democrat, and you’re a very conservative person, and that’s not really well known to the Democratic Party anymore. So for me to hang on, as long as I did, hoping the party would change, it didn’t, it got worse. Therefore, I found a new place that I can put my allegiance to and help. Once again, forget about that last eight years. It’s about the next four years that predict the future.”

So here you have a major urban mayor, who has become a Republican, because the Democrats have become so polarized, and so against small business and working class, and they’re so woke that just normal people can’t get along with them more. So that is a trend we’re seeing across the nation now. As the left gets more radically left, a lot of people were remaining silent, but now people are starting to come off the sidelines and saying I can’t be solid anymore. And John Lee the Mayor of North Las Vegas is one of the more recent ones who has just made that decision.

Rick:

Man, hopefully, that’s not only an elected official like that, but you know that a lot of people across America are so put off by this far Left agenda of the Democrats. And we’ve heard it for years, you know, I didn’t leave the Party, the Party left me. And the further the Party moves to the left, then more of those people are going to be leaving and looking for a home and hopefully they’re going to come home to the timeless principles of liberty.

That’s why we teach what we teach here on WallBuilders Live. So share this program with your friends and family regardless of what you think their political persuasion might be. Let’s take a quick break. We’ll come back and get some more good news. Stay with us, folks, you’re listening to WallBuilders Live.

AMERICAN HISTORY

This is Tim Barton from WallBuilders with another moment from American history. In the early 1700s, the Reverend John Wise preached that all men were created equal, that taxation without representation was tyranny, and that God’s preferred form of government was the consent of the governed: all of which is language recognizable on the Declaration of Independence. Why?

Because in 1772, the Sons of Liberty led by founders such as Sam Adams and John Hancock, reprinted and distributed the Reverend Wise’s sermons. So four years later, much of the declaration reflected the language of those sermons by John Wise. In 1926, on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, President Calvin Coolidge affirmed “The thoughts in the declaration can very largely be traced back to what John Wise was saying.”

Few today know that the Declaration was so strongly influenced by the Reverend John Wise. For more information on this and other stories, go to wallbuilders.com.

Rick:

We’re back here on WallBuilders Live. Thanks for staying with us on this Good News Friday. Tim Barton’s got the next piece of good news. Tim.

Tim:

Alright, guys, this is coming from a Judge in Michigan dealing with a club on campus, specifically a Christian club. At Wayne State University, the club was called InterVarsity, I guess is called Innervarsity, they still exist. And they were actually cancelled on their campus because guys imagine the audacity. They said that if there’s going to be a leader of their club, the leader of their club had to identify with the values of the club. And Wayne State, thankfully, for the members there at InterVarsity said, whoa, you can’t have any kind of requirement that would be discriminatory in your Christian club of people that don’t hold your Christian views.

Now, just the audacity of that is so silly, and yet, they were told that they could not be a club on campus because they had requirements that their leaders had to actually be Christian. With all that being said, the legal group that defended them was the Becket Fund, and this went to court. And the federal Judges recently ruled in their favor, and it was Judge Robert H. Cleland.

And one of the things he pointed out is “The uncontested facts demonstrate the defendants violated plaintiffs rights to internal management, free speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly and free exercise as a matter of law.” So he identified several points, several areas where the school messed up. Here’s what gets interesting though, as he pointed out the hypocrisy of the school. He said that if you look at the other groups on the school, he says you allow other groups you have specific requirements based on ethnicity, among other factors.

For example, the Iraqi Student Association required that its leaders be dedicated Iraqi students. So as he points out, you’re allowing all of these other clubs, not only to have levels of discrimination for their leaders, but actually discrimination based on race, ethnicity, on gender, etc. and you’re going to say that they can’t have leaders that line up with their system? Really, is silly. And that’s why it’s a really good decision for the university, but also just for Christian clubs in general, or clubs, maybe not only in Michigan, but across the nation, because this is something that helps establish that clear precedent.

And Lori Windham was a Senior Counsel of Becket Fund who had this case. And she explained “The court’s common sense ruling today means that InterVarsity must be treated fairly just as it has been for 75 years at Wayne State, and now can continue its good work serving a diverse campus community.”

To imagine this club has been around for 75 years, and now that there’s apparently this new woke administration there at Wayne State, they’re saying, whoa, you can’t require your leaders to be Christian in your Christian group. Guys, we’ve seen so many levels of hypocrisy. But we have talked often, especially on Good News Friday about how many Judges have now been upholding some very basic common sense positions.

And certainly in the midst of the news that happens on a daily basis, we don’t hear that there really are a lot of good common sense decisions being made. We see a lot of the unrest. We see the riots. We hear executive orders. We hear from Congress people doing crazy things. We don’t recognize that there actually is a lot of good ground being gained and won on lots of levels, not the least of which being religious liberty on college campuses.

So this is just one more example of religious liberty. And now for this Christian group, as Christian club on a college campus, having the freedom to follow and operate their club according to their convictions, that’s really good news.

Rick:

And isn’t that, I mean, about the simplest way to look at freedom of assembly, that you get to choose who you hang out with? And if you want to have a club that’s a certain group of people or has certain values, I mean, isn’t that the whole idea of getting to hang out with people that you like hanging out with? I mean, that’s a pretty basic concept of freedom.

David:

That is a real basic concept of freedom, so much so that that’s actually what we have in the First Amendment. You have the right to assemble, the right to associate, the right to be with others. And that’s a guaranteed First Amendment freedom. So it is a basic freedom. And it’s one that obviously gets overlooked when the other guys don’t read the Constitution much or don’t like what it says, or they want everybody to do what they want rather than have individual liberty and freedom. So it’s a big one, but it should not have even been a controversy. It should never have gotten to the point that there was a debate.

And by the way, this should be a note to everybody, note here. This is your colleges where you’re sending your kids, and look what you get off the campuses. You have leadership there who clearly does not support the Constitution, does not support the right of assembly or petition or the right of association or religious liberty, etc. This is what’s coming out of colleges and universities and we keep sending our kids there, thanking the nation is going to get better? No, no, we’re going to have to make better choices in the colleges where we send our kids.

So anyone that has any respect for the Constitution needs to look at these kinds of lawsuits and see what colleges are coming out of, and that’s the ones you want to avoid. Find the ones that really do respect the Constitution, because we’re talking the whole future in the nation. It’s a great win at this level. But at the same time, there’s a lot of other colleges doing this where we’re not having the lawsuits filed, and they need to be.

Rick:

Yeah, it’s a great win. But it reveals for us the mindset of the people that are running most of these colleges out there. This is exactly what they would like to see happen, the opposite of constitutional principles like freedom of assembly. Quick break guys, we’ll be back in a moment with more good news. You’re listening to WallBuilders Live.

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.

Rick:

Welcome back to WallBuilders Live. Thanks for staying with us. More good news, next one’s coming from David Barton.

David:

This deals with a constitutional principle of federalism. Most people don’t know what that is. Only about 17% of the nation thinks that federalism is a positive term. They think it means growth of the federal government overreach, it’s not. Federalism is the brilliance of our Founding Fathers, they understood that the more power you have in government, the more likely it’s going to be abused by government.

So they took and they separated power, first off, among three branches. So that said, here’s the constitutional power, but you know, we’re not letting any branch have all of it, we’re having three. And by the way, there’s also three levels of government, there’s federal level, and state level, and local level. And so we’re actually going to separate government power into nine different categories.

And so that really is a great provision of the Constitution to separate power so that if the federal government goes crazy, you got the states and the local can say, no, you’re out of bounds, or vice versa, whatever it may be. In this case, it’s really good to see the exercise of federalism. This has grown into right I’ve not seen in decades, literally, where you have a lot of states starting to push back, the federal government say no, that’s wrong. You have 17 enumerated powers you can do and you’re starting to do things that are clearly within the constitutional provision of the states. And you can’t just come down as the federal government tell the states what they’re going to do when this is something the Constitution tells us we can do.

And so what we have seen over recent weeks, particularly since the Biden administration has taken office, is so many attorney generals, and so many governors filing lawsuits say no, you need to stay inside the fences the Constitution put around the federal government; you’re getting over in the fences that belonged to the states and local governments.

So I’ve got here a lawsuit that was just filed. And it’s really an unusual lawsuit. It comes out of Arizona, the Attorney General there has filed this lawsuit, and it deals with what’s called the National Environmental Policy Act, NEPA. And it says, this law requires that all federal agencies have to weigh environmental considerations before taking any significant action. Okay.

So we’re talking environment, right? Except the Attorney General of Arizona says this has to do with immigration, this has to do with border security, this has to do with a wall that’s on the border, because what you’ve done is we have courts that have for years said that look, when migrants come in, they need housing, infrastructure, hospitals, schools, they purchase goods, they drive cars, they use public parks, they use other facilities. The more people you have, the more impact it has on the environment.

And this federal law says you can’t take a substantive federal step without having a consideration of the environmental impact. And you did that. You open the borders and we’re looking at it now probably a million people expected come in in coming months, and you didn’t do any consideration of what that’s going to make on the environment of the country. So that lawsuit is going which is really interesting.

Then you also have in Washington itself, the Government Accountability Office has stepped in to investigate the Biden administration, because the Biden administration froze the construction of the border wall. Now, wait a minute. The border wall right now is being constructed on last year’s budget. Last year’s budget was passed and signed, it is law.  And so you can’t just suddenly say I’m going to stop the funding that was appropriated by Congress last year. He may not like the border wall, but the General Accountability Office is no, no, you can have next year’s budget because you’re the president, you cannot affect what is being spent this year because it came from last year’s budget.

And now you’ve got all these others. You’ve got the governor of Arizona who’s issued an executive order, said, wait a minute, we’re not going to let the federal government take away guns. So we’re not going to appropriate any money or let any state money be used to enforce any federal laws than impinges on guns. We’ve got about 26 states now that have filed some type of lawsuits on the federal government getting over into state turf and state territory. And that’s a really, really healthy thing from the Constitution. It’s healthy that we’re starting to think the Constitution. And this is going to be good for the people of the United States if we can win some of these suits.

Rick:

All good news. Stay with us, folks, we got time for one more segment of good news. You’re listening to WallBuilders Live.

AMERICAN STORY

Hey, guys, we want to let you know about a new resource, we have here at WallBuilders called The American Story. For years, people have been asking us to do a history book and we finally done it. We start with Christopher Columbus and go roughly through Abraham Lincoln. And one of the things that so often we hear today are about the imperfections of America, or how so many people in America that used to be celebrated or are honored really aren’t good or honorable people.

One of the things we acknowledge quickly in the book is that the entire world is full of people who are sinful and need a savior, because the Bible even tells us that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And yet what we see through history and certainly is evident in America is how a perfect God uses imperfect people and does great things through them.

The story of America is not a story of perfect people. But you see time and time again how God got involved in the process and use these imperfect people to do great things and impacted the entire world from America. To find out more go to wallbuilders.com and check out The American Story.

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AMERICAN HISTORY

This is Tim Barton from WallBuilders with another moment from American History. After the final victory at Yorktown, the Continental Army awaited the outcome of peace negotiations with the Great Britain. Pastor Israel Evans, a chaplain in the army proposed to George Washington that they build a structure where church services can be held during the month of waiting. Washington approved the plan and urged his officers to ensure that the soldiers attended service.

Pastor Evans further knew if we were to secure the liberties they had fought for sound education would be crucial. He declared, “Every parent and every friend of the freedom of his country ought to be attentive to the improvement of our youth in the principles of freedom and good government, and then the people will stand fast in their liberty for a long time.”

Our schools today need to return to teaching the principles of freedom and good government in order for America to survive and prosper. For more information about Pastor Israel Evans and other colonial patriots, go to wallbuilders.com.

Rick:

We’re back here on WallBuilders Live, Good News Friday today. There’s more good news at our website, wallbuiderslive.com. But we’ve got time for one more piece of good news today, Tim.

Tim:

Alright, guys, this one is from Pennsylvania. And the article headline says Pennsylvania finally agrees to remove dead people from the state voter list.

Rick:

Imagine that

Tim:

Obviously, this is a good thing to talk about. This is a good thing to celebrate. I can’t believe it’s taken people this long to realize, hey, you know what, if people have died, probably they don’t need to stay on the active voter roll since they can’t vote anymore. But apparently, this was a major battle in Pennsylvania. Certainly, Pennsylvania is not the only state where this battle has been going on after the 2020 presidential election when there were so many accusations of voter fraud and so many voter irregularities that really raised some serious concerns that really made you scratch your head. And then there’s lots of reasons for that. And we’ve done entire shows on that, it’s not the point of right now.

But Pennsylvania, finally decided that they were going to clean up their voter roll of 21,000 dead people. Now, in the big scheme of things, 21,000 is not that big of a number given the size of Pennsylvania, but that’s still a lot of dead people. Here’s what becomes more interesting. So it was a legal battle, there ended up being a settlement. The Public Interest Legal Foundation was the one who worked and the Secretary of State finally acquiesced and they came to an agreement on okay, we’ll remove these deceased people from our voter rolls.

Here’s where to me it was more interesting, though, is that over 9,000 of those deceased people on the voter rolls had been deceased for more than 5 years. Almost 2,000 of them had been deceased for more than 10 years. And almost 200 of them had been deceased for more than 20 years. Which means arguably, it’s been up to 20 years before they cleaned voter rolls in some places, that just seems really silly on a lot of levels.

So this is good news that in the midst of all the question marks that are surrounding the 2020 election, there are states who are actively working to clean up voter rolls to try to stop voter fraud and maybe there are some people out there right now listening, that you are wondering, one of the questions I was wondering is, well, okay, so 21,000 dead people still in the voter rolls in Pennsylvania, did any of them actually vote?

So in 2016, 177 dead people cast ballots in Pennsylvania. And these are people who died before they would have been able to cast ballots. In 2018, that number went down, only 127 dead people cast ballots, and they haven’t released that information for 2020, as far as being able to accurately identify that yet. But we do know that there were several voters who were identified to be deceased and who turned out to still be living. So we do know there were still some voter issues in Pennsylvania. Nonetheless, the good news is we are seeing states begin to work to do things to secure election integrity and election security in their states and Pennsylvania is one of those states.

Rick:

Alright, Well, that’s very good news. We’ve got more good news at our website, wallbuilderslive.com, check it out today.

And while you’re there, check out those archives and also consider making a one-time or monthly contribution. That can be a great way to multiply this voice, magnify this voice on WallBuilders Live. Let us get that truth out there to more people in the culture. Truth and courage needed so much in the culture today, and that’s what we give to people every day here at WallBuilders Live.

So thank you to all of you that have been donating. Thank you for the folks that have been praying about that and maybe you’ve decided to do, so you can do that at our website wallBuilderslive.com. You do one-time, or you could do it monthly, either way, it helps us to add stations and reach more people. Thanks so much for being part of the good news. We appreciate you listening today to WallBuilders Live.