Rick Green: Welcome to At the Core with Walker Wildmon and Rick Green. I'm Rick Green. I'm Rick Kostuchko. I appreciate you joining me today. Lots to talk about: some good news, some bad news, and some ugly news. We're going to do the good, the bad, and the ugly today. We'll try to hit all three of them.
Rick Green: I'm going to start with what I think is the ugly, and that is a Supreme Court decision. It's not really a decision. I think we use that term way too often. It's basically a refusal to intervene until a case has made its way through and had a full trial and all of those things.
Rick Green: The reason that you would typically want the court to intervene is to either stop an action from taking place or stop a lower court from stopping an action from taking place. In this case, we're talking about, of course, the president's mail-in ballot security requirements for the post offices.
Rick Green: This is a common-sense order to be done here, basically saying we need to do what we're supposed to do as the federal government through the United States Postal Service, not allow the post office to be used as a tool for fraud, and not allow the post office to be manipulated as a tool to make it easy to cheat with these mail-in ballots.
Rick Green: The president has some very common-sense requirements that were to be implemented through the post office. Of course, the president is the chief executive and executes the law. Therefore, any federal agency that we have created through Congress is then run by the administration. That's the job of the executive branch: to execute the law.
Rick Green: The president was very much within his power to do this executive order and require this to basically implement the law, saying no cheating and no using the post office to do that.
Rick Green: Then you have all these lawsuits from the states that don't want to have to follow these laws, and they have been the ones to delay the implementation of this rule until now. We already had a ruling by the court that the president was very likely to succeed on this order.
Rick Green: The fight is whether the president has the power to require the post office to do these things, and whether this unnecessarily burdens the states by making them comply with rules that would be implemented through the post office.
Rick Green: The other one I've already talked about here on At the Core and laughed about is that the states complained, "This order actually tells the Department of Justice to prosecute us if we don't follow the law."
Rick Green: Yes, that's what any Department of Justice, district attorney, or anyone else tasked with implementing the law and prosecuting when people violate the law is supposed to do. That was one of the complaints of these blue states: "They might prosecute us if we break the law." Yes, that's what they're supposed to do.
Rick Green: All of this has been going on for five or six months, and clearly we're at the midnight hour. The election is upon us. Early voting starts in a couple of weeks, and mail-in balloting is already beginning. Basically, they ran out the clock.
Rick Green: These states fought this thing up until now, and now you have seven of the nine Supreme Court justices siding with these blue states. That means you don't just have the three leftist justices siding with these blue states. You actually have four of what are supposed to be conservative justices siding with them.
Rick Green: As always, the two that get it right, Justice Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, my two heroes, are so consistent. They are consistently logical and constitutional. They should be the poster children for what a good justice is.
Rick Green: They are, what's that first thing? Is it Isaiah 1:26? I think it is. "I will give you judges at the first, and then you will be called a righteous city." We will be again a righteous nation when we have more justices like Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas.
Rick Green: Those guys said, "What are we talking about here? Why would we reward the kind of abuse of the legal system that delayed the implementation of this rule and therefore let them get away with it for the midterms?" That's basically what Thomas and Alito have said here in their dissent.
Rick Green: But that's what we're going to do. Looks like we're going to reward the blue states. We're going to let them get away with cheating again, or let me be very specific: let them get away with creating a system in their states where it is super easy to cheat.
Rick Green: We're going to let them get away with manipulating the election system so that those who want to cheat can, and they can get away with it. What the president was trying to do was at least clamp down on some of that cheating through the mail-in ballots and make it harder to use the post office for that cheating.
Rick Green: Unfortunately, this is a loss. This is definitely an ugly one, folks. I don't have any way to sugarcoat this. At this point, I don't see any recourse for the president within the next couple of weeks to get this overridden in any way.
Rick Green: The only way you can override it, basically, is that you're going to have to pass a law in Congress. Had the same act been passed as it should have been passed, this would be a moot point. We would have already gotten rules in place that prevent cheating and require identification, citizenship, and all of those things.
Rick Green: You can blame those squishy Republicans unwilling to do what needs to be done, unwilling to be men and women of Issachar who understand the times and know what to do. They are the ones, on their watch with a Republican majority, who allowed the SAVE Act to die and not get passed when it was the most important piece of legislation.
Rick Green: I'm not going to say of our lifetime, but certainly the most important piece of legislation of this season. Probably the most important piece of legislation of the decade. Squishy Republicans allowed it to die.
Rick Green: Now, that does not mean I can hear some of your wheels turning. Some of you are thinking, "Well, yeah, that's why I'm not even going to vote for Republicans this fall, because they are no better than the Democrats." That is not what I said. That's not what I said at all.
Rick Green: There are definitely some wimpy Republicans. There are definitely some Republicans for whom I have to hold my nose to vote. But you know what? If they're the only option against a Democrat who's going to bring in complete socialism, absolute Marxism, and a total destruction of the system, getting rid of the Senate, the military, the police, and all of that, then, yes, I'm going to vote for the wimpy Republican over a socialist Democrat.
Rick Green: Of course, anybody with half a brain is going to be smart enough to do that, which means we have a lot of Republicans with less than half a brain, because I'm hearing all over the place Republicans saying, "I'm not going to vote in November." I mean, you are the wicked and slothful servant if that's you.
Rick Green: I hear Republicans saying, "I think I'll vote for that Talarico guy. I'm going to vote for Talarico. He just seems like such a sweet boy. He just says the nicest things. He looks a little bit like Ellen Page. I'm not sure whether before or after the transition, but he just seems sweet."
Rick Green: "I'm going to vote for him because that Ken Paxton guy is kind of mean. He cheated on his wife, and they impeached him down there. Even though they didn't convict him, where there's smoke, there's fire, and I just can't bring myself to vote for him."
Rick Green: So what you're saying when you say all of that, and by the way, go ahead and change out the names, because this could be South Carolinians saying, "I'm not going to vote for Graham because I wanted Ralph Norman in the primary," or people in Colorado saying, "I'm not going to vote for Victor Marks for governor because I wanted the pastor there who is leading the charge and refusing to vote," which is shameful. Just change out the names. It could be any of those people.
Rick Green: Here's what you're actually saying when you say those things: "I'm going to vote for the Democrat because the Republican did some bad things." You're saying, "I'm going to vote for the person who promotes sin over a person who I know to be a sinner." That's what you're doing.
Rick Green: Hat tip, by the way, to Pastor Jeffress. He basically said that at the Republican convention last week.
Rick Green: Folks, I have been doing this a while. Let's see, I've been voting in elections for 27 years. Yeah, I'm giving away my age. I've been voting in elections for, oh my goodness, wow, no, 37 years. I was off by a decade. That's pretty bad.
Rick Green: You know you're getting old when you do your math and you're off by a decade, and it still sounded like a lot. Thirty-seven years I've been voting, and I have never yet been able to vote for someone who was not a sinner.
Rick Green: How about you? Anybody out there? When you voted for Ronald Reagan, did you vote for a sinner? You voted for a man who had a divorce. You voted for a man who, frankly, did some things in office with which I disagree.
Rick Green: When you voted for George W. Bush, you voted for a sinner. If you are old enough to have voted for George Washington, I don't think there's anybody out there listening. Maybe there's somebody. You voted for a sinner. If you voted for John Adams, you voted for a sinner.
Rick Green: I voted for Pat Robertson in 1988, or I didn't. My dad did. I was just old enough to be paying attention, but not old enough to vote yet. My dad voted for Pat Robertson in 1988. The televangelist was a good man who did a lot of great things and built a lot of great things. A sinner.
Rick Green: Let's see who else we have in my lifetime. Obviously, Donald Trump, definitely a sinner, right? Just like all of us, flawed jars of clay. None righteous, no, not one.
Rick Green: These arguments that I'm not going to vote for so-and-so because they did this or that are irrelevant. The question is, which one is worse? You don't vote for the worst one, and you don't stay home, which helps the worst one.
Rick Green: You always have to vote for the lesser of two evils if you define evil as a sinner. I don't think you're voting for evil, the lesser of evils, unless you're going to define evil as someone who is not perfect, not a righteous, perfect saint, which none of us are.
Rick Green: I always kind of play into that phrase when people say, "I'm not voting for the lesser of two evils." Yes, you are, if you're defining evil as a flawed human being.
Rick Green: I think what you're actually doing is just doing what we do every day in every other situation. We do the best we can with what we have, where we are. I don't know of a perfect job. Anybody have a perfect job where there are no downsides?
Rick Green: I don't know of a perfect marriage where you don't have to forgive now and then, or overlook annoyances or things that you don't like. I don't know of a perfect best friendship where I haven't had to forgive or overlook things.
Rick Green: There's no perfect candidate either. You're never, ever, ever going to get the chance to cast a vote for someone for whom you don't have to overlook some things and say, "Yeah, I don't like that about them, but they're still better than the other guy or gal."
Rick Green: Are we so spiritually immature, so simple-minded and easily manipulated in our feelings, that we can't think those two steps? That's not even chess. That's still checkers. You're literally just saying, "Which of these two candidates is worse? I'll vote for the other one." That's what you do in every single election.
Rick Green: I'm put out with these people here in Texas saying, "I'm either not going to vote or I'm going to vote for Talarico because he's a nice boy." He's not, by the way. He's okay with chopping the genitals off young children. He's okay with murdering babies that are five minutes from being born. He's okay with absolute blasphemy, saying that all gods are the same and all religions are the same.
Rick Green: He believes that we're all part of a circle of spirituality, with the supreme beings in the center and all of these religions equal and all around it, whether it's Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, or whatever. That's what this man believes.
Rick Green: He's advocating for policies that will bring about abject tyranny and subjugation of women, child marriage, and all kinds of evil. Transgender surgeries, manipulation, grooming kids. That's what this guy is for.
Rick Green: You've got Republicans saying that they're okay with that, that they would rather have that than mean old Ken Paxton because he was a tough prosecutor and was mean to people. Yes, I want a prosecutor who is mean to people. I want a prosecutor who is willing to go after evil and stop it.
Rick Green: I want a U.S. senator who is willing to stand on the floor of the U.S. Senate and say no to these people who want to take away our freedoms. I want a U.S. senator who will stand on the floor of the U.S. Senate and say no to cheating in elections. You have a guy in Paxton willing to do that.
Rick Green: I just don't get these people who can't think past two steps. They're all over the country right now. It's this wimpiness that we've allowed to seep into our theology and our mindset. Anyway, we'll be back in a second. We have several other headlines to get to.
Rick Green: So, the phone number is 888-589-8840. Call with your thoughts, comments, questions, insults, whatever you've got. I only got to the ugly. I didn't even get to the good or the bad. Let's hold off just a second before we go to the phones and see if I can get to a couple of these things.
Rick Green: As far as bad, obviously the Iran thing just continues to drag on. Oil being over a hundred dollars a barrel is bad. It's also bad timing. Here we are six weeks from the election. Of course, the enemy knows this, right? So this is on purpose, to ramp up this situation and create as much conflict as possible to do everything they can to hurt Trump.
Rick Green: They know that if the Republicans hold on to the House and Senate, President Trump is going to finish the job in Iran. If Republicans lose the House and Senate, they're going to do everything they can to hamstring him and prevent him from being able to be the executive and commander in chief.
Rick Green: I'm not surprised, I guess. I should back up. I was very surprised three months ago that oil was not over a hundred dollars a barrel. I talked about it several times here on the program. It was really surprising to me that we were still at 80, 82, or 84 dollars a barrel in the middle of a war with Iran, when the straits were in chaos and you couldn't get things through, or very little through, given the uncertainty caused by all of it.
Rick Green: Normally, we would have been well over a hundred dollars a barrel, potentially in the 150-dollar-a-barrel range, since this whole thing started. Instead, I think the president has threaded the needle very well and been able to keep the market tame, if you will.
Rick Green: I'm a little surprised that now, six weeks out, it has been able to creep up to where it is. It doesn't help. I saw a report on how much damage Iranian strikes have done to U.S. bases. You have their efforts to make the straits difficult, but the president is saying, "Look, we're controlling the straits right now. We're the ones with a blockade. We're financially destroying them."
Rick Green: The hard part about that, obviously, is that we don't see and feel it. It's not like a kinetic war where you see the destruction and can see a complete surrender. When you're fighting the financial side of it and using economic sanctions and tools to strangle the Iranian regime, it's difficult to sell at home. That's just the reality of it.
Rick Green: I'm not one of these people who thinks that, because of that, we're definitely going to lose the midterms. Frankly, I think some of the other things are outweighing that in most people's minds.
Rick Green: When you see the insanity of the Democrat Socialists of America, when you hear the crazy things these people support, and when you see that their Democrat superstars are people like this Talarico guy and the Islamic guy up in Michigan, it's damaging to the Democrat brand.
Rick Green: I know they act like it's not, but when you listen to Bill Maher, James Carville, and some of these older Democrats, they know what this is going to do to their brand. They know this is driving certainly anyone over the age of 40 who cares about the country and has any sense of civics toward the Republicans.
Rick Green: It may be playing to a younger crowd that wants socialism. I understand that's probably the play. That's why they're doing it. But I don't think that wins in the long run.
Rick Green: It's not just because you see some of these crazy things. What's the old expression? If you're not liberal when you're young, you don't have a heart. If you're not conservative when you get older, you don't have a brain.
Rick Green: We kind of expect the youthful generation to be rebellious. Charlie Kirk, Turning Point, Patriot Academy, and a lot of these things help stem that. We had a better result and voting bloc, especially from young men, in the last election than we've ever seen. I don't think that's totally gone away.
Rick Green: I think there is a major pushback from the youth against these bad ideas of socialism, communism, and all of these things that the Democrat Socialists are pushing.
Rick Green: Because they're so vocal about it and not actually trying to hide it, normally a political party that is hijacked like that and going hard-core to the left would hide it and use fluffy language. That's what you hear from Talarico now in the November general election, back in the primary, and frankly in his legislative career.
Rick Green: You heard just how crazy he was and the things that he said were freakish. That's why I call him Talarico. Those videos are coming back to haunt him a little, and I think the Paxton campaign is doing a good job of creating ads and showing who he really is.
Rick Green: He's doing a better job of sounding as normal as possible in his campaigning in the last few weeks than the Al-Sai'i guy up in Michigan and some of these other Democrats. One of them said the other day that Republicans should be put in concentration camps or killed, or whatever.
Rick Green: They've just kind of lost their minds. I think I'm praying we're in a Romans situation where they have basically been given over to this, and they don't realize that they're losing the middle and losing average Joe American.
Rick Green: For our side, that's a real opportunity. That's why I think the Republican convention last week, having a midterm convention, and all of those things were smart. That was a good opportunity to showcase how crazy they are.
Rick Green: If you watched any of the speeches, Brandon Gill and some of these other guys did a fantastic job of pointing out just how nuts the Democrats are.
Rick Green: That was a really long way of saying I think that will outweigh the price of oil. Obviously, the pocketbook matters. Clearly, some people will vote just based on that. But I don't think it's going to be the dominant factor.
Rick Green: I think it's going to be the insanity of the left. It's going to be the post-COVID, post-BLM, anti-American stuff. The patriotism of the 250th has borne fruit. All of these efforts throughout this year reminding people what it means to be an American and what American values are, I think, are paying off.
Rick Green: I think we're winning more people than we're losing because of that, rather than losing people because of pocketbook issues and the difficulty they create. So we'll see. I could absolutely be proven wrong, but clearly Iran is bad. I think the good is that the left is showing us who they are.
Rick Green: The Islamic issue may end up being one of the driving factors of the election. We'll see what the post-election polling data shows. My gut says, based on what I'm hearing when I'm out there all over the nation, that the Islamic invasion is actually going to be one of the driving factors of the election.
Rick Green: I don't think Republicans have done a good job branding this issue, but I think they are going to win by default because of what the Democrats are doing.
Rick Green: I think Republicans should be saying loud and clear, "We're against the Islamification of America." Trump has said that personally in some of the press conferences, but they didn't highlight it in the convention last week like they should have. They should be talking about it more.
Rick Green: The videos coming out of Dearborn, Houston, Fort Bend County, Frisco, Texas, and some of these places should be talked about all the time right now, because that moves people. That moves the needle, and people are starting to recognize that this is turning into something that is not America.
Rick Green: We're starting to recognize that the Islamification of our country is real. You've heard me talk about it here on the program. We just dealt with that personally, literally in our backyard, right next door to us. Thank you to all of you who donated to help us buy those cottages and prevent them from being used for evil. Instead, now we're able to use them for good.
Rick Green: We closed last week. I can't remember if I mentioned that on the program last Thursday or not. I think I did. But, yes, we closed on the cottages last week. We're now using them for good, where they would have been used for evil.
Rick Green: I think we should trumpet that. I think we need to talk about that and say, when you see some little Baptist church or Presbyterian church that goes out of business or moves down the street to a new facility and is selling that church, get people together and get business people together to prevent them from turning it into a mosque.
Rick Green: Convince that deacon board not to sell to Islamists. Don't let them buy into this idea that all ideas are equal and all religions are equal. That is not true.
Rick Green: If you want to stop the Islamification of your community, you've got to convince people to say no. Come together and turn that building into a food pantry, a school, a new private school, or whatever it might be.
Rick Green: Thank you to all the people across the country who helped us do that here in Constitution City, Texas, and helped us say no, stopped the Islamification of our county, and now turned it for good.
Rick Green: God's Word is true. All things work together for good for those who love the Lord and are called according to His purpose. I can now count it all joy when I experience various trials, because God is using that to teach me patience and perseverance and make me perfect and complete, lacking nothing. We know these things, but we just have to live them out.
Rick Green: All that to say, the good, the bad, and the ugly are there, but let's not let the bad and the ugly depress us. Let's lean in on the good.
Rick Green: Before I go to the phones, let me mention one more time, because we're almost out of time for this. Today is the 15th, so Constitution Day is in two days. Make sure that you're celebrating Constitution Day by doing a Constitution class with your friends and family.
Rick Green: Make sure you're going to your local public school and asking them, "What are you doing for Constitution Day?" Legally, you're supposed to do something on the Constitution and the Declaration on Constitution Day. If they want to use our curriculum, it's free.
Rick Green: You can sign up for free as a coach at PatriotAcademy.com. You will have access in your coach dashboard to the 45-minute lesson that we give away free to teachers to use in their classrooms.
Rick Green: It's fun and entertaining, and it teaches kids about the Constitution and what it means to live in a constitutional republic. That's one thing for this week that you need to make plans for.
Rick Green: The other thing we're running out of time for is the Patriot Institute application period. We start the institute on October 2nd, so that's just two and a half weeks away.
Rick Green: I still have some scholarships to give away, folks. I have money burning a hole in my pocket right now. I want to give away these scholarships to some 17- to 25-year-olds who would like to come find purpose and passion and have an incredible nine months with us, getting grounded in apologetics, communications training, and the Constitution.
Rick Green: They can learn how to be a political operative or learn how to go into ministry and lead things. We turn out leaders. We turn out people who get in tune with what God has called them to do.
Rick Green: It may be the arts, politics, journalism, education, media, or whatever it is. We're going to help them find that. We know, because we've been doing this for nearly 30 years, the results that we get.
Rick Green: If that's something that interests you, help me give away a scholarship today. Go to PatriotAcademy.com/institute. Send some young people that way, or call in if you've got questions about it. Maybe you want to nominate a student right over the air. You can do that.
Rick Green: We really want to have as many American Family Radio listeners sending their children to these programs as possible. The American Family Association has been such a strong supporter of Patriot Academy for decades now.
Rick Green: There have been many times when I wasn't sure I was going to be able to keep Patriot Academy alive, and American Family came along and helped us financially, with promotions, and all kinds of things. We are wonderful partners when it comes to raising up the next generation.
Rick Green: Let's get some good American Family Radio listeners to have their kids and grandkids come into the Patriot Institute this year. I don't know how much scholarship money I'll have next year. I've got scholarships this year. I don't know if I'll have them next year, but I definitely do this year.
Rick Green: Normally it's $20,000 to do the whole year. Right now I have $15,000 scholarships. That means it only costs a student $5,000 to do the whole year with us. Go to PatriotAcademy.com/institute and check it out.
Rick Green: Let's see if we can get at least one phone call in before we go to the break. First up was Larry in Illinois. Larry's up first. All right, Larry, how are you doing, man?
Larry: I'm just too blessed to be stressed.
Rick Green: I like that.
Larry: I served as an Army chaplain in Korea. Thank you for taking my call. You're right. Illinois has been tax and spend, and all of it has been run by Democrats forever.
Rick Green: Ronald Reagan was your brother from Illinois, wasn't he?
Larry: Yes, he was. He's from Dixon, Illinois.
Rick Green: Dixon, Illinois. I've been there.
Larry: I was talking with the lady who screened your call. We had a nice conversation. You were talking about the first election you voted in. The first presidential election I voted in was 1976. I'm going to tell you, that's the last time I voted for a Democrat.
Rick Green: Jimmy Carter.
Larry: She said this, and I agreed with her: he was a better humanitarian than he was a president.
Rick Green: That's right.
Larry: We have got to encourage our people. I was recently at a gubernatorial rally over here in Murphysboro, Illinois, meeting the Republican candidate for governor and the lieutenant governor. We've just got to take our state back. We can't stay home.
Larry: I'm retired Army. I wasn't in the Army when Jimmy Carter was elected president, but I was when Reagan was president. Reagan was president when I went into the Army. Thank God for that.
Larry: We have a responsibility. If we step down and abdicate our responsibility, we have nothing to complain about and no one to blame but ourselves.
Rick Green: Right.
Larry: And our grandchildren.
Rick Green: They will ask at some point, "What did you do, Grandpa? What did you do when freedom was on the line? What did you do to make sure that I would be able to live in freedom?"
Rick Green: Everyone listening right now should realize that posterity is dependent on us to do our job and be good stewards. That's really what Larry is saying. We're stewards of this thing. God has given us the freedom we're enjoying.
Rick Green: Not only do we honor those who came before us and served, and as Lincoln said, have an increased devotion to the cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, but we also do it for future generations.
Rick Green: There's so much we can do. Even living in Illinois, it would be easy for some people to say, "I'm going to give up. I'm not going to do this because there aren't enough good candidates, or there are too many Democrats," or whatever the excuse might be.
Rick Green: Every community in America can be changed. Do not despair. Never, ever give up. Don't ever say we can't make a difference. You can. You absolutely can.
Rick Green: Dixon, Illinois, and Tampico, Illinois, where Reagan grew up, I say we take Illinois back, folks. Let's get as many people to turn out to vote this year as possible. My buddy Darren Beatty is running for governor up there, so help him out.
Rick Green: We've got to take a quick break. You're listening to At the Core with Walker Wildmon and Rick Green.
Rick Green: We're back on At the Core with Walker Wildmon and Rick Green. I'm Rick Green, American Constitution Coach. I'm talking a little slower than I did going into the break. I totally messed up the timing. I couldn't get the phone number out, and I couldn't finish my thought. Yes, I am a professional.
Rick Green: The phone number is 888-589-8840. Call with your thoughts, comments, questions, insults, whatever you've got. I only got to the ugly. I didn't even get to the good or the bad.
Rick Green: Let's head back to the phones. Jerry in Texas is up next. Jerry, how are you doing, man? What's your comment or question today?
Jerry: Before the bumper music came out, I wanted to say that I did 20 years in the Navy, and the oath I took to this country, by the way, as an enlisted person, never expires. That oath is still good to the day I die.
Jerry: I don't teach my children that we back down. We don't hide. We don't cower. We face the fight head-on. We trust God for the results, because it's only our obligation to do the work.
Rick Green: Spot on, man. Absolutely.
Rick Green: I think that's why I get so salty about these Republicans who say they're not going to vote because their person didn't win in the primary and they're being whiny, or decide to vote for somebody who's so bad just because they're offended or whatever the lousy excuse is.
Rick Green: It is running from the fight. It's being unwilling. There's only one way through this, and that's through this. You cannot ever expect to take your ball and go home and have the system be better when you show up later. If you check out, it's going to make the system worse.
Rick Green: We have the light. We have the truth. We need to be involved in influencing other people to fight for those things as well, not saying, "I'm just not getting the results I wanted, so after a few years I'm going to give up."
Rick Green: I hate to repeat stuff, but we have new listeners who may have never heard the story. Tuesday night I'm going to be at the U.S. Capitol, giving a tour of the Capitol. I'll take people into the old Senate chamber, the old Supreme Court chamber, and the old House chamber.
Rick Green: I'll stand over that gold plate of John Quincy Adams, where he sat for 17 years in Congress. There's a viral video going around of Speaker Johnson standing there and telling this same story. I'm thrilled that more attention is coming to these stories.
Rick Green: David Barton taught me this one a long time ago. The first time I went on a Capitol tour with him, I think he made the first spiritual heritage tour video of the U.S. Capitol, around 1995 or 1996. It was a good 30 years ago.
Rick Green: He's been doing those tours at the Capitol for a long time. I've been doing them for 20 years. He was doing them for a good 15 years before I was.
Rick Green: When you walk into the House chamber, which they now call Statuary Hall because there are so many statues in there, it's a beautiful room. Every state gets to send two statues to the U.S. Capitol.
Rick Green: There are more than a hundred statues there because there are about nine or ten that Congress has commissioned as well. There's a Ronald Reagan statue, an MLK statue, and a few others that Congress commissioned, not the states.
Rick Green: For the 50 states, there are two statues each somewhere in the Capitol. Some are down in the crypt, which is right below. Some are in the entrance as you come into the Capitol. A large number of them are right there in what they now call Statuary Hall.
Rick Green: It's the old House chamber, and we take people in there on these tours all the time and tell them a bunch of stories. Daniel Webster's statue is in there. We go over to Daniel Webster and tell the stories of him arguing before the Supreme Court and some of the cases he handled and what a champion he was for the Word of God.
Rick Green: He was the greatest attorney of his lifetime. He argued before the Supreme Court multiple times and was an incredible orator as a U.S. senator.
Rick Green: He would practice his vocal projection and all of those things by reading the Bible out loud in his office at the Capitol. When he would read Job and get to the 38th chapter, where God shows up with this booming voice and says, "Where were you when I created this and that?" people would come from all over and sit outside the window to listen to him read that part of the book of Job.
Rick Green: They said the hinges on the doors would rattle because his voice was so powerful.
Rick Green: I got sidetracked. I was talking about John Quincy Adams, but I love the Daniel Webster story. There are a couple of other cool statues in there. Lew Wallace, who wrote Ben-Hur, has a statue there. He was governor of Indiana and the New Mexico Territory, and he wrote the best-selling novel of the 19th century, Ben-Hur.
Rick Green: The gold plates are for each of the presidents who also served in that House chamber. There's a plate in there for Lincoln and plates for the other presidents. There are seven total. I forget who the other five are.
Rick Green: John Quincy Adams's plate is in a really cool spot. The room is a perfectly parabolic room, which means that if you are standing in the exact opposite spot from someone else in that room, the acoustics are so incredible that you can whisper and they'll hear you like it's a real conversation.
Rick Green: There can be other noise in the room, but somehow it sounds like there's literally a microphone on them and headphones on you. It's really, really cool.
Rick Green: It just so happened that John Quincy Adams sat directly across from the leader of the pro-slavery forces in Congress, while John Quincy Adams was the leader of the anti-slavery forces. He was trying to abolish slavery.
Rick Green: John Quincy Adams was the only one with a gold plate in that room who served as president of the United States before he was a congressman. Everybody else in there was a congressman and then later became president.
Rick Green: John Quincy Adams was president of the United States and then took the demotion and ran for Congress because he wanted to get rid of slavery so badly.
Rick Green: He got into Congress and fought to end slavery in a pro-slavery Congress. He didn't make any progress. In fact, it was so bad that the pro-slavery Congress hated him. They got sick and tired of him lecturing them on slavery.
Rick Green: They finally passed a rule that you couldn't talk about slavery on the House floor. They called it the John Quincy Adams gag order because they were basically silencing him from convicting them. He was preaching the truth about the evils of slavery, and they wanted him to shut up.
Rick Green: He just kept coming back week after week and month after month. He did this for years.
Rick Green: I have a point to this story. The point is exactly what Jerry was just saying: you don't give up in the middle of the fight.
Rick Green: We are so wimpy. If we don't get the results we want, we quit within a year or two. I've had people get involved in the political arena and work really hard in one election cycle. Because they didn't win everything they wanted to win, they say, "The system doesn't work. I quit."
Rick Green: Are you kidding me? Did you do that when you were trying to walk as a kid? Did you do that to your own kids? If they tried to get up and walk and fell down the first time, would you say, "Forget it. Walking doesn't work"? Of course not. You say, "Stay in the fight. Keep doing it."
Rick Green: You keep doing it: perseverance, failure, failure, failure, until you get to success.
Rick Green: John Quincy Adams understood this. He had the staying power to remain in Congress year after year trying to get rid of slavery, not winning anything.
Rick Green: I'll be honest with you. I need some victories now and then to keep me motivated. I'm not as good as John Quincy Adams. If I didn't win anything and just kept losing on every front with no progress whatsoever, I'd probably be saying, "Lord, did I hear You wrong? Am I not supposed to be doing this?"
Rick Green: At least when I was in the legislature, we got some pro-life legislation passed. We had incremental victories. We were able to get some parental choice in vaccines and health choices and that kind of thing.
Rick Green: We didn't have the big victories until 25 years later. It took a long time to get to the big victories. But I had some little ones I could hold on to. John Quincy Adams did not. He had no victories.
Rick Green: About 12 or 13 years into this, after he had been doing it over and over again and everybody was annoyed with him, a reporter came to him and said, "What a waste. Stop wasting our time. Every time you get up and talk about slavery, you're just wasting our time. You're not going to win the vote. What's the point? You don't have the votes. You're wasting your life. You're wasting my time. You're wasting Congress's time."
Rick Green: John Quincy Adams responded with this incredible statement: "Duty is ours. Results are God's."
Rick Green: If you've never heard that before, I hope it lands right now. If you've heard the story before, hear it anew and realize that in this election, for you personally, duty is yours. Results are God's.
Rick Green: Even if the candidate you wanted didn't win the primaries and you have to vote for your second choice, third choice, or maybe your last choice among all the Republicans, that's still better than the Democrat. I promise you that. I don't know of a single instance anywhere in the country where that's not true.
Rick Green: You have a duty to do your job and leave the results up to God. Let Him deal with the results. Let Him sort it out. Do your duty. Be like John Quincy Adams.
Rick Green: I love the fact that even when the fight was getting really tough and nasty, and they had imposed this gag order so they wouldn't even let him talk, he said, "If I talk about slavery, they're going to say that I violated the gag order. They're going to censure me. To censure me, they have to have a censure trial. To have a censure trial, they have to talk about why they're censoring me, which means they're going to have to talk about slavery."
Rick Green: So he said, "Bring it on. Let's go." He had a fighter's attitude. He was consistent. He didn't lose heart or become overly emotional about a loss or a victory. He stayed even-keeled and stayed in the fight.
Rick Green: He did that for 17 years. He did his duty and left the results to God.
Rick Green: The sad part of the story is that he died in Congress in that 17th year without seeing any progress. They did lift the gag order at one point, so that was progress, I guess, but there was no progress toward ending slavery.
Rick Green: You might say, "Then what a waste. He wasted 17 years in Congress. He didn't accomplish the task. He didn't win the fight."
Rick Green: But you have to do the Paul Harvey thing and hear the rest of the story. In that last term before he died, really in the last few months of that term and session, there was a young man who joined him in Congress who was also anti-slavery, strategic, and willing to play the long game and do his duty regardless of the results.
Rick Green: This young man was idealistic. He could articulate his position, but he was also willing to learn. He learned enough from John Quincy Adams that, when John Quincy Adams died, he felt bonded to him.
Rick Green: If you're anti-slavery in a pro-slavery Congress and you're losing every day, you tend to be bonded to the people with whom you're fighting that losing battle. The people you fight side by side with in a losing battle tend to become close to you.
Rick Green: When John Quincy Adams died, this young man was a pallbearer at his funeral. He was one of the few members of Congress listed to serve as a pallbearer.
Rick Green: This young man went home and lost his next election, his next election, his next election, and his next election. I think it was five elections he lost before he finally won another election.
Rick Green: But that young man won a pretty big election. It was the election of 1860, and he became president of the United States. Abraham Lincoln went on to implement essentially the same three-step plan that John Quincy Adams had fought for 17 years to implement.
Rick Green: Duty is ours. Results are God's.
Rick Green: I'll add to that: you have no idea who the Lincoln in your life is who is watching you fight right now. You have no idea who that person might be. It may be your own children, but there are also others watching you and watching how you handle the talents the Master has left with you.
Rick Green: They're watching how you handle this election when the person you wanted to win the primary didn't. They're watching whether you're willing to say, "Duty is ours. Results are God's."
Rick Green: They're watching whether you're willing to do your duty even if you're not enjoying it, even if it's not the way you hoped it would play out. You still do your duty and leave the results up to God.
Rick Green: You may have a young Abraham Lincoln in your life for whom you've carried the torch for years. You're frustrated, tired, and want to give up. You don't want to be in the fight anymore. I'm telling you, stay the course. Stay in the fight. Do your duty. Leave the results up to God.
Rick Green: That young Lincoln watching you right now may be inspired by that. He may get in the fight, or she may get in the fight, and carry that torch forward.
Rick Green: That's really our job: protect the torch on our watch, preserve it, protect it, and pass it on to the next generation. Teach them by living the example, not just by lecturing them, but by living it out.
Rick Green: We do our duty and leave the results to God. They'll do the same.
Rick Green: That story may apply to the issue of abortion. It may apply to the issue of stopping the Islamic invasion. I don't know what issue is most important in your life, but I guarantee you that if you'll do your duty, God will take care of the results.
Rick Green: I sure appreciate you listening today. I'm Rick Green, your American Constitution Coach. You've been listening to At the Core.
Rick Green: Welcome to At the Core with Walker Wildmon and Rick Green. I'm Rick Green. I'm Rick Kostuchko. I appreciate you joining me today. Lots to talk about: some good news, some bad news, and some ugly news. We're going to do the good, the bad, and the ugly today. We'll try to hit all three of them.
Rick Green: I'm going to start with what I think is the ugly, and that is a Supreme Court decision. It's not really a decision. I think we use that term way too often. It's basically a refusal to intervene until a case has made its way through and had a full trial and all of those things.
Rick Green: The reason that you would typically want the court to intervene is to either stop an action from taking place or stop a lower court from stopping an action from taking place. In this case, we're talking about, of course, the president's mail-in ballot security requirements for the post offices.
Rick Green: This is a common-sense order to be done here, basically saying we need to do what we're supposed to do as the federal government through the United States Postal Service, not allow the post office to be used as a tool for fraud, and not allow the post office to be manipulated as a tool to make it easy to cheat with these mail-in ballots.
Rick Green: The president has some very common-sense requirements that were to be implemented through the post office. Of course, the president is the chief executive and executes the law. Therefore, any federal agency that we have created through Congress is then run by the administration. That's the job of the executive branch: to execute the law.
Rick Green: The president was very much within his power to do this executive order and require this to basically implement the law, saying no cheating and no using the post office to do that.
Rick Green: Then you have all these lawsuits from the states that don't want to have to follow these laws, and they have been the ones to delay the implementation of this rule until now. We already had a ruling by the court that the president was very likely to succeed on this order.
Rick Green: The fight is whether the president has the power to require the post office to do these things, and whether this unnecessarily burdens the states by making them comply with rules that would be implemented through the post office.
Rick Green: The other one I've already talked about here on At the Core and laughed about is that the states complained, "This order actually tells the Department of Justice to prosecute us if we don't follow the law."
Rick Green: Yes, that's what any Department of Justice, district attorney, or anyone else tasked with implementing the law and prosecuting when people violate the law is supposed to do. That was one of the complaints of these blue states: "They might prosecute us if we break the law." Yes, that's what they're supposed to do.
Rick Green: All of this has been going on for five or six months, and clearly we're at the midnight hour. The election is upon us. Early voting starts in a couple of weeks, and mail-in balloting is already beginning. Basically, they ran out the clock.
Rick Green: These states fought this thing up until now, and now you have seven of the nine Supreme Court justices siding with these blue states. That means you don't just have the three leftist justices siding with these blue states. You actually have four of what are supposed to be conservative justices siding with them.
Rick Green: As always, the two that get it right, Justice Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, my two heroes, are so consistent. They are consistently logical and constitutional. They should be the poster children for what a good justice is.
Rick Green: They are, what's that first thing? Is it Isaiah 1:26? I think it is. "I will give you judges at the first, and then you will be called a righteous city." We will be again a righteous nation when we have more justices like Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas.
Rick Green: Those guys said, "What are we talking about here? Why would we reward the kind of abuse of the legal system that delayed the implementation of this rule and therefore let them get away with it for the midterms?" That's basically what Thomas and Alito have said here in their dissent.
Rick Green: But that's what we're going to do. Looks like we're going to reward the blue states. We're going to let them get away with cheating again, or let me be very specific: let them get away with creating a system in their states where it is super easy to cheat.
Rick Green: We're going to let them get away with manipulating the election system so that those who want to cheat can, and they can get away with it. What the president was trying to do was at least clamp down on some of that cheating through the mail-in ballots and make it harder to use the post office for that cheating.
Rick Green: Unfortunately, this is a loss. This is definitely an ugly one, folks. I don't have any way to sugarcoat this. At this point, I don't see any recourse for the president within the next couple of weeks to get this overridden in any way.
Rick Green: The only way you can override it, basically, is that you're going to have to pass a law in Congress. Had the same act been passed as it should have been passed, this would be a moot point. We would have already gotten rules in place that prevent cheating and require identification, citizenship, and all of those things.
Rick Green: You can blame those squishy Republicans unwilling to do what needs to be done, unwilling to be men and women of Issachar who understand the times and know what to do. They are the ones, on their watch with a Republican majority, who allowed the SAVE Act to die and not get passed when it was the most important piece of legislation.
Rick Green: I'm not going to say of our lifetime, but certainly the most important piece of legislation of this season. Probably the most important piece of legislation of the decade. Squishy Republicans allowed it to die.
Rick Green: Now, that does not mean I can hear some of your wheels turning. Some of you are thinking, "Well, yeah, that's why I'm not even going to vote for Republicans this fall, because they are no better than the Democrats." That is not what I said. That's not what I said at all.
Rick Green: There are definitely some wimpy Republicans. There are definitely some Republicans for whom I have to hold my nose to vote. But you know what? If they're the only option against a Democrat who's going to bring in complete socialism, absolute Marxism, and a total destruction of the system, getting rid of the Senate, the military, the police, and all of that, then, yes, I'm going to vote for the wimpy Republican over a socialist Democrat.
Rick Green: Of course, anybody with half a brain is going to be smart enough to do that, which means we have a lot of Republicans with less than half a brain, because I'm hearing all over the place Republicans saying, "I'm not going to vote in November." I mean, you are the wicked and slothful servant if that's you.
Rick Green: I hear Republicans saying, "I think I'll vote for that Talarico guy. I'm going to vote for Talarico. He just seems like such a sweet boy. He just says the nicest things. He looks a little bit like Ellen Page. I'm not sure whether before or after the transition, but he just seems sweet."
Rick Green: "I'm going to vote for him because that Ken Paxton guy is kind of mean. He cheated on his wife, and they impeached him down there. Even though they didn't convict him, where there's smoke, there's fire, and I just can't bring myself to vote for him."
Rick Green: So what you're saying when you say all of that, and by the way, go ahead and change out the names, because this could be South Carolinians saying, "I'm not going to vote for Graham because I wanted Ralph Norman in the primary," or people in Colorado saying, "I'm not going to vote for Victor Marks for governor because I wanted the pastor there who is leading the charge and refusing to vote," which is shameful. Just change out the names. It could be any of those people.
Rick Green: Here's what you're actually saying when you say those things: "I'm going to vote for the Democrat because the Republican did some bad things." You're saying, "I'm going to vote for the person who promotes sin over a person who I know to be a sinner." That's what you're doing.
Rick Green: Hat tip, by the way, to Pastor Jeffress. He basically said that at the Republican convention last week.
Rick Green: Folks, I have been doing this a while. Let's see, I've been voting in elections for 27 years. Yeah, I'm giving away my age. I've been voting in elections for, oh my goodness, wow, no, 37 years. I was off by a decade. That's pretty bad.
Rick Green: You know you're getting old when you do your math and you're off by a decade, and it still sounded like a lot. Thirty-seven years I've been voting, and I have never yet been able to vote for someone who was not a sinner.
Rick Green: How about you? Anybody out there? When you voted for Ronald Reagan, did you vote for a sinner? You voted for a man who had a divorce. You voted for a man who, frankly, did some things in office with which I disagree.
Rick Green: When you voted for George W. Bush, you voted for a sinner. If you are old enough to have voted for George Washington, I don't think there's anybody out there listening. Maybe there's somebody. You voted for a sinner. If you voted for John Adams, you voted for a sinner.
Rick Green: I voted for Pat Robertson in 1988, or I didn't. My dad did. I was just old enough to be paying attention, but not old enough to vote yet. My dad voted for Pat Robertson in 1988. The televangelist was a good man who did a lot of great things and built a lot of great things. A sinner.
Rick Green: Let's see who else we have in my lifetime. Obviously, Donald Trump, definitely a sinner, right? Just like all of us, flawed jars of clay. None righteous, no, not one.
Rick Green: These arguments that I'm not going to vote for so-and-so because they did this or that are irrelevant. The question is, which one is worse? You don't vote for the worst one, and you don't stay home, which helps the worst one.
Rick Green: You always have to vote for the lesser of two evils if you define evil as a sinner. I don't think you're voting for evil, the lesser of evils, unless you're going to define evil as someone who is not perfect, not a righteous, perfect saint, which none of us are.
Rick Green: I always kind of play into that phrase when people say, "I'm not voting for the lesser of two evils." Yes, you are, if you're defining evil as a flawed human being.
Rick Green: I think what you're actually doing is just doing what we do every day in every other situation. We do the best we can with what we have, where we are. I don't know of a perfect job. Anybody have a perfect job where there are no downsides?
Rick Green: I don't know of a perfect marriage where you don't have to forgive now and then, or overlook annoyances or things that you don't like. I don't know of a perfect best friendship where I haven't had to forgive or overlook things.
Rick Green: There's no perfect candidate either. You're never, ever, ever going to get the chance to cast a vote for someone for whom you don't have to overlook some things and say, "Yeah, I don't like that about them, but they're still better than the other guy or gal."
Rick Green: Are we so spiritually immature, so simple-minded and easily manipulated in our feelings, that we can't think those two steps? That's not even chess. That's still checkers. You're literally just saying, "Which of these two candidates is worse? I'll vote for the other one." That's what you do in every single election.
Rick Green: I'm put out with these people here in Texas saying, "I'm either not going to vote or I'm going to vote for Talarico because he's a nice boy." He's not, by the way. He's okay with chopping the genitals off young children. He's okay with murdering babies that are five minutes from being born. He's okay with absolute blasphemy, saying that all gods are the same and all religions are the same.
Rick Green: He believes that we're all part of a circle of spirituality, with the supreme beings in the center and all of these religions equal and all around it, whether it's Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, or whatever. That's what this man believes.
Rick Green: He's advocating for policies that will bring about abject tyranny and subjugation of women, child marriage, and all kinds of evil. Transgender surgeries, manipulation, grooming kids. That's what this guy is for.
Rick Green: You've got Republicans saying that they're okay with that, that they would rather have that than mean old Ken Paxton because he was a tough prosecutor and was mean to people. Yes, I want a prosecutor who is mean to people. I want a prosecutor who is willing to go after evil and stop it.
Rick Green: I want a U.S. senator who is willing to stand on the floor of the U.S. Senate and say no to these people who want to take away our freedoms. I want a U.S. senator who will stand on the floor of the U.S. Senate and say no to cheating in elections. You have a guy in Paxton willing to do that.
Rick Green: I just don't get these people who can't think past two steps. They're all over the country right now. It's this wimpiness that we've allowed to seep into our theology and our mindset. Anyway, we'll be back in a second. We have several other headlines to get to.
Rick Green: So, the phone number is 888-589-8840. Call with your thoughts, comments, questions, insults, whatever you've got. I only got to the ugly. I didn't even get to the good or the bad. Let's hold off just a second before we go to the phones and see if I can get to a couple of these things.
Rick Green: As far as bad, obviously the Iran thing just continues to drag on. Oil being over a hundred dollars a barrel is bad. It's also bad timing. Here we are six weeks from the election. Of course, the enemy knows this, right? So this is on purpose, to ramp up this situation and create as much conflict as possible to do everything they can to hurt Trump.
Rick Green: They know that if the Republicans hold on to the House and Senate, President Trump is going to finish the job in Iran. If Republicans lose the House and Senate, they're going to do everything they can to hamstring him and prevent him from being able to be the executive and commander in chief.
Rick Green: I'm not surprised, I guess. I should back up. I was very surprised three months ago that oil was not over a hundred dollars a barrel. I talked about it several times here on the program. It was really surprising to me that we were still at 80, 82, or 84 dollars a barrel in the middle of a war with Iran, when the straits were in chaos and you couldn't get things through, or very little through, given the uncertainty caused by all of it.
Rick Green: Normally, we would have been well over a hundred dollars a barrel, potentially in the 150-dollar-a-barrel range, since this whole thing started. Instead, I think the president has threaded the needle very well and been able to keep the market tame, if you will.
Rick Green: I'm a little surprised that now, six weeks out, it has been able to creep up to where it is. It doesn't help. I saw a report on how much damage Iranian strikes have done to U.S. bases. You have their efforts to make the straits difficult, but the president is saying, "Look, we're controlling the straits right now. We're the ones with a blockade. We're financially destroying them."
Rick Green: The hard part about that, obviously, is that we don't see and feel it. It's not like a kinetic war where you see the destruction and can see a complete surrender. When you're fighting the financial side of it and using economic sanctions and tools to strangle the Iranian regime, it's difficult to sell at home. That's just the reality of it.
Rick Green: I'm not one of these people who thinks that, because of that, we're definitely going to lose the midterms. Frankly, I think some of the other things are outweighing that in most people's minds.
Rick Green: When you see the insanity of the Democrat Socialists of America, when you hear the crazy things these people support, and when you see that their Democrat superstars are people like this Talarico guy and the Islamic guy up in Michigan, it's damaging to the Democrat brand.
Rick Green: I know they act like it's not, but when you listen to Bill Maher, James Carville, and some of these older Democrats, they know what this is going to do to their brand. They know this is driving certainly anyone over the age of 40 who cares about the country and has any sense of civics toward the Republicans.
Rick Green: It may be playing to a younger crowd that wants socialism. I understand that's probably the play. That's why they're doing it. But I don't think that wins in the long run.
Rick Green: It's not just because you see some of these crazy things. What's the old expression? If you're not liberal when you're young, you don't have a heart. If you're not conservative when you get older, you don't have a brain.
Rick Green: We kind of expect the youthful generation to be rebellious. Charlie Kirk, Turning Point, Patriot Academy, and a lot of these things help stem that. We had a better result and voting bloc, especially from young men, in the last election than we've ever seen. I don't think that's totally gone away.
Rick Green: I think there is a major pushback from the youth against these bad ideas of socialism, communism, and all of these things that the Democrat Socialists are pushing.
Rick Green: Because they're so vocal about it and not actually trying to hide it, normally a political party that is hijacked like that and going hard-core to the left would hide it and use fluffy language. That's what you hear from Talarico now in the November general election, back in the primary, and frankly in his legislative career.
Rick Green: You heard just how crazy he was and the things that he said were freakish. That's why I call him Talarico. Those videos are coming back to haunt him a little, and I think the Paxton campaign is doing a good job of creating ads and showing who he really is.
Rick Green: He's doing a better job of sounding as normal as possible in his campaigning in the last few weeks than the Al-Sai'i guy up in Michigan and some of these other Democrats. One of them said the other day that Republicans should be put in concentration camps or killed, or whatever.
Rick Green: They've just kind of lost their minds. I think I'm praying we're in a Romans situation where they have basically been given over to this, and they don't realize that they're losing the middle and losing average Joe American.
Rick Green: For our side, that's a real opportunity. That's why I think the Republican convention last week, having a midterm convention, and all of those things were smart. That was a good opportunity to showcase how crazy they are.
Rick Green: If you watched any of the speeches, Brandon Gill and some of these other guys did a fantastic job of pointing out just how nuts the Democrats are.
Rick Green: That was a really long way of saying I think that will outweigh the price of oil. Obviously, the pocketbook matters. Clearly, some people will vote just based on that. But I don't think it's going to be the dominant factor.
Rick Green: I think it's going to be the insanity of the left. It's going to be the post-COVID, post-BLM, anti-American stuff. The patriotism of the 250th has borne fruit. All of these efforts throughout this year reminding people what it means to be an American and what American values are, I think, are paying off.
Rick Green: I think we're winning more people than we're losing because of that, rather than losing people because of pocketbook issues and the difficulty they create. So we'll see. I could absolutely be proven wrong, but clearly Iran is bad. I think the good is that the left is showing us who they are.
Rick Green: The Islamic issue may end up being one of the driving factors of the election. We'll see what the post-election polling data shows. My gut says, based on what I'm hearing when I'm out there all over the nation, that the Islamic invasion is actually going to be one of the driving factors of the election.
Rick Green: I don't think Republicans have done a good job branding this issue, but I think they are going to win by default because of what the Democrats are doing.
Rick Green: I think Republicans should be saying loud and clear, "We're against the Islamification of America." Trump has said that personally in some of the press conferences, but they didn't highlight it in the convention last week like they should have. They should be talking about it more.
Rick Green: The videos coming out of Dearborn, Houston, Fort Bend County, Frisco, Texas, and some of these places should be talked about all the time right now, because that moves people. That moves the needle, and people are starting to recognize that this is turning into something that is not America.
Rick Green: We're starting to recognize that the Islamification of our country is real. You've heard me talk about it here on the program. We just dealt with that personally, literally in our backyard, right next door to us. Thank you to all of you who donated to help us buy those cottages and prevent them from being used for evil. Instead, now we're able to use them for good.
Rick Green: We closed last week. I can't remember if I mentioned that on the program last Thursday or not. I think I did. But, yes, we closed on the cottages last week. We're now using them for good, where they would have been used for evil.
Rick Green: I think we should trumpet that. I think we need to talk about that and say, when you see some little Baptist church or Presbyterian church that goes out of business or moves down the street to a new facility and is selling that church, get people together and get business people together to prevent them from turning it into a mosque.
Rick Green: Convince that deacon board not to sell to Islamists. Don't let them buy into this idea that all ideas are equal and all religions are equal. That is not true.
Rick Green: If you want to stop the Islamification of your community, you've got to convince people to say no. Come together and turn that building into a food pantry, a school, a new private school, or whatever it might be.
Rick Green: Thank you to all the people across the country who helped us do that here in Constitution City, Texas, and helped us say no, stopped the Islamification of our county, and now turned it for good.
Rick Green: God's Word is true. All things work together for good for those who love the Lord and are called according to His purpose. I can now count it all joy when I experience various trials, because God is using that to teach me patience and perseverance and make me perfect and complete, lacking nothing. We know these things, but we just have to live them out.
Rick Green: All that to say, the good, the bad, and the ugly are there, but let's not let the bad and the ugly depress us. Let's lean in on the good.
Rick Green: Before I go to the phones, let me mention one more time, because we're almost out of time for this. Today is the 15th, so Constitution Day is in two days. Make sure that you're celebrating Constitution Day by doing a Constitution class with your friends and family.
Rick Green: Make sure you're going to your local public school and asking them, "What are you doing for Constitution Day?" Legally, you're supposed to do something on the Constitution and the Declaration on Constitution Day. If they want to use our curriculum, it's free.
Rick Green: You can sign up for free as a coach at PatriotAcademy.com. You will have access in your coach dashboard to the 45-minute lesson that we give away free to teachers to use in their classrooms.
Rick Green: It's fun and entertaining, and it teaches kids about the Constitution and what it means to live in a constitutional republic. That's one thing for this week that you need to make plans for.
Rick Green: The other thing we're running out of time for is the Patriot Institute application period. We start the institute on October 2nd, so that's just two and a half weeks away.
Rick Green: I still have some scholarships to give away, folks. I have money burning a hole in my pocket right now. I want to give away these scholarships to some 17- to 25-year-olds who would like to come find purpose and passion and have an incredible nine months with us, getting grounded in apologetics, communications training, and the Constitution.
Rick Green: They can learn how to be a political operative or learn how to go into ministry and lead things. We turn out leaders. We turn out people who get in tune with what God has called them to do.
Rick Green: It may be the arts, politics, journalism, education, media, or whatever it is. We're going to help them find that. We know, because we've been doing this for nearly 30 years, the results that we get.
Rick Green: If that's something that interests you, help me give away a scholarship today. Go to PatriotAcademy.com/institute. Send some young people that way, or call in if you've got questions about it. Maybe you want to nominate a student right over the air. You can do that.
Rick Green: We really want to have as many American Family Radio listeners sending their children to these programs as possible. The American Family Association has been such a strong supporter of Patriot Academy for decades now.
Rick Green: There have been many times when I wasn't sure I was going to be able to keep Patriot Academy alive, and American Family came along and helped us financially, with promotions, and all kinds of things. We are wonderful partners when it comes to raising up the next generation.
Rick Green: Let's get some good American Family Radio listeners to have their kids and grandkids come into the Patriot Institute this year. I don't know how much scholarship money I'll have next year. I've got scholarships this year. I don't know if I'll have them next year, but I definitely do this year.
Rick Green: Normally it's $20,000 to do the whole year. Right now I have $15,000 scholarships. That means it only costs a student $5,000 to do the whole year with us. Go to PatriotAcademy.com/institute and check it out.
Rick Green: Let's see if we can get at least one phone call in before we go to the break. First up was Larry in Illinois. Larry's up first. All right, Larry, how are you doing, man?
Larry: I'm just too blessed to be stressed.
Rick Green: I like that.
Larry: I served as an Army chaplain in Korea. Thank you for taking my call. You're right. Illinois has been tax and spend, and all of it has been run by Democrats forever.
Rick Green: Ronald Reagan was your brother from Illinois, wasn't he?
Larry: Yes, he was. He's from Dixon, Illinois.
Rick Green: Dixon, Illinois. I've been there.
Larry: I was talking with the lady who screened your call. We had a nice conversation. You were talking about the first election you voted in. The first presidential election I voted in was 1976. I'm going to tell you, that's the last time I voted for a Democrat.
Rick Green: Jimmy Carter.
Larry: She said this, and I agreed with her: he was a better humanitarian than he was a president.
Rick Green: That's right.
Larry: We have got to encourage our people. I was recently at a gubernatorial rally over here in Murphysboro, Illinois, meeting the Republican candidate for governor and the lieutenant governor. We've just got to take our state back. We can't stay home.
Larry: I'm retired Army. I wasn't in the Army when Jimmy Carter was elected president, but I was when Reagan was president. Reagan was president when I went into the Army. Thank God for that.
Larry: We have a responsibility. If we step down and abdicate our responsibility, we have nothing to complain about and no one to blame but ourselves.
Rick Green: Right.
Larry: And our grandchildren.
Rick Green: They will ask at some point, "What did you do, Grandpa? What did you do when freedom was on the line? What did you do to make sure that I would be able to live in freedom?"
Rick Green: Everyone listening right now should realize that posterity is dependent on us to do our job and be good stewards. That's really what Larry is saying. We're stewards of this thing. God has given us the freedom we're enjoying.
Rick Green: Not only do we honor those who came before us and served, and as Lincoln said, have an increased devotion to the cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, but we also do it for future generations.
Rick Green: There's so much we can do. Even living in Illinois, it would be easy for some people to say, "I'm going to give up. I'm not going to do this because there aren't enough good candidates, or there are too many Democrats," or whatever the excuse might be.
Rick Green: Every community in America can be changed. Do not despair. Never, ever give up. Don't ever say we can't make a difference. You can. You absolutely can.
Rick Green: Dixon, Illinois, and Tampico, Illinois, where Reagan grew up, I say we take Illinois back, folks. Let's get as many people to turn out to vote this year as possible. My buddy Darren Beatty is running for governor up there, so help him out.
Rick Green: We've got to take a quick break. You're listening to At the Core with Walker Wildmon and Rick Green.
Rick Green: We're back on At the Core with Walker Wildmon and Rick Green. I'm Rick Green, American Constitution Coach. I'm talking a little slower than I did going into the break. I totally messed up the timing. I couldn't get the phone number out, and I couldn't finish my thought. Yes, I am a professional.
Rick Green: The phone number is 888-589-8840. Call with your thoughts, comments, questions, insults, whatever you've got. I only got to the ugly. I didn't even get to the good or the bad.
Rick Green: Let's head back to the phones. Jerry in Texas is up next. Jerry, how are you doing, man? What's your comment or question today?
Jerry: Before the bumper music came out, I wanted to say that I did 20 years in the Navy, and the oath I took to this country, by the way, as an enlisted person, never expires. That oath is still good to the day I die.
Jerry: I don't teach my children that we back down. We don't hide. We don't cower. We face the fight head-on. We trust God for the results, because it's only our obligation to do the work.
Rick Green: Spot on, man. Absolutely.
Rick Green: I think that's why I get so salty about these Republicans who say they're not going to vote because their person didn't win in the primary and they're being whiny, or decide to vote for somebody who's so bad just because they're offended or whatever the lousy excuse is.
Rick Green: It is running from the fight. It's being unwilling. There's only one way through this, and that's through this. You cannot ever expect to take your ball and go home and have the system be better when you show up later. If you check out, it's going to make the system worse.
Rick Green: We have the light. We have the truth. We need to be involved in influencing other people to fight for those things as well, not saying, "I'm just not getting the results I wanted, so after a few years I'm going to give up."
Rick Green: I hate to repeat stuff, but we have new listeners who may have never heard the story. Tuesday night I'm going to be at the U.S. Capitol, giving a tour of the Capitol. I'll take people into the old Senate chamber, the old Supreme Court chamber, and the old House chamber.
Rick Green: I'll stand over that gold plate of John Quincy Adams, where he sat for 17 years in Congress. There's a viral video going around of Speaker Johnson standing there and telling this same story. I'm thrilled that more attention is coming to these stories.
Rick Green: David Barton taught me this one a long time ago. The first time I went on a Capitol tour with him, I think he made the first spiritual heritage tour video of the U.S. Capitol, around 1995 or 1996. It was a good 30 years ago.
Rick Green: He's been doing those tours at the Capitol for a long time. I've been doing them for 20 years. He was doing them for a good 15 years before I was.
Rick Green: When you walk into the House chamber, which they now call Statuary Hall because there are so many statues in there, it's a beautiful room. Every state gets to send two statues to the U.S. Capitol.
Rick Green: There are more than a hundred statues there because there are about nine or ten that Congress has commissioned as well. There's a Ronald Reagan statue, an MLK statue, and a few others that Congress commissioned, not the states.
Rick Green: For the 50 states, there are two statues each somewhere in the Capitol. Some are down in the crypt, which is right below. Some are in the entrance as you come into the Capitol. A large number of them are right there in what they now call Statuary Hall.
Rick Green: It's the old House chamber, and we take people in there on these tours all the time and tell them a bunch of stories. Daniel Webster's statue is in there. We go over to Daniel Webster and tell the stories of him arguing before the Supreme Court and some of the cases he handled and what a champion he was for the Word of God.
Rick Green: He was the greatest attorney of his lifetime. He argued before the Supreme Court multiple times and was an incredible orator as a U.S. senator.
Rick Green: He would practice his vocal projection and all of those things by reading the Bible out loud in his office at the Capitol. When he would read Job and get to the 38th chapter, where God shows up with this booming voice and says, "Where were you when I created this and that?" people would come from all over and sit outside the window to listen to him read that part of the book of Job.
Rick Green: They said the hinges on the doors would rattle because his voice was so powerful.
Rick Green: I got sidetracked. I was talking about John Quincy Adams, but I love the Daniel Webster story. There are a couple of other cool statues in there. Lew Wallace, who wrote Ben-Hur, has a statue there. He was governor of Indiana and the New Mexico Territory, and he wrote the best-selling novel of the 19th century, Ben-Hur.
Rick Green: The gold plates are for each of the presidents who also served in that House chamber. There's a plate in there for Lincoln and plates for the other presidents. There are seven total. I forget who the other five are.
Rick Green: John Quincy Adams's plate is in a really cool spot. The room is a perfectly parabolic room, which means that if you are standing in the exact opposite spot from someone else in that room, the acoustics are so incredible that you can whisper and they'll hear you like it's a real conversation.
Rick Green: There can be other noise in the room, but somehow it sounds like there's literally a microphone on them and headphones on you. It's really, really cool.
Rick Green: It just so happened that John Quincy Adams sat directly across from the leader of the pro-slavery forces in Congress, while John Quincy Adams was the leader of the anti-slavery forces. He was trying to abolish slavery.
Rick Green: John Quincy Adams was the only one with a gold plate in that room who served as president of the United States before he was a congressman. Everybody else in there was a congressman and then later became president.
Rick Green: John Quincy Adams was president of the United States and then took the demotion and ran for Congress because he wanted to get rid of slavery so badly.
Rick Green: He got into Congress and fought to end slavery in a pro-slavery Congress. He didn't make any progress. In fact, it was so bad that the pro-slavery Congress hated him. They got sick and tired of him lecturing them on slavery.
Rick Green: They finally passed a rule that you couldn't talk about slavery on the House floor. They called it the John Quincy Adams gag order because they were basically silencing him from convicting them. He was preaching the truth about the evils of slavery, and they wanted him to shut up.
Rick Green: He just kept coming back week after week and month after month. He did this for years.
Rick Green: I have a point to this story. The point is exactly what Jerry was just saying: you don't give up in the middle of the fight.
Rick Green: We are so wimpy. If we don't get the results we want, we quit within a year or two. I've had people get involved in the political arena and work really hard in one election cycle. Because they didn't win everything they wanted to win, they say, "The system doesn't work. I quit."
Rick Green: Are you kidding me? Did you do that when you were trying to walk as a kid? Did you do that to your own kids? If they tried to get up and walk and fell down the first time, would you say, "Forget it. Walking doesn't work"? Of course not. You say, "Stay in the fight. Keep doing it."
Rick Green: You keep doing it: perseverance, failure, failure, failure, until you get to success.
Rick Green: John Quincy Adams understood this. He had the staying power to remain in Congress year after year trying to get rid of slavery, not winning anything.
Rick Green: I'll be honest with you. I need some victories now and then to keep me motivated. I'm not as good as John Quincy Adams. If I didn't win anything and just kept losing on every front with no progress whatsoever, I'd probably be saying, "Lord, did I hear You wrong? Am I not supposed to be doing this?"
Rick Green: At least when I was in the legislature, we got some pro-life legislation passed. We had incremental victories. We were able to get some parental choice in vaccines and health choices and that kind of thing.
Rick Green: We didn't have the big victories until 25 years later. It took a long time to get to the big victories. But I had some little ones I could hold on to. John Quincy Adams did not. He had no victories.
Rick Green: About 12 or 13 years into this, after he had been doing it over and over again and everybody was annoyed with him, a reporter came to him and said, "What a waste. Stop wasting our time. Every time you get up and talk about slavery, you're just wasting our time. You're not going to win the vote. What's the point? You don't have the votes. You're wasting your life. You're wasting my time. You're wasting Congress's time."
Rick Green: John Quincy Adams responded with this incredible statement: "Duty is ours. Results are God's."
Rick Green: If you've never heard that before, I hope it lands right now. If you've heard the story before, hear it anew and realize that in this election, for you personally, duty is yours. Results are God's.
Rick Green: Even if the candidate you wanted didn't win the primaries and you have to vote for your second choice, third choice, or maybe your last choice among all the Republicans, that's still better than the Democrat. I promise you that. I don't know of a single instance anywhere in the country where that's not true.
Rick Green: You have a duty to do your job and leave the results up to God. Let Him deal with the results. Let Him sort it out. Do your duty. Be like John Quincy Adams.
Rick Green: I love the fact that even when the fight was getting really tough and nasty, and they had imposed this gag order so they wouldn't even let him talk, he said, "If I talk about slavery, they're going to say that I violated the gag order. They're going to censure me. To censure me, they have to have a censure trial. To have a censure trial, they have to talk about why they're censoring me, which means they're going to have to talk about slavery."
Rick Green: So he said, "Bring it on. Let's go." He had a fighter's attitude. He was consistent. He didn't lose heart or become overly emotional about a loss or a victory. He stayed even-keeled and stayed in the fight.
Rick Green: He did that for 17 years. He did his duty and left the results to God.
Rick Green: The sad part of the story is that he died in Congress in that 17th year without seeing any progress. They did lift the gag order at one point, so that was progress, I guess, but there was no progress toward ending slavery.
Rick Green: You might say, "Then what a waste. He wasted 17 years in Congress. He didn't accomplish the task. He didn't win the fight."
Rick Green: But you have to do the Paul Harvey thing and hear the rest of the story. In that last term before he died, really in the last few months of that term and session, there was a young man who joined him in Congress who was also anti-slavery, strategic, and willing to play the long game and do his duty regardless of the results.
Rick Green: This young man was idealistic. He could articulate his position, but he was also willing to learn. He learned enough from John Quincy Adams that, when John Quincy Adams died, he felt bonded to him.
Rick Green: If you're anti-slavery in a pro-slavery Congress and you're losing every day, you tend to be bonded to the people with whom you're fighting that losing battle. The people you fight side by side with in a losing battle tend to become close to you.
Rick Green: When John Quincy Adams died, this young man was a pallbearer at his funeral. He was one of the few members of Congress listed to serve as a pallbearer.
Rick Green: This young man went home and lost his next election, his next election, his next election, and his next election. I think it was five elections he lost before he finally won another election.
Rick Green: But that young man won a pretty big election. It was the election of 1860, and he became president of the United States. Abraham Lincoln went on to implement essentially the same three-step plan that John Quincy Adams had fought for 17 years to implement.
Rick Green: Duty is ours. Results are God's.
Rick Green: I'll add to that: you have no idea who the Lincoln in your life is who is watching you fight right now. You have no idea who that person might be. It may be your own children, but there are also others watching you and watching how you handle the talents the Master has left with you.
Rick Green: They're watching how you handle this election when the person you wanted to win the primary didn't. They're watching whether you're willing to say, "Duty is ours. Results are God's."
Rick Green: They're watching whether you're willing to do your duty even if you're not enjoying it, even if it's not the way you hoped it would play out. You still do your duty and leave the results up to God.
Rick Green: You may have a young Abraham Lincoln in your life for whom you've carried the torch for years. You're frustrated, tired, and want to give up. You don't want to be in the fight anymore. I'm telling you, stay the course. Stay in the fight. Do your duty. Leave the results up to God.
Rick Green: That young Lincoln watching you right now may be inspired by that. He may get in the fight, or she may get in the fight, and carry that torch forward.
Rick Green: That's really our job: protect the torch on our watch, preserve it, protect it, and pass it on to the next generation. Teach them by living the example, not just by lecturing them, but by living it out.
Rick Green: We do our duty and leave the results to God. They'll do the same.
Rick Green: That story may apply to the issue of abortion. It may apply to the issue of stopping the Islamic invasion. I don't know what issue is most important in your life, but I guarantee you that if you'll do your duty, God will take care of the results.
Rick Green: I sure appreciate you listening today. I'm Rick Green, your American Constitution Coach. You've been listening to At the Core.
Rick Green opens with commentary on the Supreme Court’s refusal to allow a Trump administration mail-ballot security rule to take effect before the midterm elections. He discusses the constitutional questions surrounding presidential authority, the U.S. Postal Service, election procedures, and the Save Act, while urging listeners to remain engaged even when candidates or election results disappoint them.
The program also examines Iran, oil prices, the political implications of cultural and religious debates, Constitution Day, and the importance of teaching constitutional principles. Callers Larry and Jerry discuss civic responsibility and the duty to remain involved.
Rick then turns to John Quincy Adams’s long fight against slavery and Abraham Lincoln’s perseverance, emphasizing the lesson that believers should do their duty, remain faithful, and leave the results to God.
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