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RWW

10/20/2026

byKyle Mantyla

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RWW

05/21/2026

by

Kyle Mantyla

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rww

Absolutists At WallBuilders Suddenly Find An Exception After The Latest ICE Shooting

01/26/2026

by

Kyle Mantyla

For years, the trio of Christian nationalist pseudo-historians at WallBuilders have been radical Second Amendment absolutists, with founder David Barton asserting over and over again that the Constitution protects not just an individual right to own guns, but that is places absolutely "no limitation" on an individual's right to own "whatever you can get your hands," including tanks, fighter jets, and even nuclear weapons.

"We need the ability to protect and defend ourselves against [the] government," said Barton's son, Tim, in 2018. "We wanted to make sure the people had the same means of defense as a government might have offensive weapons, so we need the same level of weapons to defend ourselves as we're going to be attacked with because we didn't want to disadvantage the people from being able to defend themselves against a tyrannical government."

WallBuilders has dedicated multiple episodes of its radio program to highlighting "the critical role that informed, active citizenship, and the Second Amendment play in protecting our cherished liberties." Those programs featured presentations delivered by WallBuilders co-host Rick Green, who teaches "constitutional defense" courses at his Patriot Academy that provide "physical and intellectual training on the 2nd Amendment ... so that you can better understand the history and importance of the great Right to Self-Defense."

The entire premise of Green's course is that "all Americans" should be carrying weapons everywhere at all times and be trained and prepared to protect themselves and other, especially "from the tyranny of the government."

Given such views, one would expect that Green and the Bartons would be outraged by the killing of Alex Prettiby ICE agents in Minneapolis over the weekend. Pretti, who was filming ICE agents during an operation, was legally carrying a weapon in a holster when he was confronted by multiple ICE agents who shoved him to the ground and attempted to subdue him. During the scrum, one agent removed Pretti's weapon just seconds before another agent fired multiple shots into Pretti's back, killing him.

On their radio program today, Green and the Bartons blamed Pretti for his own death.

"I think we do a pretty good job of being intellectually honest and being consistent," Green said. "You mentioned this thing in Minneapolis. We have always said—whether it was the BLM riots of 2020, whether it was Jan. 6th at the Capitol, whether it was these things in Minneapolis, wherever it is—we have always consistently said, 'You don't fight law enforcement.' You don't go in and physically be violent with law enforcement. You are asking for trouble. You don't resist arrest. You don't climb through a broken window; that's the last line of defense for police officers defending members of Congress from what was literally on that side of the Capitol, a mob. You don't take a gun into a protest situation like this where you could end up in a scuffle with police officers."

"So," Green continued, "we can be intellectually honest and consistent in this. It's not based on our emotions or who the player is in that situation, who's president, who's protesting or not protesting, it's based on the principles. And I just want to point that out because I can't say that about even some of our conservative friends. Sometimes they the position based on who the players are, whereas we take the position—we try to, and I think, again, we're pretty consistent to this—we take the position based on what the principles are."

"You know, this guy that got shot and all about him being the victim; look, when it turns out you don't have any ID on you and you came in with multiple magazines, don't tell me you're a peaceful protester," David Barton replied. "In a court of law, that establishes intent right there. You have no ID; you leave that away so you can't be ID'd, and you carry multiple magazines? Not good."

"All three of us talk openly about the fact we conceal carry all the time," Tim Barton added. "It's going to be very unusual if you find us without having a handgun on us. And Rick, I know for you and me often, we'll carry multiple magazines and pocket knives, sometimes a tourniquet. We carry different things, so it's not crazy that somebody might have a firearm and have multiple magazines. However, when law enforcement is doing an operation and then you go to intervene, as you would call it, or interfere, as they would acknowledge, and then you put hands on an officer?"

"We don't yet have all the information," Tim Barton continued. "We haven't seen it all. So we don't know if in the wrestling, they saw his shirt lifted, they see the gun, or if he actually reached for the gun. We don't know. We know somebody yells 'gun.' We know they discharge their firearms, and we know he goes to stand before Jesus. That's what we know. But the bottom line is even if you are legally carrying, when you put your hands on an officer and it goes to the ground, at that point, you've already messed up so many ways. If you're showing up without ID, it could be because you have intention and motive beyond what maybe the liberal media is pretending like he did. But even if you were an innocent bystander, you don't intervene and put hands on an officer and you go to the ground where there's a firearm and there's multiple officers telling you to stop resisting and you continue to resist."

IFrame Content

There are multiple videos documenting the deadly confrontation and none of them show any evidence of Pretti ever "putting hands" on any of the ICE officers or brandishing his weapon. Every video shows Pretti directing traffic while filming ICE officers and then attempting to help another protester who had been shoved by an agent, at which point Pretti was doused with pepper spray and attacked by multiple agents, one of whom fatally shot him moments later.

WallBuilders has spent decades promoting a truly radical interpretation of the Second Amendment while openly encouraging everyone to exercise their Second Amendment rights at all times and in all places in order to fend off "a tyrannical government." But when a protestor documenting government brutality is killed by authorities, WallBuilders rushes to defend the government and blame that protester for legally carrying a firearm while absurdly praising itself for its supposed commitment to principles and intellectual consistency.

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RWW

08/11/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

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RWW 525

As an academic who has devoted considerable time to studying Christian nationalism and WallBuilders, I feel compelled to warn Hoosiers that you should be alarmed that WallBuilders’ selective reading of American history might be accorded any legitimacy.

RWW

12/11/2024

by

Kyle Mantyla

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rww 5 24

there is no myth that Christian nationalists love repeating more than the claim that the Bible was the source most frequently cited by the Founding Fathers. And Tim Barton of WallBuilders has a particular love for spreading this false claim, which makes sense given that it originated with his father, Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton.

On yesterday’s episode of “WallBuilders Live,” the younger Barton was at it again.

“When people talk about America being a secular nation, it’s really because they don’t understand the history, they haven’t done the research,” Barton said. “And there’s some people that claim to have done the research, and [say], ‘We don’t see it.’ Well, you have to be completely intentionally ignoring it when it’s so evident.”

“We can point to books like ‘The Origins of American Constitutionalism,’ where a group of professors went through and they documented who the Founding Fathers quoted and cited the most in their writings,” Barton continued. “And what they identified was that 34 percent of all of the quotations they found in the Founders’ writings were quotations from the Bible. They only included things that were in quotation marks. … [While] they’re only measuring what’s in quotation marks, they acknowledged that they recognized so many Bible references that were very obvious Bible references that weren’t in quotation marks, that [had] they included what the very obvious things were, they would have been far higher than 34 percent of the quotes and references to the Founders’ writings coming from the Bible.”

“This wasn’t a study done by a group of Christian professors,” Barton concluded. “This was a study done by intellectually honest professors who were saying, ‘We just want to see what really influenced the Founding Fathers,’ and the Bible is so far above and beyond any other influence on the Founding Fathers, as far as evidenced in their writing.”

IFrame Content

As Right Wing Watch has explained multiple times, this claim is rooted in a 1984 study conducted by professor Donald S. Lutz of the University of Houston that sought to identify which writers and sources of ideas were most cited in “the political writings of Americans published between 1760 and 1805.” Lutz found that the Bible was cited most frequently solely because many of the pamphlets included in the research were sermons that had been reprinted for mass distribution. Once the sermon pamphlets were excluded, Lutz reported that quotes from the Bible appeared no more frequently in the political writings of the era than citations of the classical or common law. More importantly, Lutz also noted that when the focus was solely on public political writings from 1787 to 1788, when the U.S. Constitution was written and ratified, “the Bible’s prominence disappears” almost completely.

In 1988, some of the contents from that study made their way into a book Lutz wrote called “The Origins of American Constitutionalism” and, predictably, it does not say what Barton claims it does. What Lutz’s book actually says is that “approximately 80 percent of the political pamphlets published during the 1770s were reprinted sermons” and that his study found that “about three-fourths of all the references to the Bible came from reprinted sermons.” Lutz said that he included about “one-third of all significant secular publications” in his study, but only “one-tenth of the reprinted sermons.” Had the two sources been “strictly proportional” in his study, Lutz said it “would have resulted in an abundance of religious references.”

When biblical citations contained in sermons were excluded, Lutz reported that the citation of the Bible among secular works represented “about 9 percent of all citations—about equal to the percentage for classical writers.”

Lutz did not find, as Barton asserted, that “34 percent of all of the quotations … found in the Founders’ writings were quotations from the Bible.” And Lutz most certainly did not say, as Barton claimed, that if indirect references to the Bible had been included in the study, there “would have been far higher than 34 percent of the quotes and references to the Founders’ writings coming from the Bible.”

Barton was deliberately misrepresenting what Lutz wrote in both his study and his book, and he presumably knows that. But what Barton also presumably knows is that his audience does not know this, which is why he and so many other Christian nationalists continue to repeat it, because doing so helps them promote their own modern-day right-wing political agenda.

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April 25, 2024 RWW

* Mark Meckler of Convention of States and Rick Green of Patriot Academy and WallBuilders are teaming up for a series of events to explain the “pivotal role the Wild West can play in shaping America’s future.”

when Rep. Mike Johnson was elected Speaker of the House last year, Christian nationalist religious-right activist Rick Green was “literally in tears” because, he said, Johnson “is one of our guys.”

“We’ve been praying for this,” Green gushed at the time. “We’ve been praying for leaders that have a fear of God, that we know have a foundation of biblical truth.”

“This is a moment to stop what you are doing and thank God for this happen,” he declared.

IFrame Content

But the elation of that moment is now long gone as Green, like many others in the right-wing movement, has soured on Johnson.

Green, founder of Patriot Academy and a co-host of the radio program “WallBuilders Live” with religious-right pseudo-historians David and Tim Barton, appeared on the “FlashPoint” program last night where he declared that he has lost faith after the GOP House Speaker orchestrated a bipartisan bill to secure foreign aid to Israel and Ukraine.

“I will admit I was wrong,” Green said. “I’ve known him for over 10 years. I believe he is a man of faith. He’s been a great constitutional attorney. He was a great congressman before being Speaker. And for the first few months, I kept saying, ‘Okay, I’m gonna give him a little more rope, give him a little bit more rope. He keeps kicking this stuff [down the road]; that’s not how I would do it but I don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes and in the closed-door meetings and what he’s learning. I’m going to trust his judgment for a little while.’ No more.

Green said that the foreign aid bill has “caused me to lose faith.”

“I know Johnson’s in an impossible position,” he said. “One vote majority. It’s an impossible job. All that good stuff. But I was wrong about his demeanor. I thought his demeanor would be perfect for the job right now. It’s not. You need a fighter. You need a Newt Gingrich-type or a Donald Trump-type in the speakership that’s going to take it to the mat and say, ‘We seal the border or you getting no funding for anything else. We will shut down the federal government.’ And frankly, I think that would probably be a blessing to most people in America right now with the way that it’s running things.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/project-blitz-is-producing-model-legislation-for-christian-nationalists

no lnx

Project Blitz is producing model legislation for Christian Nationalists

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly January 24, 2020

You may have heard about legislation passed recently in Tennessee and other states which allows adoption agencies to discriminate against gay couples or families with whom they have religious objections. The fact that bills like that are being considered and passed by red states is no coincidence. They are the product of an organized effort being led by Project Blitz.

The first thing to know about Project Blitz is that it was launched in 2015 by the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation, the National Legal Foundation, and Wallbuilders. The latter is an organization founded by David Barton, the Republican operative and discredited historian who rejects the separation of church and state, claiming that the United States was founded as a Christian nation.

This project seems to have maintained a low profile until Fred Clarkson, who has been studying the Christian right for decades, came across their 116-page manual of model legislation in early 2018. As Clarkson explains, Project Blitz is to Christian nationalists what the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was to big business.

Many of the bills on [the Christian right] agenda are making news; some have passed key legislative committees or whole state legislative chambers, and some have already been signed into law. But what reporters, activists, and most legislators don’t realize is that many of these bills draw from an unusual package of 20 model bills included in a report assembled by a coalition of Christian Right groups for an initiative they call “Project Blitz.”

The bills are seemingly unrelated and range widely in content—from requiring public schools to display the national motto, “In God We Trust” (IGWT); to legalizing discrimination against LGBTQ people; to religious exemptions regarding women’s reproductive health. The model bills, the legislative strategy and the talking points reflect the theocratic vision that’s animated a meaningful portion of the Christian Right for some time. In the context of Project Blitz’s 116-page playbook, however, they also reveal a sophisticated level of coordination and strategizing that echoes the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which infamously networks probusiness state legislators, drafts sample legislation, and shares legislative ideas and strategies.

According to an analysis by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, state legislatures considered 74 bills that echoed model legislation from the Project Blitz handbook in 2018.

The strategy for this effort is built on dividing model legislation into three categories, depending on how much opposition each bill is expected to receive.

The first category, intended to appear the most innocuous, included bills to promote “In God We Trust” license plates (now offered in at least 20 states) and the display of the “In God We Trust” motto in public schools. (Some version of the display legislation has passed in at least 10 states.) The next batch of bills centered on emphasizing “Christian heritage” and “the importance of the Bible in history” to promote the notion that the U.S. is a Christian nation. The third category, which organizers noted might be “the most hotly contested,” sought to empower licensed professionals to deny health care and other services based on religious beliefs and to enable adoption agencies to reject adoptive families on religious grounds. (At least 10 states have laws that allow discrimination by child welfare agencies, most of which have been passed since Project Blitz launched in 2015.)

That is a veritable “slippery slope” approach to undermining the separation of church and state. Most people wouldn’t find it terribly objectionable to display the national motto in public schools—even though it wasn’t adopted until 1956 in response to the “red scare” of “godless communism.” But doing so opens the door to promoting religion in public institutions and paving the way for legislation in the second category.

Of course, the ultimate aim of these efforts is to arrive at legislation in the third category. Knowing that the courts will reject arguments based on “biblical principles,” Project Blitz advises a strategy that is even more offensive.

To this end, they claim that their model public policy resolutions “rely heavily on the research that demonstrates the deleterious physical and mental health effects of same-sex intercourse and gender identity ‘transformation’.”… In support of this, Project Blitz offers data they suggest shows that LGBTQ people tend to be diseased, dysfunctional or both—and that they pose a threat to children and to society.

Given that any so-called “data” they present is bogus, we need to name that kind of thing for what it is: unadulterated homophobia.

As we saw with ALEC, the best disinfectant against an initiative like this is to shine a spotlight on what is happening. Unfortunately, there still 12 states with GOP trifectas—where the Republicans control both houses of the legislature and the governorship. That is where this initiative is likely to be the most effective.

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https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2019/08/23/convention-states-fires-up-base-for-push-to-rewrite-u-s-constitution

david a cmd

Convention of States Action (COS) kicked off its first “Leadership Summit” in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia today. COS, a project of Mark Meckler and Eric O’Keefe’s Citizens for Self-Governance, claims that “hundreds” of activists, state directors, and coordinators from all 50 states will attend to get inspired and learn strategies for passing COS resolutions in the states calling for a constitutional convention to rewrite the U.S. Constitution.

Fifteen states have passed the group’s applications so far, with 17 more states considering the resolution this year, according to COS. Wisconsin recently introduced a COS resolution, which would bump the number up to 18.

A constitutional convention has never been held since the Constitution was adopted, and COS will need 34 states to file applications in order for it to occur. If that happens, COS plans to move an array of sweeping amendments to redefine key parts of the Constitution and radically weaken the federal government.

COS has ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the National Rifle Association, the right-wing militia group Three Percenters, and the Christian nationalist group WallBuilders.

More than 200 civil rights and public interest groups, including the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), signed a letter last year denouncing such constitutional convention calls as “a threat to every American’s constitutional rights and civil liberties.”

Right-Wing Extremists to Speak

Fox News anchor Pete Hegseth, from Trump’s beloved Fox & Friends, addressed the crowd this morning, telling them that the Left hates the Constitution, the founding fathers understood that the word of “Jesus Christ our savior” is the guiding force for our country, and that there “is no other freedom-loving bastion in the world that values the individual with God-endowed rights.”

And, referencing the Three Percenters likely in attendance, Hegseth said, “it has always been the one percent or two percent or three percent of people that get it, that are willing to buck the comfiness of their moment and the established norms that everyone is comfortable with, willing to be defiant, willing to stand — be accused of being radical about things that are not radical at all.”

Recently, Hegseth has made some radical comments himself, saying that Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (MI-D) has a “Hamas agenda,” implying that she works with a U.S. designated terrorist organization.

Hegseth has also publicly defended Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s brother Erik Prince’s Blackwater contractors, who were convicted of murdering Iraqi citizens, and has called climate change a “religion” that Democrats use to “control” people.

David Barton warmed up the crowd with a history lecture on the Constitution’s basis in fixed moral standards based on natural law and scripture, and drew applause with his claim that the federal government has “emasculated the states.”

A Christian nationalist with strong anti-LGBT views. Barton once said,

“There’s a passage that I love in Romans 1. … [I]t talks about homosexuality and it says that they will receive in their bodies the penalties of their behavior. … The Bible [is] right every time … and that’s why AIDS has been something they haven’t discovered a cure for or a vaccine for. … And that goes to what God says, ‘Hey you’re going to bear in your body the consequences of this homosexual behavior.'”

Barton founded the group WallBuilders, which has worked with Focus on the Family and the Family Policy Alliance to influence judicial elections and selection rules in states across the country, the Center for Media and Democracy detailed.

WallBuilders also works with the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation to push out Christian-Right model legislation in the mold of ALEC to state lawmakers under the name Project Blitz.

Also in line to speak at the Summit is one of the NRA’s top attorneys, Charles Cooper. Cooper will speak on, “The Real Threat to Gun Rights.” In an email to COS activists, Cooper is quoted as saying:

“The real threat to our constitutional rights today is posed not by an Article V Convention of States, but by an out-of-control federal government, exercising powers that it does not have and abusing powers that it does.”

COS materials in recent years have argued that a constitutional convention could be used to rewrite the Second Amendment in order to make it Supreme-Court-proof.

Others on the agenda to speak include founding board member Eric O’Keefe, former professor Rob Natelson, former U.S. Senator and COS Senior Advisor Tom Coburn, and the right-wing author of Liberty Amendments Mark Levin.

But the stars of the summit are likely to be the actors COS will have play the founding fathers Patrick Henry, James Madison, and George Washington.

Stay tuned to ExposedbyCMD.org for more on the right-wing’s effort to rewrite the Constitution.

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/here-are-5-craziest-christian-fundamentalist-sects-cults-or-movements-feel-0

5  of the Craziest Christian Fundamentalist Sects, Cults or Movements That Feel Empowered in the Trump Era

Extremist groups are coming out of the woodwork.

By Alex Henderson / AlterNet July 19, 2018, 8:30 AM GMT

Evangelist Frank Amedia, leader of POTUS Shield

Photo Credit: The Jim Bakker Show

President Donald Trump—despite his alleged sexual activity with porn star Stormy Daniels, two divorces, lack of Biblical knowledge and a reputation for having a very foul mouth at times—has, ironically, become an icon of the Christian Right in the United States. His predecessor at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Barack Obama, actually has a long history of going to church and clearly possesses a greater knowledge of the Bible. Regardless, the Christian Right considers Obama an enemy and Trump a staunch ally—and with Trump in office, extremist groups are coming out of the woodwork more and more.

Here are some of the craziest far-right sects, organizations or Christian fundamentalist movements that are feeling empowered in the Trump era.

  1. POTUS Shield

Led by television evangelist Frank Amedia, POTUS Shield is a new organization of far-right Christian fundamentalists that describes itself as “warriors, worshippers and watchmen”—and the one they are watching out for, through prayer, is Trump (POTUS stands for “President of the United States). Amedia insists that before Trump’s inauguration, God paid him a visit in the middle of the night and asked him to help form a protective shield of prayer around Trump—who the group believes was sent by God to promote a Christian fundamentalist takeover of government. Others active in POTUS Shield include Jerry Boykin, executive vice president of the Family Research Council, and Lou Engle (known for his large anti-abortion, anti-gay and pro-Republican prayer rallies).

  1. People of Praise

After Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court, one of the people on Trump’s “short list” of possible nominees for a replacement was Amy Coney Barrett—a 46-year-old federal appellate judge who, the New York Times reported in 2017, was involved in a group called People of Praise (Brett Kavanaugh, not Barrett, eventually received Trump’s nomination). And given People of Praise’s beliefs, Barrett shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the High Court.

People of Praise is a predominantly Catholic group, although it has some non-Catholic members and incorporates Pentecostal practices (speaking in tongues, for example). Considered a cult within mainstream Catholicism, People of Praise require members to swear an oath of loyalty to the group and teach that while women can have some leadership positions, they must ultimately submit to male authority. In the past, People of Praise used the terms “handmaid” and “handmaiden” to describe women—which is downright chilling if one is familiar with Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” or the 1990 film and 2017/2018 television that were based on the book.

  1. Quiverfull

The Christian Right’s hatred of reproductive freedom goes way beyond its opposition to abortion; some fundamentalists are equally opposed to all forms of contraception. And this anti-contraception ideology is exemplified by the looney Quiverfull movement. Quiverfull is a not a sect or denomination per se, but a movement within fundamentalist Protestant Christianity—and those who embrace it could be anything from Pentecostal to Calvinist. Quiverfull ideology asserts that it is a sin for Christian couples to do anything that might prevent a pregnancy; therefore, birth control pills and IUDs for women or condoms and vasectomies for men are considered tools of the Devil. And according to Quiverfull, Christian wives must have as many babies as possible while remaining totally submissive to their husbands. Other Quiverfull rules: wives cannot have their own bank accounts or e-mail addresses without their husbands’ permission, and they must always be sexually available to their husbands whether they’re in the mood for sex or not.

  1. Project Blitz

Project Blitz is not a Christian fundamentalist church or sect, but rather, a coalition of Christian fundamentalist activists with a political agenda: to make sure that state legislatures are flooded with as many theocratic bills as possible. Working with Republicans who are sympathetic to their dominionist views—anti gay, anti-abortion, anti-contraception—Project Blitz believes that it is important for bills to be introduced regardless of how far they get. The more bills that are introduced, Project Blitz believes, the more likely they are to achieve some home runs eventually.

5. WallBuilders

In Texas, David Barton has been very active in both Republican politics and far-right fundamentalist Christianity. In addition to being a former vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party and serving as director of Keep the Promise PAC—a political action committee that supported Sen. Ted Cruz’presidential campaign in 2016—Barton founded WallBuilders, which has taught through books and videos that the separation of church and state is not constitutional and that the government should be run according to strict Biblical law. And Barton has been active in the Providence Foundation, another group with dominionist views.

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