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David Barton, Who Sues His Critics, Says Like The Prophet Jeremiah He Doesn't Care About Criticism

Submitted by Brian Tashman on January 23, 2012 - 2:20pm

Today on WallBuilders Live, Barton reflected on the alleged persecution of same-sex marriage opponents like himself. Barton compared himself to Jeremiah, which is actually modest for Barton who previously likened himself to Jesus Christ. He claimed that like Jeremiah, he doesn’t care what people have to say about him and doesn’t listen to his critics “as long as I’m speaking the right thing that God told me to say.” Of course, this is the same David Barton who is currently suing three of his critics for libel and defamation and whose cohost Rick Green is suing several people for libel over his unsuccessful campaign to serve on the Texas Supreme Court:

Barton: Anybody who goes out and looks for me up on Google or anything else is going to be appalled at how terrible I am, I mean there’s stuff I didn’t even know I did until I read about it on these articles, but if that matters to you, you lose your voice. One of the things the Lord really dealt to me early on was Jeremiah 1:17, because Jeremiah was going to deliver a message that was extremely unpopular to people, he said, ‘listen guys we are going into bondage but God’s going to bring us out,’ nobody wants to hear that, so Jeremiah’s been commissioned to give a message that nobody is gonna like. That’s why they threw him down in the miry pit and he was gonna die down there and they finally brought him out. So Jeremiah, a doom-and-gloom kind of guy in some ways, and God told him in Jeremiah 1:17 ‘do not look at their faces when you deliver the message I told you, if you do, if you pay attention to the way they respond, I will break you to pieces in front of them,’ and that’s one of the things I learned early on.

People don’t like the fact about the Christian heritage of the nation but I gotta speak whether they like it or not because if I watch the reaction, if I watch their faces, if I gage what I do by the criticism I get, I’ll soften my approach and he’ll break me to pieces in front of them. For people who are enemies, I don’t care! I don’t care whether they like me or not, as long as I’m speaking the right thing that God told me to say!

Green: You don’t want to be a man-pleaser.

Earlier in the show, David French of the American Center for Law and Justice told Barton and Green that gay rights advocates who claim that marriage equality has no victims are wrong as “the victim is our culture.” French claimed that marriage equality would devalue the institution of marriage by taking God out of the equation, but his only evidence that the legalization of same-sex marriage undercuts the institution of marriage is the existence of no-fault divorce policies:

French: Unless there are radical developments that I can’t foresee there’s going to be that challenge of dealing with that assertion that somehow same-sex marriage is a victimless phenomenon, but you know the reality is that when you’re talking about the conversion of marriage from a God-given and God-created institution into a contract between consenting adults, the victim is our culture. Because what you’ve done is you have taken one of the most fundamental building blocks of all society and you’ve converted it into an arrangement of convenience, even loving convenience, between adults that ultimately exists for the fulfillment of adults. That was never its intention. The consequences of turning marriage into that, as we’ve seen through the explosive fault of no-fault divorce, have been catastrophic.

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Rick Perry Drops By WallBuilders to Rail Against 'Socialist' Obama

Submitted by Brian Tashman on January 13, 2012 - 3:30pm

Rick Perry today appeared on WallBuilders Live with right-wing pseudo-historian David Barton and his cohost Rick Green, where he spent most of the time railing against President Obama’s spending policies while also criticizing his proposed cuts to the Defense Department budget. According to Perry, “America is paying a huge price” for electing someone who “is a socialist or was trained by socialists”:

Perry: Here’s what I tell people, I said, listen, if you’re looking for the best debater, we got a great debater in the White House right now, America is paying a huge price because they were enamored with hope and change and this president, who I truly believe is a socialist or was trained by socialists, put America in peril. Put America in peril from an economic standpoint, put America in peril from a military-preparedness standpoint, put America in peril from the standpoint of foreign policy.

Barton and Green went on to say that not only have they worked with Governor Perry but also with Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, who recently appeared on WallBuilders Live, surely to inform them that Jesus opposed the minimum wage and the capital gains tax while pastors are under the threat of arrest because of hate crimes laws:

Green: Look, I know we’re talking about all the positives on Perry, I know a lot of our listeners, we got folks who support Newt and support Bachmann, and we support those guys too, they’re good folks.

Barton: I’ve already helped a whole bunch of these guys in the campaign, I have worked directly with several of them at their request and I’m happy to do that.

Green: Yeah sure, and they stand for all the right things. But we just got to be honest about Governor Perry’s record and what he did. When we went up there to Iowa and we both went and spoke at some caucuses there, it forced me to really sit down and think, why, if I got to pick somebody to vote for, how do I measure these guys? I started thinking for me it’s got to be that they both believe what I do, they got my values, but they can also be effective. So I think some people do discount him a little be when they shouldn’t and they’re going to be surprised, if he gets the momentum back—there’s some good candidates in the race, we’ll see what South Carolinians think.

Barton: We’ve always taken the position we’ll help people who have the right values, so even when I went to Iowa and spoke for Governor Perry at one of the caucuses, I was right beside Michele Bachmann’s husband Marcus and we had a great time because I had just done some media interviews on behalf of Michele.

Green: That’s right, and I went out to Iowa in August for Michele for the straw poll, and we’ve both helped Newt and Santorum, so yeah there are good people running.

Barton: There are good people running and this is fine and we’re not taking positions, but we are pointing out positive things.

While Religious Right leaders themselves might be fractured on who to support in the race, Republican candidates for president all seem to agree on who to pander to: David Barton.

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‘Historian’ Barton Cites Michele Bachmann, Gets Her Made-Up Facts Wrong

Submitted by Miranda Blue on January 9, 2012 - 4:08pm

Lest we need any more proof that David Barton is not a real historian, or even someone with a vague grasp of current affairs, in the latest installment of WallBuilders Live he cites the research of well-known fact fabricator Michele Bachmann – and gets her fabricated facts wrong.

Discussing with co-host Rick Green the relationship between increasing secularism and the economic collapse, Barton pulls out one heck of a Bachmann whopper. Citing Bachmann as his source, Barton asserts that before the Bush administration’s financial industry bailouts and the Obama administration’s auto industry bailout, “100 percent of the American economy” was privately owned. Now, he says, that total is 33 percent:

Barton: One of the things we’re starting to see is that as the economic system is shutting down, it is corresponding to the time that we’ve become increasingly secular. As we have had an upturn in, “Hey we want less of God, we want less religion, keep it to yourself, don’t let it get out, don’t talk about it, separation of church and state,” as we’ve gone in a more secular direction, guess what? Spending’s gone through the roof, economic policies have gone away. As Michele Bachmann pointed out, before that government bailout and takeover of the various entities, what was it, now three and a half years ago, but that’s when the government stepped in and took over insurance, took over AIG, took over GM. At that point, we had 100 percent of the American economy still being free, private, privately owned. It is now down, by her calculations, to less than 33 percent of the market is still free owned and free run

Green: Is it fair to say, “Less God, more government”?

Barton: You bet it is. It is. And that’s economically as well. You lose your economic freedom, you lose your religious freedom, you lose your civil freedoms. This stuff all ties together.
 

Bachmann, as it turns out, did claim after President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act in March 2010 that “100 percent of our economy was private prior to September of 2008, but as of Tuesday, the federal government has now taken ownership or control of 51 percent of the private economy." Both of those numbers were, of course, completely made up. Barton not only cites Bachmann’s ludicrous claim that the U.S. economy was free of government spending before 2008, but exaggerates Bachmann’s already exaggerated figure of the federal government’s economic control.

Later in the program, Barton brought his revisionist history to Europe, claiming that labor unions were responsible for the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Soviet Union -- and will put America on a similar path. Commenting on on Green’s interview with business professor Steve Pejovich, a native of Yugoslavia, Barton said:

Barton: He made a statement I don’t think I’ve heard anybody else have the guts to say. He said, “Investing in labor unions is the way to destroy the best economy in the world.” I mean, that’s a profound statement. Now, he understands unions, because that was a lot of what brought Hitler in, that’s a lot of what happened with the Soviet Union afterward, they had all these workers’ unions. And there’s a guy who’s seen what’s happened with unions, and he’s watching what’s happening over here with the rise of unions and unionism and all the stuff that Obama’s doing to promote unions and unionism, he knows where it will take us.

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Gingrich Intends to Pack Courts with Judges from Regent and Liberty University, Federalist Society

Submitted by Brian Tashman on December 28, 2011 - 11:20am

Newt Gingrich appeared on Monday’s program of WallBuilders Live with David Barton and Rick Green, where Gingrich once again praised Barton’s right-wing pseudo-history and activism. In fact, Gingrich gave Barton credit for helping him develop his plan to assault the “judicial dictatorship” if elected president. He told Barton and Green that his plan is sending shockwaves through the “the secular left, which has been using the courts to replace the America we grew up in” by legalizing abortion, “driving God out of public life” and making same-sex marriages become “legitimized as if they were the same between traditional marriage between a man and a woman.”

Gingrich added that he would appoint judges in the mold of Robert George, the chairman of the National Organization for Marriage and a drafter of the Manhattan Declaration who has called people to defy Supreme Court decisions on issues like marriage that they disagree with, and graduates of Regent University and Liberty University, the schools founded by the far-right televangelists Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, respectively. Regent University absorbed the Oral Roberts University law program and teaches conservative Christian interpretations of the law, and the Liberty University School of Law even pressured students to disobey U.S. law if it conflicts with what they believe is “God’s law” in situations such as the Lisa Miller kidnapping case. Gingrich also pointed to the right-wing Federalist Society as a source for judicial appointments

Gingrich: What you have is, the secular left, which has been using the courts to replace the America we grew up in, the secular left which is desperately committed to Roe v. Wade and abortion, desperately committed to marriage between same-sex couples becoming legitimized as if they were the same between traditional marriage between a man and a woman, desperately committed to driving God out of public life, and they are suddenly faced with the possibility that we the people are going to take back our authority, that we are going to take back our rights, that we are going to redress the balance. The level of hysteria, I predict, will grow as they come to realize at the American Bar Association and elsewhere that this really is an effort to limit the power of lawyers to redesign America.

Green: Should you become president, is there a crop of attorneys and judges out there that understand history and understand originalism that you would have to choose from, in other words it’s got to be more than just you and Congress, what about good judges?

Gingrich: You start looking at people of the caliber of Robbie George of Princeton, you look at Regent University, you look at Liberty University, you start looking around and realizing there is a whole crop - Vince Haley of University of Virginia graduate who is a deeply, deeply committed Christian who clearly understands these kinds of issues - I think people would be surprised that the Federalist Society has many members who agree that we need a balance of power between the three, not a judicial dictatorship.

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Daniel Lapin Says Gays Should Have Been Quarantined During AIDS Crisis

Submitted by Brian Tashman on December 19, 2011 - 4:45pm

Daniel Lapin of Toward Tradition has emerged as the Religious Right’s favorite rabbi whose rants against government and gays have kept his image among conservatives untarnished despite his close ties to the Jack Abramoff scandal involving Indian gambling companies. Today on WallBuilders Live, Lapin not only tried to say that gay rights derived from the collapse of morality but also argued that it was “insane” that gays weren’t quarantined during the AIDS pandemic the 1980s.

Lapin told co-hosts Rick Green and David Barton, who has previously called for the government regulation of homosexuality, that health institutions should have tried to “impose quarantine” against the “homosexual-related disease” but “nobody had the moral will to do it simply because it reeked of bigotry and selective oppression and so on.”

Listen:

Lapin: Look, you’ll remember when the AIDS epidemic began, if that was anything other than a homosexual-related disease, which it obviously was, particularly at the outset, any public health organization that did not impose quarantine would have literally been tried before a court, it’s insane.

Green: So they ignored from what a health perspective they should have done.

Lapin: Yes, yes of course. If it was an outbreak of cholera or if it was an outbreak of the same severity as the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the ’80s, yes, yes of course they should have been quarantining but nobody had the moral will to do it simply because it reeked of bigotry and selective oppression and so on.

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Barton Blames Disney Movies for Making Us Believe Animals Feel and Think

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on December 19, 2011 - 4:19pm

Rabbi Daniel Lapin was the guest on today's edition of "WallBuilders Live," which was dedicated primarily to dismissing the concept of animal rights.

As usual, David Barton and Rick Green kicked off the discussion, with Barton blaming Disney movies for making us wrongly believe that animals think and feel:

Barton: I love Disney, I’ve got all of the collections of Disney, but Disney’s the first one to make animals seem human, and that’s what animation does. Bambi seems human, "Lady and the Tramp," a nice romantic dinner for dogs over at an Italian restaurant—I don’t think so—"Beauty and the Beast." And I love these stories but what they do is they elevate animals to mankind’s status ...

Green: Yeah, it start's making you think that they feel and they think ...

Barton: And they don’t.

Later in the program, Lapin sought to explain the rise of animal rights issues by asserting that the movement is rooted in the loss of Judge-Christian morality which leads to the belief that homosexuality is okay "because we’re nothing other than baboons with a little less hair":

Lapin: Over the last fifty years, little by little America has obliterated the role of the Judeo-Christian biblical worldview as a fundamental guide to morality and ethics. What happens is the uncertainty stimulates philosophical experimentation. Animal rights is particularly attractive because frankly there is something very appealing about establishing the doctrine that you and I are nothing more than sophisticated baboons. Because what it does is it strips away the uncomfortable conscience that bothers us at odd moments, it completely exculpates any concerns we have about morality because once we are nothing but sophisticated baboons then our entire moral system becomes extremely simple. So for instance the fact that baboons practice homosexuality obviously legitimatizes it for human beings too because we’re nothing other than baboons with a little less hair.

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David Barton and Rick Green: WallBuilders' Lawsuit Happy Duo

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on December 8, 2011 - 3:41pm

Back in September, David Barton of WallBuilders revealed that he had filed defamation lawsuits against several individuals; specifically against two Democratic Texas State Board of Education candidates over a YouTube video that asserted that Barton was "known for speaking at white supremacist rallies" and an Examiner.com writer who asserted that Barton is "an admitted liar."

Last night, while searching around to see if there had been any recent updates on any of these lawsuits, we stumbled across a report that, in April of this year, Barton's "WallBuilders Live" co-host , Rick Green, had filed libel lawsuits against seven defendants stemming from his failed run for a seat on the Texas Supreme Court in 2010:

Former Republican Texas Supreme Court candidate Rick Green has filed a libel suit against several defendants alleging he lost the GOP 2010 primary because political activists in his own party and media members “crossed the line” in attacking his character during the course of his campaign. In his April 11 original petition, filed in Hays County’s 207th District Court, Green names seven defendants including former Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Phillips, who now is a partner in Baker Botts in Austin; Dr. John R. Coppedge; the Texas Tribune; and the Texas Association of Realtors. Among other things, Green alleges in the petition that Phillips and a political action committee run by Coppedge distributed a letter that accused Green, a former member of the Texas House of Representatives, of “several disturbing ethical lapses and lack of judgment” including that he “drew censure” from legislative colleagues for filming a nutritional supplement infomercial in his Capitol office. In the petition, Green disputes that he drew censure and writes that he “gave a short videotaped interview which was later used in an infomercial” in his office. Green alleges the Texas Tribune defamed him by publishing an article on its website that referenced Green as being “baggage-laden” and having a “questionable history,” among other things. Green also alleges the Texas Association of Realtors distributed an e-mail critical of him that contained false information.

It is truly amazing that men like Barton and Green, who seemingly do nothing but spread misinformation which they blatantly refuse to retract, have the gall to collectively sue multiple people on the grounds that criticism of them and their work constitutes libel and defamation.

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Fired Ohio Science Teacher Plays The Victim On WallBuilders

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on November 30, 2011 - 2:51pm

The more we listen to David Barton and investigate the assertions that he makes individually and through his organization WallBuilders, the more obvious it becomes that he has absolutely no qualms about flagrantly misrepresenting issues in order to promote his Religious Right agenda.

Several months back, Barton and co-host Rick Green welcomed a former FBI agent onto their "WallBuilders Live" radio program under the guise that he had lost his job because he had discovered that the Muslim Brotherhood had been infiltrating the agency.  The truth, not surprisingly, was quite different.

Today, Barton and Green featured former Ohio science teacher John Freshwater on the program and portrayed him as a victim of religious intolerance who lost his job for questioning evolution and keeping a Bible on his desk:

Freshwater: When the 2007/2008 school year came along, there was a new principal, a new Superintendent, and three new school board members and what took place that year was they wanted me to removed my Bible from my desk. And I felt I have academic freedoms and I thought I had the right to have my Bible on my desk, so I left it on my desk in 2007/2008 school year and they told me to remove it and that was when they suspended me - April 16, 2008 - they suspended me without pay and I've been in litigation since then, the last four years.

Green: What's their complaint about having a Bible on your desk? I thought teachers were allowed to do that?

Freshwater: You know what? I thought so too, but they said I needed to remove it from my desk. Here is what it comes down to Rick, and it's this: there is a lot of fear in public school teachers, especially Christian public school teachers. They put fear into them and they keep them ignorant; they don't teach them, they don't train them on it, so what a teacher does is they take off their religious beliefs, they take their hat off before they walk into a public school building because they don't want to lose their job. They really don't have a good understanding of this whole thing called religious belief and separation of church and state, it has been convoluted, it has been putting fear in the people and it is sad, it's very sad for a public school teacher in a public school in America today.

Of course, a quick Google search reveals dozens of articles reporting that Freshwater was actually fired for allegedly burning a cross onto the arms of two of his students and using his classroom to teach creationism, attack gays, and promote his religion. And just last month, his firing was upheld in court.

But you would never have learned this from listening to "WallBuilders Live" where Freshwater was portrayed simply as a man who has been relentlessly persecuted because of his Christian faith. 

As we have said before, Barton's success is largely rooted in the fact that his intended audience generally doesn't question anything he says or bother to check to see if his claims are accurate or true, and this is just the latest example of how he uses that power to routinely mislead them in order to create false narratives that support his own political and religious agenda.

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American History 101 With Professor Kirk Cameron

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on October 28, 2011 - 2:00pm

Yesterday WallBuilders' Rick Green, the poor man's David Barton, appeared as a guest on TBN's "Praise The Lord" program to promote and share the patented brand of Religious Right pseudo-history with which WallBuilders is synonymous.

And Green had some stiff competition in the regard as host Kirk Cameron - yes, that one - tried to stump the audience with a trick question by asking if they knew the difference between the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and which one contained the phrase "four score and seven years ago." 

The answer, of course, is that neither document contains that phrase, which Cameron admitted ... before mistakenly claiming that it appeared in the Emancipation Proclamation when, in actuality, is was the opening line of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address:

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Barton, Kern Stoke Fears That Gays And Lesbians Threaten Lives Of Critics

Submitted by Brian Tashman on October 11, 2011 - 9:46am

Yesterday, David Barton and Rick Green hosted Oklahoma State Representative Sally Kern on WallBuilders Live to discuss her new book, The Stoning of Sally Kern, and caution listeners about the dangers of saying “something disparaging about homosexuality.” Kern’s book details her political activism and the fallout of her claim that the “homosexual agenda is destroying this nation ... it’s the biggest threat that our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam,” a sentiment she recently repeated, telling anti-gay activist Peter LaBarbera that homosexuality is “more dangerous” than terrorism.

Barton said, “If you touch homosexuality, be prepared to pay a price,” warning that it “may cost your life.” Later in the interview, Green said Kern must have experienced a “physical fear” of the “militant” gay-rights activists, and Kern told her story of how she was prepared to lose her life over the issue.

Listen:

Barton: With all of the protection we have for free speech, there’s still a number of areas where you’re not free to speak out on certain things. If you touch homosexuality, be prepared to pay a price, not just attacks, it’s gonna cost you economically, other things as well, may cost your life. This is, the way people respond to what you say about homosexuality if you criticize it and we got Sally Kern today, State Rep from Oklahoma who experienced that first time, what happens if you exercise your right of free speech and happen to say something disparaging about homosexuality.

…

Kern: I have to be honest with you Rick, when I was sitting there in my car that day and when she told me that those emails were coming from homosexuals, honestly, fear gripped by whole body, because I was very aware of the homosexual lobbyists and the power that they have. And people say, ‘oh you’re so brave, so heroic,’ but I’m not, I’m just a sinner saved by grace and I was gripped with fear that day. I just said, ‘Lord, what have I done?’

Green: And not just I would think not just fear, not a political fear, physical fear; there’s a militant agenda out there as well.

Kern: It entered our mind but honestly, and I mentioned this in the book, the Saturday night when my husband and I sit down and really talked about this and prayed about it, when we asked ourselves the question, are we willing to even lose our lives over this? I can’t tell you, Rick, how liberating that was, it really was.

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