ProFamily Legislature Conference-David Barton On The COVID Crisis Part 1 – The COVID crisis is now undeniably a huge part of our lives. We need the right perspective to combat the false narrative around us. Tune in now to hear David Barton at the ProFamily Legislature Conference talk about this important issue!

Air Date: 02/22/2021

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:

Welcome to the intersection of faith and the culture. It’s WallBuilders Live, where we talk about the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical, and constitutional perspective. And we are going to be squeezing in a lot this week, a phenomenal presentation from David Barton on the historical and constitutional perspectives of the COVID crisis. He gave this presentation just a few weeks ago at the ProFamily Legislators Conference. And I want to jump right into that because it’s going to take all five programs throughout this week to get this powerful presentation in. We’ll interrupt for breaks, we’ll interrupt at the end of each day, but the whole thing will be available at our website, wallbuilderslive.com Let’s jump right in. Here’s America’s premier historian David Barton, speaking on the COVID crisis at the ProFamily Legislators Conference.

David:

We all are very familiar and way too familiar with COVID and what happens with it. However, I want to try to give you a historical perspective and a constitutional perspective. I think most of us as conservatives see a lot of areas where that we’ve lost a lot of constitutional rights in this epidemic, or pandemic, or whatever call it, that’s kind of the reason we use the word “reset”.

We have not seen and I don’t think, in my lifetime, such a desire from so many people to get back to basic constitutional things, because we’ve never seen so many constitutional rights attacked at the same time. And so it really is interesting to see how many things have come down under attack. So what we’ve done over the last 9-10 months, is we’ve collected headlines of things that indicate attacks on constitutional rights. And a lot of times people and especially governors are not aware that they’re violating constitutional rights. And so what I did was kind of put together a presentation that looks at the various categories of rights that have been attacked and goes back to the history of why those rights were in place.

For example, there is a phrase we will talk about later “a man’s house is his castle”, where’d that come from, it’s surprising how many rights in the Bill of Rights came out of that one phrase. Now, it’s not a phrase we think about today, we talked about the Castle Doctrine sometimes. But the word castle was a huge legal word in the early founding, and it applied to rights we don’t think about today. So I’m going to try to take you back through some of that.

So to start this thing, give your perspective, let’s just talk for a minute about pandemics. In general, we’re all aware of the 2019, or COVID-19 is called 19, because it started in 2019. But with COVID-19, we seem to be unaware that America for 400 years has experienced a major pandemic about every 15 years for 400 years. So if we ask people to go back and name them, maybe the Spanish flu, because that’s gotten some coverage, but outside of that there’s not many that we recognize.

So let’s just talk about pandemics in general for a minute, then we’ll look at what happened with COVID in America, then rights and we have Matt Staver here and others, Brad Dacus. Because the litigation going right now is just amazing how many things we’re having to litigate that used to be basic rights, and governors and not much legislators, but mostly governors and mayors, executive branch is just stepping all over them. So we started winning cases very early on in this at the state level, now we’re winning a lot of federal court cases, some we wish we had one earlier, but it’s just now working this way to that level, so we’ll cover some of that later. And Matt’s going to be here to help with a lot of that throughout the day.

COVID-19. If you look at mortality rate for where it is now, if you take the first CDC numbers, not the second, if you recall the CDC went back and recounted numbers and downgraded about 90% of the cases, so they actually have a number now that is about 10% of what the number is reported. Nonetheless, if we use the high number, the number that was originally reported, and that was back, I had COVID, but I had a car wreck, so I died of COVID, not the car wreck. So when they went back and actually looked at death certificates and went back through, they found that about 9 out of 10 were because of some of the cause but because COVID was somehow touched in there and they called a COVID death.

Rick:

Alright, quick break folks. That was David Barton you were listening to, we’ll come right back to him, he’s giving a presentation at the ProFamily Legislators Conference on a historical and constitutional perspective on the COVID crisis. Stay with us, we’ll be right back on WallBuilders Live.

BREAK

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

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

For more information about the faith and the founding fathers, go to wallbuilders.com.

Rick:

We’re back here on WallBuilders Live. Thanks for staying with us today, David Barton, given a presentation at the ProFamily Legislators Conference just a few weeks ago. Let’s jump right back in where we left off before the break.

ProFamily Legislators Conference

David:

They said when you look at what’s actually a COVID death caused by COVID, and nothing else, it’s about 10% of what we see reported. So the 240,000 we have now, their number was under 10,000 about six weeks ago. So you know, that’s very different from what we hear, COVID infections are very high. If you look at COVID infections, COVID infections are about 15 times higher than flu infections. But flu deaths are about four times higher than COVID deaths, actual flu deaths. So flu is still much more. It has a higher mortality rate than does COVID. COVID has a higher infection rate, but a lower mortality rate.

So when you look at the mortality rate for COVID, it nationally as of last night runs about 7/100 of 1%. So 7/100 of 1% is a current mortality rate at the high CDC numbers, not the revised numbers they’ve come out with more recently. So if you look at that, say, okay, how about other pandemics? Let me take you to the smallpox pandemics we had in the 1600s.

In the 1600s of smallpox pandemics, the mortality rate was over 70%. Now take over 70% compared that to 7/100 of 1%, the mortality rate was 1,000 times higher at that point in time than what we have now. When we think that what we got now is bad, I do not in any way diminish the number of losses we’ve had. Those are all tragic. But it is not something we’ve ever shut that nation down over at any point in time for any other pandemic. So mortality-wise, it’s not a very lethal pandemic in the history of American pandemics.

If you take the city that has been most affected, New York City, the mortality rate in New York City much higher than everywhere else, about seven times higher, it is 3/10 of 1%. Yet if I go to Philadelphia for the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, that yellow fever epidemic is 25% of the city of Philadelphia is wiped out, not 3/10 of 1%, but 25% of the city. That’s a real big difference from where we are now.

So when you look over the history of what we have with pandemics particularly, you can find COVID is the center of attention now, but in addition to having smallpox and yellow fever epidemics, we also had a series of cholera epidemics, particularly in the early 1800s. These are extremely lethal. We had scarlet fever like in 1850s. There were scarlet fever epidemics, wiped out tens of thousands. Same with diphtheria. We’ve had numerous attacks of diphtheria over the years.

Measles, matter of fact, even under Ronald Reagan back in the 80s, we had about 11 years of measles epidemics. We were losing tens of thousands a year to measles. We seem to have forgotten that, that’s a fairly recent one. Tuberculosis epidemic’s across our history. We’ve had typhoid fever a number of times. In addition, typhoid, there’s been polio. Actually, we had about a 4344 year run of polio killing thousands and thousands a year, over those 43-44 years. Of course, Franklin Roosevelt is one of those folks that we know publicly suffered from polio as a result. And it was back in that in that time of FDR, when polio was going for about 40 some odd years before we got on top of that.

There have been four major flu epidemics in American history. You have, of course, the Spanish Flu of 1918, you’ve got the Asian flu of 1956, the Hong Kong flu of 1968, and the swine flu of 2009. All four flu epidemics had a higher mortality rate than COVID does right now. We didn’t shut anything down over any of the flu epidemics with a higher mortality rate than what we have now. Again, COVID, infections are higher, but the mortality is much lower.

So as you go through all these epidemics, COVID is the one that’s gotten the most attention. And we have a lot of medical professionals we see on TV and guiding political figures helping put out there information, COVID probably the most visible face would be that of Fauci. Anthony Fauci, everybody knows everybody recognizes he was the voices thing early on, he’s still the go-to voice for a lot of folks.

The verse we use last night was proverbs 18:17 that says is one side sounds good until you hear the other. And it’s that way with medical advice as well, particularly when you look historically at what doctors have done with other pandemics and other medical problems we’ve had. This is the argument that offense versus prosecution: one side sounds good till you hear the other. A jury’s supposed to listen to both sides and then make their choices.

In politics, we generally don’t have two sides to medical argument. And that is because we have two different types of doctors, I’ll get to that in a second. So the other side is what we don’t hear much of now we’re starting to see the other side organize. The other side, you tend to have public health officials and private health officials. And public health officials do things that are different level in different way than private health officials. Private health officials are now getting organized.

You may or may not be aware of the group called The Great Barrington Declaration. The Great Barrington Declaration has come out in the last few months, and they have gained steam. “As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists, we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts the prevailing COVID-19 policies and recommend an approach we call “focus protection”. So they have a whole different way of looking at what’s happening with medicine, and these guys are from all over the world. There are tens of thousands of these medical professionals who take a very different position from Fauci and what many other public health officials take. They’re medical guys, they’re trained in this; this is their training. It’s a different side of the story.

And so usually, at the political level, these guys are not heard. They’re just not organized in that way. They’re starting to become organized because of what they see. So again, the difference between public health officials and private health officials, really is substantial. Public health officials tend to deal a lot and be trained a lot as well in sociology. Now, here’s a problem with sociology. Sociology’s a problem, the way we teach sociology is.

Right now, sociology is the second most liberal profession of any profession in the United States. If you look at where sociology is taught right now, you find that if you’re teaching sociology in college, for every one Republican sociology professor, there are 27 Democrat sociology professors. So if you’ve gone through sociology training, you’re very likely to be liberal. Matter of fact, that profession is the second most liberal profession in the United States.

We’ve joked for a long time that when you see people wearing masks, you know they watch CNN, because that’s where they get their information. And it’s interesting in this room, everybody has the right to wear a mask, and nobody’s going to make fun if you do, but nobody has a mask on right now. So we represent a viewpoint that a lot of Americans hold is very different from what CNN holds, and very different from what many public health officials hold as well.

Of course, we can point to countries in Europe that didn’t ever shut down. We can point to four states in the United States that never shut it down, Kristi Noem and Larry Rhoden in South Dakota and others. And it’s interesting what happens in those states. Brian Kemp, he opened up Georgia so much faster than another governor state and what’s happened in Georgia is as a result. So there’s lots of evidence on the other side.

So going to public health official like Fauci, I want to take you back to public health in previous generations. Just as there were pandemics in previous generations, there were public health officials in previous generations. And let’s back up, for example, to 1831. This is a journal of health from 1831 public health officials. Interesting stuff in this journal. And this is the kind of stuff we have with the WallBuilders collection. If you come out on Sunday, this is the kind of stuff you can see.

And if you look here, there’s some interesting articles that I have here. One is the preservation of human life in cases of fire. Now the reason that that’s a big deal, and by the way, here’s what they say about it. “To enable a person to pass through an avenue or a room filled with flame, or to ascend or descend or flight of stairs or ladder envelop in flame”, they have come up with a discovery that will save your life while trying to save people from fire. The reason that’s significant is back in that point in time everybody had open fireplaces, this is how you cooked. Because of that, it was average in America that your house burned down about once every six years. So that’s why people like George Washington put the kitchen off to the side: the kitchen is not in the house, because let the kitchen burned down without burning down the house.

Rick:

Got to interrupt for a second here, folks. We’re going to take a quick break, we’ll be right back and join David again at the ProFamily Legislators Conference.

BREAK

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Rick:

Welcome back to WallBuilders Live. Thanks for staying with us. Let’s jump right back in with David Barton speaking at the ProFamily Legislators Conference on a historical and constitutional perspective of the COVID crisis.

ProFamily Legislators Conference

David:

Because they had open flames and you had people, you know, women with skirts and they would turn their back to pick up something, that would catch on fire, that started fire across house. So when the fire gets going and wood structures, you want to be able to save people and it would go up really quick. So they have come up with advice to allow you to say, this is 1831 medicine, they’ve come up with this device. And they actually show it here. This is a suit that they’ve come up with that can withstand the fire long enough for you to run back in and grab the kids or go upstairs and grab somebody out of upstairs bedroom or whatever it is.

So they actually would wrap this suit with mash. It has a wire mash, so there’s embers and timbers would fall, it would not go through the suit. There’s actually a shield that you can hold up as you’re running through the house to keep falling timbers off you. And so it’s a pretty cool thing that they have. It’s new technology used to save lives, except it has a couple of problems.

Number one is the suit is made out of asbestos. So it’s an asbestos suit. You have asbestos mask, you have asbestos gloves, and you have asbestos shoes. I don’t think that was the best plan, but they didn’t know that at the time, we found out from experience looking back. But medicine often comes up with first impressions and first ideas that turned out not to be the right idea when you get more information they go along. However, at the time, this is what they did. So that’s part of the Journal of Health. This is what public health officials who’re saying this is what you can do to save lives. You may kill yourself doing that, but at least you can save somebody’s life.

Then also, this article is interesting, because they’re talking about what happens in summertime. This was out of Philadelphia, actually, so they don’t know what a summertime in the south is. But assuming you’re in Texas, and I think, we have 184 days a year that we need air conditioning, is what they say if you’re building a house. So we have numbers of days that are in the three digit figures, that’s a regular common thing here. And we work outside in that kind of heat throughout the summer. And so having that, that creates some problems with heat fatigue.

And what they recommend with heat fatigue is that they tell you, you really need to be careful about drinking cold water when you’re hot. And here’s what they specifically say. They say “It is not to be wondered at therefore, that when such a person is exposed at the same time to the influence of intensity during midsummer, and to the sudden impression of cold water taken into the stomach, that an immediate cessation of life should be the result.” If you drink cold water when you’re hot, you will die. You just you just need to know that. Sorry.

See, medicine often proves itself to be very wrong. We look at it as though it’s infallible, it is not. And the Journal of health is a good example of that. So Tim on Sunday will probably tell you the story of George Washington and the medicine at the time of George Washington. It’s the kind of thing that not only we had pandemics, we’ve had medical solutions for these pandemics across time. And we find that the first things usually are not the right things. It’s what we find out later and that’s why we revise. So COVID is a good example of that.

Now, with COVID, as a result of what’s happened in COVID, we’ve seen a lot of attacks, particularly on the Bill of Rights. If you’re familiar with the Bill of Rights and other natural rights, there are a number of inalienable rights, a lot of them are listed in the Declaration and the Constitution. Those two documents give us about 19 of those rights, 18-19. Actually, the Founding Fathers identified about two dozen what they called inalienable or natural rights. And we’ve seen all sorts of them come under attack, not the least of which is the First Amendment, religious liberty. There are five rights protected in the First Amendment. But clearly religion has been one that’s under attack, things we never would have tolerated regarding what we’re doing to churches and religious expression and previous generations we’re doing with impunity almost now.

We have the same thing with Second Amendment. Who would have thought the Second Amendment to come in? But since we have COVID, we can have open carry anymore. Don’t know what that’s all about. But nonetheless, that’s another policy, executive policy. We have assembly, though with the right of assembly, is one of the First Amendment rights and that’s being challenged. In same way, you can’t have an open house, you can’t have the right of association. So we’ve lost all sorts of rights that are fundamental. And those rights actually are not related to any kind of crisis that goes on.

It’s interesting that in a Supreme Court decision in 1866, now this is the end of a civil war. You’ve lost 620,000 people, you have a lot of bad things that have been going in the south. So now reconstruction is enforced in the south because blacks have not been human, and they’ve not been equal in any way, and now we’re having to enforce equal rights so blacks now have the right to vote. Emancipation happened 1865 and states in the south said, well, blacks may be free, but they’re not citizens of our state. And so still in the south, blacks could not own property, could not get married, could not have the right to keep and bear arms. And that led in 1868 to the Fourteenth Amendment that says no, everybody gets equal protection. If you’re a former slave or if you’ve been free your whole life, you get the same constitutional guaranteed inalienable rights.

And the Fifteenth Amendment two years later said by the way, specifically, blacks have the right to vote because of all the different funny stuff that was going in the south, one of the common tactics to keep blacks from voting because blacks were Republican at the time, the first 190 blacks elected to office in South Carolina were all Republican, the first 42 blacks elected to office in Texas were all Republican, the first 137 of blacks elected to office in Louisiana are all Republican on through the South. In Texas, Republican Party, our Republican Party was started on July the 4th, 1867 by 150 blacks and 20 whites. Every Southern Republican Party was started by blacks, not whites.

So Democrats didn’t want blacks voting because they voted for Republicans, and that’s not a good deal. That’s why they found ways to shut down black voting. One of the common ways what they call Hide and Seek ballots. If you’re black, here’s how you have to vote. And just hide, they would take a ballot box, and it would be here for 10 minutes and move it somewhere: oh, you’ve got to go over there to vote. By the time you get there, it’s moved again. And so it’s “Hide and Seek” across. Or they would say you got 14 people on the ballot; if you vote for sheriff, it’s on that side of town, if you voted for mayor, you go over here. And so it was all sorts of ways to keep blacks from voting and let Democrats take control. That eventually ended with the end of reconstruction 1876, at which time no longer were there federal troops in the south to enforce law. And so that’s where you see the Jim Crow laws come in and take off until finally that was dealt with more in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.

But all that being said, that’s the climate in which they’re talking about the issue you’re going to see here. There’s a lot of confusion in the United States. There’s a lot of violence in the United States. There were, for example, Republican conventions all over the South were being attacked very violently. There was in Louisiana, the Republicans met there in 1866, Democrats attacked and killed 120 Republicans at the state Republican convention. So it was a volunteer time. And it’s interesting to see what the Supreme Court said.

Rick:

Quick break, friends, we’ll be right back, and we’ll jump right back into David Barton’s presentation. Stay with us on WallBuilders Live.

BREAK

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—-

This is David Barton with another moment from America’s history. As Christians become more active in politics, they must remember to elevate principles above party loyalty. Perhaps the best illustration of this comes from the life of Founding Father Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, who served in the presidential administrations of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, each of whom was from a different political party.

When Benjamin Rush was asked of his personal party affiliation, he responded, “I’ve been alternately called an aristocrat and a Democrat. I am neither. I am a “Christocrat”. I believe all power will fail or producing order and happiness in the hands of man. He alone who created and redeemed man is qualified to govern him.” Like Benjamin Rush, we too must remain “Christocrat” regardless of our personal party affiliation.

For more information on God’s hand in American history, contact WallBuilders at 1808REBUILD.

Rick:

Welcome back to WallBuilders Live. Thanks for staying with us today. We’re going to dive right back into David Barton’s presentation on a historical and constitutional perspective on the COVID crisis.

ProFamily Legislators Conference

David:

Supreme Court said the Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people equally in war and in peace. We used to be in war, we’re now in peace, Constitution still works and covers with the shield of his protection of all classes of man at all times and under all circumstances, where there’s war or peace, doesn’t change it all the coverage. No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the will of man than that any of his provisions can be suspended during any of the great crisis of government. To think you can suspend a constitutional right during any crisis, whether it’s a civil war, or COVID pandemic, says that there’s no more pernicious consequence than that.” Continues to say, “Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism. And the theory of necessity on which it is based is false.” There is no need ever to suspend a constitutional right. There’s no crisis that allows that to be suspended.”

Now, in times of war, there’s a few things you can do. People complain about Lincoln suspended the Right of Habeas Corpus. Read the Constitution. If you’re in times of rebellion, you can suspend the Right of Habeas Corpus for those that are in rebellion. I will point out the South called themselves rebels, and they call it the great rebellion. Constitution says you can suspend the Right of Habeas Corpus at that time.

So the Constitution gives you the only exceptions at what you can suspend the Constitution and that’s in times of rebellion. We don’t have time to rebel you on where we have a civil war going. And even in the Civil War, you could suspend all rights, just that one right, Right of Habeas Corpus. So that’s the case, we’ve seen more cases come down. Now in the last few weeks, federal judges started rule, I like this decision that came out of federal judge in Pennsylvania.

September the 14th, broad population wide lockdowns are such a dramatic inversion of the concept of liberty in a free society as to be nearly presumptively unconstitutional. If you lockdown, we’re just going to presume that’s unconstitutional, because you can’t do that in a free society. The Constitution cannot accept the concept of a new normal, where the basic liberties of the people can be subordinated to open ended emergency mitigation measures.

Rick:

Alright, friends, we are out of time for today. That was David Barton speaking on a historical and constitutional perspective on the COVID crisis. This is part one in a five part series, so you don’t want to miss the rest of this week. It’ll all be available at wallbuilderslive.com. But tune in and every day, you’re going to get a great historical and constitutional perspective on the COVID crisis. Thanks so much for listening today to WallBuilders Live.