Liberal Ideas Fail – on Good News Friday: Working through David and Tim’s stack of good news articles on this Good News Friday, first we look at the pro life rally turnout at the capitol of Maine, A recap from Tuesday’s episode with Carroll Conley. It appears that there is a rise in the pro life movement in Oregon, as well. After San Antonio, Texas attempted to facilitate abortions, legalize marijuana and ban arrests of theft, citizens stepped up and said no. El Paso, Texas declined a climate charter. In Michigan State University, a professor is fired for requiring her students to donate to Planned Parenthood. A Washington state town bans drugs after a spike in overdoses. In St Louis, Missouri there is more evidence that liberal progressive ideas don’t work. All of this and more today on Good News Friday!

Air Date: 5/19/2023

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

Transcript:

Rick Green
This is the intersection of faith and the culture. We call it WallBuilders Live. WallBuilders comes from that scripture in Nehemiah that says arise and rebuild the walls that we may no longer be a reproach. Just think about it practically, folks, back then if you didn’t have those outer walls, you were run over as a city. Here today in our nation, obviously, borders are important as well, but what we mean by WallBuilders is the fact that, you need the foundation, you need the strength of a society, you need the truths that makes a society strong instead of the lies that weaken a nation. So WallBuilders has been around for nearly three decades now rebuilding the foundations of America, bringing back the truth about what makes our constitution so strong, what makes our Declaration of Independence, why are those principles something so powerful and so true that they changed the entire world. It had such an impact on everyone on the planet because of what America became and was able to do in exporting freedom around the world. That’s what WallBuilders is all about. You can go to our main website today at wallbuilders.com or to our radio site, wallbuilderslive.com, wallbuilderslive.com. And they’re on the radio site, you can get archives of the program. So if you missed some shows last week or previous weeks, it’s all available there on the website. Throughout the week, we typically have interviews, and on Thursday, we’ll have a Foundation of Freedom program, that’s where you send in questions. You can email those to [email protected]. And then we try to get through as many of those questions as we can on Thursdays. And then Fridays, we have what we call Good News Friday, it’s a chance for us to just go through as many stories as possible that have happened in the last few weeks or months. You don’t typically get good news on programs like news program, or certainly major media, you typically only get bad news, we want to highlight a lot of those good things that have happened. So we reserve Fridays to do that. And that’s what today is, Good News Friday, a chance for David and Tim Barton to just go through as many stories as possible, their good news story stacks are way bigger than we can ever get to all of them, but we’ll get through as many as we possibly can today. And it’s time to dive into that good news. First piece of good news today is going to come from David Barton. David, where are we headed, brother?

David Barton
You know, on Tuesday we interviewed Carroll Conley. And we found out about up in Maine, how that Maine, which is a super liberal state, you had 1900 people in that very lowly populated state show up at the state capitol for 20 hours a hearing on a pro life issue. And we commented then that we’re just seeing across the country in some really blue states people start standing up and it’s like, they’re starting to get courage and backbone. And the more they stand up, the more stand up with them. And it’s turning into they’re really having some victories and unexpected places, unexpected ways. And I’ve got a couple stories like that right up front. So let me go to Oregon. Oregon, I don’t know, maybe Oregon is a lot more blue even than Maine is. I mean, it’s really tough in Oregon, and in Oregon, in the legislature there the Democrats, the progressives, and it’s not just Democrats, I mean, they’re really progressive Democrats, they have come up with a bill they’re dealing with abortion, that not only removes all restrictions on abortion, it goes a lot further than that. Their bill would allow girls as young as 10 year old to have abortions without their parents’ knowledge. So the state is saying, hey, you parents don’t need to know what’s happening to the kids. And it’s like, well, your child, you know, your child is pregnant, and it may have been a sexual molester, but you don’t need to know about that. And you don’t even need to know that, that she had an abortion. We’ll take care of all that for you. So they have completely cut parents out of this. They’re allowing girls as young as 10 to have abortions, and nobody would know about it except the state. And so part of this, the real concern here, this is where you get into sex trafficking. If you can have a molester having a 10 year old girl, and the parents not knowing and the state’s not going to say anything about it. This gets really bad. So the vulnerability for sex trafficking goes up. So what happened, Republicans are definitely in the minority in Oregon, but the entire block of Republicans walked out of the legislature, and it kept the legislature from having a quorum, which means they can’t pass the bill. So they have blocked this bill. And they’ve been out for days and days and days and days, and they’re not coming back in. And despite all the pressure and all the radical pro-abortion pressure that’s come at them, these guys are just not backing down. And so here’s you got a blue state, you’ve got some red guys and who even knows how conservative they are in Oregon who know… maybe they’re super conservative. But this is a bridge too far. The fact that you’re going to let 10 year old girls have an abortion and not let parents know anything about it, and maybe help facilitate sex trafficking. This is not a good deal. And so kudos to those guys for having walked out and being able to block this and we’ll see if there’s any give on the other side. But this is again, a great example of courage in a state where that this group knows that probably they can’t ultimately win, but they’re just doing the right thing. And I think they’re going to find a lot of people line up behind them that didn’t know the bill was this radical and didn’t know that it happened with 10 year olds, etc. So, I mean, that’s just a great piece of news. But here’s another one that goes in that same thing, now Texas is not particularly a blue state…

Tim Barton
Hey Dad, let me jump in real quick, too, because this is something that we see a dichotomy where sometimes there are people that protect an idea, and sometimes you have legislators that want to protect people. And this is certainly one of the situations where we’re looking at Oregon. In Oregon, the Democrats promoting this legislation, they are not interested in protecting children. They’re interested in protecting an idea, an ideology, in this case, abortion or whatever the case might be. They’re interested in protecting an idea, not individuals. The same thing when you look at some of these women’s sports bills, when there’s people that say no, if there’s a guy who feels like a girl, we should help transgenders be able to play in whatever team they best identify with. Well, you’re protecting an idea. You’re not protecting individuals. If people paid attention on any basic level whatsoever. And they heard the testimonies of some of these girls who have had boys walk into the girls locker room, and the boys exposed themselves to the girls, that the boys watch the girls as they take showers and everything else that’s going on in this evil idea. And you have Democrats saying well, no, but this is good, because we need to protect transgenders. They’re not protecting children. They’re protecting an idea. They’re promoting an idea. They’re not protecting kids. And so the fact that you have Republicans, and Dad, as you mentioned, you know, when you have the whole slate of Republicans walk out, you have people across the board, some that are probably super conservative, and some that are maybe moderately conservative, but at least all of them together, in unison, said that we are going to work to protect young people, we’re going to protect girls, we’re going to protect children from some of these ghastly, awful evil events, where this bill would say we don’t even notify parents when evil things happen to kids. That’s crazy. So it is good news that you do see people that at least have some level of principle. And it’s kind of shocking, that we’re seeing a, literally a political party that doesn’t care about protecting individuals, maybe right, their philosophy, they… all they care about is promoting this ideology that is ultimately destructive to young people and individuals. But it’s great news to see that even when they’re in the minority, there was individuals that rally together to protect young people. And this is where we can pray that God would increase their number and that this kind of evil would stop. But it is encouraging to see that even in a very liberal bastion, where they don’t really have a good chance to get their own legislation passed, if they can stop some of this evil from passing, that’s really encouraging.

David Barton
And here’s another example of another very blue area that’s had a great victory, and actually a few here in a row, but there were city elections that happened in San Antonio recently. And San Antonio is one of the largest cities in the nation. I think it was in the top 10, last I saw, but it’s certainly up one of the top cities. And if you look at the top population, cities in the nation, they’re all run by Democrats. The Democrat cities they’ve overwhelmingly vote Democrat progressive. I think the exception to that is Fort Worth, I think Fort Worth is the 13th largest city and they have a Republican mayor. They probably vote about 52 / 48 Republicans, so it’s barely barely Republican, but all the other big cities are overwhelmingly blue. And so when you look at San Antonio, they had a proposition on the ballot in San Antonio, it was a pro abortion proposition and said, you know, Texas has become a pro life state, after Dobbs came down as states could choose, Texas came up with all this pro life position. They don’t allow abortions in Texas anymore. But here in San Antonio, we’re going to allow abortions and we’re not going to let our law enforcement officers enforce the state laws on abortion. So this will be a sanctuary where people can come to San Antonio and get an abortion. And this will protect our view as progressive blues, we can we have a pro abortion view. And so we’re not going to allow the city police to enforce those state laws. And by the way, we’re also going to legalize marijuana and we’re also going to ban arrest for theft less than $750. And unless there’s been vandalism with damage is over 2500, We’re just not going to keep throwing people in jail that are committing these lesser crimes. We’re just not going to do that. So all of this was on the ballot and San Antonio, this was called Proposition A, it was led by pro abortion groups. And the people of San Antonio rejected this with a 72% margin. Now 72 is not just a marginal victory, a 72% margin of a very blue city said we don’t want marijuana. We don’t want to lower the standards for crime. We want enforcement to go up not to go down and we don’t want to be an abortion sanctuary. So this comes out of San Antonio. And the same night, El Paso had an election. El Paso had a measure, Initiative K on their charter. And their Initiative K and El Paso is another very blue city, all the state reps and senators out of that area, last I saw we’re still Democrats, still progressives. The mayor is and it’s a very liberal city. And they had Initiative K, which was a climate charter that we want to participate in the climate stuff that’s going on. And we really support the stuff, that the green move and the stuff that Biden is doing. And so we’re really into the climate charter. 84% of El Paso rejected that they did not want to be part of that climate charter. I mean, this kind of stuff is just absolutely astounding in numbers, to have that kind of high numbers, where people in blue areas are saying we don’t want to be part of that. And so again, I think this is an indication that maybe something is starting to shift, it doesn’t mean that suddenly they’re going to start electing conservatives in El Paso or San Antonio. But it does mean that I think progressives have gone a bridge too far, so to speak in using that old term, from war days, that they’ve they’ve gone further than they should have gone and people are starting to push back, which means it’s going to be harder for them to make their agenda move forward. But to look at those areas and see what happened in Oregon, what happened in San Antonio, what happened [in] El Paso, very blue areas. That’s really encouraging stuff to see.

Rick Green
Yeah, you know, a lot of times it ends up being, it’s once they go after the kids that people finally wake up because everybody kind of dismisses a lot of this crazy stuff and says, well, they’re adults, they can do whatever they want. And then you start seeing this stuff happening to the kids and people that were on the fence before or not paying attention, now they are. And that includes in these in these blue states, like you’re talking about, David, or in blue areas of red states, like San Antonio, for us. So very, very good news from all over the country. Very much so. Okay, Tim, where’s our next piece of good news taking us?

Tim Barton
Well guys, this one is in Michigan. And it’s an interesting piece of good news, in that Michigan State University had a professor who actually charged her students to subscribe to her website and which is not totally crazy in the sense of professors make you buy their books, and they do things that profit themselves along the way. One of the problems is that the professor at Michigan State University, her name was Amy Wisner and she was a fixed term faculty member at the MSU Broad College of Business. She required students to subscribe to her website $99 plus, I guess whatever tax, except she takes a percentage of that and donates to Planned Parenthood. So students were finding out that they’re being required, in this course, to buy something that’s donating to Planned Parenthood. And so there was a massive protest, it went to the University and the University found out and essentially quietly removed her where she’s no longer on the university’s roster. There’s somebody else now teaching the class. And this was done back in March. And so just it’s really, really interesting that we’re looking at a massive secular University- Michigan State University that had a professor that was mandating students fund Planned Parenthood. And when there was opposition, when the students protested, the university recognized, yeah, we can’t make students do this. And first of all, this is again, one of the indications we can point parents to hundreds and thousands of examples of the woke professors at these universities, and what’s going on. One of the things in the article, it pointed out that this professor could have raised more than $120,000, over her two years, just from requiring her students to sign up on her website, which seems like a pretty good supplemental income over two years, nonetheless, to see students stand up and say, no, I’m not going to allow the university to require me to give my money to Planned Parenthood as part of a requirement to complete this course, its greatest students stood up and then it’s encouraging the university recognized, yeah, you can’t do that. And they backed down, they apologize. And now they have refunded all of the students who had to subscribe to this website, and by default, then help donate to Planned Parenthood. So this is good news. That Michigan State is maybe responding the correct way, but also really encouraging that there were students who had the courage to stand up and say this is wrong and we’re not going to do it.

David Barton
You know, what’s interesting with this, her website was called patriarchy rebellion. Now once patriarchy? Well, for the left, that means the system, that means all… that means the founding fathers, the Constitution, everything that has been, that’s the patriarchy that this is them, the oppressors. And so patriarchy rebellion on her website, and this is what they all had to subscribe to, $99 bucks. This is what she gave to Planned Parenthood, she says that that website is, quote, a safe place to coordinate our efforts to burn everything to the f-ing ground. Now wait a minute? This is what the kids are being forced to sign up for. But isn’t this what all the universities were doing three years ago? Isn’t this what professors were encouraging people to do? Isn’t this what was happening with Antifa, and Black Lives Matter and with all the stuff that was going on, 1619… This is what you want. She also had a second website called cancel the patriarchy. And she described it as a community of rebels, unlearning toxic expectations of patriarchy, so rejecting everything that America has ever been. And the third thing she had a GoFundMe page to Purchase an RV so that she could cancel the patriarchy. And she was working on going… now grab this, she’s working on going on a road trip around the United States to coordinate communities of rebels committed to doing the work together. So this is exactly the kind of stuff we saw coming out of universities three years ago, and universities were protecting this. And now you got Michigan State saying no, no, no, no, no, we don’t want this going on. And if this is what she’s doing, she can’t be part of our faculty. I mean, this is a huge deal. And by the way, the head of the department came in and said, by the way, you’re all getting in $99 bucks back. We’re refunding those bucks back and you don’t… You’re not required to subscribe to the website. If you’re going to individually that’s your choice. So this is, you know, this is a huge story Tim is talking about. This is such a change from three years ago. Now, this is Michigan too. And Michigan, man, at their last election, this did not go well for conservatives in the last election. But again, we’re starting to see things change in ways that we’ve not seen even 6, 8, 10 months ago. And that’s such a good story [to] come in on Michigan State.

Rick Green
Yeah, very unexpected place, right, David, in a liberal University, and like you said, it was far worse three years ago. This is exactly the kind of stuff they were encouraging. So I… really, really good news. I don’t know if you guys noticed but we actually, since David mentioned our good news from last week that was in Maine, we went from coast to coast to San Antonio, up to Michigan, so you could almost make a Lee Greenwood song out of this thing. Okay, stay with us, folks. We got more good news when we come back from the break. You’re listening to WallBuilders.

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We’re back here on WallBuilders Thanks for staying with us on this good news Friday. Getting as much good news in as we can. And like I said, we went coast to coast, San Antonio, up to Michigan. Where are we headed next? And actually, technically, it’s David’s turn. But David kind of cheated, guys. I mean, honestly, he did two stories at the beginning. And then Tim got one. So I say we go back to Tim, man. I think Tim’s got to catch up here.

Tim Barton
I can just tell you it happens all the time. I’m used to it. It’s fine.

Rick Green
On the basketball court, is… yeah, yeah.

Tim Barton
So guys, this one is going to Washington State. And this is something that is just refreshing. The Bible talks about you judge a tree by the fruit and the Bible also tells us that don’t be deceived, whatsoever a man soweth that, shall he also reap. If you sow certain things, if you plant certain seeds, you’re going to grow certain crops, there are natural consequences or natural outcomes from doing things a certain way. And even though there are times, those that are secular, those that are the leftist who want to promote ideologies that we know are destructive, they still want to promote them. It’s refreshing when after they’ve tried them, they have not only failed, but then you see, in many situations, some of these people that promoted these very ridiculous dumb ideas, come back and go hey, that wasn’t a good idea. That is this story. It says the most hippy town in Washington banned drugs after spike in overdoses. Now, who could have ever thought two years ago when they said let’s legalize all drugs that they might have ended up having a drug problem is going forward in the future. And yet, this is exactly what happened for them. There was a Fox News program on it, Ingraham Angle went into it with America’s newsroom, where they get into this. But the bottom line is, it’s a reversal after a five year old overdosed on fentanyl, which of course, I mean, it’s awful, right? If we learned all the stories of all the damage that drugs have done to individual families, the overdoses of the young people and we’ve seen this even with some of the marijuana legalization when there’s no limitations on the level of potency with the THC and everything else. And you have kids that have just picked up gummies or brownies and thought they were candy and right just, it’s just a brownie, it’s a sweet, I’m just trying to have a treat. And it leads to a death, a violent illness. If we begin to learn some of these stories, it would probably change a lot of the conversation when it comes to drugs. But again, back up in this situation, they begin to see these overdoses happening. And they couldn’t really say you can’t do drugs, because they’ve already said we legalize, we embrace it. Anybody come do drugs here, it’s totally fine. But the repercussions that have come from that policy, has been so negative, that they’re finally going, yeah, we don’t want to do this anymore. Now the reason it’s good news is because this is a point in case an example of where this policy has been not only a failure, but detrimental and harmful to individuals in that community, to individuals in that city. And again, we don’t want to see people hurt, we don’t want to see them go through this. But when liberals are promoting ideas that we know fundamentally are destructive that we know are not going to work. And then we now have great examples and illustrations saying hey, look at the city. Right? See See what happened here as a point and example of why we should never do this. And by the way, this is in Bellingham, Washington for those that are wondering, in Bellingham is where we’re talking about. These are the examples we need to point to when someone says, hey, I think we should legalize all drugs. Well, how has that worked for places that have done that, Right? Let’s just ask some questions. When people have said legalize all drugs, did it solve drug problems? Or did it make them worse? Were there more overdoses? Were there more deaths? Was there more devastation? Were there more broken families? The answer is yes. So we don’t want to do that ever again. And the good news is we are now seeing examples where we can point to, not only the brokenness of this notion of free drugs for everybody, if there’s no drugs that are illegal. But the good news is that even the liberals, when they have gotten enough taste of this bad policy, they’ve said, yeah, we don’t want this policy anymore, this wasn’t good. Let’s go a different direction. That’s good news.

Rick Green
All right, bringing us home with our final piece of good news, David, what’s our last piece going to be?

David Barton
Well, speaking of people who have enough of a policy, particularly in blue areas, go to St. Louis. And St. Louis, is a very blue city, one of those big blue cities. And back in 2017, they elected a prosecutor Kim Gardner, one of the Soros prosecutors is really not tough on crime. And she’s been that way, all the way through her time there. And so through the time that she’s been there, she’s not prosecuting people. I think she got in trouble with the Supreme Court here a year or so ago, because more than half the cases that she’s got in her hands, she’s not prosecuting. She’s not getting them to the judges in time. There’s no shows of their attorneys. She’s losing attorneys like crazy. They don’t want to work for her. She’s put up all sorts of things on the wrong side of things. For example, one of the things she says, is alright, there’s certain St. Louis cops that we’re not going to prosecute people they arrest because those guys are really trying to be tough on crime. And we’re just not going to do that. She… one of the things that made big national news was when a bunch of really… violent protesters came into a couple’s yard and were threatening in the couple. The couple have walked out and brandished guns, didn’t point them just walked out with them, and she prosecuted them, didn’t prosecute the violent people who were tearing the stuff up, they get off. And so she’s been… the Supreme Court of the state has fined her. She was actually… there’s been some of her prosecutors that have pled guilty to concealing documents and trying to cook the books to get certain convictions. And so at this point, more than half of her attorneys have left the office. Nobody wants to work for her. Crime has skyrocketed in St. Louis, has gone through the roof. And I think kind of the final straw was back in February there was a girl there for volleyball tournament cute little nice girl and she lost both of her legs in amputation because a guy was… he crashed into a car and pinned her between two cars between bumpers and she lost her legs. Well, the guy who was driving the car has violated his bond dozens of times as she keeps letting him out, not putting him in, and so it’s just gotten so bad with the Soros kind of prosecutors that the legislature in Missouri, they were intervening. And so the good news is that the prosecutor finally resigned, saying, okay, I leave. But man, there’s been so much devastation, so much bad stuff in the wake. Tim, it’s like you were saying with the drugs up in Washington, they’ve had so many bad consequences from that liberal progressive idea that they’re finding out that wasn’t a good idea. So another good piece of news that in a very blue area, they’re waking up to what does and doesn’t work and it’s not liberal progressive ideas.

Rick Green
Alright, friends, we’re out of time for today. But there is more good news at our website. So be sure to visit that today, WallBuildersLive.com , you can go into the archive section, as we talked about at the top of the program, and you can listen to good news Friday programs, foundations of freedom Thursday programs, our interviews the other days throughout the week, it’s all available for you right there at WallBuildersLive.com . Also, please consider making that one time or monthly contribution. We appreciate all of you that have come alongside us and help us to spread this message. And last thing, if you want to see more good news and maybe see good news right there in your community, then you become the catalyst for a restoration of biblical values and constitutional principles. You can do that by becoming one of our Constitution coaches, and teaching a Biblical Citizenship class in your own living room, or at your church or your local library or wherever you can gather people together. I actually liked the idea of doing that at a restaurant because frankly, I like to eat when I’m learning. Anyway, go wherever you want to host your class, but definitely become a constitution coach and start hosting those classes. You can find out more at BiblicalCitizens.com , that’s BiblicalCitizens.com . Thanks so much for listening. You’ve been listening to WallBuilders Live.