Companies Against Woke Culture – Sport Teams Acknowledge God And More – Sport teams and coaches acknowledge God and are no ashamed of their faith. More companies and CEO’s are standing against woke culture and more!

Air Date: 06/24/2022

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.

 

Rick:

This is the intersection of faith and the culture. Thanks so much for joining us today on WallBuilders Live. You can also visit our website, wallbuilderslive.com. Wallbuilderslive.com, that’s our radio site. We also have wallbuilders.com. That’s our main site where you can go to sign up for all kinds of programs, get all kinds of great material. We’ll be talking later in the program about the American Journey Summer Institute, which is where David and Tim are right now having an incredible time.

But there’s another chance to go later in July, if you would like to be a part of that and you’re 18-25 years old. I’m Rick Green, I’m a former Texas legislator and America’s constitution coach, thrilled to host this program with David and Tim Barton. You can learn more about all three of us at wallbuilderslive.com. David is, of course, our founder here at WallBuilders. He’s America’s premier historian, author of many books, and incredible videos, all that material available at wallbuilders.com. Tim Barton, national speaker and pastor and president of WallBuilders, also author of many books in great videos. And again, you can learn more at wallbuilderslive.com.

And I would encourage you, book these guys to come in and speak at your church or your community or even your corporate event, to educate people on founding principles, educate them on the principles of liberty, that are desperately needed in our culture right now. And if we don’t restore those principles of liberty, we’re going to lose the nation. The good news is, and it is Good News Friday, but the good news is that the principles still work every time they’re tried, as Bob McEwen says, we’ve got to put them back in place. And that’s why on Fridays, we bring you all this good news so that you realize the system does work if we work the system, if we’re engaged, if we do our part, as Caesar. That’s right, you are Caesar in this particular nation. Under our Constitution, we the people are ultimately in charge.

So if you’re going to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s, as Jesus said for us to do, you got to know how to play Caesar well, how do you become a biblical citizen and influence the culture around you. That’s what we teach here at WallBuilders. So today, we’re going to be bringing you a lot of good news stories that you probably haven’t heard about, but that we try to make sure that we highlight so that you realize the system works. And David and Tim scour out there to find this good news, actually comes into them. Most of the media, though, doesn’t cover these things. But we want to bring them to you for sure.

Alright, David and Tim, let’s dive into some good news. David Barton with our first piece of good news today,  

David:

Rick, this may be some of the best news I’ve heard in four or five years, I was actually cheering over this. And I love it. The title says “Corporate executives tell workers stick to business and leave politics at home”. And there’s a number of examples here of where CEOs are now pushing back on their employees who’re pushing at them. And we saw Disney get run off of family values by employees that were working there.

But this is the thing where now, what’s happening is employers are saying I didn’t hire you to give me your opinions and to change the culture. I hired you to work for me. And if you’re not going to do that, you’re fired. And so here’s the example.

This is company I have not heard of, you guys may have heard of Kraken; as a company. It’s a cryptocurrency technology company. And so last week, the CEO Jesse Powell of Kraken, he became the latest executive to say he’s had enough. He invited the employees who felt triggered by controversial ideas, he invited them to take a severance package and leave the company. It’s just I don’t need you, you need to be out of here.

And so this is what he said. He said, “The idea of Krakenite, those that work at the company are those that are thick skinned and well intentioned.” And that thick skin stuff is so, you know, maybe because I’m old school. But my gosh, we had so many things said about us and told to us and that we had to go through and we were getting offended all the time or had opportunity to get offended all the time. We just didn’t get offended. We chose not to be triggered on stuff. And so I love the fact he’s just telling employees, you need to grow up and get over, get over the thin skin.

And then there were other companies who were talking about that a number of companies this month have given that package out. And so Powell told Fox and Friends that of the company’s 3,000 employees, 30 of them that said we’re out of here, we’re triggered by your offer so we going. But that’s the percentage-wise you’re looking at it. It’s usually a handful of people in a really large company that are really loud mouthed about something and now the CEOs are going the other way.

And then Elon Musk with the SpaceX company, certainly, he’s got a lot of companies, you know Tesla, others, but at SpaceX they started complaining about how that the stuff he was getting into like with Twitter was causing them grief at their job and so he ends up firing five employees from SpaceX. I mean, I didn’t hire you to give your opinions on what I’m doing, I hired you to work here at SpaceX and if you can’t handle that, you’re gone.

Tim:

And one of the things too along those lines, dad, as you’re saying some of these executives, some of these individuals who are not putting up with wokeness on some level, certainly, disclaimer, not everybody those companies are woke, but you do have some rising individuals of these companies or so some definitely left of center some woke individually as companies who are leaning in that direction.

And you’re seeing some of these CEOs give this ultimatum that either you can suck it up, you can change or you can walk out the door and some of these companies, we’ve seen them offer some severance packages, that if you’re offended with the way things are going, you can have the door, here’s four months’ severance. But we’re not playing that game. This is the direction we’re going. And if you’re going to be here, then we expect you to go this direction with us.

It’s great to see that in the midst of some of these companies like Disney or some of these other corporations that have shown themselves to be very woke, there are some leaders and not that we agree with everything these leaders are doing or not or not we’re supporting everything these companies are necessarily doing. But it’s great to see that at least for some of these leaders and CEOs, there is a line that they are, so to speak, drawing in the sand saying we’re not going to do this nonsense anymore. And the reason it’s great to see us because someone’s begin to wonder is anybody ever going to say no? And so it’s great to see that there are finally some leaders saying no to some of the nonsense.

David:

Another company is Netflix and Dave Chappelle about the stuff that he was doing there close with the comedy, that was offensive to several people, particularly progressives, and they sounded off about it, and so, Netflix was going to take action. And the Netflix over that period of time, they lost 200,000 subscribers for really kind of responding woke and they’re projecting to lose 2 million subscribers in this next quarter. And so they’ve sent out a note to their people saying, hey, back off, if you can’t handle freedom of expression and different opinions, this is not the place for you.

Tim:

And also, just to be clear, we’re not endorsing Dave Chappelle’s comedy in the midst of what this is, do you know a lot of things that were very offensive. But specifically, he had jokes that were offensive in some of the pro-transgender community and he said things that were obviously true that everyone who’s ever been born was born from a woman and things that, again, were offensive in that community.

In Netflix, they didn’t just lose people over this Dave Chappelle special or some kind of response. They’ve done so many things with so much of the programming that is just not family friendly, it’s not even good entertainment on so many levels. So it makes a lot of sense that they’re losing business. It’s a little bit like when we see some of the things that have happened with this new release of Toy Story, that overall it’s underwhelming from what they expected the Box Office. Now it still made $50+ million in the opening weekend. But they actually projected it could make as much as 70 million. So it underwhelmed some of their expectations.

And one of the things that is seeming to be true that some of these organizations are seeing is that when you are promoting a woke agenda and with this Toy Story movie, where they have this same sex female kissing it, things that certainly we would not encourage people to go see or give money promoting that agenda when we already know what Disney’s done, where we were a family that cancelled our Disney Plus subscription over this. We weren’t going to support that. We weren’t going to give money when they said they want 50% of their content to go to promote some of this LGBTQ+ agenda. And I said that in minorities, but still like that was a big factor when they were promoting.

All that to say, Netflix has kind of gone that direction as well. Overall, it’s good to see the response. There are people who still are more committed to deliver values or family values than they are to just some kind of baseline entertainment. But as you identify, Netflix is very fearful. They can lose a lot of people. They will do lose a lot of people if they keep going with this woke programming. If they will get back to much more of the more wholesome, the better entertaining programming, there’ll be a lot of people who are looking for those places to support right now.

I think it’s one of the reasons that when you look at someone like Daily Wire, and they are opening an entire branch just to do more of this wholesome or profamily entertainment, there’s a major market right now for people that will do entertainment that just entertains you and doesn’t promote a woke agenda along the way.

So again, going back to this Netflix stuff, not that you said this, but it’s not just the Dave Chappelle issue that’s causing them to lose people, there’s just so much wokeism happening right now. But the good thing from Netflix was that when they had some employees get really offended, they said, guys, we’re not going to bow down to justice agenda now. I think they have bowed down to the agenda in other areas that’s just kind of a side note.

David:

But that made me developed some courage now too because Disney is a great example of what happens when you let the crazies take over the company. And so they’re losing in massive amounts 27% drop in their stock so far. It’s well underperforming the S&P, which is even in a downturn right now and it’s lower than that. So I think Disney has provided a good example of what you don’t want to do. And I think some of these companies are now kind of saying that we’ve just had it.

And I was intrigued with even some of the progressive companies and they’ve been feeding this this politically correct beast for so long that it’s now grown up into a really big beast. And that’s a problem with having a lion cub for a pet is eventually it’s not a lion cub anymore, it’s a full grown lion and it can do a lot of damage and destruction. And so even the New York Times, it was interesting to see that their sports branch, which they called the athletic, they have just issued a memo where people said leave politics off, we’re just doing sports and that’s it; take your commentary, keep it home, we don’t want you to commentary with it.

Tim:

So long as sports line, let me jump to an article I have in front of me. This one, the headline is “The New Lakers Coach Darvin Ham Begins First Press Conference by Praising God: ‘He’s the Master of All Plans’”

Now, dad, to your point, part of what you’ve identified is man, I am so tired of wokeism in sports. In fact, I have about given up watching sports, by and large, because I can’t handle the commentators saying political nonsense that isn’t accurate or things that aren’t historically true. And it so bothers me. We can’t just talk about like in basketball, somebody’s shooting percentage or in baseball, somebody’s batting average or whatever the case is. Man, I’m so tired of people injecting things.

But one of the things that we have talked about over the last couple years on Good News Friday programs especially is we have seen several coaches rise in the college ranks rise now in the professional ranks that they have come to a head coaching position. And some of the first things they have done was acknowledgement of faith, acknowledgement of Jesus, where they’re doing things, Bible studies with their teams.

And this is something, I’m certainly not a big Lakers fan, which means certainly we back it up. You know, there were some great Lakers historically, Matthew Johnson so fun to watch, Kobe Bryant, Amazing Shaq, okay, so, as a basketball guy over time, there’s been some great entertainers. I’m not really a huge LeBron fan. I can acknowledge he’s incredibly talented, but whatever.

As a Texan, and certainly, someone that lives close to the Dallas Fort Worth area, I’ve been a Maverick fan. All that aside, it is really cool. Even as [inaudible 11:59] Laker fan, I’m going to give them a little props right now it’s really cool to see that the Lakers have hired a coach. And I’m reading this quote from the press conference, “First of all, I want to thank God, coming from where I came from, I was raised in a household with strong spiritual faith, belief in God and His Son, Jesus Christ.” So I want to start with that. He continued “Everything I’ve been able to overcome in my life along with the people around me, it’s been the spirit that was instilled in me as a youngster.” He talked about God’s timing, he said timing is everything. Like I said, “I put my faith in God. He’s a master of all plans. I just want to take this time to thank all of those teams that passed on me so I could end up right back where I need to be.” Said jokingly, it’s all good, I’m good, trust me. But he goes on acknowledging God more.

David:

And this is the new head coach of the Lakers?

Tim:

This is the new head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers. And he starts his press conference by thanking God acknowledging Jesus Christ. It’s something that in the midst of cancel culture, we’ve seen certainly some churches, now right in the COVID shut down where some churches, some pastors wouldn’t stand up, they weren’t always bold about faith or their own position, it is really cool to see in this sports arena…

Now, in full disclosure, I don’t know a whole lot about Darvin Ham. I just saw his press conference. Man, that’s really cool. But this is good news that there’s this acknowledgement. It reminds me where Jesus said that if we would not acknowledge him in front of men that he wouldn’t acknowledge us in front of the Father. This is a really cool example of someone being in a major spotlight, this announcement of the new head coach, his press conference and he is in this moment, acknowledging God and Jesus Christ and being led by the Spirit. Just really cool.

So this is a fun piece of good news from a new NBA head coach at the Lakers, Darvin Ham. Again, not a Lakers fan, apologize to anybody who might, I don’t mean apologize, [inaudible 13:47], that’s fine. I’m cheering against you generally speaking and we’ll just deal with that. However, it is really cool that this head coach is someone very openly acknowledging of his faith. That’s cool to see in the NBA.

Rick:

Alright, guys, we’re going to take a quick break. We’ve got more good news when we come back. And folks, if you’re listening, and you’re a regular listener of WallBuilders Live, you can tell David and Tim sound a little different today, that’s because they are at the American Journey experience in Irving, Texas over Glenn Beck studios. And it’s an amazing, amazing place. They basically got a bunch of the WallBuilders Museum, and Glenn Beck stuff all combined for this incredible experience. But then people are getting to see this stuff all day long and learn from David and Tim throughout the day as well and Glenn Beck and other speakers that come in.

You can be a part of what they’re doing right now. Not this week. But we have a second week that’s available to you, it’s towards the end of July. It’s July 18-22nd. So if you would like to experience what’s happening right now in Dallas, these folks are having an amazing time with David and Tim, you can do the same thing. Go to our website, wallbuilders.com and there’s a button at the top right called “Initiatives” and just scroll down there for the “Summer Institute, American Journey Summer Institute”. You don’t want to miss it and that’s going to fill up really quick in the next few days. So get on there and get your application in. Age range is, what, Tim 18-25, you’re going to about 25, right?

Tim:

It is 18-25. Now there can be a little flexibility because sometimes there’re going to be a homeschool student who finishes high school at 16 or 17. So generally, we weren’t students who are finishing up or finished with high school, and who are either in college, going to college or young adults. And by the way, college isn’t a prerequisite because this day and age, we don’t encourage everybody to go to college anymore. In fact, more times than not, we’re discouraging people from going to college unless you know what God’s calling you to do and unless part of that calling involves you needing a college degree.

Don’t go to college by and large, although if you’re going to go, there is a very small handful of colleges we think are, by and large, good. Nonetheless, all that being said, it’s 18-25 year old. So it’s people in that young adult college just finished with high school range. They can find all this information now go to wallbuilders.com, more information on the program. We would love to have them join us for our session in July. As you mentioned, we’re in the middle of one right now and it’s incredible. It’s so fun. We have kids from states all around the nation. 24 students here right now, and we hope to have around that many on this next session. But we do have a few spots still available. If someone wants to sign up and join us, we’d love to have them.

Rick:

Alright, more good news when we come back. Stay with us, folks, you’re listening to Wallbuilders Live.

SUMMER INSTITUTE

Hey, guys, this is Tim Barton, I am interrupting the normal broadcast to bring you something pretty special. This summer, we are doing a special program for college aged students 18-25 year olds. And it’s something that is becoming more and more special based on where the climate is.

In the middle of a crazy culture, in the middle of a nation going in crazy directions and right now we’re seeing in academia where even Christian universities are promoting critical race theory, teaching the 1619 project, we want to do something to help equip young people the next generation, to know the truth, the truth of the Word of God, the truth of America, the truth of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the free market, we want to get into a lot of this. And this is something that if you are an 18-25 year old, or if you are a parent or grandparent, if you have an 18 or 25 year old, if you’re in church 18-25 year olds, this program is something that can be life-changing for them, you want them to be a part. Go to wallbuilders.com and look for the summer institute to be part of this program.

Rick:

We’re back here on WallBuilders Live, Good News Friday today, David and Tim coming to us from the American Journey experience. And once again, as we were saying before the break, check out wallbuilders.com to learn more about the American Journey Summer Institute. And you can be a part of that. We got one more coming up in late July, July 18th, you can be there for the whole week. You get to learn from David and Tim throughout the week, other great speakers there as well. And the coolest part is you get to see the guillotine. Yeah, that’s right and actual guillotine right there at the Americans… Okay, there’s other cool stuff too. That’s just the one I’m always like, wow, that thing chop people’s heads off, anyway. Okay, let’s go to… yes.

Tim:

And Rick, that is still how we handle unruly students. So, if there’s a problem, we’re like oh, to the guillotine with this person. Okay, we actually don’t do that. It’s been disabled. So we couldn’t even do that by accident. But it’s pretty amazing, it’s an actual French guillotine. And there’s a lot of history with the French in the guillotines. We don’t cover a lot in a lot of detail at the American Journey Summer Institute program, although we do show some of the fundamental differences in the history of America with other nations and why America is special and unique. And we do all with original documents. So that is definitely not the most unique or the most significant thing we have, but it might be one of the biggest things we have. There’s a lot of other big things as well, large artifacts, but you might just need to come to the program to see those. Wallbuilders.com, go sign up, we hope to see you in July.

Rick:

That could be incredibly effective, though, Tim. I mean, just one finger, right, you just take one finger of one unruly kid film it, and then make sure you have that for orientation. You know, when people get there the first day, this would happen to Johnny when he got out, anyway…

Tim:

Now you’re saying film and we would have that, like, do you mean we would have the finger or the film? I’m not sure if it would be effective, right. We’re like, hey, see this… Now we might not be as family friendly as we usually are. So we’re going to discard that and move on to some good news of people who kept their fingers.

Rick:

So back to the good news stack from David. Go ahead, David, what’s next, man?

David:

This is kind of in the same vein. This week, I’ve just seen a lot of articles about groups and companies now they’re starting to get a backbone and stand up to some stuff and this one involves the Swimming Federation what’s known as FINA, with the International Swimming Federation. We talked about Lea Thomas, the biological male who has been swimming on the girls’ mates and just racking up all the records and just destroying them, I mean, we’ve talked about that.

Tim:

Well, destroying them in specific races because this biological male who identifies as Lea Thomas did not win some races which I did feel was pretty ironic on some level. But definitely, there were a couple of races where this individual just crushed the girls competition. It wasn’t even close in some of those races. But this is, dad, to your point where there were some people in the Swimming Federation who took note and went, something about that doesn’t seem quite right.

David:

So what they’ve done is they’ve come out with a new rule that says, if you’ve gone through puberty, it doesn’t matter what you call yourself or how you identify, if you’ve gone through puberty as a male, you cannot swim in the female division. And they had a lot of doctors who said, yeah, you know, once you go through puberty, once you hit that point, your body is bigger, you have larger lungs, your strength is greater and you have a physical advantage that is different from a different, can I say gender if it’s okay if I say gender, I mean, I believe there’s two but maybe that’s…

Tim:

It seems like biologically that’s correct. It’s been a long time since I had like eighth grade biology, although I think it took a freshman biology classes. Well, it’s been like 20 something years is that as well, maybe longer for you guys…

David:

Well, science has definitely changed in the last two years. I’m not sure [inaudible 21:00]

Tim:

Well, you know, and to trust the science, well, we trust the scientists more than science, but it seems like there was this like chromosome thing and like X and Y. It didn’t seem like anatomy. It seems like even the Bible talks about God made them male and female. And so I think you’re safe to say gender.

Rick:

I can’t wait on this one, guys, because my degrees were in finance in law, I can’t even enter the conversation.

Tim:

Well, you only have to have a biology degree if you’re a Supreme Court Justice or actually hearing maybe to be appointed as Supreme Court Justice or confirmed in that case. So, as more lay people, we don’t have to have an official degree to be able to determine the reality of biology or gender. So we’re good.

David:

As long as you’re under educated, you still have common sense. And we’re the undereducated category, so we still use our brain occasionally. So we don’t have that. But finally, the women’s Sports League has use their brain and said, you know, there are differences, and it’s going to offend some people. But we’re going to say that we’re going to make this difference, we’re going to enforce this. Now looks like they’re trying to apply K because they have said, well, we’ll create a special open division where that anybody competed that and so will allow. But nonetheless, I’ve taken a stand this logical now.

Tim:

So if it’s an open division, right, so the COVID division where anybody can compete, that would seem like then no matter how you identify, you just want everyone to identify, so really, then it’s more like the free market, whoever’s the best is going to win, which I feel like is how things were initially. And that’s why they made Title IX, because the biological women weren’t able to compete with a biological man on that level. And so it’s just interesting.

But dad, to this article, you have, along the lines I have an article that identifies the Louisiana becomes the 18th state to pass a ban on transgender athletes in girls sports. So this is something now as you mentioned, right, the Swimming Federation has done this where they identified there’s a major difference in someone who’s a biological male, who’s had years and years and years of being a biological male long after puberty hit, so they had bigger muscle structure and mass and bone density and all these other things.

Well, Louisiana, fortunately, is joining on with what 17 other states have already done identifying that there actually is such thing as male and female, and they want to protect girls and women in girls and women’s sports. And so they’ve done this ban. It’s the fairness of Women’s Sports Act SB-44. It became law.

Interestingly, after the Democrat Governor John Bel Edwards did not veto or sign the measure. So the Democratic governor was like, yeah, I’m not going to deal with this one. So clearly, if the governor had been in favor of it, the governor would have signed this. The fact the governor didn’t veto, it means probably they didn’t want to have the fight or recognize that there’s probably enough support in Louisiana that they might be able to stir up enough House and Senate members to override the governor’s veto on some level in Louisiana. Nonetheless, the governor chose not to sign this bill that came out of SB-44. And so to this point, now in Louisiana, they have become the 18 states. This has now passed in Louisiana. So we’ve only seen 18 states do this, which does seem crazy, although.

David:

But I’ve got to point out, that’s 18 states in two years. And that’s a lot of states in two years. Generally, you have to run a bill 3, 4, 5 times as you know, Rick, to get something passed. And so I’m amazed at how fast it has moved in 18 states because we got 27-28 prolife states in 50 years. So this role has moved relatively fast, I think.

Tim:

And this will be something too that will be interesting to track going forward. You know, guys, one of the things that we’ve seen it talked about the documentary from Matt Walsh, what is a woman, well, there’s just so many interesting conversations you have with some people that it seems to lack so much common sense, even though they’re these academically credentialed individuals, dad, to you’re point earlier, where because we don’t have this high education, we seem to have common sense.

Well, unfortunately, that does lead to the reality in many of the situations where it seems like those who have these higher levels of education tend to embrace wokeism on a different level, they tend to deny reality and biology on a different level. And this is going to be an interesting debate and discussion going forward because there’s a very small population that identifies or leaves life in this transgender persona. And so you’re going to have way more people who are biological females and even identify as biological females who are playing sports and transgender. And when you start seeing in more of these states girls that are getting beat by a biological boy or losing their spot in the team to biological boy, there’s going to be a lot more pressure in the states to get these laws, these resolutions pass. So it’ll definitely be something interesting to track going forward.

Nonetheless, to this point, congratulations, kudos to Louisiana becoming the 18th state to pass a law protecting girls’ sports.

Rick:

It’s pretty shocking guys that the White House was so tone deaf on this, that they would turn around and do this executive order that the President did on LGBT, all of these different things, including the whole sports. It’s just amazing. I’m glad the states are doing what they’re doing. Well, folks, we’re out of time for good news today. We’ll have a lot more good news for you next week. And of course, there’s more at our website wallbuilderslive.com. Go into the archive section there and grab you a few more Friday programs if you need even more good news than what we share today. Thanks to David and Tim for finding all that good news. And thank you for listening to WallBuilders Live.